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Developers don’t want to show gameplay at E3 anymore

180 points by luu 7y ago

Retra 7y ago
I'm pretty sure E3 started being rote 2 decades ago.
- leetrout 7y ago
  Definitely a decade; I’m not sure about two. In any case it took a big down turn so the industry agrees/agreed with you contrary to the downvotes. Big publishers went off and did their own events at the same time at a different location. I think E3 is still important, though, because it pulls the industry together. Now whether or not something like GDC could replace it is another thing but I don’t think E3 is any more rote than CES.
RandomTisk 7y ago
Besides gameplay, what else is there? Trailers, that have never and will never capture whether a game is fun to play? Good luck.
- whamlastxmas 7y ago
  Bad and awkward presentations that make executives and marketing people feel fuzzy and self important
- soup10 7y ago
  E3 is a marketing event for big publishers, if cinematic trailers create more consistent hype than gameplay trailers then that's what they will do. Critics very frequently point out the formulaic, rehashed gameplay of big budget titles and they probably want to limit that.
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  Every E3 presentation should be able to use as much on stage acting and audio as needed but limited to a single still frame of 80s style NES box art of the game.
walrus01 7y ago
After the disaster and outright lies that were the Anthem "gameplay" trailer, vs what actually shipped, gamers don't want to see fake gameplay either.
jameskilton 7y ago
Yes the gaming community can be exceedingly toxic at times, but in this case I'd say that developers and publishers did this to themselves. Biggest case-in-point since Watch Dogs: Anthem. Here's the E3 reveal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL5GSfs9fi4&t=330s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL5GSfs9fi4&t=330s. We have since learned[1], after the disastrous launch of this game, that this video was showing even the dev team what the game was supposed to be about. This game did not even exist yet as an official entity until after E3 2017 (heck, it was going to be called "Beyond" until the week-ish before E3), and then the team had just over a year to build and launch it, with predictable results. [1] https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964 https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964
- duxup 7y ago
  I wonder how many developers decide what goes on stage...or what they would show if it was their call? The indie games I follow are very cautious about what early stage stuff they show. I suspect that is pretty close to what developers would decide.
  - JauntyHatAngle 7y ago
    That sounds like marketers deciding the direction of the product. I guess you could relate that to the Steve Jobs quote about how when product focused companies get their decisions made by the sales/marketing team, they begin failing.
  - xsmasher 7y ago
    If developers made the call they probably wouldn't do any marketing before the release of the game - "Just wait until it's finished, otherwise the marketing material might be inaccurate!" Their game would fail, but they wouldn't know why.
- canpan 7y ago
  > ... that this video was showing even the dev team what the game was supposed to be about. I cannot find it anymore, but there was a (very old) website about game development failure quotes. One quote I can still remember was something like: "You know your game fails when you read in the news about the feature you are supposed to have" This kind of stuff is going on for a long time. Only, the internet changed how the audience reacted.
AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
So the gaming community reiterated loudly and clearly that it doesn't like being lied to with "gameplay" demos crafted specifically for E3 that share no code with the actual game being developed (looking at you, Halo 2), and the dev's takeaway was "Don't show them any gameplay." I would hope we could collectively rally against this sort of behavior by refusing to buy such games that refuse to preview any actual gameplay. But I doubt that will work, given that Dead Island sold five million copies[0], based off what I can only assume was due to enamor with the trailer. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Island#Sales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Island#Sales
- floatingatoll 7y ago
  In software development, 1.0 is the version number you assign to what's ready at the end of the last day you are permitted to continue working on your release. Before online gaming, games were required to deliver a 1.0 and had no further chance to patch or improve it. They would do so in silence — like Nintendo does — and essentially work for years on things that no one even knew existed until they released their 1.0 gold master and began producing marketing material from it. Nintendo continues to follow this policy today — we get demos when they've finalized the game, and not before — and Nintendo refuses to market games until they've finished them, so we get years of "will there ever be another Super Smash Bros" and "OMG TELL US WHAT'S COMING" which they silently ignore. Now you declare openly that game developers who tell us what's coming while it's not yet finished will be punished if: 1) What's not yet finished doesn't match what's finished on 1.0 day in any way that is personally meaningful to you and/or anyone; and/or, 2) What's announced is announced only with a complete finished 1.0 product from which marketing materials are exclusively developed and provided immediately upon announcement. So, you're championing the Nintendo model, which is fine — we will hear nothing about any upcoming games until they're ready to be released, and if that means years of silence from the owners of properties such as Halo, GTA, Pokemon, and so on — then that's completely acceptable and we should expect to hear no complaint from the gaming community as a result. I am not led to believe by your response that "we will hear no complaint" is the outcome that will occur if and when the entire gaming industry complies with your demands by stopping all pre-release announcements altogether, which leaves me wondering: How, precisely, do you expect a valid outcome to occur from your requirements that both satisfies your demands without triggering complaint over the lack of updates over time from studios who are busy complying? EDIT: To pre-address the most obvious reply — "they should only demo what's done" — I guarantee that nothing is ever done until the final day of development, as critical features can be cut literally hours before gold master if there's an undiscovered flaw that QA discovers at the last minute — so since "nothing" is ever done until the final 1.0 release, "they should only demo nothing until the final 1.0 release is done", and we're back to the above question.
dx87 7y ago
