Peter Molyneux is the patron saint for false advertising in video gaming. The Fable series would have been the only games you'd ever have to play if even half the things he said had actually been in the games.
" _Fable_ is by Lionhead Studios, home of longtime auteur game designer Peter Molyneux, who has a tendency to promise the Earth and be ultimately crippled by his own ambition (see the big fat broken monkey-fest _Black and White_ ). During the development of _Fable,_ for example, it was promised to have features like rival NPC characters, plants growing in real time, and a system wherein your every slightest choice of action changes your appearance and the world around you. What we ended up with was a buggy action-RPG with a great big stiffy for itself." -- Yahtzee Croshaw, _Fable: The Lost Chapters_ review
I wish I could remember enough details to try and dig up a clip, but for one of his games ages ago I saw an interview with both Molyneux and one of the developers whose job would be actually implementing the promises, and as Molyneux kept talking you could see the dev struggle to keep the smile on his face.
It is a good line, but sometimes people just like things and I really don’t like this attitude that is creeping through gaming that x thing is “objectively bad” and people who defend it are “shills” or somehow lying to themselves. It’s just garbage. Sometimes people do just like things that aren’t “objectively amazing” and have a right to. And you thinking it is bad doesn’t necessarily make you more right than someone who disagrees, especially when it is often painfully obvious a lot of people don’t even play the thing they are criticizing.
@@ducky36F No offense but I think you miss the point a bit. He's not talking about people liking games he doesn't like and merely having a different opinion which is fine. These are the people ("rabid fans" as per the video's own timestamps) that are defending false advertising (where the quote is said), threatening game devs, sometimes making them stop communicating or even developing completely or other fans who, whatever their opinions of the game criticize it and thereby making the whole industry worse, for gamers/consumers included. Which is objectively bad. In many cases these are actually crimes as they got sued as mentioned in the video. No one gets to have a subjective opinion that these things are good. Naturally you are right in your point, people should be allowed to like whatever game want. Even if someone makes a broken, unfinished mess that barely works I can still enjoy and have fun with it. But that's separate to what Frost's arguing in the video. If I pay full price for said game and defend it while it was being marketed as feature complete and harass anyone who disagrees with me, that's objectively bad and that's what the video is about, in part.
If you stand in the middle of the street with your market cart, and shout about 2 for 1 melons, then charge people full price for melon shaped footballs, that’s false advertising, because the person selling the thing is lying about what the thing being sold is. That’s what the CEO posting on social media is.
@@Praisethesunson Doesn't include the fitting to actually put the air in the football though. The good news is it is free, the bad news is you have to play for a minimum of 30 hours to put in the first half of the air, and 80 hours for the second half.
@@Shorty_LickensSame thing happened to me. Second Wind is excellent but The Escapist looked rotten, so I assumed it was. (Well some of it was but it wasn't the journalists.) Gaming journalism is bad to such a degree it makes even the odd good apples look worse by association.
It's because it's done by a company that's partnered with these CEOs and publishers. A lot of gaming media got bought out by Ziff Davis which later got converted into marketing mills which prevents situations like the IGN Kane & Lynch situation from happening again.
Sean Murray is why developers shouldn't do PR. "Is the thing you're personally trying to put into the game for release with your own two hands going to be in the game on release?" What's he gonna say? No?
I know people like to clown on Peter (later in his career, rightfully so), but during his bullfrog and EVEN Fable 1 + 2 days, he always had the games up for playability and videos so you knew EXACTLY what you were getting. Sure, maybe the tree didnt grow in Fable 1, but a lot of the life sim elements he wanted to bring to the game did happen in 2. These days? It could be 5 or 6 YEARS before a dev will even show you a screenshot, much less tell you what the game is even about! Fable and Perfect Dark are supposed to be out next year and the best was get is some CGI trailer with 10 seconds of game footage followed by some washed up british actor talking head or we get a sanitized run through that could very well be CGI and not even the game were getting!
@@lordxmugen The first time I heard Molyneux talk his shiznit was for fable 1 and I was more excited for an rpg then I ever think I was. Then I played it. I took every opportunity to shit on it and him in every single avenue where people talked about games and to this day will never play that game.
I've been honestly stunned at what passes for a release these days. I now have a simple policy. They aren't getting my money until I think the game is in a playable state. This of course limits the number of games I buy, but ...
as someone that's pretty much never bought a AAA game for over a decade, my steam wishlist has over 600 games, and I have over 1000 games in my library. There's a ton of amazing stuff to discover in the depths :D
Been doing that out of necessity at first. First kid meant less time to play and less money to buy junk. It then became a healthy habit. Wait a year before buying any game. Let others deal with the bugs, write the guides, find the exploits. It practically stomped impulsive buying, and saved me money in the long run. I don't need 20 games per year anymore, never did, in fact. Only bought three so far in 2024, and they're long going: Zelda:BotW, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Monster Hunter Rise.
I do the same. It limits the number of games, but there's still SO MANY good games to play. I don't get on hype trains anymore, ever. I learned my lesson with Spore many years ago. In fact I do my best to forget about announced games until they're already out; it works so much better that way.
I wouldn't have thought you'd have to meditate on a mountain to figure out that you should spend money on actual products and not a suspiciously lightweight mystery box.
Depends on what you call marketing to be honest. A lot of the stuff that AAA publishers push out is pure corporate marketing usually more driven by management and or the sales division. It's about sales and short term profits (because that's what makes their wages and bonuses go up, funnily enough marketing usually gets left out of those higher wages and bonuses). Things like Larian did with their Panels From Hell is also marketing. But that's what they call Inbound marketing, which is more about establishing yourself as an "authority" in your specific field and the focus is more on building up a long-term "community". And that means more often than not being way more open about (in this case) the development. Basically no 3 minute CGI trailers or extremely scripted "gameplay" videos and nothing else of actual value. Offering a free demo (PT was a genius move, were it not for Konami management ruining all the hard work from the dev team and the marketing team), doing substantial dev streams (like Grinding Gear Games does for every Path Of Exile league, or DE does for Warframe) are solid ways of doing Marketing. But most AAA publishers have the same mindset as executives in Hollywood have been doing for dozens of years. Release some fancy trailers for hype and then bring out a half-baked product. The negative perception/skepticism is finally catching up with the film industry the last 3 years. It will happen with games as well. I'm 100% fine with inbound marketing. I despise short-term sales driven marketing. Luckily, it's pretty obvious most of the time which is which.
I found the best insulation against marketing was watching the drama Mad Men. It tells you the exact thoughts behind advertisements, it's like an inoculation.
I was unaware that CEOs' public statements and interviews didn't count as "advertising". Joy. I do remember Cyberpunk winning "best ongoing game", though. That really annoyed me since making an update that fixed it was counted the same as the actual online multiplayer game that were nominated. Of course I wanted Final Fantasy XIV to win, but I would have accepted it if Apex, Genshin, or Fortnite won. Those games are designed to be "ongoing" and actually fit in the category.
Yeah, that felt like a disservice to the industry, if you ask me. I'm glad that Cyberpunk is finally playable, but like you said, fixing mistakes that you made doesn't make it an "ongoing game"
@@Dracas42 Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that Cyberpunk turned into something playable, but what bothers me is how people don't understand why it does not deserve the respect that NMS gets for its redemption NMS was set back a year in development THEN had to release a year early, the fact that the team at Hello Games basically took the reddit post outlining all of the missing features and used it as a checklist to fix in the first year of post release support, THEN KEPT GOING. Is a redemption arc that deserves the respect people are giving it. It ultimately wasn't their fault Sony forced them to release while it was missing features. The best part? They didn't even market that they were going to finish the game, they just shut up and finished the game. Hell, it's almost a meme now, NMS gets MASSIVE updates that nobody sees coming, the other day they released one of their biggest updates yet, a 17 gig update, and there was no patch notes on steam, the video on RUclips hadn't been posted yet. They literally dropped a DLC sized patch for the game and forgot to tell anyone. Cyberpunk, on the other hand, didn't have massive losses in development time, the base game was in development for like 8 years or so, then they delayed the launch two or three times... and then released the game, unplayable on consoles and still full of bugs and issues for the PC release. They promised a LOT and delivered a pretty mediocre action adventure game that was so buggy and ran so poorly that most users buying it couldn't even play it. They didn't get forced to release it early, there's no reports of their studio getting damaged and losing progress, they just decided to release a game when it couldn't even run on consoles. Sure, complaining about different PC hardware configurations causing problem is something I can partially understand, except that it was the PC version that performed the best. People with underpowered hardware could run it better than the consoles which have ONE configuration to test. Cyberpunk shouldn't get a pass, because they built their own mess, they decided to release it early, there wasn't any reasons, any legitimate excuses for why the promised a game that didn't exist.
@@loopholesloopy Cyberpunk is a No Man's Sky redemption story because both finally released the game they showed off at E3 about 4 years after launch. The anime has nothing to do with the game now being feature complete.
So fun fact, right at the start of the video, *right* as the guy hits the gavel there was a loud *BEEP*, there was a stutter, and my sound cut out completely. And I was like "oh, Frost is making a joke, where the video itself is buggy, I see where this is going!" Took me almost 20 seconds to realize my wireless headset had just run out of power and turned itself off.
That's not a fun fact. It may be a thing that happened, it may even be fun, but it;s not a fun fact. Fun fact is something I'd expect to hear from someone about to recite some trivia or some obscure snippet of knowledge. Not something that happened to you personally, especially this inconsequential. I know this is pedantic af from me but it annoys me when people speak with this hyperbolic vocabulary. Fun fact doesn't belong in that paragraph.
No no cause you see the general public would never support a politician who is willing to do that. In the U.S. we vote based on how you look and what your “pitch” is. The “pitch” is the single issue or collection of issues that you are lying and saying you care about today - from criminal justice reform to border security. If we buy your pitch and if you look how we want you to look (young, spunky, racially ambiguous) we will vote for you Americans buy the pitch and the personality. We simply aren’t interested in voting for competent people.
@@sincereflowers3218 Lol, what is this, 2008? American politics today is "just we aren't the other guy", despite both options being guilty of the same shit, agreeing on all the worst things, and in private being part of the same club be it with the same donors, same elite schools or even attending each other's weddings, funerals, parties, private islands, etc. They can call each other fascist and communist all they want (despite those words practically being meaningless) but the worst things in the US have always been bipartisan, because the parties represent different elite factions and the common, normal people are either checked out of all the bullshit or mindlessly cheering on the kayfabe.
"The customer is always right... in matters of taste". People forget the second half of that quote. I really don't get the harassment and entitlement of developers, regardless of what they have said or done. Vote with your wallet, don't turn it into an online riot.
That is a later version of the quote. The original quote is by Swiss hotelier César Jean Ritz, and it is literally "le client n'a jamais tort" end quote.
@@meej33 that “later addition” was clarification not change. That was the original intent of the phrase based on how it was used. If you want to argue it should have specified before, you’re being pedantic. It also didn’t specify “within the law” but that was clearly implied.
