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Tom Henderson: Hideo Kojima’s New Horror Game is Dubbed “Overdose” [KJP asked for article to be removed, TH said No]

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RedMercury

RedMercury

Blue Venus
Member
Dec 24, 2017
17,734
Figboy said:
Thank you for taking the time to read my post!

And I definitely get why people would be excited to see leaks of what projects are being worked on! There was absolutely a time where I was also excited for leaks, but after working in the gaming industry for as long as I have, and being on the receiving end of how leaks can affect the team/project, it's definitely changed my perspective on them, and I find them rather distasteful. Especially in regards to the clout chasers who are clearly just trying to gain followers/support/etc, for leaking privileged and confidential information.

To your point, I find it hard to even get excited about a rumor of a "new Silent Hill in development," because I know how often things can change. As a huge Silent Hill, I'd absolutely love for a new game to be coming in that series. But I personally prefer to wait until things are officially confirmed, by the source, before I get excited. It's saved me a lot of personal disappointment as a result, and I'm glad for it. Lol



To be honest, you'd think that, but if anything gaming forums have taught me over the last few decades, is that many, many gamers, are not "calm and reasonable" people. You had people getting frothy mouthed angry about missing water puddles. Being angry at misleading marketing is absolutely understandable, and believe me, I've been burned by buying into marketing and then the game I bought was nothing like it (looking at you, Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen 2...sigh). But from my experience, even that marketing can be unintentional. You'd be surprised how kept in the dark some development teams are when it comes to what marketing is doing with their work. It's not like the dev team are the ones cutting a trailer together, or designing the box art.

spoilering for length:
There have certainly been moments where the team learns that marketing said X,Y,Z, because of some misunderstanding of a design document or change list, and it went to print before it was too late to take back. Obviously, there are always intentionally misleading marketing (I'm not that naive lol), but, yeah, I've seen first hand where those kind of errors can happen, and it just reflects badly on everyone, and believe me, the team is usually rather livid when their work has been mis-represented. There are also instances where the marketing was created prior to certain features having to be removed for whatever reason; perhaps the feature just wasn't working properly and had to be scrapped, or a game breaking bug was discovered before the master disc was printed, and the feature had to be cut, but, due to how the game development process works, marketing materials and box arts were already in production, with the feature listed in them, and they couldn't be recalled. That latter situation, from my experience, was more common when games couldn't easily be patched via internet updates.

In general, I'd keep this in mind: the vast majority of people making video games would never want to intentionally mislead or lie to gamers. Without the gamers, we'd have no jobs. No livelihoods. We wouldn't be able to do the work we're so passionate about that we work 10-16 hour days, 6-7 days a week to produce for you all to enjoy. On top of that, we take pride in our work, and don't want to put our names on something we aren't proud of, or feel is the best work we can do given the time/budget/resources we have at our disposal. It's our rep on the line. Our good will and trust that gets destroyed by disappointed and angry gamers. The last thing we want is to disappoint the player. The people at the top may care about how much money they'll potentially lose in pissing off gamers, but the devs themselves care more about how the gamers feel when playing our games. And we want them to be entertained. Period. Because we're gamers too. We also want to be entertained, moved, excited, blown away, by the games we play. That we have the opportunity to be an actual part of the game making process, and putting our "stamp" on the industry via our projects, is one of the few joys this industry provides us, sometimes.

I think we've all felt burned by a project that mislead us, and, of course, there will be examples of shitty management that lies and bullshits to get our money, but largely, it's not the devs themselves trying to be snake oil salesmen. It's also one of the reasons why large trade shows like E3, where, often, the teams were showing off games years in advance, were such stressful periods. There's always a chance that that epic live demo of your kickass game may have to pivot 6 months down the line, and be largely different than what you got. As someone who was beyond excited for Cyberpunk 2077, I keenly remember losing my shit over that 45 minute gameplay demo, and then discover that the vast majority of those features weren't even in the final game (I actually still enjoy a lot of CP2077, but it's not an exaggeration to say that it isn't even really close to what was shown off back in its reveal, years before it released).

