Perhaps then videos and screenshots should be totally done away with until the game is ready to ship, since that's the version that you'll be buying?

Would make for an awful lack of info for gaming sites like this one. Imagine games not releasing any visual data until the week before the game launches. Hell, we would barely have anything to see from PS3 developers at that rate, since they're good for 6+ month away launch previews.

Marketing is for the sole purpose of selling copies. 

No one releases screenshots for the fun of it, they're aimed to build excitement and anticipation for the title in question.  If they thought they could sell more copies by not showing anything until the shipping date you can be absolutely sure that that's exactly what they would do.

Likewise, if they thought that showing footage would lower anticipation and cause the game to sell less (*cough* bait'n'switch *cough*) then they would refrain from showing such.  It's the way business works.

Exactly.

So we deal with good and bad videos and screenshots.

Smart developers don't release info, videos, or screens until they look good, so to negate negative feedback.

Why do you assume I just mean this one? Did you even properly read my posts? I of course meant in ALL CASES it's wrong. It's done, but it's still wrong. That's why when I comment on early builds, I make sure to note it's just that build.

As for Dogz, I didn't know it was an early build, or I would have been a lot more catious.

Right, but why bother to spend a serious amount of time in advance amping a game that doesn't require it, like FF13? The game MIGHT show up next year if SE plays their cards right, but there's a lot of games to get before then. It'd make more sense to drop the bomb while showing the first videos. Imagine, for example, the next Zelda game. Then at the end of the video "Available next week". Gives people an "oh shit" moment and want to scramble to the stores, and it will be fresh in their mind.

Keep in mind that there are two markets out there that a company is interested in.

There are the fans who will likely buy the game anyway and there are the new people who may not even know what Final Fantasy is.

Releasing more material has the benefit of keeping the former happy.  You see what happens to hopes and expectations when games go for long periods of time without PR.  It also has the chance of garnering attention from the latter group.  The people in the latter group aren't going to have that "OH SHIT MUST BUY!" mentality but they're also not going to be highly affected by a single advertisement either.  A steady stream of it not only has a better chance of getting their attention but in keeping that attention.

Many commercials aren't just around to try to sell something but also to remind you that a particular brand/product is still around. You may be excited for something today, but without reinforcement that excitement will slowly wither.  PR is what keeps it fresh (or attempts to).

Which is why it's terrible PR. This is one reason why Nintendo doesn't show games until they're practically finished development. Nobody can prejudge a game based on an alpha build if you never show them the alpha. If Capcom really wants this to be a quality title (I'm not convinced), they can't go about parading the mediocrity of this alpha for all to see.

I'm trying to figure out what it is about the Wii that makes PR people so damn stupid. It's like 3rd parties pay their Wii PR people with bags of crack.

Edit: I shouldn't even limit my last statement to 3rd parties. Nintendo has dealt out a few slices of bad PR themselves. Ubisoft and Capcom are probably the worst offenders, though.

I rented Dead Rising for the XBox 360 and only played it for a little while (before I got too busy and lost interest) but from what I remember there weren't that many zombies inside the mall when I was playing (which was fairly early on) ...

If this video represented the most zombies on screen in the Wii game and Hitman's crowd had as much AI devoted to it as the zombies have in Dead Rising I would say that it was a fair comparison. In reality land though, this video is blantent cherry picking ...

 There is an achievment thats like "kill the towns population" and I think the opening scene tells you the population is 10,000. So yes, later in the game many, many, many more zombies come on screen. For this video however, in the 360 version if you ran (no matter how many zombies there were) you would need to weave in and out of zombies. And the AI was hell of a lot smarter.(they reacted faster than waiting for you to get right next to them) So if this is a video from "early in the game" its still crap.

It's called "Zombie Genocider" and it takes more than 53,000 zombies to get it.

Some of the areas are sparsely populated earlier in the game, but later on, and particularly at night there are places where it's standing room only.  Parts of the tunnels are ridiculous, as is Al Fresca Plaza.  That is the absolute worst area to escort survivors through.