On the face of it, her decision is fucking idiotic. With details specific to her company, it may be much more sensible. We're not privy to that. I don't think she's an idiot and, in fact, everything I've seen of her over the years is quite remarkable. There are a lot of shitty CEOs, but she has yet to demonstrate that she's one of those. This is her opportunity to turn a failing company around and these decisions will either prove to be fair in this specific context or ridiculous and fruitless.
In the meantime, I think the internet and business coverage is reading way too much into this. "Oh my god, two failing companies are stopping telecommuting while they claim to be restructuring to stop their sinking ships --- this must be the end of remote workers, after only a few hundred years of it! Oh noes!".
I've telecommuted nearly my entire career and I would require it as a benefit of almost any job offer I ever took seriously, but taking the actions of Best Buy and Yahoo! as some sort of threat to the way I am most productive is crazy and foundless.
Guess what? I'm not a mother. I don't have kids. My fiance, a chemist, works all day in a lab.
At work (after dealing with the time and bother of a long commute), I am surrounded by six thousand other employees and plenty of noise and ridiculous conversations while I try to get work done between the precisely designated business hours.
At home, I have the ideal working environment. Invested in a magnificent desk, great huge monitors (helps with my eyes, too), a comfortable chair to help with my wrestling injury from long ago, a much better internet connection, and zero people to interrupt or distract me. In my home office, it is me and my work. No pets, no children. Not even any other adults to get in my way.
From my memories as a child and observing other people, raising children doesn't require your non-stop attention after the first couple years, so that shouldn't be much of an impact. If your children can manage without you while you're at work all day, they can manage without you while you're in your home office all day and consider you "off limits and not actually at home".
I'm sure there are some people who abuse that circumstance and don't perform, but that's hardly a reason to drop all the people who do this successfully through their career. Quite simply, hire decent employees that have a solid work ethic.
Wait, if some are leaving early and the others are arriving late, there wouldn't be any crossover. There'd be big empty gaps and they'd never run into each other on their way in/out.
So these are executives who worked on-site instead of telecommuting? Clearly, this shows the remarkable benefit of the hardworking on-site employees that can never be matched by those lazy telecommuters who would never even think of laying down tape for the lemmings, much less picking the proper color!
I have to agree on the manager part. I've had some really good managers and some not so good. Well, mostly just one. I used to have a manager (will, an upper manager) who was a micro-managing fetishist. As a result, you spent more time explaining and justifying things than actually doing them. Usually, because he just simply didn't understand what was going on, in the first place. It stressed everyone out, slowed everything down, and made it a pretty hostile experience.
On the other hand, I've had managers who make themselves available to employees and trust them to do their job. Employees are paid to do their job and location is irrelevant. They either do their work or they don't and that's the factor that has mattered to these managers. They make themselves a utility for employees to use, as necessary, rather than an obstacle.
How much of a hassle can it be? We live in the god damned future. We have instant messaging, email, telephones, cell-phones, voice-mail, video chat, face-time, web-conferencing, telephone conferencing, shared desktop sessions, chat rooms. . . Hell, a lot of corporations even have their own internal social networking (tweeting, facebook style, etc) collaboration systems.
You only have one additional option, in person, and that's walking over to their desk -- assuming it is nearby and not on a different floor, in a different building, or in a company office on the other side of the country. You're just as likely to get up and walk over there and find them not at their desk as you are to email, IM, call, or otherwise attempt to contact them without immediate response.
I really don't understand this complaint from people in this day and age. We mostly solved all of these communication and collaboration issues fifteen years ago, in this industry.
If I were in that situation, it would be a far better use of my time to make three or four phone calls and wind up employed again by the end of the week, in the position and circumstances I prefer than to drag out a bunch of bullshit in some legal action.
I like how "two dying companies that are on life-support are ending telecommuting -- is this the end of telecommuting?!". It's like concluding that if a company has to shed some office space because it is failing and can't afford the leasing costs, that it's an indicator of the end of leasing office space. No, it's just an action by a company trying desperately to stay afloat. *shrug*
There are a ton of massive companies out there that are very successful with a massive remote workforce and, often, it can be very difficult to get all the experts you want to hire to relocate to the same city (you know, where they can be watched over like children by their direct boss).