To your latter point, yeah, Kojima has a lot of currency with the gaming populace, but the gaming industry isn't made up of thousands of Kojimas. Even still, Kojima's productions aren't immune to the realities of game development. Just because we don't hear a ton about what goes on during the productions of his games, doesn't mean that there haven't been scrapped concepts, game design pivots, removed features, etc, etc. Besides, his reveals are often so damn enigmatic that most of the time, unless it's a Metal Gear sequel, we have no idea what the hell the game is even going to be about! Lol. Look at the Death Stranding reveal. That trailer was cool as shit, but did it really tell us anything about what type of game we were going to be playing outside of tone/atmosphere? It's usually much later that we'll get another trailer that sheds a little more light on the gameplay, and that's largely when those concepts/mechanics, are locked down to where there will probably be little to no major alterations to it.

And like you said, smaller studios, that don't have a big name like Kojima attached to it (and I can't stress enough that Kojima is just one man, of a team filled with talented, capable developers that produce the titles he slaps his name on and is creative director of), can't afford to really bullshit or mislead, with their projects. And because they aren't a Kojima, or a Miyamoto, or a Miyazaki, that's even more reason for them to be as secretive and guarded when it comes to leaks, because the value of their really cool concept/mechanics/design, is even higher in relation to their standing in the industry.

Kojima's team also isn't immune to the stress/tension that leaks can cause within the studio. If the leak is internal, that's the worst kind, because then you have people being suspicious of one another within the team itself. If the leak is external (ie, gaming press that got an early look at the project, blabbed the details to someone, and then that person leaks the info), it still sucks, but at least you can potentially clamp down on the level of access you grant outside parties. And that also sucks, because then the studio is treating those outside parties like "the enemy," and it works against getting the word out about your game.

And like I said before, there is a little bit of fun on our end when we get to reveal our project to a surprised and delighted gaming public. It's a little thing, but it does make all of the hard work seem worth it when an unsuspecting public sees your company logo, and then freak out at the curtain finally being raised on this thing you've been toiling away on. It's just a little disappointing when a leak sucks a little wind out of those sails. It's not the most important negative factor of leaks/insiders spoiling things, just one of those little things that kind of sucks.

I know I personally enjoy reading reactions when we announce a new character, especially if it's a highly requested, anticipated character, but we've also had leaks of some characters that felt bad, especially not knowing who the leakers were. Some we discovered, and appropriate action was taken, others, we had no idea, and that stresses the team out, and makes us very, very nervous whenever we start work on new characters. It's just not a fun feeling, that's for sure.
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Thanks Fig, I went to sleep early last night and wanted to make sure t thank you for your insightful posts.

I still like leaks as an end consumer but I think you have made a valid case for them not to be demanded or necessarily celebrated. So people should probably not do it but if it happens, I think i will still read about it and be like "oh neat"
 
Handsome James

Handsome James

Member
Aug 23, 2018
2,393
What a wild thread. I'm very excited for Kojima's new project, and I will definitely tune in to SGF now. I wasn't planning on it after Geoff told us to reel in expectations, so + 1 for this leak helping the marketing machine

It's very jarring how people react to Tom's leaks about EA or CoD (no one cares about the developers), to this. Or how no one ever had had a problem with Jason leaking stuff.
 
