Part 2: The Hype

The next entry was planed to be about EVE, a very dear friend of mine. However, I decided to change the topic because another subject caught my interest lately and quality writing comes from the things you care most.


ME 2 is a sequel of ME 1. That stands for Mass Effect and is a game from Bioware. It is not a multiplayer and it is hardly online, so is different that my normal target but still perfectly embody the “hype” factor I want to talk about.


Hype is loosely defined as the product of various marketing tools and journalistic coverage and it’s hopefully reflected in an increase of public interest.
Describing the concept one may use terms as: “promote heavily” or “exaggerated claims”. People are using the H word because is rather new and consequently cool and also to shift the focus from the promoting process to the results. What has this to do with ME you ask?


I become a victim of the ME 2 hype and then felt guilty enough to talk about it. Hype victims are not cool persons. The real connoisseur is not influence by the others and picks his quality purchases based on a superior inner feeling.


Computer games are not new, but lately the rapid growth of the industry really opened the market to incredibly opportunities. For example World Of Warcraft brings to its creators around 180 mil $ monthly only from subscriptions (they have a lot of additional paying services and popular merchandise as well). That means in 10 months they have the same earnings as Titanic (the movie, not the ship) brought world wide during 13 years of its existence. The game is running from more then 5 years now. Of course they did not always had so many paying costumers and their expenses are to be counted for, but neither Avatar or any other movie in the decade to come, can equal this income. But I digress… hopefully things are into perspective now and you can imagine the future.


Smart developers and publishers in particularly understood that is not enough to use the traditional promoting tools hence the hype term appeared. Games players are in my opinion more susceptible to this because first they are avid internet users and second, this industry is not really mature yet and that may translate into the some unprepared consumers. Yes, I am one of them!


The perfect hype should follow an exponential progress, with only limited information release during the developing process progressing gradually to a flood of coverage just before the release. There is also the term of “overhype” (this is a bad thing) that could lead to saturation and way to high expectations both being factors of failure. But that is for other time.


The so called AAA games are high profile products, with medium to high quality that just before the release receive a tone of coverage and abnormally positive reviews all over the board. Almost. There a handful number of gaming sites “that matters” with a lot of traffic, that one can pay guarantying positive build up. It is only necessary at this point to negotiate with the important ones, as that proves enough to create a hype. From buying a simple banner to specific contracts requesting positive reviews (there are copies of these type of agreements on certain forums) that can rise to a 6 digits sum, marketing never been so easy (maybe in the ’60).


The less important sites that don’t get paid, maybe from spite or journalistic integrity or a mix of both, sometime fuel the negative opinions that in most cases can be found only buried deep insides the forums. In time, the record is set strait (usually in the middle) but the initial sales can reach incredible numbers making all the investment worth.


The most important thing for me is something that I have mentioned before, the immaturity of the consumer base. In Japan for example a hype (around a computer game) is much more harder to build as industry is somehow ahead and the player base is more knowledgeable. It is the case also, for more veteran entertainment branches as movies business. It is still possible to trick the public, but require extend efforts from the producers (see Spider - Man 3 with top 10 winnings and mediocre user ratting).


I bought ME 2 with 4 days before being release and I am not sorry for that, is a decent game. I am just sorry I felt for the show before and raise my expectations so high that they got crashed when I start playing. Lesson learned, lesson shared, some cynicism added (not that I really need it anyway) and probably I am going to buy ME 3 also when it will be released.