Poll: Blacklisting Game Companies

[TehCookie]

Nope, if someone makes a good game I'll buy it because I want more good games. If gamers ignore a good game because of a company and casuals who don't care buy that crappy game by the same publish/dev, they will probably give up on good games and continue to pander to the casual crowed that is what's selling.

Of course a game that will boot me out of it because my internet had a hiccup is not a good game.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Yes, I'm currently blacklisting EA because of that whole mudslinging fiasco. I mean c'mon guys you're not 12 year olds playing hockey here you're grown men/women making/selling video games. Even most professional wrestlers have more respect for each other than you do, EA! Grow up!

There are two sides to the mudslinging, EA and Valve, it's just that Valve handled their PR much better as usual. EA hasn't really done anything different to Steam, Origin is Steam with a fresh coat of paint, a coat of paint that is admittedly still a little fresh and sticky at the moment and probably needs a little bit longer to dry.

Huh? I was talking about the mud EA was slinging at Activision several months back over the whole Battlefield/MW thing. Although now that you mention it, EA hasn't handled this whole Origin thing very well either.

 

[isometry]

Well it wouldn't be a video-gaming forum without flawed arguments and hypocracy. Have a minor aneurysm when EA says Mass Effect 3 will only be on Origin. See no problem with games that do the same thing with Steam.

My reasons for liking Steam and boycotting origin are not flawed or hypocritical. I'm fed up with EA (and Ubisoft) as a customer because I've bought games from them that waste my time with poorly-working DRM and excessive DLC promotion in-game*.

Contrast with Steam, a service that hasn't failed me in the years I've used it. The most it's ever gotten in the way of running one of my games is to need a restart, just a slight inconvenience.

People aren't boycotting Origin because the EULA has nasty language in it. All EULAs are extremely anti-consumer and pro-corporation, that's been a joke on the internet since the 90s. Forget the EULA and phantom concerns about spyware, we the customers already have years of bad service from EA, they've been getting progressively worse and Origin is part of their anti-customer progression.

By the way, I don't own any of Valve's games because I don't like their games at all. I only know them for the Steam service, 4 years and +100 games of good service from them.

*For example, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit wants to connect to EA's servers at all times for singleplayer. If it fails to connect (because their servers are down often) a female voice actor nags me about that during a "trying to connect" screen before each race, and if it succeeds I get extra loading screens telling me about DLC.

 

[scar_47]

No, while I don't agree with everything every publisher or developer does if I'm interested in a game I'll buy it.

 

[Smeggs]

I'll buy any game that looks interesting. I don't know about some people, but I have the common sense to test out something I'm interested in (in this case by renting it) before forking over sixty greenbacks. If the game is shit? Oh well, that's something over $5 for a rental that I lost, better than reselling it and only getting some shit like $25 of the $60 is cost because it was opened.

I despise EA as a company. The way they handle games is stupid.

I'm still going to buy Dead Space 3 and Mass Effect 3. Because though EA at large is shit, I know those game will at the very least be decent.

 

[Riki Darnell]

I will never deprive myself of something I'll enjoy because a company has made bad decisions. Independent boycotting does nothing, and even when people try to organize it, they completely fail, so screw it, I'mma go play good games.

Nintendo because I see right through their lazy, half-assed, reprinting of old titles over and over.

You know what fans of SM Galaxy wanted from the sequel? Exactly what they got. Same with every iteration of Mario Kart. Innovation and originality and never required to make a good game.

I agree. I've been a fan of Pokemon since the original Red and Blue and have bought EVERYONE that wasn't a spinoff. When you make a game with something that people like, why change it? People rag on Nintendo for not changing their games, but I think it works. When I was younger my friends and I loved to play Mario Party, now we still love to play it even if we're playing a rehash of the same game from years before.

But about the blacklisting, I've never done that. Companies have made games I've disliked but I don't hold that against them. I just go "eh, well that was disappointing" and go play a different game.

 

[4RM3D]

*snip*

For me it is not rallying people to start a mass boycott against company X. I was asking everyone's personal view on the matter. This thread was never made to inspire people to take action.

EA, Ubisoft and Activision do not directly inflict harm on the gaming industry. They do screw around here and there, like buying up good studios and 'corrupting' them under the corporate banner. But even all this only makes a small dent in the gaming industry.

Nay, I will save my boycotts and hate for things that will completely wreck the internet, like SOPA and PIPA.

 

[Foxglove]

I blacklisted EA after being locked out of one too many games (one) that I'd legitimately purchased by their DRM. I'd have forgiven them it tbh but their policy does seem to be the whole 'better to punish a innocent than let the guilty go free' idea.

