2OLD2PLAY
Search

Jim Sterling versus Gearbox.

C
CrypticCat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG1q3X3HxeA

Yes, Colonial Marines wasn't a good game at all. But it also takes two parties to start a fight and one of those parties is the most insessant, petulant, crutch-bearing, vindicative, bile-spewing cavedweller known to mankind. And no, I'm not talking about the evil gamesindustry 'that's only after our money'.

Because of course they're after our money. They're not a charity. Where it goes wrong in the industry is the fact that a codemonkey is put on a pedastal because he successfully strung lines of code together and called it something cool. Whisper 'Todd Howard' on some nerd-com and several bystanders will suffer from explosive hard ons. That's a simple fact.

What I miss in this whole discussion is consumer-responsibility. If you take someone who tries to get you to pull your wallet on face value, the problem lies with you, not with the seller. If you pre-order without even knowing what the company behind what you preordered is doing, the problem lies with you. If you throw money at Gearbox because Randy Pitchford, the problem lies with you. In general, if you throw money around like a moron, then in general the problem lies with you.

Randy Pitchford is a product of a culture that was created by it's consumers and not the other way around. He did not create us. But he does clearly understand his fanbase and continuously shows his fanbase that he owns them. I respect that audacity. I even have a commando in Borderlands I called Randy and pretend that all the raiders Randy kills in my game are the people that blindly keep on throwing money at him.

No one was betrayed with Colonial Marines. All those day one people crying (many going so far as to threaten the lives of the people in Pitchford's personal family) didn't do one important thing; wait and see.

It doesn't matter how big a fan of Aliens that you are. No one cares except you. It doesn't matter what a salesman tells you. No one cares except you. While I do believe that the quality of triple-A games needs to be higher, become leaner on DLC while the game itself becomes feature- and contentcomplete, at least 90% of the responsibility lies with the buyer.

How many people swear they won't buy EA games? Oddly enough, DA:I broke sales-records. Hmmm...


Comments (2)

C
CiaranORian·
Would you pay for your meal in a restaurant before you've eaten?
C
CrypticCat·
That's on first sight a fair comparision, Ciaran, but it doesn't hold up. Restaurants are still maintaining a tradition of class and cachet that belongs in the pre-WWII era, while the games industry is too young to have tradition. It's fairer to say that the games industry has habits. That's not the same as having tradition. Pre-ordering games is not a smart thing to do, as you have no real idea of what you're going to get, even when you're pre-ordering a game in a well-established franchise that to your senses has established at least a foundation that might hint at tradition. A good example is the Sims franchise. For fourteen years, each installment in the franchise was a logical evolution of what came before and pre-ordering became something that was a sure-fire way to get something awesome you could be party to from day one. Trust was build, and there was an unspoken understanding between developer and consumer. TS4 was a radical departure from what gamers have come to understand of what makes a Sims-game. Even if I fell into the pre-order trap myself, I still don't think that the fault lies with the publisher. I pre-ordered based on an idea that existed only in my head and that idea was in no way based in reality. However, when I go to a chinese restaurant and order Foo-yong-hai to go, I happily pay before I even look at what I'm getting. I know what I'm getting when I buy chinese food. And that's the whole difference.