Gabe Newell talked about this kind of stuff years ago. People are tired of big publishers promising the world pre-release, then putting out an unfinished product that is nowhere near the quality of what was advertised. Here's a snippet of an interview he did a while back: You have to stop thinking that you're in charge and start thinking that you're having a dance. We used to think we're smart [...] but nobody is smarter than the internet. [...] One of the things we learned pretty early on is 'Don't ever, ever try to lie to the internet - because they will catch you. They will de-construct your spin. They will remember everything you ever say for eternity.' You can see really old school companies really struggle with that. They think they can still be in control of the message. [...] So yeah, the internet (in aggregate) is scary smart. The sooner people accept that and start to trust that that's the case, the better they're gonna be in interacting with them.
- omeid2 7y ago
  While it is true that certain circles of people on the internet are very smart in aggregate, I don't believe you can extend that to internet as general; Empirically, you can just have a look at the "general" trends on Facebook and Reddit, even twitter.
  - lulephuckhang 7y ago
    I believe in this context smart doesn't mean the average intellectual capability of a netizen. It refers to the internet as a whole and its power to dissect information simply due to the sheer number of users dedicated to a certain topic.
    - ct520 7y ago
      Exactly!
    - omeid2 7y ago
      I understand, but as you say, it is only true for certain topics, however, sadly, internet as a general is full of misinformation, disinformation, toxicity, and plain outright nonsense.
Causality1 7y ago
>where at times developers appeared afraid of their audience Good. The amount of abuse the gaming industry has heaped upon consumers the past ten years is almost beyond belief. Microtransactions. Day-1 DLC. Season Passes that don't include all the DLC. So many versions of games you need a literal spreadsheet to keep track of how to get what feature. Broken piles of shit that rely on a "90-day roadmap" to tell us when they'll be playable. Using gambling mechanics to make children rob their parents to pay for loot boxes. The list is endless. Every second game dev could have night terrors for the next decade and it still wouldn't make up for how they have mutilated their own art form in the pursuit of unlimited profit. Almost every major games publisher, from EA to Activision-Blizzard to Ubisoft to Warner Brothers has behaved absolutely reprehensibly and in a just world would be burned to the ground by an angry mob.
- ohithereyou 7y ago
  >Good. The amount of abuse the gaming industry has heaped upon consumers the past ten years is almost beyond belief. Not to mention how they chew up and spit out the people making the games.
- lbeltrame 7y ago
  > Good. The amount of abuse the gaming industry has heaped upon consumers the past ten years is almost beyond belief. Microtransactions. What's funny about this is that part of the press actually encouraged microtransactions and what not when they were still not widespread (I remember a piece on FFXI/XIV arguing to drop subscriptions and go microtransactions). Cue a few years later, everyone in the press is screaming about how microtransactions and pay to win ruin everything. Quite ironic.
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  I believe this cannot honestly be blamed on artists and developers. These are just people to be exploited by corporate practices. The only real boss of a publicly traded company is greed. And even a CEO isn't really free anymore in todays world.
apatters 7y ago
It's a mystery to me how the gaming industry exists in its current form. I subscribe to Humble Monthly and occasionally buy a Humble Bundle. This all costs me $20-$30/mo and I get my hands on enough good games to last me a lifetime. I very occasionally will buy a cool looking new indie game, usually for $30 or less, when they come out. In general if a game looks like it has some interesting/novel gameplay I'll give it a shot. Most of them come from small indie developers, aren't super well known, and will run just fine on a 7 year old gaming laptop. Meanwhile there is this enormous multi-billion dollar world of dozens of AAA publisher FPS titles that all look basically the same. People apparently line up in droves to pay $60 for these titles and the publishers are now so confident about their revenue stream that they don't want to release gameplay footage before they sell you the game? The #1 thing I do before buying a game or installing one I already own (since I own hundreds, thanks to Humble) is look at gameplay videos on Youtube. No gameplay video = not touching it. What insane alien planet is this? It's certainly not the Earth in the dimension I live on, and it sounds much lamer.
- JauntyHatAngle 7y ago
  >Meanwhile there is this enormous multi-billion dollar world of dozens of AAA publisher FPS titles that all look basically the same. I'm also not someone who buys many new titles unless they are offering something beyond the norm, but what fps titles do you mean? I guess I'm a bit disconnected from the hype cycle, but I'm struggling to think of dozens of AAA FPS titles released in the past year. It's mostly Battle royale games that are FOTM, and there are only 3 AAA titles that do this that I can think of. (And the answer to those ones are: kids.) That said, I agree with you that there is a lot of rubbish being released prematurely without gameplay vids and embargoed reviews that rely on preorders and the uninformed to purchase before people catch on.
  - hnick 7y ago
    > FPS titles that all look basically the same. I found Dunkey's satirical take on this amusing. He spliced together footage from multiple FPS titles and reviewed it as a single game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK158ih4smY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK158ih4smY
EugeneOZ 7y ago
Worst kind of lie is a lie, mixed with true facts: even if we believe Ubisoft that they didn't downgrade quality, this article should not put The Witcher 3 as an example - there's even official patch to restore downgraded quality, and official explanation "we just tried to make game looking the same on consoles and PC". Gamers community trained to don't trust publishers - this article trying to say "because gamers are too stupid and suspicious", but in reality, as usually, because publishers lie too often.
- jerkstate 7y ago
  Ubisoft didn't say that they didn't downgrade quality, they said “the notion we would actively downgrade quality is contrary to everything we’ve set out to achieve” Sometimes you set out to achieve something and you fail, ending up with something that's contrary to what you set out to achieve.
gumby 7y ago
Has this not ever been so? Look at the covers of 1980s games with lovely pictures or even photography for a game that ran on the Apple II. Why the outrage now?
- viraptor 7y ago
  Those covers were obvious cover art. That's completely different from showing things that you could reasonably expect, as if they were actually included.
- mntmoss 7y ago
  You could make the argument that this behavior precipitated the '84 game crash, of which a major cause was consumers reducing their purchases and expectations after experiencing low quality products.
- pmontra 7y ago
  Exactly. I just looked at the tape cassette of Defender for the Sinclair ZX81 (circa 1982). A nice color illustration on the cover and a black and white 64x44 pixel game inside. However I didn't see a higher quality gameplay B/W movie of that game before buying it. They eventually tricked the ZX81 to get 256x192 pixels [1] [2] and if I saw that kind of commercial, buy the game and get the standard 64x44 I'd be pissed off too. [1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6134/how-do-high-resolution-graphics-work-on-the-zx81 https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6134/how-... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UudLLhWJGtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UudLLhWJGtk
