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

what

[joebp]

If you replace 'developers' with 'marketing and publishers' in all these articles they become fairly true.

Otherwise: what

Re:what

[Kethinov]

If you replace 'developers' with 'marketing and publishers' in all these articles they become fairly true.

Exactly. One of the biggest problems with major games, especially MMOs that continue on after the initial release is marketers and publishers. They always want a new infusement of fresh stuff to market such as expansions and so on. So instead of fixing bugs, they've got all the programmers busy coding the next expansion because to the marketers, getting out more expansions faster than your competitor is better than making an actual quality product.

Re:what

[Zork the Almighty]

I think we need a version of Godwin's Law for poor old Duke Nukem Forever.

The real problem...

[Danse]

Gamers seem to go out of their way to get a new game the absolute second it's available for sale. Then they bitch and moan about how it wasn't what they expected and didn't have all the features that they read about in an article almost a year ago. Guess who's fault it is that marketing generates sales? Yep, it's the fault of the gamer that doesn't bother to investigate what he's buying. If people would quit rushing to be the first to cram their money into the publisher's pocket, maybe they wouldn't get ripped off so often and maybe publishers would learn that it's more important to create a good game than to generate hype.

Re:The real problem...

[Alkaiser]

How exactly is everyone supposed to get an idea about a game now? IGN's pay, Gamespot's pay, and to top it off, a couple months back a bunch of game reviewers were admitting how their editors made them give special favors to advertisers.

A demo only shows 1 level, MAYBE, and you can't return games to the store. Maybe if we weren't getting so heinously screwed out of our consumer rights, we'd be a bit more "selective".

Re:The real problem...

[Danse]

Whatever. Demos may only show one level. If that's enough to convince you, then fine, if not, go to other sources. Stand there at the bookstore and read reviews in magazines, free of charge. There are TONS of review sites on the web, and only a small handful are pay sites. From what you're saying, you shouldn't trust the pay sites anyway. Read several reviews. Find reviewers whose tastes align with yours. Read in-depth reviews that really attempt to fully describe the gameplay and any problems with the game. That's how you make decisions. I very rarely purchase a game that isn't what I expect (and those few times that I have, it's because I gave in to the hype. C&C Tiberian Sun is a good example). Learn from your mistakes. Don't buy something if you don't know what you're getting.

Re:The real problem...

[JavaLord]

Yep, it's the fault of the gamer that doesn't bother to investigate what he's buying. If people would quit rushing to be the first to cram their money into the publisher's pocket, maybe they wouldn't get ripped off so often and maybe publishers would learn that it's more important to create a good game than to generate hype.

Yeah, but for multiplayer games and especially MMO's there is an advantage to buying the game right away. You get a head start on everyone who buys the game later. If you play FPS games in leagues like OGL you want the game as soon as it comes out so you have that head start. It's even worse in MMO's because at the start of them is where everyone exploits weakness in the system to "get rich quick". An example would be in Star Wars Galaxies there was an oversight by the programmers about how much faction points a group should get for finishing a mission. Ends up it was really out of wack for a week, and a lot of people got a lot of points they shouldn't have and were walking around with storm trooper armor that would take you hundreds of hours to get after the fix.

Interesting..

[sirmikester]

[Quote]:gamers tend to hold developers to every feature they promise[/Quote]

I disagree, I think that gamers only hold the developers to the truely unique and interesting features. Alot of times, the things that make a game seem different are the first to go when a lack of funds forces developers to cut down on features. This is because the unique features usually add alot of time and cost to the equation. Developers such as Blizzard usually don't forget this rule, which is why they are so successful. Its not rocket science, gamers want games that give them something new.

Completely correct.

[Alkaiser]

There is no end to the stupidity of the average person in the Marketing Department of your average game company.

First off, most of them have not played the game for long than 30 minutes. Most of them don't even like games, and on top of that, they come out of college with degrees in Social Sciences, and pretty much nothing at all that is applicable.

The HR department will hire someone new based on whether they think the person's nice, and will get along with them, because they figure that's all they're going to be doing...eating lunch with corporate buyers and talking them up.

Then they get back to their cube slap a bunch of buzzwords on some art, and voila. You've got stores will buy tons of product, and tons of customers who will hate it. 70% of everything wrong in the industry is the fault of marketing. The other 30% is a combination of hype, obstinance, and refusal to actually get some new ideas into the game world. (Also partially Marketing's fault...but I hold the designers more to task for this.)

If people would start taking the right people task for this garbage, there would be a lot more heads rolling. But most of the time, you find a game that crashes, and everyone's yelling at the QA department.

Most of the time, the QA dept. knows full well about this bug. But someone forced the game through. And it isn't the dev. team.

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.

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:Completely correct.

[Lord_Dweomer]

"The ads in magazines and the like that are good are the ones I don't remember...because they haven't pissed me off.

Funny you should mention that. I forget the name of the theory, but the theory states that you tend to remember negative experiences more than you would positive ones, and also that you tend to verbalize more about the negative ones as opposed to the positive ones.

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

As someone who used to rent/work at blockbuster, and as someone in advertising now, I agree 100% with you. Many times I've seen some of their ads that just completely missed their target audience and thought to myself "hmmm, I hope the Account Executive working on the blockbuster account used lube when BB marketing bent them over the table and told them how things were gonna work."

But you also have to recognize the importance of target audience. This is one of the hardest things for someone to understand about advertising. NOT EVERY AD IS TARGETED AT YOU. What you may consider lame and boring, might actually be quite effective with the target audience for that ad. It just so happens you happened to see it. If you want a good example of how that works, think of an ad you loved as a little kid, which you think is absolutely retarded now. You are now part of a different demographic, and thus things that appealed to you back then, won't appeal to you now, and thus you would not be the target of those old ads.

exactly

[Tumbleweed]

They said this game would, and I quote, "kick ass!"

