So you're arguing semantics?
It's a business transaction. Whether the customer willingly pays for the preorder is irrelevant. You can't market one thing and deliver something else in most industries.
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Downgrade Controversies Are Toxic and We Should Take Care To Avoid Feeding Into Them In The Future
- Thread starter Crossing Eden
- Start date
So you're arguing semantics?
It's a business transaction. Whether the customer willingly pays for the preorder is irrelevant. You can't market one thing and deliver something else in most industries.
How is it a false equivalency though?
What I said is exactly the same as a game showcasing advance AI in trailer and dumbing it down in the final release. In fact, you could replace AI with lighting, textures, animations or any other aspect of the game that persuades people to buy it....similar to a car.
Why should a customer expect a worse product when all the marketing he's been shown has been highlighting key features which are not in the final release?
No, I'm saying the consumer has control of the money, and is in charge of its spending. We hear a lot of "the customer is always right", but I believe that "buyer beware" also applies. (And also, "a fool and his/her/their money is soon parted", in the specific case of buying a game before it comes out)
Money is money, I don't get this corporate defending you guys do.
They have marketing and PR that gets paid for that job. Don't ever expect less than, what was advertised.
OP
OP
There are reasonable people yes but when people who have 100s of thousands of impressionable fans react negatively that frowns out a lot of reasonable people.
Because cars and video games are two entirely different things with two entirely different established marketing strategies for two entirely different markets.
That's a pretty weird view on consumer protection.
Just because consumers should be vigilant, doesn't mean companies have carte blanche to advertise one thing and deliver another. This wouldn't be controversial in any other industry, so I'm not sure why it is for videogames.
Because cars and video games are two entirely different things with two entirely different established marketing strategies for two entirely different markets.
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They are both products you buy with money that have advertising campaigns. Why are you bent on give studios a pass for false advertisement?
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They are both products you buy with money that have advertising campaigns. Why are you bent on give studios a pass for false advertisement?
Isn't marketing footage usually accompanied with footnotes to the effect of "Preliminary footage may not be representative of final product." ? How hard is it to assume this is always the case with marketing material, especially with videogames that go through iterative processes, meaning some things might get cut?
No man, that was totally cool because in the 2017 wasn't even a game and they had no idea what they wanted to make other than a game with a legally distinct Iron Man in it.
And Cyberpunk on the PS4? Totally not anyone's fault.
Outside extreme cases like the puddle farce, which I actually suspect was largely due to trolling, I feel "mainstream" downgrade drama is becoming less and less frequent and will be more or less gone as we approach the next generation. Obviously, I'm not a game developer so I might be missing things in my reasoning here. My views are based on books, articles, and conversations with dev buddies and it basically boils down to this:
- Screenshots are becoming less common in milestone reveal/announcement contexts, reducing the risk of misrepresentation or gamer imaginations running wild. It's becoming more normal to reveal the actual game (not counting CG teasers etc) through video footage and follow with screenshots later.
- Image quality is generally very consistent throughout its life in the public eye, often improving in the final release or with patches. High render resolutions and modern AA techniques have been eliminating aliasing and shimmering for years already.
- Gameplay/in-game footage is revealed much closer to release than before and I suspect this will continue as previously announced games are released and new projects are started. Tools, middleware, engines, etc have advanced significantly during the last 2-3 years alone and the shift to standardized tools and workflows, combined with the increasing ease of multi-platform development, will make realistic graphic and performance targets easier to lock.
Unfortunately, I fear it won't matter that much on the enthusiast scene, even if I'm right. The discourse is just gonna get more specific as we've already seen examples of. Spider-Man always looked amazing, and it's actually kinda crazy how far we've come in terms of fidelity, that gamers are crying over fucking puddles. Just a couple of years ago, the same people would be busy claiming "bullshots" and "lying devs" because the screenshots lacked jaggies and low-resolution artifacts.
- Screenshots are becoming less common in milestone reveal/announcement contexts, reducing the risk of misrepresentation or gamer imaginations running wild. It's becoming more normal to reveal the actual game (not counting CG teasers etc) through video footage and follow with screenshots later.
- Image quality is generally very consistent throughout its life in the public eye, often improving in the final release or with patches. High render resolutions and modern AA techniques have been eliminating aliasing and shimmering for years already.
