Slashdot Mirror
Game Developers: Stop Overpromising
Andru Edwards writes "Recently, there has been a flurry of game developers releasing games which did not live up to expectations the developers set earlier on. Due to this pratice of overhyping upcoming games, gamers have become wary of those games which have major hyoe behind them. Here is a look at which developers are falling victim to the hype, as well as why Nintendo's frustrating strategy might actually be the best approach after all."
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Come on this has been true fro over 20 years in PC games.
Stop overpromising.
Just a link: http://www.3drealms.com/duke4/
Fable is good but nothing spectacular.
Should be Hype instead of "hyoe"
Yeah, tell this to the presidential candidates!
Jump To Lightspeed? Another Sony title that is going to be released before its finished, and create more bugs in the original software title. This is the End of Star Wars Galaxies. I have forseen it.
Heh, just wait a few months (or years) for them to get cheaper... At least for Xbox, you can go out and buy the system for less than 50% of the original cost. Most of the good games are "Platinum Classics" or some such, which means $20 brand new.
I just got a Nintendo 64, and let me tell you, that Goldeneye game is fun! You pay a high cost to keep up with the game industry, and arguably don't get any additional entertainment from your hours devoted to gaming. Don't be a herd consumer.
My 0.02...
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
...hype sells, even if a game doesn't live up to the hype at all. Fable sold something like 600,000 copies last month (when it was released). Pikmin 2, Nintendo's woefully underhyped game, sold about 180,000. Pikmin 2 is arguably the superior game. So, unfortunately, Nintendo's strategy may make them endearing in the eyes of hardcore gamers (I myself am a Sony fan but lately have a lot of respect for Nintendo), but it's also the reason why Gamecube is in 3rd place in America :(
...Nintendo's always at the top of the charts.
writeSig(!funny);
Marketing promises more than engineering can deliver. News at 11.
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
In that case noone can rival the eliteness of Frontier, the company that has been expected for perhaps a decade (or more?) to release the next installment in the legendary space game Elite (tentatively called Elite4).
They have, howver, been successful in shutting down the existing Elite derivatives like E:TNK and terminating Darkness Falls.
This is nothing new. Every game (or really any piece of software för that matter) gets a lot of hype beforehand. It's been the norm for at least the last decade.
Especially now it's more true than ever. Games get hyped and then rushed into production. Finally they release an inferior product that is not only far from what the promise was but also full of bugs.
It's the problem with the internet-age: make a crappy product and ship it as soon as the beta-testers give the thumbs up (but with minimal amount of testing) and release patches on your webpage later.
So far this year I haven't seen a single game that has lived up to the hype. Not even Doom3, even though it was a half-decent play it did not come close to the hype surrounding it.
As I said, this is not only limited to games. Look at every product that Microsoft/etc has released in the last 5-6 years. They promise to revolutionize the world, but it's the same wordprocessor in a slightly new package.
[end of rant]
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
If Doom 3 and HL 2 (& CS:Source) were released on their initially reported release dates? (instead of over a full year later before when Doom 3 and CS:Source actually came out?)
The games would have been extremely impressive when compared to everything on the market at the time. Now there are other computer and console games that stolen some of their thunder.
Don't get me wrong; they're still incredible. I just think that I probably would have sold my family on eBay to buy them a year ago, and by time they were actually released, I really wasn't paying attention.
- Have you ever noticed that the more you learn about technology, the more stupid you sound trying to explain it?
Product Manager: When will Project A be delivered?
Lead Developer: There is a 50% chance we can deliver by March next year.
Product Manager: Good, I'll tell the customers we can deliver by February. We can deliver Feature B right?
Lead Developer: We don't have enough people to finish developing it by March.
Product Manager: You developers work overtime all the time anyway right. February it is.
I noticed this trend a long time ago and it it quite silly to me;
Everybody know that hardware is useless without software (actually it's both ways).
In the past two years I think I spent like $2000 on hardware at least, on the contrary, last month excluded, I spent $0 on software.
Many people think like I used: hardware is more 'real' something to hold on to. But this is a bad idea and that's why less and less software gets made compared to amount that could be done.
Simply there is not enough funding and that why all console makers have problems with games for their new hardware.
I wish I had some hyoe behind me!
And overpronouncing.
writeSig(!funny);
Under promise over deliver.
Yeah, we should all game people's expectations all the time. God forbid we make the effort to be honest, accurately describing our aims, and that others be reasonable in understanding that frequently things don't go the way their planned and that some ideas look better than they work.
If I'm reading an interview with a developer, I'd like the interview to be interesting since that is what I'm spending my entertainment dollar and time on. If other people want them to beging speaking like politicians, they're idiots. Things won't change, some games will be great, others will be what might have been, others will suck, and some will just be outright lies, except it'll be boring to read about the industry, which won't be pushing itself as hard.
and preorders == shelf space.
doesn't take a genius to figure out why to do it, and more than that - GAMERS FORGET FAST. and they lack spine. even when they have spine and decide that they'll NEVER buy a game from some particular studio or a publisher with kiss-of-deadly-bugs.. they just switch names.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Better to aim for the stars and hit the moon, instead of aiming for the moon and hitting the ground... or whatever the saying is.
From my short experience, cool features tend to get eliminated from a project as the delivery deadline grows near - not added.
Half of the awesome blue-sky ideas that we have for a game end up never working out. That's just the nature of the business. That doesn't mean that we're going to stop trying, though.
for great justice, this sig has been moved
Amen. This game was pretty weak considering the hype surrounding it. Don't get me wrong, I was scared in quite a few scenes during gameplay, but I felt like the level design wasn't as well thought out as it could have been. And for the love of God, if you are going to include multiplayer, do it right. I'm sorry to rant, but I would rather have seen more time spent on the single player experience and have them omit the multiplayer than to release something mediocre in both modes.
The only sig I need is actually spelled "cig".
Byzandula
The site is already running slow. Here is the text incase it dies:
"October 21, 2004
Game Publishers: Stop Overpromising!
Overhyped Videogames FableWhen Fable came out, everyone got to see if all the hype (and cool features expressed by Lionhead Studio head Peter Molyneux) is worth anything. Depending on where you go, you'll find glowing reviews to so-so reviews, mostly depending on if that person expected more (with good reason), or could just live with what the game actually provides. I personally feel that game reviews should be based on what the game has done right and wrong, rather than what I wanted to see, resulting in nitpicking every little detail.
But in this case, is it wrong to expect more? The Gear Live editors present their case after the jump.
Dorian: Look at companies like Nintendo, Valve and Bungie for instance.
Nintendo almost never reveals much about their games before release. The bulk of the game is left for us to explore on our own, and I think most gamers are the better for it.
Valve did the unthinkable, and for almost five years managed to develop Half-Life 2 without revealing anything until E3 right before last September's ill-fated launch (forget arguments about how ready they actually were).
Bungie has been very tight-lipped about Halo 2, at least as far as single player is concerned. Outside of the 10 minute footage of New Mombasa from last year's E3, almost nothing has been revealed, leaving all the details about what was not in the first Halo: Online Multiplayer.
We can probably think of other examples of game devs who kept their mouths shut and left most of their cards up their sleeves. But Lionhead Studios didn't manage to do that; they told us every single idea that popped up in their heads, as if they were brainstorming their ideas out in public. While not outright promising these features, most gamers were expecting more than what they got. Is that so wrong in this case?
Also in the news is Polyphony Digital's long waited Gran Turismo 4, and the stripping of the online multiplayer mode. While they gave no exact reason, one can extrapolate that they couldn't get online working in time for the holidays, and Sony didn't want to let their potentially biggest seller release past the lucrative holiday season. So instead of delaying the game, just take out the mode and sell the "upgraded version" at a later date. While on the surface this sounds good, they haven't said whether the upgrade will be at budget pricing, full price, have a trade in for the old version, or allow for save file compatibility between versions. There are a lot of unknowns, and it's well within reasons for those who were looking forward to racing online come December to be disappointed.
So, who's to blame when devs talk of features that don't ultimately make it? Does it all even matter?
Well obviously, the game devs themselves should show a little more restraint whenever being interviewed, especially when the game is in a pre-beta state. At that point nothing is set in stone, and this very same thing can happen as with Fable. It might be hard to resist nowadays, in this instant information age we live in. (It seems like you can't click a few web pages without running into a movie or TV show spoiler or people, for lack of a better word, "pirating" the latest software or games, even before they hit the stores (also another topic for another day). But for the greater good, talking about only that which won't spoil the entire experience seems like the best way to go.
