10 ms·
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 produ
by 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 agoWhile 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 agoI 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 agoExactly!
- omeid2 7y agoI 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.
- nitwit005 7y agoIt's a bit strange that you're bothering to debate people here if you're so certain that someone pointing out the truth won't have any effect.
- omeid2 7y agoI am not sure it is worth repeating, but as I said, the notion that "internet is scary smart" is only true for certain groups and topics, but not internet as general. That does not mean there is no "smart" forums or smart people on the internet, nor I made any remarks about YC News.
- tty2300 7y agoI think its true in the sense that if enough people are paying attention, all dishonestly and lies will be unraveled. I remember back when simcity 2013 came out EA said that always online was required because the game does a lot of processing on the servers that would be too much for your computer but shortly after someone patched out the code that checks for internet access and discovered that everything in the game except multiplayer still works. The individuals do not have to be smart here, there just has to be one person who will bother.
- omeid2 7y ago> The individuals do not have to be smart here, there just has to be one person who will bother. I don't think it works like that, most social media are a game of numbers, if one smart person was enough, you wouldn't have nonsenses like flat-earth and similar becoming "popular topics".
- ekianjo 7y agoWhy do you conflate the internet with social media?
- na85 7y agoBecause for a significant portion of the global population, those two terms are synonymous.
- ekianjo 7y agoI think you will have to find a strong source to claim that.
- omeid2 7y agoBecause in the context of consumers, that is what internet is, social media and forums (which are social media in my book). Bloggers and other professional reports are a different story.
- 7y ago
- nostromo 7y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_cow_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_cow_problem > The smart cow problem is thought to be derived from the expression: "It only takes one smart cow to open the latch of the gate, and then all the other cows follow.”
- alpaca128 7y agoThe internet probably isn't much smarter than any other community, they just have the highly efficient communication on their side which allows any nobody to easily call out a company and immediately reach a sufficiently large audience. Of course this also allows misinformation to spread more easily.
- z3t4 7y agoNever underestimate stupid people in large groups.
- wyldfire 7y ago> You can see really old school companies really struggle with that. Even GOOG seems to not be immune to this one. They're cited in recent headlines regarding a promotion of RCS but IRL they're abandoning it.
- mattparcher 7y agoCan you expand on your Google comment re. RCS? All I’ve seen recently is that they’re taking the reins from the carriers (at least outside of the US) to speed-up rollout.
- mentos 7y agoReminds me of what John Mayer says about the public when it comes to popular music: https://youtu.be/dkk_OAJXfsM?t=114 https://youtu.be/dkk_OAJXfsM?t=114
- fizwhiz 7y agoGreat share! Also surprisingly reflective for a 2008 JM.
- Vekz 7y agoGreat video thanks for sharing
- x86_64Ubuntu 7y agoHe did a great job of speaking.
- joshdotsmith 7y agoThank you for sharing this! Shared it with my wife over breakfast.
- blueside 7y agoDefinitely don't agree with this. e.g. elections
- Bombthecat 7y agoAnd then I honk about the "boycott call of duty" group, movement whatever game.where,oh surprise,almost everyone played call of duty. The internet might rage,and might call your bluff. Butbas long as it doesn't show in my wallet. Why should I care as a company?
- rjf72 7y agoHere [1] are the sales figures for various Call of Duty titles overtime. Sales have been plummeting. In my opinion this is not because of the promise:reality dissonance but it's clear evidence that people do respond to changing conditions, even in mass market entertainment. The reason this is obfuscated is because let's say sales drop from 30 million to 20 million. That's a critical decline, yet from a consumer perspective it's still 20 million people buying a video game. That's a really big number, and so from our perspective (lots of people buying a product, lots of advertising for it, so forth and so on) things stay mostly the same. As an aside the exact same is true in the movie industry. Ticket sales have been on a sharp decline since about 2002. [2] This is masked by similar effects as above, but there's also another one in the movie industry. They focus on "gross receipts" instead of ticket sales. Gross receipts = tickets_sold x price_per_ticket. Far fewer tickets are being sold, but their costs have gone up. So the whole dissonance about Hollywood releasing increasingly rubbish films because this is what people want is clearly untrue. To be clear this was also not just a clever rebalancing of price:demand. Their inflation adjusted revenues also peaked in 2002. Hollywood's in decline, overhyped games are in decline. It's only our perception that's lagging behind. [1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/321374/global-all-time-unit-sales-call-of-duty-games/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/321374/global-all-time-u... [2] - https://www.the-numbers.com/market/ https://www.the-numbers.com/market/
- Bombthecat 7y agohttps://kotaku.com/what-modern-warfare-2-boycotters-are-playing-5403286 https://kotaku.com/what-modern-warfare-2-boycotters-are-play... The picture I'm talking about...