- Gameplay/in-game footage is revealed much closer to release than before and I suspect this will continue as previously announced games are released and new projects are started. Tools, middleware, engines, etc have advanced significantly during the last 2-3 years alone and the shift to standardized tools and workflows, combined with the increasing ease of multi-platform development, will make realistic graphic and performance targets easier to lock.
Unfortunately, I fear it won't matter that much on the enthusiast scene, even if I'm right. The discourse is just gonna get more specific as we've already seen examples of. Spider-Man always looked amazing, and it's actually kinda crazy how far we've come in terms of fidelity, that gamers are crying over fucking puddles. Just a couple of years ago, the same people would be busy claiming "bullshots" and "lying devs" because the screenshots lacked jaggies and low-resolution artifacts.
On top of that, they tend to only really come to the fore during a hardware launch.
You can go too far with showing games early. They arent showing trailers or demos, they are literally doing whats almost a live devlog of what theyre working on.
Also we havent seen how that game will sell tbh. Maybe it pays off. The recent videos have had a more positive reception ive noticed.
The valid discussions have also been made less relevant with most recent games having graphics options on consoles. It certainly helped a bit for the resolution vs framerate debate, but many games also have toggles for more "contested" and subjective settings like motion blur or chromatic aberration.
I mean we should be more understanding about downgrades and its surrounding circumstances but they do love pushing people to pre-order stuff and shit huh.
Not being allowed to spkea about product you paid for, not living up to your expectations is certainly awful take.
Far from all prerelease trailers do it, and they only started doing so after some previous big bullshot controversies in the first place. Turns out calling publishers out on it does lead to improvements!
Downgrade controversies happen way before you pay your product.
Obviously. If they first show off bs trailers, then shortly 1 month before release the "release trailer", I still feel you can criticise what changed.
As soon as a game is announced, preorders will go up so don't even need trailers or vertical slices to do that!
Soft disagree.
You should criticize the BS trailer when it's shown off, no more, no less. Most downgrade controversies are predictable, but people prefer to believe BS trailers because confirmation bias and all.
And if you do that, then on Era and before on Gaf "Wait till the game is out."
You dont even know its a BS trailer when it hits as it could become like that and often there isnt even evidence its not real ingame (most of the time).
If it's done in a non toxic way I think it's perfectly okay to complain when a game has a huge downgrade from the first announcement till release.
Especially if the announcement trailer has straight up lies or if the game turns from a mario 64 into a bubsy 3d.
There are even times when a studio uses the criticism to make a better product.
Especially if the announcement trailer has straight up lies or if the game turns from a mario 64 into a bubsy 3d.
There are even times when a studio uses the criticism to make a better product.
The Division's trailer was clearly bullshit, from the moment I saw it. Hell, I even called it out as fake in the reveal thread.
My only issue is don't present a fake trailer. I don't care about slight changes, but don't slap together something that the final product can't measure up to - just to get that preorder money.
It's still a marketing trailer, it's based on the designs they have and the people on the marketing teams to make based on that to show it... Rarely(if ever) are the downgrade controversy trailers in engine, or if they are they're gassing up what it can possibly do on a machine that can do way better than anyone's computer could ever reasonably think to achieve.
So, the fast food burger analogy stands.
OP
OP
The overall point is that most developers don't slap together something that they knows beforehand isn't feasible but will drive sales
Films learned to release trailers late. Thor 4 comes out in 3 months and we haven't seen a second of footage yet.
Games could start doing that too, then there would be no downgrade controversies because there would be no downgrades, because we won't expect to see gameplay of games which need another year or two in the oven before they are ready to be released.
I also think that consumers should not be required to check the date a trailer was released in order to gauge how a game looks. If someone saw that Watch Dogs or Division reveal trailers only, then went to purchase the games they'd feel straight up scammed.
Downgrade controversies are good because they put pressure on publishers, where it should be put. Consumers should not have to investigate whether they're actually buying what they just saw in an ad.
Games could start doing that too, then there would be no downgrade controversies because there would be no downgrades, because we won't expect to see gameplay of games which need another year or two in the oven before they are ready to be released.
I also think that consumers should not be required to check the date a trailer was released in order to gauge how a game looks. If someone saw that Watch Dogs or Division reveal trailers only, then went to purchase the games they'd feel straight up scammed.
