Best I can tell, they didn’t take preorders or Kickstarter funds. Just did a release. Seems like their old plans didn’t pan out and their old marketing doesn’t align with what they did release after they scaled back due to almost cancelling the whole thing at some point. From watching Sacriel play a bit yesterday, it’s definitely not an amazing game, has typical issues with the genre (e.g. not enough AI, extract camping) in addition to other typical poor game issues (e.g. poor ui, tooltips, latency).
Seems like a lot of the backlash is due to failing to meet its own hype, plus people continuing to buy games without consulting release version reviews and feeling burned, and added to the general cultural frustration of things being released before they’re actually ready.
If marketing promises something, you should live up to that, even if plans change. If you haven’t gotten to the stage where you know what kind of game it is, you shouldn’t be marketing it that way yet.
Sure, things can change but if it’s something that might change, don’t market it.
It’s fine to be aspirational and fail, but transparency and communication are key when that happens, but it’s also on the consumer to not trust years old marketing, games change all the time, some fundamentally.
Old marketing for an old product, sure. Products change over time. However forward marketing for a product yet to be released should be accurate at release.
Best I can tell, they didn’t take preorders or Kickstarter funds. Just did a release. Seems like their old plans didn’t pan out and their old marketing doesn’t align with what they did release after they scaled back due to almost cancelling the whole thing at some point. From watching Sacriel play a bit yesterday, it’s definitely not an amazing game, has typical issues with the genre (e.g. not enough AI, extract camping) in addition to other typical poor game issues (e.g. poor ui, tooltips, latency).
Seems like a lot of the backlash is due to failing to meet its own hype, plus people continuing to buy games without consulting release version reviews and feeling burned, and added to the general cultural frustration of things being released before they’re actually ready.
If marketing promises something, you should live up to that, even if plans change. If you haven’t gotten to the stage where you know what kind of game it is, you shouldn’t be marketing it that way yet.
Sure, things can change but if it’s something that might change, don’t market it.
It’s fine to be aspirational and fail, but transparency and communication are key when that happens, but it’s also on the consumer to not trust years old marketing, games change all the time, some fundamentally.
Old marketing for an old product, sure. Products change over time. However forward marketing for a product yet to be released should be accurate at release.