AnarchistAbe said:
ResonanceSD said:
For the most part, no. The concerns are legitimate. People see gamers acting like consumers of any other product, and ddcide that they're all self-entitled little twerps.
Name me one other product where the consumers are as vocal and obnoxious as gaming.
The issue with that is that no other products out there are quite like video games. You don't get people complaining to this magnitude about movies because they go see them for about $10, and after spending two hours they can go home and relax. If they didn't like it then they're out $10. If they did, then it's awesome. To add on to that, reviews of movies are considerably more accurate than those of video games. Part of that is because they're only a few hours long at most, and everyone sees the same thing. Another part is that movie reviewers don't have to worry about being put on a publisher's shitlist and not being allowed to see the movie beforehand in order to write a review on it.
Clothes can be bought and returned if something is wrong with them, and you can see them and try them on in the store. Computers have specific specs and warranties - if something goes wrong you can get it fixed or returned. Books have reviews on the back and are relatively cheap, plus tend to be much better written than video games. And with a few exceptions they have almost zero hype to live up to because they don't need to be commercialized.
Thinking about it carefully, the two products that I see being most similar to video games are cars and houses. Cars because once you pay for it and drive it off the lot, with very few exceptions, it's yours and the price immediately drops. Houses because once you buy it, again, it's yours and you can't exactly "return" it. In both cases, however, you get to see the product before you purchase it. Cars can be test driven, houses walked through, and you can get reports on the histories of both for relatively cheap. Games don't come with any of that. The most you'll get out of a game is a demo, but once you buy it, with few exceptions, it's yours and the price immediately drops. Not only that, but companies are starting to require that you pre-order in order to get certain things and bonuses, meaning if the game is horrible then who cares, because they've already got your money. No other industry does that. Apple products get a lot of pre-orders, but they do so because they're generally decent products.
So, for a game that's been hyped up, and requires you to pre-order it in order to get certain bonuses or missions or whatever, it's perfectly legitimate for gamers to expect something good out of it. And when the company doesn't deliver, the only thing we can do, short of not purchasing any other games they put out, is to voice our concerns. Simply not buying another product form that company is marginally effective at best because they could decide not to make any more games, or that their next game is going to be amazing. Either way they already have our money, so their worries about us saying we're not going to buy another game are marginal at best.
Part of the problem is that sometimes when we voice those concerns we end up being loud and obnoxious. That's not at all limited to the video game industry though. If you've ever worked in a customer service call center you'll find out extremely quickly that there are people like that in every industry that complain about everything, and often extremely loudly with little to no point behind the complaints. In fact, gamers tend to be much more civil and, in all reality, validated in their complaints than the consumers from most other industries. We just don't see the people from other industries because those are usually done behind closed doors to customer service faculty, and from there their problem is solved relatively quickly and they can move on. Games can't do that because they're an art form, and changing them requires quite a bit of collaborative effort and money.
So, do I think gamers are entitled? Not at all. We're using the resources we have to voice our opinions, often loudly, but also because the current design of the industry prevents us from doing anything else about it. There are things that could be done to fix this, but I don't see any of them happening any time soon, which means we'll have to continue to use our resources and, hopefully, our wallets to help improve the industry as a whole.
TL;DR: No, gamers aren't entitled. Other industries provide routes for complaints to go through and, often, quick fixes of said complaints. We pay $60 for a product that could be good or bad, but that, with very few exceptions, can't be returned or changed in many ways without costing the publishers more money and time. Our "whining" is the only way for gamers at the moment to try and get companies to make better games in the future.
