Forza And Dead As Disco Made Audiences The Marketing... 007 First Light Played It Too Safe
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Quick housekeeping before anything else. As I mentioned last week, I will be at GamesBeat Summit 2026 this coming Monday and Tuesday, May 18th and 19th. I have space on the calendar both days, so if you are going to be there, let me know and I will make the time. I also hear I might be on a boat at some point. What that means exactly, I do not yet know. But great to see in-person events happening alongside everything that lives online.
Looking ahead a few weeks, I will also be at Summer Game Fest in early June, along with The Game Business event running alongside it. Same offer there. Hit me up, I will try to find time to catch up. The next six weeks are when most of the industry is in the same zip code at the same time... at least outside of Gamescom...
Now, on to it.
It has been a pretty crazy week in gaming. I had every intention of writing about earnings this week. Capcom, Nintendo, and Sony all reported, and there is a ton to unpack there. But honestly, the release-side news this week was more interesting, and the picture forming for the summer slate is fascinating. So earnings get parked. Maybe next week. Maybe in a special edition. We will see.
Here is what stood out.
Star Fox. Nintendo dropped the reveal during last week’s Direct, and the response was something to watch in real time.
There is something I love about these Nintendo Directs. They are the antithetical big splashy marketing thing. Just weird, quirky online videos that show up at 6 AM PT with two or three days of notice, and you kind of look up and go “oh, I guess Nintendo did a Direct today.” No press junket. No build-up cycle. No paid creator program. Nintendo absolutely beats to their own drum on all things related to them, and what is genuinely impressive is how much they have trained their audience to expect exactly that. They run their cadence, on their channels, on their schedule... and the audience has been conditioned to show up for it.
It works because Nintendo has figured out something most of the industry has not.
Content is marketing.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie released this past March and brought Fox McCloud back into the cultural conversation through a real cameo with real screen time. Two months later, Nintendo drops the Star Fox Direct, and search volume on the franchise pops harder than it has in over a decade. A film cameo reactivates the IP. A game reveal converts the reactivated attention. One continuous funnel... no separate $100M campaign needed. That is the Nintendo Transmedia Flywheel playing out in real time, and the data is responding exactly the way you would expect.
What we are getting is a remake of Star Fox 64 for the Switch 2, now simply titled Star Fox, and it is the second remake of Star Fox 64 following 2011’s Star Fox 64 3D on the 3DS. Counting the original, the 3DS remake, Star Fox Zero on Wii U in 2016, and this new Switch 2 version... this is the fourth Star Fox game telling essentially the same story. Nintendo knows exactly what they are doing here. Meet the audience where it actually is. Give them the version of the game they remember loving. Let nostalgia do the work. I grew up on the N64 original. I am exactly the older-millennial audience this is built for. The trailer looks great. I am genuinely excited to play it with my son... who has never touched a Star Fox game in his life. That is the entire pitch landing on exactly the audience it was meant to land on.
The data is following the story. At week -7, Star Fox is the #2 game in our entire tracked pre-launch comp set at that same week-from-launch mark, behind only Forza Horizon 6. Ahead of 007 First Light. Ahead of LEGO Batman. Ahead of nearly every other game launching in the same window. AC Black Flag Resynced will likely pass Star Fox eventually given where its trajectory is heading... which makes Star Fox more realistically the #3 game of the summer. Even so, that is still a massive win for a franchise that has been functionally dormant in our data for over a decade. One Direct, two days of notice, and the franchise is now sitting ahead of nearly every other game launching this summer. That is what content-as-marketing actually looks like when the flywheel is spinning.
Subnautica 2. Released yesterday, May 14th, in early access on Steam, Epic, and Xbox, with day-one Game Pass on top. The bigger story going in was that Subnautica 2 is no longer being published by Krafton... a saga woven through developer fallout, a court-ordered CEO reinstatement, an attempted $250M bonus avoidance, and the kind of pre-launch fan drama that should have killed any normal release. There is a lot here to unpack, and it is going to need its own piece next week to do it properly. Consider this the placeholder.
The short version of how it played out is that the audience showed up anyway. And then some. Subnautica 2 sold over 1 million copies in under two hours of launch, with 467,000 peak concurrent players on Steam alone in the first hour. The game is currently the third-most-played title on Steam, outranking Crimson Desert and Resident Evil Requiem on the live charts. Plus whatever Game Pass numbers are doing on top of all of that.
Community sentiment was always the variable here, not awareness. The audience knew, and they were paying attention. What we did not know was whether the community would carry this game forward through the publishing chaos or turn on it. That answer arrived in the first sixty minutes of the launch. Players came out so hard for Subnautica 2 that it is now almost certain Krafton will have to pay the $250M bonus it tried to avoid paying to Unknown Worlds Entertainment leadership in the first place. A decade of community goodwill did exactly what it was supposed to do for this franchise, in spite of everything. I will dig into the structural lessons next week. For now, put a pin in this one as one of the cleanest community-driven success stories we will see all year.
Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced. Reveal momentum is holding nicely. The game is now nine weeks out from its July 9th launch, and the data is doing exactly what you would want it to be doing for a remaster of a beloved entry in a franchise that has been searching for its footing for years. In our mindGAME tracking, AC Black Flag Resynced is sitting at 0.83% cumulative mindSHARE at week -9, ranked #152 globally, with peak weekly search volume topping 1.9 million during reveal week. That kind of single-week spike off a single reveal event is exactly what you want to see when you announce a game. Real audience response. Real attention. All off one moment.
I have written about my hopes and concerns for this one before in Xbox Is Xbox Again... so I will not re-litigate them here. The short version is that I remain cautiously optimistic. Ubisoft has a long history of over-engineering its most beloved IP into something the original audience does not recognize, and Black Flag is the entry that most of the Assassin’s Creed fandom would happily replay forever if Ubisoft would just let them. The audience for this game is real, the goodwill is real, and the reveal landed. Now Ubisoft has to land the launch... which is the part of the equation they have struggled with most recently.
The strategic story I am watching is more about positioning than execution. AC Black Flag Resynced is currently tracking ahead of 007 First Light despite being six weeks further out from launch. That gap is going to widen as the marketing cycle ramps. By the time both games are launching, this is shaping up to be one of the bigger games of the summer... realistically positioned to settle in as the #2 game of the season once it passes Star Fox, behind only Forza Horizon 6.
Where Is The Power In Gaming Right Now?
I have actually been thinking about this question since the Marathon and Crimson Desert discourse, and the Mixtape situation is what finally pushed me to write it down. To be clear up front... I have not played Mixtape. Not interested in playing it. Not going to bash it and not going to defend it. The game itself is largely beside the point. What matters is the conversation happening around it, because that conversation is doing the work of surfacing something the industry has been dancing around for years.
