Overhyping and other things that can kill video games

Making something look greater than it is seems to be a common human thing, we want it to be greater than what it looks like, the video game industry has gone through some very interesting PR disasters but making X, Y, Z video game look like the greatest ever (it may well be a great video game) but in the long run there is something either moving into the wrong direction or simply not working as it was promoted, this goes beyond Kickstarter Campaigns that got funded and the final item was not delivered or if it was the product is not to par (Mighty No. 9), this is about video games being killed through bad publishing just because the company wants to make a profit on it, video games can look crude and have a great story/mechanics (and possibly vice versa or mix and match any way you can imagine) that will make it work out (Hotline Miami) to the point a fanatical player base will come out of it, probably the most dangerous type of fan base available, with a fanatical player base comes the risk of high expectations and a potential disaster when what they want is not delivered. We are also not including into this matter the toxicity of a player base (thinking about the Battlefield and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare X franchises but not being reserved only to FPS).

The problem with delivering something that is not what the players want is not always related to the developers, in most cases it has nothing to do with them, there is money involved, there are people with little to no understanding on the matter that wish to capitalize, there are sales, PR, investors, management, people outside of the direct development cycle that can make some really bad decisions as there is a speculation on what is potentially “best for players” or “this is what they really want”. This line of thought can kill a games, franchises and companies.

Spore was a highly hyped game that ended up not living to expectations, it was something alright but not what we had been sold on; Fable was a game that through word of mouth I got to try out and people overexaggerated the whole thing (but thinking about it this is also the fault of Peter Molineux who is known for doing this more often than not); SimCity (the last one to come out through Maxis) pretty much crashed and burned since day one with players being unable to join the game (some time later between a couple of friends we tried the game and found it so lacking that we dropped the case in maybe a month or two at the most); Star Wars Battlefront 2 died because of micro-transactions, period, greed will not get you far when you make it too obvious; Age of Conan did not accomplish what it was set to do (kill World of Warcraft); John Romero was going to make us his bitch with Daikatana and look where that went, good night sweet prince; Duke Nukem Forever took fifteen years to finally show up in a time where it was no longer relevant after going through so many hands and losing total focus on whatever it should have delivered.