1655: Tease Me, Tease Me, Tease Me… Actually, Don’t

I’m not entirely sure how I got onto EA’s mailing list, having not played any of their games for a substantial period of time, but I do know all it took to get me to immediately unsubscribe: this email.

Said email came from BioWare, a company whose games I used to happily purchase “day one” when they came up, but whom since being absorbed by EA a few years back have become increasingly disappointing — to such a degree that now, when they send me a “teaser” email like this, I don’t find it exciting, I instead find it bothersome.

This isn’t exclusively directed at BioWare, of course. I have very little time for teasers anyway these days, and their use in the increasingly sprawling marketing campaigns for big-budget games is getting to a stage where they simply dissuade me from wanting to check the game out rather than intriguing me.

I started feeling this way while I was working in the games press. Teasers are infuriating to receive as a news writer, because more often than not there’s absolutely nothing to write about. As a general rule, I avoided writing about them altogether unless there was enough intriguing material therein to spin a story out into at least 300 words. In most cases, there wasn’t, and inevitably there were plenty of other more interesting things I could write about on any given day, so I was inclined to write about those instead. I can’t help feeling that this is the precise opposite of what whoever came up with the teaser campaign may have had in mind when they lovingly constructed it.

Now I no longer work in the games press, teasers are even more irritating. They clutter up news sites who are less discerning about what they cover than I am — the above email has likely been spun into at least one “BioWare is Working on Something” story somewhere on the Internet by now — and, when I have neglected to unsubscribe from a company’s newsletters and promotional emails like I had apparently done with EA, they clutter up my inbox, and believe me, that doesn’t need any help filling up with crap.

What I find somewhat hilarious is when mobile and social game developers decide to do teasers for their upcoming games. As much money as these types of game inevitably make at the hands of stupid people, I simply can’t take them seriously; nor can I believe that anyone could possibly get excited about the prospect of a new mobile game from notorious free-to-play conmen like, again, EA, King or numerous others.

I long for the days gone by, when protracted marketing campaigns simply didn’t seem to happen. You got previews in magazines, sure, but these actually told you something about the game. Like, you know, its title — something which the BioWare email conspicuously fails to mention. (I don’t know if the video gives any more information because I didn’t watch it. Instead of watching it, I unsubscribed from EA’s mailing list. Good job, there.) Or details about what kind of game it is. Or a bit about the story. Or anything.

That anything is how you get me interested in a new game — not waffling around the point with vague, pointless emails that tell me nothing. Show me something interesting — show me a reason to care, otherwise, spoiler, I won’t give a shit.