What was said at gamescom came up a few times. Having been to all but two gamescom events since 2002 with a press badge, here is my take on the event.
But first remember what Mike O Brien said, after all, he is the boss at ArenaNet:
If we make optimistic promises and then can’t deliver on them, everyone suffers. So when we attend a trade show or give an interview, we’re there to talk about what we’re getting ready to ship, not to speculate on what we might ship someday.
gamescom is all about optimistic promises. Closed room sessions of games which later get canceled, even public demos of games which get canceled (Prey 2, anyone?). Not to speak of the graveyard of promised features. I can understand Mike O Brien’s reluctance to join this illustrious club, but hardly any publisher ever really suffered. Bethesda is still Bethesda, EA has an entire morgue of dead games in their basement and those failures are the least of those companies’ problems. Sooner or later the good companies learned not to overshoot the amount of expectation created, or their claims were auto-corrected when somebody paraphrased them in a journalistic capacity. Turns out, if you fail the right way, no fan will ever hate you for it. Questionable publishers and developers will come and go regardless.
ArenaNet is still in the business of including the player’s alleged reaction in their long term announcements (Check Mike O Briens post for some). Which is a layer of portrayal the press will always cut and replace with their own opinion. The fan will want to do the same, that is what commenting sections thrive on. But there is a reason, the press cuts the suggested reaction from the report. When a company, such as Microsoft, heads into gamescom not being brutally honest about the exact nature of the Tomb Raider exclusivity deal and is using suggestive language, they get curb stomped. Because fans of Tomb Raider actually do not want to buy the Xbox One and if Microsoft tries to speak for those Tomb Raider fans claiming otherwise, fans will give feedback on that topic. When Microsoft suggests, the exclusivity is good for the Tomb Raider brand, they get laughed at in every forum. Vagueness combined with pretending to know the customer’s reaction are two deadly sins, not cutting edge Seattle style PR. You get more sympathy by telling the story of a miserably failure encountered during development. Check Tim Schafer on Youtube, he is a force of nature in that regard.
Major video company reps at gamescom have also forever stuck to “the plan”. The plan is to tell you what will be in stores next week (although chances are you do have the review copy already), then you shall be told what will be in stores for the holidays and then you shall be told what comes early next year. After that, there is E3 and the cycle begins anew. You want to fight the plan? Stick it to the man? Ask Sega about that 1995 E3 press conference and the Sega Saturn. Reaffirming the customer and binding him to the brand over the next nine months by using concrete examples and planned projects has become the core business of gamescom. ArenaNet can fight it, but this is not a war they can win by announcements which do not go beyond one month after gamescom, or are the vaguest of statements for an unknown point in time.
It boils down to minor adjustments on how to phrase announcements. Don’t promise a new PvP mode that will excite even the PvE players. That puts pressure on everybody. ArenaNet has to make it, I have to like it, it has to be done by some date. Suddenly people hate it, but internally everybody believed their own PR and things get messy close to release. Put all promises on hold, just stick to communicating what you want to do. “We are working on a new xyz map that still might go nowhere because this is how game development works”
The second adjustment needs to be the known timeframe. How far players can look ahead with relative certainty about what is to come. LW2, more of that, check, that is one corner of a very big game, what else? That includes having a plan on how to deal with potential catastrophic failure of something announced. Early access games should not be able to run circles around ArenaNet in this regard. It will not be the end of the world, but definitely a step out of your current comfort zone and into something which is hardly hell. After all, this is the ugly stick the competition is using, trying to prey customers away from GW2. It is not just new game releases.
The ten ton elephant in the room being that nothing the community discusses in terms of features they want currently relates to stuff which is being monetized. I hate to be the cynic, but bottom line first.