Also, if they're moving to do this because they "expect corporate employees to put in traditional 40-hour work weeks", than that is all they are going to get out of those employees. I have found that remote employees put in whatever amount of time it takes to do the job and then some. Covering for colleagues, throwing in massive extra work to make sure projects hit deadlines. They do far more than 40hrs and they do far more than just 9-5. In their minds, they're usually "always available, because my job is my job and not necessarily constrained by hours or time of day".
Treat them like a sprocket or a widget and that is exactly the work ethic you will get out of them and little or nothing more.
Ultimately, it's a matter of American employees having to live in American cities (usually in proximity to the American companies that have jobs, which means high density expensive cities) and pay American prices for food, rent, health care, education, travel, clothing, etc. The companies they work for, however, have a global pool of employees to price-pick from. There is an imbalance in opportunity here that makes competition and negotiation a tough nut to crack that favors one side of the employment equation, but not the other.
All the "robots" and machines in the world doing battle won't ever change the fact that only slaughtering young men and women (sent their, usually, by men wealthy men closer to their death than their birth) really has an impact on societies and the need to push for or withdraw from war. Frankly, not even much demand over humans these days, either as witnessed by the last twelve years.
Before we can really take any meaningful steps toward defending ourselves, we need to get all of the "screw science - let them hit us and kill us all in a bath of fire, so baby jesus can come take us to heaven after the apocalypse!" nutjobs that make up such a huge chunk of our political representatives and their constituents. The first step to finding a way to defend yourself against something is getting rid of the people who want that thing to actually happen.
Because your home system with a standard consumer router is so secure and impenetrable and the same government that could demand direct access to a full live stream of cloud data couldn't demand the major OS developers include a backdoor to them and access your home machine.
At least you got an email. I woke up this afternoon and I couldn't access Evernote on my ipad. So I tried my laptop, desktop, then web interface. I assumed I had screwed up my password somehow. Eventually, it stopped giving me an error and gave me a "reset your password" warning, instead. So I did. I've checked my email and though I've received advertising from Evernote on January 15th and then February 9th, 25th, and 26th -- I've received nothing regarding a breach or password reset (and I'm also a premium customer, for whatever that's worth).
The more concerning thing is that, as I understand it, your data is not encrypted on Evernote. By design, presumably, so they can index and perform OCR and searches and other things on your data. If they can breach the server with user credentials, why couldn't they breach the servers containing your actual documents and everything?
I don't think being trendy has anything to do with it. It simply is another piece of evidence that demonstrates an industry-wide problem of security seeming to be very nebulous. Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Valve, Facebook, Twitter, EA, Pinterest, Tumblr, LastPass, NYT, Evernote, and countless other places in the last couple of years (800 breaches of business, government, and medical institutions in just the past year according to privacyrights.org). Hell, wasn't kernel.org even compromised in the past year?
It seems to show that no matter how much attention you focus on security, there are always potential areas for exploit. Either that or absolutely everyone -- even with the biggest budget -- doesn't even bother, which seems unlikely.
Also, the issue with Evernote is that if they suffer a real data breach, it's all over. My understanding is they do not encrypt your data, so if someone breaches their storage systems (and if they can breach their other systems, why not these, too?) -- they can access all the data that belongs to the users of their service including small businesses, corporations, home users, students and everyone else.
When you buy a game on Steam, you get access to it in all available Steam formats. That means that for people who may use OSX, Linux, and Windows (as I do, for example) may not necessarily count as a "linux" sale, even though I'll play some of the purchased games there.
I've always found the "games cost more than ever to make and are sold for less than ever before" justification to be utter bullshit. First of all, most games don't cost over a hundred million to make, like GTA or three hundred million dollars to make, like Star Wars: Old Republic (and an enormous part of those budgets are for marketing and console licensing; not making the game). Second, you are selling more copies of games than ever before. Surely these people are merely disingenuous; not stupid. They know that even if games are selling for around the same price today as they were twenty years ago, it's significant that they're now selling millions or tens of millions of them instead of tens or hundreds of thousands.
And, really, it doesn't even matter. How much it costs to make your shitty Bro-Dude-Face-Shooter-Extravaganza-15 game has no relevance to how much people are willing to pay to play it. The experience is the experience. I'm not going to give you double the money, just because you wasted twice as much money making and marketing it.
