The Risks Of Overhyping...

Recently I've noticed an area of concern to me and hopefully the industry, that being "OverHyping".  Overhyping puts an extremely high amount of undo pressure on a game. Pressure that developers are expected to live up to and if they don't the reviews of their products suffer severely.

 Take for example Too Human, while I have not played this game, some scores have been extremely harsh. I'm taking the harsh scores you expect for the games you see in the bargain been at KayBee toys. Denis Dyack hyped up his 10 year development SOOOmuch that it was doomed. There was nothing anyone could do once he opened his mouth to hype it up to this level it just couldn't reach. Haze was the exact same thing, way WAY overhyped and an extremely bad ps2 game put on the ps3. But it's not only that, it's not only a dev talking a game up that causes this. Take LittleBigPlanet for example, none of the developers are out there hyping up the game, but you can bet your bottom dollar that every website and magazine out there is hyping it up more than it needs to be. While I am extremely interested in the game, I find myself ignoring the massive amounts of stories being posted. I don't need to see any more videos, I don't want to read anything about it, I just want to maintain the level of excitement I'm currently at with out going to far. I fear that this massive hype of LBP will kill its reviews and doom it.

  The gaming market is at an all time high, and over-hyping games are every where. But what's the real reason. I think a bit of it has to do with media pushes for one console or the other and/or fanboys. From what I've seen it's not the multiplatform games that suffer from overhyping, its games exclusive to one console. The closest I could think of would be Call of Duty 4 which lived up to its expectations. But the rest seem to be exclusives, like Killzone 2, LBP, GeOW2, etc. Maybe if more games where not exclusive more games would live up to the hype and not leave us wanting more (not saying any unreleased games will leave us hanging).

But its not only the gaming industry that can suffer from this, but it seems less of an issue in other industries. The Dark Knight was hugely overhyped due to the tragic death of Heath Ledger, but it blew away any expectations people had for it. It seems for the movie industry the overhype comes with sequels, which seem to more often be watered down continuations of a movie to try and nickel and dime consumers who enjoy the predessor. (Which the gaming industry does WAY TOO MUCH)

Being a member of N4G, its extremely easy to fall in the court of an overhyped game with the huge amounts of stories that are posted daily. Its just takes alot of personal willpower to not fall into the overhype hype.

I guess there is no real point to this blog, because there really isnt a way to end overhyping, but it definitely has its effects on the industry.