When to announce?

[kinougames]

@Dafool
That seems highly unethical.

Why? Every company has strict control over what information they release to maximize sales...this is just that but a little more intense.

[Aleema]

Saying your game isn't done, posting lightning-speed progress, and then you complete an entire game within a couple weeks? I would feel lied to, and for the sake of either money or ego. Making a WIP thread that says your game is not done will only put the game on the backburner in my mind. I won't be checking everyday to see what gigantic/unrealistic percent of progress you've "completed" and then rejoice, giddily handing you my money after 100%. It's highly suspect, and is not just about choosing what information to release. It's actually lying and you will be caught in it. AAA titles get away with holding released games because they actually take forever and a day to make them, announcing them (almost always) when they have substantial progress and won't change anything further. They may wait until prime release dates, but I'm sure they're not relaxing their butt off until then, either.

Anyway, in the context of this forum, I don't find that "professional" at all. But to each their own!

[Ren]

Then, the problem is easily solved.

Just post the WIP saying that the game is going to be out on so and so, and it needs polishing/testing/proofreading. While you're doing that, give people an idea of the story, concept drawings and stuff. Once the testing period has finished, publish it.

You've got your exposition period; you are less likely to disappoint people because pretty much all of the job is done; and you can take your sweet time making everything as you want it, because anyway there's no reason to rush it. Plus, at no point you lied about the progress of the game.
Personally, I prefer surprise releases, in a lot of the cases. I understand that for commercial games the story may be different, but I think in some cases way too much "talking about it" can be detrimental, too. Thinking about Shira Oka, for example, I would have probably have given it a try, even considering a lot of the things aren't fantastic, hadn't it been milked so much prior to its release. Now I'm kind of fed up with it.

[Jake]

From my long, long, long 12 year experience in anime fandom, people buy and want to spend on familiar before new. (Which is why fan art makes so much at cons and original art barely sells no matter what it looks like.) The longer people look at your characters, the more they start to imagine those characters doing...whatever, the more likely they'll care about your project when it's out.

I think you're making an unwarranted logical leap here; I'd agree that people buy fanart because they're more happy to spend on the familiar... but I think it's more that they've already experienced stories with those characters (watched the anime/read the manga/played the VN) and thus they have an actual emotional attachment to them, rather than just because they've seen them before. With an original piece of art, you're showing a character the potential-buyer has never seen before, so there's no way they could have that emotional attachment.

I'm well aware of the Bleach franchise, I easily recognise several characters from it, but I'm never going to buy any Bleach paraphenalia because I didn't ever watch or read it, so I don't have any attachment to any of the characters.

[kinougames]

From my long, long, long 12 year experience in anime fandom, people buy and want to spend on familiar before new. (Which is why fan art makes so much at cons and original art barely sells no matter what it looks like.) The longer people look at your characters, the more they start to imagine those characters doing...whatever, the more likely they'll care about your project when it's out.

I think you're making an unwarranted logical leap here; I'd agree that people buy fanart because they're more happy to spend on the familiar... but I think it's more that they've already experienced stories with those characters (watched the anime/read the manga/played the VN) and thus they have an actual emotional attachment to them, rather than just because they've seen them before. With an original piece of art, you're showing a character the potential-buyer has never seen before, so there's no way they could have that emotional attachment.

I'm well aware of the Bleach franchise, I easily recognise several characters from it, but I'm never going to buy any Bleach paraphenalia because I didn't ever watch or read it, so I don't have any attachment to any of the characters.

It's not really to say that it's an exact correlation so much as it's a principle that you need to look at and apply to your own work. Most anime fans read several chapters of something for free first before buying, and oftentimes a trailer is not enough to pull the notoriously broke anime fans into liking something without some sort of decent exposure to it. Give them that equivalent. Set aside things you can give away for free without spoiling/ruining anything, let people chew on them for a while, get the taste. This is where you have to really pay attention to what you release and how fast you release it.

Learn how the market works with successful stuff, and then alter to suit your product/budget: You know anime fans are more likely to spend on things they already knew about and decided they liked. You know anime fans tend to be on the poorer side/you have to fight other anime interests for their money. You know they like free, and they like it a LOT.

Seems easy, from there.

[kinougames]

Saying your game isn't done, posting lightning-speed progress, and then you complete an entire game within a couple weeks? I would feel lied to, and for the sake of either money or ego. Making a WIP thread that says your game is not done will only put the game on the backburner in my mind. I won't be checking everyday to see what gigantic/unrealistic percent of progress you've "completed" and then rejoice, giddily handing you my money after 100%. It's highly suspect, and is not just about choosing what information to release. It's actually lying and you will be caught in it. AAA titles get away with holding released games because they actually take forever and a day to make them, announcing them (almost always) when they have substantial progress and won't change anything further. They may wait until prime release dates, but I'm sure they're not relaxing their butt off until then, either.

Anyway, in the context of this forum, I don't find that "professional" at all. But to each their own!

