
Developers don’t want to show gameplay at E3 anymore - luu
https://www.vg247.com/2019/06/13/e3-gameplay-trailers/
======
dx87
Gabe Newell talked about this kind of stuff years ago. People are tired of big
publishers promising the world pre-release, then putting out an unfinished
product that is nowhere near the quality of what was advertised. Here's a
snippet of an interview he did a while back:

You have to stop thinking that you're in charge and start thinking that you're
having a dance. We used to think we're smart [...] but nobody is smarter than
the internet. [...] One of the things we learned pretty early on is 'Don't
ever, ever try to lie to the internet - because they will catch you. They will
de-construct your spin. They will remember everything you ever say for
eternity.'

You can see really old school companies really struggle with that. They think
they can still be in control of the message. [...] So yeah, the internet (in
aggregate) is scary smart. The sooner people accept that and start to trust
that that's the case, the better they're gonna be in interacting with them.

~~~
o10449366
"They will remember everything you ever say for eternity.'

Maybe. But outrage that results in meaningful action lasts a few months at
most. The first person shooter industry is fascinating to me. Somehow Call of
Duty is still extremely popular and commercially successful series year after
year despite continued management by the exact same studios that repeat the
exact same algorithm:

1\. Release re-skinned game each year with huge promises of new and original
content to come

2\. Underdeliver on said promises and lock remaining ones behind micro-
transactions, loot boxes, and DLC

3\. Abandon game 6-12 months in to begin preparation for the next iteration of
the game after raking in millions on suckers

4\. Repeat

You'll see thousands of people swearing they'll never pay another $60 + add-
ons for a CoD game ever again and yet somehow the cycle continues year after
year.

There are numerous other video game series (not just in the FPS genre) that
follow the same pattern. Some eventually get run into the ground, but only
after a very slow and profitable death. People have short attention spans. You
might remember touching a flame, but the feeling of pain quickly fades.

~~~
gpm
I don't think that's the point of the quote. If you said 5 years ago that the
game was going to include a talking cube, the internet is going to remember
that and when you publish is going to expect there to be a talking cube (or
accuse you of breaking your promise). The outrage only lasts for a short
period of time, but it can be based on promises said ages ago that without the
internet would have been long forgotten.

~~~
arrrg
Often that’s not what happens. Devs say “Oh, hey, talking cubes are cool,
maybe we will integrate one” people will accuse them of breaking their promise
(which is nonsensical) if they don’t include a talking cube.

But this doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s likely that people who dig up that
“promise” had an axe to grind anyway, so it’s about scoring points based on
spin and lies.

~~~
username90
Can you name any large controversies around something as small as that? As I
understood it the large ones like No Man’s Sky or Anthem even doctored
gameplay footage during their presentations in addition to promising the moon
and more. However when it was just "We might do this", then almost nobody
blames them, a small minority might be angry or upset, but most don't care and
many steps in to defend the devs in those cases.

~~~
arrrg
The problem is that even something like “we are doing that” is seen as a
promise which it isn’t. It’s just a description of what they are doing.

Even no man’s sky was like 90% toxic exaggerated bullshit, 10% truth.

~~~
speeder
I think No Man's Sky went the wrong way when they started to promise whatever
fans were begging them to promise...

If they had stuck with their seemly original plan, that was make a modern copy
of the game Noctis, with no base building and a stronger focus on exploration
of precedural worlds... things would have went better.

As soon they tried to mix it with minecraft they introduced incompatible
elements on the game and ruined it, they made stuff they already had not work,
and promised stuff that in the new game they were making made no sense.

I didn't played the current heavily patched version, but read about it, seemly
the game shifted genre completely and is nothing like the original intention.

Meanwhile I wait for someone to make a cool noctis clone... or maybe have the
original author finish Noctis 5.

------
dijit
I work for a AAA studio.

I even work(ed) on a game that was actually embroiled in a scandal regarding
E3.

I can probably shed a little insight as to why:

1) Once you show gameplay footage, you’ve promised. This isn’t necessarily the
worst thing in the world but a lot of the time the “promise” is a mega
polished version of what you want to show, it’s on rails, it’s going to show
all the best features of the engine, you control the pacing etc. Even if those
things make it into the game (as, my game actually was in 100% parity
graphically, but we ran out of budget for animations) then people /perceive/
it worse, regardless.

