Does the hype machine start way too early?

tzat

Some of these games are marketed and hyped years in advance,  Seems by time the game finally comes out your about over it.   Almost doing themselves more harm by never being able to live up to expectations

judex99

No, people get fun "hyping" a game, the fun usually ends when the game its released and you see how bad it is, so they should begin soon to get more fun, and yes i blame more the average Joe than the company doing marketing.

Anyway the hype machine dont hurt the game, a rushed release or just an unfun game ( sometimes both... ffxiv ) is what it hurts.

kirak2009

I think game hype starts waaaay  to early,  sometimes  by the time the game gets released 3 years later I have lost all  interest

xKingdomx

three words:

Guild Wars two

sigh

KorPhaeron

usually game companies do little to none "early hype", more like spaced advertising, and often only to refresh audience's memory  that they exist and the game is progressing as expected...

 

I think that you will find that 99,99999% of the early hype comes from your average Joe McDumb, running their mouths about how awesometastic something they never saw, touched let alone played will be.

 

blame the morons.

dirtyjoe78

Hype starts way too early and promises get made that can't and wont be honored.  I like the way Rift has given out information, give a class and a background story for one of that classes iconic heroes.  They tell you strenghts and weaknesses and try to give a decent discription of how that class plays.  I like these updates they arent promising me that it will roxorz ur soxorz or anything like that its just straight information. 

Take GW 2 for example their devs have made some pretty huge promises about how the game is going to play and what is going to be available.  Every game for the last 5 years has come out and made similar promises and fell flat on their faces.  I hope i am wrong about GW 2 we need more than one game that is fun to play and attracts a lot of players  It would be fantastic if Rift, GW2, SWToR and Tera were all great games it would be good for the genre. 

Vyeth

Hype is the best thing you can do to destroy your product on launch day.. Too much positive attention (especially on a site like this) will breed a false image and it's like when people gossip, the story never stays the same. By the time the hype boils to a head, the game will supposedly be the "perfect" game. (Read the praise given to games like SWKOTR and Forsaken World, and then we shall compare it to reviews given after these games have launched.)

A perfect example of this is Warhammer Online.. it had so much hype, even the people behind the game were hyping it up. And this went on for a long very long time. All the way up until launch, and what happened? The "hyped" version of the game never released, instead they switched it out for the imbalanced, content thirsty (at higher levels), and PvP exploited game it has become known for. Not to mention the bugs (but I can deal with a few bugs)..

Hype is never good for any game because hype is generated by the fan base and alot of them are truly uninformed which leads them to basically include any and every feature on their wishlist, even if its not going to be part of the game at launch or at all.

Vyeth

Just to illustrate my point, read this post taken from a thread made back in 07... Thats 3 years ago.. This post was as a result of the failure that vanguard became at the time.. "big hitters out on the market like TCoS (chronicles of spellborn), AoC (Age of Conan) and War (Warhammer Online)..."

Big hitters at the time... Already high on the hype machine.. Tell me, what happened to all of those games?

 

Originally posted by Redlucifer

i played it before and i started again with the free month they gave old people like me who quit cause it sucked the big one.

 

well after getting back into it again i find the community not wanting new people it seems and the game is still far from being polished however if u really wanted to play it i would have to say its not worth the 14.99 a month .............yet at least and by the time it would be there will be other big hitters out on the market like TCoS, AoC, WaR........and than yea why play an out dated game at that point.....but if u really need a filler than i guess u could do worse ......but you would saver money.

Czzarre

Yes, its too early

But from a business aspect, its far better for hype to start too early than to start later (or not at all)

Hugolin

"the early hype comes from your average Joe McDumb, running their mouths about how awesometastic something they never saw, touched"

 

lol are we talking about the church and religion here?

besides that, hype its not that bad, its a fun way to play the game without playing it

Brenelael

Yes... As a general rule the Hype not only starts too early but it usually snowballs to the point that no game could live up to the hype which usually leads to some very disappointed gamers. I believe that if it wasn't for their prerelease hype machines games like AOC, WAR, AION and many others would have prospered a lot more than they did. It was the initial shock that these games couldn't possibly live up to their hype that doomed them. Overhyping your game is a sure fire way to make sure it will barely be successful if that. When gamers go into a game with a preconceived notion of what the game will be like from the prerelease hype they will surely be disappointed.

 

Bren

f1seb

I in turn do blame the gaming companies for the "Hype Machine".  Just remember, how does hype start?  It usually starts when a video game company, and you can insert all the video game companies in the last 10 who released mmo's, releases a "trailer".  The trailer is then followed by "Gameplay Trailer" and then it's followed by "Alpha Test Footage", and in the end it's followed by 3 years of delays and screenshots, then all the promised stuff gets cut out of the launch product most likely seeing never being implemented into the game or if we're lucky it does with an expansion years down the road after release.





Look at what's happening with ArcheAge.  It has it's own youtube channel with movies being released by none other than the studio who is creating the game.  Look how many posts in general we already have about this game, people are even asking for it's own sub forum for this site.  This game doesn't even have a release date yet last time I heard.  Keep this post in mind and we'll see how long from now somebody in the western market will get to play this game.  And then we can all judge whether the Hype Machine starts too early.





