Video Game Tuesday: Hype

Michael Blaker
Game Industry News is running the best blog posts from people writing about the game industry. Articles here may originally appear on Michael's blog, Windborne's Story Eatery.

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This week for Video Game Tuesday I’m covering a topic I find people complain a bit too much about. It’s all about Hype!

Hype?: Yes as defined by Urban Dictionary it’s “when someone gets excited about something”, but I’m going to define it a tad bit further as “when someone gets excited about something because they’ve been told only good things about it”. It’s not always a good thing, I’m talking about you Destiny, but sometimes it’s a necessary thing for a game to do well.

Really?: Yes some great games are left relatively unknown from the majority of the gamer population simply because no one has heard about them. Games like Tales of Zestiria, Okami, and many more are destined to sell rather poorly because no one talks about them, or talks about them much. They don’t get talked about in big press conferences or get much marketing in the form of Ads, or have articles written by people like me.

I’m sensing a “but” here: You’re right, sometimes a game can honestly be overhyped, like Destiny a game where the best out of the box form of gameplay was an exploit to shoot into a cave endlessly in order to get rare items because they launched with a really stupid loot design that shouldn’t have gotten past the pre-alpha stage. Call of Duty is another series that is constantly gushed over, even though in reality the games only get a visual make over every year, and a bland story can’t really cover up the fact that you’re playing essentially the same game that was launched the previous year only with minor changes. Or Sports games, a genre of Video Games I still can’t believe people buy constantly despite it having the exact same issues as Call of Duty except they don’t even bother to half-ass a story into it.

So when you’re hearing about those big name games take everything with a grain of salt, and go searching for some games that almost no one talks about, like Tales of Zestiria or Okami.

That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday! Do you have any games you’ve found to be over or under hyped? Leave a comment below.

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