Early game announcements have the advantage of getting a name out before any potential competitors can set up their own stands. You see an example of this when Remember Me was announced at Gamescom—Watch Dogs had already made a huge impression with their own game with a similar setting and HUD, so Remember Me was often compared to Watch Dogs despite being a completely separate game with plenty of different tools to make it unique (read: memory guns!). However, despite the advantage of getting your name out early, there is a point where it becomes too early. If you announce a title and don’t follow up with more gameplay, trailers, or news updates, you can expect your game to languish in the media and be forgotten—and here’s why.
Duke Nukem Forever was a game announced twice—once when it was a viable game, and again after it had become a running joke. When the second announcement rolled around, the prospective buyers were not all fans, but people interested because it had been ‘in-development’ for so long it had become a joke. With such a huge gap between the initial announcement and the game’s publication, it probably lost thousands of fans because they found other interests or other games, and stopped paying attention to such an old series. I’m not saying this is true of all fans, but realistically, very few people keep up with a franchise that was abandoned for 15 years, unless they’re a huge fan.
But let’s say the game is announced to great fanfare. The Last Guardian’s trailer has garnered it plenty of fans throughout the years, but especially recently, the amount of time these new found fans have had to wait has shown a negative effect. Multiple rumors surrounding the game’s development difficulties have circulated—a few of them, such as Fumito Ueda’s departure from the company, turned out to be true, while other, more dratic ones, such as Sony abandoning the IP when they didn’t renew their patent on the Last Guardian title, ended up being false. But whether these rumors are true or false, their negative nature shows that fans and media have unfortunately become pessimistic about this game’s release, even though developers at Gamescom insisted that progress was being made. With no new gameplay or trailers to show for it, the IP is languishing even before it’s released.
With any luck, hopefully these large titles with poor announcement timing end up doing well. The Last Guardian is one game in particular that I would love to see succeed—especially after all of the negative rumors. But the truth is that if game developers show no progress for some time, gamers and fans start to fall out of love with the trailer that initially attracted them, and the expectations of those who remain waiting often end up too high. Preventing this kind of mess with the media and your target audience isn’t quite as difficult as it seems: simply wait to announce a game until you’re complete with development.
0 Comments