As for you, the game players, the best way to take reading all these features and interviews on games is to take it all in stride. The only time you can honestly trust any report on a game is the actual review, so sit tight, don't read up too much on a certain game if you want to be surprised, and hope for the best. Worse case scenario, if the game isn't what you were expecting, either rent it or just don't buy it. Or do what every savvy game player does nowadays: v
Every time I see the name of that newspaper I'm reminded of an old Russian proverb: There's no news in the Truth and no truth in the News.
To be fair to the developers and publishers, there exists a culture (especially online) that craves details and information about these upcoming games. I think it can be argued that they are simply filling a demand that is placed upon them. Nintendo does effectively shy away from this pressure and should be commended for it. It must be a hard thing to come to terms with when developing a game. Should they release details to generate some buzz or play it cool and let the game stand on its own merits? As a sort of related aside I think that the guys making KOTOR2 have really found the balance. They release a few details but nothing that will give the story away or stop any of the 'drama' from being played out once the game is available. The most I've heard is the names of a few planets and characters. And the basic premise. These are the sorts of things the game will reveal in the first 5 minutes of play but it has whet my appetite.
...is Peter Molyneux laughing all the way to the bank.
...Hyoe pwns joo!
Okay, I'll get some sleep.
I was amused that Peter Molyneux apologized AFTER the game had come out for a couple of weeks. He needed to come clean before people had plopped down their money on it. Having been burned by B&W, I wasn't going anywhere near Fable.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
This is a hard issue. The article does a pretty good job of explaining why over-promising can be a bad thing (although I'd be wary of using Nintendo as examples of good-practice, given that most of their games are just un-inspired remakes of previous ones). However, there is another problem that developers face, which isn't necessarily their own fault.
This is the problem of their fans getting unrealistic expectations all on their own. There's been a stunningly good example of this recently, namely Doom 3. This game comes in for a lot of flak on slashdot games; it gets called a let-down, a flop, a sell-out and a glorified tech demo. It isn't any of these.
I'd been following Doom 3's development, albeit sometimes from a distance, ever since it was first announced. So far as I can see, the end product was no different to what had been promised all along. The only significant feature to vanish was co-op play and I don't think that had ever been promised all that firmly to begin with. We'd been told to expect an atmospheric (and downright scary) single-player focussed FPS, updating the Doom games for modern hardware, with extremely limited multiplayer. I'd call this a pretty exact description of the game I played.
However, because of ID's reputation and because the Quake series (much like the aforementioned Nintendo) has acquired a fan-base which often defies reason and logic in its zealotry, there had been an unjustified expectation that the game would me much more. Despite all the warnings about the multiplayer, I still remember the cries of anguish when the game turned out to be unsuitable as a platform for Quake-style deathmatch play. I remember the people who were infuriated that the game wasn't Farcry or Half-Life 2, with huge areas and ground-breaking AI. Is it fair to blame ID for this? No. They put out a decent game, not perfect, but very decent. I look forward to seeing a similar reaction when/if Raven's Quake 4 sees the light of day.
Simple message: don't succumb to fanboydom. If you're waiting for a game, base your expectations on what the developers tell you (plus a healthy dose of scepticism), rather than your own aspirations.
Hyoe?
I'm always wary when Ed MacMahon is backing up a game.
"I'm Ed MacMahon. Buy Halo2. Hyyoooooe!"
has to be Doom 3. I was so excited about playing it - the graphics looked deadly!! After months of waiting I went out and bought it and played the damn thing for about a week. Doom 3 was all graphics and no play. Once I played it online it felt like I was playing quake 3 again. Boring.
I think Id hyped this game up too much and added very little - if anything - to the actual game-play. I'm looking forward to the mods.
This article talks about Fable. Fable is BENEFITING from its overhype. Why? Because anyone who isn't impressed is immediately accused of reacting to the hype rather than the game. Well, guess what. The game just isn't that impressive.
Fable is a largely unexceptional RPG with no particularly outstanding features except it's on the XBox. But because they promised the moon before delivering a small rock floating in orbit, it's a conversation piece. It's "important". Molyneux and co. have brilliantly manage to shift the discussion entirely off the subject of whether their 10-to-15-hour game with about as little replay value as, say, Super Mario Sunshine is actually any *good*, or whether it's worth $50, and onto the subject of whether it "fulfills".
Molyneux complains about people not giving a fair chance because they're comparing it to what it could have been. Well, guess what. If it hadn't been for all the hype about what it could have been, Fable would have gotten almost no attention. A couple people would have bought it and liked it and a lot of people would have just rented it once, went "meh" and gone on with their lives. As it is Fable gets (1) coverage at the absolute forefront of the media and (2) it's defended from any attacks of "it should have been more interesting or complicated or long" by people going YOU SHOULD PLAY IT FOR WHAT IT IS NOT WHAT YOU WERE EXPECTING! Well, guess what. Even if you hadn't heard about it before you played it, for a $50 game, we can still expect more.
Sports teams: stop overpromising
Restaurants: stop overpromising
Politicians: stop overpromising
Employers: stop overpromising
ad infinitum
word.
Money is what drives the game business, just like every business, and the more they hype it the more people who will buy it.
My sig would have been a lot cooler if
People have been saying that hype has always been there and you just have to read around it. People like us probably can but it's the little kids and everyone who want the games that are always disappointed. Most youngsters will go on for years about a game just because they've heard it's coming. And then the stupid sods will go out and buy it just because they've wanted it for years.
And it's not just games... the AvP movie has been anticipated for years but in the end, it was just crap. Daikatana, Doom3, Black & White, Half-life 2, were all over-hyped and, for how long development took, under-done.
It probably doesn't even hurt sales but it does hurt the company reputation when you've bought their third long-promised title and got a load of rubbish for your 30 quid.
It's the same as buying Nike or Reebok... if you're stupid enough to just pay for the name, that's your fault. I've worked out my system. I use a deliberately old PC, so I can only run 1-2 year old games. This means that by the time I run a game, I know EXACTLY how good it is, I have all the latest patches, I get the budget price not the 30 quid rip-off and I have the hardware to fully enjoy the game as it was intended without spending a fortune.
Yeah, it hurts for the first year or two when you can't buy the modern games you want but you save a fortune by not buying the bad games and by paying a reasonable price for the good games.
What, did it have a beginning?
I don't have the time as it is to play a lot of the big names games. So why would I pay top price for them?
I didn't get my Dreamcast until after they officially killed it off. I bought mine at Sears for $100, and it came with an extra controller, memory card, and two games. All the good games are $20 new, and the moderate games are $10 used.
I bought my N64 two years after it was released, and only because KBToys had a deal I appreciated. I only had four games until they released the Gamecube. Now I have something like 20. Problem with the N64 is that the cartridges don't allow for good prices. For instance, Harvest Moon was $35, used, everywhere. (though I eventually bought a copy that was $25)
I got my Gamecube two months ago, and that was because they had the Metroid Prime bundle. I only have five games, and I probably won't get any more for quite a while.
I'll probably get a PS2 (PSTwo?) once they drop the price again, mainly because I want to be able to play DDR. I'll probably get an XBox about the time XBox2 comes out, and with it, Halo.
Hell, I'm playing HaloPC on my laptop. Aside from the fact that I have to turn resolution way down, I love it.
Moral is, you can shell out $50 for a game that may be good, or wait a few years and pay $20 if you KNOW it's good.
Typical American, support and arm dictators, and when said dictators become politically unpopular then bash the other countries for not following your sinful lead. And the whole stupid situation really just boils down to religious conflicts that Bush's Christian views are fueling instead of calming. Vote Bush if you want perpetual war.
What separates the good companies that deliver on their promises from the shitbad slackers that deliver a half-done product with missing features that you have to download 50 megs of patches to even play?
It's not size. Companies as big as Sony Online Entertainment (most recently Star Wars Galaxies) and as small as Reakktor Media GMBH (Neocron 2) have all failed miserably to deliver on their promises and hype. You could assume that a huge company like Sony could hire competent managers, but that's obviously not true. But conversely, some smaller companies don't do any better either.
This is something that merits more study. As the gaming industry grows, more and more non-gamers are involved with production of games -- especially in areas like marketing.
These people probably don't understand fully how the "gamer" demographic thinks. They often don't understand that with the ubiquity of internet communications, people are gonna discover that a game is a lump of crap often the day it's released, or even before that if there's an open beta. Just google the title and read a few reviews . And if a game is asstastic, well, gamers have no brand loyalty. They'll happily tell a company to roll up their game, stick it in their ass, and set it on fire. And they'll do it publicly and vociferously.
