You blame and punish the conman. Always. Not the idiots who were suckered, but the people actively and maliciously taking advantage of them. Blaming the people for believing lies and false advertising is pointless. Even at the best and they wisen up to the current con, a fresh one will taker its place and the learning process starts again. It is pointless to blame those who have been suckered unless they make a pattern out of it individually, something that seems fairly rare to hear about actually. Most people get burned once and learn, but with so many customers out there, that is a lot of opportunities to con. Add to that in this case, while not all games deliver on promises, kickstarters and pre-purchase programs can and have delivered well. Makes it more of a crapshoot then simply being conned outright. And given the nature of the con here, the false advertising and undelivered promises, I would liken this more to an investment company outright lying.FirstNameLastName said:Perhaps if games had to actually exist before becoming financially viable we wouldn't be in this situation so often. Fuck yes I'm victim blaming the consumers here.
I'm not really sure how to feel about all this. On one hand, Sean Murry has well and truly made my list of slimy PR guys, and I have no love the any of the companies involved here. But on the other hand, I can bring myself to feel neither sympathy nor joy for the misfortune of those who were sucked up into the hype cyclone and spat out the other side. All I can do is shake my head and mutter to myself in impotent rage, "damn you. Damn you all. This is your fault; if you weren't so quick to throw fistfuls of cash at the developers on hype alone and instead waited to see if it was worth buying then we wouldn't be in this situation. But no, you had to make the game a financial success before it was even released."
Now, I want to stress yet again that I'm not absolving the developers of guilt here, just saying, if people weren't so keen to by snake oil there wouldn't be so many snake oil salesmen around, and perhaps their presence ought to make everyone a bit more suspicious when making future purchases.
In the end, while you can say they should have seen it coming, the legal protections from such behavior begs the question of why they should have. At the end of the day, most people assumed that if you advertise a product you are legally responsible to deliver upon it. Their willful failure to do so means they are in the wrong, and while I do get the argument of "they shoulda known better", I don't see it as very strongly supported here. They couldn't have known better when purchasing and investment decisions are based on false information and presentation. And saying they should have known the company were lying in the first place is essentially saying that it is their fault for not holding a very negative and pessimistic view of assuming dishonesty even in an environment where such dishonesty is actively penalized legally. It would be like blaming someone for letting a guy in an officer costume and painted car with lights pull him over just to rob him. Yeah, you could argue they should have been completely skeptical about the situation, but realistically, most people aren't going to and that really isn't a bad thing if cons like this are actually dealt with a blamed.