Nice Guys Come in Last
- Thread starter Sean Sands
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I agree.Chaos Marine said:
They are nice big company, but I love everything that comes out of it and they don't need cheap tricks to win us over or take our money
Alright, first thing's first. I don't appreciate the attack on my character here, it's just not called for.squid5580 said:
Now, to get to your comments. I don't buy any of those games, in fact I don't even own a current generation console. I'll play a few games of GH at my buddy's house because he downloaded songs we actually like, but I wouldn't ever pay for something like that because I actually play guitar. No sense in my buying a game where I can play guitar and letting all the money I spent on guitars, an amp, and pedals go to waste.
In understand full-well that people have the choice to buy these games, and if they do that's fine and dandy let them make the mistakes. My problem is with game companies who just make the same game with minor changes every time. It's not even like they're just "playing it safe", they're pandering to a crowd who's never had the chance to be exposed to something else because the only games that get any recognition or talked about are the Halos of the world. I was thrilled when I actually saw ads for Sins of a Solar Empire in PC Gamer a year or two back, because I feel the strategy market is being neglected for the "run-and-gun" crowd.
What I don't understand about your argument is that you seem to believe that I supported them at some point, and makes me wonder if you actually took the time to read my post. I was a little excited when CoD4 came out because it wasn't world war fucking two again, it was different. Then I read about it and realized it was pretty much the same game in a different war, and I automatically said "Well, that's not worth the money then". At the very end of my post I make the remark that hopefully people will stop buying the GH and RB games and realize they're getting scammed, indicating that yes I do believe that if people stop buying into the fads and such that the game companies will be forced to actually be creative and make good games instead of milking franchises like Nintendo and LucasArts do.
I wait for the day the hang from the gallows for what they've done to Call of Duty. They traded in great strategic gameplay, for run-and-gun, doom-esque shittery that shouldn't be called gameplay. Play call of duty 3, fine game, not that many times where i've died and argued against it with my TV, but in WaW, in which i thought they would fix from the debacle that was CoD 4, Everything was still there, AND MORE! They actually got worse, which is the soul reason i only play the co-op anymore. If there is no "Spetznaz zombies" in the newest abortion they're coming out with, then i'm not buying any more call of duties.
I can't say I blame Activision, a publicly traded company with stockholders, for trying to deliver shareholder value. Considering how badly the industry's been beaten up over the past year---ERTS (EA's stock) is down over 50% since this day last year---for Activision to actually deliver value to investors is one of the miracles of the recession.
As I often say when people bash a company for putting profit over "creativity" (whatever that is supposed to mean), I say buy stock in the company and see how fast it changes your tune. This goes for most "evil" companies (disclosure: I own stock in Microsoft). Buy MSFT. Buy EA or Activision or fill-in-the-blank evil company here. And when your stock goes down in a bear market, see if you can resist the temptation to say "screw originality, for Christ's sake, release something that will sell!"
As I often say when people bash a company for putting profit over "creativity" (whatever that is supposed to mean), I say buy stock in the company and see how fast it changes your tune. This goes for most "evil" companies (disclosure: I own stock in Microsoft). Buy MSFT. Buy EA or Activision or fill-in-the-blank evil company here. And when your stock goes down in a bear market, see if you can resist the temptation to say "screw originality, for Christ's sake, release something that will sell!"
What attack on your character? Disagreeing with you is not attacking you. Make a fist then point a finger and then count how many are pointed back at you. Unless of course you lost some in an accident then I do apologize.LaBambaMan said:
As for the rest the point still is no matter if they release game after game and change nothing and people still rush to the stores and buy them whose fault is it? The market decides what they want. The millions of gamers decide what they want. Do I want more innovative games? Hell yes. I just can't expect my feelings to influence the millions of others who seem to disagree with me. And I can't expect a company whose sole purpose is to make money to listen to me over the millions of other voices. So I have to take what I can get. And tell them this is what I want the only way they will listen. With my wallet.
*coughs loudly* Apple, IBM, GlaxoSmithKline, Cadburys, Rowntrees.DemetriTheGreek said:
Ethics and big business are rarely good bedfellows.
OK, this may be because out of my last 20-odd posts, over a dozen are in a WWII thread, but..... you could make the same arguments to defend the Nazis.
You make a cogent, relativist, economic point, but when the situation is picked apart, what they're doing is still very wrong.
Word for word, you could apply the same reasoning to Hitler and the Nazis. They DID manage to take power and entice an entire nation to almost conquer almost an entire continent. They weren't particularly smart or hard working, but definitely aggressive in every field, they were highly competitive as a political party and used underhanded tactics to bring down their opposition. Cunning, devious, unapologetic aggressive and successful, same story, all applies to dear old asshole Adolf and his crew of evil goons.
You make a cogent, relativist, economic point, but when the situation is picked apart, what they're doing is still very wrong.
Damn, Godwin's Law could not have stucken harder!Strategia said:
Though I do end up agreeing with a lot of what you're saying, just because Activision is being successful and earning lots of money, that does not mean that everything they do is excusable or "right" for that matter. You can be king of the world and have all the POWAH, but just make sure your subjects aren't "talking" about you.
