Just FYI
@Spaghetti I wasn't laughing at your point or anything, I was laughing at the "there has a been spectacular amount of ass-showing from the profession" line. It's great.
That's fine.
I couldn't really think of a better way to describe it tbh. Those early days of "OMG SONY FUNDING THE GAME" stuff really just soured me on the quality of reporting being done, because half the time journos were just citing each other from different sources, until it finally came down to a writer's conjecture based on vague comments from Sony.
Like this stuff was categorically disproven multiple times, especially once the fans got involved asking questions to Cedric; who often gave very blunt and definitive answers about what was correct and what was not.
Nah, you're talking pish sorry. There's been an enormous amount of goodwill towards the game.
At the start, legitimate questions were asked about funding; that was definitely the correct approach to take. That wasn't about dissing shenmue, it was about making sure people knew where their money was going.
Initial questions are why the budget statement was produced early in the Kickstarter. Didn't really stop the press just running with whatever they felt like before and after though. Patrick Klepek at Kotaku pretty flatly came to the conclusion that Sony were providing all the funding outside of Kickstarter thanks to some incredibly vague comments from Sony. This sort of reporting went on for a long time without anybody really bothering to probe into the specifics.
A lot of the press simply just regurgitated that article and the Polygon one floating around at the time, without them actually proving, well,
anything. It's unfortunately why, despite multiple instances of it being disproven, the myth that Sony partly funded the game continues. The press said what they wanted to, didn't follow up, and just cited inaccurate articles from each other over and over.
Pretty sure a journo from a semi-major publication plucked a figure out of the air that Sony were providing and just ran with it like fact. No source, just conjecture. They later strutted around in 2017 with the "I WAS RIGHT" stuff once Deep Silver joined the project... despite this actually disproving that Sony's money was backing the project up all along, and completely ignoring that this additional investor was only found two years after the Kickstarter completed and not waiting in the shadows this whole time.
The "SLACKER BACKERS WON'T GET THEIR REWARDS" reporting that's already been mentioned was kind of the final nail in the coffin for expecting fairness from the games press. Some major publications ran with that story, which hinged entirely on misrepresenting the truth and not literally spending a minute reading a previous KS update to understand the context. It was beyond shameful work from publications you would expect better of.
That's not even to mention Eurogamer's (who have had generally great coverage of S3 since) awful "I could do with a bit more money!" headline in a late 2015 interview with Yu Suzuki. The interview itself was great and revealed the personal lengths Yu was pushing himself to with an intense work schedule, but the headline was awful exploitation of the hubbub that came around months before that, and made the discourse around the content beyond toxic and just another stick to beat the project and its creator with.
And like... it's not as if these things have only been proved untrue with time. They were bullshit when they were written. Fans knew it, and we had sources to back it up, but any attempts to speak about it were basically met with ridicule from journos on Twitter doing "lol, fanboys, you don't know anything, *I* understand the industry much better than you" mockery instead of even considering for a second they might have been wrong.
I was there, I saw that shit happening in 2015, and I largely got involved in the community because of it. I'm glad you have a more positive experience knowing games media people personally, but for many of us our opinions were soured by the shockingly bad standard of reporting in the early days; some of which has continued to follow the game ever since.
