Why Is The Video Game Industry So Secretive?

This has never made much sense to me. It seems like the industry is so secretive about *everything*. From a games budget, to announcements, they won't even mention what exactly the game is until they see fit. Yaje the movie industry for example and you know everything about the movie before it releases, even the budget. Sometimes developers won't really answer simple questions about the games they're making like "is there guns in this one?" without some kind of double speak or vague response.

It could be that they simply haven't figured it out yet in regards to the last bit. I just find it really odd and occasionally frustrating that publishers and developers can be so tight lipped about stuff like that. I don't see how it could hurt them to mention "yes, we're making a sequel to your favorite game. It might take awhile, but we'll get there."

I know that seems like a bunch of rambling (?) but I'm just curious as why you guys think the industry can be so secretive from everything to how much it costs, to if they are even making it. It just doesn't make much sense to me, given that other entertainment industries like films are not.

Thanks! ^_^

They don't want to speak on something that's still in a stage of uncertainty. They don't want to say the game will have guns until they're absolutely sure that it will, and that aspect of the game in development is in a state of no return.

Above is a video where Paradox Interactive say that they announced a game too early, it's at the 6:20 mark but really the whole video is good.

Most games don't really come together until the final few months of development. Take Bioshock Infinite, for example. The reveal trailer had a lot of stuff in it, and it was to show off what the game would be. The E3 2011 demo, while it wasn't 'fake' it was also a highly scripted sequence, most of the stuff shown wasn't actually completed yet and was mostly just for the demo, however they really truly wanted the final game to be just like it. Unfortunately, due to a myriad of reasons (time, budget, console limitations, even the multiplayer which was never revealed was cut entirely) the final game wasn't quite up to that E3 demo.

That, and the fact that some things just don't turn out the way you think they would. You might have swords in your game early on, and the more and more you work on it, the more you realize the swords don't actually work right and don't play well with the rest of the game, and so you eventually cut them. If you never showed the swords off, no one will be able to miss them, while if you showed them off and promised to make some nice melee combat in the game only to later on say "Wait nevermind, it wasn't fun" you are going to disappoint people, no matter how few.

This is why you won't (and shouldn't) see or hear about too much about games too early as they could very well change drastically, even in just a short timeframe.

Because the gaming community is full of idiots that don't understand the development process even when developers do try being open about the process. Better to keep quiet and not give people ammunition about unfulfilled promises that usually were never actual promises in the first place.

Look at something like The Witcher 3. CD Projekt Red is widely considered a developers that treats their fans well, and the game itself turned out great, but there was still a big kerfuffle at launch because it didn't look quite as good as an early trailer. There was that whole mess with Skullgirls and their DLC characters where they carefully outlined where the money was going and why it cost as much as it did, and yet many people refused to believe them thinking they knew better.

I deeply wish that was not the case, but I fully understand why developers are gunshy. They often risk more than they benefit by being open.

Very simple.

Developer:
Here is game X! It is an RPG that features over 150 WEAPONS including RANGED, MELEE and EXPLOSIVES.

Three weeks later: Okay, so we had to name it game Y because there was some legal nonsense about the name X.

Two months later: We... hm... this RPG thing just doesn't seem to pan out with the weapon plan we had. It mostly conflicts with our world building, but we're pretty sure we got that part right. We don't know yet, we have a meeting in two days, stay calm people.

Another month later: So, yeah, we decided to make is an action game because it just seemed to make a lot more sense with everything else we had built and we were sort of working towards that anyways.

Another month later: Okay, so we discovered since we go all action we need the weapons to feel rocksolid and premium, we simply don't have the resources to create over 150 variants, much less to balance them properly. We have a new goal of 50 weapons.

Two months later: Probably going to be 25 weapons.

Two weeks later: We have settled for 20 weapons.

PS: We also removed ranged weapons. Didn't make sense.

Game Y is released!

Consumers: Wait... game Y? Where is game X you were working on? That's this? No, no, this is a dumb action game I wanted the RPG you were making. What do you mean this is that game? What!?

remember No Mans Sky? That's why you should not talk too much about your game in development.

Came here to point out this great recent example. A+

Also maybe 'cause it sees itself as a tech industry as much as an entertainment industry.

As others have said, sometimes they don't want to reveal too much ahead of time specifically because they have no way of knowing exactly which features might be cut, reduced, or altered in some way as development progresses.

