Child's Play Halts Retake Mass Effect Donation Drive

[AuronFtw]

So a poorly-worded and poorly-explained charity drive gets donations from people who think it's actually for something else, and ya'll are mad that those people wanted their money back?

What the hell does "retake mass effect 3" have to do with children's charity? It's a pretty easy mistake to make considering the blatantly poor advertising.

 

[Kashrlyyk]

...
Making anonymous donations would help the charity, but not draw their fanbase to child's play (and theirs is a lot bigger, no matter when child's play was founded)....

There are other ways to make your fanbase aware of that which doesn't involve blatantly obvious advertising and you know it. In fact there are ways for Child's Play to draw attention towards it without talking to video game companies at all! I am sure Gaming magazines would have loved to report about the charity and its successes.

So yeah nothing....

 

[Kashrlyyk]

I actually think that this is pretty reasonable and it explains why getting a refund is actually justifiable:

We'll just have to disagree on this one. I sit on two non-profit boards. If we were to ask a group to NOT raise funds for us, we would at the same time return anything they had already brought in.

Because the only time we would make such a request would be if the group raising the funds were not in line with our morals/values.

Otherwise, we'd be thankful for the money.

You can accept funds without it being interpreted as support for a cause. The only cause non-profits support is the one in their mission statement.

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/355/index/9845819/229#10481951

http://clancop.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/hold-the-line-using-a-charity-as-a-shield/

 

[4173]

It's the difference of "donated by" and "donate to."


"Support a charity in order to get this item donated by company" does give that company some PR, but it gets that PR from the donation. They aren't directly saying anything, the charity is, and the company gets a little push in a symbiotic way. The cause remains the charity, the item is a reward or incentive. You could donate, receive the item and throw it in the trash or give it away and never support the donating company.


"Give money to a charity in order to support an different agenda" is ongoing. It implies a relationship, because of the normal form of that kind of phrasing, i.e. "give money to cancer research in order to fight cancer." If someone had said, "wear a yellow shirt to support changing ME3's ending," it co-opts yellow shirts. Unfortunately, "donate money to support changing the ending" co-opts the donation/charity in the same way.



If Bioware was saying, "donate to a charity and we'll make a new ending," that would be a real fuzzy grey area. On the one hand, it places a lot more focus or emphasis on Bioware than with a traditional donation. On the other hand, one might argue Bioware has donated its employees time and expertise.

 

[mew4ever23]

Honestly, I have been opposed to the Retake Mass Effect thing from the beginning. The premise is inherently flawed - Donating to Child's Play is nice, yes. But how exactly is that going to get Bioware to release a new ending? The whole demanding a new ending thing, by the way, pisses me off, and I'll get to that in a minute, but first:

[Child's Play] has been asked what the goal is, and how much they need to raise in order to get the ending produced. We've also been contacted by PayPal due to a high number of people asking for their donations back. This is in addition to readers who simply couldn't understand how this was connected to Child's Play's mission. We were dealing with a lot of very confused people, more every day, and that told us we had a problem.

THIS IS ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING! We're trying to get away from the hopeless violent loser gamer stigma, but it seems the community trips us up every fucking time! Child's Play has been the best thing gaming as a whole has EVER done, and here some people use it to ***** about ONE AAA game's supposedly sub-par ending.

Where does this sense of entitlement come from? WHERE!? People, you do not get to demand a new ending to a story because you didn't like it. This is the story that the storyteller has chosen to tell, and even as interactive as the story was, it is still their story.

Anyone remember this happening with a book? No.
How about film? Nope.
What about a TV series? Nope again.

Every other creative medium has thrown its share of bad endings, and gaming is the only one where campaigns and petitions crop up to change the ending. We need to show the world that we are bigger than this. That we can accept an ending and move on. Otherwise we are gonna show the world that we are immature losers addicted to mindless murder simulators.

 

[Kashrlyyk]

...
They tagged on a messeage that they couldn't hold to a charity, siphoning off support for their cause. That they couldn't stand in for.

