Jimquisition: The Trap Of Gamer Gratitude

[Something Amyss]

And Kotaku, good God, are they trying to become "Your source for editorial content that's self-congratulatory, self-righteous, and wrong...?"

So they're trying to be mainstream gaming media? Because a good chunk of gaming media is exactly like this. Jim even said (paraphrased) "they're not the only ones, but their words best cover it."

And the weird thing is, I bet most of the people on here saying "this is why I don't read Kotaku" do read one of those other sources. Which is why I only trust Feed Dump. There may be better sources for news, but they don't have this hat:

Does anyone remember expansions? You know, you'd pay maybe and extra 20 dollars and you'd get hours of new content?

Most expansion packs weren't all that great. We remember the few we liked and filter the rest through nostalgia goggles.

Hey, remember when a "patch" for a game often required you to buy a new version of a game full price? I'd bet not, but it happened.

I do not entirely agree with this. It's still a good thing to show appreciation for something, even if you did pay for it. While it's true they didn't make it entirely out of the kindness of their hearts, they still put in a lot of effort to make it good, and people deserve to be thanked for it.

While I understand and even to a degree support Mr. Sterling's premise, my particular understanding of etiquette and rote social responses is such that if someone fixed a problem, even on he created, and I did not thank him for that, I think I'd end up paralyzed and completely unable to formulate a response. Maybe I should start preparing a list of responses so I can practice for the scenario. "Now don't do it again," maybe?

I support the idea of courtesy to the people making products. And servicepeople. I say my pleases and thank yous and wantses the preciouseses, but that's not exactly what this story was about. People are showering praise on a company for basically correcting a problem they engineered in the first place. "Cool!" and "thanks!" may be in order, but it's getting a little absurd when the press is running headlines that say "thank goodness." Or when they say "I am absolutely thrilled."

And for the record, I'm not saying I'm blaming him. I just think the gratitude is misplaced.

Seriously, I thank people who give me bad news. I get the politeness angle.

 

[Demonchaser27]

Even worse is the idea that we should want to decrease the amount of time we spend playing a game we paid for. Shouldn't we instead buy missions, map packs etc that increase our playing time? More money = more hours of fun?

Depends. How is the content structured? For that matter, how is the game structured?
One of the horrible truths of the video game market is that it's the ONLY market (I know of anyway) where people will gladly pay to be deliberately inconvenienced.

Many then fool themselves into calling it "challenge" to rationalize what a colossal waste of time and money it is.

MMOs, F2P games and "Freemium" games all exploit shit like grind, "stamina", and other time wasting measures to deliberately inconvenience the player so they can either sell convenience or capitalize further on stretched playtime for more subscriptions and pay gates.

Thank you so much for this. I'm tired of time waster crap being seen as "hardcore". Its not, its poor game design made intentionally to convince you to either stop playing or pay up more money.

 

[Demonchaser27]

Does anyone remember expansions? You know, you'd pay maybe and extra 20 dollars and you'd get hours of new content? Now it's like "You want this shirt? Fuck you, pay me 10 dollars". All of a sudden what used to be cheat codes are now just paying to unlock things quicker. Nope, no new content for you, pay for the shit that's already there, you just get it a bit faster.

And then they slow down the game to make that shit necessary. And then they call minimum wage workers on benefits lazy while shoving in microtransactions for their games so they don't have to work to earn money.

I have no sympathy here. None. Publishers can go screw themselves for putting in problems intentionally and then fixing them to get praise. And then they take the lion's share of the profits. And THEN they lower developer wages and then say "It's used games fault" and then the developer makes the statement against used games instead of the publisher and then some gamers side with that developer. What the hell, people?

Yes I remember expansions. They weren't all great but they were almost all better than what we have today. Hell, even the kings of expansions, Blizzard, fell shallow by charging full game price for there "expansions", at least for Starcraft 2.

I remember "expansions", and there was plenty of the same bullshit going on back then with them. Cut content being repackaged, feature that made games playable were both common back then. We just noticed less.