On the other hand, we have one video game company that we all know has something in the works as far as a new mmo.  But they're so tighted lipped about it that there is virtually no hype for it right now and no information, all that we know is that it just exists.  Now this is how games should be released especially MMO's.  Just drop the bomb on us so we can be totally in awe when it comes.

 

sentry13

Imagine for a minute just how much worse WAR and AION would have failed if they had not hyped the hell out of those games.  You think they failed hard as it is, just think what would have happened if they didn't have all those box sales.

Rynne

Originally posted by sentry13

Imagine for a minute just how much worse WAR and AION would have failed if they had not hyped the hell out of those games.  You think they failed hard as it is, just think what would have happened if they didn't have all those box sales.

 I'll have to agree with this. Hyping is always good from a business prespective no matter of an amazing or a disastrous game.

What they win out of hype is simply more box sales.

KenFisher

Originally posted by tzat

Some of these games are marketed and hyped years in advance,  Seems by time the game finally comes out your about over it.   Almost doing themselves more harm by never being able to live up to expectations

Too early, too unrealistic are problems I see.  This game of teasers to the public but keep real information under wraps is something they used to do when box sales were king.  Sell a SP game this way and make big bucks.  Sell an MMO this way and hose any potential for long term subs.  Its no wonder so many people quit after the first month.

DerWotan

*lol* @ people comparing War and Aion hypewise.

WAR's hype has been ridiculous from the get go. I've never evers een a game surrounded with so much hype and arrogance from the designers. Hell Barnett even laughed at Age of Conan and gave them his personal reasons how to do it better. Guess what? Age of Conan atm has more subs than more :-)

 

Aion got hype because of the overused beta weekends but nothing comparable to WAR.

 

Personally I've learned to deal with hype in a good way means, if you need to overhype your product chances are high that it is flawed. I don't give a damn about CGI (yes I'm looking at you TOR), marketing promises and stuff like that. I'm the typical "facts baby facts" guy.

Vyeth

Originally posted by Elidien

Hype is hype and is marketing 90%. people will always buy into hype and it works well. We are an early adopter society and that is fine. However, I do place a lot of blame at the feet of marketers who act as if there game is the greatest game ever and no other game can compete.

This is old news.. Companies have been doing this since the begining.. We see it on commercials everyday, they can tell us whatever they want, doesn't mean we have to believe them or even buy into it..

tiki

 dup

tiki

 

Of course we are all going to jump on hype, there has not been a single game that has released in the past 6 years that has held the majority of our interests.  Maybe once the majority of us find a game and are not looking to find a new one, the hype will slow down.  We find hope and cling onto it.

MMOExposed

I have a question regarding this thread?

 

How early did Blizzard start hyping WoW compared to its release date?

 

If Hype kills, then why didnt Blizzard's mmorpg didnt suffer from this same fate of over hyping release?

kirak2009

Blizzard Entertainment announced World of Warcraft on September 2, 2001. The game was released on November 23, 2004, on the 10th anniversary of the Warcraft

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Warcraft

Vyeth

When World of Warcraft was announced, do you not understand what it was riding off of? Heres a hint: It was one of the best selling RTS games ever.. Warcraft 3..

THAT game WAS the hype machine for WoW.. When that game blew up the way it did, people imagined what it would be like to play in that world.. Alot of people enjoyed WC3's storyline and Blizzard was smart enough to just continue right through into their MMO beginnings. The I.P. was there for them and it was very very very popular..

Hell, people are still making money from Warcraft 3 and its DoTA mod, its graphics, its mechanics etc...

World of Warcraft would have been JUST another game had it not been for the stellar game called Warcraft 3 they released earlier on...

DarLorkar

Originally posted by MMOExposed

I have a question regarding this thread?

 

How early did Blizzard start hyping WoW compared to its release date?

 

If Hype kills, then why didnt Blizzard's mmorpg didnt suffer from this same fate of over hyping release?

Blizzard did what it seems almost impossible for other devs to do anymore. Put out a polished game. Only issues i had with WOW on release were server issues, from too many people trying to play. I still do not remember any bugs or other game play problems.

People love to bash WOW / Blizzard, but they sure like to forget  some of the reasons WOW is still the king. For the vast majority of people, they log in and go to playing, and never have issues like 95% of the other games have.

 

Back on topic: YES :P

Leucrotta

Not really, fans hype a game up, the fans demand new info and hype that up even more etc etc

TheLizardbones

For me it depends on the information to noise ratio.  The more concrete information you have about a game, the more likely it is (in my mind) to be a well designed and run game, whether I actually like it or not. 

I think Trion is putting out actually information on Rift, not just noise. 

The more noise there is about a game, with little or no information about it tells me that we'll get another Champions Online. 

The worst is noise pretending to be information.  You can't really tell this is noise until after the game releases and you've made the purchase.  Age of Conan (I think) falls into this category.

Then there are games like Perpetuum Online and Picaroon where there's hardly any noise at all and very little information.  These two games have had the highest quality to hype rating I've seen yet and they haven't even been released yet.

Dimensional

Yes and it can happen both sides, both the community and actual developers (or the company behind it) tend to hype their game up to unprecedented levels.