Gethsemani said:
So they're in late alpha or early beta? They could have just told us so.
Dansen said:
The marketing of this game is such a shit show.
I actually think it is kind of genius. They know that they have a bunch of hardcore fans that eat up their every word and they are using that to maximum effect by releasing tidbits like this to keep the conversation going.
That sounds like a good strategy until you realize that if the game tanks, or assets are leaked, they've effectively spent the good will of some of their fans, and they aren't liable to attract new consumers.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Not only that, by releasing a decent amount of info youcan gauge player interest through discussion. Make changes. Be prepared to ascertain true market appeal. By effectively going this long into development, and showing fuck all for it, they've effectively blinded themselves in their own dev cycle and that can be dangerous.
Artists are egotistical shitheads already, and so too are people who cloister in closed off corner offices away from their general staff. A good manager knows to make routine public appearances on the working floor ... and it's no different here. If you do not take opportunities to generate speculation and discussion, get a real and grounded understanding of the floor and how operations
should be, you're already courting problems. Doing effectively bothof mere academic rather than market focussed thinktanking on a project, while cloistering your property off from public speculation, is a recipe for disaster of alienating consumers who, in the end, are their bread and butter.
By basically going so many years of prodding market interest
and doing nothing about it, you haven't inculcated a more efficient production schedule tobegin with. I mean, think about it ... it sounds likea good strategy, but the best strategy is putting a brazier under your own arse, generating the greatest possible speculative gaze, getting the public geared to buy your game, and because of routine appearances you've
created every reason for your artists and coders to meet deadlines.
By doing anything else, you're only setting yourself for possibly creating a massive boondoggle or not meeting expectations for such a longwinded dev cycle.
There's no worker more unproductive, more pointless, than an artist or writer with no deadline or too flush with cash they don't need to worry about eating and putting a roof over their head.
William Hogarth's
The Shrimp Girl is a certifiable masterpiece. And he agonized over it because he wanted, set out, to create a masterpiece portrait of the common people on London streets and thought it was never good enough to truly capture the innocent beauty of London's less fortunate whoalways lived in hopes for something better through their gruelling labours.
It never got finished, and any glories of its actual extents ofcompletion were earned only after he had died and because his wife personally invited people to view it. And as if a loving widow's angry blade at his detractors; "They said he could not paint flesh! There's flesh and blood for you!"
Honestly, they should really make a movie about Jane and William Hogarth ... The Shrimp Girl could make a nice centre focus of the film that helps act as an allegory for the pair's relationship, their works of charity, and his endless jabs at continental artists and aristocracy with his social satire... artists who fawned and were fawning over aristocratic graces, and him viciously tearing at the immorality of the world. How these decadent continental artists' works cover every square inch of a fallen aristocrat's house rife with the chaos of distance from the true industry and artistic nature of humanity.
"The Shrimp Girl" in a florid font...
A BBC1 6 parter period piece...
That being said ... still incomplete, still dead, and many years agonizing over a masterpiece that would still have been a masterpiece if he finished it prior to carking it.