On Game Development by Zach Bronow

I saw this on Slashdot and I don’t quite understand why an article like this was even written. People of the Press such as this seem to treat the initial development vision and feature lists as utter fact and don’t seem to understand that things change during the development process.

Half the information they get from press events where the company actually volunteers information through the fancy presentations which are clearly designed to get people excited and are by no means “promises.” They want the media to get inspired and then go tell the customers what they saw; thus the press does the marketing for the company.

The other half of the information they get is from spying and prying and any hint of information about the product, regardless of how tentative it is and whether it was under NDA or not, they regard as a fact and a promise, and then when it gets changed they say they were lied to.

I could never write about technology, either independently (like this goon) or for the press because I wouldn’t believe anything that the companies say. I’ve learned simply through watching the development processes of videogames that everything they announce is for hype and half of what they announce actually makes it in. That’s just good PR in my opinion…

Consider Fable. Once people had bought the game they realized how much of a disappointment it was, but Peter Molyneux and the company (despite their good intentions initially) were crafty enough to lead even the videogame media to believe, up until release, that the game was everything it was “promised” to be. The game was a sales hit because of the buzz, which seemed to come from the press who have had boners for Peter Molyneux and Lionhead since Black and White 1.

And so I think this is the only reason big companies like Microsoft have bad reputations. They’re the biggest, so they generate the most press and too much information is leaked out that should not be. The press disappoint themselves by giving themselves false expectations, and then consumers, who believe everything they read, see Microsoft as the enemy but aren’t smart enough to either modify the product or switch to another product to suit their desires.

ANYWAYZ it just pisses me off and reminds me why I don’t read tech-news unless it’s so far off as to be dreamlike or of a product that has already come out so that all the facts are true.