Mainly, it's been Activision. I'm not entirely sure what Robert Kotick's personal beef is with gamers and money, but whoever put him in charge of Activision should be put to sleep right next to the CEO himself. It's sad. One minute, the company is assailing fans who are literally doing work FOR them (King's Quest), and now I'm hearing that he felt like storming to gates at Infinity Ward and firing people left and right. I'll bet you I can figure out why he did it, too. They probably said something along the lines of what I would tell him.
"No, Mr. Kodick, you're no good at your job and your ideas suck."
No, I wasn't there, and I certainly don't know the reasoning behind every little detail, but to start firing the same crew that just made you historically massive profits in the span of ONE GAME is ignoring the creative immunity they are allowed to have. Of course, there's a certain amount of balance involved with immunity. Let the guys do whatever they want for years, and you end up with Peter Molyneux types running around spouting off whenever they get a chance. For whatever mistakes Infinity Ward had made with Modern Warfare 2, the game was undeniably massive in popularity and gave Activision a huge cushion to work with on the year's balance sheet. Don't get me wrong, IW made a LOT of mistakes, but to be honest, they put a lot of work into this game and they should be commended at least a little bit for keeping the mistakes tolerable. Let's face if, if they didn't care about this game, then considering the expectations involved, we would have a revolution on our hands.
Before all that, we got Ubisoft's DRM for Assassin's Creed 2, and there is no correct response to this except for the universal "WTF are you thinking?" that came immediately after. I love my games, but there is a line of tolerance that I'm not willing to cross when it comes to choosing a game. Ubisoft leaped across that line, which makes it easy for me to discontinue support for that company until they reverse that insult. That was a middle finger to the fans that pay for their games, and even they should have the common sense to know this.
It's been pretty hard to get all this anger into text, to be honest. I'm not one for spouting off without doing my homework, but it's clear that these companies are doing an incredible disservice to their fan bases. Most casual players would hardly notice who's the CEO of whatever company, so sometimes I look at my rants and think, "Ya know, nobody really cares in the end."
I hope that's not true. I'm probably knee deep in a "wishful thinking" scenario, but I thought we all played games because they were fun and brought people together. They should be entertaining people, and here we are facing massive companies that could care less about the fanbase. It's always been that way. Nintendo used to use some really shady market control practices back in the NES days, and nobody really knew about that until years later, even after the antitrust case was over. People still buy these games, and you can't force people not to. These companies may be crossing a number of lines that they shouldn't be allowed to cross, but we're telling them that it's OK to do it. We have the power to stop the DLC craze before it begins. We have the power to enforce our own fair-use rights on companies. We have the power to put Ubisoft out of business by next month. We can get Kotick fired if we wanted to. If he's reading this, he's laughing, because he knows that it will never happen. Companies know that you will pay them to f*** you over.
So yeah, it's hard to write a substantial article about these guys. It feels delusional in some strange way. It has to be done, though, even if it is just a messy, thrown together critique about business practices. Hopefully, it'll lose them a same here and there. Who knows.
Digg It
Stumble it !
Reddit
No comments:
Post a Comment