MorshuTheTrader

MorshuTheTrader

Member
Oct 27, 2017
1,409
Indy in the Fridge said:
Leaks are inherent to this industry and Kojima knows that. He tried using his reputation to throw his weight around and get Henderson to remove the article. There's also a 90% chance that a bunch of Kojima stans are bombing Henderson's DMs with threats and insults. Even people in this thread are trying to imply some nefarious implication in Henderson's tweets or outright accusing him of just being an asshole to poor wittle Kojima for "reasons."
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This right here. People getting too salty about a company's marketing plans being disrupted a bit. The secrecy and hype culture of video games is already starting to die (look at all the recent announcements of "we're working X, come join us") so hopefully people get over it soon
 
Lord Fanny

Lord Fanny

Member
Apr 25, 2020
26,079
J 0 E said:
Can I say something a bit controversial?
I think this is one of the examples when leaks suck.
Obviously, Kojima has a unique idea in mind that only he can properly communicate to us in a intriguing way. But with these leaks, it's very confusing and dare I say, disappointing.
Let me put it this way, if you loved Death Stranding so much, imagine if some one had leaked its minute to minute gameplay and the whole concept in text form? Would you have reacted as favorably to it as you did after you actually played the game and beat it?
I doubt it. It would have sounded weird AF.
In other words, this leak robbed Kojima of his moment.
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I think I would have hated it more honestly. Reading about the game helped soften the blow, though I still hated it from a gameplay perspective regardless. Weird take.
 
Yan

Yan

Member
Oct 29, 2017
1,515
Will they use an in house engine? Can't imagine they'll be using Decima for an xbox project.
 
Ovvv

Ovvv

Attempted to circumvent ban with alt account
Banned
Jan 11, 2019
10,030
Terbinator said:
I'm not sure if this is irony or not but there are lots of cases of investigative journalism, leaks, and transfers being announced before clubs and players by concrete personalities and journalists around the world.
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The post I replied to was asking about fan outrage coming from those leaks.
 

Atom

Member
Jul 25, 2021
11,692
PLASTICA-MAN said:
What happened to that rumored controversial Kojima trauma game about circumcision going bad?
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That wiki stuff went unhinged real quick. I remember reading the headlines and thinking "oh raising awareness about circumcision? Fair enough I can get behind that, maybe it makes sense in the context of the game" but then the talk page devolves into massive walls of unhinged insults and conspiracy.

Reddit - Dive into anything

www.reddit.com www.reddit.com

For those who have not been enlightened.

Edit holy fuck 40,000 edits.
 
Ra

Ra

Rap Genius
Moderator
Oct 27, 2017
12,299
Dark Space
Zor said:
Why are you conflating leaks to just be about protecting marketing plans? We've had two threads now with feedback from developers clearly outlining the many myriad ways that leaks can be harmful to what they do and threaten peoples' livelihoods, whether that be in development or on the business side.

Surprised to see this from a mod to be honest.
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If I had a dollar every time I got the "disappointed to see this from a mod berating", I'd have... well like $10 maybe. But still.
 
Zor

Zor

Member
Oct 30, 2017
11,469
Ra said:
If I had a dollar every time I got the "disappointed to see this from a mod berating", I'd have... well like $10 maybe. But still.
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I just can't get on board with the assessment that the only thing leaks hurt is marketing with the implication of "but who cares about those people anyway because marketing".

Whether they are writing the code themselves or working hard trying to come up with the best ways to reveal something to help maximise its impact, the bottom line is that leaks can affect the livelihoods of a number of people.

These are all people with jobs who want the best for what they are working on.

People should have more empathy.
 
PLASTICA-MAN

PLASTICA-MAN

Member
Oct 26, 2017
23,948
Ashes of Dreams said:
Greatly looking forward to all the conspiracies about how this is actually Silent Hill because it has a flashlight.
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Remember when Death Stranding was supposed to be Silent Hills till the last moments. You will never be able to stop such judgments especially when Kojima intentionally puts sole materials to trigger such ideas on purpose. XD
 
Ashes of Dreams

Ashes of Dreams

Fallen Guardian of Unshakable Resolve
Member
May 22, 2020
14,746
PLASTICA-MAN said:
Remember when Death Stranding was supposed to be Silent Hills till the last moments. You will never be able to stop such judgments especially when Kojima intentionally puts sole materials to trigger such ideas on purpose. XD
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You wish it was till the last moments. People are still waiting for Chapter 3. Any day now the ruse will be revealed.
 