2) what is shown isn’t actually a game- even if it looks like one. It’s a
prototype. And there’s many reasons that the final product has to be trimmed
down. Either it’s required because the budget goes towards something else
(such as smarter NPCs, or better animations) or it wasn’t ever possible to
produce what was shown due to things that were not known at the time of
creating the demo or footage. The fact is simply that you’re showing something
that may not be able to exist. So that is in direct violation of my first
point.

3) we got burned the last console generation, we thought the machines were
going to be at least twice as powerful as they ended up being. (You May notice
that my publishers “downgrade” scandal happened post-E3:2013). What we had
prepared was geared towards significantly more powerful hardware. (So, number
of props on screen can’t be as high, number of light sources can’t be as high,
issues with streaming “pop-in”) My publisher won’t make this mistake again and
with a new console generation around the corner it doesn’t makes sense to
underpromise (and use the current gen, which our competitors may not have done
this E3) or overpromise, and guess what the next console gen will have.

As an aside: I know it’s a trope that “console gaming holds gaming back”, and
there’s a grain of truth there, but I would caution allowing developers to use
as much hardware as they can, our work machines have obscene hardware (latest
high end Xeon with 64/128g Ram and a gtx2070 is common), if we were not
optimising for a limited platform then pc would suffer too, I just don’t know
how much it is currently limited.

~~~
rolltiide
I really enjoy the infinite entertainment and presentation format that
consoles provide, but I really question their utility next generation

and lol no PC gamers aren't a part of that equation whatsoever

I feel like the potential console gaming crowd is so heavily diluted towards
mobile and casual formats. any of the good VR titles are also running in
wireless mobile formats with good enough graphics

I hope there is a differentiating quality to make the 'set top box' format a
staple in the 2020s instead of "just" better graphics. I feel like it is
necessary

~~~
dkersten
I used to be a PC gamer, but switched to consoles in recent years because I
can spend a few hundred $ and have a machine that's guaranteed to run a large
lineup of games at acceptable performance (sure, it won't be as good as a
high-end PC, but the console also cost a fraction of what a high-end PC cost),
and, has excellent exclusives (Bloodborne alone made buying a PS4 worth it for
me). I will probably buy a PS5 for the same reason: laziness/convenience,
exclusives, still costs less than a gaming PC (people often say its not true,
but every time I price a passable gaming PC, it works out higher than the few
hundred that a console costs, especially if you buy near console release and
not when the hardware is a few years older)

~~~
pier25
With PC the hardware is more expensive but your investment can last longer and
adapt with newer GPUs.

Also you are not locked into generations and such. I own a PS4 and I can't
play my PS3 games for example unless I buy the "remastered" versions like
Wipeout Omega Collection. Don't know if it's the same in the Xbox world. I
know Sony has claimed that the PS5 will be backwards compatible with PS4 games
at least. With a PC this is a non issue. I can still play Half Life 2 on any
PC and it is a 15 year old game from the PS2 era.

The other issue is game prices. With PC you get huge discounts. It's common
these days to find 50% discounts on a 3 year old AAA game during Steam sales,
sometimes even 75%. The Sony Store never gets great discounts, except on very
old or not so great games.

IMO the only clear advantage of console gaming is that it's "plug and play".

~~~
WorldMaker
Xbox has been trying its best to move to the "PC model" where they don't break
past games if they can avoid it in a generation change. The Xbox One at this
point has a giant library of Backwards Compatible downloads for Xbox (OG) and
Xbox 360 games, and the promise for the next generation (Project Scarlett) is
that 100% of the games that run on the Xbox One will run on it.

Admittedly, the Xbox One still has a number of games that instead of showing
up in the Backwards Compatibility library, encouraged repurchases for
"Remastered" versions. Microsoft left that as a per-game decision to support
BC or not, and whether or not to release a "Remastered" version. In some
cases, Microsoft worked with the Publishers to help upgrade would-be BC owners
to "Remastered" versions for cheap or for free (though often only through time
limited deals and sales, so obviously not all owners benefitted in every
case). Arguably one of the benefits in the case of some of the "Remastered"
versions has been that publishers were given the chance to "upgrade" from
custom ARM builds for the 360 to nearly the exact same x64 builds they run on
Windows, further moving more of the library directly (and literally) to the
"PC model".

