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[cormack12]

Recent history is always best to refer to, so we've had a couple of big reveals lately.

Hardware, we had the Switch 2, we also had Mario Kart World and we've just had Marathon.

And we seem to have key and important information missing. Mario Kart World has a direct but even now 15 minutes looks a little on the light side for the specific questions I've seen floating round.

Other devs reveal information in installments, and say we will go over that closer to launch. Why? Why tease actually game modes, maps, mechanics etc.

It's really fucking weird and frustrating.

 

[Pejo]

I wanna know who directed and released those Metroid Prime 4 trailers. I am actually less excited after seeing those trailers than I was when I first saw the original logo reveal. I can only assume this is another side effect of toxic positivity on the dev side. Everyone congratulating and fellating each other and not realizing that their trailers and games aren't hitting the mark for their potential audience. They've created a bubble that they live in where stuff like the Marathon trailer only makes themselves hyped about it.

 

[Klosshufvud]

I feel like only Kojima/KojiPro still possess the capabilities to create a geniune sense of hype for their games. Other than that, I can't think of any recent example where a trailer/gameplay footage got me severely hyped up. In most cases, it has the opposite effect of me seeing the patterns of unoriginality and corporate/safe-space taint all over. The same applies to movies. Gone are the days of Man of Steel trailer being played on repeat because it invoked a very powerful story. Even when the end product didn't always live up to it, the trailers themselves have this sort of inherent value despite that.

 

[StueyDuck]

because most of the stuff devs are selling is mostly iterative and uninspiring.

There was no way you could market marathon where it isn't just "another extraction shooter".

 

[YCoCg]

The damn community managers can't even upload shit in the proper video formats anymore, it's mad that the budgets on these games is soo high yet the trailers and reveals are low bitrate slop on YouTube, sometimes at the wrong frame rate or worse RGB range.

 

[Power Pro]

Good editing and knowing what to include in a trailer is a forgotten art form I honestly think. Trailers during the PS2 through the Xbox 360 generations were some of the best.

I agree with that Metroid Prime 4 is just doing a meh job at marketing that game. The most exciting thing about it that they're said and shown are the quality and performance modes. Game will probably be fun, but the trailers have been so damn sterile and boring.

 

[Lambogenie]

Might just be the games don't interest you either.

But also so much is same old, same old.

Don't forget the need to keep audiences engaged, so the marketing calendars deliberately try to have small beats interspersed among big ones for continued engagement. So things might feel watered down or uninteresting depending when you tuned in.

Another part is data. Why try something new or be experimental if the RoI isn't there?

Personally, most games just aren't interesting to me anymore so while a trailer could still be cool, I feel like I've played most of these big budget games. Spider-Man 2 might be a good example of that. I just couldn't give enough to want to play it soon. Still haven't.

 

[Donald mac Ronald]

It also seems to be bizarrely secretive too filled with ndas. Is the movie industry secretive? No. We know when movies are being made.

 

[Power Pro]

It also seems to be bizarrely secretive too filled with ndas. Is the movie industry secretive? No. We know when movies are being made.

That's always been the case with games, more secretive than a government agency for some fucking reason. It's gotten a lot worse though, because now we don't seem to get a peep until the last minute. I mean seriously, WHY did the Switch need to be held close to the chest for as long as it was? We knew about the existence of previous consoles over a year before release sometimes.

 

[Durin]

I honestly think it's a combo of treating hype like service-based retention where they keep throwing content out piece-meal until a potential big reveal later before launch, and being high on their own supply that merely teasing things will create viral attention.

Reality is corpo culture dilutes taking a risk to make something weird enough to go viral, and no one gives a shit about teases unless it's something the audience has already been asking you to produce.

Most games should be banned from teasing shit, and instead only start with big reveals that give a condensed rundown on what the game structure, world and story are. Then do the piece-meal detail crap until you get to launch....but they keep throwing out drip-feed garbage...which is why I think Valve a few years ago updated their Store Page guidelines so that devs could only put 2 trailers before screenshots and recommended the 1st trailer feature actual gameplay footage.

 

[Kilau]

Me reading this thread:

 

[Sentenza]

I think they are bad at deciding to what to work on, to begin with.
I swear, bar few occasional exceptions once every blue moon, it feels like the triple A market is constantly pitching to me shit I wouldn't care about if I was paid to play it.

