By the contract, you couldn’t say anything detrimental about the game, so such a statement would still be forbidden. Whether such a vague limitation on what a content creator can say would hold up in court is a different thing.
Well that’s stupid. Getting negative reviews is also a good thing. It allows you to re-evaluate your product(s). Pretty much you’re going to sell a half assed product, pretending it’s amazing because you refused to take critically-negative feedback from your paying customers. Guess they just want to completely obliterate their company.
It doesn’t feel practical to enforce, save in so far as it lets them put you on a list of people not to extend future early-release games to. But you have to assume they were already doing that, as any marketing department worth its salt is going to have a boutique set of insider streamers who are effectively just contracted media flaks plugging your product.
On today’s episode of “This shouldn’t be legal”…
Think about it this way. The same guys who stream video game reviews to make money are paid by the advertisers who sponsor their streams. And the sponsor won’t pay for a stream if its disparaging of their content. So the streamer is being paid to cut an ad.
Imagine if you hired someone to go door-to-door selling people your sandwiches. And in the middle of each sales call the guys you hired would take a big bite, spit out the sandwich, and say “This is awful! I hate it!” What are you paying these asshole for?
Just stop pretending streamers are these independent objective observers and recognize them for what they are - online door-to-door sales guys. These early releases are just their sales kits. And why am I going to extend a sales kit to a guy who isn’t going to sell my shit?
Yes but it still looks bad because it’s saying “you can talk about it, but only if you say nice things”. A full embargo would’ve made more sense and wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows. This current contract leads me to believe it’s a shit game.
Embargoes do get a bit of backlash sometimes, but not nearly enough.
Why should a full embargo get backlash? They are trying to get input for an understanding, controlled population before unleashing it on a wider public. The whole idea is that the preview is not representative enough to start setting expectations for everyone. But it is far enough along to get the general idea and get feedback to address.
I am constantly testing pretty well known products in advance of their release and they are frequently crap. Like one thing I’m working on hasn’t been able to work at all for a week due to some bugs that something I did triggered and they haven’t provided an update yet. However when they actually are available to the general customers, they are pretty much always solid and get good reviews. If I publicly reviewed it, it could tank this product even though no one could possibly hit most of the stuff that I hit.
A full embargo seems fair. The selective embargo seems like an unfair idea, but also is a bad idea. If everyone knows they are allowed to talk about it, but only the good parts, then people will be speculating on what is not said. One product I tested had someone fanboying so hard about it they were begging the product team to lift the embargo so they could share their enthusiasm. They said no, they didn’t want partially informed internet speculation running until they could address all aspects of the product publicly, and frankly there was too much crappy parts even if he was over the moon over the product and didn’t really use the bad parts.
I suppose I could see being uncomfortable with the “testers” also being the likely “reviewers”, because your are developing to the tastes of specific reviewers and tailoring for a good review in the end even if those reviewers aren’t fully representative of the general population. It’s easier to get a few dozen key influencers happy by catering to them/making them feel special, than releasing a product and hoping you hit their sensibilities.
Ok regardless of whether or not you should be able to. Why the fuck would you? Wouldn’t it be in your ultimate best interest to recieve negative feedback early? So that it could be addressed?
The Closed Alpha playtest isn’t an invitation to publicly review, it’s an invitation to playtest. They’re trying to gather data and feedback on an inherently feature-incomplete and unpolished game to help with development. There are going to be private channels for feedback and the playtest data itself is like feedback so public channels are redundant. Obviously Marvel is also just trying to dodge criticism, but that’s not a mutually exclusive reason.
Yeah this seems to be something people are missing. These tests sometimes prohibit all reviewing and commenting in their NDAs (including positive ones). It’s a playtest, not a beta, review copy or pre-release.
“Good game, but the company behind it is shit and required me to sign this contract. <Insert contract clause>. Remember this whenever your reading the totally honest reviews about how good the game is.”
When they reach the aspects of the game that they didn’t like they can just say “let’s skip this next part about CTF mode, because I signed a contract” and let the viewers deduce what they deduce.
I’m just curious, what exactly would you prefer to see here? I don’t think this community is specific controversies, but I do think it is, and rightly so, mostly focused on gaming discussion rather than just games. And contentious topics are simply famously those which cause and often merit the most discussion.
Would you prefer instead if all of the posts were simply “How Great Is God of War?” followed by a chain of comments saying nothing but agreement?
You might be right. This might not have been a mistake. Some creators in the Twitter thread said that they brought it up ahead of time but the company sent those agreements out as is anyway.
I think the difference is that those play tests we are thinking of are for lack of other terms locked down. Playtests I have done were not able to be recorded, streamed and had water markers all over the place. In this case people are playing and streaming making videos at that point you should be able to give opinions on the game.
Saying nothing at all is better than only being allowed to say good things and none of the bad. The former doesnt shift opinions in either direction but the latter introduces a pro-buying bias to reviews. Good for the publisher and no one else.
Playtest results inhibit you from disclosing things because they are subject to change. They take gamers’feedback, decide if they want to act on it, and at the end of the day the finished product may look different so it makes no sense for people to loudly state “they have feature X, and they don’t have feature Y” because by release it may be the other way around.
Whereas this type of contract says “idgaf what’s bad about the game, you can only sing its praises online”.
If it’s actually a closed beta then it shouldn’t be open to streamers at all. If are going to allow stream is to play it then it’s not really a closed beta. It’s a marketing gimmick.
They are probably concerned because management has decided that the game should be shown off even though it’s probably not ready. This is that kind of clouged together solution.
As per usual it just seems to have blown up in their gormless faces.
i feel bad for the developers who worked on it because from what i played so far it looks like a surprising amount of love and care was put into the game. they didn’t need something like this at all to get generally favorable first impressions. shameful display from the suits who are always ready to ruin everything.
seriously, i was expecting a complete farce of a game considering it’s fucking NetEase but i was pleasantly surprised. the visuals, lighting and shaders, the particle effects, the UI, everything is so thoughtfully made and in line with the theme. even the alternate skins have “inspired by this comic issue” note attached.
Sounds pretty good. Personally i have no interest in Marvel stuff so its not up my alley, but i always like it when a fanbase gets something they enjoy. Have fun!
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