Pretty much what I've been saying for years now, without Jim's platform of course.
The problem is of course that simply complaining about it does comparitively little, because people have already shown that they will tolerate these things, and will do so before choosing to go without a specific game (much like an addict, complaining about their dealer). With the game industry more profitable than ever before, and comments about how it's a growing multi-billion industry compared to the basement development of a few decades ago, there is no real incentive for the industry to change.
Part of the problem of course is how locked in the industry is as well, you really can't hurt the publishers without hurting the developers. After all if you decide to boycot a game and enough people do it to affect it's bottom line, a publisher is just going to dissolve or refuse to hire (if still independant) that development house, rather than change their overall practices. To really succeed we'd need something unprecedented in terms of say the majority of the game playing audience refusing to buy ANY games no matter how incredible for an entire year or whatever to pretty much sink everything equally.
I'll also say that despite the PR, people are also not critical enough of the developers who actually make the games. Both for refusing to stand up to those who pay them (duh), but also for themselves being pretty greedy. To make a computer game basically takes three things, a bunch of computers, office space to put the computers in, and people to work on those computers and write the code/make the graphics/etc... In comparison to your typical game budget the cost of office space and computers is minimal, that means the majority of that money is going towards human resources, and the price rises as developers demand more and more money for their services. The problem is with the graphics designers, coders, etc... but perhaps a bigger problem is with the guys running the development houses or acting as the resident "rock stars". When we've had articles talking about guys like Itigaki fighting over 20+ million dollars he's owed for game developement, there is a problem, we're seeing "name" game developers demanding, and expecting, to be paid like many Hollywood actors. If a game with say a 100 million dollars as a budget sees 20 million dollars going into the pocket of say Peter Molyneux directly (I don't have any reliable figures for him, but I've read some stuff talking about him making crazy bank off), don't forget that this is passing down to us.
Likewise I think there is a problem when the cost of about lying to say a game is good, as opposed to make a game good, is becoming such a priority. Increasingly we see comments about how the advertising budget for games is a huge proportion of the overall cost of the game. I think it was TOR that spent like 100 mil on advertising for example, and I've seen a number of other obscene figures over the years by devs and publishers trying to defend game prices. The thing is that regular advertising isn't quite *that* expensive, sure it's not cheap, but some ads in magazines, some pop ups or ads on web pages, etc... don't really cost all that much. Rather what your looking at is the oft-criticized corruption in the industry, paying off reviewers and publications outright, hiring all of these viral marketers to hang out on websites and say nice things about a game, shills to adjust review scores and meta critic ratings, and all of this other garbage that has been discussed for years. I find it almost absurd that in many cases a game that is mediocre because it seems like corners had been cut with it in development, could have had millions more in it's development if they had focused on making it great, as opposed to bribing people to pretend it was great.
To an extent I think all of this is one of the things that makes so many Indie games so competitive nowadays. Pretty much the entire budget goes into the game, and the guys developing stretch as much as they can because they all want the product. With pro games it isn't the same thing anymore, a lot of the developers, especially studio heads probably look at the money offers and decide anything that puts less than X millions directly in their pocket from the budget (however they get it) isn't worth the time. For all the comments
about last minute crunches and so on, one has to wonder at the mentality that has them waiting to the last minute instead of "crunching" constantly like younger, hungrier developers, and again at a mentality that has a couple million more thrown into hiring
liars rather than say polishing the game itself.
Those are my thoughts, a lot of people loathe what I'm saying (and it covers a lot of what Jim was saying, though I'm more specific), but I've been watching this for a while, and yeah... I really do hate video games as a business, it has become everything it was not supposed to be. Nobody wants to produce a good product for a fair price, right now it's all about monsterous profits for as little as possible, and massive amounts of bloat.
On some levels I actually blame Richard Garriot to be honest. It's not directly his fault I guess, but his success and the massive amounts of money he made (through being a great creator) created a kind of standard of what everyone aspires to be. He was probably the first obscenely rich video game developer in the popular media, and set a standard that I think created unfair expectations for video games as a business. Don't get me wrong, I'm sort of a fan (and loved old school Ultima) but from where I'm sitting I did see a change in tone when people began to realize how wealthy "Lord British" had become. Such has been my observations.
Ditto for the succuess of certain franchises. See I don't play many shooters, but I don't hate them as a genere, on their own merits. I don't even care that they are successful. What I hate is that certain games like "Modern Warfare" (and others) have become so successful that they have literally gimped the rest of the industry due to a mentality where that massive success is seen as a standard, rather than an exception. You see less serious development, than people basically playing "follow the leader" trying to ape the success of whatever the current front runner is. We get so many mediocre games trying to ape the big shooter franchises, that few are actually looking to do anything else on a decent level, everyone failing to realize that such development outside of the leader's shadow is where the next big hit is actually going to come from.