The Business: On Failing To Tell Prospective Buyers What Their Experience Will Actually Be

You've seen me post various videos in the "Tex Talks BattleTech" series. Those videos are fantastic, as are Luetin09's lore videos for SpaceMace 39K, and both of these run into the same problems that fans of the Final Fantasy MMOs are now: the realization that what looks and sounds great in Wiki articles, lore videos, and single-player games do not work in the core gameplay medium of the property (tabletop wargaming for the former two, MMORPG multiplayer play for the latter).

This is a marketing problem. You want to attract people to your game. Therefore you want it to look and feel cool, so you hype things up. Then you find out that you completely screwed up by creating expectations far out of line with how the damned machine--that's what your game is, a machine--actually works in practice.

Get yourself a sheet and fill it out with a stock 3025 Warhammer. Now try to play that Mech on the tabletop like you hear Tex (and everyone else) depict them in lore videos, tie-in novels, and other secondary media- including videogames. You can apply this to the Rifleman, Marauder, Catapult, etc. and you will run into the same conclusion time and again: your actual play performance will look and feel nothing like what the secondary media tells you to expect. You will overheat quickly, see performance degrade to worthlessness just as fast, and get rooked good and harder by better designs with better players running them. This can and has resulted in prospects quitting on the spot.

In the MMO context, FF fans are having to confront that gameplay gimmicks that are novel and even endearing when you're playing a single-player game wherein you have full control over the party and how you go about doing things turn into absolute clusterfucks in a multiplayer environment because those gimmicks completely wreck the necessary real-world team dynamics that emerge organically in multiplayer play- especially if it's Player vs. Player and not Player vs. Environment.

That gambler with his extreme randomness mechanics? Completely unreliable in a real team environment, so he gets benched. Beastmasters? So you spend most of your time as a drone wrangler while in the line of fire, wherein most of your actual effectiveness depends on the devs' ability to code NPC AI competently? There's a reason most pet classes get dumped over time; it's far more bother than it's worth. Shapeshifting means, in effect, mastering multiple scuffed psuedo-classes with a thin veneer of justification (i.e. a change of player model and skin); this too is either Mandatory or Benched in practice, and that's assuming that this obese codemonkey is worth having at all since it should, and could, just replace everyone else- and in games like Place of Pwncraft, they do. This dynamic, and its clash with wrong expectations, has resulted in far more self-inflicted problems than most are even aware of.

The need to carefully establish expectations that match what gameplay is actually like is not apparent to most game companies. This is, quite frankly, because they are run by retarded fuckwits most of the time and the rest of the time they are run by people who Peter Principled themselves into leadership and thus might as well be retarded fuckwits.

In short, they do not see the problem until the steaming turd is smeared in their faces, and that is insufficient to get them to actually fix the problem.

For BattleTech, this means making certain that all secondary media conforms to the reality of tabletop play since changing the rules will go over like a lead balloon. For the FF MMOs, it means accepting that they are making a multiplayer game first and foremost and realizing that their gameplay design space is hard-bounded by multiplayer dynamics and the drive to maximize odds of success while minimizing risks of failure- and thus reducing uncertainty to zero.

The specific thing to address will vary from one property to the next, but there is a specific thing that actually exists and prospects that see this reality going into it and still accept it are far more likely to become long-term loyal customers with all the long-tail revenue that entails as well as the cultivating of positive brand perception (with all the benefits that brings).

This, ultimately, is why actual play matters, why mechanical design matters, and why bullshitting prospective buyers like this should be actionable- you're selling steak, while delivering tofu.