This is the About part of the chip-in website:

The Retake Mass Effect - Child's Play donation drive is a community driven effort to bring positive attention to our petition for an alternate ending to the fantastic Mass Effect series. The Child's Play charity was chosen as a charity started by gamers to provide video games for the patients at Children's Hospitals all over the world.

We would like to dispel the perception that we are angry or entitled. We simply wish to express our hope that there could be a different direction for a series we have all grown to love.

Thank you for your interest in our project!

The bolded parts are the message that is not in line with a charity founded "to refute mainstream media's perception of gamers as violent and antisocial." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child's_Play_(charity)).

When you bid on a donation of signed games Child's play can stand in for it. Because they have been donated.
....

Bioware could have easily donated 10.000 dollar and probably that would have been more money than the auction raised. But instead they "sold" a newly released game with some gimmicks and made a big fat webpage about it.

Why the extra effort? Because it makes them more money than it costs them and much more money than was giving to the charity. If that wasn't the case, they would not have done it. Bioware is not interested in the charity only in the money they save by using that cheap advertising.

And the charity was fine with being used like that, but than it shuts down something that donated much more money to the charity than that Bioware PR stunt above? And you actually think THAT is ok?

mew4ever23, you should inform yourself before you talk shit like that, otherwise SHUT UP! People with your attitude are the biggest problem for gamers around the globe.

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

This whole thing is getting murkier by the minute.

I don't even know whose side I should be on. To me it seems like the REMA guys were just trying to channel disappointment (lets face it a lot of people hated the ME endings) into something positive and chose Child's Play as the obvious gamer charity choice.

I think it's as much fallacy that they were 'trying to use the charity as a shield' as PA were 'trying not to lose face with Bioware'

This entire debacle has just been crap really hasn't it. I blame the Reapers.

 

[Scrythe]

snip

Also, don't compare videogames to movies/books. Apples and oranges and such. Stop being so freaking rude.

As long as videogames are trying to be a storytelling medium, then they have every right to be compared to similar forms of entertainment.

This isn't apples and oranges, this is Granny Smith to McIntosh.

Not recognizing this fact is rude, and considering what particular community you're on, downright embarrassing.

 

[FinalHeart95]

Proof that people can be entitled pricks if they really want to be. While I know not EVERYONE donated out of utter nerd rage, and even the majority of those people probably didn't ask for refunds, the fact that the refund requests are prevalent enough to mention is quite disgusting.
Here's what I imagine, really:
"ME3SUCKSME3SUCKSGIVEMONEYGIVEMONEYSOTHEYLLCHANGETHEENDING"
"This is going to sick kids, not to change the ME3 ending."
"...BUTME3ENDING!!!"
"Sorry, you're confused."
"WHYDOKIDSNEEDMONEYANYWAYWHENTHEREAREIMPORTANTPROBLEMSLIKEMYME3ENDING?!?!GIVEMEMYMONEY!!!"

Honestly, that isn't even enough mockery.

 

[MiloP]

It seems misleading to continue to call it a demand when the petition at the core of the donation drive explicitly states as one of its points:

We believe:

* That it is the right of the writers and developers of the Mass Effect series to end that series however they see fit

I respectfully request that the ending of this article be altered

If that is TRULY what this group believed in, then they shouldn't have made group called Retake Mass Effect 3 in the bloody first place. It's a contradiction in terms right there. "We think BioWare have every right to do any ending we want, but we want to RETAKE IT." It's sounds like you're annexing a city-state for God's sake.

That's my biggest problem with this initiative. They're trying to banner it under a noble cause when really all it is is people going "WAH WAH WAH I DIDN'T LIKE IT IT CHANGE IT NOW". Hell, I would have MORE respect for the movement if the people in it would just admit this fact.

OT: "You have to agree with us, we donated to charity and everything!". That was the feeling I was getting from this whole drive from the beginning. Don't get me wrong, it's great and all, 80k for sick kids is a lovely thing. But I doubt it was entirely about the charity, y'know. It was just an easy way to get a butt-tonne of PR quickly, easily, and, when you spread the cost across all who donated, quite unexpensively.

