Wednesday, April 14, 2010

What the back of a game's box won't tell you

What the back of a game's box won't tell you:

2-Player! (VS mode only, unlockable after about 16 hours into single-player mode)
Online Play! (No chat though, so you should probably play single player against the AI for a better balanced game anyways.)
Over 60 Hours of (Very Repetitive) Gameplay!

This came up when a game designer colleague mentioned something about the relationship between game developers and game advertisers. He said that if you let game advertisers get involved too early in a game's development, that they will start asking you to add features so that they can put them on the box.

2 comments:

Cap'n John said...

A very relevant Dilbert strip :)

Thallian said...

Lol Good one Cap'n. Even my favorite game publishers have been doing a lot of this kind of stuff lately. Bait N' Switches always get my dander up. It'd be nice if game companies realized that they are only hurting themselves when they are dishonest though, because players aren't stupid forever, they learn who they can trust and who they can't rather fast.