A broken game is basically unusable from the get go. A game breaking glitch makes the game unusable from that point.

Think about the iPhone 4. Was it a broken phone? No. If you held it a certain way, was it impossible to make phone calls? Yes.

Think of a flimsy stool. If you can sit on it, and use it in almost all situations, is it broken? No. If you sit on it a certain way, might it collapse? Yes.

So yeah, I believe The Division has tons of game breaking bugs. But the game isn't broken, it can just BE broken.

I see where you're coming from, but I think the multiplayer aspect of the division pretty much guarantees that someone has sat on that particular stool in the wrong way and now is screwing up your game. In a single-player only game, you can easily control for things like game-breaking exploits, but in a multiplayer scenario, you're going to encounter people who want to win even if it means cheating, and that means you can't ignore or explain away game breaking bugs like this. Because of the nature of online games and the people who play them, any similar exploit, especially in pvp situations, will be abused. That's why you need nimble archetecture when you design your backend; so you can fix these issues pronto.

Think about the iPhone 4. Was it a broken phone? No. If you held it a certain way, was it impossible to make phone calls? Yes.

Think of a flimsy stool. If you can sit on it, and use it in almost all situations, is it broken? No. If you sit on it a certain way, might it collapse? Yes.

So yeah, I believe The Division has tons of game breaking bugs. But the game isn't broken, it can just BE broken.

Yes, of course there would be backlash if all you got was a sticky note. But come on, I'm not saying pre-orders are lies. I'm saying that pre-orders have resulted in some money which would have been used for development being used for advertising instead. Boycotting pre-orders will eventually swing the pendulum the other way. This is not an all-or nothing plan - companies need to spend money on advertising as well as game development, for sure. This is about ensuring you know the real content of a game before you buy it. Yes, there is a supposition here that current return policies of most brick and mortar stores remain in place (namely, no returns on open boxes). If a robust return policy became the law of the land and you could get a full refund within, say, a week of your purchase, then pre-ordering wouldn't matter at all. Right now that's not the case. I know that steam has a limited return policy, but I'm not super familiar with it. Amazon will sometimes take things back, but again, not always the case with video games.

So yes, there are absolutely changes to the current business model that would make me be totally fine with pre-ordering. That being said, the only place where I can have a direct effect, right now, today, is the decision to pre-order or not. I choose not to, because I think that if enough of us do the same, we'll influence the business model to shift money back towards development rather than marketing, and eventually influence the changes that will allow full refunds if a game stinks, which will put pre-orders back on the menu in a more healthy (for the game industry) way.

Sorry I can't quote the pet I'm replying to, but deleting tons of text sucks on mobile.

To your point about the editing of the trailers, I can tell you with near 100% certainty it was editors that were hired by whoever Activision hired to do the spot. Activision has proven they have their own vision for marketing that is different than what Bungie may want. This is why we have Zeppelin and "fake" E3 videos, and why we DONT have Music of the Spheres.

Makes sense to me.

Your arguments are also anecdotal. And make many assumptions while being severely reductive. You are assuming where money is allocated. How much, when, and how it is allocated. Disregarding alternate income (promotions, varied revenue sources) and that money can simply be shifted.

I think my arguments are grounded in logic, not anecdotes. If the point of sale is pre-launch, the content of the game is not important to making the sale, only the pre-launch advertising is. If the point of sale is post-launch, then the content of the game is very important to making the sale and advertising serves to get the word out about that content.

This one wasn't.

Even at this early stage, the content of Destiny is very important to me even though I have only about a paragraph of vague details about the game. Yes, I will be paying money sight unseen, but I'm willing to do so because of Bungie's long history of making games and because I liked the last game in the Destiny series. Sure, there is an assumption on my part that I'm going to get something more than a sticky note that says "Thanks for the preorder, now go to hell. - Love Bungie." but if that's what I got I would at the very least return the game and my preorder would be nullified.

And then the real backlash would start. There would be very few sells as the early adopters would tell everyone that there is no Destiny 2, there's just a virtual sticky note. There would be an unending stream of criticism from players and the gaming press. There might even be lawsuits and there would certainly be mass firings at Bungie and Activision by the time it was all done. And then I and millions of others would not even consider buying a Bungie game for several years.

