Oh, no need to apologize at all! I enjoy your write-ups and replies immensely, and I was excited to see this one in my inbox - even more excited today when I finally got the chance to sit down with coffee and read it in full, as well as the essay you linked to! Thank you very much for your response.
That essay was an excellent read! I found myself nodding along with quite a lot of it, especially the section you excerpted. I really never considered the possibility of any causal relationship with modern capitalism and modern spoiler culture - but now that it's been pointed out to me, I don't think I can unsee it. It makes a lot of sense.
You're absolutely right about modern socmed-marketing generating FOMO anxiety as a strategy to drive sales - pre-sales, even. As someone who used to work in like a GameStop, your point about companies constantly pushing preorders is one that is hahah oh gosh all too familiar to me. The extent to which companies prioritize preorders these days is just astounding. You know, similar to how I don't remember the folks of fifteen or so years ago being so avoidant of pre-release 'spoilers' like leaks etc., nor do I recall preorder culture being so prevalent fifteen years ago, either.
If memory serves, only the titles that were expected to sell by the millions were preorderable back then. If you wanted, I dunno, Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials And Tribulations or some other relatively smaller/unknown release, you just had to walk in to your local on launch day and hope with fingers crisscrossed that it'd be on the shelves. These days, though, you can place a preorder on pretty much any upcoming game either in store or via the internet - and preorders aren't even limited to games themselves any more, but can be placed on merchandise like scale figures, t-shirts, and in one particularly egregious example, Nintendo Switch decals (like, tacky stickers you'd plaster on your Joy-Cons only to regret having done a few years later, the sort that if you leave them on too long and then try to pull off will only leave a very sticky residue around the console plastic). TL;DR - It amazes me how rampant if not aggressive preorder culture has become, although I suspect that's a discussion for another time, hahah.
Back to the topic of pre-release content, though, Disney's want to protect their IPs is understandable. And thinking about how many BOTW-clones were released by other video game companies following the success of the actual Breath Of The Wild, I can understand that Nintendo might want to be similarly protective of their own, especially when their own is one of the most anticipated games of the year.
You definitely don't see smaller devs and studios being so secretive, though. If anything, I love how happily transparent so many indie developers are about their upcoming projects. In an age so very dominated with spoiler aversion and a grim dearth of pre-release material, it's awesome to see all those Twitter accounts and blogs set up by indie teams to document and share conceptual sketches, preliminary renders, etc. - all ahead of release. :D
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2023-02-27 04:27 am (UTC)That essay was an excellent read! I found myself nodding along with quite a lot of it, especially the section you excerpted. I really never considered the possibility of any causal relationship with modern capitalism and modern spoiler culture - but now that it's been pointed out to me, I don't think I can unsee it. It makes a lot of sense.
You're absolutely right about modern socmed-marketing generating FOMO anxiety as a strategy to drive sales - pre-sales, even. As someone who used to work in like a GameStop, your point about companies constantly pushing preorders is one that is hahah oh gosh all too familiar to me. The extent to which companies prioritize preorders these days is just astounding. You know, similar to how I don't remember the folks of fifteen or so years ago being so avoidant of pre-release 'spoilers' like leaks etc., nor do I recall preorder culture being so prevalent fifteen years ago, either.
If memory serves, only the titles that were expected to sell by the millions were preorderable back then. If you wanted, I dunno, Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials And Tribulations or some other relatively smaller/unknown release, you just had to walk in to your local on launch day and hope with fingers crisscrossed that it'd be on the shelves. These days, though, you can place a preorder on pretty much any upcoming game either in store or via the internet - and preorders aren't even limited to games themselves any more, but can be placed on merchandise like scale figures, t-shirts, and in one particularly egregious example, Nintendo Switch decals (like, tacky stickers you'd plaster on your Joy-Cons only to regret having done a few years later, the sort that if you leave them on too long and then try to pull off will only leave a very sticky residue around the console plastic). TL;DR - It amazes me how rampant if not aggressive preorder culture has become, although I suspect that's a discussion for another time, hahah.
Back to the topic of pre-release content, though, Disney's want to protect their IPs is understandable. And thinking about how many BOTW-clones were released by other video game companies following the success of the actual Breath Of The Wild, I can understand that Nintendo might want to be similarly protective of their own, especially when their own is one of the most anticipated games of the year.
You definitely don't see smaller devs and studios being so secretive, though. If anything, I love how happily transparent so many indie developers are about their upcoming projects. In an age so very dominated with spoiler aversion and a grim dearth of pre-release material, it's awesome to see all those Twitter accounts and blogs set up by indie teams to document and share conceptual sketches, preliminary renders, etc. - all ahead of release. :D