All right, the word 'scam' is thrown left and right these days, clearly showing that consumers are losing trust in game publishers - at least major ones anyway. What I'd like to focus on in this post is one topic in particular tho: Graphical downgrades.

So, the problem: Developers show a game which is work in progress to the press early into development. A couple of years later, the game gets released, but looks more or less significantly worse than the images shown at the beginning. And customers feel betrayed by being shown something that did not find its way to the final product. All right, so let's begin this by assuming what developers are showing us at the initial presentation is an honest attempt at showing a product developers love to the potential fans in order to eliminate extreme cases of clear dishonesty like Aliens: Colonial Marines or Watch Dogs - let's focus on products where lines are a lot more blurred like, say, Witcher 3 - and it's specifically this quote: - reading the rest of the article is quite worth it too as it demonstrates the point I wanted to make in the first place:
Presentations from years before the release are from a game in progress. What you are being shown is the product as it looks like years before release, in time when it's still molded and significantly changed on daily basis. An effect developers thought looks cool may need to get completely removed for reasons as strange and seemingly arbitrary as not working properly from all angles or not meshing with distant land - console and older PC performance notwithstanding (and yes, as shocking as it is, games often need to be optimized to work on systems as much as half a decade old even for PCs as to not cut significant portion of PC market off.) And remember - optimization comes as one of the last steps of development process.

Naturally, average consumer won't know any of that. He'll see the old screenshots and new screenshots and immediately yell bloody murder - and I can't blame such customer for doing so, it's not his job to learn how does game development function. So, what do you think would resolve this particular issue? Stop presenting games before release altogether? Purposefully spend valuable development time to make the product look worse for the presentation? Just don't show any in-game screenshots or videos before release, only do interviews and occasional pre-rendered video? How would you tackle this issue in the games industry?

It's a fine line to walk. If you don't show anything at all or show something low or even mediocre quality, that severely cuts into your hype and the pre-sales gold mine. And if you show something high quality and experimental, no matter how many disclaimers of "W.I.P" or "May not represent final product" warnings you display, people will still scream when the final product looks even slightly different.

I'm not sure there is a good solution for this. IMO what most companies do now is the best way to handle it. Promote during development with videos and screen-shots, make sure they're labeled work in progress, then just deal with any fallout after release.

I think it's pretty simple. Don't show off what you don't have.

It's not unfair to say that when a developer shows off "gameplay" footage, they set expectations, and then they completely dash them after they realize it won't actually work. How about instead of blowing your load early, you work on your game and just show us honest footage when it's closer to a final build? It's not rocket science.

It's sad that nowadays when I see pre-release footage of a game, or screenshots, I no longer feel excitement, just cynicism. The first thing going through my own mind is "how much worse is this gonna look in the actual product?" They could avoid that entirely and just show us footage of the actual product we'll be playing. But publishers and devs are so eager to impress early on, I'm reminded of the worst bullshit trailer ever, Killzone 2. DNF's 2001 trailer is a bad one too. Graphic downgrades are not as bad as those but they still suck.

Here is hoping CDPR learned from that, and won't show us Cyberpunk early, only to downgrade it. It's lame and it kills excitement for a game.

Unfortunately, "fake it till you make it" is the new mantra for success for most people these days.

You see this happening in dating market where slutty women pretend to be goody two shoes virgins just to get wifed up by some good religious man.

You see this in the corporate world where people exaggerate their work experience and accomplishments just to get a promotion.

You see this in politics where politicians pretend to be good honest Christians only to end up doing things against the bible while in power.

Same goes for gaming marketing.

Sadly, you're right, and others wonder why I'm so misanthropic and grumpy :]

"The following preview is an alpha build of a work in progress. Final build may differ from the one shown here. If you think you can help us improve our product, send us your CV at email(at)company."

It's super simple - don't buy pre-orders or do kickstarters, if any of that bothers you.

It bothers me - so I don't pre-order; I don't kickstart.

I'll await the deliverable and see how it stacks up, irrespective of how it looked through the "development cycle".

Other folk - it might not bother them - so let them takes their chances. If they later feel a victim of "it's not what I expected", then maybe in the future they can choose to join the "don't pre-order" club.

That's the thing tho - you can show off what you have early in development and at the same time also then proceed to release a product which looks worse than what you had previously. Game development is an extremely complex process and how do various parts of the product look like will change throughout the process. You could opt to only show the product right before the release, but it seems that building hype works to support sales a bit better, so... The final decision is kinda difficult.

Personally, I think just making development more transparent would be a cool idea. "All right guys, we've had these amazing particle effects implemented, but look at what happened when player exploded a barrel" <insert video of exploding barrel tanking framerate to 1FPS for 5 minutes> "We didn't find a way to resolve this crap so the cool particles are, unfortunately, sacked." Stop only ever showing us the achievements and high points of your development process - also allow us to see the low points and set-backs. I think people would be a lot more understanding and perhaps even provide useful feedback ("That new filter you're using is really shit, could you roll back the old one?") - it would be an interesting dialogue, kinda what's happening in Early Access. Question is how much work would it be. That's kinda every pre-release video ever and it didn't seem to help much :-P Oh graphics are a popular subject, but it does not only happen with graphics - for example, have you seen pre-release videos of AI in Oblivion? What we got on release was significantly downgraded from that. And you can probably think of more than one example where developers were talking about a feature early into development which was nowhere to be seen in the final product too.

It is a good idea. There are a lot of companies that have developer diaries during game development and they could get into more technical details. But like you said that's extra work and I don't think it would help all that much. The loudest part of the gaming customer base doesn't know how to read and comprehend more than 140 characters at a time.

I have worked through many game design ideas in my head, and one thing I have observed is how they change over time. An idea that I might have had early turns out to not fit later.

I imagine that, if I actually were to turn one of those ideas into an actual game, things would still change further; certain aspects of the design may turn out to be unworkable when it comes to actually implementing them.

The idea that you can design a computer program and then implement it is non-sense; things work in an iterative cycle; as you actually write code, you discover that your design isn't as good as you thought it was.

Well, you asked how I would handle it, not if it would be effective. And the "Well, since you think you could do better, why didn't you send us your CV? Hell, we'll hire you now to help us patch it." angle may help with the fallout a bit ;)

You're probably right. I just don't follow the pre-release hype much, if it all. I get instantly bored watching gameplay videos, even of games I find otherwise interesting, and I have so many games to play and other things to do I just don't see much point. Once the actuall game arrives, then I'll take a look. I don't need to get it day one, or week one, or even month one. Sometimes not even year one. I'm swamped, I've got literally decades of stuff to catch up on. So the whole problem doesn't bother me that much. I'm not saying it does not exist. I'm just saying it's not a big deal to me. I can wait it out, and it's no sacrifice on my part.

Spore springs to mind.

It may work for reasonable people but I doubt the average gamer would show so much understanding. I mean, you and I obviously also didn't go batshit crazy over that "downgrade" of The Witcher 3. I don't think that moving the disappointing truth to an earlier point in production would change anything about the hateful reactions of the masses, especially the ones raging to this day.