I support the FairTax www.fairtax.org
This appears to be a common problem in all softare. Development strives wirtes what is best in the time allowed while Marketing wants to promise what sounds like it will catch the eye and possibly lead to a sale. I see this all too often: Marketing makes deals and promises that Development can't sanely reach. This means either Development embraces insane amounts of work to reach the goal or they ignore Marketing and let the finger pointing begin if something goes wrong.
Marketing is constantly making deals without realizing the feasiblity of making these deals. Development wants to make the most bulletproof features available which means less features. It has gotten to the point where selling "hype" is all Marketing can do because they view Development as something they can't control. Especially if there are commisions involved Marketing doesn't really care if they are writing checks Development can't cash.
I am never surprised when this happens to games. I see this all of the time in the dull ISV sector where the markets are much smaller. Considering how much marketing there is in games now I can't imagine the insane pressures being thrown around.
One thing you have to hand to Nintendo, they flourished the home console industry and has still survived when the market is being flooded by Sony and Microsoft money. I am not saying that Nintendo is in the poorhouse, but who can compete with Microcash when they spend billions (yes, billions with a B) to break the back of the video game market? Nintendo survives because they are clearly superior. They are the ones that have come up with darn near every innovation in the home console systems, and if they had put a disk drive on their machines like they intended to before they gave it up, we wouldn't even know who Sony or Microsoft is.
Quickly, think of all of the developers that were stolen out from under Nintendo by Microsoft's checkbook. Five? Ten? A lot for sure. All of those developers. That would have killed everyone but Sony and Microsoft, who took losses on their machines for a long, long time. How many killer titles can you hand over to another company and still be alive in a competetive, hype-driven marketplace? Face it people, Nintendo is as healthy as they come when you have people throwing billions at you to topple you. Most of you wouldn't judge the quality of the car by the size of the manufacturer, so why do it with games?
Oh, and by the way, Halo is just not THAT great. Sorry. I know for many of you this is the first time you have ever played against someone online, and you're a newlywed with the game, but others have been doing it for decades. I'm not saying that Halo sucks, it doesn't. I am saying that many of us can trace our online lineage back to Quake 2 and until you've swung away from your enemies with grappling hooks, or Tribes bombers, or whateever, you realize you've done this Halo stuff before. It is not original. It should not be hyped as original.
It's only original to the ones that have never seen it before.
Rock on, Nintendo. You give me games my wife would like to play.
Tetrisphere, on the N64, is one of the greatest game ever made. It combined all the awesome puzzle-strategy that made Tetris so wildly successful and translated into a fun 3-D environment (unlike, Wetris and Tetris3d, which just gave me headaches), with a kickass soundtrack and a collection of different play modes (including one of the best non FPS Multiplayer games, bested only by Super Puzzle Fighter II).
Nowadays you can get it for a song, and it's still just as great to play as it was when it was new. The graphics are still clean, crisp, and rendered to a modern finish. And the soundtrack just sounds killer on a good sound system.
Under-promise, over-deliver, basic rule of a salesman
No it is more like: Customer: we want this feature X PM: Ah we can do that without a problem Customer: Can we have the timeline pushed up a month? PM: We need X in less than a month Dev: That is not possible to do in 4 with what we have PM: We will shoot for 3 weeks Dev: What about testings PM: I think the customer will be happy if we can get it done sooner
If you ask someone often enough, they'll tell you what you want to hear
Overpromising will cease when the press stops chasing after every rumour, because they know their readers are interested. It would help if the game-buying public didn't pore over every preview and hint, and want more details.
Fat chance.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
You forgot the other side of the equation:
:)
Product Manager: when will Project "A" be delivered?
Lead Developer: (hmmm... we could probably get it done by January, but the PM is going to ask for sooner...) There's a 50% chance we can deliver by March next year.
PM: Good, I'll tell the customers we can deliver by February.
LD: (Good... some room for padding...)
PM: We can deliver Feature B, right?
LD: We don't have enough people to finish developering it by March.
PM: You developers work overtime and spend too much time on Slashdot anyways, right? February it is.
LD: (grumble grumble... oh well, at least the schedule was padded a bit, maybe we can make it... but I don't have to be happy about it).
I've been on both sides of the fence, it's not black and white, dude.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
There are so many games out there that if you don't hype you won't recover the cost of making your games. For consumers simple ways to avoid buying crappy games. Play the demo and read the reviews. Don't just walk into the store and buy anything with a nice picture on the box
did you forget to take your meds?
Derek Smart, the man whose reputation has become so bad that when he started talking about buying up rights to make a Freespace sequel, the Freespace user community started a fundraising drive to buy it before he could.
someone needs to tell this to management as well.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
Perhaps, just perhaps, they will finally learn why every IT person I have ever known has a passionate hatred of the marketing department?
they keep on promising us raises but they always push back the review date. I'm quiting and going somewhere else. And I work for some major game company. They're mostly about promises these guys but are never there when it is time to deliver.
To sum this article up :
So game publishers, stop overpromising. Let your games sell themselves, instead of your PR representatives. Have some faith in the developers talents, just like in the old days. Yes, your game may sell well, but when expectations aren't met you can expect the sequel not to do so well.
I'm suprised with the mention of all these games (San Andreas/HL2/Halo2/Doom3), not one of these people brought up anything about piracy, which has run rampant with 90% of the titles mentioned. I couldn't imagine having a more negative impact upon business then seeing your stolen, TOP SECRET, un-hyped product being passed around for free.
But then again, I suppose if a leak were controlled, it would be one hell of a PR stunt. Conspiracy theories, anyone?
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
There's a serious lack of innovation among recent games. How many more FPSs, RPGs, MMORPGs, RTSs can they pump out? A lot, yes I know.
I know this probably makes me a moron, but sometimes I _like_ being consumed by hype.
Case in point: Halo2. This thing has so much hype surrounding it, it's rediculous, and if truth be told, I've been utterly sucked in by the whole halo/ilovebees/piracyscandal series of PR.
And I tell you what, I will thoroughly ENJOY feeling like a little kid at christmas when it arrives at my front door, and I have the day set aside purely to play it, with plenty of snacks and drinks to accompany it.
I have been in IT for a relatively long time and yet I have not seen one developer who promised something that could not be done! Most of the time developers are on the conservative side because they know that no development process is perfect. However, things are different when it comes to marketing department...
Ugh, what a best-selling train wreck that was.
For me Fable was a _great_ game. And I'm not even a fan of real-time RPGs.
It wouldn't have hurt if it were a bit longer, though.
But then, you know, that's a sign that you actually enjoyed whatever content was in it: it leaves you wanting for more. I can think of other games I said "good riddance" to at the end, or even games which I never bothered (or even wanted to) finish.
Whereas Fable had me pretty much glued to the chair until the end. It had me thinking about it at work. And then there I was thinking "whaaa...? Over already. But I want more!"
I never tried drugs, but I'd imagine that's what drug addiction is like.
And heck, as hype goes it definitely wasn't a selling point for me. After the utter shit that was Black and White, another hyped PM game was _not_ quite something I'd fall for that easily. Doubly so another game where he passes piss-poor judgment on what "good" and "evil" means.
I mean, that guy may well be obsessed with "good vs evil", but he's totally unable to depict more than a carricature of what either means. None of his games, ever since Populous 1, raised above the over-simplified AD&D notion of "good" and "evil".
So the short version is: all that the hype had as an effect is that I was actually planning _not_ to buy it. It took a lot of talking to friends and co-workers who've actually played it before I tried it.
So basically, please. Fable may not have been _everyone's_ cup of tea. No game ever is. But there are also one helluva lot of us who think it was worth every cent and then some. In fact, in my case it was also worth every cent I paid for the XBox just to play it. (I didn't already own an XBox.)
Basically for a lot of us it _did_ live up to the hype, and then some.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Many of these authors talk about how companies like Bungie, Nintendo, and Valve have been staying tight lipped about their projects instead of hyping them. Saying that this is a great method because then people dont expect more than is delivered. However there is one key element that the authors seem to forget. With Halo2, HL2, and Anything by Nintendo the non hype method only works for one reason. Everybody expects them to have great products to begin with. If Halo 2 was being produced by some no-name software company, without the strong reputation that the original had, nobody would care and the game would do at best mediocre. Same thing goes for Half-Life 2. If you don't believe me go back to the original Halo and original Half-Life. Both these games were pretty heavily hyped up. Hell Half-Life got more than half its steam (no pun intended) from the failed expectation that Team Fortress 2 would be a modification for Half-Life! Instead we only recieved TFC, but that didn't stop HL from being a smash hit!
At anyrate, the whole tight lip thing is bogus in my opinion. Sure a blockbuster developer like Valve or Bungie can pull it off... but how the hell is a team like Lionhead going to get any sales unless people have high expectations for their games?
