At Least There’s A Good Reason I’m Sick Of Hearing About BioShock Infinite


I am sick to death of hearing about BioShock Infinite. It’s become one of those games, like Super Smash Bros. Brawl, that I’ve been hearing about for so long that the more I hear, the more it sounds like white noise.

Juggling video game press announcements can be a tricky thing. Announce a game too late (ie, too close to its release) and it might not have enough time to generate awareness. Announce it too early, though, and you run the risk of hitting a wall, your game running out of steam before it’s actually released.

That’s where I’m at with Infinite (to be fair, I’m at that point with many games, but we’re just talking about BioShock here!). It looks cool, and I was excited to see it when it was first shown off, but the more I see the more I grow tired of seeing it. Every new scrap of information – and really, most of the information to date has been in the form of meaningless scraps, like showing off enemies in individual releases – works in reverse, sucking away my excitement for the game rather than generating it.

It’s death by a million PR papercuts.

If you feel the same, about Infinite or any other game, you should at least know this: it’s not always the fault of poor marketing. It can sometimes just be a result of “external factors”.

“We probably would have announced it later, but we were worried about it leaking”, Irrational boss Ken Levine tells GI.biz. “We had a nice unintentional head fake, everyone thought we were working on this X-Com game, but we weren’t. It wasn’t what people expected. Without our presentation, people would have gotten the wrong message about [BioShock Infinite], it would have been confusing.”

“I would have announced it significantly later if I wasn’t worried about that. We had this external factor.”

OK, so they wanted the official announcement to beat a leak. I understand. I don’t agree, though. Leaks, even the most convincing ones, are never the same as official announcements, because there’s always the risk they’re either fake or will later be edited or even scrapped.

An official reveal, though, with trailers and screens and info, gets the ball rolling. And in Infinite’s case, it got it rolling too soon.

Ken Levine on why games get “overexposed” before release [GI.biz]


The Cheapest NBN 1000 Plans

Looking to bump up your internet connection and save a few bucks? Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Kotaku, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

Comments


28 responses to “At Least There’s A Good Reason I’m Sick Of Hearing About BioShock Infinite”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *