Home
As we prepare to enter the eighth generation of consoles with a waning economy and a current generation built almost entirely around motion controls and stupid gimmicks it’s arguable, depending on how you see a half-glass of water, that the video game market is doomed to crash again. In 1983 the market for video games became inundated with loads of worthless crap and consumers literally gave up on caring. After letdown after letdown from Atari due to the likes of the notorious E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial and their awful Pac-Man port alongside the dubious quality and massive quantities of competitor consoles and shady third-party software consumers just said “to hell with it” and Atari ended up burying their trash in a New Mexico landfill.
Not pictured: Kinect, PS Move, and 95% of the games released for the Wii.
Having to cower away and bury your trash in the ground is about as ultimately defeated as you can get. Nobody even does that anymore these days, but they should (on principle, we can be less environmentally destructive than that today). What’s so different about Americans from the 80′s compared to today that prevents them from saying “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore“? Why is it that something as deceptively simple as a small handful of trashy games from a leading video game company can cause a market crash in the eighties yet in today’s world Nintendo has free rein to greenlight more trashy shovelware than we have trucks to carry it all to an unsuspecting landfill? WHY?
The Wii may be the gold standard in ninth-rate garbage “video games” but their portfolio of shame is nothing compared to these five current business practices that are destroying the market and in some abstract form have got to be some kind of illegal.
“DLC” is industry shorthand for “downloadable content” (e.g. bonus characters/players, extra missions, MMO expansions). Obviously, “download” is the keyword here. This is some kind of add-on that does not come on the game disc and is something you have to purchase separately and store on your console’s local hard drive before you can play it. Again, I’m stressing the fact that this is a game expansion that doesn’t come on the disc. Developers, however, are still selling “DLC” that amounts to nothing more than a suspiciously small file (around 180KB on most Xbox 360 games) that couldn’t possibly contain the data for additional characters or missions. Hell, one high-res JPEG picture can surpass 180KB by leaps and bounds, so what exactly does this “DLC” do?
It unlocks something already on the disc.
It's basically backwards DRM.
That’s not “downloadable content”, that’s “I’ve already paid for this so why are you making me pay for it again content”, and it’s presently completely permissible in the industry even though it’s shadier than Guy Fieri wearing two pairs of sunglasses while standing under an umbrella that’s under a pop-tent under a tree when it’s overcast outside. The counterargument to this bogus DLC is simple: when you paid $60 for that game you paid for the disc and everything on it. It’s yours to do whatever you please. What developers are doing with these DLC “unlock codes” amounts to your favorite band selling their new album but charging you extra fees to unlock the second half of the CD.
The good news is not all developers are fond of the idea of these predatory nickel-and-diming practices. That still doesn’t change the fact, however, that developers such as 2K Games and Capcom have been busted using on-disc “DLC” and hawking unlock codes online. Not even Street Fighter is exempt from dealing under the table, but honestly if you paid the $15 required to unlock character outfits you probably deserved to have been duped out of your money.
Quickly, what’s the best way to beat your competition in a market? That’s right, make a better and more available product. Or you can do what Electronic Arts has done with their football games and score an exclusivity contract with the NFL effectively shutting out any and all competition in the market. EA originally signed this deal in 2004 for the duration of five years, but they have routinely extended their agreement enough times that it is currently set to expire in 2013 which I only assume will be met with another extension when its expiration rolls around again.
It is no secret that I hate sports games more than I hate myself but for the first time in my life I’m siding with the people who buy these games rather than calling them mean names.
Not pictured: A quality assurance department.
It’s pretty obvious why this isn’t right. Competition is what drives companies to make better products, to take chances and risks in an effort to outperform their competitors. When you nix all competition from the equation you also remove the necessity to execute a quality product, especially when we’re dealing with a game franchise that's essentially the same thing every single year. Football is football, but when it comes to expanding upon what amounts to running a ball back and forth the real deciding factors of what title you’ll buy revolve around the presentation of the game. What kinds of neat “little things” did the developers include? Is it a massive replay/camera system? Impeccable voice-overs and fluid commentating? Maybe they focused on in-depth player/roster interactivity? Topless cheerleader mode?
You can throw all that out the window when there’s only one company working with such an open-ended idea. You’ll get their regurgitated diarrhea and you have to like it because there’s no other competition and there won’t ever be so long as Electronic Arts maintains their contract with the NFL. For once I honestly feel badly for people who follow sports as a lifestyle as no other genre of games gets shafted as hard as sports titles has, but this isn’t Electronic Arts’ only shameful action, oh no; click over to Page 2 to see what else they've been pulling...
Itpretty obvious why this isnis what drives companies to make better products, to take chances and risks in an effort to outperform their competitors. When you nix all competition from the equation you also remove the necessity to execute a quality product, especially when we’re dealing with a game franchise that is essentially the same thing every single year. Football is football, but when it comes to expanding upon what amounts to running a ball back and forth the real deciding factors of what football game you’ll buy revolve around the presentation of the game. What kinds of neat “little things” did the developers include? Is it a massive replay/camera system? Impeccable voice-overs and fluid commentating? Maybe they focused on in-depth player/roster interactivity? Topless cheerleader mode?
You can throw all that out the window when there’s only one company working with such an open-ended idea. You’ll get their regurgitated shit and you have to like it because there’s no other competition and there won’t ever be so long as Electronic Arts maintains their contract with the NFL. For once I honestly feel badly for people who follow sports as a lifestyle as no other genre of games gets shafted as hard as sports titles has, but this isn’t Electronic Arts’ only shameful action, oh… no.
4
Problem? Report this post
