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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 wi

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.
- freehunter 7y ago
  "Lie to us" and "don't mention the game until it's done" are not the only two options. There's plenty of middle ground, including "show us a cutscene video that is obviously a cutscene video" like Cyberpunk 2077 did. Don't say "this is actual gameplay" if it's not actual gameplay. Don't show videos simulating actual gameplay if it's not actual gameplay. Don't have people on stage mimicking actual gameplay while a video plays that is not actual gameplay. "Don't lie" is a very low bar, and there is a lot of room to exist above it.
  - philipov 7y ago
    But... How are we supposed to lie to people, if we can't lie?
  - copenja 7y ago
    Right, but what can easily happen is you show gameplay footage at E3 with good intentions, then the game changes. Maybe, things change because the mechanics proved to hard to learn. Maybe, things change because to fit X number of characters on screen in level Y, you had to downgrade the main character visuals. Either way... Is that a lie? In the eyes of most developers no, it's just part of development. In the eyes of consumers...yes?
    - Mtinie 7y ago
      Changing gameplay between the E3 demo and the final release isn’t the problem, it’s when the difference between the preview gameplay is vastly better quality than the final. In the 12-24 intervening months one would expect a project to improve in quality and focus, not to devolve. It’s the curated experience intended to oversell the state of the the current offering (i.e. pre-release) that raises gamers’ ire.
      - maccard 7y ago
        Have you worked on a product that has had to show a vertical slice 2 years before the product is released? I've worked on a few e3/e3-like demos for games and there's a whole bunch of issues. It's not always quality - things that were considered "easy" or "we can solve that later" can come back and bite you. Things that are fun in a vertical slice demo might not actually be engaging for more than 15 minutes or so(or an hour, or three). It can be _very_ difficult to extract a 10 minute piece of gameplay that you have some context for to show people even if you have the entire game made, which means you might have to out in some temporary "features" (add a power/remove a pathway) to make the experience fit. All or these changes can have a butterfly effect. Adding X to simplify a demo can make Y seem more important than you want it to which means Z is now redundant, but you've already spoken about Z. There had to be done realisation that things change in games over a 2 year period, (heck, things change massively in games over a 2 week period in some games) and some acceptance of that fact.
wazanator 7y ago
I thought Dead Island was fine from a gameplay perspective which is what I bought it on because I learned early on in life that you shouldn't buy games before reviews drop.
jedimastert 7y ago
The problem there lies that there's almost zero chance that the game you see @ E3 will be the exact same game that gets released 6 months down the line. Sure, you could just stop development, but then you're just wasting 6 months you could be spending making the game better. That could mean adding new mechanics or story, but sometimes you decide that a really cool thing just doesn't fit in to the story you're trying to tell, so you cut it and it's a better game for it. I feel like it's a have your cake and eat it too. That not to mention the industry feedback you get that you could be incorporating.
- michaelt 7y ago
  Sure, you could just stop development, but then you're just wasting 6 months you could be spending making the game better. I think if people agreed that in every case the released game was strictly better than the E3 demo, that would not be controversial. Seems to me the problem is more when people feel the opposite is happening?
colordrops 7y ago
Just wait until it is out, read reviews, and watch some YouTube videos, then make your purchasing decision. What do you need a pre-release gameplay video for?
- ohithereyou 7y ago
  Pre-release gameplay is primarily there to fuel the demand for pre-orders. As I mentioned in a previous comment on this article, this is a vestige of the days where limited supply of video games was more common (due to physical media shortages, unknown demand, and the desire to have a bit of word of mouth and exclusivity drive some of the marketing) - with digital distribution for practically all games, unless you want a super special limited edition, there is no reason to pre-order - wait for the game to release and watch some YouTube/Twitch of the game and make up your mind, as you have said.
taurath 7y ago
The hardcore gamers in E3s audience can and will smell BS. The problem is generally all developers have to go off of is the vertical slice, generally created right during E3 and before a lot of the games systems are in place. If you go and tell the whole truth about a game in the development stage, it’s like showing a trailer for a movie without a lot of the VFX actually completed, or even worse. The business wants to know how much hype they can build around a game, and how much money to spend on marketing. And the big titles tend to treat their audience as idiots, because the marketing department tends to treat them as such. There’s a better way, but it goes against how so many companies especially big publishers do things.
sl1ck731 7y ago