It's because _anyone_ in the public eye has to deal with this type of disconnect, and it's been that way since we've had the public eye. Silent film stars had this, and it's not going to go away anytime soon. It's a sad reality of human nature, but it's the reality of it. We don't live in a fantasy world where the mentally unwell get the help that they need while people dealing with the general public can pick and choose who they interact with. Bemoaning that there are mentally unwell people doing mentally unwell things online and in person isn't going to change the fact that they're going to exist and by exposing yourself to the general public, you expose yourself to them. If people can't handle the reality of that, then dealing with the public isn't for them.
Something I learned a few years ago and share at every opportunity is that "The customer is always right" is only half the phrase! It's supposed to be "The customer is always right, in matters of taste" it was a phrase to remind retail staff that you can't tell the customer what they do or don't like not that they're near omnipotent beings incapable of being wrong!
I think this is the best version of a patreon scroll through. Instead of music over scrolling text like credits in movies that we all skip, it's actual content while showing off the people who support it.
Since a recent court case in the US reached the verdict that it's legal to advertise "boneless chicken wings" when they have bones in them, I'd say move to Australia if you want any chance of bringing suit against game makers...
I mean, the way that whole thing is being reported is silly but the sentiment is there. The FDA especially has always kowtowed to corporate interests, because we originated Reaganomics. Let the corporations do whatever and the consumer will benefit *somehow*.
I watch your videos because I find them engaging. I’m not killing time here. And you know, dopamine is released in anticipation? This is to say: bring back the old intro, please! It gets me in the mood. You’re not dispensing fast food; I’d sit down to eat this, with cutlery and everything!
Hits different after Frost’s resignation. Seems the same toxicity at Escapist is just as rife here. Incompetent leadership of those trying to game SEO while devaluing content creators in the process.
"the customer is always right" is one of the most misused and misunderstood phrases by decision makers. It solely refers to sales negotiations, since the customer knows what they want and the wise salesman sells them just that. But once the ink on the contract dried, this contract should become the base of every operations. Yet... many make it so that customers are allowed to break contracts and ask for extras at will and staff has to apply or face repercussions. It's just twisted to the brim.
Turns out a lot of idioms are misused like that. “Jack of all trades is a master of none” comes to mind. Used as you should hone in on one thing, when the full thing adds “but oftentimes is better than a master of one”, so the actual quote is saying generalization is better than mastery.
I was in customer service for 22 years, and that "being treated like a dancing monkey" line definitely hits home. Towards the end, I got so jaded and fed up with people's attitudes, smugness, arrogance, stupidity, ignorance, and entitlement that I started pushing back, not caring what my boss would say or do to me. Indeed, there were a couple times when I stood up to customers who got shitty with me, even threatened me, and my boss told me I was in the wrong for doing so. I now finally work a job where I have little to any interaction with people at all, and I am a lot happier.
The mentions of crazed "fans" really hits, because one of my favorite Instagram creators has been having major issues because people have been incredibly parasocial with her and trying to find her and her family, then others telling her she's just "naive" and that being on the internet she should expect that, and so should everyone else related to her. IDK what is with people anymore but.... DAMN.
All I can think about is Yahtzee’s quote about when people say a game has potential: “The best ‘potential’ novel is a blank sheet of paper - but that doesn’t make it a good fireside read”
The craziest bit of that was that the settings existed in the config files to get the PC version looking like that original footage! Why not include it as an option in the menu?
Yes! Thank you for now having the game names at the bottom of the screen. Theres been so many times I’ve seen some cool looking game on these Cold Takes i’d want to check out and have no idea what game it was lol
It's very similar to how gun people so eagerly throw around an edited version of the Second Amendment for their personal gain; "We have the right to bear arms, we have the right to bear arms!!" They scream it until they are blue in the face. But, they very conveniently leave out the entire first half of the amendment, which clearly states, "A well-regulated militia being necessary for the security of the state, the right to bear arms shall not be infringed." This is one of many topics that I stopped arguing with people about, as people are going to believe whatever they damn well want to believe, come Hell or high water.
Any product sold in Aus is bound by the Australian Consumer Law, and any contract clause that contradicts it is automatically considered invalid. This forms the main reason why we have the footing to push back against these issues
that is the reason I got a refund when Sword of the Stars 2 released (in 2011) two years before early access even existed, this being back in the day when you needed to sign up to a completely separate support website from your steam account and copy paste the part of the ACL and goods being of a merchantable quality back and forth for a while till they begrudgingly offered a "one time refund in this specific case". those buying today have no idea how good they've got it with the 2 hour "demo" and reasonable exceptions past that like when a developer slaps on an account or DRM requirement that wasn't there before
While No Man's Sky did have its redemption arc, having launched with so many missing features but adding them post-launch and then continuing to build upon it, it's unfortunately the odd one out in the "eventually delivered" aspect. Pretty much no other developer I can think of took the time and effort to build up what was missing from what they themselves offered
You know, originally, I only came here to listen to Zero Punctuation. When I saw this "cold take" stuff a few months back, i was like, "ugh, more bundled cable content that no one wants to hear. Next." But then, this guy just started speaking fact after fact, one cold truth after another, not hot takes, but genuine real problems. I think I'm a fan now. Now I come here to hear you speak, too.
In Australia, I do believe promises made by sales representatives do count as advertising. But that's in the context of being able to return the product for a full refund, not in the context of false advertising laws. Even so, it'd be interesting to me if somebody were to take up the issue in Australian courts!
It's the change in consumerism, younger more online generations are using consumer products as signals of taste and personality rather than actually developing a sense of self so now the consumer product itself doesn't matter but the symbols that it stands for and what it represents matters more than the objective quality of the package as a consumable product. It's also the reasoning behind the pervasive "media literacy" discussion in online spaces, as well as the demand and acclaim for "morally sound" and non-"problematic" media in online spaces, because people have begun to internalize consumption as a moral act that indicates a person's values and beliefs and think that by consuming or creating media with "problematic" content you are endorsing those views as your own. You can see clearly how viewing consumption as a moral imperative leaves consumers vulnerable, it's the same fundamental vulnerability that cults operate on. Why is the active playercount a metric that people care about now? Because a lot of people consuming one product means that I should also consume the product, because if they're all doing it then I'm missing out, and if I'm missing out then I am a bad person.
@@BladedEdgei lived through it, the issue is that gaming back then in the west was seen exclusively within the realm of childrens entertainment in the same sense that Transformers and Cabbage Patch Kids toys were. It was not nearly the same kind of problem as we have now, where people are essentially being groomed from a young age through adulthood to be fiercly loyal to one product or manufacturer. You aged out of the gaming demographic once you hit your teenage years back then, but now it is all encompassing and pervasive.
the problematic concent thing also stems from this misplaced idea that depicting something in media normalises it, which it does not and never has, so if you depict something particularly disgusting like rape or say incest in media you are contributing to the normalization of it even if you explicitly depict is as a bad thing.
Well said. As per the 1st paragraph, we did have fanboys before… but I think the difference now is the internet/social media. Before you only had “people on the playground” and a small amount of people on a forum, if you bothered to join a _specific_ one. But now that we’ve whittled those down to basically just Twitter and RUclips, you’ll come across a LOT more people to reinforce that behaviour. And since kids make up a huge part of these platforms, their emotional/defensive nature will come off like the consensus. Some adults will get swept up in it, and content creators will placate to it because that’s the audience that makes their job a reality. A lot of toxic positivity around these days. It’s funny when these zoomers complain that people “hate” on a game after 6 months… no, it’s just the hype wearing off and people can start to see closer to what it really was without the blinders on. Because any minute criticism or concern around launch would get yelled down, even if it’s reasonable. Then the next big AAA gets hyped up as a “GOAT” and they fall for it all over again, learning nothing. Heck, you can’t even say you like something but think it’s flawed. It’s either -2/10 or 12/10. No in-between or else you’ll be branded a “hater”. Kids? Understandable? Teenagers? Still in the ballpark, but should start learning. But we’re talking adults like 21-24 and they’re still acting like this. It’s sad.
The gaming media is complicit in this. They consistently let developers and publishers get away with releasing crap at full price, as long as it gets fixed in the 2 following years. Witcher 3 opened the door to No Man's Sky, which opened the door to Cyberpunk... All those games released in a shameful state, and were given massive passes from the media, in the years that followed their release.
Their job is to report the state of things and, occasionally, give a personal subjective state on things by an individual writer. It’s not their job to pass judgement and certainly not to punish. That’s your job.
@@markwazny6361 then why do they love to smear "best game of year xxx", "you need to play this" etc etc? Reviews aren't, weren't nor could ever be completely objective. Besides stating how broken and undelivered a game is compared to the promises isn't really a matter of subjective interpretation. They either promised something or didn't, it works or does not. It crashes or doesn't. If a game underdelivers compared to promises / competition then it needs a lower score instead of a pat on a back and a star for trying. Sadly that's what we see, especially when it comes to AAA titles.
@@karol30660 Because reviews are bought and paid for AT THE SOURCE. Gaming media big and small constantly do softball reviews and make up excuses why the "Next Big Thing" can get away with BS gameplay or lack of features so as not to piss off the bigger publishers and continue to get hands ons as well as interviews and review copies. Its a very incestuous relationship that shouldnt happen, but does, in most media.
@@markwazny6361 They certainly could systematically report, after a game is released, on how deceptive its marketing was. Because as much as I am tired of publishers lying in pretty much every way they can get away with, I'm also tired of gaming press that is happy to relay the lie without any criticism.
Where the CDPR games are concerned they were buggy and a bit flawed and slightly unfinished perhaps - but still great games lacking that final polish they would get... With games as rare and unrivalled as they are at their launch you rate them based on how good they are compared to the drought of similar titles, and the previous best of their type of game. in which despite the problems both stand up pretty well, and are worthy of a good review... So as long as the gaming media isn't hiding the problems - which as far as I can recall they never did with CDPR games, if anything the problems got more media than the game's quality that is fair enough - you can read into the media hype and get exicted but should if you paid any attention also know its not perfect... No Man's Sky on the other hand being eventually being caught lying or at the very most charitable being misleading about features in the game knowing nobody is going to be able to prove it quickly - can't really blame the reviewers for that, in their review window all they can say 'hey I liked/disliked this bit and that bit I experienced and report on the feature that is supposed to be there and what you'd think it might mean for the game' - you can't actually rate a feature that happens to not exist when you have not been able to prove it doesn't or realistically test it... All you can say is its supposed to be.
The sad thing is, I don't think he's lying. Hello Games was a relatively new company, with two really tiny games under its belt. I think feature creep just got to him, and he didn't have the experience to realize some of this stuff wasn't feasible until far too late. Internet Historian has a great video on the whole No Man's Sky debacle, if you haven't seen it already.
@@anthonylarocque7975 internet historian's video is a bunch of wet blanket equivocation trying to explain why the things Murray said didn't mean the things Murray said and rationalizing that it's okay to lie to your customers as long as you make good (years and years later). The video might be entertaining, but it's misguided at best and misinformation at worst.
