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.
