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Cliff Bleszinski: Vote With Your Dollars
silentbrad writes "Cliff Bleszinski, formerly of Epic Games, posted a blog entry titled 'Nickels, dimes, and quarters' yesterday, advocating that gamers dissatisfied with the current trend toward DLC and microtransactions should vote with their wallets. Quoting: 'The video game industry is just that. An industry. Which means that it exists in a capitalistic world. You know, a free market. A place where you're welcome to spend your money on whatever you please or to refrain from spending that money. ... Adjusted for inflation, your average video game is actually cheaper than it ever has been. Never mind the ratio of the hours of joy you get from a game per dollar compared to film. To produce a high quality game it takes tens of millions of dollars, and when you add in marketing that can get up to 100+ million. ... I've seen a lot of comments online about microtransactions. They're a dirty word lately, it seems. Gamers are upset that publishers/developers are "nickel and diming them." They're raging at "big and evil corporations who are clueless and trying to steal their money." I'm going to come right out and say it. I'm tired of EA being seen as "the bad guy." I think it's bulls*** that EA has the 'scumbag EA' memes on Reddit and that Good Guy Valve can Do No Wrong. ... If you don't like EA, don't buy their games. If you don't like their microtransactions, don't spend money on them. It's that simple. ... The market as I have previously stated is in such a sense of turmoil that the old business model is either evolving, growing, or dying. No one really knows. "Free to play" aka "Free to spend 4 grand on it" is here to stay, like it or not. ... People like to act like we should go back to "the good ol' days" before microtransactions but they forget that arcades were the original change munchers. Those games were designed to make you lose so that you had to keep spending money on them. Ask any of the old Midway vets about their design techniques. The second to last boss in Mortal Kombat 2 was harder than the last boss, because when you see the last boss that's sometimes enough for a gamer. ... If you don't like the games, or the sales techniques, don't spend your money on them. You vote with your dollars.'"
I've been boycotting all the games with DRM and DLC for over a decade and it hasn't done shit.
Also it's really too bad that there was nothing between the DLC Hell of the early 2010s and the Change-Muncher Hell of the 1980s...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If you don't like their microtransactions, don't spend money on them. It's that simple.
Sometimes I don't mind microtransactions, but they have power to ruin otherwise perfectly good game, and that's my major problem with them.
Sure, we can vote with our dollars, and we do. At the same time, we can freely complain about EA adding micro transactions, or any/all forms of DRM.
If you have noticed, if enough customers complain about something, sometimes, things change. So asking us to just vote with our dollars is asking us to reduce our potential power. So if you don't like EA's microtransactions, or any form of always on DRM, then boycott them, AND complain about it verbosely everywhere you want to.
Gamers have just as much right to whine about a company's pricing policy as the industry insiders have a right to whine about their customers' dislike of their policy. So the industry's getting sick of the complaining? Presumably, they're worried that if there's too much publicity of the issue, customers actually will start voting with their dollars.
He's right, it's a business. A business that ignores its customers doesn't usually last too long.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
DLC that is extra content tacked onto the game is nice, it's basically a form of support you wouldn't get in the old days.
DLC that is made by cutting features before the game is released and then selling them separately is what people hate. A good example of this is the recent XCOM game. There is Day-0 DLC that opens up the option to change the visual appearance of your soldiers, including armor colors, that was obviously chopped out of the game at the last minute just to make the DLC pack. That's just bullshit straight up. A 6 week delay on it would have just added insult to injury.
The second DLC offering consisted of map packs and a scenario, and is much more what I would consider legitimate DLC. It wasn't very good, but it doesn't make me angry like the day 0 DLC did.
I read the internet for the articles.
I don't buy EA's games already. There are two problems. They continue to make crappy games, and the industry tends to follow the big leaders examples. It isn't like EA is making bucketloads of money with that strategy, they lost, what, a few hundred million last year? Something like that. Obviously, people are already not buying their games. But they aren't listening. Instead, they make Real Racing 3 and charge $80 for a single ingame car, and they've stated explicitly that they intend to focus even more on F2P, microtransactions, mobile games, and DLC to increase their revenue. Why? Because they've seen how much that strategy can make, without realizing they probably never will because their games are crap (and their prices are as well). Then we have other people who look at them going down that path, think "thats a good idea", and overall we end up with lots more shit games, and whats more, games that could be good. You see, F2P can work, but not in every case, and not when run by incompetent money-grabbing arseholes.
