Somebody in the other thread said, "My head sides with Team Schreier and my heart sides with Team Balrog"
Well, that's the point.
I'm giving my personal view, not my team's or my employer's or my industry's.
Stripped of emotional response, feeling, loyalty, excitement, surprise, curiosity and all the other highly personal and subjective states a consumer might have, of
course there's probably some sort of an argument to suggest that you "shouldn't" feel a certain way about a product designed almost 100% to evoke an emotional response. But we have posters in the other thread berating people for even
wanting a surprise. Yelling past each other to demand that a player is exhibiting stockholmn syndrome because they don't want a story or feature spoiled before the event they have planned to watch on Sunday.
I can't really accede to that kind of view. It's not any of your business, is about the best thing I can say to people literally demanding that nobody should wish to be surprised or delighted.
I would certainly never tell you that you
should or
had to enjoy a surprise, that's equally ridiculous. If you
want to read a spoiler or leak thread, who am I to tell you
not to. But if my position is that I'd rather those things
didn't leak, through nefarious, sneaky, lame, sometimes criminal, sometimes accidental, sometimes incompetent reasons, then I'm not sure why that would set me in opposition to you. That position should be perfectly underdstandable. I'd rather it didn't leak. I don't want you jailed for watching that trailer, or prosecuted for posting something you came by legally or ethically. I'd rather you didn't retweet them or post spoilers, but that's about the end of my feeling about that angle as it relates to a civilian consumer of the information.
So partly I'd say that
if you eliminate fraudulent claims or false and misleading "reveals" for very obvious reasons - then
you still have to make a case against the financial and marketing rationale. That is -- to answer a question from another poster in that thread, why
shouldn't good or honest games be marketed in this way in 2019? We have excellent evidence to show that this kind of marketing can be very successful if done right. So movies, games, cars, music and many other industries continue to use it because they have inrefutable evidence and numbers showing that it DOES work. It's not the only way and there's no rule preventing other companies within any of those industries from taking other successful approaches - and they do - all the time. This is not a practice that
automatically harms
anyone - consumer or developer. If it's done wrong, sure, no good, but that's true of everything from tying your shoelaces to going to the bathroom at night.
Now, as for why it sucks for a developer? Well it's obvious. We took a job knowing this was part of its
theater and we worked long hours in tandem with our colleagues to make sure that this piece of the art is as suprising and delightful as possible - and knowing that the release and joy of suprise is almost entirely reliant on the mystery and excitement leading up to that, then those months of work, late nights and passionate advocacy for your part of the project, are at best, hugely corroded and at worst, ruined. So you don't have to have a single drop of sympathy for a developer whose work leaked in an untimely fashion, but you also have no right to tell another type of fan (or its developer) how
they should feel about it
-- and if your argument continues to be that "games should not be marketed like this, period," then I'm afraid the onus is on you to show receipts for that, because the simultaneous views, box office receipts, ticket sales, pre-order numbers, general enthusiasm measured across broad spectra of media and NPD results are all receipts that can be traced back to the nature and success of a reveal. They are not the only outcome of that, but we can measure the connection.
And if there's another more philosophical argument about the nature of secrecy versus openness, then it should not be applied to entertainment designed to evoke an emotional response.
And reporters have a responsibility to report the truth. If something happens, then it's their responsibility to report it. If a trailer leaks, of course they are going to report it. I can't think of a single time this has happened, but I wanted to provide an extreme example where I think no reasonable purpose would be served. But when that veers into the deliberate "investigation" of a mere story element or upcoming game reveal where the investigation becomes the deliberate and legally problematic (theft/trespass etc) exposure of something that serves no public interest or good (such as a loot box scandal or predatory feature) and actively undermines the art itself in a scenario where it would otherwise not have surfaced till it was supposed to, then that becomes something more like vandalism. Or the naked pursuit of commerce. That's the difference between the papparazzi snapping pictures of Tom Brady wearing Uggs to the mall, and a photographer hiding in his crawlspace to snap pictures of Tom Brady showering in his Uggs. Which he does.
1. Don't tell other poeple how to feel about entertainment
2. Don't ruin things out of spite
3. Don't steal or cheat or trespass to leak entertainment
4. Prove the case you're making with data or facts
5. If something has already leaked, have at it
6. If you HAVE to leak, don't merely shart it into the world for the lulz - do something
CREATIVE.
