Nothing wrong democratizing the pot. Big proponent of that - it's the current times, influencers are here to stay and they have not just their voice but consumer eyes. The only caveat is that the competition got well ahead of Sony in this regard and has compromised assets - so picking and chosing the correct influencers that are PlayStation aligned or really neutral, as opposed to fake neutral is key. You definitely want to touch your "radical" base in the influencer world- it's pure upside.
3-4 weeks out is a bit extreme tho. I would do 1 1/2 weeks out, 2 weeks out max.
At the end of the day this all boils down to the general objective of receiving the best meta aggregate score possible. Not sure what statistics they're seeing that I'm not privy to that made them go this direction, or if it's a ploy to get mind-share buzz around the game. If you want to buy good press - yellow chairs, I guess in this case, "red chairs" or something of this nature (free merch - shirts, spider hoody whatever it's) would be better to set up the hype train in the lead up month before launch.
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