Efrit_ said:
In recent times, I've started to see an increase in gamers whom believe they are owed something by the various Game Developers in the industry. Am I wrong to think that we are only owed the money we spend on the games we buy? I don't mean it in the sense that "If I don't get 60 bucks worth of entertainment out of this, I will lynch somebody!", I mean it in "Look, I know you tried, but if your game doesn't live up to the money I spent or isn't a good game, I won't be amused".
If you ask me, the simple-minded way of entitlement that seems to be occurring in the new generation of gamers, is simply harmful to the development process of video games and may have the potential as to hurt gaming in general. No company should pander to the consumer, I'm not saying they should ignore them, just that they shouldn't be forced to follow the dictations of people who, generally, don't know how to make a good game.
What do you all think?
~Efrit
I don't think it's the new generation of gamers feeling entitled. I think it's more a backlash to the behavior of the industry.
It's a multifaceted issue.
#1: It's important to note that the gaming industry has changed since the previous generations. While it was always about making a profit, it's turned into a situation where profit is the ONLY goal, and that leads to it seeping into every aspect of game design, leading to a lot of soulless products that are little more than the results of a "paint by numbers" approach to committee based game design.
On top of the current approach to making games, you have penny pinchers trying to find a way to get people to charge people more and more money for the same basic product. The increasing attitude is "why do I want to provide something for people that they aren't paying for?" and "why shouldn't I find a way to make the most money possible out of the same amount of work?". This is what leads to things like the major rush on paid DLC, and the transition of MMOs from subscription based services to a "free to play" model, where you actually wind up paying MORE to seriously play the game through item shops and microtransactions than you would through a subscription.
There is also the problem with increasingly deceptive marketing practices by the gaming industry. This involves things like buying reviewers (or the sites that employ them), padding up metacritic ratings, and similar things... but also the simple fact that game developers demand a "leap of faith" on the part of the consumers. It's one of the few products that is expensive, effectively unreturnable, and where you have no idea what your actually going to be getting until you actually pay the money and try and play the game. Screenshots, videos, and even playable demos, do not nessicarly have any paticular relevency to what the product is actually like. Hence why there have been some people saying that there needs to be a "Lemon Law" in this industry. A company that knowingly produces a turd, can polish up the advertising, and still have a chance of making a return on their investment (or just reducing the losses) at the expense of the customers due to the way the video game business works (especially digitally), unlike other products where you can return the item to the store as being a piece of crap, get your money back, and ultimatly the retailer is going to force the producer to buy back the crappy product. Your typical consumer doesn't have much power to get justice from a big company, but another big company does, and that's how most businesses are kept in line. Video games doesn't have that policy. If say a car company produces a crappy car, it becomes known to the consumers, the cars get returned to the dealers, and the dealers don't eat the loss, they force the car company to buy back/take a return of the inventory. Things like this don't happen that often because the laws keep things fairly honest, with the video game industry... well we've all been saddled with some utterly horrible games that were nothing like was promised, or might not even work properly.
Many of these points have even been mentioned in articles here on The Escapist (and this is generally a pro-industry site).
#2: A seperate point is that the whole "we don't owe you anything" attitude.
One big conflict with the big business of gaming right now is that the soulless corperate monsters feel that they are entitled to do whatever they want to the consumer base, and exploit people however they want. Now that they are established and sitting on top of piles of money, it's easy to say "well, if you don't like it, don't buy our products anymore" while constantly gouging the consumers and putting out the least effort for the biggest returns.
A lot of kids, the new generation of gamers, help reinforce this, because from their perspective they can't see why a big business should feel any kind of obligation to some 30 to 40 year old nerd who calls it out. I think this comes from both a lack of perspective, and also from just not having been following the industry very long.
It's like with a rock band, you get fans who find out about a band, follow it around from club to club, donate money, buy overpriced merch, and maybe even help cover hotel rooms, find gigs, or heck (cynically) buy their drugs. As a result of the fans keeping the band alive so the members can actually dedicate themselves to the music they are making, and everyone likes... as opposed to them only being able to do this part time. Due to the support of the fans the band lasts long enough to get noticed, it lands some record/radio play deals, goes on tour, gets noticed, and then decides all it cares about is making increasingly huge piles of money and changes it's entire show, style, and image to be more friendly to the mainstream market. The guys who supported that band sit there and go "Hey, wait a second, this is NOT why we made you", and the band quintessentially responds "You didn't make us, we don't owe you anything". Heck... people make movies about this kind of thing since it happens with some frequency in that industry, and it's also why the few musicians who manage to become superstars and refuse to sell out are a big deal.
With the gaming industry, it's very similar. The video game industry was NOT always this big, and a lot of the big developers got that way due to fan support. A lot of people did things like head out to buy multiple copies of games in order to support a lot of what are now big developers/publishers. You'd be shocked at how many copies of the same game I've purchused over the years for that reason for example. We fans did a lot to keep this fledgeling industry alive and help support it, so as a result when say RPG fans wind up getting neglected, or when a lot of us 30-40 somethings are treated with contempt it burns because a lot of these big companies would never have gotten to where they are without us. Thus selling out entirely to the younger/newer generatin of gamers and producing things entirely for the mass market, is an insult to the people who literally made them.
Don't misunderstand this however, nobody has ever said that a game company, or rock band, can't produce things for the mass market. The issue is when that is all that the people in question want to produce, because doing things for their core fans that made them, doesn't see as big of a return. After all if you can spend say 200 million dollars and make 250 million dollars (50 million in profit) why do that when you can spend 20 million and make 200 million dollars in profit? Smart business, but it's neither an artistic attitude, nor why people rallied to their support to begin with. "Entitled" fans are rarely demanding anything that would actually result in an overall loss, but rather things that simply would not generate as much profit and growth as the corperate mentalities might like. It's like a band deciding that soulless teenpop is going to be all that they produce, because doing darker, edgier, ballads is going to hit less of an audience, and isn't going to be a easy to merchandize or sell usage rights to for pimping products and the like.
