The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
Please vote in the Forum Structure Poll. Polling will close at 2PM EST on January 21, 2025.
Malstrom (Wii Disruption guy) takes on Tycho!
Poopywalk
Registered User new member
Registered User new member
http://seanmalstrom.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/email-my-appreciation-and-my-curiosity/This ungodly Pavlovian Wheel, this machine, this “Game Industry”, has made certain people very wealthy. And they will do whatever it takes to keep the Pavlovian Wheel in place, spinning merrily away to separate gamers’ money for mediocrity. Or, to put in another way, they don’t care that dedicated servers are eliminated from Modern Warfare 2.
...
Situations like the removal of dedicated servers from Modern Warfare 2 didn’t “just happen”. It happened because they thought they could get away with it. Even those who you thought carried your interests as a gamer, such as Tycho from PennyArcade, advise you to just “put out” anyway and enjoy it (how bizarre that this was practically a rape analogy). It isn’t hurting his money streams so why should he care?
While I couldn't care less about MW2 (CS kind of guy, and prefer not to get on a hype train), I agree. How would buying more copies of this game without d.servers make it so they include them? How does that make sense? 'Put out'? But showing you put UP with this type of stuff just shows blood suckers like Act (and yes, don't think they are anything else, they have made that completely obvious) that they can get away with stuff like this. Seems like a moronic strategy Tycho, and normally I respect what you have to say but this is beyond stupid.
Isn't the point of the PC market the hardcore gamers (true hardcore)? Wouldn't it be more effective to just not release it on PC at all if it isn't going to have any benefits other then a mouse? And no, PC gamers know they aren't the focus, obviously... But does that mean that ANY benefits that PC gamers have beyond piracy (oh wait, there's probably more of that on the 360 anyway!) should be ignored?
Go Malstrom IMO. If you HONESTLY think that the PC sales for the game wouldn't be enough to warrent d.servers then (since that is pretty much what you are saying)... well I honestly don't know what to say... That are selling the game for $90 on Steam, well I'm happy that is 9th on the top sellers list, hopefully it'll go lower.
Poopywalk on
0
Posts
Limed so hard.
Also, I kind of agree with Tycho's basic point that "If you don't like it, don't buy it".
Eh, he's not talking about hardcore vs casual. He's talking about hardcore vs true hardcore.
That's fuckin' legit, brah.
Yup, I don't really see why it needs to go any further than this. Nobody's entitled to any feature (or any game) that they want. The game companies make the games with the features they want to put in. If you like it, buy it. If you don't like it, feel free to be mad and not buy it. Another game will probably come along that will better suit your tastes, and when it does, the company that made that game will deserve your money more than the first company.
So I guess...welcome to a consumer economy? Get out there and vote with your wallets, or in this case, don't.
The MW2 debacle is just part of a larger issue. The current feeling among PC gamers that games are being consolized and thus sucking, and it's fairly true.
It will sort it self out a couple generations of video cards later and once DX10/11 take over and leave consoles in the dust. But till then expect a lot more grinding of teeth and bitching.
It's a wheel that dances when you ring a bell... or something...
Well, yeah... don't buy the shitty, console-ized games and maybe they'll realize people don't want to buy shitty, console-ized games.
If people keep buying them, it has this weird way of reinforcing the idea that people want to play them.
Unless new videocards and DX10/11 somehow make PC Gaming more profitable to developers than Console Gaming, nothing is changing in terms of how developers do things.
White FC: 0819 3350 1787
Well, yes, but the assumption is that if it's something that's actually important to a large number of people, a large number of people will not buy the product. The quoted posted in the OP mentioned that the company thought they could 'get away with it'. Well, yeah, that's what companies do: what's profitable. If they think that dedicated servers are not important enough to enough people that failing to buy, install, an maintain them will not have a significant impact on sales then there is no reason for them to do it. Video games don't come with commemorative coffee travel mugs 99% of the time because most games either don't give a shit about commemorative coffee travel mugs or are not so butthurt by the lack of a commemorative coffee travel mug that they won't buy the game for the lack.
If dedicated servers are really an issue for a significant fraction of the community then the company will notice the drastic fall in sales and figure out what happened. If some people in the internet bitch and whine but sales are high then it's really just a few people bitching and whining on the internet. This may be serious business for those people, but I'm sure there are people out there for whom the lack of commemorative coffee travel mugs is serious business, too.
