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A New Way ... Into My Wallet
Mendel
Member LegendaryPosts: 5,609
Manufacturers are always looking for new ways to get customers to pay. The game industry seems to have developed a completely new way to take money from customers. This great innovation is simply throwing out any concerns about quality or completed projects.
People are paying for incomplete, buggy, early access messes. There's probably a dozen threads on this forum about specific games. Some games are games only in the earliest conceptual stages, yet people are willing to pay for these games.
As a consumer, I have to questions I'd love to ask. Rhetorical type questions.
- What has the game developer - customer relationship become? Yes, developers want money, but customers don't seem to have the patience to wait for the game to actually be finished. Early access and pay to test are becoming more and more prevalent. Companies see customers only as income sources, and accept no accountability for old-fashioned things like 'satisfaction' or 'service' anymore. A customer with a complaint is a 'hater' and a nuisance.
- Where is consumer protection in all this mess? Companies embrace an 'All sales final' mentality, and could care less about customer satisfaction. Refunds, if offered, are blocked into minuscule time frames that expire before any reasonable evaluations can be formed.
- Has accounting replaced ethics and pride? Prices are becoming even more outrageous. Developers seem not to care about the quality of their product as long as the accountants are happy. Selling models that *might* one day be included in their game might seem extreme, but we, as customers, seem to be content to accept this as a 'product' and pay for it. I can appreciate that a company needs a return on investment, but am I expected to fund it myself?
The bigger problem is, we customers accept this. We aren't standing up for ourselves. Maybe we're looking for government regulations to step in and protect us from ourselves. We are willing to fork over money in the hopes that the product we buy *might* actually amount to something in years. Game development companies have turned customers into 'investors', only without the rights and privileges (and benefits) to actually being an investor. Take back some control of the developer-customer relationship.
If I had a Christmas wish, I'd hope that people will stand up for themselves. Hold developers accountable. Don't open the wallet whenever a developer needs money. Hold out for complete games, there's equally good games already out there. The ideas might sound good, but an actual finished game that demonstrates these ideas is better. Demand value for your money.
That's probably too much work, though.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Comments
Also, what other customers do doesn't affect you. If you don't like EA games, don't buy them. It's that simple.
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
Expect only about 30% of games to be good.
Wait a good chunk of time and do two things:
Watch YouTube reviews to see if the game is made well
Watch YouTube play through to see if you really like the game real time.
There are more perks to doing this..... 50% cheaper 6 months down the road
Problem solved
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
More like MAYBE 3%.
Relationship between customer and developer is almost non existent.
The developer only uses the kissy approach when it makes good news/pr.
Customer protection is almost nothing,the government has i assume deemed gaming to be very trivial and not worth more of their time.The problem is ,sure it might be trivial but it is still VERY big business that NEEDS laws and regulations.
I was shocked to see the best we can do to protect customers is 14 days and i believe a tad longer if the product never worked.
So there are a LOT of scenarios that will allow developers and other businesses to run ruff shot all over YOU.One i ran into with Steam involves CHANGING the TOS a year or longer after your 14 day grace period.So here is what i ran in to,a developer wants me to click an acceptance that they can do whatever they feel with my personal information and i can't even go any further to read the documents until i click OK.Here is the kicker,they are holding my game hostage unless i click OK.
Can you imagine if in another 20+ years every single business has us sign a waiver to waive ALL of our rights or we can't use their product?Well it is actually already here,the ONLY thing keeping businesses from taking over anyway they want is the countries laws override any other documents you may sign.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
If we took that attitude throughout the market, snake oil would still be a thing (and, quite depressingly, lesser versions of the concept do still exist, actually, such as Bai drinks).
I think it's high time we quit acting as if folks falling for marketing are all rubes and started recognizing the power marketing has, specifically in the digital age.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
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I very intentionally edited the phrase "folks falling for marketing are rubes" into "folks falling for marketing are all rubes" because, to be frank, some of those folks are exactly rubes. They walked in completely ignoring signs they clearly saw via the gaming news or some YouTube video, then still got miffed it wasn't a finished product quality. Those folks deserve to be burned so maybe they'll finally learn to look at the signs behind the product before buying blindly into the hype.
But just as many are like the guy I met (3 friggin' years ago now) at the Verizon store who backed SC despite not even owning a PC; dude wasn't big into gaming, just liked his console games and came across a YouTube video about the game and it's crowdfunding to finish development (a rather positive video, the way he described it to me at the time). He isn't someone who follows gaming news daily like you and I. He's not a power gamer. He's a regular Joe, and he had no clue who CR was, much less the drama surrounding the title. And his experience with crowdfunding was seeing things in the news where folks paid for others' hospital bills. It was a super positive thing to him, crowdfunding.
I honestly don't think anyone should have to spend as much time around this site and the gaming news web as I do to make informed purchasing decisions. Because if we all have to spend this much time immersing ourselves in every industry we personally interact with.. We're all absolutely fucked.
Think of early access messes as just another genre, like first-person shooters, MMOs, sports games, or whatever else. While you're at it, think of mobile cash grabs as another genre, too. Just because someone found a new genre that can make a lot of money doesn't mean that the old ones are all going away.
