I’ve Had Enough Hype

By Mike Mason

‘I’ve Had Enough…’ is a fortnightly column in which Cubed3’s Mike Mason dissects some of the more frustrating practices of the games industry. This time, he’s had enough media hype…

“A lot of promise.”  “This epic really deserves to be played.” Can you guess what game these quotes are about?

The answer: the comments are from hands-on previews of Factor 5’s Lair, a game that ended up with poor and middling grades when it came to the final reviews on the sites in question.  It’s the perfect example of a flawed title being unreasonably hyped up to astronomical levels pre-release by the media.

The entertainment industry is one that breeds off hype, and games are no exception.  Every big game can no longer be expected to sell itself, no matter what its level of quality; it must be surrounded by a myriad of hype wafting around it like a dust storm, blinding consumers people with particles of hyperbole that threaten to overshadow what the game actually is.

The largest advantage of hype, and the point of the practice, is contained within the definition of the word: the build of publicity.  Without it, nobody would be any the wiser about forthcoming games – if brand saturation is bad enough already, it could be even worse without anything there to promote what original titles do exist.  A well-hyped game is often guaranteed some level of sales before the game is even completed, with more to come should it fulfil its potential and receive positive reviews upon release.

Therein lies a problem, however; if a game has a sufficient amount of positivity surrounding it early on, it will frequently sell well regardless of its final state, leading to sales that do not necessarily correlate with its quality.  The launch of Wii saw the advent of Ubisoft’s Red Steel.  It was met with a whirlwind of hype in the media thanks to the canny combination of being the system’s first announced game, its earliest first-person-shooter, the focus on motion-based remote-slashing swordplay and some carefully placed target renders for screenshots that seemed to indicate that Wii would be able to stand relatively close to the capabilities of Xbox 360.  When the game actually rolled out, though, things were clearly not as they initially seemed – while not a bad game, it was more above-average than exemplary, displayed varying levels of visual quality throughout and limited blade combat.  Yet despite this, it has sold in surplus of one million copies worldwide, thanks in part to the boost given by hype (though admittedly the slim pickings of the Wii launch also helped it out).

Red Steel serves to highlight a negative consequence of hype – that of backlash.  When a game fails to reach the (often ridiculous) heights initially promoted, the general reaction is for gaming communities to lambaste the title and those associated with it.  The point at which backlash occurs is critical – if after the game is released, sales are less likely to be damaged, though it may take its toll on the reputation of a company or franchise.  As a result of the game coming short of the hype, Red Steel has unfairly become one of Wii’s most maligned games, constantly brought up on message boards as an example of failure. Will this affect Red Steel 2’s chances, or will that game’s own ever-increasing hype pull it through? Time will tell.

More serious is if a backlash is felt prior to release.  The chances are reasonable that this will lead to a commercial failure; amongst the deadliest of curses a developer could be afflicted by in the middle of a recession, especially when working to a high-definition game’s development budget.  Two PlayStation 3 titles spring to mind as harmful to their developers as a result of scores lower than expectation: Haze forced Free Radical into administration before they were acquired by Crytek; Factor 5 took a significant hit from the aforementioned game Lair.

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