At the cocktail reception at the February D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas, we ran into fellow Canadian Denis Dyack, better known as the president of Silicon Knights. But rather than discuss hockey or beer, our conversation quickly turned to the progress of the game that he's currently directing, the Xbox 360-exclusive Too Human, which will be published by Microsoft. We had seen the much-touted game at last year's Electronic Entertainment Expo, where it was clearly undercooked, and some of the same outlets that had praised the game in advance of E3 were now highly critical of the game as it appeared on the show floor.

In a revealing and somewhat confessional blog entry on IGN, Dyack himself acknowledged that Too Human had not been ready for prime time. And in Las Vegas, his new assertion was that games should no longer be shown to journalists until after development is complete. Intrigued, we asked him to write about it for our then-only-in-the-planning-stages Outsourced section, which is dedicated to guest commentary from people working in various areas of the videogame industry: designers, programmers, artists, producers, executives, publicists, agents, etc. Dyack agreed to answer the following question, "Why do you believe that the practice of previewing videogames is broken, and how would you fix it?" (Note: in the interim between agreeing to write this guest post and today's publication, Dyack gone public with his stance, drawing attention for his fierce critique of the videogame previewing process on the EGM Live podcast. He explains his position in greater detail below.)

As a video game creator, I am lucky enough to work in an industry that I love. Videogames are at the leading edge of entertainment and are the ultimate form of media. They are the media that other, older media--books, film, TV and radio--are converging into. In this convergence, videogames are emerging as the synthesis of these varied art forms. Participating in this convergence is very exciting and I could not imagine myself doing anything else.

However, our industry is still very young and going through many growing pains. One of the biggest problems in our industry today is how video games are being marketed. Unlike other creative industries, it is a common practice to start showing and marketing games before they are completed. The current marketing cycle in the games industry looks something like the chart attached at the end of this post, titled "How Videogames Are Marketed Now."

Marketing plans for individual games may vary widely, but in general a game has a two- to three-year development cycle. The first preview screen shots are shown as early as six to nine months after the game's development begins. A demo is shown to the media somewhere around the one-year mark in the development cycle, usually at a trade show or the game's publisher event. Review copies are handed out to print media a month or two before the game is finished and then given to online sites to review right when the game is finished.

This preview and review process is the problem our industry faces: the media and game-opinion influencers are making pronouncements about a game way before it is even finished or even near completion. Notice that at every point in the development and marketing timetable, the press is seeing the games before they are actually complete. This is equivalent to sending movie critics to review Lord of the Rings before all the special effects are added. Imagine Peter Jackson standing up in front of an audience of film critics and saying, "We're going to take the character of Gollum and make him look human, but he will be all CG. We are confident it will look great as we are using the latest in motion capture and computer rendering technologies." Sounds odd, right? Well, that's what my fellow game developers and I have to do on a regular basis, even when we believe that it is not what's best for our projects.

How did we get here? Well there are many factors, but I believe there are two major contributors:

1. Technology: For many years in game development, the technology changes were so steep that what looked good two months ago could be outdated in a matter of months with a new technology. When id created Doom, suddenly all the other games before it looked old and dated in comparison. Since this could happen to any game developer at any time, it was a good motivator for publishers to release a game as soon as it was done.

Today things have changed in that the perceptual threshold of technical advances for consumers is getting smaller with every technology improvement. As an example, the difference between 720p and 1080p is much less visible to the consumer than was the difference between 2D to 3D. Technology is still changing rapidly, but it is having less and less of an impact on the games themselves, and the chance of an individual developer being outdated by the next big technological advance is very small and unlikely to happen. This trend means that game makers must create bigger and better content instead of relying on technological tricks and advancements to put them ahead of the pack.

2. Cash Flow: This is a problem, but one that will hopefully resolve itself very soon. When we first started making games in 1989, the budgets were as little as $200,000. However, today, game budgets can run well into the tens of millions and soon will equal those of Hollywood movies. Because of these rising costs, many publishers need to immediately release a completed game to generate the revenues that will point their cash flow in a positive direction.

Many gamers may not know this, but often with big budget game titles, the marketing expenses can actually exceed the cost of development. These larger, big-budgeted games require TV commercial spots, advertisement space and other in-store marketing to be planned months ahead of time. This creates an enormous problem when the game development takes longer then expected, which happens with about 99 percent of all games in development. When the title slips, the publisher is then left with two choices: allow the game to slip and lose millions on its marketing spend, or remove features of the game so as to not miss the marketing window. No one is happy with either scenario--developers, publishers or consumers.

We in the videogame industry need to take a lesson from Hollywood in the way we market our products. We should not start the PR and marketing campaigns until after a game is complete. (See the second attached chart, "How Videogames Should Be Marketed," at the end of this post.) What would this mean? It would mean that publishers would not allow the game's first preview to be written or its first screenshots to be shown until two-thirds of the way into the development process. And only when the game is complete would publicists send the finished product out for review; first to print outlets and long-lead press, and finally to online media, who would get their review copies a few weeks to a month before the game hits store shelves.

Everyone wins!

All that is required is that publishers adjust their cash flow planning to reflect the delay in the release of the game. In this new world, developers win, because they won't be forced to show games that aren't ready; they won't have to make promises about features that they only hope will make it into the final product; and they will no longer have to cut features solely to meet an arbitrary ship date whose timing is locked into a pre-planned marketing expenditure. Publishers win, because with a gold master in hand, they can actually promise an exact date for release of a game and they can plan a marketing campaign that they know will be timely. The press wins, because it can be more critical with previews and reviews since both will now be based upon finished product. And consumers should win as well, because this new process ought to produce better games that don't have features cut at the last minute just to make a release date.