Simon Pulman posted his midyear 2026 trends piece last week, and one of the themes he flagged was “Critics vs Audience.” His framing... that the movie and games business has fostered significant discourse around the role of critics, particularly when critical reception does not track commercial performance... is accurate as a description of the surface conversation. It is the version of this debate that gets the most airtime. The Mixtape discourse fits cleanly inside it. So did the Crimson Desert discourse six weeks ago, where critics split and players showed up anyway. So did Marathon, where the audience was being asked to care about a game it had no relationship with. So did Highguard, where the industry tried to manufacture a moment the players were not buying. There is a pattern, and Simon named it cleanly.
I just do not think “critics vs audience” is the right framing for what is actually going on.
The framing implies two cohesive sides. Critics on one side. Audience on the other. Reviewers misjudge a game, audience pushes back, fight breaks out, repeat. That structure assumes the audience is a single entity that holds opinions collectively. It is not. The audience has fragmented into thousands of micro-communities, each with their own taste-makers, their own internal debates, their own preferred outlets for information, their own grievances, their own languages. There is no single audience reacting to a single critic anymore... there is a mesh of small communities each forming opinions in parallel, and the noisiest of those communities sometimes break through into mainstream visibility, which is the moment when “discourse” happens.
There is also an assumption baked into a lot of this conversation that I think is wrong. That content creators are the new monoliths. That a MrBeast or a Kai Cenat or IShowSpeed sets the tone for an entire generation, the way Roger Ebert or Pauline Kael once did for film. Yes, those creators are massive, and yes, they move attention. But the actual power in gaming attention has never lived at the top of the creator pyramid. I learned this when I was at Twitch a decade ago. The power was not with Ninja and Shroud and the household-name streamers... it was with the thousands of small communities that hovered at a few hundred concurrent viewers each. Mid-tail of the platform. Streamers who knew their audience by name. That was true in 2018. It is dramatically more true now.
What has actually happened is that the audience has become both more empowered and more fragmented at the same time. They have more choice about where to get their information. There are more outlets reflecting their specific taste back at them. Trust in any single source has eroded. Every micro-community has its own internal logic about what is worth caring about, what is hype, what is real, what is industry capture. Those communities increasingly do not talk to each other. They form. Then they cohere. Opinions calcify. Sometimes those opinions aggregate into something visible. Most of the time they just exist, churning along below the surface.
This is the actual landscape that gaming marketing has to operate inside in 2026. Not “critics versus audience.” Not “press versus creators.” Not “old media versus new media.” Thousands of overlapping micro-communities, each with their own attention economy, each with their own gatekeepers, each largely indifferent to whatever the press tier is saying about a game on any given week.
The Enemy Is Not Bad Reviews. The Enemy Is Apathy.
This is also why I keep pointing out, week after week in this newsletter, that the dominant emotion in modern gaming is apathy. Highguard did not fail because the internet was mean to it. It failed because the internet did not care. The massive yawn. 99% of the gaming audience never registered that the game came out, while the 1% who did fought over whether it was any good. Either outcome of that fight was already irrelevant. By the time the conversation even started, the floor of indifference had swallowed the launch. Wildlight failed because they did not understand the actual power dynamic of the modern attention economy. The enemy is not bad reviews... the enemy is being ignored.
Which brings me back to the three games launching in this May 2026 window. Because each of them is making a different bet about how to operate inside that landscape. Each is operating from a different theory of where the power is.
007 First Light is betting that the old hierarchy still holds. Publisher spends. Press generates coverage. Audience receives the message. The old model, executed cleanly, at AAA scale, with a billion-dollar IP behind it.
Forza Horizon 6 is betting that power has moved into the communities themselves. Not gaming communities specifically. Cultural communities. Car culture. Lifestyle. Travel. Music. Photography. The marketing is designed to live inside those communities and let them carry the game forward as a participation object, not an advertising target.
Dead as Disco is betting that power has moved to the players, who become the content creators, who become the marketing channel. The game is engineered to be inherently shareable. Players post clips. Other players see clips. The clips drive more players. The publisher’s job is to get out of the way of the loop.
And then there is Mixtape, sitting alongside Dead as Disco as the unintentional control variable in this whole experiment. Same indie launch slot, same critical reception machinery, opposite outcomes. Mixtape’s story is what happens when you bet that power still lives in the old hierarchy... and the micro-communities read that bet as evidence that something is off.
So that is the piece this week. Three games. Three theories of where power has moved in the fragmented, micro-community-driven attention landscape of 2026. One natural experiment running in real time across the same three weeks of the calendar.
Let’s start with the one I want to be wrong about.
007 First Light... Betting On A Hierarchy That Does Not Exist Anymore
My Bond Is Not Their Bond
Let me be transparent up front... I am the audience for this game.
Day one purchase. Locked in. I have been writing about 007 First Light for over a year, most recently in Three Games, Eight Days, And A Release Window That Makes No Sense. I genuinely want this game to be good. IO Interactive has done extraordinary work with the Hitman trilogy, and watching them take on a generational IP like Bond is exactly the kind of swing the industry needs to keep seeing.
The problem is that I am a terrible yardstick for whether this game is going to break out.
I am over 40. My relationship with Bond started in childhood... watching the TNT Bond marathons every holiday weekend. The cable channel would run them for entire Saturday afternoons. Dr. No into Goldfinger into The Spy Who Loved Me, all back to back, no streaming, no skipping, just whatever was on. That was how a generation got Bond... by osmosis, by accident, by happening to sit in front of the TV when Live and Let Die came on for the fourth time that year. The films I came up on are still the ones I love... From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, Live and Let Die, The Spy Who Loved Me (mostly because of Jaws), The Man with the Golden Gun, and Moonraker (mostly because of Jaws and the whole thing taking place in space). Then GoldenEye hit the N64 in 1997 and confirmed everything we already loved about the franchise in interactive form... still my favorite Bond anything, full stop.
Forty years of Saturday afternoons. Forty years of knowing what the gun barrel sequence means before I could articulate why... none of which is available to a 22-year-old in 2026.
No Time To Die came out in October 2021. Five years ago. The last theatrical Bond. Amazon MGM has been sitting on the IP since taking over from Eon Productions in February 2025, working through the “who is the next Bond” question publicly. A 22-year-old today was 17 when the last Bond movie hit theaters. They have no relationship with this character beyond cultural osmosis... no childhood with him, no investment in whether Daniel Craig’s run mattered or whether Sean Connery was the best one. Bond is, to them, an old idea their parents like.
The marketing campaign for 007 First Light is not engineered for them... it is engineered for me.
