Email: Really Capcom?

http://dvice.com/archives/2011/06/capcom-tries-to.php

Things are just getting completely ridiculous. Every bit of my common sense says this won’t catch on, yet I know the industry is so shoved up their own ass lately that I bet it will. Regardless of consumer reaction and the increase in piracy it will cause. It’s as if these companies do things with the premise that it’s inevitable that everyone will buy their game regardless of anything. The only way this could work is if we were robots that consumed products as if on an assembly line with no choice or thoughts otherwise.

Are they really so scared?

They’re not scared. It is that they think they know so much that isn’t so.

This is typical industry mindset at work. Anyone who is a gamer knows you don’t do this. Game developers, who are doing their job because they love games, know you don’t do this.

We talk about what companies should do and shouldn’t do, but the rules are extremely simple.

Create customers.

Keep customers coming back for more.

And create more customers.

That’s it. Those are the rules that must be followed. Everything must be bended to do those things. Within those rules, they can do whatever they want. A game developer can do whatever he wants… so long as it creates customers and keeps them. Industry can charge $100 a game, if they want, so long as it creates customers and keeps them.

It seems that the cause of these situations like Capcom has is how the Game Industry is intentionally trying to be out of touch with their customers, with gamers. They should try to be in touch as much as possible. There is a fast growing company called Carbonite that sells data retrieval for computers. Every week, the top executive for the company has to answer calls from customers for a couple of hours. Most executives would never do this. They would find the job a ‘waste of time’ and ‘demeaning’. They also don’t want to do it (but who does?). But doing it keeps the executive humbled (which can save millions if not billions of dollars), it keeps him realizing that the customer is the true boss he works for, and it keeps the executive up to date on to what customers are complaining about. These executives usually read a report written by someone else. But it is totally different actually talking to the customers.

In the old days before the ‘Game Industry’, there was no wall between the gamer and those who made games. I can understand why there is a wall today because of legal concerns, but it is extraordinarily important to stay in touch with the market.