When you look at your post you get the whole reason why we can’t have nice things. Dean Takahashi has more professionalism and experience in his terrible game-playing pinky than you ever will. Go take your bullshit to whatever place Gamergaters are complaining on these days.
Randomly in the sense that I wasn’t looking for it, it came on the Co-optional that i don’t even usually see. I don’t really care, I don’t expect much from enthusiast press unless I’ve seen enough of the writer.
In an age where every little marketing thing is carefully controlled, often for no good reason, it seems like an odd opinion. But, anyway, the impression I got was that the game would be too hard for me to care, I assume I wasn’t the only one to get a wrong impression out of the kerfuffle, so it affects sales.
Two weeks later, which is a long time after most people will read it. It’s incompetence and unacceptable in a journalistic setting.
He states
I think it shows quite well why Cuphead is fun and why making hard games that depend on skill is like a lost art.
Moldenhauer said the proper term was “challenging,” not “difficult.” But I quickly put the lie to that terminology.
That’s giving an impression of the game, not making a joke, and it’s an impression that is far from reliable if based solely on his play.
That came out wrong, it was more about the site (and the gaming press) than the writer. If you look at his article list, well, it has a lot of press releases. I’ll take your word for it that his actual articles are good, he doesn’t sound like a bad person and I don’t think it was his idea to make the decisions. I’m sure the first impressions that people got out of Cuphead won’t be damaging either.
Also, I generalized journalism, but I forgot the US has nowhere near the problems my country has, so it’s just false. I’ll edit it.
Linus Torvalds has more professionalism and experience than me at programming, but if a journalist tried to pass off his (hypothetical) difficulties with Scala as being relevant to the quality of the language, that would be bad journalism too.
I accept that he’s likely innocent, but VentureBeat knew what it was doing.
Yes, “But I quickly put the lie to that terminology.” is totally a serious hot-take on the game developer’s intent. It’s not a self-deprecating comment on his own lack of skills as evidenced by the 26-minute video of him stumbling through the game that accompanied the article.
I see the same gamergaters calling for Dean’s head, saying this is just fine. Racism is better than being bad at games I guess?
Feature or bug?
Not to beat a dead horse, but even he, and many others in the media, focused on how it was meant as an impressions article with an enfasis on difficulty (with a dash of the ‘social experience’ cherry on top), not as a funny sketch. https://twitter.com/AVENGEDOG/status/904474262601437184/photo/1
Again, it doesn’t justify the level of hate and vitriol of the ‘git gud’ crowd (trust me, I wouldn’t be that much better either), but nothing ever would.
Still not sure that’s fair to the Cuphead devs. There’s no guarantee that the video will always be presented in-context.
This is beautiful.
Pretend I don’t get what’s going on in your smug-o-sphere and explain.
My concern is not about Takahashi. I actually think what he did was unprofessional. If you can’t do a job properly then don’t do it. Framing it as an “aw shucks” moment for yourself is useless, because the point of Cuphead’s devs allowing a prominent game site to preview their game is to sell their game. It’s not about Takahashi, it’s about Cuphead. Viewed in that context, what he did was counterproductive at best.
My concern expressed above is that potential customers will see that video and have an unrealistic impression of the game’s difficulty level, with the result of lost sales. I have seen that specific perspective expressed on this board.
Your little snark-drop does nothing but make you look like someone who could give a damn about these issues. And maybe you don’t, I don’t see a hell of a lot of insight or self-reflection in your posting history.
Polygon published an editorial from Michael “slowbeef” Sawyer, a YouTuber, regarding PewDiePie’s latest kerfuffle.
But! There’s a plot twist! Even though the publication date says “Sep 11, 2017” this article is actually from February, when PewDiePie lost his Disney/Maker sponsorship. The article’s comments start in Feb.
I’m reminded of The Onion article for mass shootings where they just change the date and place names to match the latest tragedy.
Yet another reason to be relieved that Mattrick was shown the door sooner rather than later.
Microsoft’s answer? Throw more resources at it. “At some point Microsoft was saying ‘maybe this needs to be an even bigger game’,” Urquhart says. “‘Maybe we just need to add a bunch more people onto it - maybe we don’t have enough people to prototype all these crazy ideas we have.’ Well no, actually that sounds terrifying, that sounds like a really bad idea for us to do.”
Yeah, Mattrick really sounds like an idiot. It’s a shame that game didn’t pan out. I would have been all over that at Xbox One launch. They started with the Dungeon Siege 3 engine, which was a great starting point, I think.
Why should Dean Takahashi or any media care what the objective of the game company is? He’s an independent journalist and all PR people (good ones, at least) know that once you hand over the code, it’s out of your hands.
Dean isn’t a paid shill for Cuphead, and he shouldn’t feel like access to the code requires him to perform some sort of service.
Agreed. Game journalists are not the dev’s PR department.
Um, it’s about whatever VentureBeat want it to be about. He’s not Cuphead’s marketing director.
Dean Takahashi is so obviously terrible at gaming that anyone can watch the video and within a few minutes determine that Takahashi is completely unqualified to write about gaming in any way at all.
Or…
Someone might watch the video and think the player represents the average gamer’s skill and therefore the video is harmful to Cuphead because it gives an incorrect impression of the game’s difficulty.
If only there was a story in the middle in which Takahashi admits he played the game terribly, and the game is actually difficult. Ah, well. I guess we’ll never know that truth.
I get what you are saying, but I would just reply with two things, one of which supports my point and one which contradicts it, so I’ll only say the first thing. The concern that something in the video may “give people a wrong impression in a way that may be harmful to the game’s marketing” makes me think of all the times when (as a freelance writer) I would get some beta from a media outlet and be asked to write a preview, in which I was absolutely not encouraged to say anything negative because “it’s not done yet” and then a month later I’d get a “gold master” for review that was basically the build I had just previewed and be told to be as negative as I wanted because “this is a review.” Except if it was significantly more negative than the word on the street, it would get toned down. That’s not professionalism: that’s an industry that has very deep hooks into its enthusiast media. And this is supported by much of the audience, because all enthusiast press is biased to be widely positive. Why would it be otherwise? They’re enthusiasts! So things are labeled as “unprofessional” are really just violations of this positive bias. Unless it is some “evil BigCorp” and not an indie, in which case all vitriol is just fine. It’s a very immature medium in this sense.
I wasn’t really serious about not telling you the point that supported you, but honest to God I forgot what it was while I typed all that. Maybe it will come to me while I stall for time. Oh yeah, so if you’re saying that the guy’s job was to preview the game and it failed to meet the bar for what a preview is generally expected to comprise, then yes, that is some serious unprofessionalism. But I think I said above that there is a very questionable sense of “professionalism” in the first place. So I think I got myself out of that one? Let me know how that works out.
Yeah, I think that’s about where we end up.
As far as I can tell, Takahashi’s goof-piece serves neither the interests of the developer that granted him access nor the gaming public that he’s purportedly serving. But I’ll bet he still cashes the paycheck.