Gabe Newell talked about this kind of stuff years ago. People are tired of big publishers promising the world pre-release, then putting out an unfinished product that is nowhere near the quality of what was advertised. Here's a snippet of an interview he did a while back:
You have to stop thinking that you're in charge and start thinking that you're having a dance. We used to think we're smart [...] but nobody is smarter than the internet. [...] One of the things we learned pretty early on is 'Don't ever, ever try to lie to the internet - because they will catch you. They will de-construct your spin. They will remember everything you ever say for eternity.'
You can see really old school companies really struggle with that. They think they can still be in control of the message. [...] So yeah, the internet (in aggregate) is scary smart. The sooner people accept that and start to trust that that's the case, the better they're gonna be in interacting with them.
I wish it were true but EA is still making bank while disrespecting customers, everybody complains yet still buy. Same with Facebook. Same with politicians.
A small group of smart people on the internet may do a lot of noise, but it just echoes in the void then it's business as usual.
"They will remember everything you ever say for eternity.'
Maybe. But outrage that results in meaningful action lasts a few months at most. The first person shooter industry is fascinating to me. Somehow Call of Duty is still extremely popular and commercially successful series year after year despite continued management by the exact same studios that repeat the exact same algorithm:
1. Release re-skinned game each year with huge promises of new and original content to come
2. Underdeliver on said promises and lock remaining ones behind micro-transactions, loot boxes, and DLC
3. Abandon game 6-12 months in to begin preparation for the next iteration of the game after raking in millions on suckers
4. Repeat
You'll see thousands of people swearing they'll never pay another $60 + add-ons for a CoD game ever again and yet somehow the cycle continues year after year.
There are numerous other video game series (not just in the FPS genre) that follow the same pattern. Some eventually get run into the ground, but only after a very slow and profitable death. People have short attention spans. You might remember touching a flame, but the feeling of pain quickly fades.
I think the quote obstensibly attributed to Lincoln is apt:
‘You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.’
The public in aggregate have a perspective that insiders in a company don’t or cannot because of culture or they’re too close to the problem or they’re just being disingenuous. And the public always finds out, sooner or later.
While it is true that certain circles of people on the internet are very smart in aggregate, I don't believe you can extend that to internet as general; Empirically, you can just have a look at the "general" trends on Facebook and Reddit, even twitter.
I think it would be wrong to believe that there isn’t spin happening on the other side, too, and I don’t think that truth wins out in the end. This isn’t enlightened consumers vs evil, lying developers.
Sure, the internet will remember everything you ever said, but the question then isn’t whether what you said measures up to the truth, but whether what you said can be spun in a negative way for you.
Also, none of this is inevitable or even very predictable.
I even work(ed) on a game that was actually embroiled in a scandal regarding E3.
I can probably shed a little insight as to why:
1) Once you show gameplay footage, you’ve promised. This isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the world but a lot of the time the “promise” is a mega polished version of what you want to show, it’s on rails, it’s going to show all the best features of the engine, you control the pacing etc. Even if those things make it into the game (as, my game actually was in 100% parity graphically, but we ran out of budget for animations) then people /perceive/ it worse, regardless.
2) what is shown isn’t actually a game- even if it looks like one. It’s a prototype. And there’s many reasons that the final product has to be trimmed down. Either it’s required because the budget goes towards something else (such as smarter NPCs, or better animations) or it wasn’t ever possible to produce what was shown due to things that were not known at the time of creating the demo or footage. The fact is simply that you’re showing something that may not be able to exist. So that is in direct violation of my first point.
3) we got burned the last console generation, we thought the machines were going to be at least twice as powerful as they ended up being. (You May notice that my publishers “downgrade” scandal happened post-E3:2013). What we had prepared was geared towards significantly more powerful hardware. (So, number of props on screen can’t be as high, number of light sources can’t be as high, issues with streaming “pop-in”) My publisher won’t make this mistake again and with a new console generation around the corner it doesn’t makes sense to underpromise (and use the current gen, which our competitors may not have done this E3) or overpromise, and guess what the next console gen will have.