No offense, but where does anyone mention lightning speed progress or "completing a game in a couple of weeks"? First, you wouldn't know WHAT the company was doing behind closed doors, so talking about feeling lied to is silly since really, how would you know whether or not they were finished. There are always extra tests and finishing touches you can put on even a completed project; that's why patches exist. To fix problems/add things to already released work.

Again, how the heck would you know a game was done or not within an WIP thread? If that's not what you were referring to, why did you bother to make a WIP thread that you update fairly regularly if you think people aren't going to give a crap about your game and put it on the backburner in their minds?

AAA titles aren't the only games that can take a long time to make. Sometimes people actually want to go for quality, but can only afford to fund a small team over a long period of time. Katawa Shoujo is a completely free indie and they took 4 years with 17 people. Their blog? Was made 4 years ago and has posts from 4 years ago. And they just got an animation deal. Release dates can be held for numerous reasons, and the fact is: you'll never know why unless you have some kind of connection. And that's both for indies and massive scale companies.

[Samu-kun]

And they just got an animation deal

XD Did I also mention they got professional voice actors!? frrrooommmmmm maaarrrrrrsssssss!

(in case anyone's wondering what this post is about, both the animation deal and the professional voice actors are April Fools Day jokes posted on the Katawa Shojo blog)

[Jake]

No offense, but where does anyone mention lightning speed progress or "completing a game in a couple of weeks"? First, you wouldn't know WHAT the company was doing behind closed doors, so talking about feeling lied to is silly since really, how would you know whether or not they were finished.
Again, how the heck would you know a game was done or not within an WIP thread?

Also relevant: in software we tend to have a date called "code complete" which is often months before release-to-market; this is the date that all the coding has supposedly finished, but you're still going to spend some notable amount of time testing everything and making bug fixes before actually trying to sell it. It's entirely reasonable to 'finish' your game to the "code complete" stage, announce it as a work-in-progress, get beta-testers and do a load of testing before finally releasing a month or two later. And there's no real way to tell from the outside the difference between this and deliberately announcing as a WiP when you think you're finished.

[Topagae]

"Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit..."

[Samu-kun]

I don't think lying is being suggested. A good equivalent of dafool's advice is to just wait until you're 95% finished with your game, post the WIP topic, and let interest gather while you're finishing the final 5%, bug testing, proof reading, then adding final polish, and then releasing when you're done. At least then you won't have to worry about scrapping the game for whatever reason and embarrassing yourself.

As a side note, actually, many great philosophers have indeed argued rather successfully that lying is not necessarily unethical! XD

[Jake]

Good lord did someone just try to argue me that LYING isn't unethical? That's sort of the base case of unethical behavior isn't it?

A quote I've always liked goes something along the lines of "hurting people unnecessarily is the only thing that's morally wrong".

Lying to people by - say - telling them that the product you sell cleans floors and carpets and unblocks drains when it's actually just a base-model vacuum cleaner is unethical, because people will have bought your thing expecting to be able to unblock their drains with it and it won't work.

Lying to people by telling them that your product isn't finished yet and it'll be finished in two weeks when in fact it's finished and you're just holding it back two weeks doesn't make any difference to those people at all, because either way they're not going to be able to buy it until two weeks is up. From the outside there's no way they can tell you were lying unless you give yourself up, and it doesn't affect them negatively in any way. So where's the harm? It's hard to say something is unethical when it doesn't make any difference at all to anyone.



And that's leaving aside that beta-testing and bug-fixing are important things that you need to do before releasing a commercial product, so if you haven't done those things, you can't really call your product 'finished' anyway. Calling it "lying" in that case is at the very least an exaggeration, and if you're exaggerating deliberately to make someone else look bad then that definitely is unethical.

[Topagae]

"Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit..."

[Jake]

As for philosophers, that's fine for them, but in at the very least business society, it is considered highly unethical to lie to customers.

Companies lie to their customers all the time, and it's considered perfectly fine so long as they're not directly injuring the customer, and you know it full well.

For an obvious example: when Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft are about to release a new console, if someone asks them if they're about to release a new console they'll say on-record something along the lines of "we are always researching for future products but we have no plans to announce the release of a new console at this time". Any normal human being hearing/reading that and taking at face value would interpret it as "no, there's no new console coming in the immediate future", but what it really means is "we don't want news of a new console to prevent people from buying up all the old stock of the old console we have in our warehouse, so we're not announcing anything new until our stock levels are low enough, even though we've started manufacturing it already". It's a deliberate attempt to deceive, but it's considered perfectly normal in the realm of business and nobody bats an eyelid when they turn around the following week and announce their shiny new console.

[kinougames]

Good lord did someone just try to argue me that LYING isn't unethical? That's sort of the base case of unethical behavior isn't it? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

Oh yes, it's much more ethical to tell your wife she really does looks fat in that dress.

[LVUER]

Lying and not completely honest is different (at least in business)...