justinplouffe 7y ago
The average build for a AAA game coming out in 2020 is barely in playable shape and certainly not ready to be shown at E3. Making one polished enough to show off is both time consuming and not representative of the final product. I really wish people were more open to seeing blocked out levels and unpolished animations to have an idea of where these projects are going but unfortunately even the most pristine presentations get picked apart online so I don’t think that’s happening anytime soon.
- eight_ender 7y ago
  That's more or less what Steam Greenlight was and one reason why I love it even if it goes by a different name now. I can pick up something interesting, play around with it, and then catch up on it's progress over years. I've done this with Subnautica, Starbound, Rimworld, and The Long Dark. I don't regret going on a journey with the developers at all.
  - pferde 7y ago
    Yes, Steam Greenlight (whatever it's called these days) is a cute idea, but for every gem like the games you mention, there are hundreds if not thousands of crap, minimal effort "games", many of them in a barely working state, which are released there just to make a quick buck or two, either via direct sales, or via the Steam card sales.
    - Dirlewanger 7y ago
      Which is also why the Steam curation function is an absolute boon. Let influencers I know trawl through the ocean of games and show me what is good.
  - imtringued 7y ago
    You're talking about early access. Greenlight was just a community based moderation process to allow anyone to submit their game without depending on a well known publisher. A greenlit game doesn't have to be in early access. Nothing prevents someone from submitting a completed game.
iClaudiusX 7y ago
I would trace it to a few factors; most important is the rise of the influencer advertising strategy. It is vastly cheaper to simply pay streamers to hype up your game on Twitch or youtube than it is to give an honest, sober demo live on an E3 stage. The audience at these press events has shifted from enthusiast reporters/critics to hyperventilating influencer personalities. It was so bad this year that they were obnoxiously screaming and interrupting the presenters every few seconds to the point where the people on stage were losing their train of thought. The other aspect is that putting together a demo takes time out of development. Almost every game shown this year had a release date of either Fall 2019 or Spring 2020. That means they're either on crunch or ramping up for it and can't afford to set aside a few months to make a vertical slice for E3. This is partly due to the end of this console generation with new hardware coming next holiday season. The longer term trend is that marketing has caught on to the irrelevance of E3. They can run their own Nintendo Direct style live stream whenever they want to speak to their audience and the press will disseminate that info to the wider community. You're even seeing companies like EA experiment with dropping a new title with zero advance notice as they did with Apex Legends (their take on battle royale, from the Titanfall developers). They just had an influencer preview event the week before and dumped it to the public with pretty wild success.
anonymousab 7y ago
The corresponding drawback of trying to reap the business benefits preorder and hype-wise, of an overly ambitious or misleading (intentionally or otherwise) vertical slide demo or trailer is the backlash and loss of consumer trust when you under-deliver or cut back. It can often be really hard to make a demo or trailer that isn't a mess without polishing it as much as possible. Development is messy. But sometimes you really can say "that's a lie" or "no, it [game feature] won't do that" and those ones beleaguer the benefit of the doubt. It's a tough problem.
dijit 7y ago
I work for a AAA studio. I even work(ed) on a game that was actually embroiled in a scandal regarding E3. I can probably shed a little insight as to why: 1) Once you show gameplay footage, you’ve promised. This isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the world but a lot of the time the “promise” is a mega polished version of what you want to show, it’s on rails, it’s going to show all the best features of the engine, you control the pacing etc. Even if those things make it into the game (as, my game actually was in 100% parity graphically, but we ran out of budget for animations) then people /perceive/ it worse, regardless. 2) what is shown isn’t actually a game- even if it looks like one. It’s a prototype. And there’s many reasons that the final product has to be trimmed down. Either it’s required because the budget goes towards something else (such as smarter NPCs, or better animations) or it wasn’t ever possible to produce what was shown due to things that were not known at the time of creating the demo or footage. The fact is simply that you’re showing something that may not be able to exist. So that is in direct violation of my first point. 3) we got burned the last console generation, we thought the machines were going to be at least twice as powerful as they ended up being. (You May notice that my publishers “downgrade” scandal happened post-E3:2013). What we had prepared was geared towards significantly more powerful hardware. (So, number of props on screen can’t be as high, number of light sources can’t be as high, issues with streaming “pop-in”) My publisher won’t make this mistake again and with a new console generation around the corner it doesn’t makes sense to underpromise (and use the current gen, which our competitors may not have done this E3) or overpromise, and guess what the next console gen will have. As an aside: I know it’s a trope that “console gaming holds gaming back”, and there’s a grain of truth there, but I would caution allowing developers to use as much hardware as they can, our work machines have obscene hardware (latest high end Xeon with 64/128g Ram and a gtx2070 is common), if we were not optimising for a limited platform then pc would suffer too, I just don’t know how much it is currently limited.
- dijit 7y ago
  I forgot to add to point 2, and my edit is locked out: One of the main reasons that things get bleached out of a game (menu's, HUD, rich graphics) is accessibility or localisation. I think a lot of people only look at games in an able-bodied western way, but if you want to sell your game in arabic then your menu's have to support going right-to-left, if you want your games to be sold to people with near-sightedness then you can't have dense darkness or heavy fog for most of the game unless it's removable (thus' more testing scenarios). For demos/proof-of-concept pieces: artists have free reign, until it comes time to actually address accessibility, discoverability or localisation concerns.
keyle 7y ago
The main issue is that sometimes the entire team would stop to produce a demo for E3 or other shows which in retrospect would delay the game from actually coming out. Some would spend so much time making sure their demo looked good, it became an engine show-off and they knew the game wouldn't ship complete like that.
lifeisstillgood 7y ago
