GonzoGamer said:
President Bagel said:
It's always good to buy games new, and help support the developers.
And yet when they pull schemes like that and online pass, they make me not want to support them.
Same here. It's like saying I should always buy cars new, or houses new, or books new, or DVDs new, or clothes new, or furniture new, or appliances new, or consoles new, or domain names new, or ...
There are a LOT of industries hurting worse than freaking video game development, yet somehow they're uniquely damaged by the market for used (yet fully legal!) copies of their product?
Where is the sympathy for building contractors? Or farm workers? I'm not some loony leftist, but come on. Game programmers sit at a desk, in an air-conditioned room, and type. Maybe they work long hours. Maybe their boss is a dick. Maybe they don't feel creatively fulfilled. Boo-frickin-hoo. Have any of them lost their fingers in a disk drive? Been killed by a falling mouse? Contracted black lung from, I dunno ... toner?
My grandfather was an auto worker in the 30s. They didn't have AC. They didn't have healthcare. They didn't have freakin' *chairs*. He worked ridiculous hours in those hellish conditions to support his family, and in his "spare" time he volunteered as a union organizer.
People still bought and sold used cars back then, and he owned more than one.
Game companies are *not* hard places to work. This "pity the poor, suffering programmers" bull is a ploy dreamt up by marketers to rationalize their first tentative dick-moves towards hobbling all used (yet legal!) copies of games.
And even if there was some truth to this myth of the suffering programmer, *and* 100 percent of the customer base started buying new tomorrow, their working conditions wouldn't change one iota. The reason they are treated as interchangeable and are easily pressured by employers is that there's a glut of them on the market. If they were in short supply they'd be treated even more like royalty than they already are. This isn't the early 00s when anyone who knew what a tilde was got a six-figure job and stock options.
So buck up coders and welcome to adulthood. Maybe your job isn't as much fun as you imagined, but hey -- at least you've got one. With a chair.