And to be clear, I want this game to do well. My love of Bond as an IP is real, even if I lost the thread on most of the franchise after Skyfall. I have been bullish on this game from the jump, going back to my LinkedIn post after the trailer reveal where I said IO Interactive was one of the winners of Gamescom 2025. The reveal was strong. The trajectory through 2025 looked solid. The pitch was clean... Bond being Bond again, the fantasy returning, Aston Martin and gadgets and spycraft, the whole point of the character. I genuinely thought IO was the right studio at the right time, with the right read on what people wanted.
Then they got to within three weeks of launch and ran a 2017 marketing campaign instead of a 2026 one. That is the disappointment underneath this whole section. Not because I want to dunk on the game. Because I want it to be more than just a “fine” hit, which I think is exactly where it lands. A massive breakout on the level of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was on the table. Not anymore.
The Marketing Beats Are A 2017 Playbook
Walk through the actual marketing campaign for 007 First Light and the pattern becomes obvious. Every beat is a master class in 2017 thinking, executed cleanly at AAA scale, landing in the wrong places for a 2026 audience.
Start with the Beyond the Light developer diary series, a four-episode arc running from January 2026 through three weeks ago. Each episode covers a different pillar... Gameplay, Cast & Characters, Story, and Music. Stylish backdrops. Studio devs in turtlenecks. Polished, well-produced, and exactly the kind of long-form developer reflection content that critics and superfans say they want.
The audience disagrees. Episode 1 (Gameplay) has 36K views. Episode 2 (Cast & Characters), 23K views. Episode 3 (Story), 23K views. Episode 4 (Music), the most recent one, 12K views and dropping. Across the entire series, IO produced 56 minutes of long-form developer content. Almost nobody is watching it. For context, the 007 First Light title sequence video on the same channel pulled 1.9M views in three weeks. Beyond the Light is doing roughly 1% of the views of a single marketing drop. That format is a 2017 press tour beat... one the audience has moved on from. Bond’s marketing campaign has not.
IO ran a Keymailer-based paid creator program where creators earn points for content, with the highest reward tier going to whoever restreams the PlayStation State of Play. Functionally, IO is renting attention from a pre-selected cohort of established creators. Exactly the mechanic Wildlight tried with Highguard. The same playbook that delivered a 380K Twitch peak that collapsed to 24K inside a week.
As I wrote in that piece a few months ago:
“That is what paid attention looks like in the data... a spike you can purchase, followed by a collapse the moment the spend turns off.” — Me, Welcome To Highguard, Patch Notes, January 2026
The press junket flew journalists to IO Interactive for three-hour hands-on previews. Coverage from the Guardian, TheSixthAxis, and The Game Business is sitting where it lands. Real journalism. Glowing previews. None of it propagating into the micro-community ecosystem.
Amazon dropped a 007 First Light segment inside NBA Nightcap this week, putting Bond inside Amazon’s own sports media properties. Olivier Perbet, IO’s CMRO, framed it on LinkedIn as the kickoff of the mainstream marketing campaign, two weeks from launch. The mechanism here is leverage marketing... Amazon owns the broadcast, so Amazon puts Bond on the broadcast. It is a real placement in a real property in front of a real audience. The question is whether that audience propagates anything. NBA Nightcap viewers skew older, skew toward sports content, and skew toward people who came to the platform for basketball and got Bond as an interstitial. Reach is real. Transmission is not. None of those viewers are going to clip the segment and share it with their gaming micro-community.
The deeper problem is that IO and Amazon are skipping the hard work. To build a cultural moment in 2026, a game has to be a moment inside the gaming community first... and then the broader culture catches on. Forza Horizon 6 is doing this in real time, which we will get to. Resident Evil Requiem is doing it. Grand Theft Auto VI is the extreme version of it. Each of those games has built (or is building) a real propagation engine inside gaming itself before any normie-facing push begins. The NBA placement is designed to win over a casual audience that does not have any reason to care yet, because Bond has not become a moment in the place where moments actually start. Casual gamers will not generate FOMO for a game that has not yet built cultural cache. The marketing is trying to do the second step without doing the first one.
And then there is the Lana Del Rey theme song, dropped during the BAFTAs on April 16th. A real coup, with a real artist, in a real legitimacy moment. The kind of beat that would have moved the needle in 2017. The title sequence video is doing 1.9M views over three weeks, with the lyric video adding another 122K. Both feel like meaningful numbers... until you look at where First Light sits inside Lana Del Rey’s own catalog. The song does not appear in her Spotify top 10 popular tracks. Diet Mountain Dew sits at #10 with 923M streams. Salvatore at #9 has 470M. First Light is not in the top 50 on Spotify either. This is Lana Del Rey, the sixth most-streamed female artist of all time on Spotify. Her audience is enormous and engaged. They are not engaging with this song.
What makes it sting is that the song actually did get a viral moment... just not the one IO and Amazon designed. In the days after the First Light release, TikTok lit up with an organic “accidentally making a Bond song” trend, with creators posting their own minor-key melodramatic Bond pastiches. The audience made the moment. IO and Lana did not. There was no coordinated TikTok rollout, no creator partnerships, no co-created content. The brand was not at the table when the actual virality happened. Compare that to how Lady Gaga or Taylor Swift roll out a track in 2026... seeded creator content, TikTok choreography, sound integrations, behind-the-scenes drops timed for short-form.
The First Light rollout was a 2010 album-cycle press push for a song dropped in a 2026 attention economy. The collaboration is being treated as a Bond beat, not as a Lana Del Rey moment, which means it lives inside the Bond marketing campaign and dies inside the Bond marketing campaign. For context, Forza Horizon 6‘s launch trailer hit 1.4M views in six days... same medium, same platform. Forza is doing it 3-4x faster off a launch trailer for a racing game, while Bond is burning a Lana Del Rey collaboration for less momentum.
The partner roster tells the same story. IO and Amazon announced 007 First Light‘s key brand partners as Aston Martin, Coca-Cola, Orlebar Brown, HermanMillerGaming, Jaguar, Range Rover Defender, Omega, Nvidia, and Leica. Luxury automotive. Premium beverages. High-end menswear. Watches. Cameras. A chair company. Look at that list and ask the obvious question... where are the gaming partners, the creators, the Twitch integrations, the Discord activations, the partnerships with the actual platforms where games become moments? They do not appear to exist. The partner deck is what you would build if you were launching a Bond film, not a Bond video game. Every signal in this roster is pointing at brand partners and luxury consumers, not at the audience that actually buys video games.
None of these beats are converting because none of them are designed for the actual landscape gaming marketing has to operate in. Press junkets land inside a press tier that micro-communities ignore. Paid creator activations rent attention without building anything underneath. Owned-media placements push the message into channels younger gamers do not consume. Every beat is a 2017 cultural artifact being delivered to a 2026 audience that does not consume cultural moments through music video drops, press junkets, or NBA halftime segments anymore.
