It's that time of year again. The time of year when countless game developers are polishing their games and hiring their public relations people. Yes, starting May 21st, that event called E3 will come and shove the hype and exaggerations of every game publisher under the sun down our dry throats. And we love it. We love it because it gives us what we want. We want new games, we want something to get excited about, and we want to spend our limited supplies of cash. So we feed on their lies, and their excessive hyping of their next line of games. They love it too. They love it because they know they have us hanging on their every word, and that when their games finally come out, we're going to throw our money at them. So, it's a win-win situation right?

Wrong. Hype is a dangerous thing. If the amount of hype for a game is high enough, it's impossible for it to live up to gamers' expectations. Many things could go wrong. The developer could run out of time or money in development and have to turn out an unfinished product, they could decide that it's just too much hard work to get it to work, or maybe they keep on giving you release date after release date and continue to roll past them without a release. Even if it does everything they said it would do when they said it would do it, you'll still be disappointed that it didn't bake you a cake and solve all your problems in life.

What can be done to prevent this from happening, while still getting gamers interested? Only tell us enough to get us interested. Maybe a couple screenshots and a (short) description of the game. Don't tell us about that super-duper new graphic effect you plan on implementing. Keep us interested over time by releasing more screenshots and maybe tell us more about the game, while still keeping the some of the big things to yourself. Don't even think about release dates until you're near finishing, and even then don't give an exact date until it's ready to be pressed onto discs.

Really though, we can't rely on the developers to keep hype to themselves. They think that the more people who know and are excited about the game before release, the more sales they'll have initially after release. However, when the gamers realize that the game didn't (and couldn't) live up to their hype, they will be disappointed, and bad word of mouth will spread. Now if there wasn't that huge hype, gamers will probably really love the game if it's good, and will tell all their friends, and so on and so on. You can decide which the better business model is for yourself.

All we can really do is try to ignore the hype. There are quite a few companies that don't do a lot of hyping, you can support them and not support the developers that do hype. Most of the time the hype is bearable, and you can manage to avoid some of it and still enjoy the game fully. But there will always be that one game (*cough* Black & White) that gets such a ridiculous amount of press coverage and hyping, that it will go into the place of no return: gamers' rejection. It's not a pretty place to be, and people will remember you as "that one developer that produced that god-awful over hyped game," and will hesitate when considering your games in the future.

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zig