It seems to me that a brave decision would be to let gamers into the dev process openly - a regular vlog like approach by an optimistic old hand showing skin texture experiments or changes to explosion algorithms and so on - not lying, not cut scenes ... just openness But then again, a couple of cut scenes every six months and secrecy otherwise is probably safer
- scarejunba 7y ago
  Please. John Carmack did that and then he spent ages trying to teach people about the process of development. Everyone assumed that he was just a greedy bastard who didn't want to hire people so he could keep the money for himself and if he wanted to give them the game faster he'd just hire more developers. I'm pretty sure I read a plan file from the '90s where he wrote a massive screed against this Mythical Man Month shit. And this was John Carmack, actual mythic hero. No name game developer will get super shit on.
- toast0 7y ago
  I've followed a couple games like that, and the end result is disappointment. Every feature that didn't work out feels like something I really wanted. So, really, it's a lot of effort on the developer's part to more thoroughly disappoint the potential buyers. In my outsider's opinion, spending that time focused on building something fun without the outside world intruding would be better. When it gets to the point of only needing polish, then start showing it to the world.
  - howtomakerpg 7y ago
    Problem with most popular games is that they are not made by hardcore gamers but by cashgrabbing businessmen and huge companies (you can find out more here https://bit.ly/2ILPdHw https://bit.ly/2ILPdHw). Most indie games, if not 99 percent of them die being unseen. For example fortnite, althrough popular and addictive, it can only addict people new to such mechanisms (to games similar to fortnite) or 8 year old kids who never played. But does it make money? Oh boy.
_pmf_ 7y ago
Maybe turning everything gaming related into a SJW minefield was not a very productive decision, either.
jasonkester 7y ago
Avoiding the topic at hand, which it sounds like gamers brought on themselves, I've got to say that that Doom screenshot brought back some memories. I remember way back whenever, being excited to pick up a copy of Doom 3 for my new top-end system to show off what it could do. And being amazed that Id had spent so much time and effort to build this incredible engine to show effects that you couldn't ever actually see. Because they'd chose a color palette consisting of only Black, Dark Grey and Dark Brown, and set the game in the dark. It's nice to see they haven't backed down from their stance that "Nobody should be able to see anything in our games". In the linked screenshot, the entire world is literally on fire and the things standing in front of you are still too dimly lit to see. And they're Black, Dark Grey and Dark Brown.
- huffmsa 7y ago
  Doom 2016 was only dark enough to be atmospheric. Important things like incoming fire are bright and loud. The muted backgrounds and bright targets are needed though. Unlike Doom 3, Doom 4 and now 5 are so fast paced you'd have a bad time if the whole game looked like a pride parade.
scarejunba 7y ago
Games are so high quality these days, but gamers are insufferable. I can't read any content about games any more because it's hysterical children screaming at the top of their voice about some inconsequential difference from some concept video.
- huffmsa 7y ago
  They could, should and can be high quality. Which is why there is such outrage when developers show one thing and deliver an early beta build for $80.
- mrguyorama 7y ago
  Do not confuse a product having giant textures and a billion triangles on screen with a "high quality game" Only one is actually fun to play
kristofferR 7y ago
CGI trailers and other filler content don't build hype to nearly the same extent as gameplay does. Don't forget that the lack of gameplay shown was one of the reasons this years E3 was considered a big disappointment by most. The reason Sony's 2016 E3 press conference is widely regarded as the best press conference ever, in addition to the live orchestra, was that they blasted the audience with long gameplay demo after gameplay demo. It had very little filler speeches by executives and few empty CGI trailers, and it made a big difference. If you haven't watched Sony's 2016 conference recently, which you should, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwofRzkROo4&t=1800 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwofRzkROo4&t=1800
huffmsa 7y ago
It's no coincidence that the OGs who focus on gameplay -- Nintendo, iD Software, Rockstar -- show the least BS. They've all had bad experiences in the past when they demo'd graphics and learned from it. Nintendo's 2000 Zelda video sent expectations the entirely wrong way for Wind Waker. iDs Doom 3 mishap (no one wants a sneaky, shadowy Doom Guy).
jrootabega 7y ago
This has been going on for at least 15 years. Here's a 2005 penny arcade comic calling it out https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/09/12 https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/09/12
- MrMember 7y ago
  It's kind of a running joke. Any "in-game" footage shown at a conference like E3 is almost guaranteed to be running on a high end modern PC even if the game itself will be released on a five year old console.
roland35 7y ago
There was an interesting quote about how demos are expensive to produce - I think this is something a lot of people dismiss. People seem to think that a demo is easy, just show what you have right now! But a lot of the time is is a huge distraction from what you otherwise would be working on.
- ohithereyou 7y ago
  The amount of turd polishing that goes on for an E3 demo is massive. I had a friend that worked in the AAA games space, and he said that between half and three quarters of the team would halt work on moving the game forward and focus for three to four months on polishing the demo shown at E3.
CelestialTeapot 7y ago
The problem is publishers are not managing expectations. If you're showing gameplay footage of a product that is still a year out or more in development, you had better follow up with new trailer releases as major elements of the game change. Look to [Hideo] Kojima Productions' Death Stranding for an example of hype tempered with gameplay footage that is released in drips and drabs as development of the game progresses. You can get a realistic sense of how the game will play.
yoz-y 7y ago
I don't get it. How do players feel that something was stolen from them? Do they make their purchase decision based off a trailer aired 2 years ago? There are tons of journals and streamers out there that review finished games. At that point it is pretty obvious how the game actually looks and plays. If the preview would be anything like the real game they would be shipping it. SMH
pdimitar 7y ago
> In truth, gameplay demos at events like E3 are subject to change. They’re often built as vertical slices – self-contained examples of what a sequence will look like once every feature and asset in the game has reached its highest level of polish. They can help studios accurately schedule the rest of development. Yeah, but they never deliver. They show a carefully remastered video and then they release a game with a worse quality. It's not about what could an E3 demo be used for. It's not a corporate event. Show us gameplay. It's a consumer show.
deleted 7y ago
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180 points by luu 7y ago

