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:Obl. South Park Quote

[secolactico]

Romero said he was gonna kick my ass, and I'm still waiting.

Didn't the ad say that he was going to make you "his bitch"?

Well, those who bought the game certainly did become his bitch, among other things.

Re:Completely correct.

[Alkaiser]

Sorry, but off the top of my head, I can't think of a GOOD commercial I've seen for a game here in the US. I remember the ones they came up with for FFVII...the "reset button" ones. We told them they were stupid. They didn't listen to us.

Then the public said they were stupid and Sony would later go on to make their famous claim that basically, the public doesn't know anything, and they should just shut up and buy their games.

Then, while I was in Japan they had these ads for XBox Live that didn't make any sense at all. Some scantily clad woman who looked like she was hopped up on drugs, slinking against a wall while pie were thrown at her. What the hell was that?!

And this is Japan, where they make consistently better commercials than they do in the US.

The ads in magazines and the like that are good are the ones I don't remember...because they haven't pissed me off. But they also haven't done very much in the way of advertising.

I don't blame you, the ad agencies as much, because you aren't the ones responsible for stripping features from a game, and you aren't the ones responsible from pushing a game out the door that isn't ready to go. You aren't the ones responsible for forcing the game into a design it shouldn't be.

But honestly, no matter how good your work is, there isn't any way you can offset things like that retarded Blockbuster ad.

Re:Touched up art

[Daetrin]

I believe that these are some of the "screenshots"

In general the explosions were touched up a bit, and i think they smoothed over the rocket trails in the second image. (It's been a few years, so i'm fuzzy on the details) In general units were added to make the pictures look more exciting. There seem to be more missiles in the second picture than can be accounted for by the number of Dreadnaughts.

The first pic has a very good example of this. First of all, when the game was finally released Carriers only launched three fighters at the time, although we experiemented with five and four fighters for a time. However i believe even if the carriers had five fighters at the time, the placement of the fighters in the pic is clearly artificial. You'd never see them in that perfect of a V formation in the game. And i can't remember for sure, but i don't think the fighters actually had contrails, don't quote me on that one though.

Perhaps people who have played the game more recently can spot more changes in the pics on the site. I wasn't involved in the process of touching the screenshots up, and i kind of lost interest in playing the game after they laid me off just after starting Generals (after we'd finished up the expansion pack of course,) so my memory of what the graphics and weapon stats in the release ended up being is a bit rusty.