Game Developers And False Advertising

Pezman writes "Sam 'Freejack' Brown, formerly of Legend Entertainment, has released the 3rd installment of his article series discussing 'Game Developer Myths'." This opinion piece deals with "...this consistent belief that developers intentionally lie about a title's features in order to generate sales and interest", and points out that "developers don't generally like... early marketing, and the reasons should be fairly obvious - gamers tend to hold developers to every feature they promise."

Comments

Re:Completely correct.

[Torgo's Pizza]

Can I hear an Amen on that brother? Case in point, John Romero (disclaimer: he's a friend of mine) is probably the poster boy of marketing gone wrong. He never said "I'll make you my bitch" or approve of the marketing campaign that Eidos put together. It was a marketing campaign put together by some markethead who thought it would play over well.

Years later, when people talk about John the first thing they think of is that statement and he has been trying to distance himself from it ever since.

Touched up art

[Daetrin]

At the company i used to work for, we would take screen shots of the game for EA's marketing team to use in advertisements and articles and such.

After a few days we'd get them back again with a list of what needed to be changed. Not changed in the game, just photoshopped on the screen shots.

Marketing would tell the head of the company, the head of the company would tell the producer, the producer would tell the lead artist to make the changes. I'm not sure what arguments marketing used against the head of the company (make the changes or your don't get any marketing?) but from there on down no one was willing to say no and force the issue with the higher authority.

Usually they were fairly minor changes, but sometimes not.