Here is the cleanest articulation of the philosophy that drove this campaign, in IO’s own words, from Hakan Abrak’s interview with The Gamer:
“Understanding the IP, the hardcore nucleus of the IP, has been very important for us... This is the first time that IO Interactive, in our 25-plus years of existence, is working on another IP, not our own original creative IP.” — Hakan Abrak, CEO, IO Interactive, The Gamer, September 2025
That sentence is the entire problem in one breath. The marketing has been engineered around honoring the IP, not around making the world inside this specific game discoverable to people who do not already love it. The campaign assumes the audience comes to the table already knowing what Bond is, wanting Bond, converted to Bond. A 22-year-old does not come to the table that way. They have to be convinced... and nothing in this campaign is built to convince them.
Bond Is Closer To Indy Than It Is To Star Wars... And That Is Not Where IO Wanted To Land
The numbers follow the marketing exactly.
In our mindGAME Data tracking, 007 First Light sits at 0.48% cumulative mindSHARE at week -3, ranked #225 globally, with weekly Google search volume at 414K. Respectable for a B-tier launch, well short of cultural moment.
Bond is doing fine inside its own genre. Among 269 action-adventure games we have tracked at week -3 pre-launch, 007 First Light is the #7-ranked title at that point, putting it in the top 2.6% of the action-adventure pre-launch comp set. That is real. Most games never get close to this level of pre-launch heat. The genre context matters because it grounds the rest of this section. 007 First Light is not failing... it is just not landing where the marketing budget and the IP gravity should have put it.
To see why, look at where the closest historical boomer-IP analogs were sitting at the same point pre-launch:
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order at week -3 (Nov 2019): 0.0120 cume, 2.49x Bond
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor at week -3 (Apr 2023): 0.0084 cume, 1.75x Bond
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle at week -3 (Dec 2024): 0.0024 cume, 0.49x Bond
Bond is sitting between two very different outcomes. Above Indiana Jones. Below both Jedi games. That middle position is where the entire analytical question lives.
Start with the bottom of the comp set. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the worst case scenario, and Bond is meaningfully ahead of it. The game was a critical hit... DICE GOTY nominee, BAFTA Best Game nominee, reviews loved it. Commercially it was a disappointment dressed up as a success story. Per Microsoft’s earnings call, Indy hit 4M players by January 2025, almost entirely through Game Pass. Per Alinea Analytics, the game moved 91,000 Steam copies in its first 6 days and 117,000 PS5 copies in its first 6 days. Concurrent player counts never broke 12K on Steam. The audience moved on within a month. I wrote about the broader pattern last summer, and Indy was the cleanest case in the deck.
Bond will outperform Indy. There is no Game Pass to lean on, which means premium copies have to drive the launch the old-fashioned way. The trajectory suggests the launch window lands somewhere in the few million range. Real units. Real money. A solid release, maybe something to build on.
But solid is not great. Solid is just fine. And fine, fair or not, is not the outcome this game was supposed to deliver. 007 First Light sits in the position to reset Bond for a new generation. That is the stakes this launch is carrying. A new IO Interactive Bond, after a decade-plus of Bond games being either dormant or forgettable, with seven years of development behind it, dropping in a moment when the franchise itself is between film eras and Amazon MGM is trying to figure out what Bond is next. The game does not need to reset Bond by itself. It needs to be part of the reset. And right now, the data is not telling me it will.
I do not think clearing the Indy bar is the win it sounds like. Fine is just fine, and fine does not reset Bond for the next generation.
That brings me to the elephant in the room. The Jedi games. As I wrote about last week, the Star Wars Jedi franchise has been wildly successful, particularly Fallen Order. As a boomer-IP reinvention, that should have been the north star for what 007 First Light could become. Not Uncharted. Not Hitman. The Jedi games. Let me explain.
The Jedi Games Were The Right North Star
This is the part where I need to talk about what 007 First Light could have been.
The Star Wars Jedi franchise is the cleanest example we have in the modern era of a legacy IP getting genuinely reintroduced to a new generation through a single-player action-adventure game. Respawn took Star Wars... a 50-year-old franchise that had been starved of meaningful single-player gaming since LucasArts shut down in 2013 and EA took over the exclusive license... and gave the fanbase what they had been missing for a decade.
Fallen Order removed the baggage of the sequel movies entirely. Fans got what they actually wanted: a competent Jedi who was not a whiny baby or terrible at his job, fighting genuinely cool villains... hello Inquisitors with twirling double-bladed lightsabers... in a world that did not try to memberberries old Star Wars or force a new perspective on the audience.
The game shipped in November 2019, sold 8 million copies in 8 weeks, hit 10 million copies in 4 months, and beat EA’s high-end projection by 25%. Surpassed 20 million players by mid-2021. Survivor followed four years later and performed respectably as a sequel, though our tracking shows it saw a meaningful drop-off from Fallen Order.
Those are the numbers. The structural lesson underneath them is what matters here.
Respawn did not market Fallen Order as “this is Star Wars.” Everyone already knew what Star Wars was. The marketing led with Cal Kestis... a brand new character, with a brand new story, in a corner of the universe nobody had explored before. The trailers showed Cal first, the lightsaber second, and the franchise iconography third. Fallen Order was sold to the audience as a discovery, not as a reassurance. The propagation engine ran on world curiosity, not brand recognition.
That worked. It worked because Fallen Order understood something the Bond marketing has not. Bond is a different problem than what Star Wars was facing in 2019. Star Wars had a content drought... at least for campaign based games, not an audience problem. Bond has the opposite. The audience is the thing that has thinned out. The under-30 generation has no relationship with the IP. But the structural lesson from Fallen Order still translates: lead with the character, build the world, give the new generation something specific to grab onto, and the IP gravity will do its work in the background.
There are people who will read this and say but Uncharted. I want to address that directly because I have seen it come up in conversations about this game for over a year. Uncharted is actually a more useful comp than people realize, but not in the way the comparison usually gets made. The typical version goes: “Naughty Dog built Nathan Drake over four games, so Bond does not need to do all the world-building work up front.” That gets the comp backwards. Naughty Dog sold the entire world of Nathan Drake at the onset.
The first Uncharted in 2007 introduced Drake as a fully formed treasure hunter in a fully formed Indiana Jones-adjacent universe. Voice acted by Nolan North, with a sharp script, a clear tonal pitch, a defined supporting cast (Sully, Elena), and a specific corner of the action-adventure genre staked out. The four-games arc deepened that foundation. It did not build it from scratch. Naughty Dog sold the audience on a new character and a new world, and then spent the next decade earning the audience’s investment.