 

[Mibu no ookami]

cost savings aimed at cutting back on marketing, lack of practice doing events like e3 or putting big efforts into GDC and TGS as well as big shows for platform brands.

It's just throw a trailer together most of the time. Like how Intergalactic was revealed...

You also have really awkward people trying to sell the product rather than marketing teams are at least it appears that way. I think some directors and such have the presence for that, but most don't and certainly not the lower level staff.

I think it's just the last thing they're focused on now.

I also think sometimes media scrutinizes really cool events like when Naughty Dog did the tent event for TLOUP2. I thought that was epic or the God of War 2018 events. I liked the effort at least that they showed for Hellblade 2. And someone did mention Kojima as well who I think understand tv and movies more and how they sell their product and emulates that.

The industry now doesn't care about anniversaries or big events and things get announced in blogspots to save money and the result is no one cares about the announcement because the people announcing it didn't care.

 

[KungFucius]

I honestly don't care anymore. I like to know what games are being worked on and get more interested when their releases are imminent. I wonder if my lack of interest was curated by lack of any good reveals or if it just happened naturally.

 

[Laptop1991]

Because what they are making nowadays doesn't wow and excite a lot of us gamers anymore as lower sales has proved, if Rockstar put out a new GTA 6 trailer today it would take off and wouldn't stop and create a buzz everywhere, in fact when they do show some of their work lately, it has had the opposite effect and cost's them interest and sales now instead of generating more hype.

 

[Wildebeest]

Nobody wants to do press or community facing things any more because they are scared that people will track them down and try to ruin their lives.

 

[bitbydeath]

Because what they are making nowadays doesn't wow and excite a lot of us gamers anymore as lower sales has proved, if Rockstar put out a new GTA 6 trailer today it would take off and wouldn't stop and create a buzz everywhere, in fact when they do show some of their work lately, it has had the opposite effect and cost's them interest and sales now instead of generating more hype.

We don't even know what most devs are working on. If it wasn't for the Oblivion leak we wouldn't find out til it launched and Sony are the same way with only finding out 3-6 months in advance of release.

 

[Angry_Megalodon]

Because they are disconnected from their fanbase. They lack passion and do the very minimum to earn a monthly wage.

You can see the difference with studios that do it right.

 

[Sentenza]

Because what they are making nowadays doesn't wow and excite a lot of us gamers anymore as lower sales has proved, if Rockstar put out a new GTA 6 trailer today it would take off and wouldn't stop and create a buzz everywhere, in fact when they do show some of their work lately, it has had the opposite effect and cost's them interest and sales now instead of generating more hype.

I'm far from being the biggest GTA fan out of there, but it's easy to see why Rockstar still manages (so far) to get the excitement that a lot of other major players in the business fail to solicit: say what you want about their games, but they are constantly at the cutting edge of what's technically feasible on modern system, plus they put a genuine effort into improving most of their features.

 

[Laptop1991]

We don't even know what most devs are working on. If it wasn't for the Oblivion leak we wouldn't find out til it launched and Sony are the same way with only finding out 3-6 months in advance of release.

True, that doesn't help either, but whether they show their work or not, it no longer seems to have the effect it used to unless your GTA, i'll wait to see the game after it's out to find out if it's any good or to find out if they are lying through their teeth.

 

[Bradamante3D]

You can also blame the Covid pandemic for this, where devs lost contact with their audience and developed a bunker mentality within their own bubble. They unlearned how to make marketing material and events for fans ... because for years there were no in person events and games often sold themselves with players bored at home during lockdowns.

 

[Zacfoldor]

Everybody got jaded. There is little passion left in the industry. People are going thru the motions and it's easiest to tell in the marketing fumbles. I'm sure there's plenty of blame to go around. Leaks also damper the spirit of a surprise in this industry. I think TLOU2 leak was probably the beginning of the end for hype in this industry.

 

[PeteBull]

Because they are disconnected from their fanbase. They lack passion and do the very minimum to earn a monthly wage.

You can see the difference with studios that do it right.

Yups most games, including big budget AAA games are soulless trash nowadays, 0 innovation/0 heart put into it by devs.
Lets quickly compare it to staple bloodborne reveal cgi trailer from e3 2014 sony conference:

And 11 months later actual gameplay trailer:


Game was top notch so it was ez to make exciting trailer for it, both cgi and real gameplay.

