Hype: Savior or Saboteur?

Does game hype help or hurt?

What Is “Hype”?

We have all been there. After waiting for what seems like a lifetime, that precious game finally releases and when you finally hold that game in your hands, it feels like the first time you fell in love. You have been watching the trailers and you have been following the game through development, nabbing at any crumb of info you can get to sate your hunger for the game. This feeling and the anticipation that builds up around a game is what “hype” is. But does hype help or hurt game releases when the final product finds it way into gamers’ hands.

The Hope Behind the Hype

The hype builds up around a game for many reasons. The most predominant one being when it is a new installment on a much beloved franchise. This can help a franchise such as Fallout 4, which I was incredibly pleased

with, or with the abysmal Duke Nukem Forever, in which gamers saw the death of one of the most beloved franchises in FPS history. People loved to get hyped for a new entry in their favorite franchise, this can lead to replaying of the older games in the series, and the reliving of precious memories that helped to define our childhood gaming experiences. These hopes of a brighter tomorrow for gaming are often what lead our minds to often overlook what could go wrong and only observe the positive in the game. We are always hopeful but has that hurt us and allowed to be taken advantage of by game developers?

Have We Learned Better?

Hype can make or break a game when it comes down to it. We have been let down before, more often than not when it comes down to it. Games like Duke Nukem Forever and No Man’s Sky will go down in history as lessons we as gamers learned the hard way. Thanks to the game companies that created this view that we can’t even get excited until we see the final product, all manner of hype seems to do more harm than good these days. We are often so excited to get a hold of the new game that we are willing to go out and put down the full price on pre-order, then when the day comes we are out of luck when we realize the game is actually garbage. I’m sure you can think of quite a few games that took you for a loop when it came to actually delivering a quality product and because of that, we have learned better than to trust what we see, and wait until release day.