Solon Heritage was supposed to have been released last year. And the fact that the end of Hegemonia is similar to the end of the 2nd Matrix movie and leaves you hanging....that was pretty lame to drop the project.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
Not that the sales were related, but that one succeeded in the market and the other didn't. Pikmin might not have succeeded if it were hyped more, but I somehow do not think Fable would have succeeded in quite its way if it were not for the successful application of the same hype that Fable's creators are now complaining that people paid too much attention to. If nothing else if it hadn't been for Fable's emphasis on promotion rather than programming I do not think it would have had THIS many preorders.
Sadly, marketing is hardly ever the problem in the game business. Marketing doesn't start bombing the players until between one week to five months before ship, and they generally don't make promises. There are a few obvious counter examples, Jon Romero about to make you his B*%$h being the most famous one, but for the most part marketing does a reasonable job of handing the spec sheet to the magazines and shouting about how great it will play. I don't think I've seen an example of the marketing department actually making stuff up, though I've seen them make promises based upon specs or feature sheets that got cut.
And that's really the problem. You need to cut things. Either the hyperreal evolutionary landscape was dragging down the processor, or it added layers of unnecessary interaction that killed gameplay (Masters of Orion 3), or you just didn't have time to finish a given feature properly (the extra spirit forges from Soul Reaver), but features will be cut. If you're unprofessional and blog your development cycle to fans who build up notions from your scattered information, you're going to disappoint many of them with decisions that ultimately were correct.
All developers love their fans, and want to have a personal relationship with them. But there are areas where this has to be off limits. All entertainment media know that you have to keep people quiet if you want the experience to be new and unexpected. That we're still struggling with this issue is just another sign of our relative youth as an industry. Enough info will leak out anyway to keep your fans interested. Look at Star Wars, or the LotR productions.
Don't worry. We're getting there.
Due to a technical error, News will be at 12.
The ______ Agenda
``gamers have become wary of those games which have major hyoe behind them.''
There's a lesson in there. If something is surrounded by a lot of hype, this means that someone is trying to make you wait for their product, rather than going with a competitor's. If the hype is generated by the same group that produces the product, this is often indicative of the product being not that great. After all, if the product is really greater than the competition, people will come to use it anyway.
Case in point: OS/2 versus Windows 95. OS/2 was 32-bit, robust, included a GUI, and provided compatibility with Windows 3, long before Windows 95 was released. During all that time, Microsoft made so much hype for Windows 95 that OS/2 was almost completely ignored. When Windows 95 was released, it touted 32 bits, improved stability, and compatibility with Windows 3. Windows 95 was such a fantastic improvement over DOS and Windows 3 that everybody switched.
OS/2 got built-in networking and Internet support and various other improvements. But the Windows 95 users didn't notice, because they were too busy dealing with crashes. I've never seen OS/2 crash. It's one of those great systems (also BeOS) that were completely eclipsed by the hype generated for another product. I hate hype.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I was going to sit this election out. However, you have successfully convinced me to vote Bush just to despite you. Nice try with the propoganda though.
As a sort of related aside I think that the guys making KOTOR2 have really found the balance. They release a few details but nothing that will give the story away or stop any of the 'drama' from being played out once the game is available.
Yeah, but can they make a game that can be "played out" on the PC? I would just like for them to have a game that runs.
I have a Athlon XP 1700, 512 RAM, and a new 128 MB Nvidia card, and the damn thing can't run it? It is practically a turn based strategy game! There is nothing worse than seeing your machine slow when someone whips out a lightsaber. "Alright, let me get this jedi and kick some, whaaaa??? why the hell is this thing going so slow there? three characters in a box room! THREE CHARACTERS IN A BOX ROOM! aw cmon! CMON! CMON! DAMMIT!"
I was not apparently alone on this one. I never got past the doors of the water planet, because, well, you know, there was water there, and my computer apparently can't handle water effects. After all, it only handles water effects incredibly on UT2004 with 32 people on the server.
That was the first and last time I will ever buy anythign by Bioware.
This is just like Deus Ex 2. If it came out first on the Xbox and was built primarily for it, then I will not purchase it, because IT WON'T RUN.
But then again, that's overstating the obvious.
Isn't ironic that someone hyping a story on their own site can't deliver the goods either? Article is in the middle of melt down.
My sig of choice is Marlboro
why do people always use Duke Nukem Forever as the example and always forget abotu Team Fortress II? I had a PC Gamer from at least 5 years ago with in game screen shots of TF II saying an entirely new engine was complete and that it would be game of the year easily. Which year, they didnt say. It even won a few awards in E3 a while ago. Then, all of a sudden, it dissappeared.
http://teamfortress2.sierra.com/
Anyone know where it went?
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
[nt]
Posters recognized by their sig,
The other side of this, having been both a developer and a PM is:
PM: When can you get it delivered?
LD: In a couple of weeks it's 95% finished.
(A week later)
PM: How are we progressing?
LD: Almost there, another couple of weeks, it's 95% finshed.
(Several weeks later)
PM: How are we progressing?
LD: Almost there, another couple of weeks, it's 95% there. But look at this cool feature I've added.
PM: Was that in the spec?
LD: No but surely everyone wants VI support in their RPG. Otherwise how are they going to grep for the items they are carrying?
PM commits sepeku.
I haven't bought a game in quite a few years, for the simple reason that I already have enough games that I find enjoyable. I know that if I'm bored, I can find some game in my library that will keep me interested.
Sure, that means sacrificing the best graphics and such, but gameplay really hasn't improved much overall. Plus, with a modern machine, many older games look a lot better anyway.
From the article The only time you can honestly trust any report on a game is the actual review, so sit tight, don't read up too much on a certain game if you want to be surprised, and hope for the best. Worse case scenario, if the game isn't what you were expecting, either rent it or just don't buy it.
Holy shit!! Read the review and take it into consideration when deciding whether or not to purchase a game? This guy must be a fucking rocket scientist with a dual PHD in brain surgery!!
Seriously, if you're silly enough to buy a game based on game INTERVIEWS, you're a moron. If you buy a game after REVIEWS have been posted which highlight the pro's and cons, you're smart. Hell, download a demo of the game so you see what you're getting yourself into before you actually buy it.
Would you go to a college without asking a few students about the school or just say fuckit, I'm going here because the campus (much like a box cover/screenshots) looks cool. Here's my 10-40k/year!
Gamers should really should stop being so impulsive and take a hint from the movie-going community, that being that critics are usually pretty good at rating things. And if you don't believe 1 source, check others..then form a concensus..THEN decide whether or not you want to buy the game. In most cases, doing a little research can save you money and frustration.
Crappy and SHORT single player game hyped as an MMORPG in the Myst world.
Then the morons can't keep their servers up, nothing works, and they pull the plug. Those of us who paid $50 for the game on the promise of the MMORPG are left holding the bill.
and quit playing games
date a girl
get a real job that doesnt give you time to play games.
KIDS THAT PLAY GAMES ARE MORE PRONE TO SMOKE, SUCK, AND BE ANTI-**S**OCIAL.
Typical international community. Support and arm(errr) America for invasion on Afghanistan. Then when said country becomes politically unpopular, bash the people living in it.
I think it's odd that the Gran Turismo series is such a huge seller, but when I talk about it outside of the core GT circles no one seems to care. Anyway ...
...) they take every bit of media hype as the written law - even if it doesn't come from the game publisher. A certain amount of the hype does belong to the developer / publisher, but you have to keep in mind that the majority of the hype comes from "insider" sites and game enthusiast groups. "Fanatics", if you will. Then when the developer doesn't live up to the claims of the fanatics, the fanatics are let down and the game is viewed as a watered down version of what the developer promised, when in actuality they never claimed any such thing.
GT4 is another one that hits the over promissing scenario. The said it would be online and it won't. They said it would be ready for Christmas 2003, it wasn't.
Other comments on this topic are talking about the true product being hype. I guess that's true. When you go to a group that adores a certain game (Final Fantasy, Grand Theft Auto, Gran Turismo
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
...you'd get them.
Prior to meeting my fiancee, I was contemplating getting either a PS2 or XBox. My fiancee came with a Gamecube, and I won't look back. The games on this system are just plain F-U-N. We can play Double Dash for hours with the kids, and I went out and bought Luigi's Mansion before her and I were really serious just so I could play it.
PS2, XBox... I dunno, they may or may not have better graphics, and they have the more 'mature' titles, but in the end, I just enjoy playing Nintendo's games. They're fun, and the kids love them. Toss that in with the GBA that I have which we can take on the road, and Nintendo is the winner in our house.