Dedicated servers are huge for PC gaming. This is a rather big deal.
Yes but that doesn't mean they'll correct the problem. They might just decide to forgo making the game for the PC AT ALL, and only make it for the consoles.
I'm not an FPS gamer. I play a few but other than Left 4 Dead it's basically never in multi-player modes. That said: I don't see a problem or a surprise with the 'consolization' of games. Consoles and console gaming are hot shit. PC development is fraught with difficulties, additional costs, and side-issues like piracy. Console development is comparatively cheap and easy. Interest in games that really need a PC to work well (RTS games and puzzle-adventure games, primarily) have been in decline for a long time anyway. When the majority of gamers have an older, out of date PC in one room and a current-generation console in the other room there is a very, very obvious course of action for game developers.
And honestly, I don't see what sucks about console games. The console-only games and cross-platform console/PC games I play are, in general better than the PC-exclusives these days. This wasn't always the case, but I honestly can't think of a single PC-only title I've played in the last 5 years that I thought was superior to current genre offerings on consoles. There are certainly games I'd rather play on the PC than the console (Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, Red Alert 3) but that's just down to my personal interface preferences. I'd rather play Uncharted 2 and BlazBlue on consoles for the same reasons. Maybe game developers could make better PC-only games if they focused on the latest hardware, but why would you want to destroy your early sales numbers by only selling to hardware early-adopters?
Yup, that's definitely a possibility.
And if there are so few PC gamers that this does not significantly impact sales figures then...well, to put it bluntly: too fucking bad. Game developers are businesses. Just because a minority really want something there is no reason for a business to cater to them when they can make more money by not doing so.
Edit - May as well remove detailed graphic options, or the ability to use keyboard+mouse controls, etc, this fucking Modern Warfare 2 thing is old even with the position I have on it.
My god, we're just blowing minds all over the place.
If the bigger publishers end up deserting the PC as a gaming platform, it's not like that market is going to disappear - it might be too small for the big guys to spend money on, but that'll leave the market open for other companies and startups developing for PCs first and consoles second or not at all (Valve and Blizzard are two that come to mind).
I suppose that's true in the general sense... but in this case, there's quite a buzz as to exactly what the problem would be.
That's horrible business sense. They stand to make less money by not releasing the product at all than they do by releasing the product that people want.
The only way they lose money is if they release a product people don't want, and people don't buy it in protest.
The way to solve that problem AND make money, is to give them the product they want. This isn't rocket surgery.
edit: besides, this scenario's not going to happen. Everyone knows it's going to sell like crazy on all platforms anyways and make a bunch of money. The real problem that people are annoyed about is that if that happens, the publisher sees it as a success and will see no reason to include dedicated servers in subsequent products.
Not quite. They have to release a product that enough people want to recoup the expense of creating that product. If I spend $500 making a video game that ten people are willing to buy for $40 each, I have lost $100 and have made a mistake. Releasing a game on PC in addition to consoles is not free. Running dedicated servers is like the opposite of free. They have to make enough profit off of sales to cover development, advertising, and support costs. If a million gamers want the PC version but it costs more to release it than 1 million * price the million are willing to pay, then the clear solution is not to release it on the PC.
But that's assuming that, despite development, marketing, and middleman cuts, they're not going to make a profit on the PC version anyways, which we both know they very easily will.
They will make more money releasing this game on the ps3, xbox and pc than they will by releasing it only on the ps3 and xbox. So there's incentive to release it on all three systems.
By advising people to 'just not buy it' if they don't like a feature, rather than bitch and complain until they comply, and people actually DON'T buy it, then they lose the incentive to release it on PC, and the PC gamers lose that way as well. That's what has people pissed off about the situation. They lose either way. One way they support a pretty bad design decision, the other way they lose the game all together.
Yeah, I stopped here. Not only is that blatantly untrue, the way you claim it is absurd.
"Psh, rock? The moon is probably made of cheese!"
EDIT:
Ok, I should have stopped here instead. It would have saved me from the second part.
If it still sells well, then there isn't a reason any more. The only reason a business includes a feature is if it drives sales. If the sales can exist unchanged without it, then of course the feature will be removed. If the number of people legitimately afflicted by the change matched the volume the pissed off subset is generating, then sales would dip for the version in question. They won't, or they will but the other versions will see a corresponding increase which costs IW nothing.
