Premature Buzz

Over at Common Sense Gamer, Darren questions whether MMOs get too much hype and not enough honest reviews until well after buyers have already plunked down their money.

I don’t really agree with the second part of that assertion, at least depending where you look. Pretty much any MMO that players get their hands on in beta will get dissected on boards like FoH, F13, Q23, and elsewhere. If anything, it can be tough to sort through the sniping to find the more objective points of view.

As for the hype part, I agree, but it isn’t (usually) because developers want to trick you into buying their games; rather, it’s due to pressures being applied on a company level. Games cost a lot of money to make. Game makers and investors, as you might imagine, want to earn a profit for their endeavors. This often leads them, in conjunction with their marketing departments, to spill the beans on their upcoming game to sustain buzz that will lead to big sales on launch day.

In the MMO world, this hasn’t always provided the most favorable results.

The example that gets kicked around (until the next one comes along) is Vanguard, thanks mostly to high-profile posts made by Brad discussing his vision of the game. But it wasn’t the hype itself that was the problem; it was that Brad was posting about the game that was in his head, rather than the one that was on his hard drive. Hype is fine in the cases when developers can deliver on it, but that starts with being realistic about what their game really is–as well as what it isn’t.

I’m not one to point fingers, because my first industry job was building the pre-launch community for EverQuest II, and to this day I’m still accused of over-hyping or even outright lying when I talked about features that didn’t end up in the game. In my case, it wasn’t me making stuff up; I was just naive enough to assume that when some of the people on the team talked about upcoming features or additions to the game, those things were actually going to get done. It took a lot of pain, but eventually I learned better.

In a perfect world, I daresay that a lot of devs would prefer not to talk about a game until it’s polished and ready for public showcasing prior to launch. In my opinion, Apple is the gold standard in this regard. They throw a big press event and show you something totally cool that blows your socks off, and then say “Oh yeah, you can get this in stores next week.”

The reality, of course, is that most MMO makers aren’t in Apple’s position when it comes to revenue streams. They’ve likely just laid out tens of millions of dollars (or more!) to make their game, so they’ve got to do all they can to draw attention to it. This can lead them to talk about super cool ideas that they’re excited about and are certain they can squeeze into the game, only to realize later that they were bat-shit crazy thinking they could pull it off. Then they find themselves in the unenviable position of deciding whether to cut the feature or just do it poorly, because quality just isn’t an option anymore.

(The point above, by the way, underscores how absolutely vital strong project management people are to a project. The greatest developers in the world won’t deliver a damn thing without producers who keep track of all the moving pieces and make sure tasks stay on track.)

Every developer dreams about being in a situation where they don’t need to over-hype–myself included. My goal is to never again talk about a feature until I’ve played it in game and know it’s damn fun. It’s so easy to let your mind and heart overrule your eyeballs and objectivity; it’s a human impulse developers must fight in order to be honest about their products. And they have to be honest with themselves if they have any hope of being honest to their players.

And let us not forget, there is actually demand for this hype. My current situation is a good example. We’re years away from launching a product, yet we regularly read posts from people dying for us to spill the beans about what we’re working on. But no matter how enthused we are about the potential of a product, we’d be crazy to attempt to sustain years of hype before we have an actual game in our hands to talk about. It’s far, far better not to say anything at all. Hype will take care of itself when the time (and product) is right.

The bad or mediocre buzz some titles have gotten recently may or may not lead to a better crop of MMOs, but let’s be realistic here. Console games can have big budgets and tight approval cycles too, but plenty of console games suck. After all, a well-polished turd is still a turd. A quality product will ultimately be the best hype of all, because your players are the ones who generate the buzz for you. The thing is, it’s a thousand times easier to hire a marketing team to hype a crappy product than it is for developers to execute so well that word of mouth creates the magic for you.