To get money from people who want a good quality MMO, you have to provide one. No amount of mobile cash grabs, early access messes, or other games that are clearly of the wrong genre can get that money, any more than you could hope to claim that market by selling car tires, potato chips, or airplane tickets.
What other customers do does affect what happens to you.
I believe, I was only pigeon-holing myself into the EA bubble. Because with EA I truly don't think what other customers do should affect you. However, I failed to see the bigger picture in terms of cash shops and/or changing markets.
So thanks for the corrections.
On to another point. It is capitalism, adapt or continue complaining.
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
You go down to the store and see a game that interests you. You take it to the sales counter and ring it up. You head home, install it, proceed to hate the game because it's not what you expected or plays like crap on your machine. The only way you could get a refund was if the game was still in it's original packaging, with your original receipt in hand, and often times only a store credit not an actual, in your hand, cash refund.
If the seal of the game packaging was broken, you could exchange it for another copy of said game if you could convince them that the game was defective... scratched disc, something physically evident. You could not play buyer's remorse and get your money back because you didn't like the game.
Now in regards to the games themselves... back in the day, if it wasn't sitting on some shelf to be purchased, it didn't exist. There wasn't this anyone and everyone can be a tester crap... these people were paid employees under tight NDA agreements and were tasked specifically with HOW to test the game... NOT TO PLAY GAMES. The idea was to keep a tight lid on the idea, design, gameplay et al because they didn't want their competitor copying their idea or beating them to the market.
So now you have all this transparency which has given you the opportunity to see into the egg just as the sperm penetrates the outer egg. You get to get your panties all worked up about a game that isn't slated to ship for another 5-8 years. Yes, isn't it great to know what's in the pipeline that far into the future!
Now because everyone is pissing and moaning about a game that isn't due to ship for like a decade, they decide, aw hell, let them play the first attempts at it now. They'll probably even pay for the privilege because they are so damn desperate. Mind you, people survived just fine in the 1980's not knowing about a game until it was actually on the shelf. So they weren't hounding developers for a crack at the game before anyone else.
So who really should be to blame for this crap? Look in the mirror. If you ever played a game that was in an alpha or beta state... you are to blame. If you ever paid to get early access to a game... you are to blame. If you ever posted on some gaming forum crying about the release date of a game... you are to blame. Now it's time for you to accept the fact that you have to live with the consequences of your impatience. Because impatience is what put all this into motion.
While I agree with you 100%, I am not to blame for this crap..
A raise of hands.. who else can say the same?
Whatever the developer wants it do be. Frankly gamers have become so sensitive, that publishers are probably pretty close "gagging" developers from social media.
If you don't like the EA style of "lol whatever" or "we actually laugh at our customers". You could go to something a bit more middle ground like Blizzard (or maybe a year or three ago), where you'll have devs on "babysitting" duty with the community.
Though if you really care about this you should looking at other developers that are smaller and probably a little hungry (whether it's monetary or for passion recognition). X4 from EgoSoft has been brilliantly fixing their bugs on their newest release, though for "average play" it released fine (I was at like 5 hours in in the first week, while other's in the community were 50+ and finding out the economy breaks in long playthroughs AND they fixed that in the first month of release). Oxygen Not Included from Klei has had some of their best ideas "seeded" from player wishes. Other devs like Zachtronics, while they don't seem super active (in speaking) they seem to have a nice mutualism with their community (both very loyal to each other).
Whatever Australia and Europe demand. The US govt. doesn't care, and others likely won't matter enough to the bottom line.
Frankly I treat a game purchase like a theater ticket. Most theaters actually do have a refund policy, you just need to leave the movie soon enough, and it's mostly just to get you through concessions again in 20-30 mins when your next movie starts (Read: a good will policy, that's kind of self serving). So pretty much whatever the store wants it to be, if you don't like Bethesda's store refund policy don't use it (I imagine Discord and Epic will be matching or beating steam eventually).
Steve Jobs has a few fun quotes along the lines of "Whatever you measure, is eventually going to be what's sitting in on meetings".
And frankly publishers have gotten really good at counting money, tax evasion, measuring play time, how marketing affects sales, and the effects of psychology on the gamer spend. And frankly those things are VERY easy to measure, while things like gameplay/fun/similar are only measured at a handful of silly game award shows.
So the meetings that matter have "accountants", "lawyers", "marketing", "psychologists", and "the shared devs that do backend work for all the games"...
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
With Early Access: Players are willing to Pay for it, so, I can't really fault a company for selling it to them. I don't know WHY players are willing to pay for it, but they are, so, again, I can't blame a company for selling it to them.
I give that one up to "A fool and their money are soon parted"
With Cash Shops and DLC's, that is simply an issue that some players felt that they should get these things for free playing the game, which let be real, the whole point of games was to keep player grinding for months on end for these items to keep them paying the sub fee. With the rise of Free to Play, and thus the lack of a sub fee, there is no reason for a company to keep players grinding forever, and thus, in lieu of the Sub you have a cash shop.
They need a way to keep the money coming in, Subs Failed, they need to find another away, and that worked. Get over it.
As long as they upheld their end, Even if you do not like it, or it was not what you imagined, that does not mean it was not what they said it would be.
So, personally I don't see a problem with the current trend beyond people getting upset that reality did not match their expectations.. and that is not something a company can fix.. and if they could.. would you really want them to?