#3. Game development is malleable, fan expectation is not.
A lot of things get cut during development. Sometimes it’s for technical limitations, sometimes it’s for budget limitations, sometimes it’s for licensing, most of the time it’s for scope and schedule. Anything that gets mentioned will be taken by somebody as a promise to deliver it, even though that particular feature might get cut. Even things that aren’t mentioned by the developers themselves can become memetic promises. Just look at the response to Mass Effect 3′s ending - one of the reasons that angry fans the world over broke out the torches and pitchforks was because they were promised 16 different endings, despite the fact that nobody from Bioware had actually explicitly mentioned the number of endings anywhere.
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The hard core fans especially will take what the developers say as a promise, and we simply can’t make promises during development because features get cut all the time. This ends up becoming something of an arms race, because we have to watch what we say in public venues very carefully in order to avoid making promises. This causes the hard core fans to read over exactly what words were used and becoming forum lawyers, saying that since we didn’t EXPLICITLY SAY that we were doing feature A, that means we’re NEVER EVER GOING TO DO feature A and the game is doomed, and so on and so forth. Or they’ll call us liars or won’t believe us because we SAID we’d do feature B and we didn’t, and so we can never be trusted and we are the worst developers EVER and the game is doomed and so on and so forth. And then fans will call us liars for years because we promised.
This leads directly into…
#4. People don’t really understand game development, but think they do
It’s really really easy to be an armchair game developer. Everyone’s done it. But the general public is never going to have access to all of the information that the developers with which to make their decisions. In all honesty, however, gamers really don’t understand game development any more than diners understand how a restaurant is actually run. I don’t expect a diner to understand the subtleties in cooking technique or timing or organization that goes on in a restaurant kitchen. They might have some inkling about spices or flavor profiles, but even if they’ve done some cooking at home, there’s a whole messy world of organization and work in running a restaurant that is completely hidden from them… and I honestly believe that most diners don’t particularly care about those details. Similarly, I don’t really think that most gamers out there really care about the nitty-gritty of game development. They just want to know that the game they want is going to have the features that they want.