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Can You Handle 'THEY'?
In a refreshing turn, over at Newsweek's LevelUp blog N'Gai has some suitably chastising commentary on the newly-announced FPS entitled simply THEY. This overly-simplistic name is accompanied by a nearly informationless press release, and reinforces the idea that whatever THEY is, it's not worth looking into. "Generally, the role of a press release is to inform. But having read the THEY press release, all we've taken away from it is hyperbole and buzzwords, assembled Mad Libs-style for maximum unintended hilarity. What is THEY? Apparently, THEY is a 'next generation mystery first person shooter for PC and next generation consoles.' Who are THEY, you ask? ''THEY' are huge--'THEY' are different--'THEY' are hostile!' How good will THEY be? It's 'so mysterious, so stunning and so amazing--that 'THEY' might become one of the most anticipated world premiere titles from this year's Games Convention!'"
Turned out to be a joke THEY called Segway.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
gabbo Gabbo GABBO
From the feature list: unique weapon system that makes you "love" your weapons what the fuck does that mean?
but I bet I could handle Them.
Is the game They based at all on the 2002 horror film titled They ?
So I guess we need to find some guy named Turok and ask him what he thinks about this.
Is there much point in posting a /. article, trying to inform your fellow geeks, that there is something they've never heard of, and it looks like it isn't worth paying any attention to?
I already know there is lots of useless crap in the world that I'm not interested in. Tell me about things that ARE interesting.
--Q
From the pictures, it looks vaguely like Starship Troopers. "The only good Bug is a dead Bug".
Well son, when a man and his gun love each other veeery much...
...'THEY' will be soon forgotten...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
THEY are no match for BLAZEMONGER! In fact, HIM, HER, US, THEM and THEY are still no match for BLAZEMONGER!
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
that thing in the picture in the middle of the city looks like a half-life 2 citadel wannabe
If creativity is the field, copyright is the fence.
Please label this as vaporware. 'THEY' sound more like they're trying to sell me a Phantom than actually trying to make a good game. Expected Release Date: Holiday Season 09/0ALWAYS BET ON DUKE
So... if THEY publish this for Wii - will the gameplay and controls for boys be different from those for girls?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
i agree, i am currently using my wiimote as a mouse along with the nunchuck on my pc and playing CS:S with this is amazing. it makes gameplay so much easier and i regularly get blamed for cheating.
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum. --Arthur C. Clarke
If I recall correctly, there was a "Pinky and the Brain" episode in which the lab mice tried to join an illuminati-style international conspiracy group called "T.H.E.Y.". THEY consisted of world leaders (Bill Clinton and the like).
Even the name was an elaborate cover-up designed to deceive the public. It was an acronym; I think the "Y" stood for "Yodelers".
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
Platforms: PC & next generation console
Release date: 2008/2009
Genre: First person mystery shooter
Scenario: Near Future
* next generation 3D engine
* unique weapon system that makes you "love" your weapons
* mysterious science fiction background story
* diversified enemies--thrilling and intelligent
* heroes to identify with
* heavy usage of physics
* destructible environment relevant for gameplay
* haunting single player mode
* versatile multiplayer modes
Honestly, this pretentious crap needs to end. This doesn't make me want to purchase or play the game. Sure it's an announcement but honestly, every single buzzword is touted for every FPS game when they come out. Besides, it looks like a third-grader wrote this for a book report and copied the box on game. It provides just enough information to sound real but not enough to be useful, like this up and coming game from downtown ATL.
Title: Protecting and Analyzing the Next-gen Transportation System (PANTS)
Platforms: PC & next generation console
Release date: 2008/2009
Genre: First person strategy thriller
Scenario: Present Time
* next generation 3D engine
* unique tactics system that makes you "love" planning
* politically-charged background story
* diversified citizens--pissed off and delayed
* support characters with realistic backgrounds
* mild usage of physics
* adaptive environment relevant for gameplay
* intellectually challenging single player mode
* variety of multiplayer modes
Did anyone else see a resemblance between the weapon pictured in the screenshot and a paintball gun? Are these guys afraid of Jack Thompson or something?
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Their critical knock against their marketing drew a ton more publicity then it deserves. I'm really hoping there is a comical back lash and NO ONE will pick up a copy to punish this lazy PR.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
slash Cloverfield seems to be doing it's job of causing interest.
Maybe They (Newsweek) just don't *get it*.
Actually, none of this exists; it's all just a fig newton of your amalgamation. ;)
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
"IT" happens.
http://xkcd.com/386/
THEY can handle YOU
just to get that out of the way. And for once, the grammar nazis won't even wince.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
...''THEY' are huge ...
::ducks::
The might be giants?
Did THEY rename Duke Nukem Forever?
And will THEY ship before DNF?!
THEY did not say.
-
Well, yes and no.
Yes in that indeed it doesn't actually tell you anything that you'd base a buying decision on.
No, in that it's another somewhat comical (and somewhat sad) example of bad marketing and press releases that sound like they were generated by the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator, or a variant thereof. You know, the stuff that we all like to make fun of.
And it also shows at least one reaction to such crap, and it's not a positive one. It turns out that there _is_ such thing as bad publicity.
