"Cinematic Trailers" are WORTHLESS

[Kandid]

Cinematic trailers have nothing to do with the game itself, it's no secret. Their sole purpose is to deceive people, so that filthy rich lying piece of shit publishers can cloud the fact that their games are mediocre borefests, it's no secret either.

But there's something I hate more than these cinematic trailers, I hate it when a fatty mongoloid game developer is interviewed in IGN or GameTrailers saying stuff like "What I love about our game is that..." with the actual game in the background. They use (carefully handpicked) 0.1% portion of the game which doesn't suck and it's called a gameplay footage preview. Yeah right... And when you do buy the game, you notice something. Everything you've seen in the preview gameplay footage is the climax, the best parts of the game. Until you realized this, you've already paid full price for the game. You're not satisfied, they make you buy DLC's and sequels, and it goes on like this.

Whoa, TOR has a bunch of gameplay videos!  And it looks cool, imo!

I beg to differ.

[anariel]

Alrighty.

So then, you feel that "caveat emptor" should be the acceptable way of doing business in our modern society..?

Placing the entire onus upon the consumer, in other words. And if anyone is deceived by misleading advertising,
then that's their own fault. They were stupid -- they shouldn't have bought it -- they should have researched
the product first -- they were an idiot to have trusted the advertisements -- etc., etc. Right..?

Help me to understand. Is that more or less your position..? Caveat emptor..? Or am I missing something..?

"Fool me once, shame for you. Fool me Twice, shame for me". The only way I see to force the gaming industry... Hell, ANY industry is to make a bad bussiness for them to do this kind of things. That was -I think- the idea behind the reviews, gaming publications, etc... But in the end, some of that sources are "corrupted", and it's not 100% guaranteed you will share their conclusions anyway. So the best option, from my point of view: download the game. Test it. If you like it, buy it. If you don't, dispose of the bytes. Sadly, a lot of people just want all for nothing... the consumers version of the producers.

And about marketing... In my class it was defined in a way too "happy". My personal definition of marketing, as it is today, is more like: People have needs. They don't really know what kind of needs are those, how to treat it. Marketing offers a "cure" for those needs... but it's just a mirage: you buy what the Marketing told you to, in order to fulfill your need... but your need is only satisfied temporally, and we begin again.
I hope I explained it right... It's more a feeling, and I'm not sure if I could explain it quite well in spanish, so I'm not very confident :S

[perez007usa]

  The problem is, is most of us are gullible. We SEE it, must HAVE it, cool graphics and such. It happen to me, with Spider-man 2. I got it for the PS2 it was good. But, let me tell you!! about the PC version,!! it sucks! it was no way what it suppose to be. it didn't look like the PS2 game or the trailers, I have been TOOKEN. I would have settled with a ported  one.

   So I know what Tess is saying, "TRAILERS " are WORTLESS. If you don't agree with me. Look at the cinematic trailer of Duke Nukeum Forever, I don't have the link for it, but I'm sure most of us saw it. ( and we're still waiting). Movies are the same way (sorry), but I was an extra in some of them. Some were good and some were bad.

[Tynam]

I don't think deceptive advertising can be legislated away, though.

Not without giving legislators a chance to do a lot more damage on marketers' behalf than the con artists ever could by themselves...

But cinematic trailers aren't so much misleading as useless.  The trailer Tessera mentioned doesn't make false claims about the character creation, interface or gameplay.  It doesn't tell you anything about them at all.  It's only function, like all hype, is to tell me: this game exists, and they want us to buy it.

It's job is now done.  Now if they expect me to buy it I'm going to have to see those details Tessera mentioned, or a good demo, or a rave review from a reviewer I trust.  But some people out there seem to actually like buying stuff based on no more than "looks cool".  And that's their decision, however idiotic.