As for what you're saying about HALO, I agree completely. My soon-to-be brother in law is waiting with baited breath for the release of HALO2, and all I can ask is 'why?'. Personally, I can't stand playing FPS games on a console, because I require the keyboard/mouse combo (this may be a personal failing on my part tho). But, really there isn't much in HALO2 that I know of that I haven't seen before in Quake/Quake2/Quake3Arena/any number of other FPS games or their mods. *shrug* to some XBoxers, it may be like the second coming of Christ, but to me it's been there, done that.
~jaraxle
Even a bigger problem sometimes is the hype of the hardware! Look at the PSP. Sounds like it should be better than the current generation home consoles. If that's not hype, I don't know what is!
:)
That's why I've NEVER believed ANY of the hype that surrounds these new systems/games that come out unless they're from Nintendo. For example. When they announced the wavebird, every GameCube owner peed their pants in anticipation. What does Nintendo do? Give out CONSERVATIVE numbers. They said it should last 100hrs and have a range of about 20 feet. What happens in reviews?, well, turns out that 90 feet wasn't a problem and (the testers couldn't test battery life) but let me tell you from experience, I've only had to replace the batteries twice since I purchased mine.
So, when Nintendo says the DS has a battery life of 8-10 hours like the SP, I have 100% faith that it will. When Nintendo says the range of the wireless on the DS is 30 feet, I can expect at least that, and a 95% chance it'll be over 50 feet. When Sony says the PSP should be able to play current PS2 games, I say, can you even fit a game of FIFA in before you need to plug it in?!?
Have fun waiting for the overhyped PSP, I'll be with my buddies (and apparently total strangers!) playing wicked ass DS games.
Sorry, that turned out to be more of a rant. Well I guess it is. I guess I'm ranting on all those game devs. that like to tell me one thing, and then deliver me crap.
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
What the bloody hell are you talking about?
Ha ha. Funny cuz it's basically true, however I'm a Product Manager (seriously, a PM that reads /.) and in our defence we are trying to compete in a vaporware market where the "100%" date is a myth and even the 90% date is always too far out for the customer and the market. So, you soft-shoe, juggle non-essential features as the development effort continues, leverage betas and release candidates, etc.
/. handle for a reason.
Not all companies are Blizzard or Microsoft and can just say "ready when it's ready" and people will wait (depending on the slice of the software market you inhabit). Shareholders, analysts, customers and competition don't sit still for it in most cases. The vaporware/due-date game is part of how companies compete... it's a damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don't situation.
Not that I like it. I have my
Just as an example, look at Anno 1503 published by Sunflowers and distributed by EA. To this day they failed to provide multiplayer, mistreated customers who inquired about the status of the "patch" that never came, yet even now the demo available online still has a nice outtro screen screaming about the best "multiplayer" experience ever. Only after I had a bout with them and created a Website http://home.fuse.net/slipstreamscapes/ in order to institute a class-action lawsuit, as well as after exposure here on Slashdot http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/13/213524 5, did they finally announce that no patch would ever be released. Ironically, they had plenty of time to create a single-player add-on in the meantime. Now they are supposedly working on a new sequel, again promising mountains and valleys...
This trend is more of a rule than exception nowadays (I can think of at least dozen games in no time where I got burned in a similar fashion but never did anything about it) and we as investors in their products should finally stand-up and fight for our rights as consumers. In this case, there is enough of evidence to institute at least a lawsuit in a small claims court demanding money back for a product that did not deliver (especially in my case where I bought the game solely for the multiplayer experience).
I used to buy at least 2 games per month, nowadays (partially because I am not so much interested in gaming any more) I do not buy games any more, mainly because I am sick and tired of the lies and misleading politics by the game publishers.
It's about time to show these corporate bullies that we will not take this any more.
And Izvestia is Russian for "news". Both of these being state newspapers gives rise to the punning expression
Doom3, overhyped? Yes. But it was not id that overhyped it, it was PC news media and to a lesser degree the rabid fans. HL2, now in this case I believe the developer Valve is responsible for some of the hype. But the majority has been from the Publisher and the media.
Don't expect the Hype machines to slow any. There is more competition than ever and everyone is trying to rise above the FUD and noise, even if they are contributing to it. My advice, patience. Wait a month AFTER a game is released before you purchase. By then there be more than enough online reviews for you to make an informed decision and if there are any serious problems with the game they will be known and possibly already addressed in a patch.
Most developers are just a group of hard core geeks trying to make a game. Creating hype is not in their venacular.
Break it down into two groups first. You've got the publishing house and the developer / studio. Your marketing, and usually a nice chunk of management in a game studio comes from the publisher. The publisher foots the bill for the studio to develope a game, so they get to set all the deadlines, promote the product, and push the developer around as much as they'd like to.
I've read several game post-mortums where the developer said something to the sound of "Yeah, we wanted to include this and this in our original specifications, but the publisher made us chop it out so they could get a holiday launch in, it really would have added so much more to the game."
The deadlines the publisher sets are commonly unreasonable to begin with, and really makes you think they don't have a clue about the problems that can occure during development. You take a group of people, only have a vague understanding about how they work, and stick on deadlines that most likely couldn't be met if the team pulled 80 hour weeks every week of dev.
ID Software used to hit deadlines pretty well, if I remember correctly. Doom 3, what happened, wait, is that an Activision publishing credit I see? I don't know the full story on thier involvment, but a safe bet that they had a hand in deciding the deadline.
Nintendo gets around all this madness pretty well because they train large chunks of thier programming force, and have very very high guidelines for employment. In most cases, thier games are developed either in house working directly for Nintendo, or in the case of third party games, by groups that Nintendo has made absolutely certain can live up to thier expectations.
I suppose what it comes down to, is either be more selective with the studio you want to publish, do your games yourself, or let the studio's set thier own deadlines and let -them- dictate the amount of coverage and promises that are given.
The big publishers (Activision, Electronic Arts) need to step down, shut up, and let the studio's do thier thing. This is really the only good way to improve the industry as a whole, but unfortunately it usually means someone at the top of the ladder won't be able to afford to buy the island he wants and will have to settle for a smaller one.
Thanks, my $0.02
Look! Up in the Sky! It's Captain Obvious!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
just one year before it was released, peter molyneux gave an interview to spong:
Part One
more about children:Part Two
Part Three
he confirmed all the hype about fable, to quote him:
but at the time of the interview, he knew what would and what wouldn't be in fable !
of course even when the release date was approching he didn't deny any of his allegation (another form of lie), only to make hypocritical apologies not before fable sold enough units..
nothing but deceptive advertising.
The more people will believe it.
The art, then, is to get people to believe not the lies, but whatever you tell them. For at some point, they challenge the lie, and find the truth.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
My first 4 players experience whas with MULE, at 1987?.. and my first 2 players whas eons before with ... pong?.
-Woof woof woof!
News Flash: marketing monkeys over-hype products!
But for new, patent-capable hype, add "its on a computer".
b3 4phr41d 0f my 4bov3-4v3r4g3 c0mpu73r kn0wI3dg3!
MadDwarf
...the Lynx was actually released by Atari, not Sega. Sega's handhelds were the Game Gear, and the Nomad (which itself was really just a portable Mega Drive/Genesis).
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
You don't even know the difference between "spite" and "despite". You and Bush are like peas in a pod. Morons the both of you. (Propoganda? Is there no limit to your ignorance?)
or actually, shoot the correct messenger.
... well, forever.
This isn't "developers" making the promises, it's "business executives". It's not news, it's been that way throughout the software industry for
Developers, and by extension QA people and Production Support people live under the mantra that "just one more tweak and it'll be perfect". And that's "A Good Thing".
Marketing & Business types live under the mantra "opportunity cost & time to market". That, surprisingly enough, is also "A Good Thing" since money coming in allows developers the opportunity to write.
Those conflicting forces, when balanced with common sense and proper risk management, lead to the proper compromise of quality vs. timeliness.
The issue becomes bad, when "but we made a promise to our customers/shareholders and we can't lose face" becomes the over-riding concern and "but the software doesn't actually work yet" gets lost in the shuffle.
Too many companies in these days of "what have you done for me lately" quarterly profit/loss statement-driven management have lost the ability to think long term.
Reason why there is hope for the future generation #364:
"I wish my grass was emo so it could cut itself."
It's a shame that these magazines and websites are so focused on hype and not on protecting consumer dollars from false promises. Obivously they're so dependent on industry advertising that they wouldn't dare bite off the hand that funds them.
www.lonseidman.com
There is an inverse relationship between how much you hype/talk up something during its initial stages and how much the product resembles that hype when finished... if it even gets done.
Stay quiet. Talk mostly to people who are important to the project. Don't placate yourself by impressing people with your own hype. People will be more impressed if they're surprised.
vk.
