Sunday Thoughts: Teasers

As I’m writing this the VGAs are about an hour away. I doubt I’ll be watching them live, even with the promise of a show dripping with juicy trailers and exclusive reveals. In fact the awards part of the VGAs seems to have been pretty much marginalised in a way it isn’t at any other awards show. The Oscars doesn’t feature trailers for films that year, and whilst you might get some artists performing at the Brit awards, they don’t come out and tell you to buy the album they’ve got coming out later in the year. Of course the press coverage of the VGAs will be pretty much through the roof, and the promise of first looks at various titles will certainly do a lot to bump up Spike’s all important viewership figures.

The hype for the reveals at what has quickly become one of the biggest nights of the gaming calendar, following closely behind the big shows like E3 and TGS, seems kind of crazy this year. There’s been an almost constant drip feed of ‘this announcement’ or ‘that trailer’ for around a month now, all for a show that’s supposed to be awarding the games that, to paraphrase Wolverine*, are “the best at what they do”.

Of course the VGAs aren’t entirely alone in this approach to promotion, we’ve had countdowns to teasers and announcements for a while now. To be frank I find them a little bit dull, but they do drive a lot of press coverage and discussion about what the developer or publisher is working on and that’s the goal really.

However whilst countdowns may be dull, even if I have used one myself once (it was a silly idea), teasers fall beyond dull and into pointlessness at times. Take the teaser for Uncharted 3 that came out to build up to the full trailer at the VGAs. Beyond the fact that Uncharted 3 will be at the VGAs what does it tell you? The only thing I’ve heard anyone manage to pick out of the of the 40 odd seconds of video (of which about 16 seconds is useful) is £20 notes in the wallet on the table. Perhaps an indication that something will happen in the UK in the game.

So we’re better off by exactly one, pretty minor, fact and Naughty Dog, Spike and the awards have even more press coverage and fan buzz surrounding them. Of course the lack of info from the Uncharted teaser has nothing on the Batman: Arkham City video that was released. All that managed to convey was that the game features Batman and, apparently, a group of Sam Fisher look alikes. So essentially the game will feature Batman and enemies.

Perhaps we as fans are to blame for the growth of drip fed media from publishers and developers, if a game isn’t blasted in our face every 30 seconds it’s easy to forget it unless it’s an absolute blockbuster. That would be fine, and there’s an argument to be made there, but most of the games we get these kind of teasers for or hints at are the absolutely huge blockbusters that would still sell infinity million copies (possibly a slight exaggeration) if they were marketed by game store employees just throwing retail copies at you as you walked into the store.

These games do need marketing of course, but is this really the best way of getting it done? Could Naughty Dog or Rocksteady just not put out a simple press release that said “Hey guys, we’ll have a trailer at the VGAs”. Even a press release might be too much, in the age of social media a simple tweet is more than enough to get the buzz to build to critical levels in mere minutes. With simple sharing mechanics like retweets it might even be more effective to just tweet small snippets like that out, although that might be a discussion for another time and place.

However, given the response to these teasers it would seem that perhaps I’m in the minority here. The problem is it’s hard to discern whether people are excited by the teaser itself, or by the promise of more detailed information soon. I feel it’s probably the latter, and that excitement would be high no matter how the information was passed out. The thing is do we really need to be teased quite so much?

* Yes I know that was incredibly geeky. Hush.