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- o10449366 7y ago"They will remember everything you ever say for eternity.' Maybe. But outrage that results in meaningful action lasts a few months at most. The first person shooter industry is fascinating to me. Somehow Call of Duty is still extremely popular and commercially successful series year after year despite continued management by the exact same studios that repeat the exact same algorithm: 1. Release re-skinned game each year with huge promises of new and original content to come 2. Underdeliver on said promises and lock remaining ones behind micro-transactions, loot boxes, and DLC 3. Abandon game 6-12 months in to begin preparation for the next iteration of the game after raking in millions on suckers 4. Repeat You'll see thousands of people swearing they'll never pay another $60 + add-ons for a CoD game ever again and yet somehow the cycle continues year after year. There are numerous other video game series (not just in the FPS genre) that follow the same pattern. Some eventually get run into the ground, but only after a very slow and profitable death. People have short attention spans. You might remember touching a flame, but the feeling of pain quickly fades.
- teej 7y agoCall of Duty is like Coca Cola or McDonald’s. When you buy it you know exactly what you’re gonna get. It’s the shooter version of a FIFA game. EA isn’t promising a drastically new game every time.
- flukus 7y ago> EA isn’t promising a drastically new game every time. Every couple of years they promise "completely new engine from the ground up" and deliver an incremental improvement on the previous years. I don't necessarily consider the result a bad thing, but the marketing is always BS.
- gpm 7y agoI don't think that's the point of the quote. If you said 5 years ago that the game was going to include a talking cube, the internet is going to remember that and when you publish is going to expect there to be a talking cube (or accuse you of breaking your promise). The outrage only lasts for a short period of time, but it can be based on promises said ages ago that without the internet would have been long forgotten.
- leonroy 7y agoI think the quote obstensibly attributed to Lincoln is apt: ‘You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.’ The public in aggregate have a perspective that insiders in a company don’t or cannot because of culture or they’re too close to the problem or they’re just being disingenuous. And the public always finds out, sooner or later.
- Bakary 7y agoThere is too much information and too many scandals now. You can be found out but it won't necessarily end in your punishment.
- sametmax 7y agoI wish it were true but EA is still making bank while disrespecting customers, everybody complains yet still buy. Same with Facebook. Same with politicians. A small group of smart people on the internet may do a lot of noise, but it just echoes in the void then it's business as usual.
- jrootabega 7y agoGame publishers are drug dealers. Complain all you want on the internet; you're still addicted to escaping this reality daily/weekly. Kids also don't know or care about this stuff, and they just bug their parents to buy the latest.
- buttsu_ 7y agok, cept I did care when I was a child and I notice kids care today. There is a reason why minecraft and fortnite are more popular than a huge ip or something that would be expected to sell extremely high.
- pnloyd 7y agoFortnite and Minecraft are huge ip though.
- whatshisface 7y agoRight, but they created their own huge-ness instead of buying it from something else that was already huge.
- Bakary 7y agoGaming does have the particularity of being as expensive as you want it to be, or as cheap as you want it to be. I don't think there are many other markets where you can get hundreds of hours of genuine heartfelt value for $15.
- onli 7y agoLook at Bioware. If they hadn't lied about the Mass Effect 3 ending (they promised your decisions matter; but none of them do, you choose at the end between 3 buttons) Andromeda would still have been criticized, but it would have been criticized in a more positive atmosphere. That studio is in a downward spiral ever since. There are additional reasons than those lies, but I'm certain lying to their fans and eroding the loyalty they had (it's after all the studio that made Baldur's Gate) did not help them one bit.
- arrrg 7y agoI think it would be wrong to believe that there isn’t spin happening on the other side, too, and I don’t think that truth wins out in the end. This isn’t enlightened consumers vs evil, lying developers. Sure, the internet will remember everything you ever said, but the question then isn’t whether what you said measures up to the truth, but whether what you said can be spun in a negative way for you. Also, none of this is inevitable or even very predictable.
- JauntyHatAngle 7y agoI don't think it's the developers people are mostly angry at. It's the publishers/higher level execs that people are mostly aiming their anger at.
- arrrg 7y agoThe most toxic, extreme and disgusting hate always seems to target developers. I don’t know if that’s a majority, but I do think that mostly milquetoast boring criticism of large publishers (yeah they suck, sure, what else is new) actually has the largest actual impact here, even if more people share that criticism.
- Fnoord 7y agoDo you have a link to the source? These quotes are very prophetic if you look at Artifact's downfall, or something like Apex Legends.