(Diablo Immortal / Blizzard)
10 or 20 years ago, companies such as Activision, Sony, Nintendo, Epic or Sega (to give us several examples) communicated all their news to us at events such as E3 or through specialized magazines. Since then, things have changed a lot, and studios and publishers face the great challenge of communicating their ideas to the players who follow the news about our favorite developments. Now with the Internet, YouTube or social networks, everything has been boosted in a gigantic way, the news flies the minute it is known all over the world and it seems that this is causing problems for some.
When the people of Blizzard took the stage of the last Blizzcon 2018 to present Diablo Immortal, they did not expect the reception that it was going to have among the public, both in the present and in those who saw it in streaming . For months it had been rumored that Diablo 4 was in development, job offers had been posted that suggested they were putting together a team to work on the next installment of the franchise and we were all waiting for this Blizzcon to confirm the theory. But what we didn’t expect to hear during the presentation were the two words we never want to hear when talking about a franchise like Diablo : mobile devices.
Blizzard, the same one that in that same Blizzcon announced the remake of Warcraft 3 or World of Warcraft: Classic had made a rookie mistake when announcing that the next episode of Diablo would be for mobile phones without first announcing a new installment for PC. They themselves realized the very serious mistake during the presentation, seeing how the audience was frozen, did not react at any time and how during the question and answer session they received some of the style of “Is this a joke out of date? of the innocents? ” Later it was rumored that Diablo 4 was going to be presented, but due to a change in plans it was finally not done, so we do not know if Blizzard was in full damage control or really for some reason it was not shown.
Whatever it was, the damage had already been done, with more than 300,000 “dislikes” in the presentation trailer on YouTube and on the Internet mounting videos with the faces of the event’s presenters.
(Overwatch / Blizzard)
All this collides with the good decisions they make with another of their star games, Overwatch . Every time they have to present a new character, they give us a short film at the height of Pixar itself, let us test the new character on test servers, show development videos and a long etcetera with which to expand the lore of the game and keep the fans entertained for a long time.
(Anthem / Electronic Arts / Bioware)
A few weeks earlier, during Paris Games Week 2018 , Electronic Arts / Bioware posted a video of Anthem showing us a mission that was unfolding during the night and alarms were rapidly going off all over the internet. We were finding a brutal change in the game’s graphics, not only in the modeling and textures compared to what we had seen in its E3 2018 presentation trailer, but also in the animations and lighting. We could say that we saw a more vitaminized Destiny 2 than what we saw in its presentation. The official response to this was that the streaming had been done with the settings in low detail and a new video was published, with a day mission that effectively showed better graphics, but nothing similar (again) to what was shown at E3 2018 . A very silly mistake that was to broadcast a video like they should not caused hundreds of thousands of messages on the Internet, questioning the quality of the product and causing people to remember the dreaded word, Downgrade .
(Atlas / Instinct Games)
In the last few days we have had a case that perhaps was not simply miscommunication, but directly a hoax. The game Atlas , a pirate-themed survival MMO, a direct rival to Sea of Thieves (from the developer Instinct Games ) showed us during its presentation a trailer in which it seemed that we would find a game much superior to the mentioned reference, with spectacular graphics, Boat battles with other players or epic dungeons. What they finally published after countless delays was a game that was not a game, it was an ARK MOD (we can even access the ARK menu due to a bug that the “game” brings), with laughter graphics and thousands of bugs .
The mistakes of big companies
But not only video game studios have faults when it comes to communicating the news in their products or understanding the needs of their users, we can also find the companies that manufacture the hardware we play on. Sony has had a couple of news items to highlight in the last year that have caused ups and downs in the opinions of its faithful.
On December 3, the Playstation Classic was released , a reduced version of the classic PSX with controversy included, because from the vast catalog that we enjoy with PSX we find 20 games that do not do justice to what we had almost 20 years ago. It is true that there are real gems like Metal Gear Solid , Tekken 3 or FF VII , but we cannot understand how some titles such as Gran Turismo 2, Medievil or WipeOut have been left out of the list, games with which I did not have to negotiate with any publisher because they were made by the very first of SONY.
The second news is that he has announced that he will not attend E3 2019 , the first time he is missing in 25 years. The only official explanation is that they are looking for new ways to announce and communicate their news, because in a digital world it does not make much sense to have a single big event in which everything is announced when day by day the public can be informed thanks to the new technologies. Given that for E3 they would teach us the remaining heavyweights for the final sprint of the generation ( Last Of Us 2, Ghost of tsushima, Days Gone …) with almost no news from PS5, it seems correct that they avoid calling a “event of filling ”, with a two-hour conference in which they teach their users the same things as in other years… and make criticism rain for it.
(Event in Fortnite / Epic Games)
But not everything will be bad examples of relationships with users, because the people of Epic Games seem to have hit the key in the relationship they maintain with their followers: Fortnite and its themed seasons manage to keep people always aware of the news . Although the best, without a doubt, are the unique events, which occur only once in the history of the game and only for people connected at that time, thereby creating a feeling of exclusivity, of being part of something that is not will happen again, such as: the creation of dimensional cracks, the cube falling into Balsa Botín , the explosion of the same that showed a kind of dimension or alternative universe …
In these times, the advertising and marketing departments of large studios should perhaps start to look at how many indie developers establish communities and relationships with their followers, because bad decisions can kill a product without it having arrived. even to the market.
