Shills are not a real thing

Okay, I think I reached the point where it's starting to annoy me. I don't know when this "lmao OP is a shill" meme started, but it's really pissing me off. People pretending that developers would waste their time to advertise on the world's most remote and hateful place, lacking any kind of logical understanding that some people are just hype about a game.

What can we honestly do to improve this board? Is there any way to discourage shillposting? I really just want to get back to discuss video games from hype trailers without the entire thread derailing into people calling each other shills.

Other urls found in this thread:

alexa.com/siteinfo/Sup
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Fuck off Ubishill, no one is falling for it.

>Is there any way to discourage shillposting?
If you could get Sup Forums to leave you might.

You're just new as fuck.
You weren't around for the storm of completely identical Borderlands shill threads.

They have gotten stealthier since then, but shilling is still a thing, and it works.

good thread

Not it isn't you are a retard.
Who would waste money advertising on a site where the posts disappear after a short time?

of course they are but most of them aren't paid
if i like a game of course i will talk about it and shill it like with a good movie or a book

1) Developers have and do come to this board for various reasons. This is a free-use internet site, and plenty of humans with time and opinions, regardless of occupation, come here. Some even frequent it.
2) If you think people do not pay other people to generate discussion for a game by talking about it, but not actually having a passion for it, you are naive.
3) If you want to discuss videogames, go to Reddit. Sup Forums is for discussing politics and memes with children.

You're a dumb motherfucker if you honestly believe shilling is not a thing.

On Sup Forums it reaches millions of people and you have to pay like 1 employee to keep some threads up and shitpost in them. Compared to most 'normal' marketing campaigns it's fucking free.

Gee, I don't know
Because it's cheap as dirt and sells for millions?
The potential for "viral marketing" is so insanely huge, and the price of entry is a bowl of rice to some third world spammers.

Here is your (You) newfag

t. shill

Sup Forums is an entirely different cancer that's plaguing this board, but I do agree that we'd be better off without them

Please, this is the same shit as when people pretended that Blizzard advertised Overwatch on this board.

Is it so hard to believe that certain games just appeal to large audience?

You're paranoid for believing that people would waste actual money on paying advertisers to post on boards instead of putting that money into creating trailers to garner actual attention on sites like YouTube.

Fair enough, but I don't think fans of a series would be referred to as "shills". If I like Fire Emblem and make threads about it to tell people to play it, that's not shilling, that's simply what this fucking board is for. Actual paid shilling is not a real thing, and it's become this cancerous board myth that people just believed after a while.

op gets (OP) haha here's your (You) friendo :D

Well it's well established that as a form of grassroots marketing posing as posters of online communities dedicated to a hobby is a thing that companies do to market themselves.

It is highly cost efficient; these places are free to post and have high levels of traffic. It's also effective, people are more susceptible to marketing when they don't recognize it as marketing.

Calling out every positive post as a shill is retarded but acting like they don't exist at all is too.

Also this thread is shitposting, meta-threads are not about video games and no constructive change will come from it, so you're just shitting up the board as much as the people you're complaining about.

Okay give me one legitimate source that legitimizes your claim.
By that I mean give me proof that a company has advertised on Sup Forums by paying people to do so.

> Pay a guy $1,500 to go on a site every day for a month and make a couple of posts about how your game is literally attacking white Christian Americans
> Pay $50-150k to purchase ad spots on high volume television channels during specific hours to run your expensive CGI trailer for a month

Gee, I dunno. Wonder which has more exposure-per-dollar there..

>anonymous posting
>no need to make account
>frequented by A LOT of people daily

>better not use this absolutely free advertesment plattfrom by hiring some "social engineering" fuckers

It is another matter to spot these verminhi here OP.

its almost prime video game season again
give it a few weeks and youll start seeing dozens of threads in the same day with the same exact op about the same game

>Please, this is the same shit as when people pretended that Blizzard advertised Overwatch on this board.
It might be they did. It doesn't matter. There has been plenty of proof of shill spam here over the years, newfag.
Fucking Borderlands was the worst, but Brink was also fucking terrible.

