I personally think the time to begin the big hype drive is around four to six months before release. If you start too soon, people start suffering hype fatigue long before you're ready to release, at which point you start losing potential customers because they get sick of hearing about it.
If a games company starts putting out teasers too far in advance their potential customers start thinking the game is never coming and label it vapourware, which means they'll then assume a troubled dev cycle, leading also to lost sales.
It's a lose-lose situation.
DNF, anyone??? :P
Yeah, still waiting on that one.
STALKER anyone? :P
Though, STALKER, in the long run, still somehow turned out great.
Max Payne (the original) anyone?? :P
Yup, it was talked about majorly before it was done, then disappeared for a LONG TIME. Eventually, the game just dropped -- and once it did, it lit a fire. Somehow, it turned out great.
So I totally understand why we aren't being told much right now. They're working and we know that - but if there's nothing more to tell, why start stirring up excitement when the actual release date is still too far off? It's simply counter productive.
Yeah, we saw where that got Peter Molyneux w/ Fable and the original Black & White, since many people were not too happy w/ a lot of content Peter speak in interviews before the games were done, which mentioned a lot of content that never made the final cuts of both games.
Regardless of what was cut and what wasn't, I throughly enjoyed Fable: TLC (PC version). It was still great.
