Cliff Bleszinski: Vote With Your Dollars 369
silentbrad writes "Cliff Bleszinski, formerly of Epic Games, posted a blog entry titled 'Nickels, dimes, and quarters' yesterday, advocating that gamers dissatisfied with the current trend toward DLC and microtransactions should vote with their wallets. Quoting: 'The video game industry is just that. An industry. Which means that it exists in a capitalistic world. You know, a free market. A place where you're welcome to spend your money on whatever you please or to refrain from spending that money. ... Adjusted for inflation, your average video game is actually cheaper than it ever has been. Never mind the ratio of the hours of joy you get from a game per dollar compared to film. To produce a high quality game it takes tens of millions of dollars, and when you add in marketing that can get up to 100+ million. ... I've seen a lot of comments online about microtransactions. They're a dirty word lately, it seems. Gamers are upset that publishers/developers are "nickel and diming them." They're raging at "big and evil corporations who are clueless and trying to steal their money." I'm going to come right out and say it. I'm tired of EA being seen as "the bad guy." I think it's bulls*** that EA has the 'scumbag EA' memes on Reddit and that Good Guy Valve can Do No Wrong. ... If you don't like EA, don't buy their games. If you don't like their microtransactions, don't spend money on them. It's that simple. ... The market as I have previously stated is in such a sense of turmoil that the old business model is either evolving, growing, or dying. No one really knows. "Free to play" aka "Free to spend 4 grand on it" is here to stay, like it or not. ... People like to act like we should go back to "the good ol' days" before microtransactions but they forget that arcades were the original change munchers. Those games were designed to make you lose so that you had to keep spending money on them. Ask any of the old Midway vets about their design techniques. The second to last boss in Mortal Kombat 2 was harder than the last boss, because when you see the last boss that's sometimes enough for a gamer. ... If you don't like the games, or the sales techniques, don't spend your money on them. You vote with your dollars.'"
Vote with your dollars, complain with your mouth (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, we can vote with our dollars, and we do. At the same time, we can freely complain about EA adding micro transactions, or any/all forms of DRM.
If you have noticed, if enough customers complain about something, sometimes, things change. So asking us to just vote with our dollars is asking us to reduce our potential power. So if you don't like EA's microtransactions, or any form of always on DRM, then boycott them, AND complain about it verbosely everywhere you want to.
Re:wait what? (Score:2, Informative)
False. That stuff was either put into expansion packs or packed into a sequel. Extra content at no charge has always been the exception, not the rule. The only thing new about DLC is the delivery mechanism.
It's already happening (Score:4, Informative)
Simply put, customers already are voting with their wallets.
How's [gamasutra.com] that [forbes.com] working [gengame.net] out [gamesindustry.biz] for [cnn.com] you? [bgr.com]
Re:Exactly (Score:4, Informative)
For that matter, with the PS4 not being compatible with the PS3 (much less the PS2) Sony won't be getting any of my gaming money either. When a new console design treats my existing game library as if it's irrelevant, I'm going to ignore the new console design
I wish you had put that further up in your comment so I could have known to stop reading sooner. Do you know how consoles preserve backwards compatibility without emulation, which as we've seen with the 360, doesn't always work well? They have to include legacy chips on the board and switch to legacy mode for previous generation games. That costs money and requires engineering. The PS4 is going to be x86 based, whereas the PS3 is not, so that would lead to even more difficulties.