I hear people in the game industry point at their audience and consumers and ridicule them, a lot. They love to call them entitled children. As I grow older and see them hurl this attitude at gamers, I have come to see that it's the game industry that has the real problem of feeling entitled. What they need is a good crash. Or maybe for gaming to become something that only old people care about (which I suspect will happen, before too long, as I doubt future generations of kids will give any more of a fuck about playing video games than you or I do about putting on a disco record, some tight shorts, and going roller skating).
You're right -- it's not that people are pissed that game companies are businesses who exist to make money. It's that people are pissed that they often don't seem to give a fuck about the product they produce. You probably want your mechanic to give a shit about cars, right? You probably want your hair dresser to give a shit about hair. You want people making your art and entertainment to give a shit about making it on a creative level and have some integrity. That is undermined when you have a CEO who spent most of his life shilling pizzas and everyone creating content is forced to pull the company line of "make lots of unnecessary shit that we can link to the in-game experience and charge extra money for".
Just because you're a business doesn't mean you shouldn't give a fuck about the quality and kind of product you put out. "But we're a corporation and our job is to make money for our share holders" is a pretty meaningless fucking justification for "our practices feel gross and sleezy and our products are pretty generic, repetitive, and kind of shitty".
I think people are okay with extra content, when it feels like it has some heart and purpose and isn't just a vehicle to suck a few extra bucks from you. People aren't stupid. They have a pretty good sense of when something has a bit of soul put into it and when it's just revenue generating drivel pumped out to meet a quota.
Really? I don't remember anyone being upset with expansions, back in the day. You got a shit-ton of additional content (practically an additional game) for like $20 or $30. It was substantial. It was a continuation of the game. Today, they're selling you packs of stronger guns for $5 or extra bullets for $2.50 or a prettier coat for $5. Or access to the online game for $10.
Really, comparing the two is just . . . it doesn't make sense. They're entirely different beasts.
Well, it's going to cost you $65 including taxes up front. Then it's going to cost another $60 for the DLC. Then it's going to cost another $60 for each additional person in your household that wants to play it on other systems in your house with their own accounts.
Not to mention all the other games that -- and this has nothing to do with DLC -- simply cost an extra $10 per person to enjoy the game. Even though it's just one copy of the game being played at any one time. Bought a game to play at home? Great, that's $65. Oh, your kids want to play it online, too? That's an extra $10 each of them. Oh, and your wife wants to? That's another $10 for her. And what Cliffy and gang seem to be saying is "yeah, it's sleazy, but what are you going to do about it? stop buying it? you and what army tough guy?". So it's a gross way to pull an extra $30 or $40 out of a single copy of the game... before even getting to the DLC issue. (And sure, you could get around that by having everyone share the same console login . . . which is against the terms of service).
On the other hand, I guess it's just like buying a copy of the Monopoly board game or a movie on DVD. You know, where every person sitting down to play Monopoly (or who will ever play the board game in your house) each have to buy another copy of it. Oh, wait. They don't.:/
Personally, DLC just grosses me out. I play the main experience and that's it. I've never played Mass Effect DLC, because I don't give enough of a fuck about the "additional story" you're trying to sell me on for extra cash. In fact, I probably wouldn't do it for free, either. I already finished the game and story -- why the fuck would I come back three, six, nine or more months later and drop $15 or $20 to play more crap when I already know what happened, because I finished the actual game many months before? Especially in a world where there is always a bigger pile of incoming new content than there is "stuff I really need to play more of".
I have a better idea for Cliffy (who I do like, a lot) -- how about you just price games at the price they need to be at to be made? If games can't be made for the budget a $60 (+tax) retail price affords them without doing gross shit like flooding the interface with advertisements to buy horse armor with real money or to buy booster packs or season passes for game content "on faith" that it will be worth buying, then just charge the $70, $80, or $90 that it really needs to be to make it worth producing the game in the first place. Or stop making games with production and marketing budgets that dwarf Hollywood.
In the meantime, how about people not just "vote with their money", but also be vocal about it? I know this isn't Cliffy's intended point, but it can come across to some as "if you don't like it, don't buy it -- but otherwise, just shut the fuck up and stop convincing other people not to buy it and hurting revenue, too!