The other thing worth noting is that I think prerelease coverage of games is much more PR controlled than movies, for example. For a big budget game from a big publisher, I'm pretty sure the publisher PR people are going to dictate what information can be revealed ahead of time, because since they're handling all the marketing (and the developer is not), they have some kind of schedule of when they're going to make various announcements. There is more of a rollout of information in waves for video games, because the game is in some ways more like a product, with a list of features. While some technological features of movies are occasionally touted ("The Hobbit has a higher framerate! As if that makes those movies not total garbage!"), for the most part they do not, so movies lack the mystery hype related to how enjoyable the game may be based on the cohesiveness/innovation of its features. Yeah, one movie might have much better people in charge of cinematography or costuming or something than another movie, but the studio isn't going to make a whole mini trailer promoting that fact, so the director or actor or whoever can talk up that shit as much as they want in interviews.

Also I'm pretty sure when it comes to film interviews, directors and actors go off-script while doing PR quite a bit, and probably say some shit that PR people would rather they didn't, but oh well, who gives a fuck, the actor/director is just contracted to be on this one movie, it's a standalone project (not always, but quite often that is the case). Or maybe it's a series, but studios kinda hate recasting people if it can be avoided, so if fucking Hugh Jackman lets slip some shit about an X-Men movie in an interview that PR didn't want to be known yet, are they gonna go looking for someone else to be fucking Wolverine? The contrast I'm trying to point out is that most people speaking publicly about a film are akin to solo contractors, often part of a union, that the studio just brings together for that one project. Whereas in the publisher-developer relationship, any individual employee is part of the dev studio, and they don't want to go off of the PR message and piss off the publisher and cause trouble for the dev studio, because that could lead to their dev studio not getting future projects from that publisher if they fuck up badly enough.

As someone who dabbles in game dev: games rarely turn out to be the thing you initially intend them to be. Very, VERY much changes from concept to reality. Long time game devs know this well and thus can't really accurately say what something will be in the end. And when they do, shit like No Man's Sky happens.

It has a lot to do with the absolute shit community that they're making games for. If you say something about your game, and don't deliver 110% of what you said, you'll be crucified. Look at how Hello Games was crucified after the launch of No Man's Sky. If you were a developer and saw that, would you want to say anything about your game that you weren't 100% sure of? And it's just the nature of game development that you're not really 100% sure of very much until your game is practically done.

Because stuff gets canceled, changed, or comes together at the very end.

Peter Molyneaux is pretty good personification of why most developers are so secretive.

The man has lead development on many great games in his time, but many people think of him as a liar and con artist. If he could just contain himself during development and not talk publicly about every feature and aspect of the game the team is working on or considering that ended up getting cut, his reputation would be very different.

There are already some fantastic answers in here that I can't add much more here other than to echo that talking too much about what a game could be before it's finished is dangerous when game development doesn't start hitting its stride till the very end of the development cycle.

Do you ever feel like the industry is too secretive about what goes on during a game's development?

This is a great explanation.

A lot of it is about timing, and getting the proper message about their game out there.

Final Fantasy XV. Most things in the trailers from the announcement of Versus in '06 to the big FFXV Uncovered event on March 31, 2016 were scrapped including seemingly-big story points featured prominently in early footage.

I don't know about this. The film industry is an aberration, not the typical way in which businesses are run. You rarely see businesses as open with budget and sales data as you do with the film industry, both as a general rule or even within the more "entertainment" oriented industries. Sales figures for books, for example, are generally kept from the public much in the same way it tends to be with games, except for when it is expedient as a marketing tactic (again, much like with games).

I'm surprised so many people here are pointing out No Man's Sky as a prime example of why you don't talk about your game early when the whole kerfuffle surrounding it came about as a direct result of them not saying enough. NMS had that infamous E3 reveal where vague notions of what it will actually be were presented and then people were left in the dark for a very long time, too long, conjuring up wild theories regarding the scope of this amazing game at the forefront of the Sony E3 press conference. The problem there wasn't that they were too open about their development, it's that they weren't open enough. They barely said anything and then stubbornly refused to divulge any concrete details even through the home stretch of their press junket before release. Had they said the game will have 100 planets and 50 ships and then corrected that before release and say that because of XYZ the game is now shipping with 50 planets and 15 ships, people would have reacted a whole lot better than promising, vaguely, the universe and then delivering a big question mark in a box - one that most people, press included, judged to have fallen short of any expectations (of course I'm not discounting the people that were ultimately satisfied but popular consensus was not a net positive in this regard). That controversy was a direct result of Hello Game inadequately controlling the messaging about their product through a lack of information.