As an aside: I know it’s a trope that “console gaming holds gaming back”, and there’s a grain of truth there, but I would caution allowing developers to use as much hardware as they can, our work machines have obscene hardware (latest high end Xeon with 64/128g Ram and a gtx2070 is common), if we were not optimising for a limited platform then pc would suffer too, I just don’t know how much it is currently limited.
I forgot to add to point 2, and my edit is locked out:
One of the main reasons that things get bleached out of a game (menu's, HUD, rich graphics) is accessibility or localisation. I think a lot of people only look at games in an able-bodied western way, but if you want to sell your game in arabic then your menu's have to support going right-to-left, if you want your games to be sold to people with near-sightedness then you can't have dense darkness or heavy fog for most of the game unless it's removable (thus' more testing scenarios).
For demos/proof-of-concept pieces: artists have free reign, until it comes time to actually address accessibility, discoverability or localisation concerns.
I think the points you listed are very understandable from an engineering point of view. On the other hand, there were also games that just looked like downright lying in E3. Not sure if thats acceptable specially when we are talking about experts in the industry are involved.
Watching the Watchdogs "scandal" unfold was enough to turn me off Ubisoft for years. It's not that it was unique to Ubisoft, it was just the most grotesque case of under delivery I'd ever sunk money into. Especially when I had just come off GTA V, which was 90% of the same gameplay, but the engine and art were significantly better in every measurable way I could think of.
For a small time game dev like Hello Games failing to meet expectations with No Man's Sky, I was generally willing to accept their failure and apologies, and continued to go back and try games.
For a major publisher like Ubi, I ended up boycotting them for years.
Even when what you show really is what you have and what you will deliver you won't get away from being called a liar.
One AAA game I worked on released a trailer for E3 which we were really proud of. Our game looked amazing and that's what we showed.
The trailer was recorded in game. The only "trickery" was custom placement of some cameras and rendering to a 4K backbuffer and downsampling (which the final game does support on PC, anyway).
Despite the trailer being rendered in real time on a relatively powerful gaming rig using the actual game, the YouTube comments were flooded by people being angry at how this was obviously fake because it cannot look like that in the final game. There were even people explaining why and how this was obviously fake.
I really enjoy the infinite entertainment and presentation format that consoles provide, but I really question their utility next generation
and lol no PC gamers aren't a part of that equation whatsoever
I feel like the potential console gaming crowd is so heavily diluted towards mobile and casual formats. any of the good VR titles are also running in wireless mobile formats with good enough graphics
I hope there is a differentiating quality to make the 'set top box' format a staple in the 2020s instead of "just" better graphics. I feel like it is necessary
We have since learned[1], after the disastrous launch of this game, that this video was showing even the dev team what the game was supposed to be about. This game did not even exist yet as an official entity until after E3 2017 (heck, it was going to be called "Beyond" until the week-ish before E3), and then the team had just over a year to build and launch it, with predictable results.
So the gaming community reiterated loudly and clearly that it doesn't like being lied to with "gameplay" demos crafted specifically for E3 that share no code with the actual game being developed (looking at you, Halo 2), and the dev's takeaway was "Don't show them any gameplay."
I would hope we could collectively rally against this sort of behavior by refusing to buy such games that refuse to preview any actual gameplay. But I doubt that will work, given that Dead Island sold five million copies[0], based off what I can only assume was due to enamor with the trailer.
In software development, 1.0 is the version number you assign to what's ready at the end of the last day you are permitted to continue working on your release.
Before online gaming, games were required to deliver a 1.0 and had no further chance to patch or improve it. They would do so in silence — like Nintendo does — and essentially work for years on things that no one even knew existed until they released their 1.0 gold master and began producing marketing material from it.
Nintendo continues to follow this policy today — we get demos when they've finalized the game, and not before — and Nintendo refuses to market games until they've finished them, so we get years of "will there ever be another Super Smash Bros" and "OMG TELL US WHAT'S COMING" which they silently ignore.
Now you declare openly that game developers who tell us what's coming while it's not yet finished will be punished if:
1) What's not yet finished doesn't match what's finished on 1.0 day in any way that is personally meaningful to you and/or anyone;
and/or,
2) What's announced is announced only with a complete finished 1.0 product from which marketing materials are exclusively developed and provided immediately upon announcement.