Some people are upset enough to make a stand(!) on the internet, but no one is upset enough to not purchase the product. And as getting people to purchase their product is kind of the company's job, that's where their concern ends.
The news post's point is that its stupid as all hell to hargleblargle about how its an affront to PC gamers everywhere, make ridiculous protest threads and/or petitions, and then buy the product.
Do we? They might be making only a slim profit margin on that segment, and the money that went into developing the PC version might have been better spent (i.e. get them more money back) on either improving the console versions or invested in other games.
If each buyer only owned one system, that might be true. But gamers that own a 360/PS3 also probably have a PC. A person that buys it on the PC when it's released for all three might have bought it for a console if it was only released on consoles. The market they lose by releasing for only consoles is smaller than just the gross number of units that would sell on PCs if they release it.
They don't "lose the game all together" - they never "had the game." They had an idea of what they wanted the game to be. If the game didn't turn out to match their idea, they have to reconsider its value and whether or not they still want to buy it.
I don't understand this logic. A company who have long experience with releasing a certain type of game with certain specs and costs knows pretty well, I think, how much money they stand to make based on any given decision.
Do you really think that nobody at Infinity Ward said, "Hey, we had dedicated servers for our other games... we should probably do it this time, too, since people like it?" The only logical reason for them not to include them is that not enough people used said servers to justify the cost involved. It's not like the lack is altering the core gameplay mechanics or the aesthetic.
Yes, they would be retarded not to release this game on PS3, 360, and PC. But if for whatever reason sales on this game on the PC drop significantly, they might think twice about Modern Warfare 3. Maybe they'll do a delayed release on PC to see if they make the sales overall sales figures of MW2 just on console sales of MW3. There is logic to this stuff. It's not some guy sitting in a room at Infinity Ward saying, "Man, fuck those PC gamers. One of them shit on my lawn. How can we fuck those guys over?"
In some ways it's a self dooming approach.
There are certain things I expect in a PC game that I don't expect in a console game. If they are not there, I don't buy the game. Moreover if it was a game on the cusp for, and the PC version doesn't have what I need, I might as well buy it on a console.
We do by a number of ways. One and the simplest being, if they didn't make money, they wouldn't be releasing the new one at all. We also know that by the end of 2007, CoD4 sold nearly 400,000 copies on the PC platform, not counting for digital distribution (so the number could actually be much higher. Not as much as the consoles, but not nearly an insignificant amount (in fact, nearly as much as the PS3 version had at that same time).
Your logic here is faulty. Some gamers who own ps3/360 might have also a PC (capable of running the game?) but the question you should be asking is of the gamers who have a PC, do they probably also have a 360/ps3? If no, they've lost his sale all together. If yes, you're not going to sell him 2 versions of the same game, so your net gain is nothing, but there is a potential for lost sales.
I don't get what you're trying to say here. The game is what they want, but by losing the game all together, what I mean is by not supporting its sale, they remove incentive for the publisher to make games for the PC in the future. So if the publisher chooses to pull support from the PC platform, PC gamers do indeed lose the game all together.
edit to fix broken quote trees.
So, you'd rather they profit off a game you don't want, rather than get the idea they're making a game people don't want?
The point is that the number of people who ONLY have a PC, and care so much about dedicated servers so as to let it affect their purchase, is so small that the resources that would be put into that feature are better spent elsewhere from a business standpoint.
And honestly? If someone is a big enough gamer that they care so much about what kind of multiplayer feature they get to use in their cooperative FPS shooter? They don't just have a PC. The potential percentage of pure, honest to god lost sales is insanely small.
Who said someone was trying to fuck over PC gamers?
PC gamers don't want to screw back infinity ward by not supporting this game. I don't think you and other people understand that PC gamers WANT TO SUPPORT THIS GAME AND GIVE THEM MONEY. They want this game, they want to play it and enjoy it. They also want dedicated multiplayer servers, because frankly, it's better service. They don't want to follow the advice "don't like it? don't buy it!" Because they don't want infinity ward to stop developing for the PC.
Their reasons for wanting to remove dedicated servers is because they think that it will somehow curtail piracy. If history is any indication, it won't, not one little bit.
By which you mean mainstream vs a tiny niche hardcore of a niche of people.
Because calling MW2 the province of 'hardcore' is self evidently ridiculous.
If it sells so well on PCs (and you're certain they're making money from that release) then why are you worried about them dumping the PC as a release venue?