It's not exactly a new revelation, though. We've seen stuff like that before. Daikatana was massively torpedoed by the backlash to its own dumbly-worded marketing hype. And I forget the name now, but there was another game where a dumb PR hack thought he'd build buzz by causing a scandal with "leaked" information claiming that the game contains all sorts of moral abominations (especially to a non-gamer)... which didn't even exist in the game. Unfortunately the reaction was such that the publisher preferred to cancel the game rather than deal with it.
And then there are the less known cases where a company paid big bucks for, say, a funky company name (a few years back the hype had hit big time that some modern day shamen can construct for you a company or product name that's just short of pure magic, and causes all sorts of positive reactions and associations in people who hear it)... and then discovered that either it has no effect, or in a few cases that the test audience finds it repulsive or obscene. It actually happened. 'Course, then there are those which didn't test it first.
Etc.
Why is it important for nerds? Because for a lot of us our job depends on some marketer selling it. And it turns out that a dumb marketer can do more harm than good. Imagine your job depending on one of _these_ destructive press releases or PR campaigns.
And considering that he has the social skills to sell his ideas to the boss, while a lot of us nerds are more fluent in C++ than in our mother tongue... "do not be alarmed. Be very, very frightened, Arthur Dent."
Don't get me wrong, intelligent and competent marketing is good and I think most of us can respect a competent professional in any domain. But it's also a domain where success is so hard to measure, and there are plenty of bogus metrics with which the incompetents and dishonest pricks can justify their salary. (E.g., a fake UI campaign tends to be counted as a success based on the number of clicks, even though most just result in annoyed potential customers and chances are you didn't raise their interest in your product at all.) And there are a lot which... well, let's put it like this: when you select people based on their ability to be dishonest and sell crap, don't be surprised when they lie to your face and their main interest is in selling themselves.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So did Daikatana, didn't they?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
... sound like THEY are blowing smoke up your arses!
Karma: Bad. (As in Good?)
let's do some translation:
... ... no comments ...
Title: THEY = hey, naming a game FEAR was a good idea, let's do something similar!
Release date: 2008/2009 = 2009/2010/2011/2012/...
Genre: First person mystery shooter = what was I saying about FEAR?
Scenario: Near Future = either that or WWII
* next generation 3D engine = ooooh, shiny screenshots
* unique weapon system that makes you "love" your weapons =
* mysterious science fiction background story = [unable to translate, gibberish]
* diversified enemies--thrilling and intelligent = they can DUCK
* heroes to identify with = what, do we play a computer geek?
* heavy usage of physics = wow, gravity
* destructible environment relevant for gameplay = only the scripted cracks in walls
* haunting single player mode = i FEAR this may be a ripoff
* versatile multiplayer modes = CTF, deathmath
...So in other words it's an obnoxious viral advertising campaign, and you're falling right into it.
Liberty in your lifetime
THEY is about to make you his bitch.
"THEY" features a technically future minded 3D engine with next generation effects, brand new gameplay elements and a revolutionary weapon system to survive the challenges ahead! But always remember: Nothing is as it seems! It might SEEM that way, but it's really features an untechnical, past-minded 1D engine, with last generation effects, old gamplay elements and a (my favorite) a "non-revolving" weapon system to fail to survive the lack of challenges ahead!
Apparently their non informational ploy worked as their seems to be several articles about it. The user responses seem to be quite a large amount as well. They couldn't have asked for better advertising.
'so mysterious, so stunning and so amazing--that 'THEY' might become one of the most anticipated world premiere titles from this year's Games Convention!'
Then again, it might not.
Comment of the year
Is John Romero working on this one? I'm still waiting to be his bitch.
Dude, the question isn't whether exposure is good and bad, but whether you get the kind of PR you actually want. Exposure is only good when it doesn't cause you lost sales in the process.
Bad exposure is damn easy to get. Just do something extremely stupid, or have your product fail in a spectacular way. That'll get you headlines. Or just pull a "<insert name> will make you his bitch" again, and you might slapped by a similar backlash again. That's not the kind of exposure sane companies want though.
What you don't seem to understand is, really, where the zero point is. No PR doesn't mean "zero, it can't get any worse than that." An AAA title that noone heard much about will still be on the shelves at WallMart, will still be sent to a ton of reviews site, it will still be listed on Amazon, and will still have people posting about it or telling their friends about it. So some amount of exposure will be there anyway. I'm not saying that that's necessarily enough, but I'm saying there's room to do even worse than that. If you give people the message, basically, "stay away from these arse-clowns", you can actually do worse than if you didn't do a press release at all.
And even if you didn't get something that horrible, there's a whole continuum of reactions and effects you can get. You'll want to get people not only to hear the company or game name, but hopefully also get them interested in it. If you can have a choice between giving people the right message and the wrong message, you'd have to be a dolt to deliberately choose the second. The first also gets you, basically, some marketing on top of the exposure, the latter can lose you as many potential customers as it got you. Or as said before, it can occasionally actually lose you more customers.
Actually, are _you_ capable? No offense, but I have trouble taking anyone seriously when they operate with grossly-oversimplified canned wisecracks as their grand insight into any domain, marketing included.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Jayne: This has a name, I call her Vera
You've got your pronouns/inventors mixed up. Dean Kamen's Segway was known as "It." "They" is the legal name of the guy that invented ground-effect lighting and sunglasses with shades over them.
I remember him from an NPR interview.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
"Who are THEY?"
"THEY're bastards. THEY killed Kenny"