Game Developers: Stop Overpromising

This seems to happen often with Peter Molyneux's games. Fable promised to have trees that would grow in real-time (you could even plant a seed and watch it grow). They did encorporate it successfully, but ended up taking it out as it ate up a major portion of the processor. Black and White had the same effect. Although, with Black and White 2 under development, one can only wait and see what the outcome is.

Welcome to the world of lies and propaganda my son, lies and propaganda.

Otherwise known as "Marketing".


Precisely why I ignore advertisements. I know they're lying to me anyways.

Sometimes (often, let's say), they do that to attract publishers as a USP (unique selling point), and then their little pawns end up working their ass off trying to make ends meet. Publishers jump on it and market it as gold. In the end, it becomes worthless. too expensive (in many ways), bodged up, not thought through, don't fit the design, ... There are loads of these. It gets people excited and interested in the product.

It's cool to talk about features, but only once you've seen them in action and working.

With all the recent MMORPG fanboy posts I have come to the conclusion that gamers have completly forgottten that games cost lots of money to make.

I know, as an indie, I figure my last game cost me $1500, and I wasn't paying any employees and had 0 overhead. It's a small game, and I used freeware tools. This is just accounting for the time I COULD have spent MAKING money.

Damn, that money could come in handy right now...

Quote:

Original post by coldacid Perhaps this should be required reading for all our MMORPG fanboys who'd like to make their own. The gist of it is this: Some game developers speak too much and then piss everyone else off when they release a game with less features than anticipated. Developers should STFU about anything not critical or completed in the game so as to not let everyone down.

LOL, it's funny how I am reading this thread while working at my design document for Barren Moon (Eternal Lands 2). I have some REALLY 'nasty' features planned for it, and I am dead set to implement them :D

Quote:

Original post by Rob Loach This seems to happen often with Peter Molyneux's games. Fable promised to have trees that would grow in real-time (you could even plant a seed and watch it grow). They did encorporate it successfully, but ended up taking it out as it ate up a major portion of the processor. Black and White had the same effect. Although, with Black and White 2 under development, one can only wait and see what the outcome is.

He said recently he won't do this anymore and is aware of the results and the letdown gamers get from this.

I hate these promises. Developers just announce how superb their game is going to be, full features and stuff and when released, here comes my disappointment. Then I realize how they fooled me. However, it's not a rule. I think that knowing little is better than more. This suites only for me, or any other gamers, but not for those, who want to sell games. IMHO, it's just a question of a compromise.

Picture this:

Engineering/design teams propose spec, administration gets excited, marketing goes to work based on spec.

Projected sales, etc. indicate potential profit. Business guys realize profit is cut into by development costs. Developers are pulled onto other projects, given "side work" to develop demos WHILE developing core technology.

Development time decreases, spec does not change. Projected profits look REAL good now based on actual development cost vs. theoretical spec. Development team is now in crunch mode, as project is going over schedule.

Business guys are ready to get paid, frustrated with development team for taking too much time. Developers are now pulled back from other projects to quickly complete what they weren't given proper time to do to begin with.

Development team realizes spec cannot be met, but marketing hasn't changed. Business guys realize that projected profits are not the same for existing product as original spec, begin planning a quick release to avoid losing any more money (no units sold eyt, but development costs have occured).

Development team goes into high gear to get the game out the door, while simultaneously working up spec for NEXT great big game.

Development of next game starts late because of "last-minute" changes to first game, caused by expected issues arising from incomplete features, bad playability, etc. Core development of next game suffers, rinse, repeat.

Playing nasty devil's advocate here (don't agree with it, but...)

Why should they stop? It appears to work for them in spades. I don't know what it is but in games people DO NOT seem to vote with their dollar. We get trashed again and again by buggy software requiring patches right out of the box and promised features that never materialize (still waiting for my multiplayer mode for Terran Nova: Strike Force Centauri which promised "Multiplayer Patch COMING SOON!"[grin])

Why should they stop doing it if we're still going to buy the game anyway, and buy the magazines that hype them up? What incentive as players can we give them to cease and desist. (One promise from a concientious developer probably won't start a trend).

As a saying I've become fond of goes, "Why make fille mignon when your customers will eat dog food?" We've got to motivate them ourselves.

In fairness to - well - most of the people that the Gear Live article is criticizing: most of the time, it's not like they mean to let the end user down. As Rob said, Fable originally did have the realtime-tree thing implemented - but it had to be taken out because of technological limitations. That doesn't stop it from being something that Molyneux wanted in the game and, originally, asked them to do. I get the feeling that when he spoke about the game, he was speaking about the perfect and beautiful vision he had in his head, rather than the actual game - and how could he do anything but that, when the 'actual game' has only been half-built? The closest metric to the finished product is always going to be the vision you're trying to implement.

It's quite ironic, though. A level of overconfidence on the part of the developers ("Sure, we'll be able to do fully deforming environments on the PS2") is leading to underconfidence on the part of the consumer. [smile]