No News is No News
Spore, the ambitious protein-chain-to-spacefaring-race game scheduled to come out of Maxis, hasn’t produced much news for a long time—nothing big enough to whet the appetite since the big E3 2006 demo of the creature editor, plus a brief peek at the creature and space phases. That’s rough on the fans who want to see everything, including notes jotted on bar napkins, as soon as possible, but I’m not one of those..
A little more worrying is a creeping suspicion that no news is to be found because it’s bad: development is caught up one a serious snag or three, and Maxis doesn’t want to report how things are going until the problem is resolved. If so, the decision to keep quiet is understandable, and not just out petty vanity and refusal to admit to problems.
Sometimes, serious play problems can only be solved by fundamental changes in the model, and reporting that the game will do X, only to report later that X didn’t work, so the game will do Y instead can devastate pre-game interest. Fans expected X, got excited about X, and will consider Y a failure, even if Y proves a better idea than X was in the first place. That’s not fair, but it’s true.
Also, a serious problem can cause production delays. A respectable game company fixes the problems before going to market, however long it takes. Better to arrive on the shelves a year or even two years late than to deliver a broken game. Nonetheless, a late delivery creates bad feeling in fans with attention spans shortened by video games and unable to bide patiently until the game actually hits the shelves. Also not fair, but true.
I’d prefer to hear about design problems in detail, but I’m more forgiving of the editing process. Of course the first model won’t work quite right, and watching how new ideas are fit together to fix it up is fascinating. If, however, a company feels that watching electronic sausage being made will alienate customers who equate quality control with a failed product, it’s best just to stay quiet, as Maxis is doing. No news is merely no news. Companies, and designers, who succumb to the temptation to promise the moon, insist everything is on schedule, and would rather fail than admit that success is difficult, and finally resort to insulting the buyers by claiming the finished product is just fine the way it is, and that all promises were met, melt down spectacularly. Unfortunately, they drag everyone around them, and the industry as a whole, down several notches as they go.
[Insert your own observation about the White House here.]