Downgrade controversies are good because they put pressure on publishers, where it should be put. Consumers should not have to investigate whether they're actually buying what they just saw in an ad.
Most developers don't, but Ubi Soft has done it quite often.
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They didn't either. Watch Dogs and The Division looking like that in early demos wasn't the result of an intention to mislead. Especially since the tech used to build them exists in the final game, just not as consistently curated. Hell same with Far Cry 3, aspects of which look better in the final game compared to the demo, because of optimization/priorities.
I don't think intent is all that relevant when it's practically impossible for a customer to accurately deduce what a company's intent is, outside of generating revenue. The result is still the same no matter the intent; i.e. people being disappointed or misled by the marketing material. It's not really reasonable to put the responsibility on customers when companies are the only ones able to do something about this.
Stop making excuses for marketing teams. Companies go out of their way to foster this kind of behaviour by pretending vertical slices are the final product, they don't get to complain when they get the other extreme of unreasonable expectations.
You don't make this kind of shit if your intention isn't to mislead. This ain't a Red Hot Chilli Peppers music video.
They literally called the Watch Dogs reveal a "game demo" in their own channel. The entire walkthrough is made in a way to make people think it's being played by a person, showing off HUD and gameplay elements, transitions between cutscenes and "gameplay" and so on, and this was all in the cusp of the "next gen" hype, trying to make people reaaaaaaaally believe the PS4 was capable of that kind of game.
You don't make this kind of shit if your intention isn't to mislead. This ain't a Red Hot Chilli Peppers music video.
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They call it a game demo because it technically is one. It's not a target render video. If it was it would look way smoother. It's a heavily curated demo, one that most likely has a ton of scripting to sell the "gameplay" but a demo nonetheless.
Who does this?
So there's this really nifty article in the OP that's worth reading now you have two choices, assume that the teams behind demo are willingly trying to deceive you, or actually read that accounts of people who have worked on such things and how they're indicative of the average developer's experience of the matter. Including multiple people ITT btw.
This is the problem that I keep seeing people gloss over. It doesn't matter whether the developers/publisher actively tried to deceive people or not, when the customer feels that the end product does not match what was advertised.
In no other industry would un/intentional misleading marketing be excused or spark such a heated discussion, but for some reason we're on day 2 of this thread with some folks still telling us why it's okay when it happens in the gaming industry. And also telling us why it's actually the customers' fault.
User Banned (3 Days): Inappropriate Point of Comparison
So Crossing Eden
Let's say a game is announced and it features a strong, well-realized female protagonist with a modest design
They use this character for marketing and trailers during the year and a half leading to release since the announcement
Then people get the game on release date and she's been replaced with an anime waifu wearing a bikini
The gameplay is the same, the graphics are the same, just the main character was changed without warning
Would people complaining about it still be toxic?
Let's say a game is announced and it features a strong, well-realized female protagonist with a modest design
They use this character for marketing and trailers during the year and a half leading to release since the announcement
Then people get the game on release date and she's been replaced with an anime waifu wearing a bikini
The gameplay is the same, the graphics are the same, just the main character was changed without warning
Would people complaining about it still be toxic?
Night and day difference between what they show and how the final product turns out. The Division trailer was entirely CGI as far as I'm concerned. Far too much detail in the police side being shot to little pieces. That wasn't done in engine.
Red Steel's print ads were all Bull shots as well.
I mean, you can defend them on this - but they have quite a track record for it. One that other publishers don't.
"Its not misleading as a demo can just mean demonstration".
They did the same with Rainbow Six Siege and called it "Gameplay reveal" when the game in the end didnt look like that at all. You can argue "Yeah. They revealed the gameplay and the gameplay is mostly the same" which is dumb. They did it to drive up hype...
There has to be a line somewhere. There's a difference between showing a game in early development that can change before release and a trailer drummed up to deceive it's audience.
So... there's a couple of points here to digest. Because this is a very complex issue.
1. I see a lot of people saying 'don't market the game too early'. Most of the time that's unfeasible. For a game to be announced/shown 6 months before release let's say and then get good sales it must be a VERY popular franchise with VERY good standing and a VERY trusted developer (even Nintendo doesn't always have that amount of trust!). Hype cycle is something that regrettably HAS to happen for a considerable amount of time for a game to get traction (there are a lot of projects that have failed sales-wise because they didn't gain the proper marketing traction timeline-wise).
