Should game developers show their games before release?

[Whiternoise]

Bear with me here.

With the release of spore, this has become a pretty serious issue. I think a lot of the problems with people saying games are awful is because the developers show videos of the games at events like E3, people think it's amazingly cool - and then four years later when the game is actually released the graphics look outdated and the concept is a bit stale. Had the game just been released, odds are it would have had a much better reception.

Generally hype is bad. I really hope that games like Mirror's Edge don't go the same way that Assassin's Creed did (same sort of issue as spore but in a different way - amazing concept, but criticised for being a bit lacking in depth). Same with Diablo III - Blizzard are good, but then so is Maxis - people have remarkably high expectations for unreleased games, expecting them to be the next best thing.

So, would it be more prudent in some ways to just release games or to release perhaps small teaser posters rather than full on demonstrations every quarter?

[Virtual Monkey]

I understand where you're coming from, but unfortunately marketing is a large part of development these days. Big budget games have to have an event created around them to guarantee sales - look at the marketing build up to Halo 3, Gears 2, Fallout 3 etc and their success, compared to games of a similar (or better!) quality that just aren't hyped (Beyond Good and Evil, Psychonauts, The Witcher). Even if the games turn out to be pretty mediocre on release, a good marketing campaign and hyped fanboys makes sure there's a return for the men with big desks and checkbooks.

[directhex]

[mediaboy]

You have a point hex...

However, I think that actually releasing small demos of gameplay that has been designed to be released would help to make that wait seem shorter.

Taking Spore.. they let loose the creature creator to give y'all some stuff to do. Then they released the game.

Things like that are good, as it means that you begin to get a feel for some part of the game - although Spore is basically 1 massive stage at the end, and 4 stages leading up to it - and how some parts of it may work.

Say if NFSS had had some sort of track or two with 3 or 4 early prototype cars, I'm sure that it would have made the wait seem less of a wait

However, I can see that releasing unfinished products would ruin the company, and that to do this, the way that games are made would have to be changed to a linear way (as in.. start at level 1 and work way through) instead of a modular way (as in.. modelling, sound people, graphics and then some guy that cobbles it together)

[Whiternoise]

Marketing is fine, but when it turns into quarterly hour long demo's, it makes people extrapolate a lot more. You notice how some things even got left out of Spore - the way you tell if a star has sentient life changed a lot since the original GDC presentation.

Arguably a lot of games that would have been cutting edge are simply outdated and diluted by the time their release comes about.

I actively look for the "niche" games that don't sell by the bucketload because they tend to be a lot more fun. Hex, i think you're with me on this one. How many people do you know have heard of Ico, SOTC, Rez, Grim Fandango and when you show them the game are just "wtf"

However, the bigwigs need their sales figures

[acrobat]

I don't think it should change, and personally I would have judged the game exactly the same whether I had heard of it before or not. That's because I judge what I play and nothing else.

Also in the case of Spore, I knew exactly what to expect from this game, about 2 or 3 years ago or whenever the first movie clip was released. It showed a few clips of some stages of the game, including some little tanks rolling towards a little town and then it described that the game will let you start as a single cell and then be a creature and then have this civilisation stage etc. I knew right then (and I posted about it somewhere too), that it would either be a watered down RTS and I would therefore hate it, or it will be a fully fledged RTS in which case it could be quite good. Now that it's done, I can see that it was a horribly watered down RTS, and all the other stages were horribly watered down versions of other genres too. So I don't like it.

Also as we are sharing pictures, I didn't want to put this in the Spore thread in case it put a negative vibe in the thread, but I'll put it here: