Vivian on 4/11/2016 at 10:38
I guess I DID back the ss1-redo kickstarter, for exactly the reasons you are talking about. So I am a hypocrite. But that feels different?
Thirith on 4/11/2016 at 10:48
IMO the validity of an argument isn't weakened by us not being 100% consistent. We're human, after all. If you argued against preorders but preordered every big release coming out, then we're be entitled to throwing raw eggs at you.
Nameless Voice on 4/11/2016 at 11:16
I have to agree with the fact that you often can't know if you'll like a game before you've actually played it, but previous history is often a good indicator of what the game will end up being like.
Probably better than reviews, though that may also be because I'm looking at the wrong reviews.
For example I regularly watch Zero Punctuation, but while his reviews are sometimes good, I also often totally disagree with him. I know he's paid to write negative reviews and people get upset with him when he actually gives something a positive review, but it's not just that, he simply has different ideas and tastes than me. For example, he said Mirror's Edge was awful and first-person platforming could never work (I strongly disagree) and he pretty much hates anything complex or RPG-related on sight.
The real problem you're talking about is that no one makes
demos any more. Third-party reviews and marketing hype both fail to really give you a sense of what a game is about in the same way as demos used to.
It's actually a well-cemented industry practice to never offer demos:
Quote Posted by Blog of the developer who made Gunpoint
It also means I can afford to keep being nice. I didn't let anyone pay for Gunpoint until I was ready to put a free demo out, so everyone would have a way to make sure it ran OK on their system and that they liked it before giving me any money.
I was informed by lots of people with industry experience that this is commercial idiocy: you want to hold it back so that excited fans buy without trying, then you can release the demo later to tempt those who weren't convinced. And with some (not all), you get weird responses if you bring up non-money factors in a business conversation.
“You'll lose sales this way!”
“From people who don't really like it? I think I want to lose those sales.”
“No, you don't understand. You'll have less sales.“
I'm sure they're right, and as a noob I appreciate the advice. In fact I got so much skepticism that I started to think the lost sales might actually be the difference between being able to become a developer or not. But even if that had been the case, I wasn't going to quit my job for a career in tricking people into giving me money and regretting it.
I have no idea if and how much the pre-release demo hurt Gunpoint's sales, but it doesn't matter now - that's how I want to treat people, and the amazing support for Gunpoint means I can afford to.
Vivian on 4/11/2016 at 11:21
Pre-orders are pretty much anti-demos.
henke on 4/11/2016 at 12:41
Quote Posted by Thirith
Obviously I'd want the finished product when it comes out - but I don't feel cheated if the project falls apart, unless the information I receive leads me to expect that this was not done in good faith.
Ok, we're pretty much on the same page then. I
would feel cheated if a project just went up into thin air without
anything being released, but as long as some semblance of what I backed ends up in my lap I'm pretty much cool with it. Sui Generis for instance morphed into Sui Generis-prequel Exanima, which 2.5 years after the stated release date is still in Early Access, but I've played that thing for 31 hours already, so I'm not complaining. Certainly got my £10's worth of enjoyment from it.
TannisRoot on 4/11/2016 at 13:01
ITT: There are different types of consumers with different tolerance for risk and price.
Thirith on 4/11/2016 at 13:03
So you'd feel actively cheated if a one-man team whose project you'd pledged $10 to goes belly up because shit happens in their lives that they have little influence on? Or would you consider such projects too risky to support to begin with?
Vivian on 4/11/2016 at 13:19
Quote Posted by TannisRoot
ITT: There are different types of consumers with different tolerance for risk and price.
I think it matters more than that - there is an argument that pre-orders, in general, have a negative effect on game quality.
TannisRoot on 4/11/2016 at 14:26
Quote Posted by Vivian
I think it matters more than that - there is an argument that pre-orders, in general, have a negative effect on game quality.
Can you lay it out for me? I've been thinking about it but I don't see how it affects the quality of games in the long term. Does it open the consumer to a bait and switch? Absolutely. But there's only so many times the market will tolerate a No Man's Sky situation.
For the record, I was burned on Skyrim (PS3) despite a meta critic score of 92. After that I've avoided pre-orders.
Vivian on 4/11/2016 at 14:42
Well, all the stuff we've been talking about really. The most successful games are obviously massively influential on what sort of games get made, and the pre-order thing means that games that no-one has even played yet can be already successful enough to be influential. And once pre-order sales are an important factor in development, money, time and effort gets diverted to generating them- content gets divvied up into (often vendor-specific) preorder 'bonuses', marketing becomes more important than quality (arguably that happens anyway), no-one makes demos anymore, etc.
There's a Kotaku post here that sums it up: (
http://kotaku.com/5909105/stop-preordering-video-games-please)