I didn't play SWG, but heard lots of complaints for friends who played about missing features, and promptly quit. I've played EQ, DAoC and CoH, and they were all guilty of it to varying degrees.
I think a lot of mmorpg fanboys default response to this is "It's a work in progress, you need to be patient, they need to develop their story arc". I call bullshit on that, when I pay $40-50 for a game, then $10-15 a month subscription, I want it full featured from Day 1, not Day 180 or Day 365.
I've been watching WoW and EQ2 for this, so far from the friends in both the betas, it sounds like WoW is delivering the features promised more than EQ2 is. We'll see.
As one friend said, don't sell me a car, and then tell me the seats and tires will come later; or worse, are part of an additional package I need to pay for - when it should be standard equipment.
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
In Soviet Russia, marketting overhypes YOU!
First off, I highly doubt that Gran Turismo 4[japanese] is going to be this holidays top seller for the holiday season for Sony. I'll go out on a limb here and predict that the top seller will be GTA: San Andreas.
With that fairly obvious prediction aside, Gran Turismo 4 will be a big seller, but as a December 14 release, Polyphony Digital still has time to work the bugs out of the online side before release. This seems to me to be an inadequate explanation as to why the title isn't going to include the online functionality.
Developers of all the people that would be at fault for this are the ones that cause the least amount of overshot. Development is always striving to undershoot, cut back, trim down, and back away, it is mangement, and marketing, and PR that are overshooting, uneducated, un-realistic and after the all mighty dollar. In the beginning everyone has ideas, and some of those ideas are not realistic after PMs put dates up and the idea gets fleshed out, and its the mangement and marketing that announces those ideas before it is seen if it truly can be done, and this is who should be blamed for the failures of the video game industry. These are also the people who put a 1 17 year old at 10 dollars an hour playing games from 6AM to 10AM as the only tester for a 2 year project 2 months before release, and don't expect there to be any bugs either.
nt
Regarding the comments made on HL2:
For one, yes, there was a hack, and yes, the source was released. The game *was* overhyped though. I agree that Valve did work secretly, but the problem is that the developers really didn't have much done, as evidenced by the source that Ago supposedly stole.
A good number of people think that it is arguable that he stole it. In fact, the logs from this "unknown" source were never verified. I agree with the article, but I don't think Valve is a great source of underhyping. Peter Molywhatever is pretty well known for hyping, though I don't imagine he ever really intends to hype the games.
Black & White was a horrible game. Dungeon Keeper (not overhyped) was an excellent game. I think development time is what really matters. I get more fun out of playing new games developed for old engines (Freelancer) than new games developed for new engines (Doom3).
I guess I value plot, story, and game interface more than I value all the fancy bells and whistles.
Right on. If I can get a PS2 cheap, I'll finally be able to play GT3! yay!
Besides, Zelda on the N64 is still as good as it was a couple of years ago (as long as you play it for the first time).
Waiting is the best way to make good choices. And when more people will do it, maybe it will send a strong signal to game publishers/developers: Stop overhyping, I'm not going to buy your game right away anyway. Aim long term.
perception is reality
"Nintendo's frustrating strategy might actually be the best approach after all." Yes when you make crap games, you allways know what to expect.... Crap.
TruePunk | Games
You can run an emulator for free.
I still play some of the old classics, like Super Ghouls and Ghosts (SNES), the sonics (Genesis) and some not-TOO-old games like F-ZeroX (N64) and the N64 Zelda.
Not to mention the thousands of MAME titles and such..
With emulators, games will never die. The XBox is actually pretty awesome when it comes to this - all these emulators are available on a modded Xbox, for play on a full TV screen. You can even get controller adapters to hook up old Atari, Nintendo, etc controllers!
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Doom 3, what a let down. If it wasn't for the ID name, I never would have bought it. Farcry left them in the dust. I can't wait to see Half Life 2. My 3 cents.
Sorry for the nitpicking, but it is called seppuku ;-) and is a ritual suicide to restore honor.
;-)
I'm not sure if a product manager ever had honor
I am one of the gaming crowds that have been mentioned here, and I'd have to say alot of this stuff is accurate, but no-one seems to capture the effect the hype gives.
For example, the physics engine, and features of Half-life 2 seem so much more amazing, when you can't touch it. Once you play it, the novelty soon wears off, and the realism of it sets in. Wow, I can push over barrels, now what?!.
But when you can't explore the limitations of it, or you can't experience it, it becomes so much more than it accualty is.
This is all my opinion, but I think other gamers might agree with me.
This is my approach to movies and video games: if there's a title coming out in which I expect to be interested, then I go out of my way to avoid ads, previews, and reviews. Avoid the hype, and then you'll enjoy the product on its own merits rather than being let down. If I'm already mostly sold on the product, sight unseen, then hype is going to do nothing but spoil it for me. If I want to know a little more about the item before purchasing, then I hold back and wait until I've seen the general sentiment in reviews from early purchasers; in the case of games, I may also download the demo version when and if available.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
You are right, the story does seem to mimic Half-Life. Every good FPS since Half-Life has had the same formula too.
You're an average guy just minding your own businees, going about your everyday work when some event happens and causes you to fight for your life. You progress through the game collecting weapons, ammo, skills, whatever, and at some point in the game you lose consciousness, get captured, whatever, and LOSE all your great stuff. You then struggle a little more and eventually find your stuff, or more just like it, and a BFG.
There, follow this formula and I guarantee you a Game of the Year Sticker on your box.
That was a great article. One of the best I've read recently regarding games of late.
Not to nit-pick, but Prince of Persia 2 came out over a decade ago, and looked nothing like the screenshot in the linked article.
And UbiSoft? What happened to Broderbund?
Strange. Do they mean this as a sort of re-release with updated graphics, or did someone in marketing simply forget how to count?
"Stay Quiet and let them think you're stupid, open your mouth and prove it to them."
Yeah, Fable comes to mind. We were promised near limitless replay value, as the game's story was supposed to unfold based on in game decisions. What we got was a linear story of limited appeal, that is the same regardless of how many children you slaughter. We were promised a complex virtual economy. What we got was a bunch of traders spouting off tips to the effect of, "some people earn good gold buying and selling trade items." Well, I have news for you, you cannot make money in this regard. Your supposed to be able to buy property, and make hard cash being a landlord or shopkeeper, guess what, you'll never make up the cost of the house in rent revenue, unless you play for a bloody eternity. The story peters out after 8 hours of real game time, true you can play for some time after that. But what for? So I can get a sword out of a rock, gee, where did that idea come from? So I can escort some moron trader to Orchard Farm every few days?
Whee, what the game needed was about 300 more quests than it has, in some kind of spanning tree system, where decisions and actions make certain quests available, and others, completely unavilable. No, whatever you do, you get the same quests, at the same point in the game. One of the lamest games I have ever played.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
Oh, and REXX scripting, and a better filesystem, and ...
And incompatibility with legacy games. In my experience, more legacy DOS games ran under Windows than under OS/2, and if I remember what I had to do to get things to work, the file system was part of the problem.
...returning a played videogame because it doesn't meet your expectations is just not something that happens very often
:(
You make it sound like you can but don't. I wish you could return videogames that don't meet up with your standards. Like you would return a toaster or a vacuum cleaner that broke the first or second day. Problem is you can copy the game too easily. In a perfect world people would be honest and you could return a bad game, but the fact is the stores aren't afraid of you duplicating their whiz-bang toaster v.2 but its a real fear that you will copy whiz-bang-hyped-game II and return it
IIRC, Halo was originally supposed to be a real-time-strategy/3rd-person-shooter that allowed you to roam the ENTIRE ring as you saw fit in your battle against the Covenant. It would have been huge.
Instead it was a slightly repetitive FPS that followed a tight story, albeit a good one.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
While I don't play console games, I know that the console mags are often unable or unprepared to give realistic reviews on the hyped new title. PC games mags go the same way. In one sense, you might expect it, because the game company is an advertiser in the magazine that is reviewing the game. The magazine's customer is the advertiser first and then the reader, and so the mag is often afraid to point out any shortcomings in games that are being advertised in the pages -- that stinks, imho.
I can't count the number of titles that I picked up after reading a review only to find that the review was FAR too generous with praise and FAR too short on critique.
I'd rather see more folks whining to the publications that sugar-coat their appraisals of games.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
Too busy riting projekt plans to spell check....
You could at least spell honour correctly though....
hours would seem like days, and days seem like months.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
.... and one that the software industry hates to accept.
If you like the advertising for a game or any other commercial software, pirate it.
Play with it, figure out it's capability to meet your needs. See if it "lives up to the hype".
