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Definitely.

A few, at least.

I don't care.

Not certain.

Definitely not.

Other.

View poll. / Abstain.

[Farseer]

Do you all think that gamers should have more rights as consumers?

At the moment, it's possible to be able to buy a game and find that it's ridiculously riddled with bugs to the point of being unplayable and you can, at most, get store credit (and only if it's not a PC game). Personally, I think it's ridiculous that consumers aren't able to return products that are bad and they don't view as being worth the price, and is one of the main issues with computer gaming these days.

Imagine if you went to the shops and got a pre-cooked roast chicken. When you got home, you cut the chicken, put some on sandwiches and began eating it, only to discover it's completely rotten. These is no way for the people in the shop to resell that chicken but they would, at the very least, give you a complete refund of the chicken, if not the rest of your items as a "gesture of good will" (ie. a bribe to not tell your friends you ate rotten chicken from them).

The worst part to me is that software companies want both to have their cake and eat it. They want to have immunity to troubles with the product that they currently have as software developers, but they also want software copyright infringement to be charged as theft and to be pursued by the authorities.

I think gamers (software users in general, actually) should have a lot more rights when it comes to the product, no matter what kind of licensing issues there might be. If a game plays like a piece of shit and it doesn't outright say on the box "THIS GAME HAS A HELL OF A LOT OF BUGS" then I should be able to return it for a full cash refund.

What do you all think?

[pazuzu]

i went with not certain.

I see your points there, but really, I've never bought an unplayable game.
If it's just outright crap, then that was my fault for not looking it up or asking around first.

as an example I've bought JoWood games in the past, and now i avoid buying them now because they tend to be pretty buggy. Unless i hear really good things about them. Then maybe.

I think a little foresight or maybe just a glass of concrete is better than a bunch of new laws aimed at giving consumers immunity from their own mistakes.

Maybe you don't consider it a mistake not trying to find some info about a $100 game you're about to buy, but I do. So if in my negligence i buy some crap i hate (Wild Metal Country comes to mind, $30 if i remember correctly) then i learn my lesson.

Fair enough if it just doesn't work, but in that case you can send it back and get it replaced from the publisher (or even just download patches). Warhammer online for example didn't even run after i excitedly installed it the day it came out. I think no Australian version did, as the executable on the CD was corrupt. A quick google search told me the answer, i found that i could send it back and they'd send me a new CD. Another quick search showed that i could just download the executable and play now. I didn't even bother with the new CD.
Maybe i should be all up in arms about it but really, 30mins of finding and fixing the problem wasn't at all a hassle.

[Soulwynd]

On a similar matter... Did you guys know americans will be getting the national internet ID in the next few years? It will be like a driver's license that will bind to the IP you're currently using, making you fully traceable down to your home address.

Go america and whatever rights you guys have left.

[G-Flex]

I know this is a crass generalization, but one problem is that as a group, gamers don't know how to exercise the rights that they do have effectively. They'll buy games for obscene prices even when they know it'll get marked down. They pre-order products that aren't even finished yet and that they haven't seen. They complain about a company's practices, or about a product, or about unfulfilled promises, or lousy service, or bugs, or bad hardware, and then they'll keep buying it anyway. There's this weird sense of entitlement and bad economic sense going on in gamer culture, as if they don't realize that if you don't like the way a company does business, you don't actually have to buy their games.

It's clear that publishers can be pretty awful, but gamer culture needs to play their part, vote with their wallets, and stop [/i]enabling[/i] the publishers to be awful. I swear that, out of everyone who is to blame here, gamers are willing to examine themselves the least.

On a similar matter... Did you guys know americans will be getting the national internet ID in the next few years? It will be like a driver's license that will bind to the IP you're currently using, making you fully traceable down to your home address.

Go america and whatever rights you guys have left.

Way to speculate about legislation that hardly even exists in proposals yet. Yes, I know there are proposals floating around, but don't count your chickens before they hatch.

[jnecros]

I'm with G-Flex, like any other luxury product within a free market, games and the companies that make them are subject to self-regulating supply and demand. One would think that poor products, buggy products, unplayable products would bury a company..and by and large they do, but it takes time for that to happen..I heard a rumor that JoWood was going under..not sure if that was directly related to the many issues with Gothic 3, but my gut tells me Gothic 4 did not sell very well.

There could be other things going on with the company, but seems to me that the market itself, the collective "consumers" pushed JoWood out for making shit games. Yes, it sucks for those who bought Gothic 4, they will not be seeing offical patches, but they should have held off and waited for the reviews before buying, especially after Gothic 3..but there again, many people claim that Gothic 3 is great after installing community mods, I did not buy the game myself so I dont know. Could be many people who did get 4 did so on spec of future mods.

Anyway, sad to say that games are not vital products (but they seem like it to me , aka food, medicine/healthcare, water, shelter and communication/transport, so there should be no extra rights given to the consumer of these products.

My 2 cents

[The13thRonin]

No consumer should have to deal with digital rights management... Period.

[GlyphGryph]

Right to resale in situations where it is clearly a product is a pretty fundamental one I think they should get, especially since it has an illustrious histoy of applying to pretty much anything else.

[Knight of Fools]

I think that there are definitely some things that should be fixed in all of the legal mumbo-jumbo out there.  I hate UCLAs, and I think that companies should just skip the 50 pages of legal speak and tell us straight up, "We're not responsible for crap that goes wrong".  There really should be a law that makes companies explain things clearly for those of us who don't want to spend 3 hours looking for "We own your soul" in a stack of legal documents before signing it.  Not to mention that the things change every week.

But that's more of a minor issue.  Once companies actually start claiming ownership over souls, then I'll start worrying about this one.


