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Game Previews Just Game Marketing?
Kotaku has a feature up today written by James Wagner Au, formerly embedded reporter in the world of Second Life. He's now doing his own thing, and he's got a fairly cynical discussion over at the Kotaku site about the real purpose behind game previews in industry rags. From the article: "For the thing of it is, game magazine previews are almost uniformly positive, even for the most undistinguished titles. So it unrolls thus: publisher makes mediocre game; press previews depict mediocre game as being good or at least worth a look; excited gamers read previews, foolishly believe them, start making pre-sale orders of mediocre game; driven by preview press and pre-sale numbers based on that press, retailers stock up on mediocre game; publisher makes money from mediocre game, keeps making more games like it."
... surprised
I'm telling you, everything this guy says is gold. :)
Would you base your opinion of a car on a video of a test drive of a prototype version? No?
Then why would you do it with a game?
Can you imagine a world where journalists were objective and direct about unfinished games? "This game sucks, it's full of bugs and there's only two levels!!"
Why do games, for the most part, unrelentingly suck such ass?
..
.. but that's simply not the case. Thinking up something original is exceedingly tricky. Games cross a bridge between technical innovation and creativity .. that makes them doubly difficult. And on top of that it's (perceived to be) a big money, big profit, prestigious part of the IT industry .. and that attracts just about everyone regardless of their level of capability.
Because making games is hard.
See also: Websites, records, television programmes
Anything that involves a creative input is difficult because thats the way we're made. We love to think of ourselves as wonderfully creative creatures all very capable of coming up with brilliant new ideas day and night
So you have a difficult creative process blending with some hardcore technical requirements being worked on by just about everyone who wants fame and money.
To be brutally honest, the article should be asking how the hell any games are any good, not why most are bad.
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That'a good point, but most companies stipulate that you can't say anything bad if you want to preview a game.
Reviews ensure that developers have a reason to make the game as good as possible. If previews drive sales too, then it allows developers to take more risks -- because an ambitious game that ultimately fails will have a good preview writeup and sell enough not to be a total loss.
The author is trying to posit an implied (but untrue) connection between previews allowing mediocre games to sell and all games 'sucking.' Mediocre stuff sells in every entertainment industry that exists -- if only the best games sold then the market would be too risky to enter.
To fill pages.
No kidding. When you start the month, you have anything between 100 to 164 pages to fill. (Certainly where I worked, the editor had no say in the total number of pages - that was decided based on projected advertising revenue and the whim of the publishing director.) The advertising department says they expect to need X pages. You know fairly well how many games will come in for review based on the release schedules, and can allocate pages based on that. You have all the standing pages - news, letters, cheats and guides, house ads, subscriptions, etc.
Anything left over has to be filled. And the nature of the games business means they either have to be filled by either wacky filler features (which the magazine writers love because it gives them a chance to be self-indulgent, but the readers generally couldn't give a shit about)... or you have to talk about games that haven't come out yet. They might be lengthy interview-based stories, or they might be based entirely around the latest set of screenshots that have become avilable. Either way, they're previews.
And the sad fact is, if you preview a game that's still some months from release and get all snarky about the lame concept, the horrible control system or the blatant swipes from other games, even if it's deservedly so... the publisher is likely to tell you to fuck off when you ask for final review code down the line. Which will leave a hole in your predicted number of pages for the review section. You can fill that either by extending other reviews, even if the games aren't worth the extra space, or throw in another last-minute filler feature... or add another preview. Either way, you quickly learn to walk the fine line between gentle mockery and actual criticism, and to keep the latter until you actually have the game in your hand.
Jerry Seinfeld said it best. "Magazines are another medium I love, because 95% is simply based on 'How the hell are we going to fill all this blank space?'"
You must think in Russian.
I did some writing for a couple of print magazines in the UK. As the new guy, I'd be handed the stuff no-one else liked writing, and that included previews.
Every editor I spoke to told me to be positive. This is not the same as jacking up hype from the PR guys: I never even spoke to them. Most of the time they'll talk to someone higher up because they don't know who I am, and then I'd get the preview handed off to me. Most of the PR junk we recieved was exactly that: junk. I found it difficult to make any more favourable words simply because I had a Spiderman Web-Shooting Gun.
The reason I was told to be positive is that there is no reason to be overly critical of preview code. Most preview code looks like ass, plays like crap and has some show-stopping bugs. That's because it isn't finished. The idea of preview code is to show ideas and direction to the journalist. Exciting games get more column inches because they show better ideas and promise, *not* because their code didn't suck. And a lot of games that have very poor preview code brush up. Development is organic. You can't be critical of every piece of code that comes through the door: it's all crap. You pick out the good bits, show it to the reader and say "you might like this when it comes out." Some games are of interest to more people than others, and might get more column inches.
Until a game ships, it never deserves derision, just encouragement. It would be very ego-centric to kick the shit out of every game that I recieved just because I could in the name of "truth".
Imagine there are 2 game mags at the store. One has a preview of the Ultimate New Game you've been waiting for. One doesn't. Which one do you buy?
Right.
Now, how do you get a preview? Unless it's available for download (well, if it is, every mag's gonna have it, so let's ignore those for now), the game company has to send you the necessary goodies.
And now the big question: Will they send you their next preview if you write "This sucks! Bugs, flaws and no interesting gameplay, even if they spend another year on it it will STILL suck!"?
No. They'll send it to a magazine that hypes it into heavens and back. And the magazine that has the article about the preview sells more copies than the one that doesn't.
Sipmle as that.
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