@@anthonylarocque7975 you also have to remember: he often states that he’s nervous, and that being in front of cameras like that is his worst nightmare. He’s not a PR guy, he’s a Dev who wants his game to flourish
I feel like people have forgotten that they're capable of not being right. Am I annoyed by a thing I like not being given to me? Sure! Am I right in being annoyed? HELL NO! My annoyance is stupid and objectively wrong and I would never attempt to voice it as right because I know that.
If this is in reference to Silksong, of course you can. They chose to announce it early. If you don’t want to have fans get irritated because it’s taking so long, then don’t announce it at the start of development when it’s going to take 4-5 years. It implies it’s further on in development than it is because you didn’t set expectations (since they will know the most). Unless it’s a AAA game, people are going to assume an announcement/initial trailer means it’s 1-2 years out. Plus… people didn’t think an indie Metroidvania would take this long. And Team Cherry improperly set expectations. It first started out as DLC (no reasonable person would assume that takes years), have teasers that don’t say much, go radio silent, announce a launch window in 2023 (or at least Xbox said so and the studio didn’t correct it), then delay and announce another release window for “late 2024 at the absolute earliest”. They should’ve set expectations properly and didn’t. The only reason to announce something so early would be if it’s a crowdfunded game (Kickstarter or Steam early access). Because then you know not to expect it for several years (and they’d say it), and the justification for announcing it so early is that it needs additional funding to be made in the first place. Now, I don’t think they thought it would take that long. I think they just wanted to keep expanding and it turned into a full blown sequel. But this is also why you don’t announce things until you’re like 50% through development. Because you’ll have a better idea of at what point you’ll finish. I will say, I think people should’ve calmed down by now. Because even a year or two ago you would’ve been waiting several years and should’ve realized “I should put it out of my mind because it’s clearly not releasing anytime soon”.
@@mrshmuga9 While I wasnt talking about Silksong alone (There's a bunch of other stuff that also falls in this general ballpit for me), you're totally right. I was mostly just talking about how people assume that they are at some moral high ground. - stuff like people getting salty about Dwarf Fortress Adventure Mode taking a long time and such as if they're truly, actively *owed* it to a greater extent than they actually are. Like for example: as someone who recently got a good deal of the half life series, reaching the end is heartbreaking, and knowing that getting a "third" one would take a minor miracle hurts my soul, but I'm not actively *owed* a Half Life 3. - I have a good reason for being sad and annoyed about it, but that reason isn't some black and white, moraly flawless, "i am objectively right in all I do" reason. It's mostly a matter of knowing that all this stuff is, at the end of the day, quite literally all fun and games
@@ahumanb3ingthatexists67 There is a huge difference between wanting a third Half Life game and demanding the PVE content you were told was in the game (but now is coming "sometime later") be included in the purchase you made because of that promise. I completely agree that the folks getting massively upset about not getting something like your example, but when it comes to marketing, most of that crap is like my example - stuff promised and not delivered. I cannot help but support the victims who fell for the advertising fraud from these big publishers. (No, don't go harass individual developers, but developers, you took a paycheck and are complicit in the fraud; so yeah, you may just end up like the random Enron workers who got dirty looks for having the company on their resume after its collapse, which in this case generally manifests as hatred from victimized players.)
I'd love for Sean to do a really candid interview about exactly what he was playing at. The video "The Engoodening of No Mans Sky" really did do a good job of explaining the shit situation Hello Games found themselves in but it's a third party account, would really like to just hear it straight from Sean
It was a shitty situation they put themselves in. People love to act like the flood set them back a ton, but... I don't believe it. A setback can't just completely erase multiplayer netcode; that needs to be a fundamental element that the entire game is built around. Modders can straight up tell you that the multiplayer update required basically rewriting the game from scratch, and prior to that, there was no netcode. It can't suddenly turn the sun from an object the planets rotate around into a 2D skybox element that rotates around the planets. It can't separate the solar systems into different load zones when Sean Murray claimed you could fly from one to the other. It can't hide the animals and buildings from the "gameplay" trailers in the game files as pre-rendered cutscene elements that cannot be generated by the proc-gen engine. It can't make Sean Murray say "wow there's so many of you our servers can't handle it" when people call out the lack of multiplayer. Sean Murray just lied about a shit ton of stuff and tried to cover it up. I am a firm believer that it's just because he's an awkward nerd who wanted to impress the public and ran out of real features to list. But that doesn't change the fact he lied and doubled and tripled down on it.
This is a perfect example of things actually having been better before. They couldn't ship things the same way 15 years ago, like they do today, because they relied on physical sales. _Selling lies used to cost you dearly, but not anymore..._
The best gaming model was back when you bought a game in a physical box on floppy disks. If there came to be a bug in the game, the developer had to physically mail you a patch on a disc. This tremendously incentivized getting it right the first time and shipping a complete product. I actually miss those days, now, of waiting for that patch disc to arrive in the mail.
For me the other problem is that, as well as parasocial relationships, people have started to make products such as games a part of their personality. Making a one-way connection to a person or product a core part of your identity is mega unhealthy.
Say what you want about Sean, that mf and his company charge one price, which is frequently discounted, for a game with an almost decade worth of updates. That is legit unprecedented.
@@EastyyBlogspot A game years away is arguably the best use case for a CGI trailer, no? If gameplay footage does exist at that time, there's a good chance it could change significantly before launch. The insane length of time it takes to develop major games nowadays is, of course, another topic. I think CGI/cinematic trailers absolutely have their place, particularly when introducing a new IP with a narrative focus - it helps set expectation for worldbuilding, tone and story. But no opening pre-orders without gameplay should be a red line.
“You *could* encounter other players” : Sean Murray is clearly referring to the infinitesimally small possibility of multiplayer spontaneously appearing in the game due to random quantum fluctuations. 😂
It's wild how people will revise history for the games that redeemed themselves. According to them, Cyberpunk wasn't a buggy mess on release, CDPR didn't sell blatantly unplayable last-gen versions after saying they ran "surprisingly well", it was actually the gamers' fault for overhyping the game. Sean Murray didn't brazenly lie about No Man's Sky, he just excitedly talked about things he wanted to put in the game, and it's the gamers' fault for believing him when he claimed the game had multiplayer features after it had already been finished and shipped without them. Like, it's great that these games have been improved and are good now, but we can't pretend that they didn't start out as rip-offs sold under objectively false pretenses. It's no wonder this keeps happening when we're willing to revise history in their favor and even give them awards for it as long as they eventually patch the game to be kind of like the game they said it would be years ago.
I remember a random comment about No Man's Sky that I liked. The missing multiplayer is like a car manufacturer talking about a new safety feature, "it's this new bumper airbag that can save the car from being a write off, but it'll only deploy if the car gets into a really bad accident, so don't go trying to set it off!"
Game roadmap= developer iou Well, that's the most succinct way of putting it I've seen in a minute, good one Frosty (in the know, man). I had to say it, I'm sorry
You know, now you’ve brought it up Frost, I am still mad that Sean Murray got away with lying about multiplayer in NMS. I understand everything he was trying to do with that game, the wonder, the mystique, the sense of exploring grand alien worlds. I totally get it, but like, multiplayer requires code, Sean! Multiplayer requires servers! I can’t believe he tried to get away with pretending all of that was there when it wasn’t.
No Man's Sky gets a pass because it's literally not their fault, they lost a lot of progress, and "code", to a flood, setting them back somewhere between six months to a year of progress, then Sony forced them to release a year early, a year earlier than they had set BEFORE the flood. They get a pass because all of the missing features were implemented in the first year of the game's existence, which literally proved that Sony's impatience caused all of the issues.
@@SherrifOfNottingham I don’t think they get that much of a pass. Sony didn’t ‘force’ them to do anything. They signed a publishing contract that would have stipulated release times, & many many of Sean’s on-camera claims about multiplayer were after they partnered with Sony. Let’s not rewrite history, he knew multiplayer wasn’t in the game he was promoting the release of, & he went round all the talk shows & outlets saying “well you might run into someone, who can say, it’s just very unlikely!” When of course it was a little more than just unlikely.
@@SherrifOfNottinghamyeah then they should've fessed up about it when it happened, not a day before launch and then continuing to lie right up until the moment they could no longer deny it. Quit making excuses for being lied to. It's embarrassing.
@@SherrifOfNottinghamThat’s not an excuse unless the flood happened a month before they printed the discs, which it didn’t. If they supposedly lost that data, they could’ve said months before launch the effect of the flood and that they won’t be able to complete that aspect. People would be understanding. Even if you wanted to say “they were trying/thought they could get it in”, he waited until the 11th hour to say it when he would’ve known full well before then that it wasn’t happening. And it’s not like “oh we were close but missed before printing”. No, it was months later that features started creeping up. They gave up early enough, then slowly walked it back from “yes” to “it’s so unlikely it might as well be no” to “no” at the latest point just so they could say “See? We said it won’t be in.”. As if months of confirming and baiting people could be corrected to the mass of people with a single tweet at the last second. I think they probably bit more than they could chew and were overzealous (and too open) about what they wanted to do, but that doesn’t absolve them of guilt for being dishonest when they had time to correct the record.
@@Gingrnut The publishing deal they signed functionally forced them to lie, they weren't allowed to say that many of the features the game was marketed on were not done, likely because they were in the contract they signed. To be clear though, the release date they initially signed for with Sony WAS a year later, Sony changed the deal on them, which they could do because Sony is a multi-billion dollar corporation and Hello Games was 20 people in a shitty office whose entire livelihood depended on Sony actually paying them.
I like the new format! Sort of miss the opening theme song but I like that it jumps right into the story. And the closing credits are clever - keeps me watching to the very end. Good stuff!
Lethal Company is a game I love and its astounding how it was only made by one person. But if you go into the Steam forums today you'll find heaps of people calling the dev "lazy" for not cranking out updates like a triple A studio. What happened to games just releasing and being happy with a product? I'm glad Lethal Company gets updates but nearly every update is met with derision from "fans" claiming that modders work faster and the dev should've spent all the money he's making on hiring a bigger dev team to produce more updates. They're completely ignoring the fact that game development isn't a full time job for some people and working on games full time might not even be what they want. People are expecting INDIVIDUALS to put out content roadmaps and monthly updates that most live service games can't even maintain. Its unhealthy for the gamers and the developers alike.
‘The customer is always right’ in matters of personal taste - is the rest of that quote ….the forgotten, unspoken caveat. The quote means that people can like vanilla and it’s their choice & should not be criticized BUT that is the only thing the customer is right about. Forget this at your own peril.
Should we just be flagging all CEO statements about games under development as meaningless nonsense? I mean, CEOs are nearly useless to begin with, maybe we should just stop interviewing them if nothing they say means anything.