Shilling isn't a thing but you should in all honesty check out Halo 5 by 343 industries. It's FREE on PC and still has a hot community. It's 10x better than Halo 3.

Sup Forums basically engineered the use of the term shill and was the first board to use it in common parlance.

Lurk more and learn to use google, you fucking child

...

eh, it's like "white knight", "sjw", "go back to Sup Forums", etc. meaningless insults in anonymous discussion

Go back to sjw, Sup Forumsknight

Of course people shrill here
We're one of the bigger and more influential game community.
Not just that but its so fucking easy here
Everyone is anonymous and all you have to do is post cute girls Sup Forums will flock to your game in drones.

If I made a daily thread saying
>Sup Forums likes Battleborn now
What the fuck happened?

How long would it take for some here to eventually start defending it a little?
In fact Gigantic was blatantly shrilling their game here I played it.

You're joking, right? Capcom shills come here on a daily fucking basis to advertise. Not to mention how many times people have straight up admitted to shilling, like with that Ryse game or whatever.

...

If you are paying for advertising you don't need Sup Forums to be aware of it to get exposure.
Meaning if you are a large company, you get passive exposure from game news sites and people who follow your releases.
If you are a small company you aren't going to shell out 1.5k to pay some somali with a laptop to shill your game on Sup Forums. And even if you did, I wouldn't call it shilling because it is likely nobody has heard of your game anyway.

Meta-threads are absolutely legit, though. And while nothing constructive may come from it, it might help raise awareness to how ridiculous people come across when they point and shout shill at every trailer on the fucking board.

Granted, while I agree that in theory shilling may be profitable, I'm very certain that the actual amount of shilling on this board is far lower than it's made to be. I'm very certain devs, especially start-ups who posted here to begin with use this board to advertise their game, and so will any other dev that frequents this board. But I highly doubt that large companies have the foresight to do so, let alone if they had it would bother to do so, because the amount of potential customers they could attract is very minor.

Reddit's a different story. It's no secret that plenty devs have a presence there, and I think it's also more "friendly" and well-known to the average marketer.

I did that for free though.

That is what I thought.
>use google
I said legitimate source.

Lolicons are not a real thing.

>Shills that publishers hire have been 100% confirmed on Reddit, beyond any doubt, there's concrete proof that it happens and has happened
>Stupid fucking pedo animefaggot assumes they wouldn't also shill on a site that's EASIER to shill on (no signup, no account, no papertrail leading to any account info, very lax moderation, very large userbase etc.)

Fucking kill yourself you stupid pedophile cunt.

You are a ridiculous person. I get where you're coming from, but everything you think you know about this particular thing is wrong. Good luck with your life, I guess.

You need to stop hurling newfag as an insult because you disagree with someone's opinion. Spam is completely separate from shilling, and I think it's done mostly to piss people off, rather than to "shill" game. It just happens to have that side-effect.

There's more.

You'd be surprised.

Well then prove me wrong.
Show me where a game company has paid people to shill here and I will shut up.
I have looked for it, anything I find is either a thread from Sup Forums or reddit post.

Its all shills to me since there arent any games worth buying anymore.

Battleborn has been become such a solidified meme that I don't think any amount of "shilling" would make people play it.

People will pay for advertising, you really think companies won't pay some faggot minimum wage to make posts about their games that can't be blocked by adblock?

Not only that but many fanboys shill for free, ffxiv and overwatch fags are prime examples of this.

W-wait Todd, I bought Skyrim like 5 times already!

This guy was posting regularly for half a year before DMC's release.

Protip: The meme IS the advertising.

Sounds like a buttmad fanboy whose post turned into a copypasta

There's a difference between very determined fans posting about games daily, and actual shills paid by a developer to advertise their game.

The difference is that the latter doesn't exist on this board. Maybe 1 out of every 100 posts that are claimed to be shilling.

That does not prove anything.
I said a legitimate source, this is a sceencap of some Sup Forums posts that literally anybody (including someone who wanted people to believe people shills here) could have posted.

This is just to prove that even small indie devs are well aware of the platform and not afraid to post.

>But I highly doubt that large companies have the foresight to do so, let alone if they had it would bother to do so, because the amount of potential customers they could attract is very minor.

