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Industry must change the way it markets games - Dyack

And stop calling me God.

Dark blue icons of video game controllers on a light blue background
Image credit: Eurogamer

Game God Denis Dyack, boss of Silicon Knights, believes that the games industry needs to radically reconsider the way it markets its output.

Dyack is still nursing the wounds inflicted upon Too Human at E3 in 2006 when SK's Xbox 360 exclusive was ripped apart by mean old journalists.

"We're getting to the point where we don't ever want to show a game again until it's finished. It's almost pointless," Dyack said in an interview with our sister-site GamesIndustry.biz.

"The media has a hard time with looking at games before they're done. If you take the movie industry as an example, how often do you see a movie before it's completed? You don't. I think our industry needs to start doing that too."

Dyack also reckons the press needs to be more critical. "I hate previews and interviews where a writer says how they see a game maker as a 'God'," he says. "They should be intimidating him, they should be his critic. Every time a writer refers to a developer as a 'game God' I vomit internally." Oops.

What's more, Dyack reckons that most of the industry wants to shift toward a model similar to the one seen with films, and apparently even Microsoft's marketing guys are with him.

"For the marketing people at Microsoft it's their dream. Quite frankly it's a dream of a lot of marketing people in this industry because it's a model that works and is reliable," he claimed.

For more from Dyack, check out the rest of the GamesIndustry.biz interview.

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