Gamers have been known for shooting messengers left and right because of the hype culture surrounding a lot of high-end game releases. It’s been happening with games of the past. With the praise directed towards games like Evolve, Aliens: Colonial Marines, No Man’s Sky and even Lawbreakers.

It always was the same. How these games were supposed to be the messiah of video gaming at some point. How this or that was the game we needed in our lives despite not even having a short semblance of testing or actual gameplay footage in some of these cases to actually sustain these claims.

The most bothering problem is that nowadays it seems like every part of the industry relies on the hype from the audience to be alive. Journalists have to talk about how spectacular a trailer looks, how astonishing the music in said trailer was and how a game managed to get prizes without a single hand touching a controller to experience it. This is definitely a trend I would much rather see stopping before it gets worse.

These Journalists Are Trying to Take Our Games!

We already are seeing the repercussions of allowing this silly phenomenon happen with the cases of death threats and DDoS attacks against critics who oh-so-boldly dared to not think the same way the hive mind did. Most of the time, journalists are simply doing their job and voicing their opinions.

However, on other occasions, hype culture has actually driven a lot of people to do disturbing things for rather meaningless causes. It’s certainly something incredibly mind-boggling, to say the least.
 

This should be common knowledge nowadays, the fact that a journalist from Kotaku got flooded by death threats for announcing a simple delay on No Man’s Sky. Jim Sterling getting DDoS’d for giving The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild a 7/10, people starting to dox critics that don’t think Yooka-Laylee is the greatest thing ever and being insulted because I gave a negative outlook to Bendy and the Ink Machine.

There are many problems with the hype culture that surrounds gaming nowadays. We discussed the part where the audiences turn to shoot journalists because they don’t say something to please them.

However, there’s also the fact that when a product gets too overhyped, it faces way too many expectations. The bar reaches heights that will inevitably make the expectations hard to reach because of this. Once the final product is released, an inevitable backlash will occur when the game turns out to be average at most.

We all know the backlash Destiny got a few days after release when it didn’t turn out to be the messiah of gaming everyone was hyping it up to be (I mean, what messiah has Microtransactions in it? Probably a corporate Messiah). No Man’s Sky is definitely another example of this issue, with a backlash happening due to how mediocre the product was.

Sure, both of these games became better thanks to updates or megapatches. However, there’s only one first impression and sadly, the audience that once was hyped by the product may not even look at the game that “Became better”. Their hype simply died out and they don’t want to risk facing another disappointing product.

Considering how many events like this have gone time and time again. I can’t stress enough that gamers should have skepticism in their mindset first before adding some hype to the mix.

Sure, a game trailer may look impressive enough but that’s something movies are supposed to do. This doesn’t mean that game trailers can’t look impressive or everyone’s opinion on a game will be made up as soon as they watch it.

However, games are something that’s meant to be played rather than seen. Unless you have the game on your hands and have played it at a demo booth or something of the sort, you shouldn’t pre-order a game that doesn’t even exist yet outside of a video showing you the features it supposedly has. Maybe that way, you'll be less disappointed when Fallout 76 turns out to be a bad game.

How to Not Get Swayed by Corporate Spokespeople

Don’t misunderstand me, however, you can still enjoy your products for what they are. And hey, maybe you are one of those few fellas that enjoys games like Fallout 76 or Destiny 2. I will never fault you for whatever you like or not. However, liking something that had a backlash or was a mediocre product often results from a placebo effect.

In the end, the reason why people ended up pre-ordering games like the above mentioned was because they might have been wow’d by the announcement trailers.

If we keep going the route we’re going now, we’ll keep seeing this “Us Vs. Them” mentality when addressing audiences and critics. In the end, it’s the job of a critic or a journalist to protect the consumer from a potential bad choice.
 

If there’s something we should learn from this video and this petition it’s that sometimes, even the audiences don’t really know what they are talking about. Journalists exist to provide guidance to the audiences who may have doubts about the product they are buying. Of course, they also are supposed to not get swayed by the trailers and such.

Critics worth listening to will never attempt to impose an opinion over one of the audience’s but much rather make a suggestion that the piece of media in question could not exactly be something worth being hyped about. But as some might point out, even a suggestion in the form of an early review is not enough.

It’s important to still have a discussion, enjoy games and media for what they are and not get too overblown by just bits and pieces of footage a company wants to pass off as gameplay without even having anything to show for it in reality.

Hype can kill your interest in a video game by just showing you a mediocre product. Once your hype dies down, I’m fairly certain you wouldn’t even dare to attempt that experience again with any other game. I wouldn’t even fault you for not wanting to take risks after a bad outcome.

However, just because journalists look at games critically does not mean we have a grudge against them or we don’t want to have fun. On the contrary, we want them to become better and more suitable for the person who is going to play it. Although, sometimes not even the journalists know what their audience is.

Not to mention, not everything in the industry is something to write home about. We barely went off the “Augment your Pre-order” bullshit by just a small margin because audiences tried to defend it way too much when nobody asked them to.

So please, try not to expect too much from the games you’ll see in the upcoming E3 or any gaming event for that matter. Be skeptical of any and all pieces of information you get and take the opinions of critics like a suggestion, not a demand. It’s really not that hard to grasp and it will actually benefit the gaming industry in the upcoming years.