The eagerness to grave dance on unpopular games has become a bad habit

alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgmod to Gaming@beehaw.org – 41 points –
The eagerness to grave dance on unpopular games has become a bad habit
pcgamer.com
18

Have some empathy for megacorporations. They're moral (lol) entities just like you and me. /s

Over and over and over and over the gaming community has been screwed over by Publishers so I'll stop grave dancing when Corpos stop being so horrible

  • Requiring a third party account to play a game months after it was released and after selling it to customers who can't legitimately make an account because you don't feel like their country can make you enough profit. Helldivers 2

  • Attempting to take away peoples digital "purchases" of media because you can't be bothered to pay licencing. Sony

  • Changing the definition of "purchase" an established word in English and not defining your new definition until page 22 of a EULA that you know nobody is going to read. Sony, and everyone else

  • Shutting down a server and rendering a game with a whole single player aspect completely useless and not telling consumers this at the time of purchase. The Crew (https://www.stopkillinggames.com/)

  • Selling a terribly incomplete game filled with glitches for the price of a full game. Cyberpunk 2077 and so many others.

  • Selling Pre-Purchases to let people play the game early but really its just another way to get people to pay to be Guinea pigs in your buggy game. That new Star Wars game and so many others.

  • Adding so many stupid "micro transactions" to games to milk players as much as possible for useless skins and camos etc. Diablo 4 and so many more.

  • Adding a "Season Pass"???? I don't even understand what this is??? Buy a full priced game and then buy a subscription to that game??? But still not have access to all of the content and then be shown a magic glove that costs €500, why is this not part of the subscription or is it???? I hope it is. New COD and probably others

  • "Making" a game and selling it to people but really its just a scam where they got "volunteers" to work on the game for free. Then shutting the game down instantly. That zombie game with Will Smith.

  • Something, something Overwatch 2 is a totally brand new game.

  • Shutting down third party mods for an unsupported and dangerous game just after the sale for that game is over. Fine, they didn't own all of the assets used but they did fix the issue where people could infect your system with malware. COD

  • Increasing the prices of all of your subscriptions and making those subscriptions worse by offering less while your parent company is posting ~$20 Billion profits in the most recent quarter, yes quarter, thats like 3 months...

Btw all of these examples have happened within the last 4 years. Its pretty sad that I can list these off the top of my head. I only play single player games and I only got back into gaming a couple of years ago after ~10 years of not really playing anything

Here are some more to add to the list:

Running a proprietary anti-cheat at the kernel level that causes system instability and only works on Windows. Valorant and many others.

Releasing a sequel to a live service game that doesn’t port over the money / skins users have purchased in the original game over many years. Smite 2.

Paying publishers to make games exclusive to your crappy store on PC instead of making the store front better. Epic Games.

Making a single player only game with always on DRM and network requirements. A lot of games by EA, Ubisoft, and Bethesda.

That time Ubisoft tried to make NFTs in video games a thing.

EDIT: Removed Overwatch 2. It does allow skin transfers for ones the developer chose to keep in the sequel.

This is the first I've even heard of "Concord"

Sounds like I'm not missing much

Bad headline but reasonable argument within. Concord probably failed for the reasons people outlined, sure.

The point is that peoples fingers aren't quite as on the pulse of what will make something successful as what we give ourselves credit for. We attribute reasons for something's success or failure after the fact.

Personally, I don't know what makes a hero shooter successful or not. A game like this could be going gangbusters for some reason in 6 months time and I would probably not understand why. I say that as someone who's been an avid gamer over the last 30 years.

There's no jubilation at "seeing a big game fail" there's jubilation at seeing a game fail that is developed by a studio that is doing fucked up shit, or a game that is shovelling some fucked up agenda, or the like.

We dance on the graves of any game developed by Actiblizz, Ubisoft, EA, etc not because they are big games, but because they are developed by evil corporations.

Dancing on concords grave is more fun than playing concord, and it's free!

I have a very simple reason for hating Concord and being slightly happy that it failed: They bait-and-switched the hell out of all of us with that reveal video.

You can't build up an interesting world filled with characters like that and then give us a PvP-only hero shooter. Who do you think you are, old Blizzard?

That's not old Blizzard, but new Blizzard.

Old Blizzard is everything before WoW.

Being critical about games is a bad habit?

In general talking about something bad, disappointing or controversal is always a good way to generate clicks. That works for news too. We humans are wired just like that. So its not something that has become recently a bad habit, this is something happening since decades, before and outside of gaming as well.

Pcgamer sure is putting a lot of words and intentions onto people.