If you like it, don't just leave it on your drive, go out, buy a copy, get the manual and a hard copy, and reward the developer for a job well done.
If you don't like it, delete it.
Of course, the last two paragraphs never really get addressed - some people keep software they don't like around to give to others, others keep software they do like to save money.
But until commercial software figures out that giving full-featured demos with reasonable time limits is the only way to advertise software, or embraces the concept of "try before you buy" by eliminating draconian copy protection schemes and hoping society will weed out the the abusers, it will continue.
Case in point, I bought "The Sims 2" two months ago for my wife, and after trying to get SafeDisc 3 to cooperate with her aging CD-ROM drive, I got a couple of tools to mask the features of the copy protection and gave her virtual drive images. We won't be buying any of the additions if they contain SafeDisc 3 as a result.
And there's no way the BSA, SPA, or any other organization will be able to stop it.
s/software/favorite digital medium of choice/g;
Who cares about overpromising, I'd be excited to see something original for once. With a few exceptions (Sims; and even that's changing) the only thing that ever comes out these days is FPS games.
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
The claim that stores don't take returns because they are afraid of piracy is simply a lie. I'm not saying that YOU are lying, but that the stores have lied to you.
There are plenty of ways to get your hands on the original media long enough to copy it, and when CD burners were $800, and media was $30 a pop, most stores still wouldn't take returns. Back then, the reason was that you might put a virus on the write only CD.
From personal experience, I used to work at a Software Etc. We did take returns. In fact when someone came back and told us the game worked fine, but sucked, we would tell them that they should brink it back for a refund or exchange! Funny thing is that crappy/buggy games got returned fairly often, and good games almost never got returned. I don't think a single copy of Falcon 4.0 (The best flight sim at the time) ever got returned.
In two years, only one time did I ever run across an individual that was abusing the return policy. After about the 5th return, I simply explained to the "customer" that we obviously don't sell software that is compatible with his system, so this would be the last return he would be allowed to make. Since returns required a form to be filled out (like in almost all types of stores) that contained a name, it is incredibly easy to see if someone is abusing a store return policy, even in a big Best Buy type store.
Sure, Nintendo never overhypes and underdelivers! /sarcasm
Like the time they promised Perfect Dark to Goldeneye fans and instead made them wait years for a game that was plagued with choppy framerate and (unsurprisingly) lackluster sales. All we wanted was another Goldeneye engine game in 1998! Not an overhyped game in 2000! There's a reason this game quickly got dumped to $10 in bargain bins.
Like the time Nintendo hyped GBA as a handheld SNES (or better) and instead delivered a machine missing 2 buttons, a large chunk of the resolution, with worse sound, and the darkest-yet-most-glary reflective LCD screen ever. Prompting harsh criticism from portablemonopoly.com and others.
Like the time Nintendo promised "pixel-perfect" (to quote Ken Lobb) home conversions of the Cruisn USA and Killer Instinct games for N64. Years later, we are still waiting. The ports were met with harsh criticism. Censorship (Cruisn), blurry textures (Cruisn) and sprites (KI Gold) and missing frames (KI Gold) and video (KI Gold). For years Nintendo-owned Rare *made fun* of people asking for a new Killer Instinct game in their "uncle tusk" section of their website! What kind of gratitude is that?
How about the teaser footage of a realistic Zelda game on GameCube, only to get a silly cartoony Zelda game that was also met with harsh criticism and lackluster sales. Years later they still aren't done making the realistic game they probably now realize they should have done in the first place.
How about "Mario 128"? People just wanted a sequel to Super Mario 64 and instead they got a tech demo with 128 Marios running around. The Mario and Luigi games have both been quirky and widely criticized gimmicky games that both rely on *cleaning*! Cleaning is not fun. Not surprisingly, no one is asking for sequels to these.
Nintendo's flirtations with censorship are now quite infamous.
Don't forget Virtual Boy. Before that disaster they hyped it alot in their own magazine, too.
Speaking of which, what about all of the hyped games and machines that they advertised and then got canned? Riqa for N64? CD-ROM for SNES?
64DD for N64 was years too late and then made Japanese-only. Insult to injury for the rest of us.
It's posiible with the pirates who sell for $4 around here. :-)
But what happens if the messenger IS someone whos part of the development team? I don't consider marketing to be part of a dev team and there have be cases where the DESIGNERS of the game will make these statements. Developers, not including execs or marketing people, are humans as well. You know how people always compare recent video games with art? Well just consider recent developers with artists, often times overzealous in their product.
My benchmark for immersion, replay value, and entertainment value remains nethack.
Now, there's no shortage of people who would rather pull their fingernails off with pliers than play nethack, but no computer game has ever done more for me, held my attention as well, or given me the same level of satisfaction (or humiliation) as nethack.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Stop believing all that hype! He was born in New New Haven, Connecticut.
For instance, the developers of "Deus Ex: Invisible War" managed to overhype its quality and exaggerate its features by first releasing "Deus Ex". ;-)
Since this is slashdot I can't believe MS releases things "ready when it's ready"
::)
I believe that's John Carmack's theory for games, and he definitely does right by them.
But as a devel under PM who have little or no technical experience, when they come to you with a request for "when will it be done" and you tell them 6 months and they respond with 3. It's a bit annoying, how do you explain to someone in plain english everything that has to be done when in their mind you push a few buttons and it works.
PM's are pains in the ass. No offense
-- taking over the world, we are.
What do these guys want developers to do? Tell us the truth? That would make every video game press release look like this:
"xyz Software announced , a knockoff of that adds two new features, five hundred new bugs, and a graphics slightly prettier than in the game just like it that you bought LAST year!"
Video game hype is like pr0n models: you know that the body parts are (mostly) fake, and that they'll probably OD or commit suicide within five years, but hey, it's fun to get off on until the real thing comes along.
overestimation, not oversetimation... whoops
Come on this has been true fro[sic] over 20 years in PC games.
I'd say closer to 30 years. Some background:
In the early 70s the chip maker General Instruments made a "pong on a chip" device as a skunkworks project (ie. it was a "for fun" project not designed for any of their customers). They observed that Atari Pong and Magnavox Odyssey (the REAL first video tennis game) were selling quite well. As such, G.I. contacted the inventor of the original game, Ralph Baer, for a license agreement to market the chip (Magnavox did not use a single-chip solution--it used Baer's original design).
This is where the "over-hype" comes in. Baer was good friends with Arnold Greenberg--president of Coleco. He told Greenberg about the new chip that was to be released in 1975 and secured G.I.s first big customer in Coleco.
Using engineering samples, Coleco developed the first "Telstar" Pong/Odyssey clone and became a pioneer in the field of overhype and vapourware even before people knew about Bill and Paul's new BASIC. By the time G.I. finally made the first production run of the chips, Coleco had people falling over each other to get a Telstar, which was always in short supply due to manufacturing difficulties. Competitors made clones using the same chip once GI sorted the problems out (and Coleco was still having problems with supply) and sparked a "pong mania".
Eventually the flood of mostly low quality machines caused a shakeout--by that time Coleco was a big enough player in the market to survive. Atari made a CPU-based system with ROM cartriges and started a new craze. Coleco and Mattel joined in and Atari and Mattel learned all about hype from Coleco. They were the "Big 3 of vapourware". By the early 80s all of them had hit systems with lots of games and were promising even more games and better machines. All three also hyped computer expansions and/or next-gen systems. All three were either late to market or reneged on promises.
The public had high expectations based on the Big 3's marketing hype. What they got were things like Atari 2600 Pac Man and E.T., A late initial shipment of Coleco ADAM computers that were DOA and nothing from Mattel but a limited release of a crappy computer expansion and more expensive, slightly incompatible Intellivisions that were no better than the original except perhaps for better looks and speech built in.
The "big crash" 20 years ago was caused precisely because of this overhype. Nintendo succeeded because it blindsided the public with the NES--no one expected the big release of a new system becuase the console market was dead in 1985. No expectations + good product = big hit. It maintained supremacy by being selective about licensed developers and for awhile with monopolistic practises.
I don't forsee a big crash like in the 80s again where all the big players in console hardware die off, but I do see a shakeout on the developer side if they do not learn from this history. It might come to a point where Sony, Nintendo and MS take (even more?) charge of all the major games development for their respective systems. However, I'd prefer if they remained open but did like UBISoft and release demos as development is done and not fuel speculation about what isn't done.
On the checkbook front, remember N selling Rare? The rumored number was in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Rare had done some incredible games (Goldeneye, Banjo Kazooie) and a good number of good games too. N was surely sunk without them, right?