So, you're championing the Nintendo model, which is fine — we will hear nothing about any upcoming games until they're ready to be released, and if that means years of silence from the owners of properties such as Halo, GTA, Pokemon, and so on — then that's completely acceptable and we should expect to hear no complaint from the gaming community as a result.
I am not led to believe by your response that "we will hear no complaint" is the outcome that will occur if and when the entire gaming industry complies with your demands by stopping all pre-release announcements altogether, which leaves me wondering: How, precisely, do you expect a valid outcome to occur from your requirements that both satisfies your demands without triggering complaint over the lack of updates over time from studios who are busy complying?
EDIT: To pre-address the most obvious reply — "they should only demo what's done" — I guarantee that nothing is ever done until the final day of development, as critical features can be cut literally hours before gold master if there's an undiscovered flaw that QA discovers at the last minute — so since "nothing" is ever done until the final 1.0 release, "they should only demo nothing until the final 1.0 release is done", and we're back to the above question.
In all honesty I don't know how anyone can make 60$ purchases on games without seeing what it looks like. I can't comprehend it at all. Preordering was never even a question for me even before all of the recent issues with it. I just cant understand the mindset for anything other than cult-like franchises.
I can only imagine, with contempt, the cube jockey who figured out that distributing game demos was bad for their bottom line.
The problem there lies that there's almost zero chance that the game you see @ E3 will be the exact same game that gets released 6 months down the line. Sure, you could just stop development, but then you're just wasting 6 months you could be spending making the game better. That could mean adding new mechanics or story, but sometimes you decide that a really cool thing just doesn't fit in to the story you're trying to tell, so you cut it and it's a better game for it. I feel like it's a have your cake and eat it too.
That not to mention the industry feedback you get that you could be incorporating.
The hardcore gamers in E3s audience can and will smell BS. The problem is generally all developers have to go off of is the vertical slice, generally created right during E3 and before a lot of the games systems are in place. If you go and tell the whole truth about a game in the development stage, it’s like showing a trailer for a movie without a lot of the VFX actually completed, or even worse. The business wants to know how much hype they can build around a game, and how much money to spend on marketing. And the big titles tend to treat their audience as idiots, because the marketing department tends to treat them as such. There’s a better way, but it goes against how so many companies especially big publishers do things.
I thought Dead Island was fine from a gameplay perspective which is what I bought it on because I learned early on in life that you shouldn't buy games before reviews drop.
What? I don't feel owed gameplay demos at a trade show months or years before release. I'm fine with one a month out or not at all, they're selling me a game not nine months of anticipation.
Just wait until it is out, read reviews, and watch some YouTube videos, then make your purchasing decision. What do you need a pre-release gameplay video for?
> the dev's takeaway was "Don't show them any gameplay."
The average developer has almost no input into what is and isn't shown at E3. They can present some source material but E3 decisioss like these are made by a marketing company or the publisher.
I would trace it to a few factors; most important is the rise of the influencer advertising strategy.
It is vastly cheaper to simply pay streamers to hype up your game on Twitch or youtube than it is to give an honest, sober demo live on an E3 stage. The audience at these press events has shifted from enthusiast reporters/critics to hyperventilating influencer personalities. It was so bad this year that they were obnoxiously screaming and interrupting the presenters every few seconds to the point where the people on stage were losing their train of thought.
The other aspect is that putting together a demo takes time out of development. Almost every game shown this year had a release date of either Fall 2019 or Spring 2020. That means they're either on crunch or ramping up for it and can't afford to set aside a few months to make a vertical slice for E3. This is partly due to the end of this console generation with new hardware coming next holiday season.
The longer term trend is that marketing has caught on to the irrelevance of E3. They can run their own Nintendo Direct style live stream whenever they want to speak to their audience and the press will disseminate that info to the wider community.
You're even seeing companies like EA experiment with dropping a new title with zero advance notice as they did with Apex Legends (their take on battle royale, from the Titanfall developers). They just had an influencer preview event the week before and dumped it to the public with pretty wild success.