Also, want to know why Valve gets a free pass and EA doesn't? Because Valve makes and effort to show they care about gaming and gamers. They show an interest in pleasing their customers. EA (remember, the A stands for "arts" -- hah!) acts more like a utility that has a monopoly, like American broadband providers (now that I am NOT saying EA is a monopoly -- duh). That is, EA comes across with the same "we're going to do what we want, how we want, so fuck you and give us your money, because we're the only service in town, fuckface". Business is important, but let's remember that what you're putting out there is creative content. Art. Experiences. Can we maybe expect companies that do this for a living to treat the content with a little more value than a fast food joint shoving mother fucking chalupas out the door? Is that too much to ask?
And is it too much to ask to say "just put the price on the box that it's going to cost for me to play the game that you intended me to play" and stop padding it with all this extra weasel bullshit to suck a few extra bucks out of people? That's the only reason these additive parts and DLC crap are in there -- for the extra bucks. Not the extra value to the gamer. So just make the actual game you want to make to tell the story you want to tell. Have some balls. Show some integrity. And put the right price on the product, in the first place.
As someone who has been gaming off and on most of his adult life, I am starting to find gaming about as impersonal, disinterested, and nickel-and-diming people as fucking cell companies and cable companies. That it's even such a huge deal for so many gamers and has been an ongoing gripe for the better part of a decade shows that it's an actual problem, no matter how much people like Cliffy want to dismiss it as "a bunch of whiny children on the internets".
Buying your way to victory very often isn't the case. Take DOTA 2, for example. It's riddled with microtransactions for the F2P title. They don't actually *do* anything. it's still kind of gross, though. Not so much in a F2P game as in everything else, though. Nothing like having a giant "BUY DLC HERE!" or "YOU CAN GET MORE GOLD TO BUY WEAPONS IF YOU PAY REAL MONEY!" buttons in the middle of the game you paid $65 for.
Video games are, increasingly, becoming a demonstration of what happens when a form of art and creativity is taken over completely and absolutely by business. Buy guys who don't refer to things as "games" or "movies" but as "intellectual property". That isn't to say there's anything wrong with treating it like a business, but it's a business whose product is compelling creative content and unique experiences for their customers. Instead, they're finding ways to simultaneously devalue the experience while putting a value on every single thing. It's gross.
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On the face of it, her decision is fucking idiotic. With details specific to her company, it may be much more sensible. We're not privy to that. I don't think she's an idiot and, in fact, everything I've seen of her over the years is quite remarkable. There are a lot of shitty CEOs, but she has yet to demonstrate that she's one of those. This is her opportunity to turn a failing company around and these decisions will either prove to be fair in this specific context or ridiculous and fruitless.
In the meantime, I think the internet and business coverage is reading way too much into this. "Oh my god, two failing companies are stopping telecommuting while they claim to be restructuring to stop their sinking ships --- this must be the end of remote workers, after only a few hundred years of it! Oh noes!".
I've telecommuted nearly my entire career and I would require it as a benefit of almost any job offer I ever took seriously, but taking the actions of Best Buy and Yahoo! as some sort of threat to the way I am most productive is crazy and foundless.
Again, it's an issue of circumstances.
Guess what? I'm not a mother. I don't have kids. My fiance, a chemist, works all day in a lab.
At work (after dealing with the time and bother of a long commute), I am surrounded by six thousand other employees and plenty of noise and ridiculous conversations while I try to get work done between the precisely designated business hours.
At home, I have the ideal working environment. Invested in a magnificent desk, great huge monitors (helps with my eyes, too), a comfortable chair to help with my wrestling injury from long ago, a much better internet connection, and zero people to interrupt or distract me. In my home office, it is me and my work. No pets, no children. Not even any other adults to get in my way.
From my memories as a child and observing other people, raising children doesn't require your non-stop attention after the first couple years, so that shouldn't be much of an impact. If your children can manage without you while you're at work all day, they can manage without you while you're in your home office all day and consider you "off limits and not actually at home".
I'm sure there are some people who abuse that circumstance and don't perform, but that's hardly a reason to drop all the people who do this successfully through their career. Quite simply, hire decent employees that have a solid work ethic.
Wait, if some are leaving early and the others are arriving late, there wouldn't be any crossover. There'd be big empty gaps and they'd never run into each other on their way in/out.
Or . . . wait, was that the joke? :D
So these are executives who worked on-site instead of telecommuting? Clearly, this shows the remarkable benefit of the hardworking on-site employees that can never be matched by those lazy telecommuters who would never even think of laying down tape for the lemmings, much less picking the proper color!