Microsoft has a lot of good reasons to want the Xbox and PC to be friends and
to increasingly apply the PC model to the Xbox. (Xbox Play Anywhere where you
can buy a game once and play it both on PC and Xbox, often with cross-play
between the platforms, is magical.)

The Xbox Store / Microsoft Store usually has good deals on par with Steam
rotating every week, with the usual big sales around the holidays. They also
generally have bonus discounts for gamers with Xbox Live Gold and/or Xbox Game
Pass subscriptions.

------
jameskilton
Yes the gaming community can be exceedingly toxic at times, but in this case
I'd say that developers and publishers did this to themselves.

Biggest case-in-point since Watch Dogs: Anthem.

Here's the E3 reveal:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL5GSfs9fi4&t=330s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL5GSfs9fi4&t=330s).

We have since learned[1], after the disastrous launch of this game, that this
video was showing _even the dev team_ what the game was supposed to be about.
This game did not even exist yet as an official entity until after E3 2017
(heck, it was going to be called "Beyond" until the week-ish before E3), and
then the team had just over a year to build and launch it, with predictable
results.

[1] [https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-
wrong-1833731964](https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-
wrong-1833731964)

~~~
elliekelly
Is this the same Anthem that’s plastered in ads all over Origin? I thought it
was just meant to be EA’s knock-off version of Fortnite/PUBG? It actually
looks like it would be kind of cool as a single player game, I wonder why they
went through the effort to make it multi if they only had a year to build?

~~~
walrus01
Anthem was supposed to be a destiny 2 killer (shoot, loot), instead it's
become a sad joke. The Kotaku article does a good job explaining why.

~~~
newsgremlin
I thought Destiny 2 was already dead? It seems it still has it's following,
although I always thought Warframe was the leader of shooter looters, even
though these aren't my type of games.

~~~
pdimitar
I'm yet to see a game that's as smooth and polished as Warframe. I've tried
like 10 and I'm amazed how such a small studio like DE basically raised the
bar for everybody else.

~~~
mrguyorama
But the grind is utterly soulless. I understand the company wants to make
money, but I shouldn't have to put in 40 hours a week to make any progress

~~~
pdimitar
That is sadly true. My wife and I spent 3 months in a haze last year while
starting from scratch and it was fun but it eventually gets to you.

Truthfully though, I'm not bothered. I play very scarcely in the last 9-10
months (not only Warframe bit in general) and only when I'm in the mood. If I
miss out on progress then oh well, much worse things can happen. :)

------
AdmiralAsshat
So the gaming community reiterated loudly and clearly that it doesn't like
being lied to with "gameplay" demos crafted specifically for E3 that share no
code with the actual game being developed (looking at you, Halo 2), and the
dev's takeaway was "Don't show them any gameplay."

I would hope we could collectively rally against this sort of behavior by
refusing to buy such games that refuse to preview any actual gameplay. But I
doubt that will work, given that Dead Island sold five million copies[0],
based off what I can only assume was due to enamor with the trailer.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Island#Sales](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Island#Sales)

~~~
floatingatoll
In software development, 1.0 is the version number you assign to what's ready
at the end of the last day you are permitted to continue working on your
release.

Before online gaming, games were required to deliver a 1.0 and had no further
chance to patch or improve it. They would do so in silence — like Nintendo
does — and essentially work for years on things that no one even knew existed
until they released their 1.0 gold master and began producing marketing
material from it.

Nintendo continues to follow this policy today — we get demos when they've
finalized the game, and not before — and Nintendo refuses to market games
until they've finished them, so we get years of "will there ever be another
Super Smash Bros" and "OMG TELL US WHAT'S COMING" which they silently ignore.

Now you declare openly that game developers who tell us what's coming while
it's not yet finished will be punished if:

1) What's not yet finished doesn't match what's finished on 1.0 day in any way
that is personally meaningful to you and/or anyone;

and/or,

2) What's announced is announced only with a complete finished 1.0 product
from which marketing materials are exclusively developed and provided
immediately upon announcement.

So, you're championing the Nintendo model, which is fine — we will hear
nothing about any upcoming games until they're ready to be released, and if
that means years of silence from the owners of properties such as Halo, GTA,
Pokemon, and so on — then that's _completely acceptable_ and we should expect
to hear no complaint from the gaming community as a result.

I am not led to believe by your response that "we will hear no complaint" is
the outcome that will occur if and when the entire gaming industry complies
with your demands by stopping all pre-release announcements altogether, which
leaves me wondering: How, precisely, do you expect a valid outcome to occur
from your requirements that both satisfies your demands without triggering
complaint over the lack of updates over time from studios who are busy
complying?

EDIT: To pre-address the most obvious reply — "they should only demo what's
done" — I guarantee that nothing is ever done until the final day of
development, as critical features can be cut literally hours before gold
master if there's an undiscovered flaw that QA discovers at the last minute —
so since "nothing" is ever done until the final 1.0 release, "they should only
demo nothing until the final 1.0 release is done", and we're back to the above
question.

