I have mixed opinions to be honest.
One thing the video game industry does is underproduce games, hardware, and other things to try and generate hype and demand due to the attention the shortages get. We've seen it with both of the last two Playstation consoles, and with Nintendo's marketing "strategy" for the Wii. It's hardly shocking that were starting to see similar things happening with increasing frequency when it comes to video games.
The retailers are also to blame, because they really don't do their homework or give a crap about the customers, in the end they are willing to take pre-order money from anyone, and if they screw something up or have problems with a producer/publisher they basically figure they can just refund the pre-order money. In general guys selling video games are NOT going to upgrade your product, or offer worthwhile store credit incentives, their usual attitude is "well, we'll give you your $5 back", forget the time, gas, and emotional investment here.
The thing is that neither the product producers OR the retailers are held in any way accountable for this. At least not accountable in an approchable enough sense that is going to make a disgruntled customer happy. To be honest, in a case like this a company like Best Buy should be held accountable and suffer punitive measures, perhaps being able to themselves sue a game producer after the fact to recoup their losses.
To be honest the entire situation sucks, and as much as a lot of people here who have worked retail might empathize, I'll go so far as to say that I think a few people actually going on shooting rampages or blowing up stores for such petty things might be a good thing. It would force some attention to be paid to the situation, and society to adopt viable methods to guarantee satisfaction for wronged customers. After all if the failure to deliver on a pre-order is going to net the guy in question enough money to buy a Lamborgini, he's going to have little reason to shoot up the store. Likewise producers are going to be a lot more wary about creating artificial shortages as part of a pscyhological marketing ploy if those same retailers are going to be able to hold them accountable in return.
Right now so many things get messed up because of buereaucratic/corperate unaccountability, a system where things go wrong for someone, but there is no clear person you can blame for it since everyone can point a finger to someone higher, or in circles that amount to blaming the policy. Acts of violence might not be a good thing, but they do tend to draw attention and force people to change. After all if some guy walks in with a pump shotgun and blows away half a dozen employees at Best Buy today, and then someone blows up a Gamestop tomorrow, and another guy drives a truck wired with a fertilized bomb into Activision's front lobby, the bottom line is going to be that the people running the show have a lot of money at stake and they can't run their company without the little people making up the gears in their machine, if those people start to die they won't find people eagerly coming in to replace them, and for their own survivial they have to create a climate where the people are safe, and when security won't cut it, policy changes will.
Do NOT misunderstand this though, I doubt the guy in question had any great ideas of revolution or reforming one small haywired aspect of society. I'm just saying I understand his rage, and viewed from enough distance and without emotion for all the dead people, someone actually doing what he threatned to do probably isn't a bad thing in a long term.
It's sort of like my points about the Wall Street protest, regardless of what I think of the movement, a non-violent protest only goes so far unless it's backed by the threat of violence. Non-violent protest at it's core being a show of fource. Successful non-violent protests have generally worked by coming from segements of the population known to be violent to begin with. If you just sit around and nobody is scared of you because you can't do anything but take up space, it's meaningless.
In comparison the whole "oops, we messed up, we're sorry about your pre-order, here's your $5 back, now toddle off you schmuck, you probably shouldn't have been invested in a product like this to begin with" is the same thing, it shows a complete lack of respect. In the end Best Buy doens't give a crap, the publisher doesn't give a crap, heck the retail worker doesn't give a crap, forgetting about him 5 seconds after he leaves if he doesn't do
anything. The point is to make people give a crap, and while it's always best to work within the system, when the system doesn't provide any *viable* alternatives, angry people have to start thinking outside the system.
I know a lot of people will disagree with me, and won't like what I'm saying, especially due to me speaking in favor of violence over something seemingly trivial (though I'd argue while each individual incident is trivial, the overall problem is not, and contributes to de-humanizing society, since businesses will ignore the individual whenever they can given the oppertunity. This kind of situation exists due to people being reduced to mobile dollar signs), but hopefully it gives people something to think about.
Truthfully, ask yourself why all the news media is covering this from the perspective of this guy being crazy and out of line. Why is it that nobody is asking the obvious question of why these jerkwads couldn't have had the game they took money from him in advance for... Instead of him "angling" for something, what did they offer him in compensation?
At any rate, I think this is going to be the tip of the iceberg. I have this odd suspician that EA is going to be pulling something similar with TOR next month. There were a limited number of collector's editions, yet I noticed very few places being told how many they were getting and nobody seemed to be having much trouble ordering one when I was paying attention. Given some of the perks on offer, I think a LOT of people are going to be upset if EA doesn't meet the demand and we see less CE copies being shipped to stores than they took orders from, and it's going to be the fault of the stores as well for not verifying things before they took the money. Given the social aspects of MMOs and how invested a lot of people get to them (not to mention the hype/investment in this one in paticular up until this point), I'll be very surprised if we don't see things a bit louder than this guy making threats.... unless of course EA meets the product orders.
