I've asked question related to Battlefield 4, which indeed is a future release. However, the question wasn't about the game itself, but about videos and information already released at E3.
Why is question about what already happened in the past considered "future speculation"?
And how is that different situation than this: https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/34355/extended-persistence-in-back-to-karkand?
I want to take a different angle at this issue. Not quite what you're getting at here, but it sorta touches on how we apply the whole rules regarding speculation and such.
News is important information to the world of gaming, and I love what other sites do with it. But to keep our strength of how we do what we do, and to prevent ourselves from doing a mediocre job at what we're not suited for, I think it's best that we let other sites deal with the domain of gaming news. When all the reporting is done and people start getting solid copies in their hands, that's when we start doing our job here. They are proactive information gathers, while we are reactive information providers, and this differentiates us greatly.
One of the reasons behind the way the Stack Exchange Network's success in how it does what it does, is in focusing our efforts at accomplishing a specific goal within specific verticals. It's what differentiates us from general Q&A sites, and what makes Arqade different from a lot of other game information sites. What makes us shine is our focus on sticking to Q&A.
Branching into this direction of coverage, to me, feels to be straying from our position and goals and mixing us up with a different kind of gaming website. Yes, if we stick to the root words in these things, we are dealing with a "question" that is asked about a "game". But that's a major abstraction of what the heart of the question is. "Oh snap, I just ran into Supreme Weapon of Extreme Hellish Annihilation - Golden Disaster, how do I kill it?" and "What platform was this game demonstrated on?" are both questions about games, but there's a different direction in how these questions are intended. The first is intending to solve a problem about gameplay. The latter is staying on top of current events and developments of the world of gaming. Due to the individual directions and designs of the approaches, we excel at the former, while a news site excels at the latter.
Which is, at heart, what I think is the target destination for this kind of information. News sites are where people dedicate themselves to tracking down every bit of developing data about the world of gaming, about new releases and especially about big events like E3. It's a completely different domain of dedication than what we do here, and for that reason I think it's important that we don't mix ourselves up as a news site. We are not intended to be a singular destination for all things gaming-related - different kinds of material require different space to host them. We can barely even store special data relevant to any individual game, being pretty limited to whatever we put in a tag wiki.
News is a different beast than the Q&A we regularly deal with. Not just in the manner of it being a different domain of knowledge than our traditional forte, but also in the approach of the content. Yes, we do tons of research and we even have to deal with developments that invalidate our earlier information, but there's a difference in the expectations of news and of our Q&A - the heart of which is captured in LessPop_MoreFizz's answer. Even though this report was done in the past, it sits firmly in the realm of news, separate from what we usually deal with. And relative to how our Q&A works, news tends to be speculative in feel.
We are a community that works off of a reactive approach - we have a bed of information waiting to be given out, and when people ask questions we provide that information. Until something happens within our domain, we don't shift. The only news we will cover is what is asked of us, and in a large scale matter, any information we provide is echoing that found at a real news site. By comparison, a news site is proactive and seeks information out to give people, even for things no one asked about. We act as a middle man, and a very inefficient one at that - our readers would be better served going to a proper news site.
This post isn't meant to change our scope - nothing of the sort, really. Rather, my intent is to point straight at our existing scope, and using a different perspective than a basic timeline, illustrate why these kinds of questions fall under "speculation". The world of our site exists as the facts of what happens in the games - what happens when you press whatever buttons at whatever time. Until this information enters this world, it doesn't matter how factual news is, it exists in our "future", and thus sits firmly as speculation. Which is a good thing - this lets us maintain the strength and authority of the information we have in our domain knowledge, whilst news sites and communities can cater far better to developing data on the gaming world. Better service to readers of all types.
If the intent to visit us instead of a news site because one is not fond of the reporters, then, well, that's what our chat service is for. That's where you get to meet our people, rather than our knowledge.
In general, here at Arqade, we deal with games that are publicly available.
Not announced games. Not possible games. Not leaks from private alphas of games.Not demos of games (unless your question is 'How do I get past the third room in the downloadable demo!').
Unless you have a reasonable expectation that 'random jerk on the internet' can play the game you're asking about (assuming they're willing to pay for it and own appropriate hardware), the question isn't on topic here. That's what we're talking about when we cite the rule about speculation regarding the future.
The BF4 demo was a pre-release version of the game, running on pre-release debug hardware, in a preview to an audience at an industry conference. If there are more words I could've put into the previous sentence that mean 'unfinished and not ready for public consumption', I'd've put them in there, because it deserves all of them.
You stated yourself, when asked why the answer to the question is of concern to you:
it does, because I wanna know if X1 has so crappy graphics. And what future? This video has already been made and released. – vartec 18 hours ago
Given the aforementioned constraints of prerelease software and debug hardware this far in advance of any actual products being complete and ready for release, it just reinforces even further how incredibly specious your reasoning here is. So let's throw a Too Localized on the pile to go with the Off Topic, and arguably Not Constructive.
It's a bad fit for this site, and deserved the downvotes and close votes it received.
(On a related note, I think your other question, which you cite as precedent, is pretty lousy as well. I've voted to close it.)
