At the end of the day my basic attitude is that nobody is doing it right, and that's pretty much the problem. It's largely a matter public relations, and the amount of scrutiny gamers expose them to. Pretty much every gaming company seems to be pretty bad if you look closely enough, and while it's easy to lionize some of the smaller and more independant seeming ones by focusing on their size and the positive things they do, it can be hard to overlook the negatives. Exceptions of course exist, but I'm not going to argue that.
To put things into perspective some of the companies like Atlus that seem to be being lionized, have long and very trouble histories with fans. Yes, they have released some very good niche RPGs, but they have also been involved in what seems to be overt racism at other times in determining why other titles wouldn't make it to the US. One big battle involving Atlus that I still have some hard feelings over that sort of epitomizes the problem was their promise to release "Soul Hackers" in the US and then backing out of it, then combining this with the censorship in the Persona games (entire sections missing from the first one), ane even the middle chapter of a trilogy missing. All of which took place with some very insulting justifications to fans when this was fairly new news (it's been a long time though). It can be said that Atlus DID eventually release a lot of the cut content, the missing chapter of the original trilogy, and even Soul Hackers is having a version released, BUT this all started to happen YEARS after these games were new, and more relevent. Mostly it's kind of a nostolgia trip, as you can see how a lot of those series progressed beyond the material we're just now getting. I theorize it's because a lot of this got old enough where the Japanese audience didn't care, combine with a demand for Atlus RPGs that was larger than it could meet, so it was time to throw the Gaijin a musty old bone.... at a premium rate no less, as your paying a ton of money for a PSP version of say "Innocent Sin" when you consider that it should arguably be a $6 PSone classic by now.
People like to lionize Valve in discussions like this, and I have to admit I like them too even if they don't develop in my generes of choice, but at the end of the day this is not a company without taint. As much as people want to, you can't seperate Valve from STEAM, you have to look at the hat debacle, the whole contreversy over "Left For Dead 2" and WHY that occured... in response to promises being made by Valve about the first game, which were not being kept by it's release. People do not like being lied to, the quality of a product or justifications for it's existance don't really matter when people feel deceived, and this is something people do not get. It's also why guys like Jim Sterling have done shows talking about the banality of the whole "companies exist to make money" defense, because this is the kind of situation where it occurs as fans try and justify the unjustifiable.
With Double Fine/Tim Schaefer, you might like their attitude, but at the same time it can be argued that they are a one trick pony that has been releasing mostly shovelware adventure games that have met with mixed commercial and critical success. Sure people will sit down and talk about how great and unfairly maligned games like "Psychonauts" were and get general approval, but as a general rule just about everything they have produced has been fairly mediocre when you get past the charm, and not generally successful. It's not like you have hordes of people lining up to tell you how wonderful "Costume Quest" or "Stacking" were, for every high review about "The Cave" (even if it was more Ron Gilberts thing) you have people talking about how it's basically a dumbed down retreat of "Maniac Mansion" where the central gimmick of 3 protaganists generally doesn't matter at all since it doesn't really alter the mechanics in the areas you play which tend to be very character-centric. You can't generally radically alter the events/solutions in say the Adventurer's pyramid by having say the Time Traveller as Opposed to the Hillbilly, since no matter who you have with you, the supporting characters get relagated to platform weighting duty. It's easy to call Double Fine charming, and like their style, but at the same time it's hard to really say they've had much in the way of monster successes. People also tend to forget the results of Tim's big AAA outing "Brutal Legend" which inspired a lot of hate because what was promoted as being a heavy metal themed sandbox game, wound up being both incredibly linear, and also almost entirely based around RTS mechanics... It has it's fans, but when rating Double Fine as "doing everything right", not really. Their response to the "Brutal Legend" reaction didn't exactly inspire me, especially seeing as it was fairly well justified, that was NOT the game I expected it to be either given what was said about it, and did feel an awful lot
like a bait and switch.
Now, before attack fans get on me, I'll say flat out I'm not going to debate the merits of any paticular company here, as that isn't the point of my tirade here. I'll even go so far as to say I personally like to use STEAM when it comes to digital distribution, I love what ATLUS RPGs make it to the US, and I've enjoyed most of Double Fine's games that I have played. The point here is simply to say that when you get down to it no company is really "doing it right" they all have negative and sleazy aspects to them, even the ones you want to love, it's just that as gamers we tend to not have very good memories of what has gone on before. Half of our problem is we pay too much attention to the here and now, and what shiny thing is beign waved in front of us, without bothering to consider patterns of behavior and how even the "good guys" aren't all that good from our pespective because even the Charming Double Fine is slavering over getting as much money out of your wallet as it can for as little as possible. As a result in the big picture we tend to keep getting screwed in the same ways, and inevitably wind up acting all surprised when we wind up getting stabbed in the back by some company we trusted, when really... as the industry is there are no good companies.
Hence why I tend to go off about needing to pretty much reform the entire industry, and gamers taking a stand (not that it's paicularly possible) against the whole bloody thing, accross the entire spectrum, with no exceptions. There is simply so much rot accross the board, even where you can't see it, that really the only option is to hope we can cause a money-deprived crash of the business asspects, and hope that with constant monitoring and hopefully organized consumer advocacy, it doesn't get to this level again.
Such are my thoughts. Some think that remaining peeved over things a company like Atlus did years ago is silly. I think it's silly to NOT remain peeved over it. Failing to remember things like that is exactly why they repete. I might love a lot of their games, but yeah... I do feel a bit insulted to have them selling a game they should have released in the PSone era today for $30, especially given the way they acted when they cancelled US release... and really attitude like that is hard to forget. I have a sort of "dark rockstar" view of them... I like their work, but at the end of the day the guy on stage is the worst kind of human there is. Their music might be great, but if they beat up groupies in their hotel room, and bounce in and out of rehab (good news I'm off the Booze... I'm back on the Coke though) every other month, I feel no contridiction when I refer to them personally as human waste material. Boo Hoo, rocker X ran some kid over with a car while stoned, he deserves to go to freaking jail, not receive a fan rally demanding leniency because he sings pretty. I think that's a reasonable analogy for my current attitude about the state of the game industry, and sadly, the exceptions (which doubtlessly exist) are so few and far between that they might as well not exist.