I hope I don't come across as another rabid Silksong fan, but as someone who's going through a bit of a drought waiting for that game and a few other indies I'm curious about, I'll say this: I don't want to know your game exists until, at maximum, like two years before it's ready. A 6 year wait for Tears of the Kingdom, an 8 year wait for Metroid Prime 4, who knows how long with Silksong, who knows how long with Deltarune. I don't love the trend of teasing fans way way before a product is ready and then the devs being surprised that we get impatient. I'm not sending death threats to Team Cherry and I'm not constantly posting about Skong, but I can't help but feel impatient due to the fact that we've been waiting 5 years with almost no updates. Almost anyone who wants Silksong to see the light of day can agree that they should've simply waited until they were more certain of the release window for the game before releasing a trailer and demo for it.
Even now, I'm not sure Team Cherry has a release window planned. To me, it's clear that Silksong is suffering from either scope creep or constant revisions to stuff that's already done. That's the only reasonable explanation for why something that started as a DLC is taking this long.
"Fend everyone off with the sharp ends of the broken dream". There's some truly excellent writing happening on this channel and I just wanted to leave a comment saying how much I enjoy that.
The thing about No Man's Sky is that it WAS an indie, and they signed the worst possible marketing deal with Sony, they legally couldn't say "this isn't gonna be in the game". The moment they stopped being restrained by a marketing deal they started being pretty clear with stuff and not doing any kind of promises at all. It's also worth noting that the game as it released was like, the way it was intended to be, it wasn't (just) incomplete, it was simply going for a very different kind of game than what the marketing campaign was advertising. It was like a chocolate cake advertised as a steak. Many of the "missing features" that were later actually added in large content updates completely changed the game and for many it was in a negative way. Similarly quite a few things were *removed* to match the expectation that had been built up.
I enjoy how Frost manages call out marketing tactics while simultaneously turning this around to blame consumers for wanting information in an industry that thrives on mushroom farming... "Keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em shit." In an industry where a trailer will launch for a game that is years away from completing development or doesn't even exist in any state. I find it hard to swallow the "just eat your shit" take... At least it's not entirely blaming consumers for wanting transparent communication.
@@NihilistZealot It's a double-edged problem. Some people get unreasonable, to say the least, and start harassing devs and publishers, whereas some devs and publishers are under-performing at best and outright lying at worst. He's trying to appeal to both sides for reason, or at least that's the impression I'm getting - stop scamming and stop harassing, basically.
@@JulieLamia yeah I'm kinda sad he didn't dwell on the fact that the unfair response to team Cherry's lack of saying literally anything did at least come from a fair place of frustration
This really is one of those trends that will never change without regulation, and the more publishers that adopt this piecemeal release and verbal promises approach the harder it will be to disentangle, much like "live services".
Thank you for calling cyberpunk out for this frost. I got violently ill when I heard cyberpunk the award for best ongoing game. I pre-ordered it over a year before they launched. I bought all their bullshit. And to this day cyberpunk 2077 was the last game I pre ordered as well as the last game I have played remotely close to the release date. The videogame industry is a ugly shell of what it once was.
I think this ties into an even larger problem with games right now: The absurdly, unsustainably huge cost of producing top-tier games. And it gets more expensive every generation. So you have companies staring down the barrel of an eye-watering nine-figure investment, which could ruin a studio or publisher if it fails, looking for ANY way to mitigate that risk. This is NOT to defend scammy hype-based marketing and "minimum viable product" releases, per se. But it does constitute rational behavior, under the circumstances. And that's the central problem. When the economy of gaming is so broken that even supposedly respectable companies are resorting to such shady behavior, well, something is very rotten at the core of the industry. (But then, of course, you have the players who expect every generation to blow their minds even harder than the last gen, or launch into online tantrums because they feel like their top-spec ultra-high-end PC isn't being used to its fullest potential, which further incentivizes all of this. It's one big jujuflop situation, basically.)
Nowdays No Man's Sky is remembered for how it turned around, but man, being there fore the launch was a RIDE. It's still impressive to see Sean Murray straight up lie without even flinching about features that were probably never even planned to be added, not to mention the completely false trailers. The fact that they still failed upwards, regardless of the state of the game today, is insane.
The noise around silksong is really annoying. If team cherry never releases anything that would be totally fine. They owe nothing to anyone. But the constant bringing it up by the outlets and the demands from "fans" is insane. Until Team Cherry says something, just shut up about the game.
I'm going to disagree with this partially. It wasn't No Man's Sky that started this, it was Minecraft. Jerma does a great video on this topic called TF2: A Mini-Rant on "The Everlasting Beta" all the way back in 2013. In summary, games changed after Minecraft came out and people started playing for an incomplete process. Before that, games didn't really have a Beta period except for MMO's doing it for network testing, or other similarly large games, and even then they were mostly finished products. Minecraft basically told devs that people would pay for an unfinished product and you could make hundreds of millions of dollars. At look where that brought us.
I feel there should be more consideration on the role of journalism in relation to hype/advertisement of upcoming games. We seem to have sauntered right past the journalists and their often too-cozy relationship with publishers/developers.
This. Games Journos, the ones working for your IGNs, your Gamespots etc. are already in the pocket of the publishers. This is why we have the infamous "every Triple A game is a 7/10 *if* the publisher is paying for it". One of your employees bad mouths the latest Madden/Fifa and gives it a low score...well would you look at that, EA has suddenly stopped sending you review copies. Now you have to buy it like a consumer AND you won't have the review up until a week after launch...when everyone has already read a review from another website which was willing to tow the company line thus reducing clicks and leads to advertisers pulling out to go to the other, more clicked on, website. And that's if the review isn't just some ChatGPT dross shat out in under a minute with the prompt "write a 7/10 review for [insert game]".
That Silksong aside was a bizarre addition. The complete silence from the studio far beyond any of their previous metrics isn't parasocial, and I don't even gaf about the game.
Go on r/Silksong and me and the chat for any indie gaming event. Who cares if TC are silent? They are still working on it, the end. They don’t want to give any updates. I would say their “metrics” are way more indicative of silence than communication.
@@TheOracleofClocks Totally agreed and not to mention that Silksong is one of the achieved stretch goals of the original Kickstarter ("second playable character") that the devs chose to spin off into a separate game. I'm not a backer of the original Kickstarter nor a fan as such. To me, the devs cook for as long as they want. However writing people who are annoyed that they still haven't gotten what they were promised seven years after the game initially released doesn't seem fair. Especially when it seems like most of those people would be happy if the devs just tweeted "we're still working on it, here's a cool new screenshot" every couple of months.
Yeah I'll be excited if and when Silksong comes out and ok if it doesn't, because they don't owe me anything. But there's some people out there that they kind of do owe it to, and I don't think it's crazy that those people feel differently as a result.
I feel like I'm crazy for finding that one segment weird cause yeah he said nothing about how at least some of the frustration with the utter lack of communication was valid
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
Peter Molyneux is the patron saint for false advertising in video gaming. The Fable series would have been the only games you'd ever have to play if even half the things he said had actually been in the games.
" _Fable_ is by Lionhead Studios, home of longtime auteur game designer Peter Molyneux, who has a tendency to promise the Earth and be ultimately crippled by his own ambition (see the big fat broken monkey-fest _Black and White_ ). During the development of _Fable,_ for example, it was promised to have features like rival NPC characters, plants growing in real time, and a system wherein your every slightest choice of action changes your appearance and the world around you. What we ended up with was a buggy action-RPG with a great big stiffy for itself."
-- Yahtzee Croshaw, _Fable: The Lost Chapters_ review
Every once in a while, I go back to that RPS interview. It's a piece of art.
I wish I could remember enough details to try and dig up a clip, but for one of his games ages ago I saw an interview with both Molyneux and one of the developers whose job would be actually implementing the promises, and as Molyneux kept talking you could see the dev struggle to keep the smile on his face.
It's why Populous 3 is the best of that series.
Because Peter had fuck all to do with that one! :)
Todd Howard: Tell me Lies, tell me sweet little lies
This is why I tend to buy games years after launch. Then I pay a fraction of the original price and get the best experience with the game.
same usually. I have a huge backlog anyway collected from Steam sales.
if you're able to wait a few years you'll even know if any expansions are worth picking up, and they'll probably be cheaper at that point too
And the wiki will already be written for when you need it
And the PC parts that can run those games are much cheaper then too
Yup yup yup. Doing the right thing.
Incredible writing. 10:20's "All the while the most diehard fans fend everyone off with the sharp ends of broken dreams" is a crazy good line.
I watch Cold Take for exactly this sort of prose.
Shit, he just described me with the Battlefield series, what a shame, but i feel betrayed at every new entry
It is a good line, but sometimes people just like things and I really don’t like this attitude that is creeping through gaming that x thing is “objectively bad” and people who defend it are “shills” or somehow lying to themselves. It’s just garbage. Sometimes people do just like things that aren’t “objectively amazing” and have a right to. And you thinking it is bad doesn’t necessarily make you more right than someone who disagrees, especially when it is often painfully obvious a lot of people don’t even play the thing they are criticizing.
Dude goes unreasonably hard sometimes and I love it. I hope he's writing a ton of things.
@@ducky36F No offense but I think you miss the point a bit. He's not talking about people liking games he doesn't like and merely having a different opinion which is fine. These are the people ("rabid fans" as per the video's own timestamps) that are defending false advertising (where the quote is said), threatening game devs, sometimes making them stop communicating or even developing completely or other fans who, whatever their opinions of the game criticize it and thereby making the whole industry worse, for gamers/consumers included. Which is objectively bad. In many cases these are actually crimes as they got sued as mentioned in the video. No one gets to have a subjective opinion that these things are good.
Naturally you are right in your point, people should be allowed to like whatever game want. Even if someone makes a broken, unfinished mess that barely works I can still enjoy and have fun with it. But that's separate to what Frost's arguing in the video. If I pay full price for said game and defend it while it was being marketed as feature complete and harass anyone who disagrees with me, that's objectively bad and that's what the video is about, in part.
I really appreciate that you guys have the game title in the bottom left corner for each game you show.
Huh, I didn't notice until you pointed it out. Thank you
Yes, so very much.
If you stand in the middle of the street with your market cart, and shout about 2 for 1 melons, then charge people full price for melon shaped footballs, that’s false advertising, because the person selling the thing is lying about what the thing being sold is. That’s what the CEO posting on social media is.
It wouldn't be as bad if you at least got 2 footballs. Instead it's a football and a sponge they claim is the same as the other.
Also the football is flat and the air needed to make it good costs an extra $39.99@@LegendStormcrow
Exactly! Too bad the courts don't see it that way.
@@Praisethesunson And we'll also sell you the pump to fill it up for another $25 DLC.
@@Praisethesunson Doesn't include the fitting to actually put the air in the football though. The good news is it is free, the bad news is you have to play for a minimum of 30 hours to put in the first half of the air, and 80 hours for the second half.
The last cold take episode. Good luck Frost in your next project.
@@wairen5020 yep o7 good luck frost
@@IanDunbar1 Nick *really* needs to stop picking fights on twitter.
Where did he end up ?
