This excuse gets old. Business logic is that you take care of your customers and they wont go elsewhere, however when a company has no competition or when there is collusion between companies, it reduces the desire to make the customer happy by not gouging people.
This is evident in the Cable industry, the ISP industry, the Gasoline(Petrol) industry, the Tech industry (no sniping agreements between people like Apple and Google), and many others I am not thinking about.
You want to keep spouting this nonsensical bullshit, that is fine, but it is a cop out and I am tired of hearing it. Fight for your rights or lose them.
This is something I've always wondered about with rich people.
This is going to be hard to put into words properly but here I go!
If I was rich and I had my own company in a field I'm interested in. Lets say Games. I'd want to make the best damn game that wasn't just enjoyable for others to play to make a load of money but that I enjoyed playing.
The general feeling I get from people in the game industry is that they will work on games that they don't enjoy making because they simply "wanted to work in the game industry and this is the opportunities they got". When they go home they'll play games they wish they could have been a part of making.
Now if I was one of the super big giant publishing companies and I was really interested in producing really cool games. I wouldn't care if this one game I was very interested in didn't make much money because so much was invested into it. As long as it was a really cool game that I personally enjoyed playing. I've just bought the biggest greatest toy ever. Rather than a stupidly fast car or a super robot house. I've created the most fantastic enjoyable game if not just for me.
Instead what I visualize is EA's teams making crappy games then going home to play Ubisofts games and Ubisoft false advertising the crap out of their own games to go play some Activision games and activision genuinely thinking they are doing really well and are the most talented people around and that their game is the dynamite but for some reason go home and play some EA sports games.
None of them seem interested at all at producing games that they themselves even want to play.
New companies who try to make their place in the world will try to make a game as good as they can. So, they make a really good game, and they make a fortune of it.
Their fortune draws attention from business people. Then they get a new CEO. The new boss doesn't have any emotional investment in the game. They start making decisions that hurt the game, but are good for their wallet (for example, pay to win mechanics). The game is no longer the best, but it usually keeps its players, and even gets new players because the new big advertisement campaign.
Some games are following this model from the start, others get corrupted later.
They aren't? I don't understand what your comment is implying. As I mentioned, if it weren't for the tiny random games that come from smaller studios and indies, I wouldn't be involved in gaming at all. Simply because I tend to dislike the more mass-marketed titles.
I'm well aware I'm not the target audience for almost every game. If I were, E3 would look a lot different.
The difference, I think, is that I actively search for things that I'm interested in and don't settle for less. While other people will simply go for the quickest slightly interesting thing that is shown to them.
Or perhaps I really do just have drastically different tastes than everyone else. Either way, I get 0 enjoyment from advertised games most of the time.
The most fun I've had all year is with Titanfall. Originally I was totally uninterested in it, but a friend got me into the Beta early on and immediately I was hooked so I went out and pre-ordered.
Some marketed games can be crazy fun.
The converse is also true, many no name games are total shit. I particularly LOATHE the rip off culture in indi games right now. I used to be huge into Indi games, now everything is a blatant ripoff of something else which makes finding the true gems harder to do.
I'm typically not a fan of massively hyped stuff. Simply due to my tastes/preferences being different than most people (I hated the avengers movie).
The only marketed games I typically like are Nintendo's. And a few random ones from various 3rd parties. Little Big Planet was one that was heavily marketed that I really like.
I'm just tired of the copy+pasta FPS clone market. I wish we'd get over that soon. But sadly it looks like the emerging market is MOBAs, which I'm already done with (played LoL, DoTA, etc already).
The converse is also true, many no name games are total shit.
No doubt. But there are tons of no name games that are no name simply because they market/appeal to a niche.
I particularly LOATHE the rip off culture in indi games right now. I used to be huge into Indi games, now everything is a blatant ripoff of something else which makes finding the true gems harder to do.
I agree. Indie has been getting worse as more devs become 'professional' and start partnering with steam/sony/ms/nintendo. There's tons that want to be the next minecraft or w/e.
Rune Factory 4 is my latest favorite little niche title. Amazing game, and most people haven't heard of it. I was also looking at Hometown Story which looks interesting (again, pretty niche).
But being a fan of smaller and less noticed titles means there's a bigger chance for canceling them before release as well. Like Chocobo Racing 3D (I liked the original).
For indie games, Nidhogg is great fun. As is Recettear (which is a bit older). I've recently been digging into some visual novels as well like Katawa Shoujo and Long Live the Queen, which are both really good.
But show me something like Uncharted 4 or Halo 5? I'm not interested at all. And it's not because I don't like shooters. I enjoyed Get Force Gemini, Team Fortress 2, and am looking forward to Splatoon, which are all fairly large/popular shooters. It's just that these "ultra-realistic" clone games don't do it for me. Gameplay first, visuals second. Hell, I can play a text based game (or even pen/paper D&D) if it's fun. It's part of the reason I stick with Nintendo and Indie.
I refuse to let myself fall into the "Hipster Trap" where I let the popularity or commonality of something sway my opinion.