EDIT: I still revel in the hypocricy of Activision saying "We may have to stop supporting the PS3 if they don't drop the price" and then they come back with hiking the price of MW2 to nearly double in the UK on the standard edition of the game. Ohhhhhh, hypocricy can be fun sometimes.
Yeah, but when everybody's placed artificial restrictions on themselves, the people who don't place these restrictions on themselves are going to have a much easier time becoming successful.Strategia said:
The same way you applied this article to Hitler, you can apply it to something like spawn camping. It's just somebody playing by the rules, but not burdening themselves with extra rules. The point of and FPS is (usually) to kill the other person more times than they kill you, not to run around and come up with awesome tactical plans. If someone can win by shooting you as you respawn, and their not cheating, then it's a legitimate strategy. People will hate you, though, because they have the notion that the point of the game is something other than simply getting more kills.
It scales upwards, too. The point of politics is (usually) to become the most influential person around. We, however, place restrictions on ourselves, like not simply killing the people in our way. Those extra restrictions are not actual rules, though. Killing millions in a massive, world war to take over the planet is going to get you desposed by the people who stop themselves from doing the same, but if you're successful, people can't really say your bad at politics because you just became the most powerful and sucecssful political figure ever. It's not like Hitler hacked the universe and godmoded his way through WWII by himself, so what he was doing was one option out of many that he could have chosen to raise Germany's stuatus in the world.
Before you start talking about the tragic event so the Holocaust, I'm not saying that it didn't happen, or that people didn't suffer, just that waging war is simply ine method out of many when it comes to gaining political power.
Activision is doing to the gamer demographic what Nintendo is doing to the what Nintendo is doing to everyone, they are targeting the broadest audience possible and not following the established business model. If people are upset with Activision be like me and don't buy their games, but you can't say their doing anything wrong.
I am tired of this " they are a company, they are suppost to shit all over you" line. No thats not how it works, they make the stuff, and I buy the stuff with my money, charging me twice as much for the same stuff is just being a greedy arse.
An arsehole is an arsehole, the fact they are making money by screwing you over doesn't strike me as a good excuse.
An arsehole is an arsehole, the fact they are making money by screwing you over doesn't strike me as a good excuse.
And yet, when they have milked all their current IP into the absolute ground, as they are already doing, and when they have driven away all their creative talent, as they are already doing, they will cease to make any money off the derivative crap they continue to publish.
Carpetbagging is a bad way to do business if you intend to stick around as company. People forgive, they do not forget.
Carpetbagging is a bad way to do business if you intend to stick around as company. People forgive, they do not forget.
Because they are making money people can't complain? What kind of ethics are these? The price hike in the UK is a little more than a burning papercut to the people that live there, and they can either suck it up and hand over the cash or go without a game they might have liked. But they can't complain?
People are perfectly comfortable with companies attaining success, just look at Valve. Activision are unpopular for other reasons.
People are perfectly comfortable with companies attaining success, just look at Valve. Activision are unpopular for other reasons.
No, Activision is still completely evil, just in the whole "soulless corporation slanging crack for big money" kinda way. They remind me a bit of Mcdonalds or Walmart in that way. And I actually kind of prefer it to the way of 3D Realms- "we are going to promise you a sequel for ten years then "suddenly" go bankrupt and get sued" kind of evil. ( and yes, in my book, that is totally evil.
Business is business, but fuck you Activision. I am a firm believer that business should be about the consumer, the customer, rather than the money. There should be passion and desire to do good in what is done. Activision seems to have neither. And as such, I have confidence that this will come back to bite them in the ass.
As endlessly awesome as hacking the universe and godmoding all the way to world domination would be, I have to disagree with you.randommaster said:
True, they may not be doing anything wrong from a legal standpoint, and they're definitely not doing anything wrong from an economic standpoint. They are, however, doing wrong from a somewhat vague standpoint that I'm just going to go ahead and call a moral standpoint. They focus solely on their profits, and they display blatant disdain for the gaming community by pulling stunts like this. Brütal Legend is, from what I know about it, a fairly innovative (at least visually) game that has immense appeal to a certain audience and is generally being well received. However, because Double Fine has refused to shoehorn it into the Guitar Hero franchise (which is increasingly getting the image of a re-releasing cash cow, like EA Sports), Activision instead chooses to (make every effort to) kill one of the most anticipated games of this year, which has received widespread media attention and is already quite well-known and will likely become a huge (or at least larger-than-average) success. By this are they not only looking out for their profit margin, they're giving the gaming and game journalism community the finger, by showing that they don't care what the public thinks about a game, they only care about their profit margin.
The same issue is present with your spawn camping argument. FPSes are intended to be competitive, true, and spawn camping may be possible without cheating. But spawn camping is wrong from, again, let's call it a moral standpoint. By denying your opponent the chance to fight back you take the competitive aspect out of the game almost entirely, as you can just sit there calmly picking off the enemy from a safe location while the enemy barely gets two seconds of play time before they're dead, so they can't even attempt to fight back. You're doing everything right from a game-technic standpoint, as you're rapidly and steadily increasing your kill count, but from a moral standpoint you're denying the other players the chance to enjoy a nice, challenging game.