@@hazukichanx408what is Frost's channel called?
@theotherfrost , which also has his video giving his side on why he left
It ain't just CEOs and publishers, a lot of gaming media also stokes the flames just to get clicks.
@@Shorty_LickensSame thing happened to me. Second Wind is excellent but The Escapist looked rotten, so I assumed it was. (Well some of it was but it wasn't the journalists.) Gaming journalism is bad to such a degree it makes even the odd good apples look worse by association.
It's because it's done by a company that's partnered with these CEOs and publishers. A lot of gaming media got bought out by Ziff Davis which later got converted into marketing mills which prevents situations like the IGN Kane & Lynch situation from happening again.
“They essentially got away of murder by putting a tablecloth on the body and serving tea on it.”
That’s such a banger interpretation of the events.
Not sure if it's apt tbh. Usually murder victims don't get better (except in Monty Python movies)
Except that it ignores that the murderer was actually Sony.
@@SherrifOfNottingham Sean Murry lied AND Sony fucked up. Both can be true.
Sean Murray is why developers shouldn't do PR.
"Is the thing you're personally trying to put into the game for release with your own two hands going to be in the game on release?"
What's he gonna say? No?
Thanks for your hard work, Frost. Will miss seeing your content and hope to see you somewhere else soon.
Ah yes, the Peter Molyneux school of marketing.
Still waiting on that room in Black & White to do...something.
I know people like to clown on Peter (later in his career, rightfully so), but during his bullfrog and EVEN Fable 1 + 2 days, he always had the games up for playability and videos so you knew EXACTLY what you were getting. Sure, maybe the tree didnt grow in Fable 1, but a lot of the life sim elements he wanted to bring to the game did happen in 2. These days? It could be 5 or 6 YEARS before a dev will even show you a screenshot, much less tell you what the game is even about! Fable and Perfect Dark are supposed to be out next year and the best was get is some CGI trailer with 10 seconds of game footage followed by some washed up british actor talking head or we get a sanitized run through that could very well be CGI and not even the game were getting!
@@lordxmugen The first time I heard Molyneux talk his shiznit was for fable 1 and I was more excited for an rpg then I ever think I was. Then I played it.
I took every opportunity to shit on it and him in every single avenue where people talked about games and to this day will never play that game.
All the lies promoting the first Fable turned me off of that franchise and any game he was associated with going forward.
Yes, right next to the Todd "It Just Works" Howard: School of Business Communication...
Wild this is the last "Cold Take"
Nah Frostbitch will just make more on his own channel when he’s done embarrassing himself
Dude got tired?
@@Peremptor Nah, he quit claiming seccond wind was being mismanaged.
He has his own channel and still makes these.
I've been honestly stunned at what passes for a release these days. I now have a simple policy. They aren't getting my money until I think the game is in a playable state. This of course limits the number of games I buy, but ...
as someone that's pretty much never bought a AAA game for over a decade, my steam wishlist has over 600 games, and I have over 1000 games in my library. There's a ton of amazing stuff to discover in the depths :D
Been doing that out of necessity at first. First kid meant less time to play and less money to buy junk.
It then became a healthy habit. Wait a year before buying any game. Let others deal with the bugs, write the guides, find the exploits.
It practically stomped impulsive buying, and saved me money in the long run.
I don't need 20 games per year anymore, never did, in fact.
Only bought three so far in 2024, and they're long going: Zelda:BotW, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Monster Hunter Rise.
I do the same. It limits the number of games, but there's still SO MANY good games to play.
I don't get on hype trains anymore, ever. I learned my lesson with Spore many years ago. In fact I do my best to forget about announced games until they're already out; it works so much better that way.
I wouldn't have thought you'd have to meditate on a mountain to figure out that you should spend money on actual products and not a suspiciously lightweight mystery box.
Only 2016? Damn that's generous.
The enshitification of gaming honestly started with horse armor.
@@TheSkittles00 nah you can easily go back as far as tomb raider at the very least
killzone 2 trailer. NEVER FORGET.
@@SharienGaming Wait, what did Tomb Raider did wrong?
Totally. Todd Howard's "sweet little lies" have been going on LONG before 2016.
Marketing is lies, every parent should teach their children that all ads are lies.
Interesting video, well done.
Depends on what you call marketing to be honest. A lot of the stuff that AAA publishers push out is pure corporate marketing usually more driven by management and or the sales division. It's about sales and short term profits (because that's what makes their wages and bonuses go up, funnily enough marketing usually gets left out of those higher wages and bonuses).
Things like Larian did with their Panels From Hell is also marketing. But that's what they call Inbound marketing, which is more about establishing yourself as an "authority" in your specific field and the focus is more on building up a long-term "community". And that means more often than not being way more open about (in this case) the development. Basically no 3 minute CGI trailers or extremely scripted "gameplay" videos and nothing else of actual value.
Offering a free demo (PT was a genius move, were it not for Konami management ruining all the hard work from the dev team and the marketing team), doing substantial dev streams (like Grinding Gear Games does for every Path Of Exile league, or DE does for Warframe) are solid ways of doing Marketing.
But most AAA publishers have the same mindset as executives in Hollywood have been doing for dozens of years. Release some fancy trailers for hype and then bring out a half-baked product. The negative perception/skepticism is finally catching up with the film industry the last 3 years. It will happen with games as well.
I'm 100% fine with inbound marketing. I despise short-term sales driven marketing. Luckily, it's pretty obvious most of the time which is which.
I found the best insulation against marketing was watching the drama Mad Men. It tells you the exact thoughts behind advertisements, it's like an inoculation.
Man I'll miss this guy, he and Yahtzee where the main thing I come to thenchannel for. The rest of the content is a nice bonus.
Wild to think that this is the last cold take on this channel, might even be the last one we see.
Damn, gonna miss Cold Take on SW hoping Frost keeps putting these out on his own channel
I was unaware that CEOs' public statements and interviews didn't count as "advertising". Joy. I do remember Cyberpunk winning "best ongoing game", though. That really annoyed me since making an update that fixed it was counted the same as the actual online multiplayer game that were nominated. Of course I wanted Final Fantasy XIV to win, but I would have accepted it if Apex, Genshin, or Fortnite won. Those games are designed to be "ongoing" and actually fit in the category.
Yeah, that felt like a disservice to the industry, if you ask me. I'm glad that Cyberpunk is finally playable, but like you said, fixing mistakes that you made doesn't make it an "ongoing game"
@@Dracas42 Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that Cyberpunk turned into something playable, but what bothers me is how people don't understand why it does not deserve the respect that NMS gets for its redemption
NMS was set back a year in development THEN had to release a year early, the fact that the team at Hello Games basically took the reddit post outlining all of the missing features and used it as a checklist to fix in the first year of post release support, THEN KEPT GOING. Is a redemption arc that deserves the respect people are giving it. It ultimately wasn't their fault Sony forced them to release while it was missing features. The best part? They didn't even market that they were going to finish the game, they just shut up and finished the game. Hell, it's almost a meme now, NMS gets MASSIVE updates that nobody sees coming, the other day they released one of their biggest updates yet, a 17 gig update, and there was no patch notes on steam, the video on RUclips hadn't been posted yet. They literally dropped a DLC sized patch for the game and forgot to tell anyone.
Cyberpunk, on the other hand, didn't have massive losses in development time, the base game was in development for like 8 years or so, then they delayed the launch two or three times... and then released the game, unplayable on consoles and still full of bugs and issues for the PC release. They promised a LOT and delivered a pretty mediocre action adventure game that was so buggy and ran so poorly that most users buying it couldn't even play it. They didn't get forced to release it early, there's no reports of their studio getting damaged and losing progress, they just decided to release a game when it couldn't even run on consoles. Sure, complaining about different PC hardware configurations causing problem is something I can partially understand, except that it was the PC version that performed the best. People with underpowered hardware could run it better than the consoles which have ONE configuration to test.
Cyberpunk shouldn't get a pass, because they built their own mess, they decided to release it early, there wasn't any reasons, any legitimate excuses for why the promised a game that didn't exist.
What irked me the most is so many people acted like cyberpunk was some no man sky style redeption story because they watched and liked an anime...
@@loopholesloopy Cyberpunk is a No Man's Sky redemption story because both finally released the game they showed off at E3 about 4 years after launch. The anime has nothing to do with the game now being feature complete.
@@finlaygilfillan7963 not true but okay
I loved the metaphor "sharp ends of broken dreams"
So fun fact, right at the start of the video, *right* as the guy hits the gavel there was a loud *BEEP*, there was a stutter, and my sound cut out completely. And I was like "oh, Frost is making a joke, where the video itself is buggy, I see where this is going!"
Took me almost 20 seconds to realize my wireless headset had just run out of power and turned itself off.
lol XD
That's not a fun fact. It may be a thing that happened, it may even be fun, but it;s not a fun fact. Fun fact is something I'd expect to hear from someone about to recite some trivia or some obscure snippet of knowledge. Not something that happened to you personally, especially this inconsequential. I know this is pedantic af from me but it annoys me when people speak with this hyperbolic vocabulary. Fun fact doesn't belong in that paragraph.
@@YummyWhiteLiquid It's a fact and I had fun, ergo it's a fun fact. You being whatever this is is on you.
@@YummyWhiteLiquid fun doesnt belong in ur life and thats a fact tho
@@Crosshill My parents aren't going to be home tonight. Come over, I'll oil up for you xoxoxo 8====D
All we need to do is make it exactly as illegal to lie to customers as it is to lie to shareholders.
No no cause you see the general public would never support a politician who is willing to do that. In the U.S. we vote based on how you look and what your “pitch” is. The “pitch” is the single issue or collection of issues that you are lying and saying you care about today - from criminal justice reform to border security. If we buy your pitch and if you look how we want you to look (young, spunky, racially ambiguous) we will vote for you
Americans buy the pitch and the personality. We simply aren’t interested in voting for competent people.
@@sincereflowers3218 Lol, what is this, 2008? American politics today is "just we aren't the other guy", despite both options being guilty of the same shit, agreeing on all the worst things, and in private being part of the same club be it with the same donors, same elite schools or even attending each other's weddings, funerals, parties, private islands, etc. They can call each other fascist and communist all they want (despite those words practically being meaningless) but the worst things in the US have always been bipartisan, because the parties represent different elite factions and the common, normal people are either checked out of all the bullshit or mindlessly cheering on the kayfabe.
"The customer is always right... in matters of taste". People forget the second half of that quote.
I really don't get the harassment and entitlement of developers, regardless of what they have said or done. Vote with your wallet, don't turn it into an online riot.
+1
That is a later version of the quote. The original quote is by Swiss hotelier César Jean Ritz, and it is literally "le client n'a jamais tort" end quote.
Voting with your wallet never works. There's always a bigger sucker. Rioting though, that gets results.
@@meej33 that “later addition” was clarification not change. That was the original intent of the phrase based on how it was used. If you want to argue it should have specified before, you’re being pedantic. It also didn’t specify “within the law” but that was clearly implied.