That is the playbook Bond should have run. Instead, what the marketing for 007 First Light has done is the equivalent of Naughty Dog launching the first Uncharted in 2007 with the message “this is Nathan Drake, he is cool, you should care.” No tonal pitch. No world-building. No specific reason to invest. Just the assumption that the audience already cares because the brand exists. That would not have worked for Nathan Drake in 2007, when he was a brand new character with no audience.
It is not working for Bond in 2026, when the IP itself is the thing the new generation has no relationship with. The Bond marketing is selling the assumption that you already care, instead of selling why you should care. The protagonist is not being built. The world is not being shown. The villain, Bawma, got a strong TGA reveal in December and has basically not been mentioned since. The conspiracy has not been hinted at. Strip the IP signaling out of the campaign and there is nothing left to grab onto.
That is the missed opportunity. A new generation of gamers was on the table for IO and Amazon MGM. The Jedi playbook was right there. The Uncharted playbook was right there. They did not run either. The 2017 boomer-IP playbook is what got picked instead, and three weeks from launch, the data is telling us exactly what that costs.
The Bet The Old Hierarchy Lost
I am still buying this game day one. None of what I have written here changes that. 007 First Light will land as a competent IO Interactive single-player action game, with a young Bond worth getting to know, in a 2026 release calendar that has been a problem for it since the day it was scheduled.
But fine is not great. And great is not what this is going to be.
The miss is partly structural. 007 First Light is launching into a stacked window. Forza, LEGO Batman, Subnautica 2... every one of those games is pulling attention out of the same micro-communities Bond should have been claiming for itself. Release calendar matters. I have written about this before. Launching alongside a moment like Forza is a ceiling-compressor, regardless of how good the game ends up being.
The miss is also positional. The marketing campaign bet that the old hierarchy still holds. Publisher spends. Press generates coverage. Influencers receive kits. NBA Nightcap delivers the message. The IP does the rest. In 2017, that bet works. In 2026, the audience that bet was built for has fragmented into thousands of micro-communities that do not propagate brand-as-shorthand campaigns. The marketing did not build the world. It did not sell the character. It did not give the new generation a reason to discover Bond from inside the game itself. It assumed the assumption would carry. That is not how attention works anymore.
So Bond will be fine. Its launch window will do a few million copies. It will get respectable reviews. It will fade from the conversation by August. Fine.
That is the old hierarchy bet, played out in real time. Next up, the bet that is actually working.
Forza Horizon 6... The Bet That Power Has Moved To The Communities
The contrast with Bond is immediate.
I am not going to spend much time setting up Forza Horizon 6 because I have written about this game multiple times across this newsletter, most recently in Microsoft’s Gaming Problem back in February, where I flagged it as the clear second-biggest game of 1H 2026 behind Resident Evil Requiem and on a “borderline S-tier trajectory” well over 15 weeks before launch. The news cycle has done the rest of my work for me. Reviews dropped this week. Metacritic 92 across 62 critic reviews, Universal Acclaim, Must-Play badge. Early access begins May 15, full launch May 19, day one on Game Pass at $69.99. The reviews are in. The verdict is unambiguous. This is one of the best games of 2026, and the marketing campaign that delivered it to us is the cleanest case study I have for what the new propagation playbook actually looks like.
The Marketing Is The Inversion
Run Forza Horizon 6 through the same checklist I used on Bond, and every box flips.
Where Bond shot four episodes of Beyond the Light with devs in turtlenecks reflecting on Bond’s legacy, Forza built The Art of Driving. A three-episode long-form documentary series hosted by Larry Chen, the most-followed car photographer working today, traveling through Tohoku with DRAGON76, Kyushu with Kazuhisa Uragami, and Kanto with Inko Ai Takita. Each episode pairs Chen with a Japanese artist working in a different medium. The format is a Japan travel show that happens to feature a video game, not a video game ad that happens to feature Japan. The Tohoku episode alone has pulled 262K views. The series total sits north of 1M cumulative views. Compare that to Beyond the Light, whose four episodes combined are sitting at 94K views. Eleven times the audience for marketing that does not look like marketing.
Where Bond ran creator preview events in LA, London, and Shanghai for established gaming media and gaming creators, Forza built Tokyo Lights, Horizon Nights... a real-world activation in a Shibuya multi-storey parking garage in May 2026, with 100+ creators from 20+ countries. The guest list is the entire point. Larry Chen. Dino Dalle Carbonare. Lia Block. Wataru Kato of Liberty Walk. Inko Ai Takita. Gaming creators were there too, but the room was anchored by car culture, photography, and lifestyle voices, alongside manufacturer partners like Lamborghini, McLaren, AMG, Aston Martin, Ferrari, and Toyota Gazoo Racing. The activation got covered by Hypebeast and Turnpike Global... publications that do not write about video game launches. Forza did not buy attention from the gaming press tier and call it a day. The brand placed itself inside cultural communities that already had organic reach, and let those communities propagate the game forward as a participation object.
The agency behind the Art of Driving series, Boo Agency, said the quiet part out loud:
“We know that 80% of ads fail to create a memory, so The Art of Driving was built to engage with communities across Art, Travel, Photography, Car-culture and gaming to set the stage for them to create their own memories with FH6 on launch.” — Boo Agency, Little Black Book
That is the entire propagation thesis stated by the marketing agency itself. Build inside communities. Let them generate their own memories. Get the game to launch with momentum the brand did not have to manufacture.
The Data Is The Proof
In our mindGAME Data tracking, Forza Horizon 6 sits at 1.65% cumulative mindSHARE at week -2, ranked #85 globally, with weekly Google search volume cracking 1.06 million. Bond, two weeks behind Forza on the calendar at week -3, is at 0.48% cume, rank #225, 414K weekly search.
Forza is doing 3.4x Bond’s cumulative attention at this snapshot.
The more revealing comparison is what happens when you align both games at the same point in their pre-launch lifecycle. Last week, when Forza Horizon 6 was at week -3 (exactly where Bond sits today), the picture was already lopsided. Forza was at 1.48% cumulative mindSHARE, rank #158 overall, #128 in Google, #169 in YouTube, with 619K weekly Google search. Bond today, at the same point pre-launch, is at 0.48% cume, rank #225 overall, #189 in Google, #218 in YouTube, with 414K weekly search.
Forza at the same point in its launch cycle was already 3.1x Bond’s cumulative attention, ranked roughly 60 spots higher across mindSHARE, Google, and YouTube. This is not a final-stretch acceleration story. The gap was already structural a week ago, when Forza was at the exact same pre-launch milestone Bond is now.