The average build for a AAA game coming out in 2020 is barely in playable shape and certainly not ready to be shown at E3. Making one polished enough to show off is both time consuming and not representative of the final product. I really wish people were more open to seeing blocked out levels and unpolished animations to have an idea of where these projects are going but unfortunately even the most pristine presentations get picked apart online so I don’t think that’s happening anytime soon.
>where at times developers appeared afraid of their audience
Good. The amount of abuse the gaming industry has heaped upon consumers the past ten years is almost beyond belief. Microtransactions. Day-1 DLC. Season Passes that don't include all the DLC. So many versions of games you need a literal spreadsheet to keep track of how to get what feature. Broken piles of shit that rely on a "90-day roadmap" to tell us when they'll be playable. Using gambling mechanics to make children rob their parents to pay for loot boxes. The list is endless. Every second game dev could have night terrors for the next decade and it still wouldn't make up for how they have mutilated their own art form in the pursuit of unlimited profit. Almost every major games publisher, from EA to Activision-Blizzard to Ubisoft to Warner Brothers has behaved absolutely reprehensibly and in a just world would be burned to the ground by an angry mob.
It's a mystery to me how the gaming industry exists in its current form. I subscribe to Humble Monthly and occasionally buy a Humble Bundle. This all costs me $20-$30/mo and I get my hands on enough good games to last me a lifetime. I very occasionally will buy a cool looking new indie game, usually for $30 or less, when they come out. In general if a game looks like it has some interesting/novel gameplay I'll give it a shot. Most of them come from small indie developers, aren't super well known, and will run just fine on a 7 year old gaming laptop.
Meanwhile there is this enormous multi-billion dollar world of dozens of AAA publisher FPS titles that all look basically the same. People apparently line up in droves to pay $60 for these titles and the publishers are now so confident about their revenue stream that they don't want to release gameplay footage before they sell you the game? The #1 thing I do before buying a game or installing one I already own (since I own hundreds, thanks to Humble) is look at gameplay videos on Youtube. No gameplay video = not touching it.
What insane alien planet is this? It's certainly not the Earth in the dimension I live on, and it sounds much lamer.
The problem is publishers are not managing expectations. If you're showing gameplay footage of a product that is still a year out or more in development, you had better follow up with new trailer releases as major elements of the game change. Look to [Hideo] Kojima Productions' Death Stranding for an example of hype tempered with gameplay footage that is released in drips and drabs as development of the game progresses. You can get a realistic sense of how the game will play.
The corresponding drawback of trying to reap the business benefits preorder and hype-wise, of an overly ambitious or misleading (intentionally or otherwise) vertical slide demo or trailer is the backlash and loss of consumer trust when you under-deliver or cut back.
It can often be really hard to make a demo or trailer that isn't a mess without polishing it as much as possible. Development is messy. But sometimes you really can say "that's a lie" or "no, it [game feature] won't do that" and those ones beleaguer the benefit of the doubt.
Worst kind of lie is a lie, mixed with true facts: even if we believe Ubisoft that they didn't downgrade quality, this article should not put The Witcher 3 as an example - there's even official patch to restore downgraded quality, and official explanation "we just tried to make game looking the same on consoles and PC".
Gamers community trained to don't trust publishers - this article trying to say "because gamers are too stupid and suspicious", but in reality, as usually, because publishers lie too often.
Ubisoft didn't say that they didn't downgrade quality, they said “the notion we would actively downgrade quality is contrary to everything we’ve set out to achieve”
Sometimes you set out to achieve something and you fail, ending up with something that's contrary to what you set out to achieve.
Avoiding the topic at hand, which it sounds like gamers brought on themselves, I've got to say that that Doom screenshot brought back some memories.
I remember way back whenever, being excited to pick up a copy of Doom 3 for my new top-end system to show off what it could do. And being amazed that Id had spent so much time and effort to build this incredible engine to show effects that you couldn't ever actually see.
Because they'd chose a color palette consisting of only Black, Dark Grey and Dark Brown, and set the game in the dark.
It's nice to see they haven't backed down from their stance that "Nobody should be able to see anything in our games". In the linked screenshot, the entire world is literally on fire and the things standing in front of you are still too dimly lit to see.
