Movies do this sometimes when they release too many trailers and we see all the good bits ahead of time.A blockchain is basically a special kind of database. It's all the access and overload of information and assets we get prior to a game's release that bugs me. But marketing is not really the focus of this piece. Viral marketing can be its own form of entertainment. Hideo Kojima did some pretty clever stuff leading up to the announcement of Metal Gear Solid: V. Sometimes marketing and PR for video games ahead of launch can be fun and entertaining, too.
I don't want to "believe the hype." I just want to play the game. There's something kind of excellent about that. It's how I first played Half-Life, DOOM, and myriad other titles, having never heard about them until I turned them on, or having just read one or two reviews. I'm just at a point where I want to go into some games blind. Maybe that's just me, and I'm okay with that, too.
That used to be the case only with troubled projects like Aliens: Colonial Marines, The Last Guardian, and Duke Nukem.Īll of which is to say that sometimes I wish the hype train would hit the brakes and we could all get off. Instead of announcing just a year (or half a year) out, we're hearing about games that may be several years in development. We also end up hearing about games much further out. Kickstarter presents games to the world that are often merely concepts, robbing us of some of the excitement we'd see if the game were announced further into its development. Unlike an episodic release, these Early Access titles are often unfinished beyond mere linearity. It's a very deflating experience, whether or not the game is good. I've played games with only one Act finished then had to wait for Act Two, sometimes having to start new characters. Meanwhile, dozens of indie titles are opened to Early Access and prying eyes long before they're done. And this keeps happening again and again. Watch Dogs wasn't a bad looking game at all, but the hype that started building it up as early as E3 2012 grew disproportionate to the final product. It didn't look bad by any means, but all the early hype left a lot of people feeling betrayed and let down. But the final release was severely pared down. Even the beta maintained the dynamic lighting and shadows gamers and the press had come to expect. Like Watch Dogs, early previews of the game looked far superior than the final product. How do you avoid hype but still get information out there? How does someone like me-a huge fan of Dark Souls-cover Dark Souls II announcements without letting my own hype trickle into the mix, especially since I write mostly opinion pieces?ĭark Souls II is a good example of hype gone awry. Gamers are excited about their favorite upcoming games (or at least what they expect to be their favorite.) The press likes to write about games that are popular since that garners more clicks and readers (and yes, we are all guilty of this including your humble narrator.) PR and marketing for the industry run the hype machine and let the gamers and the press do a lot of the heavy lifting via gaming sites, social media, YouTube, and so on and so forth. But they're often just part of the advertising. In-depth video previews of games can be helpful, on the one hand, in determining whether you want to buy a game. Long behind-the-scenes videos strike me as the sort of thing you'd watch after playing the game, rather than before. I don't mind seeing some gameplay footage in a trailer, but if I'm interested in a game I also like to be surprised by it. I see headlines for "20 minutes of gameplay footage" and I avoid them. There comes a time when I just don't want to know anything about an upcoming video game.
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