dobahci said:
AyreonMaiden said:
This. I respect not one of these bullshit whiny boycotts because of this, and man is it ever tiring nowadays. Every time SOMETHING happens, it's just negativity all around. The "pirating it," thing, and the "I'll get it used instead so no one, not even the devs, get my money" utterly gall me. Nice one, bro, way to make sure the right people get fucked. Way to show you're not gonna take it and will not stand for any bullshit by...buying the game.
If you're taking a stand, mean it. Inconvenience yourself all the way or you might as well give them your money now, since you will later anyway cause you simply could not go without blue bitchin' sex in space to stand by your beliefs. As far as I'm concerned, you either send the message home, or be a pussy. Your call.
I might be missing something, but I don't think the point of a boycott is to inconvenience yourself or prove that you aren't a pussy. The point is to ensure that the company in question doesn't get your money. Piracy does that while still ensuring you don't miss out on the game. Where's the problem? It sounds like an ideal solution to me.
Why should a gamer have to inconvenience himself to make a statement anyway? If we protest every company that is run by pricks, then we'll basically end up finding a new hobby, because pretty much the entire mainstream game industry is prick-dominated nowadays, and finding a company that DOESN'T use invasive DRM or milk their customers out of every little cent with day-of-release DLC and rushed sequels is more the exception than the rule. And unfortunately there are precious few ways we can influence this.
How can you really get a company to change their ways? Even if you do manage to organize some kind of full-scale boycott, you're still only going to impact a tiny fraction of the sales expected for the game, and the company you were trying to boycott is still going to make enough money off of it to buy your entire town and rename it to Butthurtville. And there's NOTHING you can do about it. You can send them emails saying that they really ought to treat their customers with more respect, and they'll just say, "Sorry, I can't hear you over the whooshing sound of my moneyfountain."
Every time a company gets taken to task for DRM that rapes your computer upon install or for taking advantage of paying customers in some way or another, they come out with some press release with a bunch of bullshit and excuse-making, but you never see any changes made. Why should you inconvenience yourself for them when it's not even going to make the company change the shitty policies that made you boycott them in the first place?
The message you send matters. That's why inconveniencing oneself matters in a boycott.
I posted this in another thread of a similar nature that awoke me to that notion. If you get the game used/pirate it instead, what these publishers or whatever will see when they connect the dots as to the reason why the game has been pirated/bought used is "The game itself was fine, but how can we make it harder to pirate/less attractive to buy used?"
If you withhold buying the game outright, there's a bigger chance they'll rethink everything, including the pricing/DRM/DLC, because they won't know what the problem was in the first place until they look in the internet and see "X was wrong, Y was wrong and Oh! the DRM sucked/day one DLC sucked. Let's rethink those."
And the look absolutely matters. Being organized, determined, CIVIL and 100% serious with NO COMPROMISE makes your voice more respected. Look at OpRainfall; A vocal minority that unified civilly, sent letters asking for the service they wanted, encouraged respect among themselves and towards Nintendo, and demonstrated peacefully.
Bioware vocal minority by comparison? Abused Jennifer Hepler, bitched about Jessica Chobot's existence, whined about that one guy who looks like he's from Jersey Shore's looks, cried "EVIL CORPORATION" over a DLC character no one knows the importance of, and are now saying they'll pirate/buy used instead of supporting those (seemingly) DEADLY SERIOUS PROBLEMS.
One group managed to make Nintendo, CONSERVATIVE NINTENDO, take a chance for very little gain on 2 games of a niche alienating genre, on a console that's rarely used for said genre, in a country that currently has fallen out of favor with said genre.
The other group earned the ire of a corporation that KNOWS they can live without their money, and as a group evokes a bipolar reaction: People either want them to STFU, or join in the childish abuse.
Again, don't pussy out. Organize, unify, refuse to partake at all, and make your shit happen. You won't look entitled, you won't look like a thief, you won't look like a whiner, you won't make Bioware more pissed off at you than they already are. The look matters. The look is the message.