In all honesty I don't know how anyone can make 60$ purchases on games without seeing what it looks like. I can't comprehend it at all. Preordering was never even a question for me even before all of the recent issues with it. I just cant understand the mindset for anything other than cult-like franchises. I can only imagine, with contempt, the cube jockey who figured out that distributing game demos was bad for their bottom line.
- lbeltrame 7y ago
  > In all honesty I don't know how anyone can make 60$ purchases on games without seeing what it looks like. It depends on the game, I'd say. While I'd like often playable demos, I try to document myself on what's available (videos - not trailers - and previews) and if it is interesting to me (but again, I don't really get most of the AAA games, although some of the ones I own may be classified as such). Also, at least releases in Japan and in Asia have actual perks with preordering (and by actual perks I don't mean useless digital items), although that comes as an additional cost.
  - lifthrasiir 7y ago
    Some studios also are able to continue to make great (if not greatest) titles. I however think AAA games are generally too broad in scope and have a much greater probability to fail to keep their reputation and/or to live up to the expectation.
- ohithereyou 7y ago
  Pre-ordering was a way before digital distribution to ensure that you got the game on day 1. I grew up in a tiny little town in Texas where the nearest, non-Walmart video game store was 45 minutes away - this is back in the tail end of the NES, the middle of the SNES, and the dawn of the PlayStation era. The store I went to would often only get between five and ten copies (beyond what was pre-ordered) of a video game on launch day, with a typical waiting period of two to three weeks to get more copies. I vividly remembering pre-ordering video games that sounded interesting, some for as few as $5 that could be transferred to another video game pre-order if I changed my mind. Back then (and still today for physical games in some stores), you could pay the balance when you pick up the game. Today, aside from bullshit pre-order bonuses that the video games companies make exclusive to each retailer, there is very little reason to pre-order - Steam/Origin/GOG/Epic Game Store will not run out of copies - they can copy the bits an infinite number of times. In fact, in the case of some flops (looking at you, Fallout 76, with your nearly 50% price cut within a month of release), it makes no sense to pre-order. The real mind-melter for me is Kickstarting games. Crowd funding is nice and helps projects that would otherwise not be funded, but why would you want to pay for a game that isn't even completely conceptualized yet?
jayd16 7y ago
You seem to think it's a very sinister practice but imagine making a video of what the product you're working on now will look like in two years. Can you do that with what you have now? Will you get it right? We as software engineers aren't great at predicting what we'll have in two weeks. If the community doesn't want to see target renders, good. They derail development anyway
- sl1ck731 7y ago
  The issue is that it is presented as if it is actual, current gameplay. I don't think anyone would have an issue if there was a giant watermark that said "CONCEPT" across ones that are no where near being represented in the final product yet, but it obvious that these companies are being intentionally deceitful.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Goronmon 7y ago
    I don't think anyone would have an issue if there was a giant watermark that said "CONCEPT" across ones that are no where near being represented in the final product... I'm struggling to think of a diplomatic way to express how naive I feel this statement is, so I'll just leave it at that. The online community doesn't even need real reasons to be angry, they'll make them up at they have to. It's somewhat ridiculous to suggest they aren't capable of ignoring a "CONCEPT" watermark to get riled up about "broken promises".
    - username90 7y ago
      > The online community doesn't even need real reasons to be angry, they'll make them up at they have to. The online community consist of millions of people, of course some of them will always be angry. However when you have millions of people hating you and very few defending you then there are usually a good reason to it, otherwise they don't unite like that. Example: Nintendo announcing that the first game to use their paid subscription pokemon storage system wont actually be able to use all pokemon, and that no game in the future will either, meaning that some pokemon people paid to store and reuse later will never be able to be used. This lead to a lot of hate on the game, including some over the top criticism of the graphics which otherwise wouldn't be an issue but now most of the energy goes towards hating the game so nobody bothers to defend it.
colechristensen 7y ago
What? I don't feel owed gameplay demos at a trade show months or years before release. I'm fine with one a month out or not at all, they're selling me a game not nine months of anticipation.
balaam 7y ago
> the dev's takeaway was "Don't show them any gameplay." The average developer has almost no input into what is and isn't shown at E3. They can present some source material but E3 decisioss like these are made by a marketing company or the publisher.
smadurange 7y ago
One practical way gamers can respond to this is to avoid preorders. That might work.