> In truth, gameplay demos at events like E3 are subject to change. They’re often built as vertical slices – self-contained examples of what a sequence will look like once every feature and asset in the game has reached its highest level of polish. They can help studios accurately schedule the rest of development.
Yeah, but they never deliver. They show a carefully remastered video and then they release a game with a worse quality.
It's not about what could an E3 demo be used for. It's not a corporate event. Show us gameplay. It's a consumer show.
It's no coincidence that the OGs who focus on gameplay -- Nintendo, iD Software, Rockstar -- show the least BS.
They've all had bad experiences in the past when they demo'd graphics and learned from it. Nintendo's 2000 Zelda video sent expectations the entirely wrong way for Wind Waker. iDs Doom 3 mishap (no one wants a sneaky, shadowy Doom Guy).
CGI trailers and other filler content don't build hype to nearly the same extent as gameplay does. Don't forget that the lack of gameplay shown was one of the reasons this years E3 was considered a big disappointment by most.
The reason Sony's 2016 E3 press conference is widely regarded as the best press conference ever, in addition to the live orchestra, was that they blasted the audience with long gameplay demo after gameplay demo. It had very little filler speeches by executives and few empty CGI trailers, and it made a big difference.
It seems to me that a brave decision would be to let gamers into the dev process openly - a regular vlog like approach by an optimistic old hand showing skin texture experiments or changes to explosion algorithms and so on - not lying, not cut scenes ... just openness
But then again, a couple of cut scenes every six months and secrecy otherwise is probably safer
E3 is a marketing event for big publishers, if cinematic trailers create more consistent hype than gameplay trailers then that's what they will do. Critics very frequently point out the formulaic, rehashed gameplay of big budget titles and they probably want to limit that.
Every E3 presentation should be able to use as much on stage acting and audio as needed but limited to a single still frame of 80s style NES box art of the game.
The main issue is that sometimes the entire team would stop to produce a demo for E3 or other shows which in retrospect would delay the game from actually coming out. Some would spend so much time making sure their demo looked good, it became an engine show-off and they knew the game wouldn't ship complete like that.
[+] [-] dx87|6 years ago|reply
You have to stop thinking that you're in charge and start thinking that you're having a dance. We used to think we're smart [...] but nobody is smarter than the internet. [...] One of the things we learned pretty early on is 'Don't ever, ever try to lie to the internet - because they will catch you. They will de-construct your spin. They will remember everything you ever say for eternity.'
You can see really old school companies really struggle with that. They think they can still be in control of the message. [...] So yeah, the internet (in aggregate) is scary smart. The sooner people accept that and start to trust that that's the case, the better they're gonna be in interacting with them.
[+] [-] sametmax|6 years ago|reply
A small group of smart people on the internet may do a lot of noise, but it just echoes in the void then it's business as usual.
[+] [-] o10449366|6 years ago|reply
Maybe. But outrage that results in meaningful action lasts a few months at most. The first person shooter industry is fascinating to me. Somehow Call of Duty is still extremely popular and commercially successful series year after year despite continued management by the exact same studios that repeat the exact same algorithm:
1. Release re-skinned game each year with huge promises of new and original content to come
2. Underdeliver on said promises and lock remaining ones behind micro-transactions, loot boxes, and DLC
3. Abandon game 6-12 months in to begin preparation for the next iteration of the game after raking in millions on suckers
4. Repeat
You'll see thousands of people swearing they'll never pay another $60 + add-ons for a CoD game ever again and yet somehow the cycle continues year after year.
There are numerous other video game series (not just in the FPS genre) that follow the same pattern. Some eventually get run into the ground, but only after a very slow and profitable death. People have short attention spans. You might remember touching a flame, but the feeling of pain quickly fades.
[+] [-] mentos|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leonroy|6 years ago|reply
‘You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.’
The public in aggregate have a perspective that insiders in a company don’t or cannot because of culture or they’re too close to the problem or they’re just being disingenuous. And the public always finds out, sooner or later.
[+] [-] omeid2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arrrg|6 years ago|reply
Sure, the internet will remember everything you ever said, but the question then isn’t whether what you said measures up to the truth, but whether what you said can be spun in a negative way for you.
Also, none of this is inevitable or even very predictable.