I have to agree on the manager part. I've had some really good managers and some not so good. Well, mostly just one. I used to have a manager (will, an upper manager) who was a micro-managing fetishist. As a result, you spent more time explaining and justifying things than actually doing them. Usually, because he just simply didn't understand what was going on, in the first place. It stressed everyone out, slowed everything down, and made it a pretty hostile experience.
On the other hand, I've had managers who make themselves available to employees and trust them to do their job. Employees are paid to do their job and location is irrelevant. They either do their work or they don't and that's the factor that has mattered to these managers. They make themselves a utility for employees to use, as necessary, rather than an obstacle.
How much of a hassle can it be? We live in the god damned future. We have instant messaging, email, telephones, cell-phones, voice-mail, video chat, face-time, web-conferencing, telephone conferencing, shared desktop sessions, chat rooms. . . Hell, a lot of corporations even have their own internal social networking (tweeting, facebook style, etc) collaboration systems.
You only have one additional option, in person, and that's walking over to their desk -- assuming it is nearby and not on a different floor, in a different building, or in a company office on the other side of the country. You're just as likely to get up and walk over there and find them not at their desk as you are to email, IM, call, or otherwise attempt to contact them without immediate response.
I really don't understand this complaint from people in this day and age. We mostly solved all of these communication and collaboration issues fifteen years ago, in this industry.
Who has the time or energy for that?
If I were in that situation, it would be a far better use of my time to make three or four phone calls and wind up employed again by the end of the week, in the position and circumstances I prefer than to drag out a bunch of bullshit in some legal action.
How about "I'm not five years old and I don't need to be constantly supervised to be productive and perform the service for which I am well salaried"?
You are a shitty employee and you hired shitty employees. They were shitty working remotely and they're shitty working on-site.
I like how "two dying companies that are on life-support are ending telecommuting -- is this the end of telecommuting?!". It's like concluding that if a company has to shed some office space because it is failing and can't afford the leasing costs, that it's an indicator of the end of leasing office space. No, it's just an action by a company trying desperately to stay afloat. *shrug*
There are a ton of massive companies out there that are very successful with a massive remote workforce and, often, it can be very difficult to get all the experts you want to hire to relocate to the same city (you know, where they can be watched over like children by their direct boss).
Also, if they're moving to do this because they "expect corporate employees to put in traditional 40-hour work weeks", than that is all they are going to get out of those employees. I have found that remote employees put in whatever amount of time it takes to do the job and then some. Covering for colleagues, throwing in massive extra work to make sure projects hit deadlines. They do far more than 40hrs and they do far more than just 9-5. In their minds, they're usually "always available, because my job is my job and not necessarily constrained by hours or time of day".
Treat them like a sprocket or a widget and that is exactly the work ethic you will get out of them and little or nothing more.
Ultimately, it's a matter of American employees having to live in American cities (usually in proximity to the American companies that have jobs, which means high density expensive cities) and pay American prices for food, rent, health care, education, travel, clothing, etc. The companies they work for, however, have a global pool of employees to price-pick from. There is an imbalance in opportunity here that makes competition and negotiation a tough nut to crack that favors one side of the employment equation, but not the other.
All the "robots" and machines in the world doing battle won't ever change the fact that only slaughtering young men and women (sent their, usually, by men wealthy men closer to their death than their birth) really has an impact on societies and the need to push for or withdraw from war. Frankly, not even much demand over humans these days, either as witnessed by the last twelve years.
Before we can really take any meaningful steps toward defending ourselves, we need to get all of the "screw science - let them hit us and kill us all in a bath of fire, so baby jesus can come take us to heaven after the apocalypse!" nutjobs that make up such a huge chunk of our political representatives and their constituents. The first step to finding a way to defend yourself against something is getting rid of the people who want that thing to actually happen.
Because your home system with a standard consumer router is so secure and impenetrable and the same government that could demand direct access to a full live stream of cloud data couldn't demand the major OS developers include a backdoor to them and access your home machine.
At least you got an email. I woke up this afternoon and I couldn't access Evernote on my ipad. So I tried my laptop, desktop, then web interface. I assumed I had screwed up my password somehow. Eventually, it stopped giving me an error and gave me a "reset your password" warning, instead. So I did. I've checked my email and though I've received advertising from Evernote on January 15th and then February 9th, 25th, and 26th -- I've received nothing regarding a breach or password reset (and I'm also a premium customer, for whatever that's worth).