Retra 7y ago

I'm pretty sure E3 started being rote 2 decades ago.

leetrout 7y ago
Definitely a decade; I’m not sure about two. In any case it took a big down turn so the industry agrees/agreed with you contrary to the downvotes. Big publishers went off and did their own events at the same time at a different location. I think E3 is still important, though, because it pulls the industry together. Now whether or not something like GDC could replace it is another thing but I don’t think E3 is any more rote than CES.

RandomTisk 7y ago

Besides gameplay, what else is there? Trailers, that have never and will never capture whether a game is fun to play? Good luck.

whamlastxmas 7y ago
Bad and awkward presentations that make executives and marketing people feel fuzzy and self important
soup10 7y ago
E3 is a marketing event for big publishers, if cinematic trailers create more consistent hype than gameplay trailers then that's what they will do. Critics very frequently point out the formulaic, rehashed gameplay of big budget titles and they probably want to limit that.
Waterluvian 7y ago
Every E3 presentation should be able to use as much on stage acting and audio as needed but limited to a single still frame of 80s style NES box art of the game.

walrus01 7y ago

After the disaster and outright lies that were the Anthem "gameplay" trailer, vs what actually shipped, gamers don't want to see fake gameplay either.

jameskilton 7y ago

Yes the gaming community can be exceedingly toxic at times, but in this case I'd say that developers and publishers did this to themselves. Biggest case-in-point since Watch Dogs: Anthem. Here's the E3 reveal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL5GSfs9fi4&t=330s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL5GSfs9fi4&t=330s. We have since learned[1], after the disastrous launch of this game, that this video was showing even the dev team what the game was supposed to be about. This game did not even exist yet as an official entity until after E3 2017 (heck, it was going to be called "Beyond" until the week-ish before E3), and then the team had just over a year to build and launch it, with predictable results. [1] https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964 https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964

duxup 7y ago
I wonder how many developers decide what goes on stage...or what they would show if it was their call? The indie games I follow are very cautious about what early stage stuff they show. I suspect that is pretty close to what developers would decide.
- JauntyHatAngle 7y ago
  That sounds like marketers deciding the direction of the product. I guess you could relate that to the Steve Jobs quote about how when product focused companies get their decisions made by the sales/marketing team, they begin failing.
- xsmasher 7y ago
  If developers made the call they probably wouldn't do any marketing before the release of the game - "Just wait until it's finished, otherwise the marketing material might be inaccurate!" Their game would fail, but they wouldn't know why.
canpan 7y ago
> ... that this video was showing even the dev team what the game was supposed to be about. I cannot find it anymore, but there was a (very old) website about game development failure quotes. One quote I can still remember was something like: "You know your game fails when you read in the news about the feature you are supposed to have" This kind of stuff is going on for a long time. Only, the internet changed how the audience reacted.

AdmiralAsshat 7y ago

So the gaming community reiterated loudly and clearly that it doesn't like being lied to with "gameplay" demos crafted specifically for E3 that share no code with the actual game being developed (looking at you, Halo 2), and the dev's takeaway was "Don't show them any gameplay." I would hope we could collectively rally against this sort of behavior by refusing to buy such games that refuse to preview any actual gameplay. But I doubt that will work, given that Dead Island sold five million copies[0], based off what I can only assume was due to enamor with the trailer. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Island#Sales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Island#Sales

floatingatoll 7y ago
In software development, 1.0 is the version number you assign to what's ready at the end of the last day you are permitted to continue working on your release. Before online gaming, games were required to deliver a 1.0 and had no further chance to patch or improve it. They would do so in silence — like Nintendo does — and essentially work for years on things that no one even knew existed until they released their 1.0 gold master and began producing marketing material from it. Nintendo continues to follow this policy today — we get demos when they've finalized the game, and not before — and Nintendo refuses to market games until they've finished them, so we get years of "will there ever be another Super Smash Bros" and "OMG TELL US WHAT'S COMING" which they silently ignore. Now you declare openly that game developers who tell us what's coming while it's not yet finished will be punished if: 1) What's not yet finished doesn't match what's finished on 1.0 day in any way that is personally meaningful to you and/or anyone; and/or, 2) What's announced is announced only with a complete finished 1.0 product from which marketing materials are exclusively developed and provided immediately upon announcement. So, you're championing the Nintendo model, which is fine — we will hear nothing about any upcoming games until they're ready to be released, and if that means years of silence from the owners of properties such as Halo, GTA, Pokemon, and so on — then that's completely acceptable and we should expect to hear no complaint from the gaming community as a result. I am not led to believe by your response that "we will hear no complaint" is the outcome that will occur if and when the entire gaming industry complies with your demands by stopping all pre-release announcements altogether, which leaves me wondering: How, precisely, do you expect a valid outcome to occur from your requirements that both satisfies your demands without triggering complaint over the lack of updates over time from studios who are busy complying? EDIT: To pre-address the most obvious reply — "they should only demo what's done" — I guarantee that nothing is ever done until the final day of development, as critical features can be cut literally hours before gold master if there's an undiscovered flaw that QA discovers at the last minute — so since "nothing" is ever done until the final 1.0 release, "they should only demo nothing until the final 1.0 release is done", and we're back to the above question.

dx87 7y ago

Gabe Newell talked about this kind of stuff years ago. People are tired of big publishers promising the world pre-release, then putting out an unfinished product that is nowhere near the quality of what was advertised. Here's a snippet of an interview he did a while back: You have to stop thinking that you're in charge and start thinking that you're having a dance. We used to think we're smart [...] but nobody is smarter than the internet. [...] One of the things we learned pretty early on is 'Don't ever, ever try to lie to the internet - because they will catch you. They will de-construct your spin. They will remember everything you ever say for eternity.' You can see really old school companies really struggle with that. They think they can still be in control of the message. [...] So yeah, the internet (in aggregate) is scary smart. The sooner people accept that and start to trust that that's the case, the better they're gonna be in interacting with them.

omeid2 7y ago
While it is true that certain circles of people on the internet are very smart in aggregate, I don't believe you can extend that to internet as general; Empirically, you can just have a look at the "general" trends on Facebook and Reddit, even twitter.
- lulephuckhang 7y ago
  I believe in this context smart doesn't mean the average intellectual capability of a netizen. It refers to the internet as a whole and its power to dissect information simply due to the sheer number of users dedicated to a certain topic.
  - ct520 7y ago
    Exactly!
  - omeid2 7y ago
    I understand, but as you say, it is only true for certain topics, however, sadly, internet as a general is full of misinformation, disinformation, toxicity, and plain outright nonsense.