A massive swath of the actual content DLC sold for £9.99+ these days would have been sold for £14.99+ in the past.


There is a massive bullshit DLC/micro transaction swamp thats masking the stuff thats the same. The reason isn't publishers have got any more greedy, its just the delivery method makes the crap viable.

We train them towards a better good stuff balance rather than tarring the whole lot the same way and we'll get somewhere.

Yeah that's probably true. It probably happened more than I noticed. It just never seemed as rampant to me because so few people were head deep into expansions compared to DLC (which everyone seems to want on that train).

 

[Demonchaser27]

]That video was ok until the Valve fanboyism. It makes me sad how stupid people are about Valve. Valve is the same as the other corporations caring only about profit and themselves. Or, go ask them "why don't you let us actually own the games we buy?"

Please. Valve has gotten beloved because they made their money by giving people a quality product they wanted, not trying to exploit their users to extract cash through manipulative garbage. Compare Valve's version of microtransactions like Steam Cards with anything in an EA game and the difference is night and day. You can actually MAKE money by selling stuff on the Steam Market. Does EA let me sell things I earn in game to others? No, that would threaten their scam business model.

The answer to "Why don't you let us actually own the games we buy" is "Because you've never owned the games you buy. Not now, not 20 years ago." A more pragmatic answer is: "With digital distribution there are tradeoffs. One of the tradeoffs is your license is non-transferrable. As a result, you are likely to be able to purchase that license for vastly reduced cost. Take it or leave it."

Millions of gamers choose to take it.

I agree that we may not "officially" own our games. But the kicker is that ToS are not the be all end all. And people already break them daily by showing youtube footage of gameplay and cutscenes. And we by and large ignore that its against ToS because we all look at it as, "well he bought the game and owns the right to do with it as he pleases." That isn't saying he can just copy the characters and sell them somewhere. But to say that when he purchases his game that he has no right to access it indefinitely is one of the biggest reasons piracy flourishes like it does. Most people wouldn't bother with the hassle if they didn't feel like they were being wronged by the current industry. But instead we have DRM infested services and games. Just because someone writes a rule somewhere that says you don't own what you buy doesn't mean people have to agree of follow it. Things change, and with services like GoG/Piracy/Anti-Copyright Movements existing I don't think that's something a lot of people would agree with.

 

[Thanatos2k]

]That video was ok until the Valve fanboyism. It makes me sad how stupid people are about Valve. Valve is the same as the other corporations caring only about profit and themselves. Or, go ask them "why don't you let us actually own the games we buy?"

Please. Valve has gotten beloved because they made their money by giving people a quality product they wanted, not trying to exploit their users to extract cash through manipulative garbage. Compare Valve's version of microtransactions like Steam Cards with anything in an EA game and the difference is night and day. You can actually MAKE money by selling stuff on the Steam Market. Does EA let me sell things I earn in game to others? No, that would threaten their scam business model.

The answer to "Why don't you let us actually own the games we buy" is "Because you've never owned the games you buy. Not now, not 20 years ago." A more pragmatic answer is: "With digital distribution there are tradeoffs. One of the tradeoffs is your license is non-transferrable. As a result, you are likely to be able to purchase that license for vastly reduced cost. Take it or leave it."

Millions of gamers choose to take it.

But to say that when he purchases his game that he has no right to access it indefinitely is one of the biggest reasons piracy flourishes like it does.

What are you talking about? What about Steam prevents you from indefinitely accessing your game? In fact, Steam makes it EASIER to indefinitely access your game because you can do it from any computer that has an internet connection, and not limited by having a physical dongle in your hand in the form of a disk.

Just because someone writes a rule somewhere that says you don't own what you buy doesn't mean people have to agree of follow it. Things change, and with services like GoG/Piracy/Anti-Copyright Movements existing I don't think that's something a lot of people would agree with.

Well there's a thing called "The Law." Break it at your own peril. Challenge it in court if you disagree.

 

[daxterx2005]

That shithouse analogy had me rolling.
Thanks as always, Jim.