~~~
freehunter
"Lie to us" and "don't mention the game until it's done" are not the only two
options. There's plenty of middle ground, including "show us a cutscene video
that is obviously a cutscene video" like Cyberpunk 2077 did. Don't say "this
is actual gameplay" if it's not actual gameplay. Don't show videos simulating
actual gameplay if it's not actual gameplay. Don't have people on stage
mimicking actual gameplay while a video plays that is not actual gameplay.

"Don't lie" is a _very_ low bar, and there is a lot of room to exist above it.

~~~
copenja
Right, but what can easily happen is you show gameplay footage at E3 with good
intentions, then the game changes.

Maybe, things change because the mechanics proved to hard to learn.

Maybe, things change because to fit X number of characters on screen in level
Y, you had to downgrade the main character visuals.

Either way... Is that a lie?

In the eyes of most developers no, it's just part of development.

In the eyes of consumers...yes?

~~~
Mtinie
Changing gameplay between the E3 demo and the final release isn’t the problem,
it’s when the difference between the preview gameplay is vastly better quality
than the final. In the 12-24 intervening months one would expect a project to
improve in quality and focus, not to devolve.

It’s the curated experience intended to oversell the state of the the current
offering (i.e. pre-release) that raises gamers’ ire.

~~~
maccard
Have you worked on a product that has had to show a vertical slice 2 years
before the product is released? I've worked on a few e3/e3-like demos for
games and there's a whole bunch of issues. It's not always quality - things
that were considered "easy" or "we can solve that later" can come back and
bite you. Things that are fun in a vertical slice demo might not actually be
engaging for more than 15 minutes or so(or an hour, or three). It can be
_very_ difficult to extract a 10 minute piece of gameplay that you have some
context for to show people even if you have the entire game made, which means
you might have to out in some temporary "features" (add a power/remove a
pathway) to make the experience fit. All or these changes can have a butterfly
effect. Adding X to simplify a demo can make Y seem more important than you
want it to which means Z is now redundant, but you've already spoken about Z.

There had to be done realisation that things change in games over a 2 year
period, (heck, things change massively in games over a 2 week period in some
games) and some acceptance of that fact.

------
iClaudiusX
I would trace it to a few factors; most important is the rise of the
influencer advertising strategy.

It is vastly cheaper to simply pay streamers to hype up your game on Twitch or
youtube than it is to give an honest, sober demo live on an E3 stage. The
audience at these press events has shifted from enthusiast reporters/critics
to hyperventilating influencer personalities. It was so bad this year that
they were obnoxiously screaming and interrupting the presenters every few
seconds to the point where the people on stage were losing their train of
thought.

The other aspect is that putting together a demo takes time out of
development. Almost every game shown this year had a release date of either
Fall 2019 or Spring 2020. That means they're either on crunch or ramping up
for it and can't afford to set aside a few months to make a vertical slice for
E3. This is partly due to the end of this console generation with new hardware
coming next holiday season.

The longer term trend is that marketing has caught on to the irrelevance of
E3. They can run their own Nintendo Direct style live stream whenever they
want to speak to their audience and the press will disseminate that info to
the wider community.

You're even seeing companies like EA experiment with dropping a new title with
zero advance notice as they did with Apex Legends (their take on battle
royale, from the Titanfall developers). They just had an influencer preview
event the week before and dumped it to the public with pretty wild success.

------
justinplouffe
The average build for a AAA game coming out in 2020 is barely in playable
shape and certainly not ready to be shown at E3. Making one polished enough to
show off is both time consuming and not representative of the final product. I
really wish people were more open to seeing blocked out levels and unpolished
animations to have an idea of where these projects are going but unfortunately
even the most pristine presentations get picked apart online so I don’t think
that’s happening anytime soon.