This game did not kick any ass. Not my ass, nor any other asses. There was no ass-kicking included, which the box CLEARLY stated it would.

This is clearly a case of false advertising, if not breach of contract. I demand my rights! This is an outrage, and an affront to man and God. An abomination of the highest order! No ass kicking, whatsoever. Amazing to think they could get away with this. What arrogance! This is fargin' war - I'm gonna rip them a new icehole! Fargin' bastidges.

To quote Homer Simpson, rakish devil and man-about-town, "Those sucks were the suckiest bunch of sucks that ever sucked."

False marketing

[John M Ford]

From the article:

All these cool features, all these neat effects, all these promises... it's great stuff, but you need to keep in mind that it is designed to be "great stuff". The information given is intentionally positive and always glowing.

...the released title may be different, even dramatically different than what was previewed a couple years ago or even a month prior to release.

The writer may be correct in that the above practice does not strictly fit the definition of false advertising. I would argue that the practice of deliberately misleading your customers is, in spirit, very similar. Knowingly releasing inaccurate, overly optimistic marketing material seems to be more and more common.

I'm starting to view game developers with the same mistrust as I do all salesmen.

John

Re:False marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see.. you're working on Game XYZ. Game XYZ has features 1, 2, 3, and 4.

T+3 Months - Interview time. At the moment, you've just finished the design for your levels of the game, all of which incoroprate features 1, 2, 3, and 4. You're confident that your design is sound, and that the ideas are grand. You tell the interviewer that features 1, 2, 3, and 4 are going to make the game great.

T+9 Months - Your game has reached first playable, and you have an in-house play test of the levels. Turns out that Feature 1 is confusing, Feature 2 hurts the player, everyone hates Feature 3, and Feature 4 can work, but with modifications.

T+18 Months - After several more revisions, Game XYZ is released. Feature 3 has been cut (people hated it), Feature 2 now works opposite of what it used to (since hurting the player is bad), Feature 1 now works differently, and is introduced with a tutorial, and Feature 4 has been so heavily modified that you removed it from your levels.

Did you knowingly release inaccurate information? How were you to know that what looked great on paper would turn out to suck in game?

So, what should you do? Never believe what you put on paper? Of course not. You have to start somewhere, and then find out later what works and what doesn't. Give no interviews? Well, the article is right - interviews get your game title out there, and you'll be hard pressed to find a publisher who would say "oh, fine, no interviews. We'll market some other way - maybe put just the title (no screenshots - they might change) on busses or something".

Yes, I am a game developer. No, I have never intentionally misled, or even given what I thought at the time was an overly optimistic statement to be printed. Has it ever turned out that what I said didn't pan out? Yes. That's life.

Re:False marketing

[Golias]

Here's a thought: Talk about what you are sure of.

If you are developing a two-player third-person shooter for the PS2 based on a license from Gilmore Girls, you know for a fact that the game will feature Lorelai and Rory fighting their way through the streets of a quaint little Northwest town. They will consume coffee for power-ups, and will use the local diner as a base of operations. You can tell them all about the back-story you are using for the game ("Stars Hallow is being attacked by zombies") without too much fear that you will end up looking like an idiot.

On the other hand, if you choose to brag about some outrageous new feature when you are not sure you will be able to pull it off (as in "The cool thing about our trees is that every single leaf will be individually rendered as 3D ojects based on a random leaf-generation system that we are carefully modeling on real trees! We are taking similar care to make sure the leaves change color every autumn, but differently every time you play the game, based on what the weather has been like!"), you deserve all the scorn and hatred you eventually get when you fail to deliver as promised.

Re:False marketing

[Golias]

But what if it turns out that consuming coffee just wasn't as fun as you thought it would be...

A cross-licensed Gilmore Girls product with no coffee? Don't be absurd. That would be as stupid as a Star Wars game with no space ships.

Re:Developers spewing lies?

[shamino0]

And it isn't just game development.

At a previous job, I can recall many times where sales and marketing (S&M being an incredibly accurate acronym here) promised features that were not even on our development roadmap, simply because a big customer wanted them. The feature gets promised, a deadline for shipment is decided on and then the developers are expected to hold to that schedule.

The result is invariably that other more important features get dropped from the release and the release has inadequate testing. And very often, the customer we were doing all this for ends up deciding that that feature wasn't very important after all. So everybody from top to bottom gets screwed.

At that company, we managed (after several years of this nonsense) to get our VP of engineering to get the president involved, who tightened the thumbscrews on S&M to prevent this. We managed to do it because it was a small company with only 3 layers of management between the president and the lowest-level developers. When this problem happens in bigger companies, however, engineering is simply SOL.

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:Heh

[Mike Hawk]

Why didn't you quote any of the parts of the article about timing? Oh wait, because that would make your point untrue.

If, 2 years before release, a feature is expected to be in the game, then at the last minute is cut, thats not false marketing. Actually, its not even lying. Its just being incorrect. One can be incorrect without having malicious intent.

Now, if the day before release a feature is promised that is definitely not in the gold released product, that is all of the above and then some.

In summary, like you intentionally ignored, its all about timing.

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.

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.

Re:Obl. South Park Quote

[Lord_Dweomer]

"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."

I'd love to see this be argued in court.

Judge: "So you're claiming Mr. Romero did not make your client his bitch upon purchasing the game?"
Prosecutor: "Correct, the only thing my client got upon purchasing the game was a poor gaming experience."
Judge: "So your client paid for a game which gave him a poor gaming experience?"
Prosecutor: "That is correct your honor."
Judge: "Judgement for the defendant is NOT GUILTY. Your client is indeed Romero's bitch now."