I’ve Had Enough Mysterious Announcements

Understandably, getting people to talk about your company and back catalogue is considered to be a good thing, but is it really so smart to goad your user base into jumping to wild conclusions? Whatever is announced off of the back of the mystery claim, people will be left disappointed because they’ve been given free reign to, and have been encouraged to, imagine it’s whatever the heck they want the most.  There is always fallout, always a little resentment, and always the possibility that users are going to lose interest in the company’s exploits because they’ve been allowed to let their ideas roam and have subsequently had them punted back into place when the announcement proper has been made.  Who wins in that scenario?

If the full announcement was made initially you’d still get a degree of disappointment, but there’s nothing worse than having hopes – no matter how slim – built up and dashed down to the ground.  A very recent example of speculation in the face of a pre-announcement announcement was born of Ubisoft declaring ‘a big announcement’ soon via one of their Twitter accounts.  In conjunction with the rumours that new Nintendo hardware is to be announced at March’s Game Developers’ Conference, plus a lack of talk about new third party Wii games fuelling the hardware rumour even further, very quickly it became anticipated that Ubisoft was speaking about a significant Wii title.

Then it was revealed to be Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, and you could almost hear the collective sigh.  Ghost Recon fans would have been just as happy to have the announcement any time; there was no need to build anyone else up only to drop them.

Thing is, this business isn’t new.  It’s just more predominant and nonsensical than ever in its frequency.  If you’re like me and remember the heady days where – gasp – the Internet wasn’t relied upon (and barely functional, even) and gamers got their information from magazines, you’ll recall that they would often mention that they would be announcing something ‘next month’.  Yet that doesn’t seem quite so offensive, as looking back you realise there were logical reasons for that.  Preview builds may have appeared or press events may have happened too close to the deadline to possibly get anything worthwhile in the current issue.  The same things may have been due to happen very shortly after the deadline for the issue that was being worked on.  From a purely financial standpoint, they were trying to secure their future sales, which isn’t quite as important on the web.  These days it’s ridiculous.  We’re in the age of the Internet, the age where everybody expects information immediately.  Don’t taunt us with a page that is blank aside the date; give us a big flashy site and stop hiding things away.

Nowadays ‘proper’ videogame journalists are rivalled by groups of hardcore fans online that discover information by unravelling source code and scour LinkedIn profiles – that’s how much people want their news and how unwilling they are to wait for it.  The Internet makes these useless announcements more viable and easier to spread wide, but equally it deems them worthless; people would rather have the news with the immediacy that the web specialises in.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way.  Visit numerous forums and you will see the sarcastic retorts about the ludicrous announcement strategies championed by an increasing number of publishers and developers.  Sometimes it feels as if there are more ‘fake’ announcements than ‘proper’ announcements, such is their increase in density.  Surely, at some point, people are going to say ‘enough’ and stop listening out for announcements alone, only paying attention when a decent amount of facts are out there.  The story of the boy who cried wolf springs to mind: continue to fill the Internet with information-starved, empty announcements and, eventually, there is every possibility that they will all start to lose all meaning and significance. By Mike Mason

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