I guess this boils down to differing definitions of what "wrong" means. To return to the case at hand, yes, Activision does nothing "wrong" from a legal or corporate standpoint, by maximising their profit, but by doing so they are flipping us all the bird, all but telling us they don't give a shit about any part of us beyond our wallet. And THAT is what's wrong here.
You know, this comment reminded me slightly of another comment I can barely recall from a user I barely remember;Tony Harrison said:
"What ever happened to 'We are their customer' and 'They shouldn't treat the customer like that'?"
Take that how you will, but this is what business seems to come down to nowadays. While it's never completely "The customer is always right", some decency with the people you're selling to helps your own business.
The thing is, though, that there's a difference between breaking the rules/law and breaking social conventions.Strategia said:
Breaking the rules/law means that you have actually done something wrong and are no longer eledgeble to claim superior methodology if you succed. Breaking conventions means that what you are doing is looked down on by the majority, or at least the majority of the people who matter.
This is easier to see in a game because the rules are clearly defined. To use the spawn camping example again, the people who matter are the people who made the game. If they son't want spawn camping, they will make it impossible. or at least very hard, to spawn camp. A good example would be TF2, where you CAN spawn camp, but each team has an area where the other team cannot enter, so they can prepare themselves the campers. The players in the game don't matter, that is, unless they have the ability to kick you from the game. Inless they have the power to do that, though, the strategy which gives you the best advantage in the one to use. It may be annoying, but the game doesn't care about who had fun, it only cares about who won. It's not sporting, for sure, to make someone have to sit through ten minutes of camping, but if winning is your goal, then you will camp if it is the best strategy, regardless of what others think.
Now, that only applies to you if you want to win, if you just want to play, then stopping someone else from playing is just being a dick because you're not trying to achieve anyhting, just keeping them from having a good time. You can see the difference in this when it comes to tournaments and friendly matches. In a tournament, where the goal is to win, camping is something you have to deal with because the other person is not breaking any rules, they're just aggrivating you. When playing in your living room, however, camping is likely to make the other person stop playing or they will make you stop playing. Everyone may want to win, but they don't want to deprive anyone else of fun, either. The game has changed so that camping is not longer the best strategy because doing so will violate one of the rules.
It gets harder to explain when you move to the global scale, but the arguement still stands. If one strategy will help you achieve your goal better than any other, not using that strategy means that you are either not actually trying to achieve that goal, or that you are placing artificial restrictions on yourself. If your goal is to earn money, anything from mowing lawns to robbing banks is fair game. If your goal is to earn mney legally, however, you have to discard the options that involve breaking the laws of the place where you live. The same goes for trying to take over the world. If you simply want to do it, then you have to consider wholesale war in addition to negotiations. If you want to take over the world without bloodshed, however, you are forced to negotioate because killing people is now breaking the rules.
This system works well when everybody is playing by the same rules, but where a lot of people get upset, however, is when someone is willing to do anything to reach a goal, the people who have chosen to put limitations on themselves are going to raise hell. They only matter, however, if they can do something about it. When Hitler tried to take over the world, the people that he pissed off were people who could stop him, so their opinion mattered. If Hitler had succeded, however, it wouldn't matter what the rest of the world thought, because they would not matter anymore because they would have been unable to do anything. Going back to the video game example, tournaments of the same game will usually ban stages/characters/equipment that is unbalanced. Entering the tournament means that you have agreed to follow the rules. Not following them will get you disqualified, so the people who organized the tournament have power over you, so their opinion matters. The opinions of the people in the tournament don't matter, however, because they don't have the power to kick you out if you're not breaking the rules. They have to beat you within the rules, and they may have opinions of your playstyle, but as long as you beat them, what they have to say about you is mearly an opinion and carries no weight. If you spawn camp and the rules don't disallow it, then it doesn't matter is everyone in the room hates the way you play because you have followed the same rules.
Once you know the rules of the game, there is nothing stopping you from exploiting them to come out on top. The trick is, though, to find out what the rules are. When it comes to life, you won't get booted from the server for doing something. People created societies, however, so that they could enforce more rules, and anybody in that society has agreed to follow those rules. Not following them will get you in trouble, but only if you are trying to work in that society. The goal of capitalism is smply to gain the most resources, in this case, money, so the strategy that earns you the most money is the correct one. You can play for the short game, or the long game, but the goal is to make the most money in a given amount of time. We don't use pure capitalism, however, or CEOs would be assassinated left and right. Buisnesses have aggreed to not kill each other's employies/property, as well as other rules to ensure stabillity. Activision is playing by these rules, and most of the people who don't like them don't matter to Activision. The opinion of the jugde overseeing their lawsuit does, however, because that judge has some power over Activision.
I'm going to stop now because I've started rambling and I've typed way too much for something that doesn't have a due date.