Larger companies literally will hire entire teams of interns to drum up social media hype on websites like this. Dozens of people who will spend their entire days posting here (and elsewhere) about it.

Your understanding of how big the problem is is completely backwards.

PAY FOR DLC

But where is Fallout 4?

You're absolutely fucking retarded if you think this board doesn't have actual paid (and unpaid) shills.

Sup Forums isn't the "most remote place in the world", it's one of the most used website in the world. This place isn't "underground" or whatever, seriously it isn't. alexa.com/siteinfo/Sup Forums.org
It stand to reason that shilling in here would be massively efficient and extremely easy. Thanks to the anonymity and meme culture people here will simply deny the existence of shills and parrot everything they read.

You're a market. You don't matter, your money do. The sooner you realize that the better.
People have successfully used advertising in more outlandish places. Do you sincerely think putting a cardboard cutout of some vidya protagonist in your local mall has more impact than a 300+ replies thread in Sup Forums? And which one is the cheapest?

What do you expect for proof then, a government approved document stating that there are fucking shills on Sup Forums?

You know sometimes I forget that some people have been here so few years that they cannot tell the difference between genuine posts and satire.

And how would that work? They make an anonymous post on this image board and then walk back to the publisher and tell them that they totally just shilled 100 people but they can't actually prove it because they don't actually have any account to verify them doing so. What, do they just screencap their Sup Forums post daily and send them to whoever's responsible at their department? These aren't fucking referral links. How do you even advertise yourself as a shill on here if everything's anonymous? Do marketing departments just hire random fucks off the street because they claim to be experts at advertising?

Maybe we can't 100% prove that there is paid shilling on the site, but similarly you absolutely can't prove there isn't and there has been a whole lot of suspicious shit on this board for the past 4 years.

stop bumping this shit thread

Ironic shilling is still shilling. Congratulations on playing into Zenimax's hands. Inb4 you stupid children post more "epic" le angry Todd faces at me.

Again, doesn't prove anything other than you want to believe what you are saying.

>asks for proof
>gets it
>"That doesn't prove anything"

The entire point of shilling is that it can't go detected. This is specifically why companies and devs DON'T shill on places like Reddit or NeoGAF. Because if you have a brand new account on there and you've made 10 posts and they're all identical posts about the same game and anyone can click on your name and see your post history, it becomes very difficult to shill effectively.

Sup Forums however is arguably the BEST possible place on the internet to shill. Because everyone is anonymous it is significantly more difficult to detect shills which is PRECISELY why people shill on Sup Forums. The site is not a secret clubhouse anymore. It's a massively popular site that wields a large amount of cultural influence. If a game becomes popular on Sup Forums IT WILL get cross posted to places like Reddit, NeoGAF, Tumblr, Facebook etc. and IT WILL receive a noticeable financial bump as a result.

There are dozens of games that Sup Forums has popularized and game companies and devs are fully aware of this. Which is why they pay people to shill their games here.

tl;dr How much it is actually done is up for debate but if you think it doesn't happen at all you're a moron.

>Government approved document.
I would settle for literally any documentation at all that proved there are fucking shills on Sup Forums. Sceencaps don't even meet that criteria.
>Prove a negative because I cannot prove a positive.
.......Resulting to the same logic that religious people use to justify believing in something they have no evidence of really is not helping your point.

Ironic shilling is still shilling, yes, but it's for a different reason entirely. It's making fun of the subject matter, and honestly, it's really not half bad. Toddposting can be funny, and I don't really believe that Skyrim will get more or less sales from one or two guys posting some funny image of Todd in a Mario costume.

>Calls a Sup Forums post proof.
>WHY WON'T YOU ACCEPT MY PROOF?
Because your proof is fake and gay.

But Fallout 4 is a legitimately good game that the other user should buy.

Still, what kind of fucking document do you expect and why would anyone bother collecting it?

It's fucking Sup Forums, screenshots are the best thing you'll get.

This is rubbish, I have a friend that works as a community manager and I know he posted the most recent game his company put out a a year ago numerous times at launch here. He also posts in the generals on /vg/

If shilling was a real thing Battleborn would have been massively popular. The amount of threads that have been made about it are ludicrous, and you know what they say, any kind of publicity is good publicity. Then why did it fail? Because it's a shit game and shilling isn't a real thing.