You seriously need to rethink your argument, starting with the part that you think people don't care about the content of a game they are preordering. You could argue that they are putting more faith in the developer than someone who orders post launch after reading a number of well written reviews, but "...then content of the game is not important to making the sale..." is so bizarre a claim that I'm honestly not sure if you are trolling us.

To your point about the editing of the trailers, I can tell you with near 100% certainty it was editors that were hired by whoever Activision hired to do the spot. Activision has proven they have their own vision for marketing that is different than what Bungie may want. This is why we have Zeppelin and "fake" E3 videos, and why we DONT have Music of the Spheres.

My comments there were regarding budgeting, primarily.major budgets change all the time on many projects. Usually negotions are built into contracts so that both sides can attempt to better do business over the life of a project. The projects I have anecdotal experience with have had different end budgets than starting budgets as situations are fluid. So unless you have major insider knowledge about the budgeting conteacts between Activision and Bungie, your claims of spending v quality are purely anecdotal experience.

One way or another the sale is about the content. Because consumer backlash exists. If you don't ballpark your promises from advertising, you will destroy your return on investment. At this point in video games it is naive to assume that a publisher like Activision isn't playing the long game.

I know firsthand that ATVI only cares about next quarter's profits and will fully cut off their nose to spite their face in that regard. The number of wasteful and disgusting decisions that corporate handed down in my tenure there really soured me on the entire company. Sabotaging entire games just to fire a single producer, hiring excessive staff for the optics of doing a big hire, shortening development cycles in order to convince shareholders they had the same sort of "high buzz" product coming out as their competitors... it was all pretty poorly managed from the top level on down.

Also, consumer backlash is minor in a world where game retailers don't accept returns on open boxes (and you can't return most digital purchases whatsoever - steam being a limited exception) If full refunds for bad games was a thing, then I wouldn't care about pre-orders because, obviously, the money would only be made if the game was any good. But that's not the case here. Most of the time, once the company has sold you the pre-order, they have your money for keeps.

Activision doesn't own Bungie, though. Obviously we don't know the details, but they have a payment contract--they're not just going to arbitrarily give more money to Bungie if they spend less on advertising. The deal has already been made, with who knows what terms and opportunities for renegotiation.

Very true, but i guarantee they did the calculations of total budget vs. ad budget vs. how much they'll pay Bungie before they entered negotiations with Bungie.

Yeah that's true. FWIW, I generally agree with your point. It's not just about one game or one company--it's a trend throughout the entire industry. Horizon Zero Dawn was first game I've pre-ordered in a long time, and that's because reviews hit a week before the game launched (and were great!), so I was confident enough to take the gamble.

I think this is great. Pre-release reviews leading to pre-orders mean you're still getting the opinion of a reviewer you've grown to trust and are making an informed decision that's ultimately rooted in the quality of the game more than the strength of the advertising for that game.

4. Finally, how much of a studio's time / effort is spent on the marketing vs the game they are making? It seems... questionable... that the two have much to do with each other. For instance, how many of Bungie's programmers, environment artists, tools designers, etc even touched the Destiny 2 teaser and trailer? And of the ~3 years Destiny 2 has been in development, what percent of the studio's time was spent on the advertising vs the game?

I'd actually be curious to know that, too. We know that Bungie didn't have total marketing control during the first Destiny because of what happened with Marty. So how much control do they have? Someone said earlier that they suspected that Bungie writers had basically nothing to do with the script of the teaser or the trailer and probably only looked it over for canon discrepancies, and I'd have a hard time believing that.

I can probably answer a bunch of questions about this. I've worked on several commercials as an editor, and been present for the dev side of several commercials as a Lead Production Tester.

The short of it is that marketing is a different department and doesn't really interact with development. In the case of destiny, ATVI probably just asked Bungie for assets, and then did whatever they wanted with the resulting footage. Occasionally you'll hire a real writer and director to come up with something more powerful and cinematic like the "wolves" trailer for Destiny (was that the name? The one with the guy from breaking bad in it), and that doesn't get much feedback from the studio beyond - as you said - cannon confirmation and maybe some help with art direction.