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.

freehunter 7y ago
"Lie to us" and "don't mention the game until it's done" are not the only two options. There's plenty of middle ground, including "show us a cutscene video that is obviously a cutscene video" like Cyberpunk 2077 did. Don't say "this is actual gameplay" if it's not actual gameplay. Don't show videos simulating actual gameplay if it's not actual gameplay. Don't have people on stage mimicking actual gameplay while a video plays that is not actual gameplay. "Don't lie" is a very low bar, and there is a lot of room to exist above it.
- philipov 7y ago
  But... How are we supposed to lie to people, if we can't lie?
- copenja 7y ago
  Right, but what can easily happen is you show gameplay footage at E3 with good intentions, then the game changes. Maybe, things change because the mechanics proved to hard to learn. Maybe, things change because to fit X number of characters on screen in level Y, you had to downgrade the main character visuals. Either way... Is that a lie? In the eyes of most developers no, it's just part of development. In the eyes of consumers...yes?
  - Mtinie 7y ago
    Changing gameplay between the E3 demo and the final release isn’t the problem, it’s when the difference between the preview gameplay is vastly better quality than the final. In the 12-24 intervening months one would expect a project to improve in quality and focus, not to devolve. It’s the curated experience intended to oversell the state of the the current offering (i.e. pre-release) that raises gamers’ ire.
    - maccard 7y ago
      Have you worked on a product that has had to show a vertical slice 2 years before the product is released? I've worked on a few e3/e3-like demos for games and there's a whole bunch of issues. It's not always quality - things that were considered "easy" or "we can solve that later" can come back and bite you. Things that are fun in a vertical slice demo might not actually be engaging for more than 15 minutes or so(or an hour, or three). It can be _very_ difficult to extract a 10 minute piece of gameplay that you have some context for to show people even if you have the entire game made, which means you might have to out in some temporary "features" (add a power/remove a pathway) to make the experience fit. All or these changes can have a butterfly effect. Adding X to simplify a demo can make Y seem more important than you want it to which means Z is now redundant, but you've already spoken about Z. There had to be done realisation that things change in games over a 2 year period, (heck, things change massively in games over a 2 week period in some games) and some acceptance of that fact.

wazanator 7y ago

I thought Dead Island was fine from a gameplay perspective which is what I bought it on because I learned early on in life that you shouldn't buy games before reviews drop.

jedimastert 7y ago

The problem there lies that there's almost zero chance that the game you see @ E3 will be the exact same game that gets released 6 months down the line. Sure, you could just stop development, but then you're just wasting 6 months you could be spending making the game better. That could mean adding new mechanics or story, but sometimes you decide that a really cool thing just doesn't fit in to the story you're trying to tell, so you cut it and it's a better game for it. I feel like it's a have your cake and eat it too. That not to mention the industry feedback you get that you could be incorporating.

michaelt 7y ago
Sure, you could just stop development, but then you're just wasting 6 months you could be spending making the game better. I think if people agreed that in every case the released game was strictly better than the E3 demo, that would not be controversial. Seems to me the problem is more when people feel the opposite is happening?

colordrops 7y ago

Just wait until it is out, read reviews, and watch some YouTube videos, then make your purchasing decision. What do you need a pre-release gameplay video for?

ohithereyou 7y ago
Pre-release gameplay is primarily there to fuel the demand for pre-orders. As I mentioned in a previous comment on this article, this is a vestige of the days where limited supply of video games was more common (due to physical media shortages, unknown demand, and the desire to have a bit of word of mouth and exclusivity drive some of the marketing) - with digital distribution for practically all games, unless you want a super special limited edition, there is no reason to pre-order - wait for the game to release and watch some YouTube/Twitch of the game and make up your mind, as you have said.

taurath 7y ago

The hardcore gamers in E3s audience can and will smell BS. The problem is generally all developers have to go off of is the vertical slice, generally created right during E3 and before a lot of the games systems are in place. If you go and tell the whole truth about a game in the development stage, it’s like showing a trailer for a movie without a lot of the VFX actually completed, or even worse. The business wants to know how much hype they can build around a game, and how much money to spend on marketing. And the big titles tend to treat their audience as idiots, because the marketing department tends to treat them as such. There’s a better way, but it goes against how so many companies especially big publishers do things.

sl1ck731 7y ago

In all honesty I don't know how anyone can make 60$ purchases on games without seeing what it looks like. I can't comprehend it at all. Preordering was never even a question for me even before all of the recent issues with it. I just cant understand the mindset for anything other than cult-like franchises. I can only imagine, with contempt, the cube jockey who figured out that distributing game demos was bad for their bottom line.

lbeltrame 7y ago
> In all honesty I don't know how anyone can make 60$ purchases on games without seeing what it looks like. It depends on the game, I'd say. While I'd like often playable demos, I try to document myself on what's available (videos - not trailers - and previews) and if it is interesting to me (but again, I don't really get most of the AAA games, although some of the ones I own may be classified as such). Also, at least releases in Japan and in Asia have actual perks with preordering (and by actual perks I don't mean useless digital items), although that comes as an additional cost.
- lifthrasiir 7y ago
  Some studios also are able to continue to make great (if not greatest) titles. I however think AAA games are generally too broad in scope and have a much greater probability to fail to keep their reputation and/or to live up to the expectation.
ohithereyou 7y ago
Pre-ordering was a way before digital distribution to ensure that you got the game on day 1. I grew up in a tiny little town in Texas where the nearest, non-Walmart video game store was 45 minutes away - this is back in the tail end of the NES, the middle of the SNES, and the dawn of the PlayStation era. The store I went to would often only get between five and ten copies (beyond what was pre-ordered) of a video game on launch day, with a typical waiting period of two to three weeks to get more copies. I vividly remembering pre-ordering video games that sounded interesting, some for as few as $5 that could be transferred to another video game pre-order if I changed my mind. Back then (and still today for physical games in some stores), you could pay the balance when you pick up the game. Today, aside from bullshit pre-order bonuses that the video games companies make exclusive to each retailer, there is very little reason to pre-order - Steam/Origin/GOG/Epic Game Store will not run out of copies - they can copy the bits an infinite number of times. In fact, in the case of some flops (looking at you, Fallout 76, with your nearly 50% price cut within a month of release), it makes no sense to pre-order. The real mind-melter for me is Kickstarting games. Crowd funding is nice and helps projects that would otherwise not be funded, but why would you want to pay for a game that isn't even completely conceptualized yet?

jayd16 7y ago

You seem to think it's a very sinister practice but imagine making a video of what the product you're working on now will look like in two years. Can you do that with what you have now? Will you get it right? We as software engineers aren't great at predicting what we'll have in two weeks. If the community doesn't want to see target renders, good. They derail development anyway

sl1ck731 7y ago
The issue is that it is presented as if it is actual, current gameplay. I don't think anyone would have an issue if there was a giant watermark that said "CONCEPT" across ones that are no where near being represented in the final product yet, but it obvious that these companies are being intentionally deceitful.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Goronmon 7y ago
  I don't think anyone would have an issue if there was a giant watermark that said "CONCEPT" across ones that are no where near being represented in the final product... I'm struggling to think of a diplomatic way to express how naive I feel this statement is, so I'll just leave it at that. The online community doesn't even need real reasons to be angry, they'll make them up at they have to. It's somewhat ridiculous to suggest they aren't capable of ignoring a "CONCEPT" watermark to get riled up about "broken promises".
  - username90 7y ago
    > The online community doesn't even need real reasons to be angry, they'll make them up at they have to. The online community consist of millions of people, of course some of them will always be angry. However when you have millions of people hating you and very few defending you then there are usually a good reason to it, otherwise they don't unite like that. Example: Nintendo announcing that the first game to use their paid subscription pokemon storage system wont actually be able to use all pokemon, and that no game in the future will either, meaning that some pokemon people paid to store and reuse later will never be able to be used. This lead to a lot of hate on the game, including some over the top criticism of the graphics which otherwise wouldn't be an issue but now most of the energy goes towards hating the game so nobody bothers to defend it.

colechristensen 7y ago

What? I don't feel owed gameplay demos at a trade show months or years before release. I'm fine with one a month out or not at all, they're selling me a game not nine months of anticipation.

balaam 7y ago

> the dev's takeaway was "Don't show them any gameplay." The average developer has almost no input into what is and isn't shown at E3. They can present some source material but E3 decisioss like these are made by a marketing company or the publisher.

smadurange 7y ago

One practical way gamers can respond to this is to avoid preorders. That might work.