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Modern Warfare 2 Surpasses $1 Billion Mark; Dedicated Servers What?
The Opposable Thumbs blog is running an interesting article contrasting everything Activision did "wrong" in creating and marketing Modern Warfare 2 with the game's unqualified success. Despite price hikes, somewhat shady review practices, exploit frustrations, and the dedicated server fiasco, the game has raked in over a billion dollars in sales.
"There was only one way to review Modern Warfare 2: on the Xbox 360, in Santa Barbara, under the watchful eye of Activision. Accepting the paid trip, along with room and board, was the only way you were going to get a review before launch. Joystiq noted that this broke their ethics policy, but they went anyway. Who can say no to a review destined to bring in traffic? Shacknews refused to call their coverage a 'review' because of the ethical issues inherent in the situation, but that stance was unique. The vast majority of news outlets didn't disclose how the review was conducted, or added a disclaimer after the nature of the review was made public. This proved to Activision that if you're big enough, you can dictate the exact terms of any review, and no ethics policy will make news outlets turn you down."
I think the game is great, especially multiplayer with its leveling, perks and the amount of customization you can do to your characters game style. Even those who complain about things are still playing it full force.
It's also nice that you can just jump in to the game (without friends, or with them in same lobby - you always get to same side and see each others with different color on radar and name). No need to hunt for different servers which can be crappy. Yes, there are host migrations and other stupid things sometimes, but the easiness to just jump in to the game outweights them. I'm not a serious gamer and neither are majority of people.
When the cheapest way to get a product is $60, of course you're going to beat sales of something that costs $15 or less.
This doesn't make sense. You aren't going to beat a great and popular movie that costs $15 with a mediocre or bad game that costs $60. The higher priced product also has to be good, which MW2 definitely is.
But who cares? The majority of gamers will experience the game on consoles, and PC gamers don't need things like a console for tweaking the game or support for mods.
No they don't. Me and almost all of my friends play it on PC because of keyboard and mouse. And to tell the truth, I rather don't see so much tweaking and mods by the users and get all stupid doom and quake sounds or no gravity when I join the server. I like the game the way IW made it.
Why spend all this money on flying journalists to a resort in Santa Barbara? Because it works. Activision refuses to comment on the review situation, and the Metacritic score for the game stands at 94 percent.
And the game actually being great has nothing to do with it?
I don't spend that much in games, but I've spent days playing MW2. It deserves the scores it got, it's definitely the best game of 2009.
I consider myself a hardcore PC gamer. I pretty much switched to playing multiplayer FPS games almost exclusively after Doom came out; I just love the genre and the competition of playing against real people. I loved it so much it ended up becoming my job; me and some friends founded a company to provide multiplayer gaming servers for other people in Australia (which went on to become the biggest online game service provider in Australia, blahblahbalhablah).
As a Ye Olde Time PC gamer, I remember the days of games like Doom, Quake, Half-Life, and Unreal - when you could drop AUD$80 on a game and know that you were going to be able to play that game for years, because it had freely downloadable and publicly available dedicated servers, meaning anyone could run a server anywhere in the world, at any time, with any settings. Not only that, the games were generally moddable - which meant the game experience would always be changing.
This model brought about things like Counter-Strike (probably the most successful multiplayer FPS ever), Desert Combat (directly responsible for the development of Battlefield 2), Day of Defeat (one of the first of manymanymany WW2 shooters). It brought about Team Fortress, which has since turned into Team Fortress 2 - another staggering success story. (Lucky Valve are still on the ball.)
There's been a clear paradigm shift recently though. I feel that it began with Battlefield 2, and more games are following the new model. Yes, there's a clear focus on console gaming. But more significantly, I feel, is the focus on trying to really sell brands over and over again as fast as possible.
With few exceptions (Blizzard, Valve), game developers and publishers don't want you to be playing the same game for three or four years. They want you to upgrade to the new hotness so they can get another chunk of cash out of you.
I didn't buy MW2 - I'm completely and utterly uninterested in it if it doesn't have dedicated servers, and I put my money where my mouth is and didn't buy it even though I've heard its pretty awesome. But it's hard for me to come out and say what IW are doing is clearly wrong - because obviously it's commercially successful. I do feel it's not in the best interests of gamers - I think we'd get much more /value/ if they went back to the old model. But MW2 has set a precedent, and I'm sure MW3 is already on the drawing board and not very far away.
There's one problem though.. Amazon was the target of a concerted campaign by 'PC Gamers' who feel spurned by Activision and they dragged down the Amazon average review score as a sign of 'protest'. If you're looking for proof, go to the Amazon site linked in the post above, and filter the reviews by 1 star rating. Most of those reviews are written even before the game released. And half the reviews written after it's release basically complain about problems with using Steam and/or installing the game. Anecdotal though it may be, I've seen that most people who actually play the game end up enjoying it and saying as much. It is nowhere near as bad as some people want to make it out to be.
88 comments so far - and about 80 of them are about how wonderful the fucking game is, about 8 on the ethics of journalism - if you include the posts that said the article left out how great this game was.
Activision has you suckers pegged dead right and you have no independent press serving you because you deserve none.
Goodie for the rest of us - you people also get to drink, smoke pot, drive cars and make babies - fucking me me me me me wankers that you are.
That's merely Activision's decision tho. Infinity Ward had $70 million to develop the game (actually Activision tried to give them more, but they declined). Since it is actually a great game, Activision saw that it would be good to spend that on marketing. Putting $130 million in marketing budget of a crap game would not only be really risky, it would be outright stupid.
What Activision wants to spend on marketing is irrelevant to game quality or Infinity Ward.