Are You Ready for the New Bethesda Game Release?
On May 5th, Bethesda is going to release Prey, which is a long awaited game that falls into the space-horror genre. However, the developers did not make a big case of this release, which is kind of odd. Definitely, they are to blame for this situation, and the source is their new policy about early copies of the games that are embargoed. Naturally, this is affecting the games.
What is this policy?
Briefly put, in 2016 Bethesda announced that they will not release any advance review copies of their products with preset embargoes. They tried this out with DOOM, and the predictions said that the game was bad. However, when Bethesda saw that this wasn’t true, they applied the policy to all games.
Even so, there still are some review copies around, but you can’t get early scored reviews for the game. As such, the initial reviews are going to be in fact the first impressions, just like what we got to see last week with the Prey demo which lasts an hour. This means that we will have to wait for more until we receive full and actual reviews with scores. Needless to say, people are expecting some outlets to rush and score the game as soon as possible.
What about advertisement?
Indeed, Bethesda advertised this game on TV, but if you’re only spending time online, most likely you weren’t aware of this release. Alternatively, you can find information about the demo and other reviews from other sources, but is this what Bethesda really wants?
All in all, people seem to be quite disappointed with the decisions Bethesda has been making recently. First they decided about the early review copies for journalists, then they initiated trademark hunts and so on. What will their next move be?