We all know shit like concord, marathon, fairgame$ and all the other bad games have hard time marketing themselfs, coz they gotta deceive the public and pretend they are good games when in reality they arent, ofc its hard to sell those to players

Edit: U take those 2 trailers, cgi from june 2014, gameplay from may 2015 and they look miles above what duskbloods on switch2 looks like.

Which allows us to draw only one conclusion from it- game on switch2 looks worse and gonna be worse from bloodborne, unfortunately...

 

[RodriGames40]

Everybody got jaded. There is little passion left in the industry. People are going thru the motions and it's easiest to tell in the marketing fumbles. I'm sure there's plenty of blame to go around. Leaks also damper the spirit of a surprise in this industry. I think TLOU2 leak was probably the beginning of the end for hype in this industry.

TLOU2 was truly the last of its kind, arguably Cyberpunk before it crashed and burned. I still wonder if we are gonna get a game with nearly as much hype as those two ever again, GTA aside.

 

[Danjin44]

I think that's has more to do with the fact people far too jaded to enjoy anything, especially in GAF.

In that front not much devs can do for jaded people.

 

[Angry_Megalodon]

I think that's has more to do with the fact people far too jaded to enjoy anything, especially in GAF.

In that front not much devs can do for jaded people.

Considering that devs say stuff like "I hate gamers" you couldn't be any more off the mark.

They/them are the jaded ones.

 

[Danjin44]

Considering that devs say stuff like "I hate gamers" you couldn't be any more off the mark.

They/them are the jaded ones.

I still would say gamers faaaaaaar more jaded and majority devs I support don't do this.

You wont see Monolith Soft and Vanillaware say stupid shit like that.

 

[MiguelItUp]

In most cases, especially with Switch 2 and Marathon, I think it's simply because these reveals weren't for you. They were successful and did their job with a specific type of person, or people. Casual, mainstream, otherwise. A lot of "hardcore gamers" or adjacent knew what was coming, had specific expectations, etc.

I just hit 41 this year and the past few years have taught me to not have expectations as they'll never be met majority of the time. The amount of times I've been excited about new content or reveals has felt few and far between these days. It DOES still happen, but when it doesn't, I just accept it and hope that the next thing isn't that far away. It's worked out much better for me I feel.

I thought the Switch 2 was more than fine. It was what I expected, a better Switch, and that's what we got. I wasn't expecting the weird chat/party features, and that price. But for the most part that's what we got and are getting. Marathon is just.... not for me. I was eager to see Bungie's "next big thing", went in with absolute zero expectations. Only real extraction shooter I ever really loved was Dark & Darker, and still, what I saw felt incredibly... been there done that. The thing is, this is going to be the first real big AAA extraction shooter title, so, this is for the Bungie heads, casuals, and those that are new to the genre. Which isn't me. But there are people out there that are excited for both.

 

[Midway-AGNC-]

I agree about Nintendo, especifically, and have been critical about this for years ever since. The excuses for this were always the same "do you prefer to wait 4 years or more for a game?"-level nonsenses.

I'm not really keen into revealing major titles only a few months, days or even a shadow drop before the release, and pretty much the entire gaming release schedule for an entire half-year (even the whole year) only into a sporadic event, leaving you into radio silence for the entire year in return. This creates unnecessary anxiety and uncertainty about what's coming or even about how the gaming development is progressing. It's like a "we don't need to show anything to you until is ready" mentality. I'm not keen about waiting 4 years for a gaming either, but using this as reason to justify this is nothing but black and white mindset.

I'm perfectly okay if Nintendo announces the new Super Mario 3D title now and wait it until the end of the year. They did this for decades and always generated huge hype and attention for the title.

 

[Matt_Fox]

The secretive element of games design is... a negative for all.

Fans love to know what games are being worked on and what's going on, the positive potential to engage people with the 'journey' is a wonderful way to roll the snowball downhill and generate hype and goodwill.

The NDA , fortress mentality is based on fear. Those high-profile instances such as an Avowed art director picking a twitter fight over pronouns. But those are rare cases and easy to avoid if you just feed your press officer with interesting 'behind the scenes' tidbits and cool things about your game. Engage fans with the process rather than shut them out.