Which brings me to my second point. The publishers own lots of promising IP. For example, EA owns Bioware. Bioware was an amazing studio. They made one of my favorite games ever, KOTOR, and Baldur's gate, and similar. Now, though, they've ended up being destroyed and ripped apart by EA's focus on making money in the short term (which, as mentioned above, doesn't even work), and instead of producing gems like they have, they produce crap like SWTOR (sure, some people might like it, but it's nothing at heart but a cheap WoW rip-off), or the "ending" to Mass Effect 3. So we end up with games that should have been good, and even in some cases are if you move past the micro-transaction crap (like the aforementioned Real Racing 3 aparently is), but are simply stupid thanks to the publishers greed.
So in short, people already are voting with their wallets. The big studios just aren't listening, because they're run by a bunch of marketers and buzzword-obsessed executives, not by the people who actually care about the games themselves (except, of course, for the privately own Valve, which is why so many people praise them). Plus, of course, you can't get everyone to stop spending money, especially because a lot of gamers genuinely do like playing AAA titles, and if we stopped playing every game with DLC we simply wouldn't be playing AAA titles anymore. We'd just prefer not to be asked to insert our credit card every 5 minutes.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
When someone tells you to stop complaining about a product, but to simply not buy the thing you're complaining about, what he really means is:
Shut up! I can't make you buy my crap, but your complaining is getting other people not to buy it also! Now I won't make the money I'm entitled to!
Actually it was more of a sales nightmare. Go look over their SEC filings numbers, and you'll see that their PC division had lost nearly 55% of it's business right up until last year when they decided to scrap it.
Om, nomnomnom...
Nobody complained that the SNES wasn't backward compatible with the NES, or that the N64 wasn't backwards compaitble with the SNES, or that the Gamecube wasn't backwards compatible with the the N64. I think the first backwards compatible games console was the PS2. Now it's something that's a deal breaker? You can still play the old games on the old system, and the new games on the new system. It's not like your PS3 stops working because you buy a PS4. Sure it would be a nice feature for the PS4 to be backwards compatible, but I don't see how it's really a deal-breaker. People complain that consoles are getting too expensive, yet they expect that the newest console will contain a whole other console internally with the new console, without thinking about how this effects the price of the system. It's especially difficult when they completely switch system architectures like they did with the PS4.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Personally I just see in EA a sort of banal, brainless corporate "squeeze it until it bleeds dry" greed.
Steam (ie Valve's greatest product) is a giant sucking parasite perched on the carotid of modern gaming. It is the worst thing to happen to gaming, ever, and consumers are too stupid to see it.
Steam offered a brave new world of content delivery, and it was great. Except for the worm in the apple: the fact that they are NOT just a delivery organ, they are a license-management organ. No resale. No gifting of products (once they've been played). No transfers of licenses in any circumstance.*
Further, the system is stupid: if I'm logged in to Steam because I want to edit a Civ5 scenario (a game I legally own) on one computer, and want to play a quick game of Magicka (another game I legally own) with friends on my laptop, I can't, because Steam doesn't allow simultaneous logins FOR ANY REASON. So essentially, my game library is now locked behind a vault wall, with an asshole running the show who will only "let" me play one title at a time. BRILLIANT!
*Truth in advertising, I'll explain my particular beef with them, and let you decide: I have 2 sons, who until recently were minors. To manage their exposure to the world of multiplayer games, whenever they got games that were Steam-required, we attached them to MY steam-account. Now they're 16, and there's no need for me to manage their access anymore, but Steam offers no provision for me to one-time-transfer) licenses (we don't give a crap about achievements, etc) to their own Steam accounts. So now when one son wants to play 'his' copy of TF2, the other one can't play Xcom.
I even tried to actually talk to someone in Steam, I've offered to do ANYTHING to prove that I'm their father, this is a one-time deal, anything; the response I got was a flat refusal to give me a contact name, and the assertion that "we're a flat organization, we don't have managers". Right, so Gabe Newell's right there, answering tech support calls I bet?
I disliked Steam, but every time I see a title on the shelves that says "Steam Required" I hate them that little bit more.
-Styopa
First party games can be ported. If they were properly designed that should not be hard.
Moving to another arcitecure is not hard? Do you have any coding experience?
The disk can be used for purchase verification.
What does this have to do with your point? You're just throwing arguments up as a smokescreen now.