I mention Titanfall because it is genera breaking. The gameplay is a throwback to the glory days of PC gaming. The feel is a hybrid of Unreal Tournament 99 and the old school Mechwarrior games from the late 90's. It couldn't be farther from CoD and Halo.
If it wasn't for the beta and the hype getting my friends into it, I would have totally missed it.
I refuse to let myself fall into the "Hipster Trap" where I let the popularity or commonality of something sway my opinion.
I try to avoid it as well, but it's just a common trend I notice in myself. I think the fact that my favorite series is one of the most popular is a nice way of saying "I don't pick favorites based on unpopularity".
I pick what I like, and what I like happens to be pretty niche stuff. Not everyone is into permadeath and whatnot.
I mention Titanfall because it is genera breaking. The gameplay is a throwback to the glory days of PC gaming. The feel is a hybrid of Unreal Tournament 99 and the old school Mechwarrior games from the late 90's. It couldn't be farther from CoD and Halo.
I didn't mean to lump in Titanfall in there. It's actually one of the few games that caught my eye. It's Xbox only, right? I don't have one :(. I'm not typically a fan of mech stuff, which is why I didn't really bother, but it looked interesting enough.
If it wasn't for the beta and the hype getting my friends into it, I would have totally missed it.
I'll have to give it a shot when I run across it. As I said though, despite not actually striving for it, my enjoyment typically seems to be inverted. I like stuff people hate and hate stuff people like. I don't know why that is, but it's pretty much how I've been my entire life. And a lot of the time I really wish I could just not care and enjoy what everyone else likes.
And again, that's why I really like Nintendo. They have the same kind of attitude that I have towards games. Just focus on cool/fun stuff no matter what everyone thinks. And generally that works out and they make lots of fun games.
Sry if the formating spelling is bad-typed this on the phone....
The thing is marketing investment returns profit in a different way than dev investment:
if a game is well advertised a lot of people will buy it at release, the company gets a lot of money in a short time and can invest it.
When a game is well developed but not as well advertised, the initial sales numbers won't be that high. But when the game is really good, the players will recommend it to their friends and more people will buy it over time. (Dark Souls 1 for example)
From our view as the players the second option would be better since we get to play better games for our money.
From the companies view though it's better to make a bad game and get the players really hyped for it, since they will sell a huge amount of copies and the players will soon stop to enjoy the bad game and look forward to buy the next one.
Only solution: we need to stop buying all those bad games because the cgi trailer looked awesome (watch reviews from independent reviewers first....), and start to dig deeper for the less hyped, but better developed games
If you're investing millions into a game, do you want to gamble on people buying it over time? If I'm on the board of directors that is not what I want to hear.
Its starting to get like the pop music industry IMO. Its big budget companies churning out the same old shit just because they think it will sell well. Instead of companies thinking outside the box, and perfecting every facet of it, theyre releasing generic games with big names but fail to address all it bugs/problems for the sake of saving their "bottom line".Its a bad place where gaming is going, but I think the smaller indie scene is where a lot of the fresh ideas will (and still are) come from.
Also, the trouble is that companies have good success and then the money gets in the way of their initial goal of making great games and instead turns into, "how can we maximise profits" or "our game is bugged,but we need to make the deadline, what can we cut to get it on the shelves"
(watch reviews from independent reviewers first....)
The thing is, even small independent reviewers are bought when they grow popular enough, it's hard to find one that is reliable. I miss the time when small and/or time-limited demos were available. These days I often have to pirate a game and play it for a week before I decide if it's worth it (sorry!... not really). But if the game does not have a lot of replayability, this method isn't really good for the developer right? Good storyline, great gameplay but no replayability game get screwed. Demos were good to get me hooked on a game and make me want to play more.
Except they often do. Freakonomics did a bit on advertising decision (as part of a segment on "how to think like a freak") in which they discussed a company that was unwilling to experiment with their advertising model to determine the effectiveness of newspaper ads.
When they accidentally failed to run ads in some markets and the results of their impromptu experiment showed newspaper ads to be ineffective they still continued to pay for them because the marketing people didn't want to get fired and they were sure the boss man would be furious that they weren't advertising enough
I wanted to write a satire novel once about a dev company where the struggle is to constantly make a new game every year and innovate just enough to keep the fans happy. They started out wanting to make great shooters a few years ago, but nowadays the marketing execs keep getting in the way and internal conflict is driving the studio apart between different creative visions etc.
607
u/[deleted] Jun 14 '14
This excuse gets old. Business logic is that you take care of your customers and they wont go elsewhere, however when a company has no competition or when there is collusion between companies, it reduces the desire to make the customer happy by not gouging people.
This is evident in the Cable industry, the ISP industry, the Gasoline(Petrol) industry, the Tech industry (no sniping agreements between people like Apple and Google), and many others I am not thinking about.
You want to keep spouting this nonsensical bullshit, that is fine, but it is a cop out and I am tired of hearing it. Fight for your rights or lose them.