PrototypeC said:
How is Cliffy B. wrong on this one? I don't find EA to be the CAUSE, they're the SYMPTOM. The most important part, the part gamers as a whole seem to conveniently forget, is the last part; our money IS our voice, not a blog or a petition. You can't bring a bought EA game across the counter with one hand and flip them off with the other.
This is a subject I've been discussing with people a lot recently.
Our money isn't our voice. Let me explain why;
Firstly, the "gaming community" - or, more specifically, the people who care enough about games to discuss them with other people, usually online - are the minority of video game purchases. The majority are people who buy games, but do not join the community. This creates a big problem, if you're trying to persuade people of the "gaming community" to boycott products they don't like, because even if the whole community unites, the impact is pretty insignificant. And that is if you could get the whole community to agree on anything, which is as impossible as herding cats.
Secondly, boycotting products doesn't send the right message. The publisher would never be able to glean the underlying message behind the boycott. The sole product of boycotting is fewer sales, and we have plenty of examples of how the large publishers like EA and Activision react to low sales, for example;
Activision gets incredible sales for Prototype 2, but less than they wanted. So what do they do? Well, they sack the majority of the developing studio, absorb the rest to work on their other projects, and then they cite Prototype 2's "failure to find a broad commercial audience" as the reason.
And this is not helpful to us, or the future of the industry. But this is the only reaction they've ever had, when a game sold less than they expected.
We could never uproot EA, through boycotts, because the only titles we'd be able to damage would be the "risky", unique, niche titles - the ones we least want to hurt - and cause EA to close the development studio, repurposing whatever staff they don't fire to work on their major titles. So EA would just go back to EA Sports, where our boycotts wouldn't make the slightest tickle of a difference, and they'd still be making enough money to buy more studios.
But how we can effect the industry is through complaining, whining and moaning in places like this. In this, the size of the community isn't such a drawback, because despite our small size, we can grab headlines [http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/03/21/did-the-real-mass-effect-3-ending-go-over-everyones-heads/], when we don't like something about a game.
And when gamers manage to complain so obnoxiously that they get headlines on Forbes, EA sit up and take notice. When we complain loud enough that we give EA bad press, we begin to have an effect on that otherwise unreachable majority, by damaging EA's PR.
This effect caused EA/BioWare to change Mass Effect 3's ending, it got Capcom to say it was done with Day One DLC, and it got EA to stop using SecuROM in all of its games. It has EA doing press release after press release about microtransactions, trying to justify them and half-apologizing, because they're worried that the complaints about microtransactions are going to hurt them. And apparently, judging by the article in the original post, CliffyB's worried about EA, too. This is by no means the full list of things the "gaming community" has changed by just complaining, but it's much longer than the list of "good things accomplished in video games by boycotting" because that list is empty.
The best thing we can do, is buy the games we want to buy, and then complain if someone like EA has messed them up. Complaints from someone who owns the game will be taken infinitely more seriously. If so many people hadn't bought Aliens: Colonial Marines then we'd have nowhere near the righteous furor we have now, and that rage extends beyond the gaming community, damaging Gearbox's PR even for people who have never been anywhere near a gaming forum in their lives.
