Welcome to Magical Wasteland, a new blog on video games and the industry that creates them. I'm Matthew, your mysterious host.

The opinions expressed here are and will always be the personal views of the author and never those of his employer.

PR materials of upcoming games find themselves under a lot of scrutiny, and sometimes intense debate. There’s always going to be an element of exaggeration in the old art of selling, but games in particular seem to have bred a culture of mistrust between the marketers and their audience. I’m not laying blame, though, because how to get people excited about a title in development is actually a more difficult question than one would first think. Speaking simply, we have three options:

Engine Parts:
Valve
Gearbox
Turbine

Civil Unrest:
Radical
Rebellion
Guerilla

Team Effort:
Ensemble
The Collective
The Creative Assembly

Self-Descriptive(?):
Irrational
Nihilistic
Insomniac

Make Up a Word – and Get Bought by Activision!:
Treyarch
Luxoflux
Beenox

Oftentimes I’ll happen across a discussion about the business side of games and someone will bring up sales figures, saying things like “but the game sold great, so they must be doing fine,” or “why do these big dumb publishers keep making such crappy games that sell so poorly?” Assertions like these are usually backed up by no data at all, or some anecdotal evidence that doesn’t inform how successful the title actually was from a financial standpoint. Unless you’re a higher-ranking employee of the publisher that released the game, it’s safe to assume you don’t know the complete picture of how a particular game is doing– even if you work for the developer that made the game (sometimes especially if you are the developer, since someone might decide that keeping you in the dark about the numbers that lead to your royalty payments is the best strategy).