I bet you just read the title of this blog went “WTF IS THIS?” Well if you give me 5 minutes of your time, I will explain to you how marketing hype in the gaming industry has ruined the way games are been made and isolating any chances for those people that are trying to be innovative and create NEW IPs…
It’s a known fact that big developers and publishers these days are playing it too safe and relying on a game’s renowned names, established through loyalty to sell to the consumers. To elaborate on what I mean is that instead of been innovative and taking risk to create some brand new IP’s, we get constant sequels to games that honestly should have ended on 3’s or 4’s, but that’s just my opinion. They know fully well that fans of the series will want to play the next sequel of they favorite games and with enough marketing they can get through in terms of sales target. Now normally that wouldn’t be a problem at all, the fans want a sequel, the developers delivers. A simple system. The problem with this method is that as time passes on, the quality of games and the sequels that follow are constantly reducing. Why is that? Hype is why.
It seems that today’s publishers and developers are spending more money on advertising their games to hype us up rather than actually making sure their games have the content that’s worth the money they’re charging us for and aren’t broken on launch. We are constantly been mislead by versions of the game been shown to us in conferences and trailers, only to have the final product looking almost nothing like what we were been shown.
Along with that, with the rise of gaming personalities and influencers in the gaming industry, publishers have realized that with these individuals, they have the capability to draw a large portion of consumers to purchase their games simply because their favorite YouTuber are playing it. This has also led to some shady business practices in which publishers will sometimes “buy” the opinions of these youtuber to say that their games are fun and worth the money.
While on the other side of things you have some indie developers who actually go out of their way to break the norm and create an experience that’s currently not available in the market. Unfortunately for these guys they don’t have the funds for advertising their games and because of that they get ignored by mass majority. This is sad because a lot of amazing games came from indie developers who were able to break the barriers and get their games known to the market.
That is why I said that marketing hype is killing games that are genuinely trying to innovative and provide something new. People naturally follow what the masses are doing and if a game gets a lot of hype around it, people will want to join the hype as they don’t want to be left behind. This causes certain games to fall of the radar and not get the attention that is probably deserves. This also leads to publishers rushing developers to hurry up with the game in order to release it to “cash in the hype”. The consequence of that leads to rushed games that are broken on launch and requires patches to fix. Sometimes these developers do on purposes, breaking games into parts and selling it to you as DLC but that’s a different topic that I already talked about here.
2016 is a new year and so I urge you to be more little bit more open-minded of the games that may come out or be announced that aren’t from the popular developers. I am NOT saying to pre-order these games immediately, in fact, I strongly recommend you to not pre-order games period as that leads to more problems that will ultimately destroy the gaming industry itself, but what I am saying is that to at least check them out and make your own judgement based on the game itself. You might just like it.
Thank You for reading.