Causality1 7y ago

>where at times developers appeared afraid of their audience Good. The amount of abuse the gaming industry has heaped upon consumers the past ten years is almost beyond belief. Microtransactions. Day-1 DLC. Season Passes that don't include all the DLC. So many versions of games you need a literal spreadsheet to keep track of how to get what feature. Broken piles of shit that rely on a "90-day roadmap" to tell us when they'll be playable. Using gambling mechanics to make children rob their parents to pay for loot boxes. The list is endless. Every second game dev could have night terrors for the next decade and it still wouldn't make up for how they have mutilated their own art form in the pursuit of unlimited profit. Almost every major games publisher, from EA to Activision-Blizzard to Ubisoft to Warner Brothers has behaved absolutely reprehensibly and in a just world would be burned to the ground by an angry mob.

ohithereyou 7y ago
>Good. The amount of abuse the gaming industry has heaped upon consumers the past ten years is almost beyond belief. Not to mention how they chew up and spit out the people making the games.
lbeltrame 7y ago
> Good. The amount of abuse the gaming industry has heaped upon consumers the past ten years is almost beyond belief. Microtransactions. What's funny about this is that part of the press actually encouraged microtransactions and what not when they were still not widespread (I remember a piece on FFXI/XIV arguing to drop subscriptions and go microtransactions). Cue a few years later, everyone in the press is screaming about how microtransactions and pay to win ruin everything. Quite ironic.
raxxorrax 7y ago
I believe this cannot honestly be blamed on artists and developers. These are just people to be exploited by corporate practices. The only real boss of a publicly traded company is greed. And even a CEO isn't really free anymore in todays world.

apatters 7y ago

It's a mystery to me how the gaming industry exists in its current form. I subscribe to Humble Monthly and occasionally buy a Humble Bundle. This all costs me $20-$30/mo and I get my hands on enough good games to last me a lifetime. I very occasionally will buy a cool looking new indie game, usually for $30 or less, when they come out. In general if a game looks like it has some interesting/novel gameplay I'll give it a shot. Most of them come from small indie developers, aren't super well known, and will run just fine on a 7 year old gaming laptop. Meanwhile there is this enormous multi-billion dollar world of dozens of AAA publisher FPS titles that all look basically the same. People apparently line up in droves to pay $60 for these titles and the publishers are now so confident about their revenue stream that they don't want to release gameplay footage before they sell you the game? The #1 thing I do before buying a game or installing one I already own (since I own hundreds, thanks to Humble) is look at gameplay videos on Youtube. No gameplay video = not touching it. What insane alien planet is this? It's certainly not the Earth in the dimension I live on, and it sounds much lamer.

JauntyHatAngle 7y ago
>Meanwhile there is this enormous multi-billion dollar world of dozens of AAA publisher FPS titles that all look basically the same. I'm also not someone who buys many new titles unless they are offering something beyond the norm, but what fps titles do you mean? I guess I'm a bit disconnected from the hype cycle, but I'm struggling to think of dozens of AAA FPS titles released in the past year. It's mostly Battle royale games that are FOTM, and there are only 3 AAA titles that do this that I can think of. (And the answer to those ones are: kids.) That said, I agree with you that there is a lot of rubbish being released prematurely without gameplay vids and embargoed reviews that rely on preorders and the uninformed to purchase before people catch on.
- hnick 7y ago
  > FPS titles that all look basically the same. I found Dunkey's satirical take on this amusing. He spliced together footage from multiple FPS titles and reviewed it as a single game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK158ih4smY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK158ih4smY

EugeneOZ 7y ago

Worst kind of lie is a lie, mixed with true facts: even if we believe Ubisoft that they didn't downgrade quality, this article should not put The Witcher 3 as an example - there's even official patch to restore downgraded quality, and official explanation "we just tried to make game looking the same on consoles and PC". Gamers community trained to don't trust publishers - this article trying to say "because gamers are too stupid and suspicious", but in reality, as usually, because publishers lie too often.

jerkstate 7y ago
Ubisoft didn't say that they didn't downgrade quality, they said “the notion we would actively downgrade quality is contrary to everything we’ve set out to achieve” Sometimes you set out to achieve something and you fail, ending up with something that's contrary to what you set out to achieve.

gumby 7y ago

Has this not ever been so? Look at the covers of 1980s games with lovely pictures or even photography for a game that ran on the Apple II. Why the outrage now?

viraptor 7y ago
Those covers were obvious cover art. That's completely different from showing things that you could reasonably expect, as if they were actually included.
mntmoss 7y ago
You could make the argument that this behavior precipitated the '84 game crash, of which a major cause was consumers reducing their purchases and expectations after experiencing low quality products.
pmontra 7y ago
Exactly. I just looked at the tape cassette of Defender for the Sinclair ZX81 (circa 1982). A nice color illustration on the cover and a black and white 64x44 pixel game inside. However I didn't see a higher quality gameplay B/W movie of that game before buying it. They eventually tricked the ZX81 to get 256x192 pixels [1] [2] and if I saw that kind of commercial, buy the game and get the standard 64x44 I'd be pissed off too. [1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6134/how-do-high-resolution-graphics-work-on-the-zx81 https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6134/how-... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UudLLhWJGtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UudLLhWJGtk

justinplouffe 7y ago

The average build for a AAA game coming out in 2020 is barely in playable shape and certainly not ready to be shown at E3. Making one polished enough to show off is both time consuming and not representative of the final product. I really wish people were more open to seeing blocked out levels and unpolished animations to have an idea of where these projects are going but unfortunately even the most pristine presentations get picked apart online so I don’t think that’s happening anytime soon.