It's because _anyone_ in the public eye has to deal with this type of disconnect, and it's been that way since we've had the public eye. Silent film stars had this, and it's not going to go away anytime soon.
It's a sad reality of human nature, but it's the reality of it. We don't live in a fantasy world where the mentally unwell get the help that they need while people dealing with the general public can pick and choose who they interact with. Bemoaning that there are mentally unwell people doing mentally unwell things online and in person isn't going to change the fact that they're going to exist and by exposing yourself to the general public, you expose yourself to them.
If people can't handle the reality of that, then dealing with the public isn't for them.
Good luck on your future endeavors Frost, I'm interested to hear what else you have to say about this whole situation.
I want to shout it from the rooftops: STOP PRE-ORDERING GAMES!
Better yet, "REJECT AAA. THE INDUSTRY BELONGS TO THE INDIES"
Something I learned a few years ago and share at every opportunity is that "The customer is always right" is only half the phrase! It's supposed to be "The customer is always right, in matters of taste" it was a phrase to remind retail staff that you can't tell the customer what they do or don't like not that they're near omnipotent beings incapable of being wrong!
I think this is the best version of a patreon scroll through. Instead of music over scrolling text like credits in movies that we all skip, it's actual content while showing off the people who support it.
Since a recent court case in the US reached the verdict that it's legal to advertise "boneless chicken wings" when they have bones in them, I'd say move to Australia if you want any chance of bringing suit against game makers...
I mean, the way that whole thing is being reported is silly but the sentiment is there. The FDA especially has always kowtowed to corporate interests, because we originated Reaganomics. Let the corporations do whatever and the consumer will benefit *somehow*.
I watch your videos because I find them engaging. I’m not killing time here. And you know, dopamine is released in anticipation? This is to say: bring back the old intro, please! It gets me in the mood. You’re not dispensing fast food; I’d sit down to eat this, with cutlery and everything!
Hits different after Frost’s resignation. Seems the same toxicity at Escapist is just as rife here. Incompetent leadership of those trying to game SEO while devaluing content creators in the process.
"the customer is always right" is one of the most misused and misunderstood phrases by decision makers. It solely refers to sales negotiations, since the customer knows what they want and the wise salesman sells them just that. But once the ink on the contract dried, this contract should become the base of every operations. Yet... many make it so that customers are allowed to break contracts and ask for extras at will and staff has to apply or face repercussions. It's just twisted to the brim.
Turns out a lot of idioms are misused like that. “Jack of all trades is a master of none” comes to mind. Used as you should hone in on one thing, when the full thing adds “but oftentimes is better than a master of one”, so the actual quote is saying generalization is better than mastery.
It means to do market research.
Cold Take is owned by Frost. You will probably see it again, but definitely not on this channel.
"All the while, the most diehard fans fend everyone off with the sharp ends of the broken dreams."
Damn, what a line!
I was in customer service for 22 years, and that "being treated like a dancing monkey" line definitely hits home. Towards the end, I got so jaded and fed up with people's attitudes, smugness, arrogance, stupidity, ignorance, and entitlement that I started pushing back, not caring what my boss would say or do to me. Indeed, there were a couple times when I stood up to customers who got shitty with me, even threatened me, and my boss told me I was in the wrong for doing so. I now finally work a job where I have little to any interaction with people at all, and I am a lot happier.
The mentions of crazed "fans" really hits, because one of my favorite Instagram creators has been having major issues because people have been incredibly parasocial with her and trying to find her and her family, then others telling her she's just "naive" and that being on the internet she should expect that, and so should everyone else related to her.
IDK what is with people anymore but.... DAMN.
Is this the last cold take on this channel? 😢
Apparently this is the last episode of cold take. Atleast he chose a sadly timeless topic to close on...
Untrue. This is the last episode of cold take on second wind. Cold take is still owned by Frost.
@@ITNoetic That's good to know atleast
All I can think about is Yahtzee’s quote about when people say a game has potential: “The best ‘potential’ novel is a blank sheet of paper - but that doesn’t make it a good fireside read”
I didn't know that none of that stuff counted as false advertising... I'm appreciative of this education.
Who's here after THAT happened?
@@mushuwu Here👋
I think the first time I felt like the marketing was super egregious was the Watch Dogs trailer in 2012
The craziest bit of that was that the settings existed in the config files to get the PC version looking like that original footage!
Why not include it as an option in the menu?
@@BladedEdge It's sad that Ubisoft are still doing it
First time I can recall is Killzone 2
@@JHawke1 the birth of the 'bullshot' - the b/s screenshot that was too good to be true!
Thank you guys a lot for making the intro sequence so much quicker! It feels instant now! We’re into the show in less than 3 seconds, well done!
Thanks!
Yes! Thank you for now having the game names at the bottom of the screen. Theres been so many times I’ve seen some cool looking game on these Cold Takes i’d want to check out and have no idea what game it was lol
"Last version of Windows".
"The Customer is always right
...in matters of taste."
Always thought it was convenient how folks forget the back half of that.
You can’t let the truth get in the way of your ego.
It's very similar to how gun people so eagerly throw around an edited version of the Second Amendment for their personal gain; "We have the right to bear arms, we have the right to bear arms!!" They scream it until they are blue in the face. But, they very conveniently leave out the entire first half of the amendment, which clearly states, "A well-regulated militia being necessary for the security of the state, the right to bear arms shall not be infringed."
This is one of many topics that I stopped arguing with people about, as people are going to believe whatever they damn well want to believe, come Hell or high water.
Take care Frost!
We’ll miss you Frost, Second Wind get your shit together
Any product sold in Aus is bound by the Australian Consumer Law, and any contract clause that contradicts it is automatically considered invalid. This forms the main reason why we have the footing to push back against these issues
that is the reason I got a refund when Sword of the Stars 2 released (in 2011) two years before early access even existed, this being back in the day when you needed to sign up to a completely separate support website from your steam account and copy paste the part of the ACL and goods being of a merchantable quality back and forth for a while till they begrudgingly offered a "one time refund in this specific case".
those buying today have no idea how good they've got it with the 2 hour "demo" and reasonable exceptions past that like when a developer slaps on an account or DRM requirement that wasn't there before
You will be missed Frost. Hope to see you again soon even if on a different channel. 👍
I feel like mentioning the great editing right at the end. That combination of footage and patreon credits was smooth.
While No Man's Sky did have its redemption arc, having launched with so many missing features but adding them post-launch and then continuing to build upon it, it's unfortunately the odd one out in the "eventually delivered" aspect. Pretty much no other developer I can think of took the time and effort to build up what was missing from what they themselves offered
You know, originally, I only came here to listen to Zero Punctuation. When I saw this "cold take" stuff a few months back, i was like, "ugh, more bundled cable content that no one wants to hear. Next." But then, this guy just started speaking fact after fact, one cold truth after another, not hot takes, but genuine real problems. I think I'm a fan now. Now I come here to hear you speak, too.
the sharp ends of broken dreams is a crazy bar
In Australia, I do believe promises made by sales representatives do count as advertising. But that's in the context of being able to return the product for a full refund, not in the context of false advertising laws. Even so, it'd be interesting to me if somebody were to take up the issue in Australian courts!
It's the change in consumerism, younger more online generations are using consumer products as signals of taste and personality rather than actually developing a sense of self so now the consumer product itself doesn't matter but the symbols that it stands for and what it represents matters more than the objective quality of the package as a consumable product.
It's also the reasoning behind the pervasive "media literacy" discussion in online spaces, as well as the demand and acclaim for "morally sound" and non-"problematic" media in online spaces, because people have begun to internalize consumption as a moral act that indicates a person's values and beliefs and think that by consuming or creating media with "problematic" content you are endorsing those views as your own.
You can see clearly how viewing consumption as a moral imperative leaves consumers vulnerable, it's the same fundamental vulnerability that cults operate on.
Why is the active playercount a metric that people care about now? Because a lot of people consuming one product means that I should also consume the product, because if they're all doing it then I'm missing out, and if I'm missing out then I am a bad person.
@@BladedEdgei lived through it, the issue is that gaming back then in the west was seen exclusively within the realm of childrens entertainment in the same sense that Transformers and Cabbage Patch Kids toys were.
It was not nearly the same kind of problem as we have now, where people are essentially being groomed from a young age through adulthood to be fiercly loyal to one product or manufacturer. You aged out of the gaming demographic once you hit your teenage years back then, but now it is all encompassing and pervasive.
the problematic concent thing also stems from this misplaced idea that depicting something in media normalises it, which it does not and never has, so if you depict something particularly disgusting like rape or say incest in media you are contributing to the normalization of it even if you explicitly depict is as a bad thing.
Well said. As per the 1st paragraph, we did have fanboys before… but I think the difference now is the internet/social media. Before you only had “people on the playground” and a small amount of people on a forum, if you bothered to join a _specific_ one. But now that we’ve whittled those down to basically just Twitter and RUclips, you’ll come across a LOT more people to reinforce that behaviour. And since kids make up a huge part of these platforms, their emotional/defensive nature will come off like the consensus. Some adults will get swept up in it, and content creators will placate to it because that’s the audience that makes their job a reality. A lot of toxic positivity around these days.
It’s funny when these zoomers complain that people “hate” on a game after 6 months… no, it’s just the hype wearing off and people can start to see closer to what it really was without the blinders on. Because any minute criticism or concern around launch would get yelled down, even if it’s reasonable. Then the next big AAA gets hyped up as a “GOAT” and they fall for it all over again, learning nothing. Heck, you can’t even say you like something but think it’s flawed. It’s either -2/10 or 12/10. No in-between or else you’ll be branded a “hater”. Kids? Understandable? Teenagers? Still in the ballpark, but should start learning. But we’re talking adults like 21-24 and they’re still acting like this. It’s sad.
@@mrshmuga9 corporations are their personal version of God, and they are zealously defensive of their God.
It started with Reaganomics, bud.
Frost I'm sorry to see you go. This is utter BS. Your and Yahtzee's work is why I joined Second Wind. I don't know how long I'll stay now.
The gaming media is complicit in this. They consistently let developers and publishers get away with releasing crap at full price, as long as it gets fixed in the 2 following years. Witcher 3 opened the door to No Man's Sky, which opened the door to Cyberpunk... All those games released in a shameful state, and were given massive passes from the media, in the years that followed their release.
Their job is to report the state of things and, occasionally, give a personal subjective state on things by an individual writer. It’s not their job to pass judgement and certainly not to punish. That’s your job.
@@markwazny6361 then why do they love to smear "best game of year xxx", "you need to play this" etc etc? Reviews aren't, weren't nor could ever be completely objective.
Besides stating how broken and undelivered a game is compared to the promises isn't really a matter of subjective interpretation. They either promised something or didn't, it works or does not. It crashes or doesn't.
If a game underdelivers compared to promises / competition then it needs a lower score instead of a pat on a back and a star for trying. Sadly that's what we see, especially when it comes to AAA titles.
