Quoted from Aurich:

I was at the Dialed In reveal at Expo, and man, people were just bummed out when the cloths came off the games, everything got quiet. Nobody could believe that the cell phone rumor was true, whole room felt pretty crummy, I felt bad for Pat and the team. And it was fully pitched as a phone game, let's not pretend otherwise. If you were there you got the comic book even (pretty cool promo idea) and it was the focus there also.
So everyone streams out of the seminar, and there's grumbling. I later saw on Pinside people were bitching too, but nobody at the show was reading online stuff, we were already there.
Then of course what happened is the games went out on the show floor, and people got to play them. And you started seeing the attitude change. Because it's a fun game. I know I felt differently after flipping it. You would talk to people and you could really see the change rippling out as people got time with it.
There were still complaints, but it was more like "the phone part is eh, but it's a fun game" kind of stuff. Having multiple games on the floor all working was impressive too.
So I get home from Expo, I log on to Pinside, and man, it was a shark fest here. People smelled blood in the water and were eating each other's bellies, it was just bitching left and right. Phone game blah blah blah. It was just interesting to see how the forum was still in the original reveal mode still, and the people at the show had already moved to the next phase because they'd played it.
My takeaway from it all was this:
1) Being there and flipping the game counts. Duh, no shit, of course, but sometimes I think we need a reminder of that here.
2) Theme and initial presentation really matters. It doesn't matter that it's not a phone game, it's still a phone game. That's what people saw, and you can't shake it.
Dialed In was probably a missed opportunity. Maybe they needed more young people in the room, it felt a little bit like your grandpa trying to be hip. If they had ditched the cute Dialed In name, made the phone a 'pocket computer' and leaned into the futuristic city disaster theme without changing anything else? Might have been a different result, who knows. It's been talked to death, and can't be changed now. I only care because I want original themes to do well.