eight_ender 7y ago
That's more or less what Steam Greenlight was and one reason why I love it even if it goes by a different name now. I can pick up something interesting, play around with it, and then catch up on it's progress over years. I've done this with Subnautica, Starbound, Rimworld, and The Long Dark. I don't regret going on a journey with the developers at all.
- pferde 7y ago
  Yes, Steam Greenlight (whatever it's called these days) is a cute idea, but for every gem like the games you mention, there are hundreds if not thousands of crap, minimal effort "games", many of them in a barely working state, which are released there just to make a quick buck or two, either via direct sales, or via the Steam card sales.
  - Dirlewanger 7y ago
    Which is also why the Steam curation function is an absolute boon. Let influencers I know trawl through the ocean of games and show me what is good.
- imtringued 7y ago
  You're talking about early access. Greenlight was just a community based moderation process to allow anyone to submit their game without depending on a well known publisher. A greenlit game doesn't have to be in early access. Nothing prevents someone from submitting a completed game.

iClaudiusX 7y ago

I would trace it to a few factors; most important is the rise of the influencer advertising strategy. It is vastly cheaper to simply pay streamers to hype up your game on Twitch or youtube than it is to give an honest, sober demo live on an E3 stage. The audience at these press events has shifted from enthusiast reporters/critics to hyperventilating influencer personalities. It was so bad this year that they were obnoxiously screaming and interrupting the presenters every few seconds to the point where the people on stage were losing their train of thought. The other aspect is that putting together a demo takes time out of development. Almost every game shown this year had a release date of either Fall 2019 or Spring 2020. That means they're either on crunch or ramping up for it and can't afford to set aside a few months to make a vertical slice for E3. This is partly due to the end of this console generation with new hardware coming next holiday season. The longer term trend is that marketing has caught on to the irrelevance of E3. They can run their own Nintendo Direct style live stream whenever they want to speak to their audience and the press will disseminate that info to the wider community. You're even seeing companies like EA experiment with dropping a new title with zero advance notice as they did with Apex Legends (their take on battle royale, from the Titanfall developers). They just had an influencer preview event the week before and dumped it to the public with pretty wild success.

anonymousab 7y ago

The corresponding drawback of trying to reap the business benefits preorder and hype-wise, of an overly ambitious or misleading (intentionally or otherwise) vertical slide demo or trailer is the backlash and loss of consumer trust when you under-deliver or cut back. It can often be really hard to make a demo or trailer that isn't a mess without polishing it as much as possible. Development is messy. But sometimes you really can say "that's a lie" or "no, it [game feature] won't do that" and those ones beleaguer the benefit of the doubt. It's a tough problem.

dijit 7y ago

I work for a AAA studio. I even work(ed) on a game that was actually embroiled in a scandal regarding E3. I can probably shed a little insight as to why: 1) Once you show gameplay footage, you’ve promised. This isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the world but a lot of the time the “promise” is a mega polished version of what you want to show, it’s on rails, it’s going to show all the best features of the engine, you control the pacing etc. Even if those things make it into the game (as, my game actually was in 100% parity graphically, but we ran out of budget for animations) then people /perceive/ it worse, regardless. 2) what is shown isn’t actually a game- even if it looks like one. It’s a prototype. And there’s many reasons that the final product has to be trimmed down. Either it’s required because the budget goes towards something else (such as smarter NPCs, or better animations) or it wasn’t ever possible to produce what was shown due to things that were not known at the time of creating the demo or footage. The fact is simply that you’re showing something that may not be able to exist. So that is in direct violation of my first point. 3) we got burned the last console generation, we thought the machines were going to be at least twice as powerful as they ended up being. (You May notice that my publishers “downgrade” scandal happened post-E3:2013). What we had prepared was geared towards significantly more powerful hardware. (So, number of props on screen can’t be as high, number of light sources can’t be as high, issues with streaming “pop-in”) My publisher won’t make this mistake again and with a new console generation around the corner it doesn’t makes sense to underpromise (and use the current gen, which our competitors may not have done this E3) or overpromise, and guess what the next console gen will have. As an aside: I know it’s a trope that “console gaming holds gaming back”, and there’s a grain of truth there, but I would caution allowing developers to use as much hardware as they can, our work machines have obscene hardware (latest high end Xeon with 64/128g Ram and a gtx2070 is common), if we were not optimising for a limited platform then pc would suffer too, I just don’t know how much it is currently limited.

dijit 7y ago
I forgot to add to point 2, and my edit is locked out: One of the main reasons that things get bleached out of a game (menu's, HUD, rich graphics) is accessibility or localisation. I think a lot of people only look at games in an able-bodied western way, but if you want to sell your game in arabic then your menu's have to support going right-to-left, if you want your games to be sold to people with near-sightedness then you can't have dense darkness or heavy fog for most of the game unless it's removable (thus' more testing scenarios). For demos/proof-of-concept pieces: artists have free reign, until it comes time to actually address accessibility, discoverability or localisation concerns.

keyle 7y ago

The main issue is that sometimes the entire team would stop to produce a demo for E3 or other shows which in retrospect would delay the game from actually coming out. Some would spend so much time making sure their demo looked good, it became an engine show-off and they knew the game wouldn't ship complete like that.