~~~
eight_ender
That's more or less what Steam Greenlight was and one reason why I love it
even if it goes by a different name now. I can pick up something interesting,
play around with it, and then catch up on it's progress over years.

I've done this with Subnautica, Starbound, Rimworld, and The Long Dark. I
don't regret going on a journey with the developers at all.

~~~
pferde
Yes, Steam Greenlight (whatever it's called these days) is a cute idea, but
for every gem like the games you mention, there are hundreds if not thousands
of crap, minimal effort "games", many of them in a barely working state, which
are released there just to make a quick buck or two, either via direct sales,
or via the Steam card sales.

~~~
Dirlewanger
Which is also why the Steam curation function is an absolute boon. Let
influencers I know trawl through the ocean of games and show me what is good.

------
Causality1
>where at times developers appeared afraid of their audience

Good. The amount of abuse the gaming industry has heaped upon consumers the
past ten years is almost beyond belief. Microtransactions. Day-1 DLC. Season
Passes that don't include all the DLC. So many versions of games you need a
literal spreadsheet to keep track of how to get what feature. Broken piles of
shit that rely on a "90-day roadmap" to tell us when they'll be playable.
Using gambling mechanics to make children rob their parents to pay for loot
boxes. The list is endless. Every second game dev could have night terrors for
the next decade and it still wouldn't make up for how they have mutilated
their own art form in the pursuit of unlimited profit. Almost every major
games publisher, from EA to Activision-Blizzard to Ubisoft to Warner Brothers
has behaved absolutely reprehensibly and in a just world would be burned to
the ground by an angry mob.

~~~
ohithereyou
>Good. The amount of abuse the gaming industry has heaped upon consumers the
past ten years is almost beyond belief.

Not to mention how they chew up and spit out the people making the games.

------
apatters
It's a mystery to me how the gaming industry exists in its current form. I
subscribe to Humble Monthly and occasionally buy a Humble Bundle. This all
costs me $20-$30/mo and I get my hands on enough good games to last me a
lifetime. I very occasionally will buy a cool looking new indie game, usually
for $30 or less, when they come out. In general if a game looks like it has
some interesting/novel gameplay I'll give it a shot. Most of them come from
small indie developers, aren't super well known, and will run just fine on a 7
year old gaming laptop.

Meanwhile there is this enormous multi-billion dollar world of dozens of AAA
publisher FPS titles that all look basically the same. People apparently line
up in droves to pay $60 for these titles and the publishers are now so
confident about their revenue stream that they don't want to release gameplay
footage before they sell you the game? The #1 thing I do before buying a game
or installing one I already own (since I own hundreds, thanks to Humble) is
look at gameplay videos on Youtube. No gameplay video = not touching it.

What insane alien planet is this? It's certainly not the Earth in the
dimension I live on, and it sounds much lamer.

~~~
munchbunny
Setting aside the Skinner Box aspect of the gaming industry for a moment, I
think you're missing the social dimension of gaming.

A lot (if not most) of these new AAA games that are coming out have a strong
social aspect. The game is a way to hang out with friends, the same way going
to see a movie in the theaters might be, or checking out a new restaurant, or
trying a new board game, etc. The novelty of the new game helps to decorate
the shared experience.

~~~
taurath
IE - marketing works, especially to generate hype and word of mouth.

~~~
ohithereyou
Partially that, but as an example of the social aspect of video games: my
college friends and I have scattered across the country for work and
relationships. The cheapest way for us to stay in touch is a weekly video game
night. We play old stuff, emulator stuff, new stuff we all like, all on PC
connected over Discord for voice and occasionally video chat. It is our
primary way of socializing with our friend group, often digressing from the
video game we're playing into what is going on in our lives.

It's much cheaper than plane tickets, we can all drink the booze we like and
have whatever dinner we want, all for the low price of one $60 game a quarter,
at most.

~~~
pdimitar
I get you fully, but none of that requires a modern $60 - $150 AAA game.

