Congratulations, Bungie; your upcoming game Destiny is the latest in a long line of high-profile, big-budget games that I’m sick of hearing about long before they’re generally available to the public.

This phenomenon, which I tend to think of as “reverse hype”, is a common issue with modern gaming. High-profile, big-budget games have every step of their development chronicled both internally and by the press, and this, for me, leaves me feeling saturated with information about them by the time they finally hit store shelves. (And, in the rare instances where I have tried out a triple-A game in recent memory, they have usually ended up being rather disappointing compared to what was promised.)

Destiny has been particularly bad today, though, because its “beta” launched today on PlayStation platforms, and as such social media has been filled with two things: people with “spare” codes and people begging for codes.

Let’s not kid ourselves: this isn’t a true beta in the development sense. It’s a limited-access demo positioned as you getting the opportunity to preview an unfinished version of the game shortly before its official release. The fact that anyone who preordered the game gets not one but three “beta” codes is not generosity on Bungie’s part — it’s a convenient bit of free marketing. And, of course, it’s working.

I’ll add at this juncture that if you’re playing and enjoying Destiny, great. I hope you like it, and I hope that, as an MMO, it provides enough interesting content to keep things interesting after launch. It is, however, just the latest in a long line of games that utterly dominates coverage and conversation, making attempts to talk or find out about anything else an exercise in frustration while the hype train continues clattering its way noisily along the tracks.

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person who gets frustrated with this seeming inability for both press and public to acknowledge the existence of more than one thing at once. And now, having left behind the games press as my profession, it’s doubly frustrating because I’m not really in a position to do anything about it.

Thank heavens for groups like the Squadron of Shame, is all I can say. A haven of calm amid all the noise!