When Bioware was bought by them I decided to still buy Bioware's games and my reward was being locked out of saves because my net is unreliable and I had the bad taste to have DLC (or should that be the other way around?) and being shafted one last time by EA by being forced to jump through loops to create an EA master account to access DLC for DA:O as the email that I had for my Bioware stuff was already registered with EA under an old account system that they had removed access to but were still validating on. It seriously took me half a day to get it all sorted out.

Just not worth the hassle when there are plenty of other games out there I like playing just as much that you only pay for once in $ instead of multiple times in grief.

 

[Puddleknock]

Maybe its partly my own ignorance and partly my own apathy but I personally don't give a damn who publishes a game, if a game is released that I want to buy then I buy it. It really is as simple as that. Devs I see as slightly different but even then I still take each game on its own merit rather than who develops or publishes it.

 

[Steampunk Viking]

Oh I forgot to add, I have decided to boycot Capcom games for the first 3 months of their release, during said months they will inevitably advertise a bunch of DLC that actually make the game a whole game and then announce they're re-releasing the game with brand new, non-essential content that they won't be putting as DLC and charging £25-£30 for it.

Yeah, Capcom are dicks when it comes to that.

 

[Zeckt]

I try to free myself from bias, but I seem to have grown to despise capcom after the crap they pulled with MvC3 turning it into a dlc money maker then going so far to re release the game barely 6 months after.

Then they throw their support behind SOPA for some bizarre reason. Clearly they no longer care about their customers and only see the dollar signs, so I will stop caring about them in return. I will never buy capcom again.

 

[Vivi22]

Blacklisting a games company is stupid. The best example for me that comes to mind is Bioware. I see a TON of hatred spewed towards Bioware and I really can't understand it.

If a game isn't good don't buy it. You don't need to swear off the company at large. Oftentimes different teams make different products within a company.

If I don't like EA because I think that the way they design their marketing is fairly juvenile, and their handling of Origin and it's TOS in particular is draconian and an invasion of privacy, and am angry enough about these things (particularly the latter) that I no longer wish to support a company who treats their customers like commodities to be exploited and abused, then I'm not going to support them in any fashion. It's somewhat ironic given a few years ago they seemed to be on the up and up, but now they've done a complete 180 and more than squandered any good will I had for them.

And yes, not wanting to support a publisher like EA means I don't buy any of their games, regardless of which developer made them. Yes, I'm sure most of their developers have nothing to do with many of the decisions EA makes that I disagree with, and I'd like to support them. But so long as a dollar in their pocket means 2 more in EA's, that's not going to happen. Because in this case, my problem is with the parent company which owns all of these different development teams, and I will not give them my money because they've done little to earn it.

 

[Durgiun]

The only company I will never buy a game from is EA. Everybody else is a maybe, depending on how they act.

 

[Skoldpadda]

To the people that say that "blacklisting a game company is stupid": lolwut?
Is it so hard to understand that we'll start ignoring companies if they disappoint or piss us off too often?

Companies I won't give money to anymore:

Bethesda. Their games are soulless, and buggy to the point of broken. They know that anything they release will get praised to high heaven regardless, so they don't bother with QA. Their games are the equivalent of a car with only two wheels and no doors - they sell it full price to consumers they expect will fix it for them. The only thing that they are apparently really good at, is PR. Hype the fuck out of their next release as much as you want, I'm not touching it. And I weep for my beloved Fallout.

Lionhead. Fable 2 had potions that gave XP. I'll repeat that: it gave you potions that gave XP. I like the humor in their games - they have an unmistakable British vibe to them, but just how scared are these guys that there's one single retarded five year old somewhere who won't be able to see the shitty ending because the game isn't easy enough?

Bioware. I'll give them one last chance, and that's Mass Effect 3. I've got a couple of savegames ready for this one, and I'll preorder it because the box is nice and I'll probably get a cool weapon with it. All this despite the fact that I'm fairly certain it will be the worst game in the series. It's about closure, I guess. Bioware has become a corporate puppet, an EA drone. There's no use denying it. We will never see a "spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate" from them. We will never see a game from them again that isn't dumbed down to the point of being insultingly shallow. I loved you, Bioware. But the thrill is gone. You let yourself go, and I'm not attracted to you anymore. Just don't mess up Mass Effect 3 too much, so we can part as friends.

 

[DannyJBeckett]

I don't play or buy any games from EA or Activision. I've also extended that to Ubisoft, but not before I got Rayman: Origins. (That being said, I went out of my way to get Rayman second-hand so Ubisoft still didn't get a penny from me.)

 

[GrandmaFunk]

There's lots of companies I refuse to support financially. In the game publishing realm there's really only Ubisoft that I'm dead set against doing business with, though I'm unlikely to buy anything from Blizzard/Activision either.

 

[Oly J]

I haven't actively blacklisted a company, I don't generally buy games by EA but that's only because I don't normally like the games (with a few exceptions) the company itself has very little to do with it