Gaming Annoyances 101: The Industry Factor

Some time ago (look here and here) we had spoken about certain player-related annoyances that tend to muck up perfectly good gaming sessions. Today we’ll take a look at some more serious annoyances from an industry point of view. Let the rant begin...

False Hype
In the gaming industry it’s a given that if a game performs really well financially and commercially, it’s going to get a sequel (or sequels). We journalists know it, and gamers know it, so why do various publishers and developers insult our intelligence by saying stuff like "we can’t talk about it now but you know, nothing’s impossible..." A case in point – Gears of War.

GoW was perhaps the Xbox360’s very first system seller and it even ended on a cliffhanger note, paving the way for a sequel, so everyone and their grandmom knew that Gears of War 2 would be arriving shortly. When asked, however, Epic choose to remain mum throwing scraps of useless information at our feet. I understand developers have to build a certain amount of hype around their games, but trying to hide the obvious just borders on stupidity.

Lackadaisical Attitude Towards Smaller Markets
As most of you already know, Grand Theft Auto IV released worldwide on April 29 but till date we have no news regarding the official Indian release. The game was supposed to release here on day one but due to shortage of stock India and other Asian countries haven’t received shipment in the first place. And to make matters worse, publisher Take Two claims to be too busy to even respond to our local distributors, as a result of which all of us are in the dark. Taking advantage of this situation are the infamous grey market dealers who are selling copies of the game for nearly double the rate.

Then you have publishers such as Midway who just aren’t interested in distributing their games over here. With nowhere to turn, it’s no wonder more and more people are modding their Xbox360s just so that they can play their favorite games.