As for buying a bad game, well, I've been there and done that, but I don't feel like the rotten chicken/buggy game analogy works.  A rotten chicken would be comparable to a game that's unplayable on any system.  A chicken that's dry and is stuffed with uncooked rice is a little more comparable to a bad, buggy game.  It's still edible, but you probably won't enjoy it.

However, chickens don't cost $50.  There are far more chicken consumers than gamers.  Stores can't be held responsible for a bad game.  You also won't die if you play a bad game.

When it comes to games, I agree that there should be a way to say, "This sucks!" and make an impact that'll be heard by the money heads in the industry, but at the moment it's fairly "Buyer Beware - And do your research".  People just keep making uninformed purchases that can't be undone.

[Farseer]

When it comes to games, I agree that there should be a way to say, "This sucks!" and make an impact that'll be heard by the money heads in the industry, but at the moment it's fairly "Buyer Beware - And do your research".  People just keep making uninformed purchases that can't be undone.

Which is probably the reason a lot of people pirate games.

[Soulwynd]

Way to speculate about legislation that hardly even exists in proposals yet. Yes, I know there are proposals floating around, but don't count your chickens before they hatch.

The announcement was last week, it will be pushed forward in the next few months, they said. Granted, it's not as bad as I've made it sound, but I bet my unhatched chickens every store and their mom will require the credential for you to make a purchase in the next few years and it will only get sillier from there.

It's clear that publishers can be pretty awful, but gamer culture needs to play their part, vote with their wallets, and stop enabling the publishers to be awful. I swear that, out of everyone who is to blame here, gamers are willing to examine themselves the least.

Couldn't agree more. But there's also the lack of decent demos, most are way way biased to make you purchase their crap, similar to the ads we get everywhere. You can't even trust reviewers, so it's hard to tell where to put your 50 bucks in, which is an absurd price for most games anyway. I'ma keep my olde measure of warez first, buy later. Has worked pretty well, I don't usually waste money on crap and good games get paid.

My 2 worst purchases have been Spore... which I sadly prebought *picard-facepalm*... and Red Faction Guerrilla... They never patched the sound issues and ... seriously... games for windows live match making? ... That killed the multiplayer completely. You could never ever get a match for the destruction mode, which was the most fun mode... It required 14 people and match making would never let people in there long enough... I once sat for 2 hours with the game on in the background waiting for a destruction match... never happened.

[Muz]

I've stopped buying games for this very reason. There's only so much crap you can buy before you just decide that it's not worth it.

The Guild 2 was literally unplayable when they sold it. It had a fatal bug which crashes the game somewhere in the game. They didn't apologize too much about it, they just released a patch that fixed it. Instead of going "Our bad", they went with a "Shut up and download the patch" attitude. Fallout Tactics had some unplayable disks too, but they actually allowed you to return those disks for good ones.

However, I do buy games that are good and backed up. Spiderweb software sells some fairly pricey indie games with sucky graphics at $30 a piece. But they actually return your money if you don't like it. They release massive demos of their games letting you wander around and pull you into the game, while only telling you to pay to unlock another many hours of that content.

Most games don't even give any guarantee of them being good. They stuff it full of hype and just shrug when you tell them that they suck. Reviewers are horrible too, they're the lowest rank of journalists, and that's already quite low as it is. Some won't do their job and play a game till the end. Some will be too harsh on graphics, some expect one game to play like another from the same genre, some just simply have different tastes than me.

I've been moving to the indie gaming cave for a while now. It's simply because indie gamers know that they can't slap DRM on their games. They know they have to convince players that the game is good, and get sympathy out of them, instead of trying to cheat them into paying as much as possible, only to get their games mass pirated.


Heh, the chicken analogy isn't that good. But I can't think of a good one. Games are a luxury item, but they treat their customers like trash. Unfortunately, every publisher does that, so you just have to suck it up and go with it, or steal it. I normally have no sympathy for theft, but when a publisher deals with theft by taking away rights, I'm not at all sorry someone's getting their games pirated.

It's not even as good as other luxury items. If you had a nice watch or ring or shirt, you could at least show it off to your friends. Games are embarrassing. The only exception are luxury items in certain MMOs, or say a limited edition version of Fallout 3 or Civ5 which you could gloat about to your friends.

[freeformschooler]

I've been moving to the indie gaming cave for a while now. It's simply because indie gamers know that they can't slap DRM on their games. They know they have to convince players that the game is good, and get sympathy out of them, instead of trying to cheat them into paying as much as possible, only to get their games mass pirated.

Absolutely. I've seen any number of licenses for indie games, and they range from "if you like it please buy it" to "I guess there's nothing we can do if you wanna steal it but we worked really hard and will throw in free updates if you do buy it". There's a surprising number of good indie games out there, and the large majority of them are free. For example, well... 

On the regular topic, while I don't like the idea of every retailer and/or producer being forced to give you a full refund if you didn't enjoy the game after opening the box, slamming it in your CD drive and playing around for five hours, it's a gracious thing to see done. I do think gamers are sometimes treated like crap by big-name companies who have the budget to create waterfalls of hype and survive the disaster of bad reviews that only come in AFTER the wave of consumers have contributed over several dozen million dollars in total to them, permanently. It's abuse, but at the same time, it's a free market.

[BigD145]

All (honestly, most of) companies want immunity from any responsibility for the product they make/provide. Consumers in general, all of them, need better rights. If you are of age to vote, assuming you live in a marginally democratic country with elections, then make sure you get some representative that is willing to bring these corporate whores to task. MORE regulation, damn it. Consumers don't know what the F* is going on if they aren't told and most companies aren't required to say diddly squat about their operations.

[Soulwynd]

^

You mean... "None of the above"?

Countries need that option.

[kulik]

YES! I say it as a gamer and as a father of a gamer!