In my opinion the big problem of the video game industry is that it wants to have it's cake and eat it too. They want to drum up excitement, get people riled up for their project, and announce games way too early and subsequently skitter back into the radio silence complaining that expectations were unrealistic when people finally get their hands on the now much altered final product. As some pointed out earlier in the thread, people "don't know shit" about game development, and this is exactly because game development has always been veiled in this cloak of mystery where only the entitled few get a look behind the curtain. For the longest time it was only the press, and then you had some journalists snidely remarking how ridiculous fan expectations are, if only they knew how these games get literally stitched together hours before the deadline, if only they knew how complicated, how ever shifting and in flux real game development is. Well how are they supposed to know when nothing is ever explicitly said exactly because of this fear that the common person simply won't get it?

I mean I understand that the target audience is unfortunately a vast pool of unhinged teens ready to decree something the "worst thing ever" at the smallest infraction to their idealized version of what a game should be. That sucks, I get it. YouTube comments, or even GameSpot comments really, hammer home this notion that you're generally slaving over a product for 2-3 years of your life for a completely ungrateful group of online malcontents. I also get that game costs have gone up so now more than ever publishers are exerting pressure on early builds, a scotch taped amalgamation of early ideas, anything to get some pre-orders moving. Still despite all this I do believe that transparency would in the long run start seeding this idea that games are in fact a fluid and ever changing medium and expectations should never be set in stone.

No Man's Sky is a weird one, because it cuts both ways. They definitely didn't talk enough about what the game actually was, as your comment describes, but they ALSO talked about or hinted at a lot of stuff that isn't in the final game (a decent chunk of that list is nit-picky, but it illustrates the point). Had it just been unmanaged unreasonable expectations, I don't think the backlash would have been as severe - the cut and/or simplified features seemed to aggravate more people.

As I said, more transparency would have benefited the entire situation. NMS was like a perfect storm of everything that could go wrong. They said too little, and what they did say turned out different or got cut in the development process - so the few tidbits of "solid" information that people were clinging to for years turned out to be wrong. Then Sony advertised this game as if it was a AAA flagship behemoth instead of this cool indie passion project made in a basement by a small group of people. At the end of the day though, if they would have been a lot more forthcoming about the entire situation, and this is both Sony and Hello Games, I think peoples expectations would have been a lot more tempered. To a lesser degree all these "Early Access" games and Kickstarter projects which are a lot more transparent in their development are already beginning to condition people into understanding that sometimes aspirations will fall short of their mark no matter how passionate the initial pitch was.

That's not accurate. People were upset because the things they did say were not true. Whether they had intended to implement those features and just didn't have the time/resources or whatever else doesn't matter. It is the perfect example of why you shouldn't talk about things that aren't set in stone, thus why developers are secretive.

Pretty much all the hate I have seen on No Man's Sky (and why I dislike it myself) is tracked back to a 'missing features list', that compiled all the promises they made and broke. They were much better off if they had said none of those things.

@zevvion: Exactly my point: the problem stems from a lack of information on their part. They promised some things that got cut in the development or were beyond their scope and then failed to communicate these changes with the consumers as time went on. If they would have kept up a more engaged and honest rapport people would have not been as disappointed as they would have been made aware of the changes that the game had underwent. It highlights how not communicating things and being "secretive" during development as the game changes and evolves can be hurtful in the long run. You either communicate fully or not at all, but never somewhere in between - either let people know what you're cutting and what made it in by the time it ships, or remain radio silent until it has gone gold.

@humanity: Agreed. It's either full honesty, or just not letting people know until you know yourself for certain. However, I think it is easy to argue the latter is easier to pull off in practice. Additionally, you're going to have some consumers upset still if you're full honest because they don't follow every single thing you have said and they will still think that the promises you've made previously stand. For example, how many people still thought the Xbox One was online only even after its release? Too many.

Letting people know every detail on what you're working on just seems like a bad idea.

What's early access?

I think that's a good thing. Most movies you know way too much about on release. It builds suspense, and I love a good surprise!

@zevvion: not every detail but the main points. If people don't follow every detail that's on them really, because you can always point to an official developer diary video where XYZ was clearly discussed. The XB1 launch is a whole 'nother can of worms that mostly stemmed from poor communication.

@humanity: For sure, but that doesn't really matter for the reception of a game. If a dev says: this game will have 'X' and then later they change it by saying: 'X' didn't work, it will now have 'Y', then come release day there will still be people that flap their arms saying 'X' isn't in there. As a developer, being right doesn't matter so much as having happy consumers. It's better to just wait with saying anything until you have stuff nailed down yourself.

@bojackhorseman Not wanting to be spoiled might be something else than this, though I will say I haven't seen anything on Mass Effect Andromeda. I've seen some threads on these boards about gameplay trailers, didn't check it. There was a video on this site, didn't check it. I'm going completely dark on that game. It will be the most glorious experience ever.

Better to show, not tell.