[+] [-] Fnoord|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bombthecat|6 years ago|reply
The internet might rage,and might call your bluff. Butbas long as it doesn't show in my wallet. Why should I care as a company?
[+] [-] wyldfire|6 years ago|reply
Even GOOG seems to not be immune to this one. They're cited in recent headlines regarding a promotion of RCS but IRL they're abandoning it.
[+] [-] dijit|6 years ago|reply
I even work(ed) on a game that was actually embroiled in a scandal regarding E3.
I can probably shed a little insight as to why:
1) Once you show gameplay footage, you’ve promised. This isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the world but a lot of the time the “promise” is a mega polished version of what you want to show, it’s on rails, it’s going to show all the best features of the engine, you control the pacing etc. Even if those things make it into the game (as, my game actually was in 100% parity graphically, but we ran out of budget for animations) then people /perceive/ it worse, regardless.
2) what is shown isn’t actually a game- even if it looks like one. It’s a prototype. And there’s many reasons that the final product has to be trimmed down. Either it’s required because the budget goes towards something else (such as smarter NPCs, or better animations) or it wasn’t ever possible to produce what was shown due to things that were not known at the time of creating the demo or footage. The fact is simply that you’re showing something that may not be able to exist. So that is in direct violation of my first point.
3) we got burned the last console generation, we thought the machines were going to be at least twice as powerful as they ended up being. (You May notice that my publishers “downgrade” scandal happened post-E3:2013). What we had prepared was geared towards significantly more powerful hardware. (So, number of props on screen can’t be as high, number of light sources can’t be as high, issues with streaming “pop-in”) My publisher won’t make this mistake again and with a new console generation around the corner it doesn’t makes sense to underpromise (and use the current gen, which our competitors may not have done this E3) or overpromise, and guess what the next console gen will have.
As an aside: I know it’s a trope that “console gaming holds gaming back”, and there’s a grain of truth there, but I would caution allowing developers to use as much hardware as they can, our work machines have obscene hardware (latest high end Xeon with 64/128g Ram and a gtx2070 is common), if we were not optimising for a limited platform then pc would suffer too, I just don’t know how much it is currently limited.
[+] [-] dijit|6 years ago|reply
One of the main reasons that things get bleached out of a game (menu's, HUD, rich graphics) is accessibility or localisation. I think a lot of people only look at games in an able-bodied western way, but if you want to sell your game in arabic then your menu's have to support going right-to-left, if you want your games to be sold to people with near-sightedness then you can't have dense darkness or heavy fog for most of the game unless it's removable (thus' more testing scenarios).
For demos/proof-of-concept pieces: artists have free reign, until it comes time to actually address accessibility, discoverability or localisation concerns.
[+] [-] smadurange|6 years ago|reply
Sometimes, they feel just deliberate.
[+] [-] cheschire|6 years ago|reply
For a small time game dev like Hello Games failing to meet expectations with No Man's Sky, I was generally willing to accept their failure and apologies, and continued to go back and try games.
For a major publisher like Ubi, I ended up boycotting them for years.
[+] [-] Agentlien|6 years ago|reply
One AAA game I worked on released a trailer for E3 which we were really proud of. Our game looked amazing and that's what we showed.
The trailer was recorded in game. The only "trickery" was custom placement of some cameras and rendering to a 4K backbuffer and downsampling (which the final game does support on PC, anyway).
Despite the trailer being rendered in real time on a relatively powerful gaming rig using the actual game, the YouTube comments were flooded by people being angry at how this was obviously fake because it cannot look like that in the final game. There were even people explaining why and how this was obviously fake.
[+] [-] pier25|6 years ago|reply
I thought AAA studios would be in close communication with hardware manufacturers (Nivida, Sony, AMD, Microsoft, Ninendo, etc).
[+] [-] hoseja|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rolltiide|6 years ago|reply
and lol no PC gamers aren't a part of that equation whatsoever
I feel like the potential console gaming crowd is so heavily diluted towards mobile and casual formats. any of the good VR titles are also running in wireless mobile formats with good enough graphics
I hope there is a differentiating quality to make the 'set top box' format a staple in the 2020s instead of "just" better graphics. I feel like it is necessary
[+] [-] jameskilton|6 years ago|reply
Biggest case-in-point since Watch Dogs: Anthem.