@@karol30660 Because reviews are bought and paid for AT THE SOURCE. Gaming media big and small constantly do softball reviews and make up excuses why the "Next Big Thing" can get away with BS gameplay or lack of features so as not to piss off the bigger publishers and continue to get hands ons as well as interviews and review copies. Its a very incestuous relationship that shouldnt happen, but does, in most media.
@@markwazny6361 They certainly could systematically report, after a game is released, on how deceptive its marketing was. Because as much as I am tired of publishers lying in pretty much every way they can get away with, I'm also tired of gaming press that is happy to relay the lie without any criticism.
Where the CDPR games are concerned they were buggy and a bit flawed and slightly unfinished perhaps - but still great games lacking that final polish they would get... With games as rare and unrivalled as they are at their launch you rate them based on how good they are compared to the drought of similar titles, and the previous best of their type of game. in which despite the problems both stand up pretty well, and are worthy of a good review... So as long as the gaming media isn't hiding the problems - which as far as I can recall they never did with CDPR games, if anything the problems got more media than the game's quality that is fair enough - you can read into the media hype and get exicted but should if you paid any attention also know its not perfect...
No Man's Sky on the other hand being eventually being caught lying or at the very most charitable being misleading about features in the game knowing nobody is going to be able to prove it quickly - can't really blame the reviewers for that, in their review window all they can say 'hey I liked/disliked this bit and that bit I experienced and report on the feature that is supposed to be there and what you'd think it might mean for the game' - you can't actually rate a feature that happens to not exist when you have not been able to prove it doesn't or realistically test it... All you can say is its supposed to be.
God watching Sean Murray awkwardly lie still gets to me. The second hand embarrassment is too much.
The historical revisionism by current fans of NMS is even more embarrassing tbh
The sad thing is, I don't think he's lying. Hello Games was a relatively new company, with two really tiny games under its belt. I think feature creep just got to him, and he didn't have the experience to realize some of this stuff wasn't feasible until far too late.
Internet Historian has a great video on the whole No Man's Sky debacle, if you haven't seen it already.
@@anthonylarocque7975 internet historian's video is a bunch of wet blanket equivocation trying to explain why the things Murray said didn't mean the things Murray said and rationalizing that it's okay to lie to your customers as long as you make good (years and years later). The video might be entertaining, but it's misguided at best and misinformation at worst.
@@anthonylarocque7975 you also have to remember: he often states that he’s nervous, and that being in front of cameras like that is his worst nightmare. He’s not a PR guy, he’s a Dev who wants his game to flourish
@@BardianAngel he lied. Is that really hard to understand?
So is this the last Cold Take we get then?
He'll get to keep the IP and probably start putting it on his solo channel
@@SandraNLNWhat’s the name of his channel?
@@anor_naur Theotherfrost
In no world can I imagine that second wind owns the IP rights to their shows after what happened to ZP when escapist collapsed
I feel like people have forgotten that they're capable of not being right.
Am I annoyed by a thing I like not being given to me? Sure!
Am I right in being annoyed? HELL NO! My annoyance is stupid and objectively wrong and I would never attempt to voice it as right because I know that.
If this is in reference to Silksong, of course you can. They chose to announce it early. If you don’t want to have fans get irritated because it’s taking so long, then don’t announce it at the start of development when it’s going to take 4-5 years. It implies it’s further on in development than it is because you didn’t set expectations (since they will know the most). Unless it’s a AAA game, people are going to assume an announcement/initial trailer means it’s 1-2 years out.
Plus… people didn’t think an indie Metroidvania would take this long. And Team Cherry improperly set expectations. It first started out as DLC (no reasonable person would assume that takes years), have teasers that don’t say much, go radio silent, announce a launch window in 2023 (or at least Xbox said so and the studio didn’t correct it), then delay and announce another release window for “late 2024 at the absolute earliest”. They should’ve set expectations properly and didn’t.
The only reason to announce something so early would be if it’s a crowdfunded game (Kickstarter or Steam early access). Because then you know not to expect it for several years (and they’d say it), and the justification for announcing it so early is that it needs additional funding to be made in the first place. Now, I don’t think they thought it would take that long. I think they just wanted to keep expanding and it turned into a full blown sequel. But this is also why you don’t announce things until you’re like 50% through development. Because you’ll have a better idea of at what point you’ll finish. I will say, I think people should’ve calmed down by now. Because even a year or two ago you would’ve been waiting several years and should’ve realized “I should put it out of my mind because it’s clearly not releasing anytime soon”.
@@mrshmuga9 While I wasnt talking about Silksong alone (There's a bunch of other stuff that also falls in this general ballpit for me), you're totally right. I was mostly just talking about how people assume that they are at some moral high ground. - stuff like people getting salty about Dwarf Fortress Adventure Mode taking a long time and such as if they're truly, actively *owed* it to a greater extent than they actually are.
Like for example: as someone who recently got a good deal of the half life series, reaching the end is heartbreaking, and knowing that getting a "third" one would take a minor miracle hurts my soul, but I'm not actively *owed* a Half Life 3. - I have a good reason for being sad and annoyed about it, but that reason isn't some black and white, moraly flawless, "i am objectively right in all I do" reason.
It's mostly a matter of knowing that all this stuff is, at the end of the day, quite literally all fun and games
@@ahumanb3ingthatexists67 There is a huge difference between wanting a third Half Life game and demanding the PVE content you were told was in the game (but now is coming "sometime later") be included in the purchase you made because of that promise. I completely agree that the folks getting massively upset about not getting something like your example, but when it comes to marketing, most of that crap is like my example - stuff promised and not delivered. I cannot help but support the victims who fell for the advertising fraud from these big publishers. (No, don't go harass individual developers, but developers, you took a paycheck and are complicit in the fraud; so yeah, you may just end up like the random Enron workers who got dirty looks for having the company on their resume after its collapse, which in this case generally manifests as hatred from victimized players.)
I'd love for Sean to do a really candid interview about exactly what he was playing at. The video "The Engoodening of No Mans Sky" really did do a good job of explaining the shit situation Hello Games found themselves in but it's a third party account, would really like to just hear it straight from Sean
It was a shitty situation they put themselves in. People love to act like the flood set them back a ton, but... I don't believe it. A setback can't just completely erase multiplayer netcode; that needs to be a fundamental element that the entire game is built around. Modders can straight up tell you that the multiplayer update required basically rewriting the game from scratch, and prior to that, there was no netcode. It can't suddenly turn the sun from an object the planets rotate around into a 2D skybox element that rotates around the planets. It can't separate the solar systems into different load zones when Sean Murray claimed you could fly from one to the other. It can't hide the animals and buildings from the "gameplay" trailers in the game files as pre-rendered cutscene elements that cannot be generated by the proc-gen engine. It can't make Sean Murray say "wow there's so many of you our servers can't handle it" when people call out the lack of multiplayer.
Sean Murray just lied about a shit ton of stuff and tried to cover it up. I am a firm believer that it's just because he's an awkward nerd who wanted to impress the public and ran out of real features to list. But that doesn't change the fact he lied and doubled and tripled down on it.
'stochastic advertising' this phrase is brilliant
'sharp ends of the broken dreams' is just as good but not as broadly applicable
This is a perfect example of things actually having been better before.
They couldn't ship things the same way 15 years ago, like they do today, because they relied on physical sales.
_Selling lies used to cost you dearly, but not anymore..._
The best gaming model was back when you bought a game in a physical box on floppy disks. If there came to be a bug in the game, the developer had to physically mail you a patch on a disc. This tremendously incentivized getting it right the first time and shipping a complete product. I actually miss those days, now, of waiting for that patch disc to arrive in the mail.
For me the other problem is that, as well as parasocial relationships, people have started to make products such as games a part of their personality. Making a one-way connection to a person or product a core part of your identity is mega unhealthy.
Shit while watching this I read Frost has resigned.
That's a shame, I would like to know what he moves onto. These cold take videos are awesome
Say what you want about Sean, that mf and his company charge one price, which is frequently discounted, for a game with an almost decade worth of updates. That is legit unprecedented.
Let's stop dragging Shaun, shall we? He's already been through enough. At most, let's use it as a case study of what not to do.
Cold take is the most sensible, down to earth, diligent comment on the modern gaming industry. Hats off mate, you are the best
Marketing that irks me ....CGI trailers....and CGI trailers for a game years away
All video games trailers are cgi. 😊
@@EastyyBlogspot A game years away is arguably the best use case for a CGI trailer, no? If gameplay footage does exist at that time, there's a good chance it could change significantly before launch. The insane length of time it takes to develop major games nowadays is, of course, another topic.
I think CGI/cinematic trailers absolutely have their place, particularly when introducing a new IP with a narrative focus - it helps set expectation for worldbuilding, tone and story. But no opening pre-orders without gameplay should be a red line.
It's like Lyle rath says on pregame discharge, no game no hype those is the rules
“…fend everyone off with the sharp ends of their broken dreams.”
😂
“You *could* encounter other players” : Sean Murray is clearly referring to the infinitesimally small possibility of multiplayer spontaneously appearing in the game due to random quantum fluctuations. 😂
It's wild how people will revise history for the games that redeemed themselves. According to them, Cyberpunk wasn't a buggy mess on release, CDPR didn't sell blatantly unplayable last-gen versions after saying they ran "surprisingly well", it was actually the gamers' fault for overhyping the game. Sean Murray didn't brazenly lie about No Man's Sky, he just excitedly talked about things he wanted to put in the game, and it's the gamers' fault for believing him when he claimed the game had multiplayer features after it had already been finished and shipped without them. Like, it's great that these games have been improved and are good now, but we can't pretend that they didn't start out as rip-offs sold under objectively false pretenses. It's no wonder this keeps happening when we're willing to revise history in their favor and even give them awards for it as long as they eventually patch the game to be kind of like the game they said it would be years ago.
I remember a random comment about No Man's Sky that I liked.
The missing multiplayer is like a car manufacturer talking about a new safety feature, "it's this new bumper airbag that can save the car from being a write off, but it'll only deploy if the car gets into a really bad accident, so don't go trying to set it off!"
9:14 It's "the customer is always right in the matter of taste" I hate how everyone cuts off that second part
You can’t let the truth get in the way of your ego.
Game roadmap= developer iou
Well, that's the most succinct way of putting it I've seen in a minute, good one Frosty (in the know, man). I had to say it, I'm sorry
You know, now you’ve brought it up Frost, I am still mad that Sean Murray got away with lying about multiplayer in NMS. I understand everything he was trying to do with that game, the wonder, the mystique, the sense of exploring grand alien worlds. I totally get it, but like, multiplayer requires code, Sean! Multiplayer requires servers! I can’t believe he tried to get away with pretending all of that was there when it wasn’t.
No Man's Sky gets a pass because it's literally not their fault, they lost a lot of progress, and "code", to a flood, setting them back somewhere between six months to a year of progress, then Sony forced them to release a year early, a year earlier than they had set BEFORE the flood.
