game announcements
The Game Awards happened and with it, lots of announcements people go hogwild over. I’ve noticed game announcements have gotten so boring to me. If it went my way, they would just announce it 3 days prior to release and then release a finished and functioning product, as opposed to announcing it 5 years prior, going bankrupt during, canceling it, or delivering a half assed, extremely buggy game after 3 release date delays; all while trying to squeeze every cent out of people with stupid preorder rewards.
Why are you as a company even telling me? I don’t want to know. Just deliver and let it speak for itself. Many games, especially indie games, have needed absolutely no AAA level marketing campaign to succeed. They were blowing up over quality and word of mouth alone. But ah, the poor people in marketing who’d lose their jobs….
At this point, a game usually doesn’t even exist to me if it hasnt been out for 3 months and gotten several patches. The prices keep rising and honestly, games don’t mean that much to me to justify 70 euros anymore, so I’m completely fine playing games 4-8 years after release even. No preordering, no preloading, no launch day frustration. I can live without some custom ingame outfit just fine. I’m just getting a patched game for -80% on sale and it works. Or just getting a 20 euro indie game that just works and hasn’t spent an unjustifiable amount of money on marketing hype to deliver half-cooked garbage.
I can’t even get excited over remasters, remakes and continuations of older franchises that haven’t seen a sequel in 20 years. The time between original and remasters seems to be shorter and shorter, just for money. I recently saw a timeline of the The Last Of Us releases, and it has to be a joke.
It’s also the reason I will just never buy a PS5 - what for? To play the games people already have on the PS4, but better raindrops? Wow.
Of course, certain games just don’t have a chance to live up to the hype no matter what, whether marketing induced hype, or hype by waiting for the sequel for a decade. People can judge unfairly with sky high expectations. But there are projects that don’t even try, who are just banking on the brand and name to get the sales in and will absolutely bastardize the concept. It kills my trust in any kind of “bringing back” something. What are you bringing it back with? 10 DLCs? Microtransactions? More bugs? Removing the signature style and music?
As someone who grew up with Spyro and Crash Bandicoot on the PS1, a Mass Effect fan, a Dragon Age fan, who used to be obsessed with Assassins Creed until Black Flag… big games, remasters and sequels with big fanfare have largely lost me because the franchises inevitably die or get distorted. I have absolutely no franchise/brand loyalty anymore, if you can call it that. Seeing an announcement of a new entry is evoking a sigh, not excitement. Oh how cool, you found a way to apply the formula to a new setting while also somehow losing its essence; good for you. It feels like every major release is now FIFA-esque. I hope someone enjoys it, but it’s likely not for me. If it hasn’t worsened on its own, I might have simply outgrown it, like I seem to have outgrown most of Bioware’s writing (if it isn’t that, I cannot explain why people genuinely wanted Veilguard to be GOTY…).
There’s one single exception though. A game I know virtually nothing about, that has no proper marketing aside from a few screenshots or short video sequences, no set release date - but my trust in it is immeasurable. I’m happy with whatever releases and have no expectations and I’m hyped as hell nonetheless. This is the only thing I would get on release day. And it’s The Haunted Chocolatier. Eric Barone could charge me a hundred euros and I would pay it. And he deserves it. My loyalty is to this man and this man only, hahaha.
Published 25 Dec, 2024