I suppose I'm paraphrasing what Tycho said here, but if the drive isn't solely about raising money for charity, then it's already a bit morally questionable.

To me, any cause which needs to rely on easy PR from a charity drive, instead of the ACTUAL importance of it's cause...well, maybe the cause really isn't all that important.

 

[The Human Torch]

snip

Also, don't compare videogames to movies/books. Apples and oranges and such. Stop being so freaking rude.

As long as videogames are trying to be a storytelling medium, then they have every right to be compared to similar forms of entertainment.

This isn't apples and oranges, this is Granny Smith to McIntosh.

Not recognizing this fact is rude, and considering what particular community you're on, downright embarrassing.

Regardless of Mass Effect being art or not, of course things should be changed when customers are confronted with subpar quality like this. It's one thing if you knew that the ending sucked and you bought it anyway, but if you have no prior knowledge that it was going to be THAT bad, than you have a right to demand a change, or at least a refund (which only Amazon has been offering). Most stores won't take it back.

Art is not devoid of all critism, simply because it's art. In my city there was a lot of hubbub about a new statue coming that would be a dedication to large forest area's we have, and how they are supposed to be preserved forever. People liked that idea, so money was put aside for it (a large sum even), a committee erected to select an artist for it and the whole thing was under way.

One year and a whole lot of taxpayer money further; durving the unveiling, the statue was nothing more than two green pipes bent together at the end to represent a needle from a pine tree. NO ONE clapped and the same day a massive complaint register started to remove the statue and get the money back from the artist.

Two months later, statue removed, artist was sued to get the money back and everybody was happy that at least justice was served.

A player has every right to complain about an ending that is THIS bad. Especially because 95% of the game is actually good. The drop in quality is so obscene, it's not even funny anymore.

 

[likalaruku]

They really named their organization after a horror franchise about a doll who kills children?

 

[Sperium 3000]

*Sighs* I am an avid defender of the status of the game industry as art. I'm also an avid defender of the gaming community as a whole. Things like this whole fiasco just make that all the more difficult.

 

[The Human Torch]

Regardless of Mass Effect being art or not, of course things should be changed when customers are confronted with subpar quality like this. It's one thing if you knew that the ending sucked and you bought it anyway, but if you have no prior knowledge that it was going to be THAT bad, than you have a right to demand a change, or at least a refund (which only Amazon has been offering). Most stores won't take it back.

Here's the thing, no you don't. You already played through the entire game, you got your monies worth out of it. The game was functional throughout the entire thing, there was nothing preventing you from finishing. The only thing marring the end was the fact that you didn't like the ending.

I just recently saw The Hunger Games, I didn't like it, the direction was shotty, and the movie was overly-long and boring through most of it. Here's what I did, I got up, said it sucked to my friends and left. I didn't demand that they change it, I didn't demand a refund from the theatre. I didn't sign a petition for them to change the movie.

Well, maybe you just take everything in your stride, but I've seen a few shitty movies where I walked out and asked for my money back, and I got it back without a fuss.

It's not easy to change the ending of a movie, because it's quite final once it hits theaters. Maybe some things get changed/added with a blu-ray release, but besides George Lucas, there are not many directors who do change chunks of a movie.

A videogame is NOT a movie, it's an interactive, completely changable medium. Maybe during the SNES/Megadrive era we couldn't change diddly-squat, but with this fantastic thing we call the internet we can change things. Just look at the obscene amount of DLC that is out there.

Bioware CAN change Mass Effect. If they have any shred of decency they will. If not, they are just like any other asshole company out there, but you can't blame us for trying.

Ow, and I didn't play Mass Effect 3, I happened to bump into all this hubbub before I got around to it and I decided that it was enough for me to return the game (sealed) to the store where I got it.

I will rebuy it as soon alterations are made. If nothing is ever altered, then it will never be part of my videogame collection.

Captcha: easy as cake
Indeed.