People just hype about already popular games and then pretend the fact that they got excited about it was the sole reason the game was popular.

That's literally what I said earlier. People that were browsing Sup Forums to begin with will obviously hype their game here. But there's a difference between a community manager hyping up his game on one the websites he frequents because he obviously wants the game to sell well and literal random fucks that publishers supposedly picked off the street and gave 10 bucks to post on fucking Sup Forums.

Shilling = advertising.

Advertising is about making people aware of your game and updates, they aren't mind control you silly fag.

>Just believe everything you hear here because it is what it is my man, why would you need to see proof of something before believing it brah?
Nah.

The shill thing is just a way for Sup Forums to cope with the fact that people might like/be excited for things they don't like

I could write a nice post about why Dragon Age Inqusistion is a good game and one of my favorites and Sup Forums would just call me a shill

Sometimes marketing campaigns fail. Why would shilling be any different.

What exactly do you want user? A peer reviewed scientific paper on shills and their salaries? Or do you want a documentary where companies like Blizzard talk about how they advertise on the "racist, sexist, gamergate Sup Forums"? Plenty of indie game devs have posted on here, Notch did, there was some kerbal space program guy who used to post in /kpg/ before all the shit went down with that, Risk of Rain guy came from the game dev general. To think that companies don't see this as a cheap and effective way to advertise would be ignorant, plus you add on the fact that a guy from EA games was giving games out on Origin way back in 2012, before this last wave of newfags and popularity, it's almost certain companies are shilling on here.

>What can we honestly do to improve this board?
Use the report button and stop posting garbage just because someone else is.

Fair enough, but it's still a bit annoying because it reinforces the myth.

DA:I was pretty alright. But it did have some nasty elements to it, like having to wait real-time.

>If shilling was a real thing Battleborn would have been massively popular.

What kind of fucked up retarded logic is this. That's like saying advertising doesn't work when a movie with a huge advertising budget flops. You're an idiot.

>I could write a nice post about why Dragon Age Inqusistion is a good game and one of my favorites
Please do. I could use a good laugh.

Fuck hype trailers, and fuck devs hyping their game with no game play involved. And to answer your question it's been around since at least TORtanic and maybe sometime prior to it.

Again, I would believe it if I had seen ANY documentation proving a connection between a game publisher and an advertiser that is know to use Sup Forums to do so.

Why is the concept of being a skeptic such an outrageous thing to you?

Different user, but yeah, I would like that. Right now all of this is is just hear-say and people stirring up drama to get reactions. Shills aren't a real thing just because some people claim they're totally 100% real, and they won't be real no matter how many screenshots of people you post that supposedly confirm their existence.

List of anons who are shills:

>Anons whining about Sup Forums
>Anons making threads about Horizon, Life is Strange, Uncharted etc
>Anons posting left wing opinions

any more?

I won't make the claim that shilling never happens, but it just annoys me that people will call posts that are sincere hype shilling just to not hear a positive opinion about something, or falling for a falseflag shill or troll, calling it a legit shill.

t. Sup Forums

...

Gee, it's almost as if when people claim literally every game in existence is being shilled it's kind of hard to deny that when a game is successful it's totally because it was shilled and not because it was good or anything.

How fucking new are you

Sup Forums is the essence of Sup Forums

fuck off to reddit

Like this guy. He'll seriously call anyone who doesn't tout ha political opinions as a shill. This is the shit I'm talking about.

Sup Forums is the cancer of Sup Forums.

Congratulations, you perfectly illustrated my point of why shills aren't actually real and are a fabrications of Sup Forumstards like you.

...

>Sup Forums getting defensive on boards other than their own.
Imagine that.

Sup Forums is full of retarded people who will stop at nothing to make sure that everybody knows that their opinion is the right opinion

>there are no shills here
100% lie, OP confirmed for faggot

This thread has nothing to do with games, report and stop bumping it.

What documentation do you want? Screencaps are the best you're gonna get because no company is ever gonna publicly admit to shilling here.