Nothing promotes a game more than hype. It’s that special ingredient in a marketing campaign that gets players instantly hooked on the franchise and craving to get their hands on it on release day.
The word hype has been around for awhile, but has taken a special residence in the gaming world. Hype is basically the over exaggeration of the quality of a product or experience that gets people excited and invested.
This is accomplished mainly through game demos and trailers as well as having key guests such as head developers and famous in-game actors talk up the game like it’s going to be the next revolutionary step in gaming.
It’s an effective marketing strategy as it gets future players in anxious anticipation for the game’s release and are actively working towards getting a copy of the game in their possession as soon as humanly possible.
Hype can be a great way to get a game blowing up right out the door. However, hype can also be a dangerous tool that, if overused, can completely ruin a game’s potential.
Why is Hype Dangerous?
Hype is one of those things that, if not properly controlled, can get out of hand very quickly. Whether it’s a new update to a long running game or a fresh new IP ready to break into the newest adventure, hype can be a volatile thing to hang onto. It’s a double-edged sword that can either make or break a game, but typically does more breaking than making.
Hype has the power to really build up a game, like a lot! The more a studio goes in on the hype, the more excitement they get surrounding their game, which causes their fanbase to grow more and more.
Developers accomplish this by parading around amazing and surreal promises on what the game will include and all the things the players can do in the game to make it seem like it’s a one of a kind experience.
Sometimes the developers get sold on their own hype and begin to go to the extremes of the potential their game can accomplish. However, the more developers push their hype the more they have to put into the game and that’s where the trouble of misplaced ambition starts to come in.
When developers buy into their own hype, they start setting unrealistic expectations for the studios to fulfill to really break the boundaries of what games in the past could accomplish. And, if we’re being real, chase after those dollar bills that all the hype is generating in the process.
Of course, this just causes the employees of these studios to scramble to meet razor tight deadlines leaving a wake of buggy and unfinished fragments of game lying in their wake.
Cyberpunk 2077 is guilty of going down this path. The hype train for this game had been chugging along strong for over 7
years.
Ever since it was first announced, people were immediately hooked on the idea of exploring a Cyberpunk themed open world and the excitement for the game only grew over the years.
Every time a new update on the game’s progress was released, whether it was a game changing mechanic or having Keanu Reeves being cast as a main character in the world, fans would be blowing up the internet, amazed on what they would see and ecstatic to get their hands on it.
However, the developers saw the amount of publicity and fandom they would get from the hype of their game and kept tossing more and more coal into the hype train, adding more and more features and promises to the game until it inevitably came to a hard and disappointing head.
As many of you guys have probably heard, the game didn’t do too well when it launched last December...like at all. It was a complete buggy and broken nightmare of a game to play, especially on last-gen consoles.
Textures looked dull and washed out, making it look like a crappy PS2 game. Cars and people would appear out of nowhere and clip through walls. Many of the promised features that were supposed to be in the game were broken, half-hazardly thrown in, or were completely missing from the game.
Game breaking bugs could be found by pretty much everyone causing the game and sometimes even the system itself to crash and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Let’s just say this game did not meet up to the hype at all. CD Projekt Red dug themselves into an inescapable hole with all the hype they were producing. The more they tried to add to the game, the more bugs and broken mechanics they had to fix.
Not only that, but they had to develop a completely new engine for Cyberpunk, while developing the game at the same time. These setbacks are what caused the game to be delayed so many times over the years.
And yet, the studio kept shooting itself in the foot by promises of new add ons and expectation defying features to the world.
Even as the game was nearing it’s release date, problems and bugs were still popping up all over the place, but the studio kept pushing forward in the hopes of being able to create something worthwhile.
But of course, as we all know now, that isn’t what happened. CD Projekt Red had poured so much hype into this project that they took on too much than they could handle and came out with what should have been a game with an enormous amount of potential, but instead just turned into a broken and disappointing mess.
Now the studio is facing a disgruntled fanbase, a mess of a game that they’ll need to spend months fixing, and even legal action from the studios investors on charges of misrepresentation. Yep, that’s right CD Projekt Red is getting sued for misrepresenting the quality of their game.
They promised that Cyberpunk was going to be this amazing gem of a game, but in the end they couldn’t back up any of their promises. In fact, they flat out lied about the overall progress of the game in a video the studio revealed at E3 in 2019 showcasing never before seen gameplay.
The entire video was fake because they knew the real game wasn’t anywhere close to what fans thought it would be. So, instead of taking the time to fix and complete the game, they spent months fabricating a pseudo-Cyberpunk experience to keep the hype going.
This overindulgence in hype made the studio too ambitious to the point where they were pushed into a corner to finally deliver on promises they couldn’t hope to keep.
Cyberpunk isn’t the first game to fall into this trap, however. You guys might remember this last overhyped game that was going to be the next big thing, No Man’s Sky. This game by Hello Games was paraded as the next ground-breaking step in the open-world genre.
No Man’s Sky was basically a game where you could explore billions of randomly-generated worlds all with their own unique landscape, creatures, and resources that you could harvest and study. It was supposed to be this glorious game that you could literally spend your entire life playing and still would not be able to experience all that the game had to offer.
But, what ended up happening was that the game was very bare bones. You would get on your ship, land on a random planet, maybe take a few pictures of some creatures and rocks (if you lucky enough to find any), and then mindlessly collect resources so you can fuel up your ship and do the whole thing all over again.
Let’s just say, it was very underwhelming. This company tried to accomplish this highly ambitious project, but the hype that the game was getting only fueled misconceptions and too good to be true promises that left a game with potential to be cast aside and forgotten for years.
Hello Games faced a huge backlash from fans on how lackluster this “breakthrough” of a game was. People were reselling the game in droves and the company had to deal with death threats from certain fans on an almost daily basis for the first few weeks after launch.
The head of the studio made some apologies and promised to repair the mistakes the studio had made. For a while, people forgot about the game entirely, but after a few years of updates and gameplay changes, No Man’s Sky turned into a decent game that many people still enjoy playing.
Who knows, maybe CD Projekt Red will follow down the same path and, with some work and time, Cyberpunk could live up to its potential and then some. However, this isn’t a great practice for studios to fall into.
There are already so many studios out there who adopt the “release now and complete later” method of game development and it’s not very fair to the gaming community. Players expect the game that they pay their hard earned money for to work and be as an enjoyable experience as the studios promise it to be the second they boot it up not months or years later.
Sure not every game is going to be perfect and there’s bound to be glitches and issues for some people when a game launches. Technology is just naturally buggy that way.
But when big chunks of the game are missing, that’s when it becomes a problem. It causes gamers to have less and less faith in studios to finish what they started.
This, in turn, requires studios to produce even more hype for their upcoming game, which will require more work in an already demanding industry.
And no matter what kind of technology that studio has or how talented the employees are, there are still limits to what people can actually accomplish in the time given to them.
Realizing these limits, developers will cut corners and do everything they can to get a technically working product out into the world and the whole cycle just repeats again. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like lazy and unfaithful game design to me and I’m not for that noise at all.
Look, hype is fine in it’s own right. I can’t tell you how many games I’ve been hyped about over the years. I’m hyped right now about this new Ratchet and Clank game that’s coming out this summer!
But, if hype is unchecked, then the fun and enjoyable experiences a game could have will just be a fantasy that we live out in our minds rather than living it out in the game.
So yeah, that’s my little spiel on game hype. What games were you excited for that didn’t manage to live up to the hype. Let’s continue the conversation below in the comments and stay tuned for my next post!
Dean Willms
Gamer. Designer. Friend.
