Malstrom,
In response to your latest article about “gamers have too much power”, I’d like to offer up my theory:
The relationship between the gaming industry and gamers (especiallly the hardcore) is not that of customer/salesman. It is addict/dope pusher.
If you look at it from that point of view, the industry’s attitude toward gamers, and quite frankly, gamers’ responses to the industry, make a lot more sense.
You’ve covered the relationship between legitimate customers and legitimate businesses quite a bit, but let’s examine the relationship between addicts and pushers and see if there are any similarities to the gaming industry.
1. Addicts desire the product more than pushers want to sell it.
2. Pushers can sell whatever they want to addicts because the addict has a compulsion to buy that he can not overcome.
3. Pushers make sure their product is addictive, so as to create more addicts. Quality is not important as long as the product is addictive.
4. Pushers often offer a “first taste” of their product for free to get the addict hooked.
5. Pushers do not respect addicts; in fact, no one respects addicts.
6. Pushers determine the market, and can extract as much money as they see fit from the market, because of #1.
When you sum this up, I think it is clear how the gaming industry sees itself. And quite honestly, a lot of the hardcore do fit the bill as well. Remember the Modern Warfare 2 debacle where a group of gamers decided to boycott, only to end up buying the game Day 1? The industry does. And there’s the language of these guys. “We give you [x], be happy.” If I have to pay for it, you didn’t give it to me, dope pusher. It explains the ridiculous Mass Effect 3 debacle and many others. EA/Bioware know full well that these same complainers will line up to buy Dragon Age 3 and whatever else Day 1, coaxed by the vast unpaid PR arm of the industry, gaming “journalists”. Dragon Quest going MMO – showing some signs of life in the West and being a stable franchise wasn’t enough. Now they want us to pay $15 a month for a MMO everyone and his mother knows will be horrible so that we can bail out vanity project money-losers like Final Fantasy versus 13 (which is still
laughably exclusive to Sony after 6 years of flushed money because Nomura prefers Sony – not because of any business reason.) Though if Dragon Quest 10’s sliding position on Famitsu’s anticipation poll is any indication, even Japan’s gamer-addicts aren’t going for that one.
However, there is a fatal flaw. The Malstrom gamer is NOT an addict. He is not fooled. And he says “No” to drugs.
… and a small minority of hardcore gamers are starting to see the industry for what it is. Anti-used games? Tacked on multiplayer? Gaming as a service? DLC endings? The next few years should be fun.
With that specific example of ‘do gamers have too much power’, I think it is more revealing to look at the gaming press as an entity itself.
Once upon a time, everyone was a gamer. No one called themselves a ‘game developer’ and there was no ‘industry’. Some gamers made games that other gamers bought. They were called game designers. There was no wall between the gamer and the game maker as there is today.
Due to the nature of laws and millions upon millions of dollars, the makers of games became isolated from the gamers. Corporate walls arose. Some of it was necessary due to legal reasons. But the people who make games are considered more ‘developers’ than as ‘gamers’. They toil away secretly for years behind walls working on a game the universe of gamers do not know about (until it is ready to be unveiled).
And where is the press in all this? My idea of a gaming press is a serviceman to the gamers. The gaming press gives the gamers the information of what games are coming, how do games review, what hot games people should keep an eye on, which ones people should avoid, and do all the work of gaming information. But the gaming press does not work like this.
What we have instead is a gaming press that is more of a serviceman to these game companies. The gamers are creatures to be manipulated and corralled. The job of the game journalist isn’t so much to deliver the information to the gamer but to deliver the gamer to these companies. Every preview talks about how ‘revolutionary’ a new game is. Every expensive game is the ‘greatest Industry game ever’ which eventually line your shelves.
It has gotten to the point where game journalists consider themselves more part of the “industry” than they consider themselves a part of the gamers.
“Do gamers have too much power?” asks the game journalist. But we should ask that game journalist, “Are you not also a gamer?” Gaming has lately become more about this ‘secret world’ of the developers and the companies. But the magic of gaming actually occurs with the gamers. The dynamics of gamers decide which games sell, which games are played, and which games are loved.
There seems to be no interest in the gamers. The only time was when the Wii came out and many stories were released noting, with great curiosity, how players used the Wii and these non-traditional gamers. “But do you want to hear about the Call of Duty player?” Actually, yeah. Who are these Call of Duty gamers? How do they play the game and combine it with their daily lives? How do players interact with their game consoles and their games? I remember Nintendo Power used to spend quite a significant amount of time talking about how players used the NES and the games. I still remember the grandma who loved Tetris so much, she made a Tetris quilt!
The most important person in all this is the gamer. Not the game designer. Not the game producer. Not the game journalist. But with articles like ‘do gamers have too much power?’, it is attacking the idea that the gamer is the most important person in the room.
Nothing in gaming makes any sense without the gamer. How can you tell if a game is good or bad without it being played, without becoming a gamer?
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