Bandai Namco's Event: A Post-mortem (Patreon)

In my previous post, I talked about the rumoured Bandai Namco event originally discussed by games writer Marcus Sellars on Twitter. A small part of the rumours Marcus and others shared came to fruition - the event was real. Almost everything else that had been talked about was inaccurate. Here's what actually went down in a little breakdown I've written for you, my kind Patrons.

It was held at the Huit Valois, a modest venue in Paris, France on Friday, December 15. In attendance was a small number of representatives from various (mostly European) game news sites. 

The event kicked off with a quick keynote in which one (not five, as had been previously claimed) game was revealed. The rest of it consisted of updates on previously announced games, including the statuses of upcoming Western localisations.

That presentation was followed by interviews and hands-on sessions with games like Dragonball Fighter Z and Soul Calibur 6, in addition to Bandai Namco's packed line-up of anime adaptions. Some were shown in asset-only form, but a couple were playable.

That was more or less it. No Xenosaga or Dark Souls love. It panned out as I imagined it would in my last post. It was a private press event that wasn't live streamed and didn't have the big announcements some were expecting. I get the impression that some guesswork and wishes got in there at some point, leading to it being wrongly hyped up. The general public wasn't even supposed to hear about it, but here we are.

I think a lot of this kerfuffle could have been avoided if certain websites hadn't ran rumour stories on the basis of very little evidence. Sites such as VGCulture ran entire articles based upon second hand accounts of my comments on the podcast, which completely misinterpreted everything I had said. I mentioned there were rumours going around of a 'Xenosaga HD', but stressed carefully that I didn't know if there was any truth to them and that I hadn't vetted them yet (which I later did). The next day, I woke up to several news sites saying I had claimed the game existed. 

None of the writers had even listened to the podcast. They read it on an anime forum (I'm not kidding), where some guy had completely misinterpreted what I had said on the show. I had to spend an entire morning writing to site admins, asking them to issue corrections. I shouldn't have to do that. It's basic journalism.

ANYWAY... 

You won't have to wait long until we start seeing articles and coverage from the event. The embargo expires on Monday at 8am, GMT. Around that time, you will learn about that one unannounced game. I'm obligated to keep quiet on what that is until then (sorry!), but I'll say that it is a Switch game. As I said on Twitter, it's small but I think some people will appreciate it.