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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."
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.
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.