Thief releases early?

There are streams of the new thief game already. I know it's been released in the middle east, but has it been released else where? Should i call gamestop and ask if they have available copies?

A lot of games tend to get "Released early" nowadays. Stores breaking the official street date, employees handing out copies to their friends and some other methods that aren't quite as savoury. If you want it that bad it couldn't hurt to check your local shoppe.

And then of course with PC it's pretty much just open season for that sort of thing.

It was leaked on to torrent sites last I heard.

I just called my local gamestop and they and they said they arn't selling it early. Although, i did learn on the stream that amazon sent it out early. Quite annoying, especially with the ending being leaked already it makes it dangerous to even google the game anymore. Hate early releases if i don't get them

I never understood the need for withholding an already finished game , if the game is already distributed why the fuck not sell it already , only because they need to rub their PR ego or something? Idiotic

Go the Radiohead In Rainbows route and announce the game a few days before putting it on sale. It would cause a frenzy with some really anticpated sequel or something; may not make much marketing sense however. (i guess Typing of the Dead: Overkill on Steam was an example of that sorta...)

The 360 version is floating around on the internet, but it's a terrible port that doesn't deserve yours or anyone's time. Wait for the next-gen release.

I wonder if this has any real impact on sales. When NBA Live PS4 got out a few days early, it seemed like it turned into a car crash, people couldn't stop looking at its badness. You guys think the streams will push people away from Thief?

@jeff: But thta was a terrible game wasnt it? i mean if Thief is at least a decent game , then people will rave about it. But i guess it would make your job harder I suppose with all the NDAs and shit you have to put up with :/

Videogame industry is just fuckin weird.

@aetheldod: If we were hellbent on being first and built our entire appeal around being the only place to get information about a game, yeah, I'd be making angry phone calls to publishers and pacing around my house every time some street date broke. But that's a shortsighted way to run an outlet and a really negative way to live your life.

I can only imagine what that's like.

"They showed this thing before I could show this thing!".

Yeah.

Leaked version aside, I didn't know this won't be released in EU 'till friday the 28th, instead of 25th for the US. Sort of a good thing, since I'll get a few more days to read through reviews and decide on whatever I'll buy this or not.

So, what's the word out there? Is it any good?

Same reason they don't throw a movie out to the masses once it's done.

So, forgive me if I miss understand, the people who get early copies, either legally or illegally, they can show the games on streams and such with no legal repercussions. But you guys who have a copy, can't show it yet lest you incur the wraith of the publisher? Seems kinda dumb, but I guess these big publishers move slowly with lots of people that have to give 'okays' to things like this and PR professionals that need to cry in a corner because their meticulously planned release was broken

It is also something to do with the fact that Jeff represents a company that commands a certain level of critical respect. In any line of criticism there's a balancing act between amateur opinion-pushing and professional analysis. Whatever Giant Bomb does would fall under the latter regardless of how off the cuff or loosely produced it would be compared to, say, a GameTrailers piece, and publishers want to condense the audience's consumption of those trusted critical voices into as tight a window as possible. It's hard not to make it sound nefarious, but it really makes sense when you're in the thick of it. As a music reviewer, it's nice to know that I'm not expected to have an opinion formed before [Random Tuesday X], whereas a random blogger or Twitch gamer equivalent has no such censorship imposed on them to think their opinion through. As damning as some people like to believe random streams can be, it's still the publications like Giant Bomb that help "drive the conversation", so GB giving their thoughts on something is much more worrying to a given publisher than GirlGamer420247.

In other words, NDA legalese is often written in a threatening way (ie. LET NO ONE ELSE HEAR THIS PROMO DISC OR YOUR EARS WILL BE REMOVED FROM YOUR SKULL) but it's not actually meant for that purpose. It benefits both sides when written properly; it's the oddly-specific content embargoes in games that sound like a real problem to me, not publishing dates.

@slyspider: It's not illegal to stream a game that you got early, so people can do that (there has been cases of people getting their Xbox accounts banned for playing games before release, but that has mostly been bots banning people, and fixed after the fact). Publications sign NDAs with publishers and risk being black listed if they break it. Even if GB doesn't depend on early exclusives etc., they still need review copies.

That said, NDAs are normal in many mediums, like film, TV and music. Aintitcool.com was black listed by several studios when the site started because they didn't respect NDAs. You could argue that the video games media, and especially big publications like GI, GS and IGN who still very much depend on exclusives, is unique in that the relationship between the media and the industry is closer than elsewhere. I won't argue that even though I think the people who see Doritos and Mountain Dew everywhere are looking a bit too hard for what isn't there. But when people say that the industry is "weird" for having stuff like NDAs they clearly don't know that this has always been the case in all forms of entertainment (TV reviewers get screeners at home that they can't talk about, Movie reviewers go to early screenings, Entertainment Weekly and Empire gets exclusives that they never say anything negative about etc.).

It's absolutely fucking HORRENDOUS. And that's the only way I can describe this game.

@onomatopoeia: i have it and think it's pretty good, waaaay better than dishonnored.

@rvbfreak: I think what you meant to say is, "don't freaking torrent new games for the hell of it."

@onomatopoeia I myself have heard nothing but bad about the game, but I don't really take general vibe around a game at face value, especially before it has even released. I'll just be happy to play the game and form an opinion for myself. I just want to end my PS4 dry spell and play some vidya games.