 

[jctyproj]

that was a good one, jim.

you were particularly on form in the monologue this week. nice job. bravo sir. enjoyed this week.

 

[zerabp]

Coming way too late to the game here, but sometimes Jim I really do think you are the only one looking out for the consumer. Granted you can only go so far (The adblock episode)but at the same time it seems that Kotaku's view is closer to the majority now, and it's literally killing the industry as we know it. Thank you though for always trying to be a voice of reason, even the few times I have disagreed with something you said, you at least put it in a way that was thoughtful and more importantly thought provoking.

 

[Creedsareevil]

Look out for the consumer?!

I say the consumer needs to learn to look out for himself.
There is one simple truth that is ESPECIALLY true to americans :
Businesses are not your friend. Businesses do NOT HAND OUT MONEY FOR NO RETURN. NEVER. Even Donations are just measures to work the TAX.

People need to carefully check if the business is treating them FAIRLY because that is the best you can expect from a business.

 

[DoctorObviously]

Jim's my friend!

Thank GOD for Jim.

 

[Freyar]

Look out for the consumer?!

I say the consumer needs to learn to look out for himself.
There is one simple truth that is ESPECIALLY true to americans :
Businesses are not your friend. Businesses do NOT HAND OUT MONEY FOR NO RETURN. NEVER. Even Donations are just measures to work the TAX.

People need to carefully check if the business is treating them FAIRLY because that is the best you can expect from a business.

Unfortunately, people don't. A lot of people have faith that businesses will operate in the best interest of their customers when it hasn't been that way for a long time.

I ****ing knew that EA was going to pull freemium bull**** in Garden Warfare which is why I didn't touch it, especially since they were charging ahead of time.

 

[grigjd3]

A significant portion of games journalists have become more connected to publishers and developers than gamers. This often results in a media that has a very skewed viewpoint.

And a divide as between them and their readers as well.How many games journalist flatout attacked their readers in the past year?DMc and ME3 are perfect examples of the gaming press choosing their cushy connections with the game publishers/developers over the people who keep them relevant.

If this were actual journalism then all of them would be fired for taking what is essentially bribes.

An honest assessment is that we are a commodity that the games journalists trade. Since we basically refuse to pay for the journalism ourselves, websites need to be funded by ads and if you're a games website, you're most likely customers for ad space comes from producers of games. So the customer in this trade is the game publishers and the commodity being sold is our eyes. These websites need to be nice enough to us to keep us coming back but that's like saying a lumber mill needs to be nice to trees.

 

[Twinmill5000]

Here's the thing.

EA wasn't just in the wrong here. They aren't just lumping together a shit laden house and then spraying glade around to mask the scent. EA's doing that, setting it on fire, giving you gasoline, and telling you that, hey, just pour this gas on yourself and it'll make the smell go away. Thank us later.


What EA did with PvZ is absolutely horrendous. It's the potential start of one of the absolutely darkest ages in gaming history, where publishers design a game, from the ground up to have the same cynical cashgrab attitude as a F2P MMO, charge 30 dollars for it, and the people playing it lap it up, refuse to acknowledge what's going on, and happily give the publishers their money.

I'm guilty of overspending in F2P games. Some of them Korean. Some of them designed to take my money. I didn't thank the publishers for giving me the option to buy a better gun in S4League. I angrily gave them my money, so I could stay competitive when I used to play it. I thought that was bad.

I thought that was low.

No.

Low is thanking a company for stealing from you. Say what you want about Ubisoft's DRM, but at least they had an idea in mind when they developed it. It was along the lines of 'hurrr durr stop piracy suprt gaem develupurs, must make game hardur to crack no mattur whut', but it was an idea nonetheless. EA... is just disgusting here. I don't care how good the game is. I hope it flops. In a perfect world, it would. In a world full of intellectual people, it would.

But this is the world we live in. As someone as against piracy as Ubisoft is, I urge everyone to pirate it, even if it won't really make an impact.

