Don't get me wrong, I hear what you're saying, but let's not pretend that Activision acts in a vacuum. They only get away with what you let them get away with. You, as gamers, not you as "oh I don't buy Activision games," let it happen. If Activision's antics become untenable, it's up to the gaming public to communicate the change they want to see in the market. (And, as an aside, piracy does nothing to further this except give them additional ammunition for screwing you harder.)
This conclusion is pointless. Not that it is totally wrong, it's just a convenient excuse to do nothing. You can't discuss with the gamers community, or persuade it in any way, because communities work completely different than singular human beings. You may convince several people in this forums but most of the people who could change something won't even hear your message. And even if they did, it won't probably affect them more than several advertisements and viral marketing campaign. So what's the point in blaming it?
The point in blaming the gaming community is that
they are the ones at fault! The gaming public buys the shit. If they did not,
it would not be made. Activision et al. provide what the customer wants, and do so in a way that frankly I'd say is of better quality than is strictly necessary--most consumers are not exactly picky about their gaming titles if they have the right label on it. You're complaining about them serving their customers what their customers want. This complaint is even more hollow given the astonishingly awesome rise of independent gaming--interesting, low-cost titles that aren't affiliated with Activision, EA, etc. in any way.
You have choices. Theirs do not affect you.But if you want it to change, because you think that Evil Activision is so bad, then your only option is to change the market. Is it hard? Sure. Things that are worth doing often are. But "it's too hard and we'll fail anyway" is the
real excuse to do nothing. Don't try to throw that back on me.
Something tells me most gamers who fancy themselves as having a clue will prefer to just rail against Bobby Kotick. He's a bad man, after all.
The question you must answer, and I don't think you can do so rationally but you're welcome to try, is this:
Why should Activision make what their customers don't want?And I think you have an entirely wrong impression on piracy. It is the only gamers' activity the game publishers see and fear. They can neither stop it, nor ignore it. Of course, it's not even a form of protest per se. It is only a flaw of this particular business model. But, thanks to its existence, any bullshit thrown by the industry ultimately works against them. It is giving them ammunition, but they are going to shoot the entire clip in their foot anyway.
Not really. All piracy does, in the end, is encourage them to go to even greater extremes. Piracy communicates a message to publishers: "hey, you're making a great product that we want, we're just dickheads who just don't want to pay for it." It is a perfectly rational decision, given that perception (
whether or not it was intended--it is the inference, not the implication, that matters), to attempt to
make you pay for it, then, through technological means if necessary.
Your claim that it "works against them" is not well-grounded in reality. The publishers are
winning, because they are transitioning to gaming systems and ecosystems that are orders of magnitude more difficult to pirate software on. Consoles--you can crack a 360, but I hope you enjoy your LIVE ban. Smartphones--the number of people willing to put up with instability from jailbreaked phones is pretty marginal, and other than that, for the most part you're getting your applications from signed, established sources. Always-online games--most people, and most casual pirates, aren't willing to spend time fucking about to get it to work, and at least
some will buy it, so it's a win for the publisher.
Something does not have to be piracy-proof; it just has to be piracy-resistant until most people give up and buy it. Do you realize how many companies have
fled the PC gaming market? Only a few are coming back recently (Capcom, for example, has long developed their titles
for the PC first and then ported to consoles--they only started releasing those titles on the PC due to effective DRM systems like Steam.) Piracy is a major driver toward the consoles, where it's possible but, comparatively, extremely hard to pirate.
Frankly, all this slap-fighting between pirates and publishers just pisses me off. I get screwed coming and going, because while I'm a gamer who gets screwed by publishers' often idiotic attempts to curtail piracy, I'm one of those unfortunate people who actually creates IP and makes a living off of it--which, to the short-sighted and largely dumb pirates, makes me something of the enemy.
And, sitting in the middle, something really unfortunate but very true is apparent: at some point, y'all are going to have to come to peace with the uncomfortable realization that you, as a gaming community, brought a great deal of publisher dickishness down upon yourselves. You are nowhere near blameless. Foisting it all off on The Bad Corporations is the height of disingenuousness.
The guy's openly said he wants to create a culture of skepticism, pessimism, and fear. Who does he think he is, David Miscavige of Scientology? What happens when his top designers get headhunted by, oh, Valve? What happens if he pisses one of them off bad enough to leak the full fucking source code to the Pirate Bay or something? Since when did openly hating your customers and your employees become a wise leadership decision?
Pull your brain out of neutral and think rationally instead of screaming about Scientology and other hyperbolic derp. If Activision's culture is so bad that development companies can poach their talent, then
the market works, Activision will fail, and you can stop whining about that evil Bobby Kotick. You won't, because then you have nothing else to whine about, but you could.
And, FWIW, I actually know a couple of people who work at Activision studios, and the sense I get from them is that he talks up a big game for the shareholders. They enjoy their jobs. But they don't work at IW or the like--they work for non-acquisitions without the same sort of "founder" issues IW had, which may be an entirely different deal (I don't know the culture first-hand, as I don't work there). I get no sense from these people, who are both technically sharp and socially perceptive, that anyone in management "hates" their employees. I also get no sense from Kotick that he "hates" his customers. I do get the sense that he understands them very well and isn't impressed. And you know what? Even as a gamer, I'm not impressed with his customers either. They are, by and large, lowest-common-denominator consumers. Activision targets them effectively, and the only thing about him that gets your knickers in a twist is that Kotick doesn't dissemble about it like the rest of the big publishers.
I mean, for the love of god, do you really think John Riccitiello thinks any more highly of his customers than Kotick does? Kotick's a loudmouth, yes. He's also right, and his company is fantastically successful.
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Topic: Should Gamers Have More Rights As Consumers? (Read 6349 times)