Although the video game industry is now more inclusive and diverse, and there are many teams or projects that are not so pursuing commercial interests, most games still decide whether they make money. In the increasingly competitive market environment, everyone is trying to "win at the starting line" and is vigorously engaged in various publicity and marketing.
"Is this melon ripe?" / Of course, you don't want money if you're not familiar!"
It is difficult to see complete honesty in buying and selling, even if it is a roadside fruit stall, it is inevitable that the queen mother will sell melons and boast about herself, not to mention the commercial masterpiece with sales of hundreds of millions of dollars. Bragging about the excellence of your work, exaggerating to users about the excitement of various experiences, and promising yourself an uncertain future is the norm when promoting AAA games. Objectively speaking, this kind of bragging behavior of publishers is generally understandable and tolerated.
▲ Advertising is harder than development
However, due to the increasing difficulty and risk of large-scale development, most manufacturers can no longer afford to fail. Whether it is to reassure investors or to further expand the desire of users to buy, manufacturers have appeared "giant" worship psychology, bragged to players about some exaggerated data with no practical significance, and even brazenly engaged in false propaganda, which has almost become the norm in the industry.
"Numbers" game
About 10 years ago, the open world wasn't as widespread as it is today. After the release of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim in late 2011, it not only further allowed players to experience the impact of the game's form, but also set off a revolution among peers. Many developers have been refreshed, and many merchants have begun to see it as the next gold-sucking password.
So in those years, as long as the map or process structure is relatively open, nine times out of ten will emphasize at the time of publicity: the map of our game is larger than "Skyrim".
This phenomenon lasted for a long time before it was broken by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wilderness – so many games now emphasize that "we have a deep reference to Breath of the Wilderness and the map is larger than Hailar".
Until recently, there have been game companies that superstitiously emphasize the reference to these two open-world masterpieces and take pride in the larger map. When the foreign uncle party exposed Obsidian's "Oath", it particularly emphasized that the map must be larger than "Skyrim"; the J2 project of Heluo Studio a few years ago , now we know that it is "The Legend of Heluo Group", in a media interview, the art designer said the same thing.
▲ Two games have had a profound impact on marketing strategies
It is not surprising that a successful case in an industry can become a presence in which peers compete to imitate or try to surpass. Publishers are always accustomed to describing how to express their advantages in this regard to the most intuitive numbers. Moreover, most people are indeed attracted to digital value-added, if a popular game has 100 points of so-and-so elements, then we promote our own work to emphasize that it has 10,000 points. Whether it's useful or not, I believed it first anyway.
This superstition can even lead to some very stupid publicity cases, such as the super sparse "Three Kingdoms 8" in the open world. In order to emphasize that their map is really oversized before the release, Glory actually invited the electroshock PlayStation editorial department to imitate "how big is the map" and conducted a live broadcast of running across the game's large map.
So we saw Cao Cao walk all the way, walking for 1 hour and 40 minutes (the video even had to be 10 times fast-forward), stepping on a map without design for reusing various materials. This live broadcast may have had the opposite effect, resulting in a wave of pre-order users immediately refunding it...
▲ Hard work! Boss Cao
In addition to the large map, such as the type of weapon and equipment entry, or how many lines are in an RPG, etc., are the hardest hit areas of digital worship. And these boast that there are thousands or even hundreds of millions of varieties of so-and-so content, in fact, there will be serious irrigation components behind the hand.
In addition, some companies are also very fond of promoting the total length of play, especially today's various long-term service games. Like Ubisoft, even if it is often spat at by players about content like assembly line cans, their marketing department is still obsessed with the length and volume of publicity. And this kind of thinking has also taught some companies, such as the recent "Fading Light 2" that claimed to take 500 hours to complete the full content, and because of this statement, the gold content of the game content was doubted.
Indeed, it's a shame if a $60 commercial blockbuster sells in 3 hours. And as long as the game experience is full, 50 or 5000 hours we are willing to pay. Unfortunately, most open-world games today are always full of repetitive collections and boring walking time — think of the "question marks" of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in the archipelago, or the various dispensable collections of the Assassin's Creed series, which are just a torment for most people over time.
▲ People are numb
Many players have long since stopped eating this set, but publishers have a hard time finding other topics to appeal to you, so they can only pin their confidence on the numbers. Not only are there all sorts of unattractive-sounding map kilometers or game lengths, but there's even the infamous "16x detail" of Fallout 76.
Trailer scam
Indulging in bragging about data, at most, only makes people feel that they lack creativity and imagination, and users will feel that they are dissuaded, which is silly but harmless. But developers occasionally have some intentional or unintentional — it may be a lack of confidence in the actual quality of the work, or it may be a simple marketing department employee shell is broken, leading the game company to do something to deceive the player.