The more concerning thing is that, as I understand it, your data is not encrypted on Evernote. By design, presumably, so they can index and perform OCR and searches and other things on your data. If they can breach the server with user credentials, why couldn't they breach the servers containing your actual documents and everything?
I don't think being trendy has anything to do with it. It simply is another piece of evidence that demonstrates an industry-wide problem of security seeming to be very nebulous. Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Valve, Facebook, Twitter, EA, Pinterest, Tumblr, LastPass, NYT, Evernote, and countless other places in the last couple of years (800 breaches of business, government, and medical institutions in just the past year according to privacyrights.org). Hell, wasn't kernel.org even compromised in the past year?
It seems to show that no matter how much attention you focus on security, there are always potential areas for exploit. Either that or absolutely everyone -- even with the biggest budget -- doesn't even bother, which seems unlikely.
Also, the issue with Evernote is that if they suffer a real data breach, it's all over. My understanding is they do not encrypt your data, so if someone breaches their storage systems (and if they can breach their other systems, why not these, too?) -- they can access all the data that belongs to the users of their service including small businesses, corporations, home users, students and everyone else.
When you buy a game on Steam, you get access to it in all available Steam formats. That means that for people who may use OSX, Linux, and Windows (as I do, for example) may not necessarily count as a "linux" sale, even though I'll play some of the purchased games there.
I've always found the "games cost more than ever to make and are sold for less than ever before" justification to be utter bullshit. First of all, most games don't cost over a hundred million to make, like GTA or three hundred million dollars to make, like Star Wars: Old Republic (and an enormous part of those budgets are for marketing and console licensing; not making the game). Second, you are selling more copies of games than ever before. Surely these people are merely disingenuous; not stupid. They know that even if games are selling for around the same price today as they were twenty years ago, it's significant that they're now selling millions or tens of millions of them instead of tens or hundreds of thousands.
And, really, it doesn't even matter. How much it costs to make your shitty Bro-Dude-Face-Shooter-Extravaganza-15 game has no relevance to how much people are willing to pay to play it. The experience is the experience. I'm not going to give you double the money, just because you wasted twice as much money making and marketing it.
I hear people in the game industry point at their audience and consumers and ridicule them, a lot. They love to call them entitled children. As I grow older and see them hurl this attitude at gamers, I have come to see that it's the game industry that has the real problem of feeling entitled. What they need is a good crash. Or maybe for gaming to become something that only old people care about (which I suspect will happen, before too long, as I doubt future generations of kids will give any more of a fuck about playing video games than you or I do about putting on a disco record, some tight shorts, and going roller skating).
You're right -- it's not that people are pissed that game companies are businesses who exist to make money. It's that people are pissed that they often don't seem to give a fuck about the product they produce. You probably want your mechanic to give a shit about cars, right? You probably want your hair dresser to give a shit about hair. You want people making your art and entertainment to give a shit about making it on a creative level and have some integrity. That is undermined when you have a CEO who spent most of his life shilling pizzas and everyone creating content is forced to pull the company line of "make lots of unnecessary shit that we can link to the in-game experience and charge extra money for".
Just because you're a business doesn't mean you shouldn't give a fuck about the quality and kind of product you put out. "But we're a corporation and our job is to make money for our share holders" is a pretty meaningless fucking justification for "our practices feel gross and sleezy and our products are pretty generic, repetitive, and kind of shitty".
I think people are okay with extra content, when it feels like it has some heart and purpose and isn't just a vehicle to suck a few extra bucks from you. People aren't stupid. They have a pretty good sense of when something has a bit of soul put into it and when it's just revenue generating drivel pumped out to meet a quota.
Really? I don't remember anyone being upset with expansions, back in the day. You got a shit-ton of additional content (practically an additional game) for like $20 or $30. It was substantial. It was a continuation of the game. Today, they're selling you packs of stronger guns for $5 or extra bullets for $2.50 or a prettier coat for $5. Or access to the online game for $10.
Really, comparing the two is just . . . it doesn't make sense. They're entirely different beasts.
Well, it's going to cost you $65 including taxes up front. Then it's going to cost another $60 for the DLC. Then it's going to cost another $60 for each additional person in your household that wants to play it on other systems in your house with their own accounts.
