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

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.

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".

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.

There is usually a "reason" people get riled up online, whether that reason is "good" is usually pretty debatable to most rational people. And claiming that any "good" reason is able to be stretched into all sorts of other criticisms as you state is an even shakier stance to take.

Personally, I'm not convinced that the online gaming community is worth caring about in the aggregate. The community is so dwarfed by people not interesting in participating in arguments about their hobby online that the separation between people who have legit criticisms and people just looking to be angry about something isn't meaningful.

Say you have a million players for a game you've created, and 30,000 of those players participate regularly in online discussions, with 25,000 of them being reasonable and 5,000 being nonsensical (and the 5,000 is largely going to be at least the same if not more vocal than the 25,000). How much time and effort do you really want to spend trying to separate those 25,000 from the 5,000 given your playerbase as a whole?

I think you're wrong about that.

https://i.redd.it/rk5t6snmp8531.jpg

The tree (and background) is from the new Pokemon game, yet it looks perfectly at home in a game released nearly 21 years ago. Game Freak has been pumping out cut rate Pokemon games for years and they deserve every last bit of the hate.

"WORK IN PROGRESS - DOES NOT REPRESENT THE FINAL LOOK OF THE GAME"

As well as having similar messages reiterated by the narrator throughout.

Previously CD Projekt Red was roasted for perceived "downgrades" in The Witcher 3, notably in lighting which CDPR had to change to accommodate the day-night cycle in the game.

That said, hype for Cyberpunk 2077 is incredibly strong right now. We'll get to see whether players really do take disclaimer messaging into account when the final product launches, no doubt with "downgrades" evident in many facets of the game.

The solution to this is showcasing your product when it's much closer to release. I'd welcome the idea of revealing games months before release and some developers already practice this approach, like Borderlands 3.

Hell, I'd even go as far as suggesting a true announce when it's done approach: Take something like Cyberpunk 2077 - just imagine the idea of Keanu Reeves mentioning that it's available...today.

I think that's because our development is supposedly agile and we iterate a lot because we don't know what we're actually building very well (that's not a bad thing). Iteration in game development is much slower and lends itself to a waterfall approach because the developer is the client most of the time. In theory the game should look like a very close approximation of the final version years before its launch.

Given that much of game development is an iterative creative process, you would hope that iteration is much faster than in other development work. Maybe not for the programmers, though.

I don't see how its any more suited to waterfall than any other industry. Sounds like something game devs tell themselves so they feel better about their bad habits, like how crunch is necessary or how automated testing is too hard.

I assume that in the 'game as a service' kind of long going projects it's different, but I don't have that kind of experience.

If the former, then I would say a lot of large companies end up that way (they tell themselves they’re “doing agile” but in reality are really just doing some form of modified waterfall). If the latter, then I will ask: why is that?

Waterfall might make sense if you know up front exactly what you will build, which as an engine developer may well be the case, but for anybody else, I don’t see how a more agile approach short iterations and tight feedback loops wouldn’t produce better results.

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.

"Don't lie" is a very low bar, and there is a lot of room to exist above it.

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?

It’s the curated experience intended to oversell the state of the the current offering (i.e. pre-release) that raises gamers’ ire.

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.

https://youtu.be/yzDTdBsW1GU

Atlas was so bad that they actually found menus from ark in it, i.e. it was a skin. They actually left promotional models in the production game, so at one point cheaters were attacking other pirates with ww2 fighter planes left in from a demo.

Don't use a video that promises things your players won't get.

But AAA game industry doesn't do honest anymore, they do marketing instead.

How is that good intentions? Halo 2 is not an outlier

It's simply marketing spin, gameplay or no gameplay, it's why you can never really trust such hyped up demonstrations and they can only tell you about their product, not show it. That also applies in further interviews on various news outlets.

And E3's reputation for housing flim-flam and lies is well established: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/03

I think another view is how the FF7 remake has been treated for years since its initial announcement. There was hype, skepticism, and finally support.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkFdqqyI8y4

There was some pre-release publicity for many games in development before online gaming. Peter Molyneux was working the press with his famous enthusiasm before 1990: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAuvaAGnqQw . Maybe Rise of the Robots was the first real debacle of pre-release hype, but it was probably as bad as anything since: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4udiQq5gpY .

CD Projekt retained trust because Witcher 3 is an amazing game - not because they delivered games with graphics matching their E3 videos.

I just watched a W2 side-by-side comparison and I really don't see it. Yes, some textures look less sharp in the release version, but only some. The rest seems to just be a colour grading thing. In any case, the two look so similar to me that I don't see what the controversy was about. Also, the enhanced edition, which everyone who bought the release version got for free some months later, included a ton of graphics improvements which make W2 IMHO surpass the E3 demo's visual quality easily.

I was just pointing out that CDPR retains their reputation based on the quality of their games, and not because they deliver a final product that matches gameplay videos presented at E3.

The Xbox version came out about 9 months after the PC version came out, so while they designed it with consoles in mind, I doubt too much of the "downgrade" on PC were because of the console version.

> I was just pointing out that CDPR retains their reputation based on the quality of their games

Yes, absolutely. CDPR aren't immune to criticism and get plenty of it, they just deal with it well and don't suffer from it because they've built a reputation of amazing games and of being consumer friendly. Most of us can overlook the criticism since its quite minor in the grand scheme of things.

I can only imagine, with contempt, the cube jockey who figured out that distributing game demos was bad for their bottom line.

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?

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.

That not to mention the industry feedback you get that you could be incorporating.

  Sure, you could just stop development,
  but then you're just wasting 6 months
  you could be spending making the game
  better.

Seems to me the problem is more when people feel the opposite is happening?

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.