The Hype Train is Running Out of Steam – Cold Take

This week on Cold Take, Frost dives takes a look at how the concepts of hype and anticipation are starting to run out of steam.

Check out more recent episodes of Cold Take, including Armored Core 6 and the ‘Git Gut’ Mentality, The Problem of Voting With Your Wallets, and Baldur’s Gate 3 Has Caused Quite a Hubbub.

The Hype Train is Running Out of Steam – Transcript

Wait, if I’m on the hype train and you’re on the hype train, who’s driving the train?

Xbox got caught with their pants around their ankles. Long story short, Some kind of internal mishap led to a public leaking of secret documents and corporate emails. I will note that a lot of these documents are older and made during the pandemic, so I’m not sure how many of them hold relevance in a business that pivots fast and loose in a time when everyone was locked inside baking bread and watching Tiger King for some God forsaken reason. For example, the new Xbox may or may not be shaped like a jumbo can of chili from Costco. What did catch my attention was Phil Spencer’s emails where he criticized the business practices of the industry he’s in for being too short-sighted and wanting to make more money in the immediate at the risk of not having a sustainable future.

It echoes a lot of my earlier Cold Take topics, like in the video where I say publishers are looking to prey upon the smaller developers and consequently force them into monotony, the business-heads are ruining video games video, and the we need Triple-A video games, the list goes on. The exact thought from Spencer that I am basing this ramble around is when he points out that triple-A publishers have been riding the success of 10-year-old franchises, because they’re the only ones capable of being a safe enough bet to commit millions of dollars for production. The reason they’re safer than new ideas is because old IP runs on its own reputation and hype. We’re seeing the long-term effects of riding your own coattails for a decade, and it looks like the hype train is starting to run out of steam.

Gamers can scoff all they want at the likes of Ubisoft, EA, or any other big name that some would consider to be in a creative and moral downwards spiral, but you have to have earned grace to fall from grace. Earning a reputation is difficult. You need to chain together explosive releases that break the mold of one time and make a new one for the next. It’s as much a stroke of genius as it is a stroke of luck the first time around, but the follow up gets a boost. There is always a crowd watching and waiting to see what your next work may be. This is as true for old franchises, from CoD to Metal Gear to Mario, as it is for smaller studios like Supergiant Games, and it even manages to trickle down to the most personal level where people patiently await the follow up creations of solo developer auteurs such as Toby Fox, the creator of Undertale, Eric Barone, the creator of Stardew Valley, and Lucas Pope, the creator of Papers, Please and The Return of the Obra Dinn. If you manage to catch lightning in a bottle a second time you draw an even bigger crowd. Do it again and you’ve gained a reputation that has its own gravitational pull. The size of the crowd itself draws a crowd. I’m sure everyone’s bought a game at least once that they knew nothing about aside from “well, a lot of people seem to like it, so I figured I’d give it a shot.” That is hype.

Hype is the anticipation that something will be good based on past performance. “Why is that a bad thing? Let people be happy, Frost. Let people hope.” Therein lies the detail. Hype and hope are different. Hope is wishful thinking that something will turn out well. You put your positive energy out into the world and move on with your life knowing that sometimes good things come and sometimes they don’t. Hope needs no justification. Hype believes it has every justification. Hype believes it’s better informed and reasonable, in fact it’s banking on it. You can monetize it. “The game isn’t even out yet, but the last game was so good you might as well just give me your credit card now!” Hype is scheduling time off work to play Diablo 4 on release day, knowing good and well that Blizzard’s servers can’t handle the stress and you’ll spend most of your day waiting in line. Hype is buying the next installation of a franchise that’s been well out of its prime for longer than it was in it simply because it still has the same name. That is what publishers have been peddling for quite a while now.

Hindsight being 20-20, around 2013 or so is when I got the tingling sensation that games had stopped surpassing the quality that came before. I’m not saying games got bad. Oh no, they were still good, great even. Hell, some still managed to catch lightning here and there, but they weren’t consistently shifting the culture in the way people had gotten accustomed to. Regardless, the hype train continued picking up speed, and the quality of the tracks was starting to degrade. The speed of the train made the cars shake as the quality of games went from culture-defining to just good, until a few studio mishaps made the train go off-rails at certain points. Phil Spencer lamented that Xbox had no premiere exclusive content for 16 months due to improper planning, calling it a “disaster situation.” The hype train had gone from the Halo Infinite station and crashed straight into Redfall’s poor release. Costly mistakes make publishers even more hesitant to play it risky, and they were already renting old IP instead of making new ones to minimize the gamble and keep the hype train running on schedule. EA rented Star Wars, Sony rented Spider-Man, Ubisoft rented Avatar. I don’t think anything is sadder than Call of Duty, and that’s coming from an old fan. They’re using their old content as fuel for the hype train. The big CoD release of 2023 was the big release of 2011, filled with all of the old maps. But here’s the thing, who is that appealing to? The new demographic is there for an entirely different feel than what initially brought me to the series. Assassin’s Creed is doing it as well with Mirage targeting the people who preferred the stealth patrolling style of the originals over the new RPG style.

Actually I did think of one thing sadder than old IP being burned to keep the hype train running, workers being thrown off to lower costs. As I write this, Epic Games has laid off 16% of its workforce. The reason given by Tim Sweeney, the CEO of the studio that owns the money-printing machine that is Fortnite, is because they spent too much money chasing “the next evolution of Epic and growing Fortnite as a metaverse-inspired ecosystem for creators.” Simply put, Epic bought into their own hype from the Ninja era and the Major Crossover era, a moment in time where Fortnite grew beyond the sphere of gaming and into the rest of pop culture because of pop stars like Drake and Travis Scott, alongside sports stars like SuperBowl Champion wide receiver Juju Smith-Schuster, and major collaborations that brought recognizable IP to the game like Thanos and Goku. Oh, and let’s not forget this happened right before a major pandemic that shut people inside with nothing better to do than twiddle their thumbs, a literal captive audience. I don’t mean to be an armchair business mogul, but the revenue gain during that time should’ve been marked down as abnormal and unsustainable growth. Give all the hard workers a bump in pay, but save a majority of it for when things return to normal so these people can continue to work and explore other avenues similar to the exploration that created Fortnite. The reason these companies can make billions and still lose money is because they buy into their own hype and believe their new highs are the standard, so they feel justified in raising their cost of operations because they assume the money will be made back.

Hype does make money. It makes money for the businessman who wants to make a quick buck for 4 to 5 years and cash out. Hype has no business in any business that is serious about their long-term growth and potential. I agree with Phil Spencer’s older emails. There’s too many publishers squeezing their cash cows dry, selling you powdered milk on hype alone, and then butchering the cow when it’s got nothing left to give. I can’t say this means Phil Spencer is looking out for the everyday gamer or even that he is a good businessman, but he’s a better dairy farmer than his penpals. That’s for sure.