ParanoidObsessive posted... There are plenty of ways to find excitement or joy in life without constantly getting tricked into "hype" by manipulative marketing-fueled Schrodinger's Cat boxes. Especially when the cat pops out dead 99% of the time.
If anything, hype is part of why the industry is so shit now. Because they know they can always trick a significant percentage of the customer base into buying (and pre-ordering!) hyped-up games based on the wisp of a dream, so they don't need to try as hard to make a worthwhile game when all they really have to do is invest in enough marketing and propaganda.
Gamers need to be more critical. Wait until after games are released, rather than pre-ordering or rushing to get them on launch day. Give it time for reviews to come out (and multiple patches to fix all the stuff that's inevitably broken), so you can know what a game is really like, rather than the lies you've been fed via faked screenshots, carefully manipulated footage, or deceptive corpo-speak. Seek out the games that are actually good, not the ones that are pretending to be good. Don't let companies take advantage of you.
Don't embrace hype, seek contentment. Even if that means you wind up playing 5-10 year old games.
If enough people stopped buying into the hype train, publishers would actually have to start fixing some of the problems and business practices we've spent the last 20 years complaining about. But since all we do is complain, and then buy the games anyway, why would they ever change?
The sad part is it's not even just gaming at this point. There's a reason why it was the RedLetterMedia guys who summed up the whole corporate mindset with the phrase "Don't ask questions, just consume product! Then get excited for next product!"
I wasnt talking exclusively about video games, more about life events. Sometimes games though.