Swen Vincke keeps teasing "things that they are changing according to feedback" (and *which* feedback exactly could be in itself a cause of concern), but he seems to be adamant about keeping the secret on what these changes would be and I can't help but wonder... What purpose does this serve exactly?
It seems to me like a counterproductive strategy. If your user base is vocally asking for something and you are actually listening to them and doing what they asked for (whatever he's referring about) it wouldn't just help to give everyone peace of mind if you were going to be open about it?
i was wondering the same and found a good reddit post about "why gave developers don't talk more" interestingly enough, the main article blamed gamer culture for why devs don't talk, link if you're interested
Here's the comment that was top voted:
Quote
Developer here (project manager for a AAA) and with 1093 comments no one will likely read this (and it is possible someone said these things already), but here it goes:
A lot of the things I am not candid about are because they are partner decisions. People spending millions of dollars like to listen to marketing when they have ideas about game design - even when that data is based on a very limited data set and the games within them may be dissimilar to what we are creating. If I was to say that we made changes to our game that were poor because the publisher forced our hand to try to sell more games, it would piss off a lot of people off and make me less persuasive. By not pointing out these mistakes until the next time they want to mess with our game's design, it gives me ammunition too.
Sometimes we fuck up. With games, you tend to become committed to mechanics after a while. You can change some things, but you can't change an entire game. I don't work for Bioware, but if you go and look at the Mass Effect Andromeda previews, you can tell that they already anticipated a lot of negative feedback about how the open world design destroyed the game's pacing and narrative. What likely happened is that they saw all the extremely similar criticism of Dragon Age Inquisition, but they couldn't just delete all the work they'd done on making Andromeda open-world because they probably had a year or more of content created that was all open-world with a design document that was all for open-world. Changing it. . . even if they cut all the side content that was lame and just did polish on the good parts of the game would likely have extended the game's development while making it a shorter (but much better) game. Given that they have had to shutter the franchise as a result of bad game design decisions, they probably should have done that, but though they certainly knew this would be a major criticism for the game, they didn't know that it would necessarily lead to the series having to be shuttered. Having said all this. . . even when you screw up, you don't want to scream it from the mountain-tops as that is likely to lead to fewer sales and those sales are what pay for your kid's food.
Online anonymous forums are always going to contain toxic people who are just terrible. It isn't just gaming and it certainly isn't most gamers. Even the subreddits tend to have a ton of witch-hunts and people with axes to grind. . . but this isn't why we don't engage directly with gamers or give candid answers. We would just ignore the flamers and respond to the many thoughtful gamers who give us feedback. The reason we don't do it is that we have marketing professionals who want to save information releases and discussions to create content for magazines, podcasts, and gaming hobbyist websites so that we can maximize our free media. You want the cover of a magazine, then they want to know that you aren't going to be scooped by developers talking to gamers directly before the publish date.
TL;DR - Reasons we aren't more candid:
Professionalism and protecting the product Even when we screw up, we're still selling a product; and Maximizing free media.