Here's the E3 reveal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL5GSfs9fi4&t=330s.
We have since learned[1], after the disastrous launch of this game, that this video was showing even the dev team what the game was supposed to be about. This game did not even exist yet as an official entity until after E3 2017 (heck, it was going to be called "Beyond" until the week-ish before E3), and then the team had just over a year to build and launch it, with predictable results.
[1] https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|6 years ago|reply
I would hope we could collectively rally against this sort of behavior by refusing to buy such games that refuse to preview any actual gameplay. But I doubt that will work, given that Dead Island sold five million copies[0], based off what I can only assume was due to enamor with the trailer.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Island#Sales
[+] [-] jayd16|6 years ago|reply
Can you do that with what you have now? Will you get it right? We as software engineers aren't great at predicting what we'll have in two weeks.
If the community doesn't want to see target renders, good. They derail development anyway
[+] [-] floatingatoll|6 years ago|reply
Before online gaming, games were required to deliver a 1.0 and had no further chance to patch or improve it. They would do so in silence — like Nintendo does — and essentially work for years on things that no one even knew existed until they released their 1.0 gold master and began producing marketing material from it.
Nintendo continues to follow this policy today — we get demos when they've finalized the game, and not before — and Nintendo refuses to market games until they've finished them, so we get years of "will there ever be another Super Smash Bros" and "OMG TELL US WHAT'S COMING" which they silently ignore.
Now you declare openly that game developers who tell us what's coming while it's not yet finished will be punished if:
1) What's not yet finished doesn't match what's finished on 1.0 day in any way that is personally meaningful to you and/or anyone;
and/or,
2) What's announced is announced only with a complete finished 1.0 product from which marketing materials are exclusively developed and provided immediately upon announcement.
So, you're championing the Nintendo model, which is fine — we will hear nothing about any upcoming games until they're ready to be released, and if that means years of silence from the owners of properties such as Halo, GTA, Pokemon, and so on — then that's completely acceptable and we should expect to hear no complaint from the gaming community as a result.
I am not led to believe by your response that "we will hear no complaint" is the outcome that will occur if and when the entire gaming industry complies with your demands by stopping all pre-release announcements altogether, which leaves me wondering: How, precisely, do you expect a valid outcome to occur from your requirements that both satisfies your demands without triggering complaint over the lack of updates over time from studios who are busy complying?
EDIT: To pre-address the most obvious reply — "they should only demo what's done" — I guarantee that nothing is ever done until the final day of development, as critical features can be cut literally hours before gold master if there's an undiscovered flaw that QA discovers at the last minute — so since "nothing" is ever done until the final 1.0 release, "they should only demo nothing until the final 1.0 release is done", and we're back to the above question.
[+] [-] sl1ck731|6 years ago|reply
I can only imagine, with contempt, the cube jockey who figured out that distributing game demos was bad for their bottom line.
[+] [-] jedimastert|6 years ago|reply
That not to mention the industry feedback you get that you could be incorporating.
[+] [-] taurath|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wazanator|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colechristensen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colordrops|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balaam|6 years ago|reply
The average developer has almost no input into what is and isn't shown at E3. They can present some source material but E3 decisioss like these are made by a marketing company or the publisher.
[+] [-] smadurange|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iClaudiusX|6 years ago|reply
It is vastly cheaper to simply pay streamers to hype up your game on Twitch or youtube than it is to give an honest, sober demo live on an E3 stage. The audience at these press events has shifted from enthusiast reporters/critics to hyperventilating influencer personalities. It was so bad this year that they were obnoxiously screaming and interrupting the presenters every few seconds to the point where the people on stage were losing their train of thought.
The other aspect is that putting together a demo takes time out of development. Almost every game shown this year had a release date of either Fall 2019 or Spring 2020. That means they're either on crunch or ramping up for it and can't afford to set aside a few months to make a vertical slice for E3. This is partly due to the end of this console generation with new hardware coming next holiday season.
The longer term trend is that marketing has caught on to the irrelevance of E3. They can run their own Nintendo Direct style live stream whenever they want to speak to their audience and the press will disseminate that info to the wider community.