"New rendering, lighting and depth-of-field technology that allows us to have sixteen times as much detail in Fallout 76 and even see the weather in the distance... – Todd Howard"
Some players may have heard of the "Todd's Sweet Little Lies" meme. It refers to the fact that Bethesda producer Todd often uses some gimmicks that, although objectively not fraudulent, are actually only theoretical implementations in the game, or they are completely farts and no gimmicks to promote the game. Because he's pretty good at words, and because the game is really great, players have turned a blind eye for years.
And when he gave the "Fallout 76" platform that was not developed by himself, and the game turned over, the players began to calculate the old and new accounts together.
False publicity is a common problem in the industry. After a game goes on the market, players often find that the content in the original promo film is missing, or it is replaced by something else. Usually, the game development process always cuts some content, so this is normal in most cases, as long as there is no fundamental quality problem, it is generally understandable.
However, a project will always encounter various variables when developing - hidden dangers caused by technological upgrades, infighting among teams, capital pursuit leading to cutting corners, and so on. Nowadays, like some F2P or large-scale AAA games, there are more and more frequent problem products such as Fallout 76, Anthem, or Cyberpunk 2077 that are found to have a significant reduction in actual content compared to the promotion.
There is hardly any detailed example. Nowadays, as long as you compare the trailers of most games, you will find that there is a significant difference between them and the actual finished product, especially when the promotion completely ignores that these games have the most basic operating problems, and no manufacturer will actively tell users that there are technical defects in this product.
Whether or not these games constitute deception, game makers will always habitually mislead players. Many of Halo 5 Guardians' promotional materials deliberately fake a story atmosphere that doesn't exist in the actual game. However, after the player cleared the level, he found that this life-and-death battle, which was packaged as a new protagonist and a non-commissioned officer, was actually a thunderous rain and a small amount, and the new and old fans were confused.
▲ Misleading the plot This trick is actually learned from Hollywood
Another misleading point is the shrinking of the picture. Alien: Colonial Marines, commissioned by Sega to Gearbox in 2013, is a prime example of this. This jump ticket for many years, the funds were once rumored to be privately embezzled by Gearbox to "Borderlands 2" and led to the development of the hell of the work, its promotional video shows the effect is seriously inconsistent with the actual finished product.
It was later learned that in order to cope with E3, developers had to make a short DEMO that was much better than the official game on an ad hoc basis to cover up the inferiority of the actual product.
This clearly violated consumer rights, and Sega and Gearbox were also subject to class-action lawsuits. However, peers did not learn from this, and Ubisoft's "Watch Dogs" released a year later, as well as EA's "Anthem", made such a fake "real machine" demonstration. After their official release, regardless of the actual quality of the game, this performance that is seriously inconsistent with the time of publicity has had a long-term negative impact on the company's image.
▲ The most famous deception game (Xiandi)
The larger the mainstream commercial AAA game, the more it will throw money at marketing, and then there will be all kinds of promotional content that does not match the truth. CDPR's Cyberpunk 2077 is arguably the most marketed in recent years, and the money it spent and the years-long series of promotions are still fresh in our minds.
But I don't think I need to dwell on what the actual sale is. It often makes inexplicable promises when it is announced, such as the so-called non-existent mission failure, and can advance the process no matter what the player does. And things like shrinking the picture and content, covering up basic structural problems, etc., almost none of them have fallen.
Because CDPR bragged about this game so much, Cyberpunk 2077 can't even define what the situation is, maybe this is the legendary rain and dew.
▲ The most famous publicity fraud game (current)
The same case that can be used as a case of false propaganda in recent years is "No Man's Deep Space", which is promoted as an independent game. The difference is that after experiencing the early verbal criticism and litigation crisis, the game has gradually reached the qualified quality in the continuous update over the past few years. Also gradually moving in this direction is Fallout 76. It remains to be seen whether Cyberpunk 2077 will join the ranks or become the next Anthem to make "difficult decisions."
epilogue
After boasting that it had a 500-hour game flow, Gone with the Light 2 found that something was wrong, it immediately changed its mouth to say that the actual main line was only 20 hours, and threw the pot to the QA department. Not long after, however, the official Twitter announced that a total of 3 million players had added the game to the wish list. Obviously, even if the previous laughing stock has not passed, they still haven't changed their habit of bragging about numbers.
Obviously, the industry will still be accompanied by all kinds of advertising bombardment and excessive publicity in the future - after all, we actually eat this set. However, it must be stated that in some cases of crossing the line, doing this will not only discredit the game company, look like a beam-jumping clown, but also may violate local laws.
Therefore, for the players to the manufacturers themselves are good, help, rather than holding some illusory content to blow hard, it is better to take this fund to do more optimization is more reliable.