Not to mention all the other games that -- and this has nothing to do with DLC -- simply cost an extra $10 per person to enjoy the game. Even though it's just one copy of the game being played at any one time. Bought a game to play at home? Great, that's $65. Oh, your kids want to play it online, too? That's an extra $10 each of them. Oh, and your wife wants to? That's another $10 for her. And what Cliffy and gang seem to be saying is "yeah, it's sleazy, but what are you going to do about it? stop buying it? you and what army tough guy?". So it's a gross way to pull an extra $30 or $40 out of a single copy of the game... before even getting to the DLC issue. (And sure, you could get around that by having everyone share the same console login . . . which is against the terms of service).
On the other hand, I guess it's just like buying a copy of the Monopoly board game or a movie on DVD. You know, where every person sitting down to play Monopoly (or who will ever play the board game in your house) each have to buy another copy of it. Oh, wait. They don't. :/
Personally, DLC just grosses me out. I play the main experience and that's it. I've never played Mass Effect DLC, because I don't give enough of a fuck about the "additional story" you're trying to sell me on for extra cash. In fact, I probably wouldn't do it for free, either. I already finished the game and story -- why the fuck would I come back three, six, nine or more months later and drop $15 or $20 to play more crap when I already know what happened, because I finished the actual game many months before? Especially in a world where there is always a bigger pile of incoming new content than there is "stuff I really need to play more of".
I have a better idea for Cliffy (who I do like, a lot) -- how about you just price games at the price they need to be at to be made? If games can't be made for the budget a $60 (+tax) retail price affords them without doing gross shit like flooding the interface with advertisements to buy horse armor with real money or to buy booster packs or season passes for game content "on faith" that it will be worth buying, then just charge the $70, $80, or $90 that it really needs to be to make it worth producing the game in the first place. Or stop making games with production and marketing budgets that dwarf Hollywood.
In the meantime, how about people not just "vote with their money", but also be vocal about it? I know this isn't Cliffy's intended point, but it can come across to some as "if you don't like it, don't buy it -- but otherwise, just shut the fuck up and stop convincing other people not to buy it and hurting revenue, too!
Also, want to know why Valve gets a free pass and EA doesn't? Because Valve makes and effort to show they care about gaming and gamers. They show an interest in pleasing their customers. EA (remember, the A stands for "arts" -- hah!) acts more like a utility that has a monopoly, like American broadband providers (now that I am NOT saying EA is a monopoly -- duh). That is, EA comes across with the same "we're going to do what we want, how we want, so fuck you and give us your money, because we're the only service in town, fuckface". Business is important, but let's remember that what you're putting out there is creative content. Art. Experiences. Can we maybe expect companies that do this for a living to treat the content with a little more value than a fast food joint shoving mother fucking chalupas out the door? Is that too much to ask?
And is it too much to ask to say "just put the price on the box that it's going to cost for me to play the game that you intended me to play" and stop padding it with all this extra weasel bullshit to suck a few extra bucks out of people? That's the only reason these additive parts and DLC crap are in there -- for the extra bucks. Not the extra value to the gamer. So just make the actual game you want to make to tell the story you want to tell. Have some balls. Show some integrity. And put the right price on the product, in the first place.
As someone who has been gaming off and on most of his adult life, I am starting to find gaming about as impersonal, disinterested, and nickel-and-diming people as fucking cell companies and cable companies. That it's even such a huge deal for so many gamers and has been an ongoing gripe for the better part of a decade shows that it's an actual problem, no matter how much people like Cliffy want to dismiss it as "a bunch of whiny children on the internets".
Buying your way to victory very often isn't the case. Take DOTA 2, for example. It's riddled with microtransactions for the F2P title. They don't actually *do* anything. it's still kind of gross, though. Not so much in a F2P game as in everything else, though. Nothing like having a giant "BUY DLC HERE!" or "YOU CAN GET MORE GOLD TO BUY WEAPONS IF YOU PAY REAL MONEY!" buttons in the middle of the game you paid $65 for.
Video games are, increasingly, becoming a demonstration of what happens when a form of art and creativity is taken over completely and absolutely by business. Buy guys who don't refer to things as "games" or "movies" but as "intellectual property". That isn't to say there's anything wrong with treating it like a business, but it's a business whose product is compelling creative content and unique experiences for their customers. Instead, they're finding ways to simultaneously devalue the experience while putting a value on every single thing. It's gross.