The view-count gap on launch trailers tells the same story from a different angle. Forza’s official launch trailer dropped six days ago and has pulled 1.4M views. Bond’s Lana Del Rey title sequence, dropped three weeks ago with a major BAFTAs reveal moment behind it, has done 1.9M views over a far longer window. Apples to apples on time-adjusted basis, Forza’s launch trailer is propagating at roughly 3 to 4 times the rate of Bond’s flagship cultural beat. For a racing game. Against a Bond game with a Lana Del Rey collaboration.
The genre comp confirms the gap. Forza Horizon 6 is the #1 game at week -2 in our entire pre-launch comp set across all genres tracked. Not first in its category. First, period.
Why Forza Casts A Shadow Over The Entire Window
This is the part Bond should have seen coming, and the part LEGO Batman is also going to have to navigate.
The window is no longer a future problem. It is already in motion. Subnautica 2 launched in early access yesterday and immediately did the work of a tentpole hit. 467,000 peak concurrent players on Steam alone within the first hour. Over 1 million copies sold in under two hours, confirmed by Unknown Worlds. Day-one Game Pass on top of that. The game is currently the third-most-played title on Steam, outranking Crimson Desert and Resident Evil Requiem on the live charts. All of that arrived in spite of the pre-launch drama around Krafton’s ouster of the original studio leadership, the legal fight that followed, and the very real fan boycotts that had been organizing against the game for months. The audience showed up anyway.
That is the first weight on the window. Subnautica 2 is going to keep pulling Steam concurrents, Game Pass attention, and discourse oxygen for weeks. Forza Horizon 6 lands on May 19, four days from now, into a market that Subnautica 2 has already primed. A 92 Metacritic, Game Pass day-one Forza release, with 1.65% cumulative mindSHARE going into launch week, will pull a meaningful chunk of the attention budget on top of whatever Subnautica 2 is still holding. That is the structural reality of how 15% of gamer attention is “up for grabs” any given week. Stack two simultaneous tentpole hits in the same two-week window and the math gets brutal for anything launching after them. Every Bond review that drops over the next three weeks will be read against the Forza review and the Subnautica 2 numbers that hit the same outlet first. Every Bond launch-week TikTok will be competing for FYP placement against Forza launch-week TikToks and Subnautica 2 leviathan clips. Every Bond Game Pass non-inclusion will be compared against Forza‘s and Subnautica 2‘s Game Pass day-one inclusions.
The shadow is real, it is structural, and it was avoidable. Bond did not have to launch into this window. The choice to ship two weeks behind Forza, a Game Pass tentpole that had been telegraphed for two years, was a strategic miss before Subnautica 2 even announced its surprise release date. Now Bond is launching into a window where two simultaneous hits are pulling attention, one of which IO and Amazon could not have anticipated, but the other of which was on the calendar for a long time. The marketing did not build the propagation engine. The release calendar did not build the breathing room. Bond is launching into a window where the air has already been sucked out twice over.
That is what propagation marketing looks like when it works. Forza built its moment inside the communities first. Subnautica 2 let its audience show up for it even through a publishing meltdown that should have killed the launch. The communities propagated both games forward. The reviews and the CCU numbers validated what the propagation engine had already established. The launches are cultural events, not marketing campaigns.
Next up, the cleanest case study of all... an indie that took the same playbook and turned a 30-person studio into a nice win before the marketing budget was even spent.
Dead as Disco And Mixtape... The Bet On The Players Themselves
What Is Dead As Disco, And Who Built It
I have written about this game before, and I have been keeping an eye on it this past year. Dead as Disco has been one of the most persistent outliers in our mindGAME tracking of TikTok-driven pre-launch discovery for the better part of this past year. Our model had Dead as Disco tracking in the top 0.1% of pre-launch indie games in our data, and the lifetime TikTok view count on the game’s content sits north of 300 million views across more than 16,000 videos. I had the pleasure of meeting Will Cook, the studio’s founder, at GDC earlier this year. We hit it off, talked about the studio’s go-to-market theory, and I came away convinced this was a story worth telling at launch. Now the game is out, the data is in, and the story is even cleaner than the trajectory suggested.
Dead as Disco is a rhythm-action brawler from Brain Jar Games, an indie studio that did not exist three years ago. The pitch, in the studio’s own framing, is “John Wick meets Baby Driver”... a music-synchronized combat game where every dodge, parry, and finisher snaps to the beat of the soundtrack. The game launched into Steam Early Access on May 5, 2026, currently sits at a 96% Overwhelmingly Positive Steam review score, peaked at 8,413 concurrent players in its launch week, and is the rare indie that broke through to the top of the discoverability heap without paid creator activations or traditional press tier coverage doing the heavy lifting.
Brain Jar Games was founded in early 2024 by CEO Will Cook, an ex-Trion Worlds veteran (back when Trion was shipping RIFT) and former Creative Director at Dynasty Studios. The co-founder team is Rohan Knuckey, Krys H Kozlowski, Kaitlyn Kincaid, and Marcin Deja, all AAA veterans with credits spanning Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Call of Duty, and RIFT. Adam Gershowitz, the COO, joined as the operational lead after stints as Production Director at Blizzard Entertainment and Studio Head at Netflix’s ISX division. The studio operates as a fully-remote team of roughly 30 people.
The funding history tells the rest of the setup. Brain Jar raised a $6.7M seed round in March 2024, co-led by Transcend Fund and Menlo Ventures with 1UP Ventures participating. The advisory roster reads like a who’s who of gaming, music, and creator-economy operators... Chris Rigopulos (ex-Harmonix COO), Nate Mitchell (Oculus co-founder), Eden Chen (Pragma CEO), David Stelzer (Xsolla), Scott Hartsman (ex-Trion CEO), and creators CohhCarnage and Sacriel. By March 2026, total funding had reached $12.2M across two rounds.
Here is Will Cook’s framing on what they were actually trying to build, from the GamesBeat interview at the seed announcement:
“In a world where so many studios want to promise the world and the scopes are always creeping, it was very refreshing for our investors to get something that was so scoped but had a vision for how it would succeed in the long-term.” — Will Cook, CEO and Co-Founder, Brain Jar Games, GamesBeat, March 2024
That word, scoped, is going to come up a lot. Cook framed the studio’s whole philosophy around it in the same interview, and it is the structural foundation everything else in this section sits on:
“These times of crisis... there will be a lot of new studios springing up that try to do it in a better way. And if that’s the revolution the games industry needs to be sustainable, then we want to be part of it. We feel a big responsibility to be a studio that contributes to what people want out of the industry. We want to be the studio you dream of joining when you’re just starting out.” — Will Cook, CEO and Co-Founder, Brain Jar Games, GamesBeat, March 2024
The trajectory from there is one of the cleanest indie growth curves I have seen tracked in our data. The June 2025 Steam Next Fest was the inflection point. Dead as Disco landed in the Top 5 Most-Played demos during the event. Within three weeks, the game had 400,000 Steam wishlists and ranked 93rd globally on the entire Steam platform. Anthony Franklin II at Vice captured the energy around the demo at the time in a piece titled “I Have Seen the Light, and Its Name Is Dead as Disco”:
“An absolute banger... the game has everything it needs to be one of the best indie releases of its year.” — Anthony Franklin II, Vice, June 2025
By October 2025, the demo was approaching a million unique players. Brain Jar had over 1 million Steam wishlists in hand by the time the early access launch hit on May 5, 2026. All of that growth happened with a 30-person studio, with minimal traditional marketing spend, and with the game itself doing the propagation work.