~~~
ohithereyou
Agreed. I even said as much in my comment. We get a lot of games on sale from
Steam and GOG for less than $20, often less than $10.

------
CelestialTeapot
The problem is publishers are not managing expectations. If you're showing
gameplay footage of a product that is still a year out or more in development,
you had better follow up with new trailer releases as major elements of the
game change. Look to [Hideo] Kojima Productions' Death Stranding for an
example of hype tempered with gameplay footage that is released in drips and
drabs as development of the game progresses. You can get a realistic sense of
how the game will play.

------
anonymousab
The corresponding drawback of trying to reap the business benefits preorder
and hype-wise, of an overly ambitious or misleading (intentionally or
otherwise) vertical slide demo or trailer is the backlash and loss of consumer
trust when you under-deliver or cut back.

It can often be really hard to make a demo or trailer that isn't a mess
without polishing it as much as possible. Development is messy. But sometimes
you really can say "that's a lie" or "no, it [game feature] won't do that" and
those ones beleaguer the benefit of the doubt.

It's a tough problem.

------
EugeneOZ
Worst kind of lie is a lie, mixed with true facts: even if we believe Ubisoft
that they didn't downgrade quality, this article should not put The Witcher 3
as an example - there's even official patch to restore downgraded quality, and
official explanation "we just tried to make game looking the same on consoles
and PC".

Gamers community trained to don't trust publishers - this article trying to
say "because gamers are too stupid and suspicious", but in reality, as
usually, because publishers lie too often.

~~~
jerkstate
Ubisoft didn't say that they didn't downgrade quality, they said “the notion
we would actively downgrade quality is contrary to everything we’ve set out to
achieve”

Sometimes you set out to achieve something and you fail, ending up with
something that's contrary to what you set out to achieve.

------
jasonkester
Avoiding the topic at hand, which it sounds like gamers brought on themselves,
I've got to say that that Doom screenshot brought back some memories.

I remember way back whenever, being excited to pick up a copy of Doom 3 for my
new top-end system to show off what it could do. And being amazed that Id had
spent so much time and effort to build this incredible engine to show effects
that you couldn't ever actually see.

Because they'd chose a color palette consisting of only Black, Dark Grey and
Dark Brown, and set the game in the dark.

It's nice to see they haven't backed down from their stance that "Nobody
should be able to see anything in our games". In the linked screenshot, the
entire world is literally _on fire_ and the things standing in front of you
are still too dimly lit to see.

And they're Black, Dark Grey and Dark Brown.

~~~
huffmsa
Doom 2016 was only dark enough to be atmospheric. Important things like
incoming fire are bright and loud.

The muted backgrounds and bright targets are needed though. Unlike Doom 3,
Doom 4 and now 5 are so fast paced you'd have a bad time if the whole game
looked like a pride parade.

------
pdimitar
> _In truth, gameplay demos at events like E3 are subject to change. They’re
> often built as vertical slices – self-contained examples of what a sequence
> will look like once every feature and asset in the game has reached its
> highest level of polish. They can help studios accurately schedule the rest
> of development._

Yeah, but they never deliver. They show a carefully remastered video and then
they release a game with a worse quality.

It's not about what could an E3 demo be used for. It's not a corporate event.
Show us gameplay. It's a consumer show.

------
jrootabega
This has been going on for at least 15 years. Here's a 2005 penny arcade comic
calling it out

[https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/09/12](https://www.penny-
arcade.com/comic/2005/09/12)

~~~
MrMember
It's kind of a running joke. Any "in-game" footage shown at a conference like
E3 is almost guaranteed to be running on a high end modern PC even if the game
itself will be released on a five year old console.

------
huffmsa
It's no coincidence that the OGs who focus on _gameplay_ \-- Nintendo, iD
Software, Rockstar -- show the least BS.

They've all had bad experiences in the past when they demo'd graphics and
learned from it. Nintendo's 2000 Zelda video sent expectations the entirely
wrong way for Wind Waker. iDs Doom 3 mishap (no one wants a sneaky, shadowy
Doom Guy).

------
kristofferR
CGI trailers and other filler content don't build hype to nearly the same
extent as gameplay does. Don't forget that the lack of gameplay shown was one
of the reasons this years E3 was considered a big disappointment by most.

The reason Sony's 2016 E3 press conference is widely regarded as the best
press conference ever, in addition to the live orchestra, was that they
blasted the audience with long gameplay demo after gameplay demo. It had very
little filler speeches by executives and few empty CGI trailers, and it made a
big difference.

If you haven't watched Sony's 2016 conference recently, which you should, here
it is:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwofRzkROo4&t=1800](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwofRzkROo4&t=1800)

------
lifeisstillgood
It seems to me that a brave decision would be to let gamers into the dev
process openly - a regular vlog like approach by an optimistic old hand
showing skin texture experiments or changes to explosion algorithms and so on
- not lying, not cut scenes ... just openness

But then again, a couple of cut scenes every six months and secrecy otherwise
is probably safer

