Hi. My name is John and I’m a Doom fanboy. It all started back in 1995 when my cousins gave me a copy of the game’s shareware edition. A year later, I bought a blazing fast IBM Aptiva with a Pentium processor (133 MHz!), a massive hard drive (2 GB!), and Windows 95 pre-installed. With a little leftover money, I purchased The Ultimate Doom on compact disc. After playing around with the first episode for over a year, the full game just absolutely blew me away. It may have been one of the earliest first person shooters around, but I’d never seen anything like it, before or since. It is what made me a lifelong fan of the franchise.
I’m the guy who raved about Doom 64 when everyone else was playing Turok. I’m the guy who will defend the Doom movie as a fun way to spend 100 minutes. And I’m the guy who rebought Doom and Doom II on the Xbox Live Arcade because, by that time, my blazing fast Aptiva had gone to the great computer graveyard in the back of my closet.
So you can imagine my frustration at Bethesda for keeping the Doom 4 demo video offline as an exclusive treat for QuakeCon attendees. Apparently, Bethesda and id Software went to great lengths to ensure that the video wasn’t leaked onto YouTube because the game is still in a very early state, going so far as to confiscate phones and cameras from con-goers. Here we are on Monday, and a leaked video still hasn’t surfaced, convincing me that one doesn’t exist.
But after reading (and re-reading) the eyewitness accounts by those who were there, I’ve come to admire id Software’s commitment to their fans that could make the journey to Dallas, especially in light of the way other companies act towards their fans at these events. Their exclusive presentation should be applauded, not pilloried.
If Bethesda did everything right, then Ubisoft’s PAX East 2013 presentation for Watch Dogs is the perfect example of a publisher that did everything wrong. Fans waited in line for hours all weekend to view a short trailer. But as soon as the convention closed its doors, Ubisoft promptly uploaded it to YouTube the next morning. Earlier this year, 2K had similarly long lines for a Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel demo presentation at PAX East 2014. They held out for a bit longer (about two months), but a recording of the demo was eventually added to YouTube as well. These fans essentially wasted their precious PAX time to watch videos that would eventually be put online for all.
Bethesda also had a booth at PAX East 2014, where they showcased a live demo of The Evil Within. Perhaps it was the poor reception to the demo, but Bethesda never released a recording of it for public consumption. It’s something you only got to see if you attended this year’s PAX East and if you stood in line specifically to see the demo for The Evil Within. Just like the Doom demo, they made it a special one-time-only event.
On the other hand, you could easily categorize Bethesda’s commitment to their fans as a crass marketing stunt, a way to get people talking about one game that doesn’t look all that great and another that is literally the product of another generation. But I don’t think that’s what Bethesda is going for, and even if it was just a way to drum up publicity, it worked. People left PAX East 2014 talking about The Evil Within on a different level than if it were just another gameplay demonstration. Fans got together to discuss if it was fair to pre-judge a game that was still half a year away. Others wondered if Shinji Mikami was just trying to create an off-brand version of Resident Evil 4 instead of a wholly original game. Still others questioned what this meant for the survival horror genre. And those that couldn’t attend PAX East this year devoured every opinion about the demo because there was no other way for them to experience it.
And people are talking about the Doom 4 demo in ways that they might not be if it was simultaneously streamed on Twitch. For millions of people out there, we’re disappointed that we don’t know exactly what this new entry in one of our favorite franchises looks like, but we’re intrigued by the discussion and the possibility. And the fans who traveled to QuakeCon got to see something that no one else did. Bethesda wants to make their convention appearances “worth it” to those that choose to attend. And in that way, it’s definitely not about marketing.
If nothing else, Bethesda’s pattern of exclusive demo presentations will make people pay much closer attention to the next convention the publisher attends. Especially if they announce they’re going to talk about the future of franchises like Dishonored, Fallout, or The Elder Scrolls. The lines will be insane, but it will be worth it. And I hope this encourages other publishers to create these kinds of exclusive events instead of putting everything on YouTube once the con is over.
