Reading Too Much Into Everything

A very interesting thread popped up on Twitter. A game developer opined that the reason developers don't talk to gamers is that the gaming culture is so toxic that anything said by developers concerning how games are made will be accused of lying or cheating the gamers in some way.  I read the thread about a day before the story broke on news outlets, so I've had more time to think about the issue than others. And he does have a point. Whenever a video game is about to come out and it has a feature that is unfamiliar, weird or shady, (or had a feature that was in a previous game taken away), the gaming community will rage and troll and launch boring tirades against the developers of that game, claiming they will boycott the game. Then the gamers buy it, enjoy it, and wait for the next outrage to cross their path. If you want a really good example of this, take a look at the outrage surrounding No Man's Sky . Even I wrote about this game, and while I have softened my sta...

Never be afraid to mislabel a product - Rule of Acquisition #239 Jim Sterling has brought up the issue of Triple-A video game companies reaching into gamers’ wallets to yank out additional cash AFTER they have originally paid $60 for a video game again and again and again . He has repeatedly stated that he will stop talking about this anti-consumer practice immediately once these game companies stop doing this. Well, good luck with that, since apparently game companies seem disinclined to stop. Let me be fair to these companies. Businesses exist to make a profit. And I’ve argued before that companies can be as greedy as they want. But I’ve also maintained that they don’t need to be jerks about it. I could go on about this, but for now I want to focus on this video made by Jim Sterling. The subject is how to have microtransactions in games correctly. I will expand on this video by comparing the advice he gives with Star Trek Online, which does all these approaches right. Noti...

Hi, I’m back. It’s been a while (thanks to real life concerns, really sorry about that), but a recent event has brought me back to the internets once again, and that event is the recent release of the Destiny 2 video game. And in my opinion, this game represents everything wrong with the AAA game industry. I will present my case through a unique method; by responding to the comments about Destiny 2’s new way of giving shaders to players. Shaders are color palettes that can be added to your in-game gear. You know; make your gun red, your boots green, your armor gloves purple, that sort of thing. In the first Destiny game, once you acquire shaders, you can keep them & apply them to all your gear. In Destiny 2, shaders are consumable items that you apply to individual pieces of your gear. And once you apply a different shader, the original is gone. Same thing if you get better gear down the road. Once you get rid of the other gear you applied shaders to, the shaders  on...