That’s what hype does. Hype can be good if the end product lives up to it, or the hype isn’t so potent. Tears of the Kingdom comes to my mind for this. The hype was more like “it’s coming, we think it’s going to be cool” and a couple of gameplay vids. Then their reputation combined with the understatement of how good the game actually was created a wildfire of good hype.
Starfield was like “PREPARE YOURSELVES FOR THE BEST GAME EVER MADE, IN THE WORKS FOR HALF A DECADE, YOU’LL NEVER PUT IT DOWN, GAME OF THE YEAR GUARANTEED” and created a ton of bad hype. Bad hype is good for sales, but creates unrealistic expectations and makes a lot more people go “meh” once they find out what it is.
Let me tell you a secret: bad hype is intentional. All that matters to a studio is how much they sell, not that players continue playing.
Bad hype makes players stop talking about a game pretty quickly.
Renacles@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
I think discussion around it just became toxic, you can’t really say anything about Starfield without a bunch of people hijacking the conversation to talk about how much they hate it.
jedibob5@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Maybe I just don’t look at the right parts of the internet to end up seeing it, but I haven’t even really seen anyone talking about hating it.
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 11 months ago
I watched some videos on it after it released and for about a week after my whole YouTube frontpage was full of Starfield-bashing (many with several hundred thousand views) so it’s definitely out there.
kautau@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Yeah a couple of streamers I watch made it a point to stream “starfield bad” streams and then stream literally anything else while talking about how it was better than starfield
TheDarkKnight@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I don’t hate it, I’m mostly just ambivalent to it. It felt like Bethesda’s Ubisoft moment, where they went from being a company that had been doing something really well and switched to doing something really safe…which is iust boring and generic nowadays. For the first ten or fifteen hours it was like ooh my first Bethesda game in ages! And then I put it down and never felt compelled to go back. I don’t hate it, I don’t love it, I don’t really feel anything towards it. Skyrim grabbed me from jump street and I was all in, same with FO…idk I really wanted to like Starfield…but I just never really felt anything towards it.
Renacles@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
I’m not sure how, you got lucky.
Lemmy was filled with posts linking to clickbait articles from PcGamer bashing the game.
YouTube just flooded my feed with videos about how Starfield was the worst game ever made, modern gaming was dying or something of the sort after watching a couple positive reviews.
Even in comment sections, whenever I mentioned some nitpic I had about the game, I’d get answers bashing the game as if I had said it was terrible.
It was pretty much everywhere for a month and a half to the point I just decided to stop trying to find discussions on it.