Ah, Assassin’s Creed. I wonder if anyone else remembers feeling excited for this game? It certainly looked awesome. Innovative per-npc AI, good graphics, intriguing story, interesting gameplay. And I do remember that simply awesome promo video with the Lonely Souls song in the background. I was hyped for the game.

Who wasn’t? Why, even Ctrl-Alt-Del featured AC, and expressed excitement. Penny-arcade, Kotaku, many others were all excited for AC. Why, for a week, the promo video was one of the most-watched on gametrailers.com.

There was a very large marketing push for this game, and it ended up… not exactly meeting expectations. Why, one could even go so far as to say it was a bad game. But, this whole fiasco does remind me of one key fact with games: the heavier the advertising, the worse the game will be.

Just think about every game you’ve seen, where there were banner ads, videos on tv and the internet(where applicable), even print ads! Now, tell me if that game was any good.

There are of course, a few exceptions, namely any game made by Nintendo, Blizzard, or Bioware, and games that have already proven popular across the ocean(either Europe or Japan).

But, it seems, that when a game is felt not to be… blockbuster calibre, the executives decide to ‘cover their ass’, and push the marketing. Of course, that just pushes up the expenditures related to said game. And they even put pressure onto the reviewers(as detailed here).

The end result are a lot of broken hopes and failed expectations, and yet another broken game, pushed out before it was ready, wasting people’s time, money and effort. Is it any wonder that gamers are becoming so jaded about advertised games?