I've been asking myself this question for a couple of months now: Why CDPR are not marketing harder Gwent? The conclusion I came up to is that they strive for perfection and enjoyable experience across all factions! If they wanted a huge boost with Homecoming they would have given the game to popular card-gamer streamers, they would have paid for more prolonged ads and some PR opinions and threads about Gwent. None of that happened except the YouTube ads that no one was seeing because of ADBlocks! Let's not lie to ourselves that CDPR did everything they could with the marketing when HC came out. On the contrary, they did almost to nothing! And that's because they test their game! Beta was part of a larger experiment of how the playstyle should work and what's the sweet spot for balancing! 3 rows and lots of thinning, along with hyper-synergy was not the way to go because of lots of different reasons!
-first: EXTREMELY hard to balance,
-second: pre-decided matches,
-third: decks consisting only of synergy cards making the other 70% of the cards not even an option of this playstyle of decks
With HC they shook those weaknesses, however they didn't test enough the HC version of Gwent, so the existing community of Gwent got through a second Beta cycle with HC and with the first expansion CC and SY introduced we started to see what was good before and what's good now, how the cards should be balanced and how the game should play out! This community went through a lot of changes along with the developers of the game but I believe only for the better!
Now imagine working as a Co-founder/Founder of CDPR: you own one of the most beloved franchises in the history of gaming, and you are struggling to market a game that is as good as Gwent? I mean compare the art-style, the voice actors, the depth and mechanics this game has to other franchises. It's not coming close to anything! MTG is something I can debate about that is close to Gwent in those departments, but in Gwent, I don't have to sell my left kidney so I can play the next expansion on a competitive level and play in tournaments! So what CDPR is doing right now is completing the game with the help of the community, balancing cards, rushing on new factions and making the game to reach its highest potential so that when Mobile comes out, they can focus their resources not on a new expansion to keep the game fresh but on aggressive marketing and streamers, ads, pr, etc. Because when you have a game where all factions are viable with lots of different playstyles that are competitive your game will always be fresh and you will preserve the current player base and the newcomers will feel like they have a choice of how they want to play the game, not only net-deck Gudrun and spam one playstyle!
After so much brainstorming I couldn't find any other reason than that CDPR want this game to be as balanced and as fun as possible with as much variaty as leaders there are in Gwent, before marketing it to other people. Everything in this game screams perfection! From the art-work to the unorthodox playstyle, it's all-around a ONE OF A KIND experience and I am CERTAIN that there is an untapped Gwent community out there that simply don't know that this game exists!
-first: EXTREMELY hard to balance,
-second: pre-decided matches,
-third: decks consisting only of synergy cards making the other 70% of the cards not even an option of this playstyle of decks
With HC they shook those weaknesses, however they didn't test enough the HC version of Gwent, so the existing community of Gwent got through a second Beta cycle with HC and with the first expansion CC and SY introduced we started to see what was good before and what's good now, how the cards should be balanced and how the game should play out! This community went through a lot of changes along with the developers of the game but I believe only for the better!
Now imagine working as a Co-founder/Founder of CDPR: you own one of the most beloved franchises in the history of gaming, and you are struggling to market a game that is as good as Gwent? I mean compare the art-style, the voice actors, the depth and mechanics this game has to other franchises. It's not coming close to anything! MTG is something I can debate about that is close to Gwent in those departments, but in Gwent, I don't have to sell my left kidney so I can play the next expansion on a competitive level and play in tournaments! So what CDPR is doing right now is completing the game with the help of the community, balancing cards, rushing on new factions and making the game to reach its highest potential so that when Mobile comes out, they can focus their resources not on a new expansion to keep the game fresh but on aggressive marketing and streamers, ads, pr, etc. Because when you have a game where all factions are viable with lots of different playstyles that are competitive your game will always be fresh and you will preserve the current player base and the newcomers will feel like they have a choice of how they want to play the game, not only net-deck Gudrun and spam one playstyle!
After so much brainstorming I couldn't find any other reason than that CDPR want this game to be as balanced and as fun as possible with as much variaty as leaders there are in Gwent, before marketing it to other people. Everything in this game screams perfection! From the art-work to the unorthodox playstyle, it's all-around a ONE OF A KIND experience and I am CERTAIN that there is an untapped Gwent community out there that simply don't know that this game exists!