Lots of times you just hand your assets over to another company, and that company makes the thing. The ad agency will send back "we need this rigged to do a thumbs up" and then your animator will take some time to re-rig the asset and send it back. OR the ad agency will hire their own cinematic animator who will do the re-rigging himself (both are equally plausible. Often it depends on whether or not you want to preserve any rigging for the final game; reciprocal asset use saves money, and allows the devs to "steal" some of the advertising money to help their art team out, but lots of times you also don't need - or want - all of that extra rigging on the character models since you'll almost never be using it. That being said, Destiny has incredibly articulate character models, so I can see reciprocity being a thing for them.

Anyway, some studios (blizzard) have in-house animators and directors, and editors who all work to make the cinematics themselves. Other (most) studios hire out via their marketing departments, and some associate producer is tasked with collecting from the devs whatever resources the ad agency needs to make their commercial. Then there's several rounds of corporate approval, focus testing on messaging, and the ad gets released.

This is how you get things like "out here in the wild, this is how we talk" showing up in adverts. The materials were delivered to the marketing department probably months in advance, and were either not updated when they were removed from the game, or the ad was already complete and just not fully approved at the time of the changes, so they pushed forward with it anyway rather than reworking the whole thing.

Any other questions, let me know.

There may be some truth in the idea that preorders do some harm to games, especially when viewed over the long term, but there are also major problems with the idea, like:
1. Have games' ad budgets been increasingly subtracted from their development budgets over the years, or has the market grown bigger so that there is more total money to spend?

I think the answer is yes to both. Video games are an 80 Billion dollar industry. Compare to film, which is only 8 Billion globally. There's just a crapton of money flying around gaming. So while budgets are the highest they've ever been, a higher percentage of AAA game budgets is going to advertising than ever before, too. Actually, I'm not sure that's true. At Activision and EA it is true. Other AAA devs I can't speak to. This neogaf thread where a guy collates info about destiny indicates ATVI spent $140 million developing bungie, and another $360 million ($500M total) on marketing, licensing, and packaging. The packaging claim is kind of weird here, since it's always included in the sale price of a game and is thus "baked in." It also necessarily changes based on how many copies of a game you have to produce to meet demand. Let's be super generous and assume $100M was spent on packaging (there's no way it's this high, but screw it). That still means ATVI spent $260 Million on advertising and promotions for this game. Nearly double the actual development cost, both of which are astronomical amounts of money. I'm not aware of many games that outspend development with marketing, but I know 50/50 splits are fairly common in AAA devs these days. That's a recent development (last 10 years). Before that, you were hard pressed to find a game like Myst that had a 50/50 split, and I have been unable to find any game with more marketing expenses than development costs without going back to a time when games were developed pretty much on spec by a guy in his basement and marketing was 90+% of the initial cost because game development as an industry wasn't really a thing yet.

Again, much more money is available to both pools, but marketing % of total costs is higher now than it has been in years past (and still climbing).

2. If a game only starts taking preorders and running marketing five months from shipping, like Destiny 2, can a preorder boycott actually have any impact on development?

A preorder boycott will not impact a single game, especially if it starts so late in the development cycle. An overall trend in the industry away from pre-orders will influence budgets down the line, however.

3. Would pouring all the marketing money into a game's development even work? Would more programmers, artists, etc fix a game's problems? And even if it did, would something like that be sustainable? That is: Does a perfect game that nobody knows about get any sales?

No, and I wouldn't want to pour all marketing money into game dev. Rather, I'm looking for more of a 30/70 marketing/game dev split than a 50/50 (or worse) split. Usually longer development cycles are the most advantageous expenditures of money, rather than additional staffers. Not always though, it depends on the game. And no, a perfect game no one knows about doesn't sell at all, obviously. You still need to spend on marketing. I just don't think you should spend so much, and certainly not spend so much before launch as opposed to post launch (promoting your rave reviews, etc).

4. Finally, how much of a studio's time / effort is spent on the marketing vs the game they are making? It seems... questionable... that the two have much to do with each other. For instance, how many of Bungie's programmers, environment artists, tools designers, etc even touched the Destiny 2 teaser and trailer? And of the ~3 years Destiny 2 has been in development, what percent of the studio's time was spent on the advertising vs the game?

