was first 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:announced in a Warne๊r Bros. earnings call, but I highly doubt the executives knew they were leaking the next big fighting game. Joe Everyman understandably expects a game coming out this year to have been marketed already, but that’s not how this industry works. Three months later and the only news we've had is 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:a literal grain of sand at the end of an anniversary clip looking ba♓ck at the series’ history. The fact that game marketing thrives on being quiet, mysterious, and purposefully withholding in the first place is bizarre, only serving to fuel a never-ending cycle of misinformation and hype among gamers that breeds toxicity.
So many don’t understand how the sausage is made, leading to tired questions like, ‘Why don’t they just swap engines?’ or ‘Why can’t you make new servers?’ There's a clear disconnect between players and developers. The player thinks games are as easy to make as putting together a few Lego bricks, but the developer knows that everything is piled onto a rickety wooden foundation, held together by duct tape, hopes, and prayers. Asking a game dev to ‘swap the engine’ for something more stable is like asking your hairdresser to turn your buzz cut into a sweeping mane.
Marketing is risky with games because of this. So often, early footage will be shared and then later held up as an example of a game being ‘downgraded’ when it finally launches. Spoiler alert, it was probably just optimised or iterated upon. We saw this with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man’s ‘’, in which gamers angrily decried that the puddles didn’t look as good in the release version as they had at E3. Puddles. Who cares? It's understandable that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-💖Man 2 is choosing to hold off on marketing until closer to launch to avoid going through this again, something which is quickly becoming the industry standard. But playing it safജe to avoid backlash is a self-fulfilling🌺 prophecy.
Gamers don’t know how games are made, so marketing slows down and secrecy brews, but that just obscures the process even further. If anyone now breaks the cycle, puddlegate will still happen. The solution isn’t to withhold footage until right before launch, it’s to pull back the curtain and let Dorothy see the wizard. The wizard being a tired game dev on their sixth cup of coffee, telling themselves t🐼o stay off gaming forums for their own sanity.
The 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dead Space remake tried this, with developer streams that let us see how the team was building certain areas. EA is also letting gamers try out alpha versions of Skate, which by nature looks barebones and feels unfinished… because it is. This is something tha🍌t indie developers have long been spearheading with early access, launching games during development so the community can provide feedback and stress test servers. But given the continued lack of transparency across the industry, gamers still woefully misunderstand the process, and we regularly see anger toward bugs and unfinished features. This is why the industry as a whole needs improved transparency, to curb these misconceptions.
Marketing games like movies is a key part of the problem. Teasing them in the same way often leaves people confused or uninterested as games are so much more than their stories and visuals. CGI trailers unpack game worlds with beautiful shots and thundering scores, but are often met with lackluster responses as they don’t show us anything tangible. They aren’t designed to be mysterious but are often used when developers don’t have much to show so they can announce that a game is in the works, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:much as with The Elder Scrolls 6. But given the lack of transparency and use of CG𝔉I trailers, the ballooning scope of development amidst expectations of huge generational leaps with each sequel becomes obscured, and the average player isn’t aware of just how expensive and time-consuming games are to develop now. That’s why we see teasers as vague as non-descript mountain ranges—it’s a promise that it’s coming, even if it’s a decade away.
Teasers and trailers are only one part of a movie's marketing campaign. Casting and crew news is just as important. Games are marketed by faceless corporations like Insomniac, Activision, and Obsidian; it's not often that people buy games because of the directors, writers, and producers, let alone know about them. There are of course exceptions to the rule like with Hideo Kojima and Neil Druckmann, but since so much is kept secret until late into a project's development, the talent behind games is usually pushed back.
That’s because games are prone to change or even cancellation more so than movies. Take reshoots—they’re par for the course in film because we regularly hear about production. Meanwhile, Tony Todd accidentally saying Spider-Man 🦄2 comes out soo🀅n is a complete breach of contract. He’s not allowed to talk about a game coming out in Fall. Hiding a key part of development is exactly why delays and h꧒uge unexpected changes spark backlash and anxiety—not enough is known, so it’s automatically seen as a sign that a project is on the ropes, quietly struggling until launch. It’s more often than not just a normal part of the process. But we aren’t told that, and thus suspicion is twisted into malice.
Marketing should show us what’s going on behind the scenes, let us get to know the devs, and unpack how things are put together. If it’s a standard part of revealing and hyping games, there’ll be a natural realisation as to why ideas like ‘change the engine’ don’t work, and it’ll help to break down the notion that game devel꧒opment is incredibly easy. If we want to root toxicity out of gaming when it comes to developer and player relations, gamers need to understand what it is they’re playing and how outlandish some of their requests really are. Games aren’t magically cooked up in a few months with automated software that anyone could use, so let us see the devs putting the pieces together, even if it’s not the mostꦛ flattering thing to watch.