Kill the Hype for Our Own Good

I point you to any of the chat logs for ANY of the previous livestreams and an inordinate number of posts on the forums that assume that what they saw in the livestream was approaching "finished" quality.

Open your eyes nlspeed911 and don't take something I specifically labeled as tangentially related at face value.
It's a friggin quote from "Men In Black" for crying out loud. How tongue in cheek do you want me to get?
:roll:

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with you, I'm just pointing out that having that quotes massively subtracts to your actual arguement. I don't mean to attack you or something.

I'm sorry that a film made in the nineties is not entirely perfect.

The heliocentric model IS proven.

You say our physics is wrong and we know it, but it's not. It all works. It's incomplete, but not wrong.


Anyway: we shouldn't kill or do whatever with the hype. I like to think that we're all capable intelligent individuals. if we continue the current trend, it shouldn't be too dangerous.

"Hyping the game" also know as advertising is a very important part of the PA business model. In case you missed it, Jon has repeatedly encouraged the people watching the live streams to pre-order the game. Their doing this because a part of their business model is to get as many of us to buy the game now as possible, and likely make more money doing it. Example alpha access, and beta access. A large part of the reason they make those streams is to help advertise to help raise capital to work with.

Yes, but Uber has Full control of those Streams. This thread is more so to caution US to be more careful about how we spread hype.

Mike

So we tread this line ourselves quite a bit. Pre-orders really matter to us and let us hire more people and do more stuff with the game. If we could get 50k pre-orders over the summer it will make a huge difference to the game in terms of resources we can put on it, so we are probably going in the direction of keeping the hype going. We are relying on the high price point of alpha to keep that manageable while still selling pre-orders for the final game.

It's also very likely we won't embargo video from the alpha (although we may reserve the right to pull particular video we don't like or something along those lines).

I think in this case, hyping the game is good exactly for this reason, but, it's inevitable, a few people spreading the word that the game is broken or unplayable for them not mentioning the game is in alpha are simply stupid.

Now obviously the game is going to be bug ridden, but it's a few that don't quite get it. The fact is, stupid people make a lot of noise and unfortunately some people listen to them, because it's the internet.

Although if someone could give me an example of this happening on a large scale with sales being hampered significantly with a game in which you could be given early access such as PA, please tell me, because I cannot think of one which has been damaged because of this idiotic whining.

If people bought alpha they should get alpha and not just a week or two before beta.

I feel like that's sort-of irrelevant to this particular topic, but the alpha will be given out basically by "date-of-order".

So, if you order the alpha today, you can almost guarantee that you won't get access for a while, even when there are other people that already have it. That particular method might be viewed as a bit "unfair", but really, to do anything other then that would sorta shaft all the other guys that have had the alpha ordered for the last three months and longer, and would be even more of a shaft to the original alpha and up backers.

Plus, if I remember correctly, I believe it was stated in the first "Alpha Announcement" stream, that the beta won't happen till like, some time in September - correct me if I'm wrong on that though.


On-topic: I believe that even if we were to successfully kill most of the hype, there are still going to be people that just don't understand the whole concept of "Alpha + Beta". It doesn't matter how you explain it to them, there will always be those people that give you the whole "It doesn't matter if it's Alpha, I payed for X, therefore I demand X", or something to that extent. I've seen it all too many times on the Early Access section of Steam.

I can never tell if those people are just trolling - AKA being an asshat - or literally don't understand. This is often my reaction:

Linked due to size, click here!

And I think that's a pretty good reaction. :lol:

Even that isn't technically correct, just read the entire Alpha Info sticky, all is explained within.

Mike

Backing level, right. I think I'm remembering incorrectly, I feel as if something was said regarding the time at which you backed/preordered, but apparently I'm just imagining that.

But yeah, everyone just go read the thing.

Thanks for clarifying. Really looking forward to showcasing the alpha when it finds it's way to us

Folks, I have to point out that so far, there has been not much in the way of hype. There is a difference between hyping a product, and demonstrating it's goals and features.

Etymology time folks. The word hype is a contraction of the latin word hyperbole (pronounced hi-per-bowl-ee), which means to over-exaggerate or excessively overstate something. So far, Uber appears (in my eyes at least) to have put a lot of their cards on the table in showing what they want the final product to be, and how it is evolving as it is developed. I haven't seen much in the way of so-called "vertical slices" or "bullshots". If you want an example of hype, look at the furore around Aliens:Colonial Marines. Most of the excitement around PA has been due to community reactions to what the devs are trying to do. Not due to orchestrated and carefully planed marketing releases.

As long as the devs stay open about the development process, and how things are coming along, I suspect we won't have too much to fear when it comes to hype-collapse. I know it's a difficult line to tread on behalf of the devs, but I'm glad they took this route, and I'm also glad to see that more studios these days are being a bit more open about how they develop games.

Oh hey, it's exactly what happened to SMNC.

I'm not even entirely sure if, even in hindsight on SMNC, this would be a good/practical idea. That aside, I think it would have worked on SMNC, if only because the interest was drawn up prematurely, but with this being a one-time purchase instead of free-to-play with some micro(lolnotatall)transactions, the factor of people getting in and then dropping out in the early stages doesn't exist.

like that's ever going to happen