I've had an "EA is the Devil" category on this blog for years, it's somewhat tongue-in-cheek but there's a real reason it's there too.

Keen just opened up a bucket of worms by making the issue of 'incomplete' MMORPG launches an ethical issue of inflated customer expectations. The problem is, he's pumping EA-Mythic as his example of a company he trusts to deliver on what he'd hold others accountable for.

I probably would have discussed more of the premise, but as it was, I choked on my drink and sprayed my desk in the process.

Needless to say, I don't think EA is the bastion example of ethical behaviour when it comes to customer expectations in the MMORPG market. I also don't think Mythic is a good example of responsible budgets and deadlines for the health of their products, although that perspective is interwoven with their arrival to their EA-Mythic roost.

I'm surprised to hear this from a fellow Peter Molyneux fan, the king of raised expectations. Developers do get excited and hype stuff that they want to get into the game, and much of that stuff doesn't make it in time, or doesn't work as planned. Passion for your game just comes out that way. This is especially true with the complexities involved in MMORPGs.

I think the implication that there's an intentional bait-and-switch is absurd. There's no sinister attempt to hijack expectations. Wishful thinking perhaps. From evidence Funcom seems almost too honest about their shortcomings.

I still see this as more of a Craft than purely a business. I'm more often disappointed when it's treated as the later.

In most areas of entertainment, the journalistic focus is on new products. In videogames, for some odd reason, it's on future products.

This is IMHO the Number #1 Uno Prime reason Videogame Journalism is so messed up.

Anticipation is not such a bad thing by itself, it's what sells product right? But it's just so accelerated, what's been on the shelf for days is already old news. The window for game sales is so small, if it isn't a blockbuster from the get-go, it's getting tossed into the discount bin pretty quickly.

There's no more room for sleeper hits. I honestly don't think The Sims, Rollercoaster Tycoon or Warcraft could have made it in today's game climate. Neither of those games were hyped much before release (The Sims barely got attention in a small corner of EA's '99 E3 booth, seriously).

The games industry has become addicted to anticipation.

• Beta and Alpha product is never fully indicative of the final game. Simple things like removing debuggers, compressing textures and patching visibility leaks are rarely done until last minute and make huge performance differences. Or a game with pretty pre-release screenshots can turn out to have horrible framerates.
• Journalists choose favourites based upon brand, designer and worse: the games they have pre-release access to. A stinker can get a lot of attention and a gem can be neglected.
• Journalists comment on what they think ~may~ be good features based how they expect a game will turn out, applying inaccurate assumptions.
• Gamers begin to predict success or failure (of games and consoles) and the pride of predicting correctly overshadows the actual enjoyment of the game.
• It's ethically unsound, because a game can be hyped by the press without actually reviewing it, creating conflicts of interest between advertisement and news.
• The 'scoop' becomes the 'exclusive first peek', which again, is ethically questionable as these become hand-selected by the publishers looking for pure promotion.

I could think of a whole lot more points, but you get the idea. The fascination with what's in development versus what's playable now is the root of so much evil.

Now, we're migrating into a situation that's compounding it: Bloggers the world around have decided that the established journalists are corrupt (there's plenty of good evidence for that) and are taking it upon themselves to replace the industry, which they're doing very effectively.

Except the Numero Uno problem is now just exasperated, because bloggers write what they damn well please and the fascination with beta and 'next-gen' is so over the top at this point.

I've seen a lot of bloggers comment that what they think is wrong with the established press is the lack of full disclosure over games before they get released. This is soooo messed up backwards to me, it's not thinking with their heads it's thinking with the pre-release hype. Correct the mistakes, don't repeat them.

We need more disclosure of completed products and less of what's in the works.

It's a damn good thing most game designers are passionate about the games they make, otherwise it would be all hype and no game. That's probably the only reason I see this as a journalistic problem, not one with the game developments themselves.

Update: Apparently Creative has backed down on this particular situation: "we did not make it as clear as we would have liked that we do support driver development by independent third parties". There is some truth in that quote, because Creative has released info in the past for open-source drivers for Linux, etc. although it should be noted that they have not done so with their current X-Fi hardware.

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The latest fiasco with Creative Technology (previously Creative Labs) has some folks screaming boycott, which brings up an interesting point for me personally. It's a whole lot easier to get offended when you don't have a stake.

Take Apple for instance, when they demonstrate obnoxious behaviour I'm the first to exclaim my disbelief that people still buy their products. But I don't depend on Apple for much, my last purchase from them was an iPod Shuffle that failed to impress. It's soooo easy for me to boycott Apple.

With Creative, I'm well aware of their shortsighted idiocy in regards to their overly-protective stance on their drivers. It's directly related to the way their tier their product models, they don't want people getting the full use out of the hardware they've deemed budget. It's ethically corrupt.

I don't mean to pick on Puck, he was right to highlight the situation on his blog and his call for a boycott is perfectly valid too. But I can't help thinking it's an easy thing for him to say if his only tie to Creative is an Audigy (likely 6 years old).

Myself, it's humbling to realize I haven't been so quick to jump down Creative Labs' throats over questionable practices with drivers: I love my Creative Labs X-Fi too much, or at least enough to shrug the nonsense off.

I'm a pretty active guy in the activism sense, at least under certain fields of my expertise. I'm not sure if I should be disappointed in myself, or if I should count myself as being a realist while I cave on this particular issue.