Metaphor since the announcement felt "underrated" by many (which is something I disagreed on considering the dev's pedigree), and way more people never thought it could be a GOTY contender since the first announcement, yet the game is on its way to be the fastest selling Atlus title (it already is on pc)
For me, this is a testament on how much "marketing" has changed. This has been a year with a high amount of high profile bombs, some very catastrofic. It feels like the "old" type of marketing is no longer working. If a well known streamer did a paid Concord stream at launch it lost subscribers, if a game you don't care about appears at the TGA or SGF you just tab out and pretend it never existed, twitter engagement or youtube views mean nothing, "I didn't even knew this came out already" is one of the sentences I read the most this year and in many cases it was referring to games that had multiple trailers in many high profile streams, critic reviews have basically no value. And yet "unexpected" games are doing amazing numbers on Steam since the year started
I can only speculate we're seeing the first steps in a new kind of marketing:
1) The first reveal is the most important and it's imperative to have all the pages ready to go to get as many wishlists as you can
2) Early sales and pre-sales help the game appearing more on a store main page, making it easier for people that missed the announcement or release to notice it
3) Actual player interactions seem to have a much bigger impact instead of critics and professional streamers, which makes the 2 above points even more important
4) Launch numbers and comparisons give the "unc0nvinced" a bigger picture on how the game is doing and when you can expect the first sale, which may convince some of them to get the game early, further improving on point 2
Ironically, all 4 of those points are also in Steam favors. I'm more and more convinced Steam is doing a much better "marketing" than the actual companies may think. Of course there is also the opposite side in how Steam is also much better at doing "anti-marketing" when your release sucks