The studio doesn't spend very much time on marketing at all; it's a different department. Some people, like Deej, have a job that entails occasionally promoting the game with livestreams etc.., but that's all a very small impact on the other devs, most of whom are proud to show off their work and thrilled for the 15 minutes to share it with the world. Morale boost, if anything. For a fully animated game trailer, the development could have gone lots of different ways. It could have been fully produced out of house, but I highly doubt that. Maybe it's 100% in-house like a Blizzard games trailer (they have dedicated animators who do only the movies and split their times between games and ads etc. Often the ads serve double duty as cutscenes or splash screen teasers within a game, too). Usually it's a mix. You get a few artists to rig up your existing assets with more animating handles and bones, and you get a motion picture animator to do the actual work. The writers either write the script or hire a commercial writer who learns about the characters and writes to their strengths. The voice actors are obviously the same ones as in the game in this case (but aren't always). Sometimes you hire additional artists to upscale your textures and poly counts. Sometimes your game is built at very high scales to being with and we're only ever seeing downscale versions of the working models in the actual game, so those assets are already built. The actual editing and post processing is probably a contract hire (I do this kind of work from time to time as a freelance editor, myself - cody can probably speak to this as well, though I think he mainly does features? I'm not sure) It's usually a week's work, more if you're getting loads of notes from corporate, and it's pretty straightforward. Anyway, the point is that commercials aren't usually a drain on the development team's staff, even when they use the same assets.

I do like the idea that games should get sales based on their quality vs a flash ad campaign. And paying for a game before anyone even knows if it is good or not does seem silly. Especially new games in a series like Destiny 1. But even if a good ad campaign gets a lot of undeserved sales, wouldn't a bad or disappointing game cause hesitation next time?

Very true. A bad or disappointing game that has poor sales as a result, however, gives the developer who missed the mark all the more reason to make a better game the next time. A bad or disappointing game that has great sales because of strong pre-release advertising, however, has little reason to change anything (less so at a large corporate environment where the people making the decisions aren't really involved in actually making the game). I've actually been *very* impressed with Hello Games and the post-fiasco work they've been putting into NMS. I wish more studios had that sort of drive to make amends when they let down their customers.

Isn't that what we're kinda seeing around here with Destiny 2 right now?

Yes.

Ultimately, I think a blanket statement that preorders hurt the quality of games is, at best, ignoring too many economic, marketing, and software development realities to be valid. Even when we do see an example of a game with good marketing turning out to be a disappointment, like with Destiny 1, it is probably the case that it was poor development decisions made long before a single pixel of marketing material was created that caused the disappointment. And not the fact that some millions of dollars were spent on that marketing two or three years later.

Agree to disagree on this point, I think. I feel like pre-orders are detrimental, overall, to the quality of games because they remove some of the pressure from the development team to make an actually good game. It's totally fine to feel differently.

I don't think the advertisers are all evil villains lying to sell the game. I think the game they are selling would be better (generally) if the company spent more money making the game and less money selling it. Pre-orders encourage the opposite approach.

1. Have games' ad budgets been increasingly subtracted from their development budgets over the years, or has the market grown bigger so that there is more total money to spend?

That's a valid point. I think it's probably the latter, but even then, that advertising money could probably be better spent on development (in an ideal world).

2. If a game only starts taking preorders and running marketing five months from shipping, like Destiny 2, can a preorder boycott actually have any impact on development?

For a single game, no, but if consumers stopped preordering altogether and did so consistently, it would be a trend and devs/publishers would know they'd have to focus on developing a good game rather than marketing hype to sell games. It's a weird issue, because other than some shady idiots on Steam Greenlight or whatever, I don't think any developers set out to make a bad game to just take the money and run. But if they used marketing money and used it to actually give the developers time to finish things instead of kicking the game out the door and hoping advertising will have sold enough copies, it'd probably be a net positive for games. I haven't played it, but Mass Effect: Andromeda looks like a perfect example of this. That's a game that clearly needs more work (and arguably a game that probably doesn't need a lot of advertising to sell). I wager that it would have sold quite a bit more if got great reviews and was known as the best Mass Effect game instead of (arguably) the worst. Sure, it probably sold well enough, but I'd bet quite a few folks are going to wait until it hits that $20-30 price point before they buy it, or pick it up used for even less, rather than rushing out day one to buy it at full price. Maybe it works out for them to have kicked it out the door like they did, or maybe it would have been worth investing the extra money to give the devs time to finish it. I don't know.