That is the setup. A scoped indie game from a remote studio of AAA veterans, with a clear product-as-channel theory of go-to-market, that built a million-wishlist audience by letting the demo carry the message and the community do the propagation. The marketing thesis follows.
Why It Worked... The Product Was The Marketing Channel
Dead as Disco did not break out because of a marketing campaign. It broke out because the game itself was designed as the marketing channel. Every play session generates content, every clip is a unit of distribution. The TikTok virality was not an output of the marketing strategy. It was a design parameter baked into the gameplay loop from day one.
A few weeks before the early access launch, I sat down with Will Cook and Adam Gershowitz to understand what they had actually done. The conversation was one of the cleanest articulations I have heard of why a product can function as a propagation engine, not just as a game.
Will walked me through the design philosophy first. The goal, as he framed it, was never to do marketing work in the traditional sense. The game itself was supposed to produce shareable moments without the studio having to manufacture them. Brain Jar deliberately built a community-first game, got it into people’s hands early, designed the moment-to-moment gameplay loop to be holistically fun, and trusted that the rest would take care of itself. The studio’s whole approach was to keep the team lean instead of hiring up to manage a traditional campaign.
That is the propagation thesis stated by the developer who built the product. The game does the work. The studio’s job is to design moments worth sharing and then get out of the way of the loop.
Will got more specific on the structural design call later in the conversation. He described Dead as Disco as a unified go-to-market product designed all the way down to the layers... not because the studio over-engineered the thing, but because the scope was small enough that every piece could reinforce every other piece. He compared it to Bruce Lee’s one-inch punch. The whole product compressed into one pure form. Like a race car.
The Bruce Lee analogy is doing real work in that framing. Brain Jar did not build a game and then bolt a marketing campaign onto it after the fact. They built a product where the gameplay loop, the visual style, the music synchronization, the social-sharing mechanics, and the TikTok-native dance moments were all the same design problem. Every piece reinforced every other piece. The marketing channel was the product itself.
Adam was even more direct on the spend side, and this is the quote I want to put in front of you verbatim because it lands the structural reality of what Brain Jar actually pulled off:
“When you say, hey, we haven’t spent a lot of money, the answer is yes. Other than doing a little bit of boosting and some data research on Reddit, we haven’t done much at all.” — Adam Gershowitz, COO, Brain Jar Games, mindGAME interview, April 2026
Let me state that plainly. A 30-person studio shipped a 96% Overwhelmingly Positive rhythm-action game, peaked at 8,400 concurrent players, sold over 200,000 copies in the first week against a million-plus pre-launch wishlists, and had not actually started its marketing spend yet at the time of that conversation. The product was the propagation engine. The audience was the distribution channel. The game’s design carried the campaign.
When I asked Will what the team would credit for the trajectory, his answer came back to the same place. He talked about having to be a certain amount of naive about the difficulty of what they were doing... if they had fully appreciated how hard it would be, they would have been scared off. They jumped in trusting that the right game concept would carry them. From there, the playbook was the same one he had described earlier. Keep the team small. Build a community-first game. Get it into players’ hands early. Prove the moment-to-moment fun. Let the rest follow.
That is the model. Scope tight. Design clean. Demo early. Community first. Trust the product to do the propagation. The studio’s job is to ship a game worth talking about, not to manufacture the conversation.
The Mixtape Control Variable
The cleanest way to test whether the Dead as Disco outcome was actually about propagation theory, versus just being a lucky breakout, is to look at a comparable indie that launched into the same window with the opposite marketing approach. That game is Mixtape.
Mixtape was published by Annapurna Interactive and developed by Beethoven & Dinosaur, the studio behind The Artful Escape. The game launched on May 7, 2026, two days after Dead as Disco. The marketing campaign was a textbook 2017 indie publisher push. IGN ran a rare 10/10 review. Influencer gift kits went out with KOSS Porta-Pro headphones inside them. Press tier coverage hit the right outlets. The pre-launch story was about a beloved music-driven coming-of-age narrative game being treated with the kind of editorial respect Annapurna’s catalog usually earns.
And then the audience did not show up.
Mixtape peaked at 2,237 concurrent players on Steam on May 9th, then dropped to 1,067 by May 12th. A 52% peak-to-trough decline in three days. Dead as Disco, by comparison, peaked at 8,413, settled into a sustained 5,000-7,000 CCU floor through its second week, and is still doing 3.8x Mixtape’s peak as its daily floor. The story is not that Mixtape failed because micro-communities tore it down. It is that Mixtape never broke through to anyone in a way that mattered. The peak was 2,200 concurrent players... not a rejection number, an apathy number.
Nathan Grayson at Aftermath wrote about the discourse cycle that did emerge around the launch, and the framing is worth pulling because his analysis lands the half of the picture that is genuinely real:
“The very content creators who accuse IGN and other sites of misusing their influence are the real tastemakers of the modern era... they shape the conversation around new games, often via misinformation and ragebait, which more reliably drives engagement on social media than discussing games on their own terms.” — Nathan Grayson, Aftermath, May 12, 2026
The rage-bait micro-communities Grayson is describing are real. “Industry plant,” “pay-for-coverage,” “the headphones gift kit proves the 10/10 was rigged”... that critique cycle is a real dynamic, and I have written before about how those communities operate in gaming culture. Grayson is also right that the journalism class itself is operating in a brutal environment: writers underpaid, getting harassed online when reviews land wrong for certain fandoms, working inside ad-supported businesses that need engagement metrics to survive. All of that is fair.
Where the framing gets incomplete is the assumption that this is a creators-vs-journalists fight with a right side and a wrong side. Both sides are operating in the same attention economy with the same incentive structure. The journalism outlets are not charities. They exist to drive ad revenue, and that revenue model rewards inflammatory headlines and engagement-bait coverage in the same way TikTok creator economics does. Both are chasing the same currency through the same mechanisms. This is not a moral fight, it is a structural one, and the audience can feel it from both sides at this point.
The deeper miss in the Aftermath framing is that it focuses on two very small pods of internet gaming culture arguing about each other, when the broader internet largely does not care about either of them. Mixtape‘s 2,200 CCU peak is not a rage-bait casualty. It is an apathy number, and apathy is the actual story.
What Mixtape needed was not better defenses against the bad-faith micro-community attacks that did show up. The game needed to go find the right micro-communities for what it actually is.
This is where the broader gaming discourse, and the Aftermath piece by extension, tends to flatten micro-communities into a single thing... the rage-bait gaming pods that go after IGN reviews. Micro-communities are not just gaming communities. They are music communities. Vinyl culture. Mixtape culture. ‘90s alt-rock revival pockets. Indie music scenes. Audiophile communities. The specific people who light up at the phrase “music-driven coming-of-age narrative game” do not live inside the gaming-press-vs-creators discourse. They live in entirely different corners of the internet.
Forza Horizon 6 understood this and went after car culture creators. Dead as Disco understood this and went after TikTok dance culture. Mixtape is a music game. The natural cultural home for Mixtape‘s propagation engine is music culture. Annapurna ran a publisher playbook designed for the gaming press tier instead, and built the marketing for the journalists rather than for the audience the game’s themes actually belong to.
The Propagation Engine Worked
Defining The Term
It is time to formally land the term, because it has been doing work across this entire piece and it deserves a clean definition.
Propagation marketing is the discipline of designing a product, a release window, and a community engagement strategy where the audience itself becomes the marketing channel. The studio does not buy attention. It does not manufacture moments. What it does is build something worth sharing, place it inside the cultural communities that already care about its themes, and then trust those communities to do the propagation work. The product is the engine. Audiences are the channel. A publisher’s job is to find the right communities and let them carry the launch.
This is not a gaming concept. Propagation marketing is the defining brand-building pattern of the last decade across consumer categories, and the case studies are not subtle. Stanley Cup built a billion-dollar tumbler business in 2024 on the back of TikTok moms posting “emotional support water bottle” content. No traditional advertising. The product was the channel. Liquid Death turned water into a punk-rock content brand by treating the can itself as a marketing artifact and letting customers do the cultural placement. Different industries, different products, same engine.
What Gaming Gets Wrong About “Community”
Gaming knows the word “community.” The industry says it constantly. The problem is what publishers actually mean when they say it.
What they usually mean is one of two shallow definitions. The first is the echo chamber. Your own existing hardcore fans, talking to each other, propagating inside the same closed loop the brand has already saturated. That is a community... it is just a community, importnat. yes... but its not the community. Instead, it’s one of many communities. The cleanerest example of this is Star Wars. Huge community... Yes. Heck, I’m in that community... and yet... we are in part the anchor holding Star Wars back from being bigger.
The second is paid creator sponsorship. Cutting a check to influencers to run a brand activation, then calling that “unlocking the community.” Rented attention from someone else’s audience is not community engagement. It is fleeting by design, treated as if money buys you cultural placement. It does not.
Real community is many things. Many micro-communities, defined by interest, not by who shouts the loudest on the internet. Sports. Street culture. Anime. JRPGs. Guns. Cars. Farming. Collecting (cards, LEGO, watches, vinyl, sneakers). Fashion. And yes, gaming itself. Some of these overlap. Others operate entirely on their own terms. All of them have to be tapped authentically to move the needle on a launch, because the audience you actually need to reach lives across this entire landscape, not inside one or two pockets you already control.
The angry internet exists. Rage-bait gaming pods exist. They are loud, they are real, and they do real damage to launches that walk into them naively. But they are a minority of what is happening in the broader landscape, and treating them as if they ARE the community is the same mistake as treating the echo chamber as if it IS the community. Two small loud pockets are not the audience.
The IGN-tier gaming press class has fallen so far that they barely matter outside the rage-bait fight, and the rage-bait fight is the wrong fight, because both sides run the same business model. Ad-supported. Engagement-driven. Both irrelevant to the audience that exists outside that argument. Publishers anchor on the historical gaming press because that is what they have always known, and that is why the broadcast playbook persists. Not because gaming is structurally behind other industries on community marketing, but because the people running AAA campaigns are pattern-matching on relationships and channels that no longer reach the actual audience.
Two Propagation Plays That Worked
The propagation playbook works in gaming when it treats community as it actually exists. Multiple. Varied. Interest-based. Scattered across the internet in places that have nothing to do with gaming media or paid creator deals. Two games launched in May 2026 that ran the propagation playbook from opposite ends of the budget spectrum, and both worked.
Forza Horizon 6 ran a propagation play by design at AAA scale. The marketing campaign placed the game inside car culture, photography, lifestyle, and travel communities. Art of Driving with Larry Chen. Tokyo Lights Horizon Nights. Manufacturer partnerships with Lamborghini, McLaren, Ferrari, Toyota Gazoo Racing. The campaign did not chase the gaming press tier. It chased the cultural communities the game actually belongs to. The result was 92 Metacritic, 1.65% cumulative mindSHARE going into launch week, and a campaign covered by Hypebeast and Turnpike Global before a single major gaming outlet’s review dropped.
Dead as Disco ran a propagation play from the ground up at indie scale. Brain Jar designed a game where the gameplay loop, the visual style, the music synchronization, and the social-sharing mechanics were all the same design problem. Every clip became a trailer. The audience built the marketing. 300M+ TikTok views, 1M+ wishlists, 200K+ copies sold in week one, with minimal traditional marketing spend.
Two propagation playbooks. Two different scales. Two different theories of where the engine starts (cultural communities, product design). Both worked.
And Then There Is Bond
Bond is the harder version of the same problem.
The IP touches dozens of cultural pockets in theory (cinema, watches, cars, classic fiction, casino culture, fashion, espionage thrillers), but a meaningful slice of those audiences may not care about Bond as a brand in 2026, or may know Bond only as a residual cultural reference from a generation ago. Showing up inside those communities with the gaming version of a neon sign that reads “I am Bond” is not community engagement. That is brand announcement, the same broadcast playbook in a different costume.
Real propagation would have required introducing Bond to audiences who no longer have a native cultural reason to care, in ways that respected each community’s actual interests rather than treating Bond’s IP recognition as a passport. From what is visible publicly, the campaign did not do that work. Mixtape faced an easier version of the same problem (the audience exists, Annapurna just did not find them) and missed it too. The data has been telling this story for months, and the launch will confirm it.
The Structural Moment
This is the moment the gaming industry is in. The power has moved. Audiences are now the marketing channel. The product itself is the propagation engine. And the publishers who understand this are launching cultural events. Those who do not are launching marketing campaigns.