2. When it comes to marketing early, we get to a catch-22 situation. Be absolutely honest and showcase what the game really is (which is, 75% of it would be a broken mess), people will be like, 'what the fuck is this shit'. So, some segments are polished up specifically for those demos, some WIP mechanics are scripted to represent what the developers want those features to become in the end.
3. And here we get to the No Man's Sky situation. The 'lies'. This is actually part of the reason why many developers try to be as secretive as possible and show/announce things that they're SURE are gonna make it. Because if something is announced, and then not put in the final release of the game, that is considered to be a 'lie' now. Which is really not true. 99% of the time developers do not lie, because at the moment they're talking about a certain feature they're working on it and expecting it to be in. And sometimes features have to be literally cut last moment because even though all the important parts seem to be there it just doesn't work, or after scaled up testing you start seeing that everything just falls apart and it's better not to have that feature.
When it comes to No Man's Sky in particular, it's a shame what has happened, but let's remember that it's a project that, at the time, was essentially made by 15 very excited about their game people with little marketing skills. They worked on a lot of cool stuff and they wanted to share about it, because they fully expected that to be in the game. Only it didn't turn out that way in the end. And also there's the fact that NMS didn't really have anyone versed in marketing so they didn't have a 'stopper' that would prevent some of those situations, but that's a different issue.
Some of the most beloved games out there have a bunch of stuff that was faked in their demos (because it wasn't ready) that was used to hype up people and then by the end of the dev cycle the devs managed to implement that feature. This happens much more often than you can imagine. Most of the time it isn't talked about because it's not a fail and just seen 'as expected', and it's the fails that are discussed because that's the situation where the developers didn't manage to meet the targets they were aiming for.
Again, yeah, sometimes there are active bullshit marketing pushes. That happens. But those are the exceptions.
At the end of the day games are a mess of different stages of brokenness until the final months before release, there's really no 'best moment' to show it to the world in a way that's fully, let's call it, 'honest', i.e. showing the game in its actual state. Because showing games in their actual state will lead to many potential buyers thinking that that's what it's gonna be on release, just due to the emotional reaction ('oh this looks like shit', - now 'shit' is associated with that game, even if by release it gets insanely polished), so stuff is prettied up and whatnot.
Even when it comes to publishing deals - you can't really show potential publishers a version of a game that's WIP. You have to either show some CLEARLY not completed thing full of placeholders and stuff, OR a very polished sort of vertical slice demo. Anything inbetween will sour the the impression, and we're talking about pitching to people IN the industry who should know better really, but that's just how human mind works.
This is why this is such a complicated question. You want to market the game early so it would have better chances to make a profit on release, and you want to market it in such a way that shows what it would be on release, but you can't do that without a lot of custom/scripted things because at that moment the game would be mostly broken because that's how games are while in progress.
1. I see a lot of people saying 'don't market the game too early'. Most of the time that's unfeasible. For a game to be announced/shown 6 months before release let's say and then get good sales it must be a VERY popular franchise with VERY good standing and a VERY trusted developer (even Nintendo doesn't always have that amount of trust!). Hype cycle is something that regrettably HAS to happen for a considerable amount of time for a game to get traction (there are a lot of projects that have failed sales-wise because they didn't gain the proper marketing traction timeline-wise).
2. When it comes to marketing early, we get to a catch-22 situation. Be absolutely honest and showcase what the game really is (which is, 75% of it would be a broken mess), people will be like, 'what the fuck is this shit'. So, some segments are polished up specifically for those demos, some WIP mechanics are scripted to represent what the developers want those features to become in the end.
3. And here we get to the No Man's Sky situation. The 'lies'. This is actually part of the reason why many developers try to be as secretive as possible and show/announce things that they're SURE are gonna make it. Because if something is announced, and then not put in the final release of the game, that is considered to be a 'lie' now. Which is really not true. 99% of the time developers do not lie, because at the moment they're talking about a certain feature they're working on it and expecting it to be in. And sometimes features have to be literally cut last moment because even though all the important parts seem to be there it just doesn't work, or after scaled up testing you start seeing that everything just falls apart and it's better not to have that feature.
