An Obvious Blog About the Games Industry- Part 2

So, last week we took a quick reminder of why the industry enjoys rehashing ideas, how resources limit game developers and why “corporate greed” is a redundant term. This week it’s time for a slightly shorter collection of things everyone should be keeping in mind when talking about the games industry.

Accountability

 People aren't any more or less accountable for their actions because they're part of a business.

To kick things off, there is a rather extreme position which many people take when it comes to debates about games publishers, which I can’t say I agree with. People often claim that because businesses are businesses, that they somehow have less accountability than other people when they do something wrong, or which customers or other companies don’t like. It must be remembered that there are people behind these companies, and that when a company makes a decision what that really means is that certain higher-ups within the company are making decisions. Companies may default to “greed” and “capitalism” mode, but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be held accountable for their own actions.

That being said, companies should also be able to do what they want as long as what they do is not harming anybody. All too often it seems people find it hard to differentiate between companies doing something wrong and companies doing something that they don’t like, and this leads me onto my next point.

Entitlement

One of the most obnoxious traits of the gaming community has consistently been its sense of entitlement. On a regular basis I still see people claiming that companies “owe” them sequels to games (Half-Life 2: Episode Three seems to be predictably the biggest victim of this one), or that they were somehow betrayed because a developer took a new direction with a series of games they previously enjoyed. Another common problem seems to be people being fully aware that a game contains certain features that they dislike, such as online passes or DRM, agreeing to buy the product, and then claiming that they were somehow screwed over by being sold a game with these objectionable features. We have every right to complain about these kinds of features and I in fact encourage complaint about these kinds of systems, but in these scenarios “screwed over” we are not.

 Your sense of entitlement saddens Mr. Newell.

Often claims by games consumers that they have been cheated are made without any kind of justification to back them up, but when people do try to justify this demand for companies to act in a way they want, consumers usually claim it’s because they “made the company what it is” by buying their products and that the companies should do what they want because they’re dependent on their money.

Yes, we fund the companies, but the companies have already given us something in exchange for our cash: the product that we bought. The entirety of the transaction of us purchasing a game involves us giving our money to a retailer and them giving us the game we’re purchasing. Any concept of the developer, publisher or retailer owing us something beyond that is a figment of our imaginations. It’s not abnormal to develop an attachment to a company or a franchise and I know that it’s very frustrating when things in the industry don’t go the way we want, or companies start acting in a way we don’t like, but the people who make games are in no way indebted to us and can do whatever they like with their own intellectual property. Pretending this is not the case makes us look like spoiled children.

Duder, It’s Over

Of course all of this (or at least most of this) is what you knew already, and in a better world everyone interested in video games would be aware of what I’ve talked about here, but we’re still far from this being the case and video games are by no means the only industry that deals with these kinds of misunderstandings and misconceptions. It’s easy to be very pessimistic about the way the games industry is and we do have a lot of problems, but I don’t think we should see the business influence in the world of games entirely as an enemy. If it wasn’t for big business we wouldn’t have our countless stores full of video games, our hundreds of games to choose from, our gaming consoles or our big budget titles, and for this we should be thankful.

If there’s anything else I’d like people to take away from this though, it’s that old idiom “vote with your wallet”. I really can’t repeat this enough, the companies are reliant on our money and while we often see the big corporations as the one with the iron grip on the world of video games, ultimately we as consumers have full control over the kinds of games that the industry makes. I still see people every day complaining profusely about the very games they keep buying, but if the video games industry is to further devolve into a world of micro-transactions, poor remakes of popular games and brown-grey graphics and we’re still the ones buying the games which use those components, we have to accept at least some responsibility. Thanks for reading.

-Gamer_152