The Business: This Vidya Marketer Understood The Assignment

This is how you sell a game based on a known IP.

Someone saw how well leaning into the memes worked for the knockoff (Helldivers) so they did the smart thing, cut Casper a check, let him be Rico for a minute, and then cu to footage of the game.

Will it be good? Fuck if I know. The last one got the Very Okay judgement from Arch, for what that's worth.

But if you want the target audience--who knows the movies, not the book, and the same is true for the devs--this is how you do it right. You spend some of that money on Casper doing his Rico thing, you go hard for that first movie feel (because Verhoven did a big Task Failed Successfully there), let folks make all the inferances that the devs paid attention to the competition, and then shut the fuck up.

That means that Management is aware of who they need to target for this to work, and they look to be positioning this as "The game you play to take a break from Helldivers while you wait for new content to get patched in."

If the Helldivers team has the sense God gave a sloth, they'd take the opportunity that this game's launch presents and use it to polish up a major content update so that when the launch window closes Helldivers is ready to go.

IF

We know that people not being stupid in Management is a problem. Hopefully they Save vs. Dumb.