Games becoming a bit too much like movies
June 5, 2005So I was reading Computer Gaming World (the print magazine, not their horrible Web site) and there was an ad for a new MMORPG called Imperator. Which is not due to hit stores until June of next year. That’s right, June 2006 and they’re already advertising the game. Just like going to a movie and they run a preview for a movie that’s a year away. I really hate that in movies, and it’s just as annoying in the video game world.
And this was not just any ad, this was a full-page ad. Ironically, the actual url they gave out in the ad doesn’t work right now, it’s throwing a 404. So somebody spent all the money for that ad, hoping to generate interest in the game, and then included an url that’s busted. So if anybody is interested and bothers to type in the url they get a page-not-found.
Not exactly a promising way to promote your game, especially an online game. Would you buy an online game from a company that can’t even distribute a working url? I mean really, magazine ads have enormous lead times. You should be able to get something up on that url by the time the mag hits the streets.
For the record, what was broken was the relative path /cgm. So I used the url to their main page instead of the one in the magazine ad, that worked fine. They should have made their home page the default error page, at least that way unknown urls would land in the front door of the site instead of an ugly 404 page. Really ugly–they didn’t even replace the default 404 with a custom page. Literally it’s the standard Apache 404 message they’re spitting back. That’s lazy, you gotta at least put some kind of custom 404 page out there.
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