Everywhere! Not only does it go into the obvious things like plastering every major gaming site, and plenty of non-gaming related sites with localized advertisement, TV advertisement (and plenty of it, on primetime), but it also goes into event promotions (both local pre-release events and events with sites & TV-channels interested in showing such things, in many different countries), it also goes to many stores (here, have a lot of marketing material and a fiberglass statue of our main character to put on display), and general PR things. And I would suspect that that is just scratching the surface.

While there are many people here who have it in for the game because of the shameless use of the Syndicate name, a very significant portion of the target demographic for shooters has never played the original Syndicate, and probably hasn't even heard of it. For these people, calling the game "Syndicate" is neither a positive or a negative. No, the problem wasn't that a good game capable of standing on its own merits was brought down by calling in "Syndicate", the problem was that the game simply couldn't stand on its own merits (speaking in terms of sales) and calling it "Syndicate" did nothing to change this.

100% agree +1

I'm basing my opinion on the reviews I've read on-line. And no, I don't plan to play a mediocre FPS that would like to be a "remake" of the tactical isometric shooter of yore. One of the few ones I've ever played and enjoyed, indeed....

good, that's all I need to know. The game is not bad, but the way, just a little generic and not "shitty" at all, neither have I seen any game review calling so either. Metacritic places it on 69%, which is a little above mediocre.

Didn't know about it releasing, can't find it on Steam... definitely a lost battle from the get-go.

Quite ironic that an EA title is suffering more from "steamlessness" than most indies.

Indeed, it might have been wise to allow for a more tactical approach to deciding which games should be "Origin-only." BF3 could take such a harsh requirement, but not a game with no strong marketing campaign or massive following.

Of course everybody is entitled to his opinion but that's not what most reviews I read said.

A very common critic of the game was that, even if the game had some interesting/good ideas, at least on paper, most of them where badly implemented/exploited in the game itself; that most of the time they were either too contextual (i.e. you can only use them when the game/script tell you to) or too systematic (i.e. you HAD to use them when the game tell you to) to be actually any fun.

Another common critic was that, even for a modern FPS, the game was linear as hell (some magazine's reviewer even joked that, when compared to Syndicate, MW2 felt an "open world" game.)

The only two positive things I remember being mentioned being that : the general design (not level design) was good and that the multiplayer was fun for some time.
Dark Messiah was a "spin off" game, it was neither a sequel nor a reboot of Heroes and Might Magic or Might Magic and never pretended being one.

IMO Psychonauts is more an example of catastrophic distribution.

The game was only available in Europe and other part of the world a year after it's US release and even then it was rather hard to find. It's no surprise that it bombed as badly as it did.

Sad thing is, that is great game, and deserves to be played! :/

Hmm, you're right. Just read the Wikipedia entry on the classification incident. I was thinking of The Walking Dead, by Telltale. How'd I come to think it was Syndicate?

How courageous is it to take a vintage franchise, completely remove all semblance of what made the rabid fanbase love it, paste the lleftover lore/themes/setting onto a Counterstrike/Call of Duty-esque FPS?

1) FF's ruled. HD remake/GOG release needed.
2) Army of Two is a tad closer to Synicate as well.