Lastly, I hope I'm wrong. I hope gaming's not in for some dark, microtransaction ridden times. The model works, if done right, in F2P titles. In better F2P titles, it's actually fair. EA's been known, however, to take something that works, that's fair, and run with it, make it as profitable as possible, as disgusting as possible, and succeed because of it.

 

[Aaron Sylvester]

....aaaaaaand this just in:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/134314-DICE-to-Launch-Community-Test-Platform-for-Battlefield-4

I hope that nobody starts praising EADICE for that. For the sake of the fucking game industry :S

 

[MrFalconfly]

Look out for the consumer?!

I say the consumer needs to learn to look out for himself.
There is one simple truth that is ESPECIALLY true to americans :
Businesses are not your friend. Businesses do NOT HAND OUT MONEY FOR NO RETURN. NEVER. Even Donations are just measures to work the TAX.

People need to carefully check if the business is treating them FAIRLY because that is the best you can expect from a business.

Of cause the consumer should exhibit a certain amount of skepticism when buying products.

But that doesn't mean that companies shouldn't be held accountable for shite like this.

There is a reason that EU has extensive consumer protection laws (including the classification of games as property, and not a license).

 

[KiKiweaky]

Well said Jim. I think we should get you a time turner so you have enough time to review every game and come up with more shitRbricks analogies, that was fucking hilarious.

You must promise not to use it to install yourself as emperor of the universe ok

 

[Demonchaser27]

Look out for the consumer?!

I say the consumer needs to learn to look out for himself.
There is one simple truth that is ESPECIALLY true to americans :
Businesses are not your friend. Businesses do NOT HAND OUT MONEY FOR NO RETURN. NEVER. Even Donations are just measures to work the TAX.

People need to carefully check if the business is treating them FAIRLY because that is the best you can expect from a business.

They already do mostly. Its better to stick together and help each other. Ostracizing one facet of society instead of teaching them isn't going to help any of us. More bad decisions will be made and all customers will lose eventually. People learn if their burnt, sure. But why force them to be burnt through trial-and-error? We don't teach classes this way. We pass our knowledge on and help. We're a society, a civilization. Extreme isolation (individualism) won't solve this problem. In fact it's what business' want. The more divided we are the easier it is to screw a lot of us.

 

[Demonchaser27]

]That video was ok until the Valve fanboyism. It makes me sad how stupid people are about Valve. Valve is the same as the other corporations caring only about profit and themselves. Or, go ask them "why don't you let us actually own the games we buy?"

Please. Valve has gotten beloved because they made their money by giving people a quality product they wanted, not trying to exploit their users to extract cash through manipulative garbage. Compare Valve's version of microtransactions like Steam Cards with anything in an EA game and the difference is night and day. You can actually MAKE money by selling stuff on the Steam Market. Does EA let me sell things I earn in game to others? No, that would threaten their scam business model.

The answer to "Why don't you let us actually own the games we buy" is "Because you've never owned the games you buy. Not now, not 20 years ago." A more pragmatic answer is: "With digital distribution there are tradeoffs. One of the tradeoffs is your license is non-transferrable. As a result, you are likely to be able to purchase that license for vastly reduced cost. Take it or leave it."

Millions of gamers choose to take it.

But to say that when he purchases his game that he has no right to access it indefinitely is one of the biggest reasons piracy flourishes like it does.

What are you talking about? What about Steam prevents you from indefinitely accessing your game? In fact, Steam makes it EASIER to indefinitely access your game because you can do it from any computer that has an internet connection, and not limited by having a physical dongle in your hand in the form of a disk.

Just because someone writes a rule somewhere that says you don't own what you buy doesn't mean people have to agree of follow it. Things change, and with services like GoG/Piracy/Anti-Copyright Movements existing I don't think that's something a lot of people would agree with.

Well there's a thing called "The Law." Break it at your own peril. Challenge it in court if you disagree.

A lot more people would challenge it if it weren't a money racket. Its not about justice most of the time. And its far too expensive for the average individual. Hence why they circumvent it in other ways.