3. Would pouring all the marketing money into a game's development even work? Would more programmers, artists, etc fix a game's problems? And even if it did, would something like that be sustainable? That is: Does a perfect game that nobody knows about get any sales?

It's not necessarily about more programmers, artists, etc. It's about time. More money for the same amount of employees means a longer development period, which is probably always better (unless we hit a Star Citizen situation). Sure, having an unlimited amount of time means that you probably just never finish the thing and try to do too much, but being able to have a buffer period when you realize things aren't working would undoubtedly be better than having a strict deadline.

4. Finally, how much of a studio's time / effort is spent on the marketing vs the game they are making? It seems... questionable... that the two have much to do with each other. For instance, how many of Bungie's programmers, environment artists, tools designers, etc even touched the Destiny 2 teaser and trailer? And of the ~3 years Destiny 2 has been in development, what percent of the studio's time was spent on the advertising vs the game?

I'd actually be curious to know that, too. We know that Bungie didn't have total marketing control during the first Destiny because of what happened with Marty. So how much control do they have? Someone said earlier that they suspected that Bungie writers had basically nothing to do with the script of the teaser or the trailer and probably only looked it over for canon discrepancies, and I'd have a hard time believing that.

One way or another the sale is about the content. Because consumer backlash exists. If you don't ballpark your promises from advertising, you will destroy your return on investment. At this point in video games it is naive to assume that a publisher like Activision isn't playing the long game.

Activision doesn't own Bungie, though. Obviously we don't know the details, but they have a payment contract--they're not just going to arbitrarily give more money to Bungie if they spend less on advertising. The deal has already been made, with who knows what terms and opportunities for renegotiation.

Very true, but i guarantee they did the calculations of total budget vs. ad budget vs. how much they'll pay Bungie before they entered negotiations with Bungie.

Yeah that's true. FWIW, I generally agree with your point. It's not just about one game or one company--it's a trend throughout the entire industry. Horizon Zero Dawn was first game I've pre-ordered in a long time, and that's because reviews hit a week before the game launched (and were great!), so I was confident enough to take the gamble.

I do like the idea that games should get sales based on their quality vs a flash ad campaign. And paying for a game before anyone even knows if it is good or not does seem silly. Especially new games in a series like Destiny 1. But even if a good ad campaign gets a lot of undeserved sales, wouldn't a bad or disappointing game cause hesitation next time?

Isn't that what we're kinda seeing around here with Destiny 2 right now?

Ultimately, I think a blanket statement that preorders hurt the quality of games is, at best, ignoring too many economic, marketing, and software development realities to be valid. Even when we do see an example of a game with good marketing turning out to be a disappointment, like with Destiny 1, it is probably the case that it was poor development decisions made long before a single pixel of marketing material was created that caused the disappointment. And not the fact that some millions of dollars were spent on that marketing two or three years later.

Back when I used to have to work sales jobs I had a hard time selling products I couldn't find value for the customer in. But things I already knew the value were easy to sell. Rarely are advertisers lying to you, and it is usually really easy to tell. Just like you have stated paid reviews are easy to identify. How your personal biases interpret their message is going to lead to different feelings about the advertising and the value you place on their message.

I don't trust a lot of critics because my experiences are different. But most advertising campaigns (as I acknowledge them as advertising) don't lead to me feeling deceived.

Your arguments are also anecdotal. And make many assumptions while being severely reductive. You are assuming where money is allocated. How much, when, and how it is allocated. Disregarding alternate income (promotions, varied revenue sources) and that money can simply be shifted.

I think my arguments are grounded in logic, not anecdotes. If the point of sale is pre-launch, the content of the game is not important to making the sale, only the pre-launch advertising is. If the point of sale is post-launch, then the content of the game is very important to making the sale and advertising serves to get the word out about that content.

You are acting like things are set in stone until someone pre-orders a game then things can turn on a dime. I have never seen anything in any major project budgeting that implies that is common.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Nothing is set in stone until the game launches, and even then it can be patched. It seems like maybe you're missing my point that pre-ordering emphasises advertising quality over game quality.