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Wal-Mart Controls Modern Game Design?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the telling-you-what-is-good dept.

An anonymous reader writes "That Wal-Mart smiley face is looking pretty evil now that Allen Varney has explained how much influence they have on virtually every modern game: 'Publisher sales reps inform Wal-Mart buyers of games in development; the games' subjects, titles, artwork and packaging are vetted and sometimes vetoed by Wal-Mart. If Wal-Mart tells a top-end publisher it won't carry a certain game, the publisher kills that game. In short, every triple-A game sold at retail in North America is managed start to finish, top to bottom, with the publisher's gaze fixed squarely on Wal-Mart, and no other.'"

3 of 696 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Raise your hand... by garcia · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Me neither.

    Yet you have the grammar skills of the typical Wal-Mart shopper...

    Regardless of what the general Slashbotter feels about any number of retailers, a healthy majority of people buy too much of their shit at Wal-Mart.

  2. Awful web design by cortana · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I wish we'd stop linking to sites with such broken designs. It appears that my choice of font is too tall for the almighy web designers at The Escapist, and so the bottom of each column on the page is chopped off.

    Also, although artificial pagination is such a common annoyance on the web today that it is not worth mentioning, for some reason whenever I switch into the tab containing the article, it sees fit to move to a different page!

    (This seems to be a conflict between the page's choice of pgup/dn for next/previous page and my browser's use of ctrl+pgun/dn for next/previous tab).

  3. The problem with Wal*Mart by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    ... and other chains for that matter, is only that they're large, monopolistic, and limit choice in smaller markets where there's no alternative to them. It's that they drive smaller stores ('Mom and Pop' type as well as local chains) out of business. Think about it - would you rather own a hardware store and lumberyard and be able to sell it when you retire to have something to retire on, or would you rather be an underpaid middle manager in a place like Home Depot (often with no health insurance/benefits) your whole life? What the shift of power towards large corporations is doing is taking equity out of the hands of the middle class and putting it into the hands of corporations controlled by the wealthy - this causes the middle class to shrink and the ranks of the super-wealthy and moderately poor to increase.

    So, before you buy your next widget, think about the kind of future you want *your* kids to have.

    -b. - speaking as the owner of a small consulting business here