When it comes to No Man's Sky in particular, it's a shame what has happened, but let's remember that it's a project that, at the time, was essentially made by 15 very excited about their game people with little marketing skills. They worked on a lot of cool stuff and they wanted to share about it, because they fully expected that to be in the game. Only it didn't turn out that way in the end. And also there's the fact that NMS didn't really have anyone versed in marketing so they didn't have a 'stopper' that would prevent some of those situations, but that's a different issue.
Some of the most beloved games out there have a bunch of stuff that was faked in their demos (because it wasn't ready) that was used to hype up people and then by the end of the dev cycle the devs managed to implement that feature. This happens much more often than you can imagine. Most of the time it isn't talked about because it's not a fail and just seen 'as expected', and it's the fails that are discussed because that's the situation where the developers didn't manage to meet the targets they were aiming for.
Again, yeah, sometimes there are active bullshit marketing pushes. That happens. But those are the exceptions.
At the end of the day games are a mess of different stages of brokenness until the final months before release, there's really no 'best moment' to show it to the world in a way that's fully, let's call it, 'honest', i.e. showing the game in its actual state. Because showing games in their actual state will lead to many potential buyers thinking that that's what it's gonna be on release, just due to the emotional reaction ('oh this looks like shit', - now 'shit' is associated with that game, even if by release it gets insanely polished), so stuff is prettied up and whatnot.
Even when it comes to publishing deals - you can't really show potential publishers a version of a game that's WIP. You have to either show some CLEARLY not completed thing full of placeholders and stuff, OR a very polished sort of vertical slice demo. Anything inbetween will sour the the impression, and we're talking about pitching to people IN the industry who should know better really, but that's just how human mind works.
This is why this is such a complicated question. You want to market the game early so it would have better chances to make a profit on release, and you want to market it in such a way that shows what it would be on release, but you can't do that without a lot of custom/scripted things because at that moment the game would be mostly broken because that's how games are while in progress.
User Warned: Antagonizing Fellow Member
TIL It's okay to mislead in marketing because they don't intend to be misleading.
Crossing Eden its okay to have wrong takes sometimes, I know you think you have The Correct Take but you don't need to double down so much so that you're now defending dishonest marketing.
Crossing Eden its okay to have wrong takes sometimes, I know you think you have The Correct Take but you don't need to double down so much so that you're now defending dishonest marketing.
If it's a kojima game than it's just his genius
ofc kojima would never have a strong well realized female protagonist but that's why hypotheticals are fun
People shouldn't harass or threaten others online, the folks that do that are psychos. Also, people should better understand that games are made by several different groups/organizations each with their own priorities and each acting in their own self interests. So much is directed at "developers" when many times the people making the decisions you aren't crazy about aren't developers at all.
Beyond that though, keep it within the rules and all, but rest is fair game IMO.
Beyond that though, keep it within the rules and all, but rest is fair game IMO.
Thanks for all of this. We gotta listen to actual developers more and understand how our hobby is made.
I feel like a bunch of people in this thread (and in general) don't understand how game development actually works and/or have unrealistic expectations and don't quite see the nuances. Part of it is that I legit think a lot of us simply need to.... well, chill out. Puddlegate, for instance, is hugely different than the No Man's Sky stuff (though there were legitimate reasons for that), is different from, like, that one Abandoned app. But they're all seen as the same sort of thing, and then you introduce the overreactions from gamers like death threats and such, it's just.... ugh.
It's not entirely dissimilar from movies, either. There's a reason TVTropes, whether you love it or hate it, has an entire page about trailer scenes missing from the final products. It's different given the interactive nature of games versus movies, but I feel like a lot of this boils down to people having absolutely 0 chill and leaping to hyperbolic anger no matter what the situation actually is. We shouldn't put puddle placement and lighting effects on the same level as mobile games that advertise using entirely unrelated footage or the Fallout 76 collector's bag debacle. Everyone's gonna have a different threshold for excitement and expectations, absolutely, but come on.
Could we not with this? That's not the situation OP's talking about at all. A sexist redesign of an established character isn't at all the same thing as devs going with high-fidelity assets instead of ultra-high-fidelity assets to prioritize how the game runs.