okay hello and welcome to my coronavirus special simplified guide to Assassin's Creed 3 liberation I'm gonna make this short snap eating sweets in as I cannot really do any visuals or anything else that's exciting with this video this video about Assassin's Creed 3 liberation is only relevant to you if you are studying the educast Media Studies a level specification Assassin's Creed 3 liberation is part of the Assassin's Creed franchise is a spin-off from Assassin's Creed 3 therefore it's part of a big franchise highly popular big pre-sold audience Ubisoft or uber soft depending on how you want to pronounce it is the publisher of this video game they're the ones that are in charge of this franchise they are a very large global company they have offices all over the world which makes them very powerful they've made a lot of other very successful video games franchises over the years and that means they're gonna have a lot of resources a lot of staff and a lot of money being a global company is gonna help them massively with distribution it means that they're going to be able to distribute this product in a global fashion in a very competitive way they're gonna have lots of money to spend on marketing with Assassin's Creed 3 liberation they made a kind of promo for TV where they use lots of gameplay footage gameplay footage is essential in video game marketing because people really want to see what the game is going to look like when it's played they also had lots of filmic sections in the trailer which made it feel more epic as well and appealed to audiences who liked big-budget Triple A rating games but had a variety of posters and the posters had a lot of similarities or intertextual references to the other Assassin's Creed games so similar poses and styles on their posters so pre-sold fans of the Assassin's Creed franchise would have recognized the poster as being part of the franchise and that would have drawn them in to Assassin's Creed 3 liberation the game was released exclusively on a PS Vita which was a handheld console new at the time so if people wanted to buy the console there was a very small choice of games that were available at the time Assassin's Creed 3 liberation being one of them and that was a good play of theirs working with Sony who made the PS Vita to create two products working alongside one another which both increased demand of the other product yes the handheld games console has become increasingly popular as a kind of technology over the years we went from things like the Gameboy to the Nintendo DS and then the PS Vita and now we're on things like the switch as well and all see onto mobile phone gaming too so handheld gaming has been quite a big industry over the years so doing this tie-in release with the PS Vita would have been a good way to attract those gamers who wanted to be part of new technology and wanted to be the first people to try out this handheld console the game was also unusual in that it had a female playable main character Aveline now that was quite unusual it was also quite unusual that she was sort of mixed-race as well and anyone who's played games will know that women in games and in particular ethnic minority women are often either underrepresented completely or represented in hugely stereotypical ways so very sexualized and objectified and often there is the kind of damsel in distress character to be rescued in Assassin's Creed 3 liberation aveline is very strong and dominant and powerful and she is the one doing the majority of the killing and so this might have appealed as a unique selling point to the audience at the time particularly female gamers who are now making up a very large part of the market you miss often also released a range of videos on YouTube so targeting that audience who spends a lot of time online but these videos included things like gameplay tips and hints about how to play the game as well so using social media in quite a big way in order to attract those global audiences online most large companies are all about trying to maximize their profit think about theorists like husband Hal and Conan Seaton and Ubisoft is no different so as well as doing lots of marketing they also saw every opportunity to try and make more money from the game so when new technology was developed a couple of years later they remastered Assassin's Creed 3 liberation in HD and re-released it and that meant that a lot of dedicated fans bought the again just to get a higher quality version so utilizing new technology and seeing that as an opportunity in order to make more money gaming conventions also a very big part of marketing games now Ubisoft took the whole Assassin's Creed franchise regularly to places like comic-con where you can meet up with you know hundreds of thousands of video game fans they even made an assassin's creed three obstacle course where fans could line up and actually take part in all the obstacles as though they were a real assassin and that's a good way of not just engaging super fans but the kind of thing that people are gonna film and then it's gonna end up on YouTube and if you want to look that up on YouTube you can find videos that doing that obstacle doing that obstacle course themselves when I was your age if I wanted to get hold of a video game that was rated 18 or over it was quite difficult but now you can download the games via the Xbox Store and sorry the xbox arcade the PlayStation Store you can go via Steam you can pirate the games a lot of the time so these new technologies are digital distribution of games has made the regulation of video games very very difficult and it's much easier for underage players to get hold of the game some people think that video games they're going to make players violent particularly if you look at theorists like bandura and the media effects theory they believe that if you are a particular young player then you may copy the violence that you see in video games although it's quite an old outdated theory now and I suppose you have to have a think about whether you know people under the age of 18 should be playing these games or whether parents should be taking more responsibility for what their children play there have been a number of incidents over the years where people have committed violent crimes and blamed them on video games and whether you believe that that is something that can cause violence or not it has led to quite a big moral panic about the media and how it can affect young people in particular and if you think about video games they are asking you to actually commit the violence within the game yourself so unlike a film where you're watching a character kill somebody else in a video game you are the one operating the controls and so sometimes you have to think about the immersive nature of games and whether that might make it more challenging for young people to tell what is real and what is not a c3l is rated 18 the regulatory board for video games is the vs see the video standards Council and they use the PEGI rating system and they gave it an 18 certificate primarily because there was quite a lot of violence within the game and although it wasn't particularly gory for its time they did feel that the violence was kind of unjustified you know it was motiveless killing and that's one of the requirements to get that 18 certificate was the characters kind of kill for the sake of killing and not really for any particular reason a lot of people really enjoy social interaction now and the PS Vita offered that with Wi-Fi online capabilities so people could play the games more regularly with their friends because the narrative of Assassin's Creed 3 liberation is based around slavery it may mean that the audience for the game might be particularly engaged if they have an interest in historical topics like this perhaps it might appeal more to a mixed race or ethnic minority audience or perhaps it might mean that the game has a more educated audience who are interested in politics and historical events the game had a variety of downloadable content available so as people progressed through the game they could download extra stories and actually if they finished the game they could download the ability to then play as Connor which is an additional character from the main franchise if you bought the main game Assassin's Creed 3 and also the spin-off Assassin's Creed 3 liberation you could then unlock even extra content so it's kind of really pushing audiences to spend as much money on the franchise as possible so that was my easy-to-understand coronavirus special edition of my guide to Assassin's Creed 3 liberation