Mon, Aug 11, 2008 | 10:17 BST

Crackdown was hyped too early, says Realtime Worlds

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Realtime Worlds studio boss Colin Macdonald has told GI that he believes Microsoft pushed Crackdown too early, and that people should have only seen the open-world crime-buster “much later”.

“With something like Crackdown we could have pushed Microsoft into hyping it even earlier, but as it was we felt it was done too early as it stood,” he said. “We’d have rather waited until much later, until more people had seen the game and were impressed by it – rather than seeing the early versions.

“We just rather our games do the talking,” Macdonald added. “It’s maybe not necessarily the most conventional way of going about publicising yourself, but I think if we can build up a reputation for consistently delivering great games, then hopefully we won’t need to come out with the hyperbole that often comes out with games – and often never comes through.”

Macdonald offered a glimmer of hope for a Crackdown sequel recently, so Crackdown all the way, please. More Crackdown. More.

3 comments

#1

pjmaybe
11/08/08, 10:35 am

Half the problem with Crackdown was the nasty insinuation that it was a lesser game simply because the Halo 3 multiplayer beta was shoehorned into the package. I think it ended up doing the game more harm than good. I’m sure there were loonies out there who actually bought the disk and didn’t even bother firing up the game, just leaped straight in on the Halo 3 content. Numpties.

#2

BraveArse
11/08/08, 11:02 am

Yup – totally agree. That H3 demo was a big mistake. It’s interesting to see some developers now coming out to say that they think the hype-factory goes into overdrive too early. I’ve been thinking this for a long time. There are a good many games that I’ve already tired of by launch day. Feels like I’ve played them to death and not even put my mitts on ‘em yet.

#3

Daniel Plainview
11/08/08, 2:01 pm

“we can build up a reputation for consistently delivering great games”

insomniac

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