I’ve been thinking this for a while. I can understand letting people know a title is in development but since the advent of the internet the coverage has gotten out of control.
“BRAND NEW!! Three second video of the sniper rifle from CODMW3!”
“EXCLUSIVE! 4 second video of the Monk from DIablo 3!”
“Check out the new color for the prison guards pants in Chicken Malarky’s: Biggin Figgin!”"
It all seems like overkill. Particularly when a game is more than a year away. Go on any game site for the past 6 months and the front page is littered with videos/articles of sniping in COD/BF etc… How much is too much? Doesn’t anyone like to be surprised when they get a new game any more? And these hype trains roll out so early that more times than not they are hyping games that turn out to be megashitty.
I don’t know. I’m probably not articulating my point very well because reading my post it sounds pretty dumb but I’ve already typed it and am hitting submit. Does anyone else get where I’m coming from?
Nintendo is one of the few companies still kind of good about this, for Zelda: Skyward Sword we’ve had a couple interviews here and there, but mostly just a handful of E3 trailers and demos. Oddly enough, the gamefaqs boards (compared to games with the hype you’re describing) are dead without the overhype, and it ain’t like nobody’s paying attention to the thing, the collectors edition was facing backorders within hours of it being announced.
The words “no shit” were never more applicable. And I say that as a dude who runs a moderately popular game news site.
Although I think it’s getting better than it used to be. Jragon’s right, Nintendo doesn’t buy into this crap at all. What do we really know about Super Mario 3D Land or Kid Icarus: Uprising? Nothing at all. And they still regularly announce games for the first time with release dates in the same calendar year.
Sony is really the worst offender. Gran Turismo 5 was announced five years before it was released. That’s just insanity. But like I said, they’re getting better too. Everything they’ve announced is at least expected to come out next year and most of the 2012 stuff is still pretty mysterious yet.
I think part of it is that games seem to have somewhat longer development cycles nowadays, and there’s sort of a self-feeding loop of everything being vapourware if you haven’t heard EXACTLY what the texture art interns did last week. People release media every 2 seconds so they don’t get branded as vapourware, then people expect media releases every 2 seconds or it’s vapourware, so they release media every 2 seconds…
The “Peter Molyneux syndrome”?, I hear that Lionshead Studios now employ a team of ninjas, authorised to “handle” him if he shows signs of talking spontaneously about an upcoming game.
If you watch more recent interviews you’ll notice that he has a hunted expression, is obviously reading carefully from a script, and sometimes flinchs at a percieved movement in the shadows
They’re changing the color? Good GOD, they just won’t rest until they’ve gotten rid of EVERYTHING we know and love from the original Chicken Malarky, will they?
I find that not reading the articles helps. Well, it helps if there’s a beta for the game. Then you can at least have some input on it, but otherwise, you just sit on the hype train as a total passenger, which sucks ass.
Does game design usually take longer than, say movies? As that might explain the problem: it’s too hard to keep something for leaking for too long, so the companies just get it out early. Or maybe that it helps inspire the creators to know how much people are looking forward to the game.
I think that’s it; they do keep things secret early on… Dead Space 3 was started literally right after the release of Dead Space 2 (I know a guy at Visceral), but it didn’t really come out in the media until several months later.
Plus, it lets them work up the fan base and keep them interested and thinking about the game during the development process- otherwise people will forget, and not be excited enough to buy the game initially.
On the other hand, most people were applauding Blizz for lifting the NDA and allowing read-only access to the beta forums of WoW vanilla so early on in development. In a way, while it was allowing scores of information to come out, it acted as a massive hype killer. In addition to near perfect release timing, I think the utter lack of hype due to almost total transparency is what allowed the game to succeed as much as it did (at first at least), because people knew EXACTLY what to expect, rather than what carefully controlled tidbits marketing told them to expect.
To be fair to Blizz, they didn’t really “announce” Titan so much as begrudgingly admit it existed and answer a few questions about it because their fans were obsessively trolling their “now hiring” pages.
Fans, hell, that is one of the best ways for game journalists to break the story of a new game.
Using the job listings, Blizzard actually has five games known to be in development: Diablo III, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, WoW expansions/updates, Titan and an untitled/unannounced game.
I don’t want to besmirch Justin Bailey’s profession as I’m an avid end user, but I partly blame websites needing page hits (and maybe comments) to drive revenue. Any morsel of information scrounged from an interview is puffed up, given an inflammatory headline and thrown into the all-consuming maw of the internet. There was a piece on The Escapist last week about Skyrim fitting on one disc - why the hell does that need its own article?
I will admit to buying into the hype of some games (yes, I read the Skyrim article), so I guess I’m part of the problem. It’s also pretty cool to hear about a game, forget about it, and then months later be reminded when you see it on the shelves and you already know that you would enjoy it.
You can view users websites from the dropdown menu when you click on their usernames. I assume the one that comes up for Justin Baily is his video game site.