You're even seeing companies like EA experiment with dropping a new title with zero advance notice as they did with Apex Legends (their take on battle royale, from the Titanfall developers). They just had an influencer preview event the week before and dumped it to the public with pretty wild success.
[+] [-] justinplouffe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Causality1|6 years ago|reply
Good. The amount of abuse the gaming industry has heaped upon consumers the past ten years is almost beyond belief. Microtransactions. Day-1 DLC. Season Passes that don't include all the DLC. So many versions of games you need a literal spreadsheet to keep track of how to get what feature. Broken piles of shit that rely on a "90-day roadmap" to tell us when they'll be playable. Using gambling mechanics to make children rob their parents to pay for loot boxes. The list is endless. Every second game dev could have night terrors for the next decade and it still wouldn't make up for how they have mutilated their own art form in the pursuit of unlimited profit. Almost every major games publisher, from EA to Activision-Blizzard to Ubisoft to Warner Brothers has behaved absolutely reprehensibly and in a just world would be burned to the ground by an angry mob.
[+] [-] apatters|6 years ago|reply
Meanwhile there is this enormous multi-billion dollar world of dozens of AAA publisher FPS titles that all look basically the same. People apparently line up in droves to pay $60 for these titles and the publishers are now so confident about their revenue stream that they don't want to release gameplay footage before they sell you the game? The #1 thing I do before buying a game or installing one I already own (since I own hundreds, thanks to Humble) is look at gameplay videos on Youtube. No gameplay video = not touching it.
What insane alien planet is this? It's certainly not the Earth in the dimension I live on, and it sounds much lamer.
[+] [-] CelestialTeapot|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymousab|6 years ago|reply
It can often be really hard to make a demo or trailer that isn't a mess without polishing it as much as possible. Development is messy. But sometimes you really can say "that's a lie" or "no, it [game feature] won't do that" and those ones beleaguer the benefit of the doubt.
It's a tough problem.
[+] [-] EugeneOZ|6 years ago|reply
Gamers community trained to don't trust publishers - this article trying to say "because gamers are too stupid and suspicious", but in reality, as usually, because publishers lie too often.
[+] [-] jerkstate|6 years ago|reply
Sometimes you set out to achieve something and you fail, ending up with something that's contrary to what you set out to achieve.
[+] [-] jasonkester|6 years ago|reply
I remember way back whenever, being excited to pick up a copy of Doom 3 for my new top-end system to show off what it could do. And being amazed that Id had spent so much time and effort to build this incredible engine to show effects that you couldn't ever actually see.
Because they'd chose a color palette consisting of only Black, Dark Grey and Dark Brown, and set the game in the dark.
It's nice to see they haven't backed down from their stance that "Nobody should be able to see anything in our games". In the linked screenshot, the entire world is literally on fire and the things standing in front of you are still too dimly lit to see.
And they're Black, Dark Grey and Dark Brown.
[+] [-] pdimitar|6 years ago|reply
Yeah, but they never deliver. They show a carefully remastered video and then they release a game with a worse quality.
It's not about what could an E3 demo be used for. It's not a corporate event. Show us gameplay. It's a consumer show.
[+] [-] jrootabega|6 years ago|reply
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/09/12
[+] [-] huffmsa|6 years ago|reply
They've all had bad experiences in the past when they demo'd graphics and learned from it. Nintendo's 2000 Zelda video sent expectations the entirely wrong way for Wind Waker. iDs Doom 3 mishap (no one wants a sneaky, shadowy Doom Guy).
[+] [-] kristofferR|6 years ago|reply
The reason Sony's 2016 E3 press conference is widely regarded as the best press conference ever, in addition to the live orchestra, was that they blasted the audience with long gameplay demo after gameplay demo. It had very little filler speeches by executives and few empty CGI trailers, and it made a big difference.
If you haven't watched Sony's 2016 conference recently, which you should, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwofRzkROo4&t=1800
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|6 years ago|reply
But then again, a couple of cut scenes every six months and secrecy otherwise is probably safer
[+] [-] RandomTisk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soup10|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whamlastxmas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keyle|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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