lifeisstillgood 7y ago

It seems to me that a brave decision would be to let gamers into the dev process openly - a regular vlog like approach by an optimistic old hand showing skin texture experiments or changes to explosion algorithms and so on - not lying, not cut scenes ... just openness But then again, a couple of cut scenes every six months and secrecy otherwise is probably safer

scarejunba 7y ago
Please. John Carmack did that and then he spent ages trying to teach people about the process of development. Everyone assumed that he was just a greedy bastard who didn't want to hire people so he could keep the money for himself and if he wanted to give them the game faster he'd just hire more developers. I'm pretty sure I read a plan file from the '90s where he wrote a massive screed against this Mythical Man Month shit. And this was John Carmack, actual mythic hero. No name game developer will get super shit on.
toast0 7y ago
I've followed a couple games like that, and the end result is disappointment. Every feature that didn't work out feels like something I really wanted. So, really, it's a lot of effort on the developer's part to more thoroughly disappoint the potential buyers. In my outsider's opinion, spending that time focused on building something fun without the outside world intruding would be better. When it gets to the point of only needing polish, then start showing it to the world.
- howtomakerpg 7y ago
  Problem with most popular games is that they are not made by hardcore gamers but by cashgrabbing businessmen and huge companies (you can find out more here https://bit.ly/2ILPdHw https://bit.ly/2ILPdHw). Most indie games, if not 99 percent of them die being unseen. For example fortnite, althrough popular and addictive, it can only addict people new to such mechanisms (to games similar to fortnite) or 8 year old kids who never played. But does it make money? Oh boy.

_pmf_ 7y ago

Maybe turning everything gaming related into a SJW minefield was not a very productive decision, either.

jasonkester 7y ago

Avoiding the topic at hand, which it sounds like gamers brought on themselves, I've got to say that that Doom screenshot brought back some memories. I remember way back whenever, being excited to pick up a copy of Doom 3 for my new top-end system to show off what it could do. And being amazed that Id had spent so much time and effort to build this incredible engine to show effects that you couldn't ever actually see. Because they'd chose a color palette consisting of only Black, Dark Grey and Dark Brown, and set the game in the dark. It's nice to see they haven't backed down from their stance that "Nobody should be able to see anything in our games". In the linked screenshot, the entire world is literally on fire and the things standing in front of you are still too dimly lit to see. And they're Black, Dark Grey and Dark Brown.

huffmsa 7y ago
Doom 2016 was only dark enough to be atmospheric. Important things like incoming fire are bright and loud. The muted backgrounds and bright targets are needed though. Unlike Doom 3, Doom 4 and now 5 are so fast paced you'd have a bad time if the whole game looked like a pride parade.

scarejunba 7y ago

Games are so high quality these days, but gamers are insufferable. I can't read any content about games any more because it's hysterical children screaming at the top of their voice about some inconsequential difference from some concept video.

huffmsa 7y ago
They could, should and can be high quality. Which is why there is such outrage when developers show one thing and deliver an early beta build for $80.
mrguyorama 7y ago
Do not confuse a product having giant textures and a billion triangles on screen with a "high quality game" Only one is actually fun to play

kristofferR 7y ago

CGI trailers and other filler content don't build hype to nearly the same extent as gameplay does. Don't forget that the lack of gameplay shown was one of the reasons this years E3 was considered a big disappointment by most. The reason Sony's 2016 E3 press conference is widely regarded as the best press conference ever, in addition to the live orchestra, was that they blasted the audience with long gameplay demo after gameplay demo. It had very little filler speeches by executives and few empty CGI trailers, and it made a big difference. If you haven't watched Sony's 2016 conference recently, which you should, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwofRzkROo4&t=1800 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwofRzkROo4&t=1800

huffmsa 7y ago

It's no coincidence that the OGs who focus on gameplay -- Nintendo, iD Software, Rockstar -- show the least BS. They've all had bad experiences in the past when they demo'd graphics and learned from it. Nintendo's 2000 Zelda video sent expectations the entirely wrong way for Wind Waker. iDs Doom 3 mishap (no one wants a sneaky, shadowy Doom Guy).

jrootabega 7y ago

This has been going on for at least 15 years. Here's a 2005 penny arcade comic calling it out https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/09/12 https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/09/12

MrMember 7y ago
It's kind of a running joke. Any "in-game" footage shown at a conference like E3 is almost guaranteed to be running on a high end modern PC even if the game itself will be released on a five year old console.

roland35 7y ago

There was an interesting quote about how demos are expensive to produce - I think this is something a lot of people dismiss. People seem to think that a demo is easy, just show what you have right now! But a lot of the time is is a huge distraction from what you otherwise would be working on.

ohithereyou 7y ago
The amount of turd polishing that goes on for an E3 demo is massive. I had a friend that worked in the AAA games space, and he said that between half and three quarters of the team would halt work on moving the game forward and focus for three to four months on polishing the demo shown at E3.

CelestialTeapot 7y ago

The problem is publishers are not managing expectations. If you're showing gameplay footage of a product that is still a year out or more in development, you had better follow up with new trailer releases as major elements of the game change. Look to [Hideo] Kojima Productions' Death Stranding for an example of hype tempered with gameplay footage that is released in drips and drabs as development of the game progresses. You can get a realistic sense of how the game will play.

yoz-y 7y ago

I don't get it. How do players feel that something was stolen from them? Do they make their purchase decision based off a trailer aired 2 years ago? There are tons of journals and streamers out there that review finished games. At that point it is pretty obvious how the game actually looks and plays. If the preview would be anything like the real game they would be shipping it. SMH

pdimitar 7y ago

> In truth, gameplay demos at events like E3 are subject to change. They’re often built as vertical slices – self-contained examples of what a sequence will look like once every feature and asset in the game has reached its highest level of polish. They can help studios accurately schedule the rest of development. Yeah, but they never deliver. They show a carefully remastered video and then they release a game with a worse quality. It's not about what could an E3 demo be used for. It's not a corporate event. Show us gameplay. It's a consumer show.

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