Keeping game development a secret is not just about bringing the gaming audience a 'childish' surprise - though the kid in me loves this kind of surprise I have to admit - which is why I try NOT to read/watch too many things about a game in development such as W3.
Though this more secretive and traditional process of game development flies in the face of the recently-birthed 'crowd-funding' process which is quite transparent through and through, keeping your project under wraps is otherwise a common practice not only with game development but also with movies (Exhibit A: Star Wars 7) as well as with many other entrepreneurial efforts.
When you have perhaps tens/hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, in the form of 3rd party and personal investment, you find yourself in the position of feeling entitled (and rightly so) to control the flow of information in a way that serves to better your chances of success. People may disagree on the why and how one might choose to control information, but the person in the financial 'hot seat' ultimately has the duty to make the final choices for better or worse.
In my own small entreprenueral endevours, keeping things secret is tough when many people are involved. The main reasons to keep things secret in my own ventures boil down to two things; keeping possible competitors in the dark (not just in terms of the MAIN idea, but also about specific details) and secondly to prevent any kind of 'loss of interest' during the time between development and release of the product. There are more reasons, but those are the two big ones I imagine are in play with most businesses.
I've been paying careful attention to the quickly evolving sentiment toward Witcher 3 as it nears release. Right now, I think CD Projekt Red began it's pre-release media blitz about two weeks too soon… this blitz was just too long of a span - approximately 30 days.
In these 30 days I've seen a considerable macro-shift in the gaming community from pure un-adulterated excitement to 'patchy storm clouds' of skepticism over visuals, DLC concerns, FPS (on consoles), art direction, and gameplay. Personally, I didn't detect much of any of this skepticism prior to the blitz. Add to all this how the gaming community quite shamelessly creates it's own hype from razor-thin rumor during the development years, and one can quickly realize the need to control information as much as possible.
There's also another phenomena when it comes to media products. It's what I call the 'naysayer' reaction. What I mean by this is say for example Game A is either wildly praised or wildly criticized - doesn't matter which direction - what matters is that a significant majority of people view the game one way or the other. What inevitably happens is a small but vocal minority will begin chiming in with a clearly opposite viewpoint. In my opinion these people do this mostly for the attention, sometimes making ridiculous claims or criticisms over very minor issues to drive their point of view home. This is another consideration to wrestle with when it comes to timing of your informational releases. W3's extended pre-release media blitz is already bringing out the naysayers which can't be helpful to sales.
Still, W3 is shaping up to be a huge commercial success nonetheless. But I think their early and too long media blitz doesn't help them.