LycanXIII

LycanXIII

The Fallen
Oct 26, 2017
10,064
Angie said:
Tom is a freelancer right?
Not sure how smart it is to upset gaming websites and journalists.

But leak away, we are always here to discuss it.
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Yeah, and this could hurt the sites that are currently publishing him. Why would a Kojima publisher ever invite TryhardGames to an event now?
 
PLASTICA-MAN

PLASTICA-MAN

Member
Oct 26, 2017
23,948
Angie said:
Awesome question.
I have no idea lol
I just tagged you because you are more knowledgeable about SH than me.
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About those three dots: they are a simplified version of seal/sign called halo of the sun that Kojima used in P.T. to implicitely indicate it was Silent Hill without disclosing it directly if it was the full sign. So if the game over(dose) screen is authentic, Kojima could be again teasing stuff or just trolling.
 
Gavalanche

Gavalanche

Prophet of Regret
Member
Oct 21, 2021
18,055
Grubb just said he does not believe this is the xbox game, but he is not 100% sure.
 
Reynolds Woodcock

Reynolds Woodcock

Member
Oct 27, 2017
1,010
I thought the rumor on Gematsu was bull, but after the logo with the suns, maybe Kojima is working on Silent Hill after all and Overdose is a PT style teaser game on phones.
 
Phantom_Snake

Phantom_Snake

The Fallen
Jul 26, 2018
3,812
Montana
Gavalanche said:
Grubb just said he does not believe this is the xbox game, but he is not 100% sure.
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Hmmm... he's probably basing it off of his previous knowledge, which I believe all he knew at the time was that a letter of intent was signed but not an actual game contract. Can't wait for tomorrow to have some of these questions answered. Hopefully lol
 
Cipherr

Cipherr

Member
Oct 26, 2017
13,490
jelly said:
Leaking stuff like this close to big reveals is as lame as when people posted "first" in news stories and threads.
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NediarPT88 said:


If this is a SGF thing and journalists are already aware of the game, then this "reporting" is seriously lame.
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This sums it up better than I ever could. It's not always about 'protecting reveals'. Sometimes its just people pointing out that it was a lame thing to do, which in this case it REALLY was.
 
PlanetSmasher

PlanetSmasher

The Abominable Showman
Member
Oct 25, 2017
116,857
jaymzi said:
Be hilarious if Overdose is just another PT for his actual full horror game.
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Honestly, that would just be boring. He pulled that stunt once, why bother doing it again? Just announce the damn game, don't waste everyone's time developing a fake game to advertise a different game.
 
Ovvv

Ovvv

Attempted to circumvent ban with alt account
Banned
Jan 11, 2019
10,030
PlanetSmasher said:
Honestly, that would just be boring. He pulled that stunt once, why bother doing it again? Just announce the damn game, don't waste everyone's time developing a fake game to advertise a different game.
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Okay, but what if the trailer is propped up as Overdose throughout and is then revealed to be Silent Hill at the end?

I know you're not into the Kojima-SH thing as is anyway
 
PlanetSmasher

PlanetSmasher

The Abominable Showman
Member
Oct 25, 2017
116,857
Ovvv said:
Okay, but what if the trailer is propped up as Overdose throughout and is then revealed to be Silent Hill at the end?

I know you're not into the Kojima-SH thing as is anyway
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I'd still extremely disappointed, because Kojima would make an aggressively awful Silent Hill, but at least we wouldn't be wasting a ton of time hyping up a weird demo that won't even accurately represent the real game they're making.

Just make something entirely new, please.
 
Drachen

Drachen

Member
May 3, 2021
5,879
Leaks are fine to me, but it IS kinda lame to leak something that's seemingly going to be announced soon. Like I'd rather just have not known and been surprised/hyped by the initial announcement.

I just hope it's not a mobile game or else my heart will break.
 
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