Patrick Klepek weighs in on the backlash: (Gaming)

by Kahzgul, Thursday, August 18, 2016, 20:52 (3023 days ago) @ cheapLEY

As far as press goes, is there ANY benefit to announcing your game so early? Are you really missing out in sales of you announce your game say, 3 or 4 months before release? I don't see any.

Wouldn't the best thing to do be to announce your game say, 4 months from release, detail your game fully knowing what will ship and what won't, and then releasing? A reasonable amount of time for hype, but close enough out that you've already got your game locked down, thus eliminating the possibility of broken promises.

That's what makes sense to me.

I don't see the benefit either. Showing your game at E3 generates hype, by why do it three years out from release? Just put out a press release and some concept art or something, then actually show the game say no more than six months before it ships. I don't think announcing it so early is helping it reach a bigger audience or anything--no one really cares when a game is so early in development (especially not the wider audience that isn't paying attention anyway).

To be fair, when they announced the game at E3 2013, they said it would be available in January of 2014. The game has been delayed many, many times over. At one point Hello Games' office flooded and all of their computers fried. They had to re-write everything from notes they'd taken using old backups as their framework. There's also Sony's involvement. My professional experience tells me that the original game didn't even have the survival or crafting elements, and Sony stepped in and said "you can't sell a tech demo as a game" which forced longer delays while they figured out systems for actually interacting with the world(s) they'd developed. I have zero evidence to support this, just a strong feeling that comes from having spent my 10,000 hours in the industry.