They get a pass because all of the missing features were implemented in the first year of the game's existence, which literally proved that Sony's impatience caused all of the issues.
@@SherrifOfNottingham I don’t think they get that much of a pass. Sony didn’t ‘force’ them to do anything. They signed a publishing contract that would have stipulated release times, & many many of Sean’s on-camera claims about multiplayer were after they partnered with Sony. Let’s not rewrite history, he knew multiplayer wasn’t in the game he was promoting the release of, & he went round all the talk shows & outlets saying “well you might run into someone, who can say, it’s just very unlikely!” When of course it was a little more than just unlikely.
@@SherrifOfNottinghamyeah then they should've fessed up about it when it happened, not a day before launch and then continuing to lie right up until the moment they could no longer deny it.
Quit making excuses for being lied to. It's embarrassing.
@@SherrifOfNottinghamThat’s not an excuse unless the flood happened a month before they printed the discs, which it didn’t. If they supposedly lost that data, they could’ve said months before launch the effect of the flood and that they won’t be able to complete that aspect. People would be understanding. Even if you wanted to say “they were trying/thought they could get it in”, he waited until the 11th hour to say it when he would’ve known full well before then that it wasn’t happening. And it’s not like “oh we were close but missed before printing”. No, it was months later that features started creeping up. They gave up early enough, then slowly walked it back from “yes” to “it’s so unlikely it might as well be no” to “no” at the latest point just so they could say “See? We said it won’t be in.”. As if months of confirming and baiting people could be corrected to the mass of people with a single tweet at the last second.
I think they probably bit more than they could chew and were overzealous (and too open) about what they wanted to do, but that doesn’t absolve them of guilt for being dishonest when they had time to correct the record.
@@Gingrnut The publishing deal they signed functionally forced them to lie, they weren't allowed to say that many of the features the game was marketed on were not done, likely because they were in the contract they signed. To be clear though, the release date they initially signed for with Sony WAS a year later, Sony changed the deal on them, which they could do because Sony is a multi-billion dollar corporation and Hello Games was 20 people in a shitty office whose entire livelihood depended on Sony actually paying them.
I like the new format! Sort of miss the opening theme song but I like that it jumps right into the story. And the closing credits are clever - keeps me watching to the very end. Good stuff!
Lethal Company is a game I love and its astounding how it was only made by one person. But if you go into the Steam forums today you'll find heaps of people calling the dev "lazy" for not cranking out updates like a triple A studio. What happened to games just releasing and being happy with a product? I'm glad Lethal Company gets updates but nearly every update is met with derision from "fans" claiming that modders work faster and the dev should've spent all the money he's making on hiring a bigger dev team to produce more updates. They're completely ignoring the fact that game development isn't a full time job for some people and working on games full time might not even be what they want. People are expecting INDIVIDUALS to put out content roadmaps and monthly updates that most live service games can't even maintain. Its unhealthy for the gamers and the developers alike.
‘The customer is always right’ in matters of personal taste - is the rest of that quote ….the forgotten, unspoken caveat. The quote means that people can like vanilla and it’s their choice & should not be criticized BUT that is the only thing the customer is right about.
Forget this at your own peril.
Should we just be flagging all CEO statements about games under development as meaningless nonsense? I mean, CEOs are nearly useless to begin with, maybe we should just stop interviewing them if nothing they say means anything.
I hope I don't come across as another rabid Silksong fan, but as someone who's going through a bit of a drought waiting for that game and a few other indies I'm curious about, I'll say this: I don't want to know your game exists until, at maximum, like two years before it's ready.
A 6 year wait for Tears of the Kingdom, an 8 year wait for Metroid Prime 4, who knows how long with Silksong, who knows how long with Deltarune. I don't love the trend of teasing fans way way before a product is ready and then the devs being surprised that we get impatient. I'm not sending death threats to Team Cherry and I'm not constantly posting about Skong, but I can't help but feel impatient due to the fact that we've been waiting 5 years with almost no updates.
Almost anyone who wants Silksong to see the light of day can agree that they should've simply waited until they were more certain of the release window for the game before releasing a trailer and demo for it.
Even now, I'm not sure Team Cherry has a release window planned. To me, it's clear that Silksong is suffering from either scope creep or constant revisions to stuff that's already done. That's the only reasonable explanation for why something that started as a DLC is taking this long.
"Fend everyone off with the sharp ends of the broken dream". There's some truly excellent writing happening on this channel and I just wanted to leave a comment saying how much I enjoy that.
The voice over sounding like a grizzled noir detective in 1947 adds a lot to these.
I've rarely heard the plight of a retail worker in a company that uses "the customer is always right" put quite so aptly.
The thing about No Man's Sky is that it WAS an indie, and they signed the worst possible marketing deal with Sony, they legally couldn't say "this isn't gonna be in the game". The moment they stopped being restrained by a marketing deal they started being pretty clear with stuff and not doing any kind of promises at all.
It's also worth noting that the game as it released was like, the way it was intended to be, it wasn't (just) incomplete, it was simply going for a very different kind of game than what the marketing campaign was advertising. It was like a chocolate cake advertised as a steak. Many of the "missing features" that were later actually added in large content updates completely changed the game and for many it was in a negative way. Similarly quite a few things were *removed* to match the expectation that had been built up.
I enjoy how Frost manages call out marketing tactics while simultaneously turning this around to blame consumers for wanting information in an industry that thrives on mushroom farming... "Keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em shit."
In an industry where a trailer will launch for a game that is years away from completing development or doesn't even exist in any state. I find it hard to swallow the "just eat your shit" take...
At least it's not entirely blaming consumers for wanting transparent communication.
@@NihilistZealot It's a double-edged problem. Some people get unreasonable, to say the least, and start harassing devs and publishers, whereas some devs and publishers are under-performing at best and outright lying at worst.
He's trying to appeal to both sides for reason, or at least that's the impression I'm getting - stop scamming and stop harassing, basically.
Why would you "need" information for a product that is not out yet?
Marketing an unfinished product is a solution to a problem that does not exist.
@@JulieLamia yeah I'm kinda sad he didn't dwell on the fact that the unfair response to team Cherry's lack of saying literally anything did at least come from a fair place of frustration
Remember: *Never preorder or buy on Day One.*
If you do, executives aren't the ones funding the game to probably make a complete game. *You* are.
A video about false advertising, directly followed by one of these mobile game commercials. That is where we are now.
This really is one of those trends that will never change without regulation, and the more publishers that adopt this piecemeal release and verbal promises approach the harder it will be to disentangle, much like "live services".
Thank you for calling cyberpunk out for this frost. I got violently ill when I heard cyberpunk the award for best ongoing game. I pre-ordered it over a year before they launched. I bought all their bullshit. And to this day cyberpunk 2077 was the last game I pre ordered as well as the last game I have played remotely close to the release date. The videogame industry is a ugly shell of what it once was.
One thing I love about Frost is that he speaks what everyone is thinking, but not everybody has the balls to say it out loud.
I think this ties into an even larger problem with games right now: The absurdly, unsustainably huge cost of producing top-tier games. And it gets more expensive every generation. So you have companies staring down the barrel of an eye-watering nine-figure investment, which could ruin a studio or publisher if it fails, looking for ANY way to mitigate that risk.
This is NOT to defend scammy hype-based marketing and "minimum viable product" releases, per se. But it does constitute rational behavior, under the circumstances. And that's the central problem. When the economy of gaming is so broken that even supposedly respectable companies are resorting to such shady behavior, well, something is very rotten at the core of the industry.
(But then, of course, you have the players who expect every generation to blow their minds even harder than the last gen, or launch into online tantrums because they feel like their top-spec ultra-high-end PC isn't being used to its fullest potential, which further incentivizes all of this. It's one big jujuflop situation, basically.)
Nowdays No Man's Sky is remembered for how it turned around, but man, being there fore the launch was a RIDE. It's still impressive to see Sean Murray straight up lie without even flinching about features that were probably never even planned to be added, not to mention the completely false trailers. The fact that they still failed upwards, regardless of the state of the game today, is insane.
The noise around silksong is really annoying. If team cherry never releases anything that would be totally fine. They owe nothing to anyone. But the constant bringing it up by the outlets and the demands from "fans" is insane. Until Team Cherry says something, just shut up about the game.
Australia represent :)
On another note the ACCC otherwise know as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is really good in Australia
If I could send my elected officials the same kind of spiders Australians had access to, I'd absolutely be sending a letter to my government.
I'm going to disagree with this partially. It wasn't No Man's Sky that started this, it was Minecraft. Jerma does a great video on this topic called TF2: A Mini-Rant on "The Everlasting Beta" all the way back in 2013. In summary, games changed after Minecraft came out and people started playing for an incomplete process. Before that, games didn't really have a Beta period except for MMO's doing it for network testing, or other similarly large games, and even then they were mostly finished products. Minecraft basically told devs that people would pay for an unfinished product and you could make hundreds of millions of dollars. At look where that brought us.
I feel there should be more consideration on the role of journalism in relation to hype/advertisement of upcoming games. We seem to have sauntered right past the journalists and their often too-cozy relationship with publishers/developers.
This. Games Journos, the ones working for your IGNs, your Gamespots etc. are already in the pocket of the publishers. This is why we have the infamous "every Triple A game is a 7/10 *if* the publisher is paying for it". One of your employees bad mouths the latest Madden/Fifa and gives it a low score...well would you look at that, EA has suddenly stopped sending you review copies. Now you have to buy it like a consumer AND you won't have the review up until a week after launch...when everyone has already read a review from another website which was willing to tow the company line thus reducing clicks and leads to advertisers pulling out to go to the other, more clicked on, website.
And that's if the review isn't just some ChatGPT dross shat out in under a minute with the prompt "write a 7/10 review for [insert game]".
That Silksong aside was a bizarre addition. The complete silence from the studio far beyond any of their previous metrics isn't parasocial, and I don't even gaf about the game.
Go on r/Silksong and me and the chat for any indie gaming event. Who cares if TC are silent? They are still working on it, the end. They don’t want to give any updates. I would say their “metrics” are way more indicative of silence than communication.
@@TheOracleofClocks Totally agreed and not to mention that Silksong is one of the achieved stretch goals of the original Kickstarter ("second playable character") that the devs chose to spin off into a separate game.
I'm not a backer of the original Kickstarter nor a fan as such. To me, the devs cook for as long as they want.
However writing people who are annoyed that they still haven't gotten what they were promised seven years after the game initially released doesn't seem fair. Especially when it seems like most of those people would be happy if the devs just tweeted "we're still working on it, here's a cool new screenshot" every couple of months.
Agreed. The Silksong thing isn't about entitlement. It's about promises made, broken, and then radio silence. Unprofessional.
Yeah I'll be excited if and when Silksong comes out and ok if it doesn't, because they don't owe me anything. But there's some people out there that they kind of do owe it to, and I don't think it's crazy that those people feel differently as a result.
I feel like I'm crazy for finding that one segment weird cause yeah he said nothing about how at least some of the frustration with the utter lack of communication was valid