~~~
toast0
I've followed a couple games like that, and the end result is disappointment.
Every feature that didn't work out feels like something I really wanted. So,
really, it's a lot of effort on the developer's part to more thoroughly
disappoint the potential buyers.

In my outsider's opinion, spending that time focused on building something fun
without the outside world intruding would be better. When it gets to the point
of only needing polish, then start showing it to the world.

~~~
howtomakerpg
Problem with most popular games is that they are not made by hardcore gamers
but by cashgrabbing businessmen and huge companies (you can find out more here
[https://bit.ly/2ILPdHw](https://bit.ly/2ILPdHw)). Most indie games, if not 99
percent of them die being unseen. For example fortnite, althrough popular and
addictive, it can only addict people new to such mechanisms (to games similar
to fortnite) or 8 year old kids who never played. But does it make money? Oh
boy.

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RandomTisk
Besides gameplay, what else is there? Trailers, that have never and will never
capture whether a game is fun to play? Good luck.

~~~
soup10
E3 is a marketing event for big publishers, if cinematic trailers create more
consistent hype than gameplay trailers then that's what they will do. Critics
very frequently point out the formulaic, rehashed gameplay of big budget
titles and they probably want to limit that.

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keyle
The main issue is that sometimes the entire team would stop to produce a demo
for E3 or other shows which in retrospect would delay the game from actually
coming out. Some would spend so much time making sure their demo looked good,
it became an engine show-off and they knew the game wouldn't ship complete
like that.

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scarejunba
Games are so high quality these days, but gamers are insufferable. I can't
read any content about games any more because it's hysterical children
screaming at the top of their voice about some inconsequential difference from
some concept video.

~~~
huffmsa
They _could, should and can be_ high quality. Which is why there is such
outrage when developers show one thing and deliver an early beta build for
$80.

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roland35
There was an interesting quote about how demos are expensive to produce - I
think this is something a lot of people dismiss. People seem to think that a
demo is easy, just show what you have right now! But a lot of the time is is a
huge distraction from what you otherwise would be working on.

~~~
ohithereyou
The amount of turd polishing that goes on for an E3 demo is massive. I had a
friend that worked in the AAA games space, and he said that between half and
three quarters of the team would halt work on moving the game forward and
focus for three to four months on polishing the demo shown at E3.

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yoz-y
I don't get it. How do players feel that something was stolen from them? Do
they make their purchase decision based off a trailer aired 2 years ago?

There are tons of journals and streamers out there that review finished games.
At that point it is pretty obvious how the game actually looks and plays. If
the preview would be anything like the real game they would be shipping it.

SMH

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gumby
Has this not ever been so? Look at the covers of 1980s games with lovely
pictures or even photography for a game that ran on the Apple II.

Why the outrage now?

~~~
viraptor
Those covers were obvious cover art. That's completely different from showing
things that you could reasonably expect, as if they were actually included.

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_pmf_
Maybe turning everything gaming related into a SJW minefield was not a very
productive decision, either.

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Retra
I'm pretty sure E3 started being rote 2 decades ago.

~~~
leetrout
Definitely a decade; I’m not sure about two.

In any case it took a big down turn so the industry agrees/agreed with you
contrary to the downvotes. Big publishers went off and did their own events at
the same time at a different location.

I think E3 is still important, though, because it pulls the industry together.
Now whether or not something like GDC could replace it is another thing but I
don’t think E3 is any more rote than CES.

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walrus01
After the disaster and outright lies that were the Anthem "gameplay" trailer,
vs what actually shipped, gamers don't want to see fake gameplay either.

