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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."
If you replace 'developers' with 'marketing and publishers' in all these articles they become fairly true.
Otherwise: what
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.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
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.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
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.
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.
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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.