deathjavu said:
SMBC has it covered, as it so often does.
Marketers have become extremely adept at exploiting psychological holes in human minds, and this is one of em.
People are happy when a bad thing is given to them, then taken away, even when the bad thing didn't need to be there in the first place.
^I knew about that many years back.
It's why I don't immediately forgive companies; especially for shit they knew well in advance that would go fucking wrong.
Because a lot of these things are planned. Unfortunately the public at large has the attention span of a goldfish so the only transgressions they remember seem to be those most recently topical. I do things differently. I measure a company's long term behavior to see if they're actually changing, or if they're just salving the raw spots.
Exploiting behavioral psychology like this is unpleasantly common.
Like last year with Sim City.
The game was rendered unplayable for most for reasons so many predicted (Always Online). Reasons that EA promised to address in advance. And when it inevitably failed, EA caved and put forth a mea culpa.
But instead of offering refunds for a product that didn't fucking work because of problems THEY DELIBERATELY CREATED (knowing full well the problems in advance and not doing what they promised is quite deliberate), they offered free games on Origin to everyone who purchased Sim City as an apology.
Business wise, this makes the most sense, because proper refunds would result in a "hard loss" of revenue, while giving away free games only results in "potential loss" (we can't assume everyone wanted the games offered normally).
And when I pointed this out, some folks jabbed me for it.
"Oh, but it's a nice gesture. These are full priced games EA is giving away for free! Why are you so cynical?"
And to those people I say: "Congrats, if you really believe that, you just got played."
By accepting their token apology on the spot you've already committed yourself to accepting their fuckup; thus negating any pressure on your part to force a solution to said fuckup. Even worse, the free games were only offered via Origin; so even their fuckup was leveraged into a means of furthering user attachment to their system.
The same system that failed in the first place.
So in the end, EA still makes money and the market is one game built on shitty practices wealthier.
EA isn't the only company to pull that. Back when PSN was breached (in one of the largest information breaches in history) Sony pulled the same gambit, and it worked.
All of this can be mitigated in the market if consumers would wise up a bit and stop doing business with these jackals.
At least enough to make them sweat a bit.
Bad Jim said:
Even worse is the idea that we should want to decrease the amount of time we spend playing a game we paid for. Shouldn't we instead buy missions, map packs etc that increase our playing time? More money = more hours of fun?
Depends. How is the content structured? For that matter, how is the game structured?
One of the horrible truths of the video game market is that it's the ONLY market (I know of anyway) where people will gladly pay to be deliberately inconvenienced.
Many then fool themselves into calling it "challenge" to rationalize what a colossal waste of time and money it is.
MMOs, F2P games and "Freemium" games all exploit shit like grind, "stamina", and other time wasting measures to deliberately inconvenience the player so they can either sell convenience or capitalize further on stretched playtime for more subscriptions and pay gates.