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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."
Just a link: http://www.3drealms.com/duke4/
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 :(
Yeah, I remember how pong was going to simulate real tennis in every minute detail.
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.
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.
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
I personally try to get out of the respawn area as quickly as possible. Damn campers.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
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.
...Hyoe pwns joo!
Okay, I'll get some sleep.
Yeah, real tennis was a pretty big let down for you, too, huh?
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.
Or...imagine this! They would require such complicated geometry, that even the best machines that were available two years ago could only run them at low-rez, low quality 640x480.
... Pentium 3 1Ghz teamed up with the hot new Geforce Ti4600!
How would they have been treated in all the reviews? A bit like Tresspasser or Ultima IX, albeit without all the box puzzles and boring landscape?
You think people complain about how boring D3 is now --- all the horsepower a P4E can crank out just to render two or three zombies! Imagine if you were forced to play it on your brand new, $3000
Hyoe?
I'm always wary when Ed MacMahon is backing up a game.
"I'm Ed MacMahon. Buy Halo2. Hyyoooooe!"
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
Not to be a dick, but it's spelled "misspelling".
-matt
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.
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.
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. --
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.
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?)
Everyone's obsessed with release dates, and I believe this is one of the biggest problems with game development these days.
Many people seem to assume that a game produces itself, and if it fails to meet the expected release date then the developers are somehow deliberately holding back a finished game. I've seen claims that Halo was complete a long time before the launch of the Xbox (in reality, it shows definite signs of being rushed to completion), and that Half-Life 2 has just been sat on for most of the past year. That sort of situation is very rarely the case.
Half-Life and its sequel are probably good examples of the developer not rushing the game to market, both being delayed by about a year. The original went from being a probable also-ran to a memorable experience in that extra year, and I hope the same can be said about HL2. There was something they really weren't happy about with the game, and they had the bravery to delay it. Beyond the insistence that it was still ready for release on September 30th 2003, I have a lot of respect for them for the delay.
There are the endless lists of technical features and numerical 'assessments' of a game's worth, and that's how some seem to rate their games. Personally, I don't care if a game has per-pixel stencil shadow lighting or precalculated radiosity lightmaps, whether it has a certain licensed physics engine or not. What matters to me is the art, the design, the gameplay, the audio and the story. The underlying engine is important, but only in how it makes the previous aspects possible. A great game can be built on a poor engine, albeit with more difficulty, and a poor game can easily be built on a great engine.
I was playing through System Shock 2 recently. It's old, the engine is primitive, and the graphics are mediocre (in terms of a buzzword contest, anyway). It's still a great game.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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."
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
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.
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. -
I think you mean lawn tennis, old chap. Real tennis is a far superior game.
Oh lord, spare me. I'll bet you think "football" is played by kicking a spherical ball into little nets, too.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
...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
Nah, football is played by flicking a piece of paper folded into a small triangle between another person's index fingers. I hear that's also how sex is made.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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