Heck no. N seems to have got the good end of the deal. Rare has struggled to release anything. And their premiere title, some multiplayer Conker game has been delayed over a year and is still terrible (it is playable at E3 each year).
Meanwhile, what has poor old Nintendo done? They've hooked up with Intelligent Systems (Paper Mario GC, Advance Wars I and II for GBA) and Retro Studios (Metroid: Prime). Surely they got in the ground floor with these companies too, and so didn't have to pay a mint for them.
Nintendo may not have the splash of MS, but they seem to execute the best of any company in the business. Perhaps the GC has too few exclusive games, but those they do have rarely fail to impress.
Note to parent poster: to see how unexceptional Halo is, you really want to look at Marathon 2, Bungie's first online title, not Quake 2.
Marathon created the move with keyboard, point-with-mouse controls that made real 3D FPSes work. Quake 1 didn't have them on by default. And the level designs showed it. The levels didn't use the vertical axis at all, since it was so cumbersome on the old controls.
Marathon had these controls. It also introduced capture the flag, kill the man with the ball and teams to network play.
I'm not putting down Quake 2, I like it. But Bungie came up with this stuff, JUST NOT WITH HALO. Halo is just Marathon Infinity with better graphics and cars. Add in the poor level design and it really fails to impress.
Halo 2 looks good though.
I cannot agree enough
When we whine, the developers sometimes respond by doing better next time... but mostly they just laugh all the way to the bank.
That'll almost certainly be down to the publisher, not the developers themselves. I don't know many games devs, but I know a fair few programmers, and I can't think of any who don't want to do the best job they can.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Doom 3 sucks. I'm really sorry I spent that money on that horrid game.
UT2004 (Bought at the same time) gets a lot more play.
But not much can surpass my alltime favorite, Half-Life. Got it in what, 1998, and it's still going strong! Wow! Now THAT was a bargain!
Actually, there is a different story behind this from what I heard. The stores couldn't care less if you copy it and return it, assuming most of the people don't do it, assuming they can still sell the software as new. What happened is some guy sued the software stores for re-shrinkwrapping software and selling it as new, and actually won. Once that happened, they stopped taking returns on new software. Most of them however, will take returns on used software (at least GameStop and EB both do). So in the end, it wasn't greed on the store's part that made them stop taking returns...
...to download the dreamcast/n64 emulators from www.suprnova.org to play games on your PC
If internet rumors from people who have played it are correct, the final game falls WAYYYY short of what was promised in Frank O'Connor's weekly updates.
If only Valve released Half-Life 2 09/30/2003 it would have been the exact opposite of what happened with Fable, etc. No hype, just game.
What I disagree with you on is what you think the role of marketing is.
As a marketer, my job is to let the public know about our product. Now, ethical people like myself would not lie about a product or promise things that obviously don't have a snowballs chance of hell of making it into this version. We do not just go hog wild with everything you give us......well, not if we're good at what we do. You see, its one thing if you just want to sell a product to someone once and never see them again, and never get any customers again. But if you have any desire of getting return customers, or having them spread the good word so you get more first time customers, viral marketing (industry term for word of mouth) is ESSENTIAL. And you don't have a chance in hell of getting that unless you have a solid product that lives up to your claims.
So while not all marketers are evil, and not all of us hype the hell out of everything we touch, game companies are definitely guilty as charged. And you are dead on about people eating up the hype. Well, ignorant people who don't suspect hype at least, which unfortunately is the vast majority.
In our industry, there's two terms we use, hype and buzz. Hype is more of a negative thing for the exact reasons you describe. Buzz however is the viral marketing aspect of it, and means people are spreading the good word about your product because the product lives up to claims, and in essence, sells itself.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog00000003 56.html
I stopped reading game hype years ago and have been the better for it. I read the consolidated game reviews over at Blue's News daily. Never buy a game that doesn't get a consistent collection of good reviews from the reviewers.
:)
I've been happier about game playing ever since.
Personally, I thought Warcraft III was horrible. Absolute ass. Fuck, it was an FPS RPG, not an FPS- the "So and So Must Survive!" mission goals of some of the Warcraft II and Starcraft missions had gone from being occasional objectives to being shoved up your ass on every single map- to the point where the build tree was augmented to ressurect your characters!
War3 was everything I didn't like about Starcraft (precious little) blown up into a full game and stuck onto the same basic RTS model as Warcraft and Starcraft.
So yeah, I thought War3 sucked. Throwing in RPG elements and more plot does not constitute RTS Innovation, which is what I was hoping for. Instead I was stuck playing a hyperannoying character for half the game- the kind of guy you'd take out behind the bar and beat senseless in the Real World. Same reason I dropped Final Fantasy- the games went from being fun gameplay to tedius interactive novels focusing on characters I just couldn't get into.
Fortunately Blizzard has realized where its strengths are and seems to be focusing on the worldbuilding/character thing with WoW, rather than flogging the RTS genre into some bastard RPG hybrid. >_
Nice grammar for a spelling Nazi. That would be Morons, the both of you, if you had two neurons to rub together, you pedantic jackass.
The former marketing crew where I work discovered first hand how customers react after they discover that the reality doesn't match the hype.
The current mantra that new marketing folks are giving to sales is "Managing Expectations". That translates roughly to "don't bullshit the customers".
And guess what? Customer satisfaction is up, and Sales are up.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
Thats what second HDD drives were for.
Which major OEMs of the time offered those as a reasonably-priced add-on? And which customers knew to add one for legacy games?
Or for the brave installing from scratch
Not if the OS/2 restore disk provided by your computer maker reformatted your HD before installing.
Incidentally, a lot of the file system issues that blocked OS/2 and DOS dual-booting now block Windows XP and Linux dual-booting.
Hmm, been reading a lot of Chomsky lately?
-Dead Lesbian Witches! Think about it!
"In our industry, there's two terms we use, hype and buzz. Hype is more of a negative thing for the exact reasons you describe. Buzz however is the viral marketing aspect of it, and means people are spreading the good word about your product because the product lives up to claims, and in essence, sells itself."
So where do marketers fit in? Haven't you just talked yourself out of a job?
Tofurkey kicks ass. I love that shit! My only quesiton is, would the Cowboy dude on the package be disappointed if he found out that the jerky he was eating was made of tofu? I mean, he doesn't look like he knows what tofu is, and if he did, he wouldn't like it. He seems to be a bit of a man's man, and as such, would probably have a strange predisposition towards hating tofu products.
Did I just say all of that?
Being one of those Halo fanbois I can testify that Bungie has indeed let out large chunks of information regarding Halo single player. They release an update every week with tidbits and details. One that stands out in my mind is the ability to swap weapons with your A.I. comrades. A unique feature not included in other games. Also their press releases to magazines have almost locked down what will be involved in single player. Don't go looking though, you might ruin the game for yourself.
No, too busy doing seppuku... err...
but one look at its library consisting almost entirely of ports and various licensed games
Do you mean "licensed" as opposed to so-called "unlicensed" games such as the NES games by Tengen and Color Dreams, or do you mean "TV-licensed"?
shows who its market is.
Ports: adults who grew up on classics as kids. Licensed games: their school-age children. It may be a toy strategy, but it's a good toy strategy. However, the exception proves the rule, and it is WarioWare. It appears just about all the good ideas in 2D have been taken, which is why you get so many ports, sequels, and adaptations of existing franchises into existing game engines.
It's been a long time since any major console had to worry about unlicensed games
The web site gbadev.org is running a competition right now for making unlicensed GBA games.
I mean licensed games like from television shows, films, Disney, etc., of course.
I call those "TV-licensed" or "toy-licensed".
See, I just don't agree [that the majority of 2D game concepts have been explored], if nothing else because the old NES had a bigger 2D game variety than the GBA does
Well, wasn't the NES around first to provide a platform for exploring all the low-hanging fruit?
And where is Nintendo's new Super Mario World for GBA?
The closest might be Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga, although that isn't very close.
Nintendo simply isn't offering anything remotely innovative or even as high quality as their old games (unless it is an exact port of those games, of which there are plenty!).
It doesn't have to be an exact port. The F-Zero series keeps evolving, albeit more slowly than some radicalists would prefer.
People didn't love the NES or SNES games only because they were children
Having been children is not the only part but a large part. Children are easily amused (yes, I admit to having liked Ikari Warriors for NES when I was 11) and have limited resources to buy new games (price of new game == allowance for half a year; better learn to love what you have).
Nintendo created/started both of these companies and you criticize me for saying the "got in in the ground floor"? Seems like that's the definition of the ground floor.
Who's hard on Conker? Me. I play it at E3 each year. It's terrible, absolutely zero fun.
I dunno about Grabbed by the Ghoulies, didn't play it.
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