Game Companies Deserve Backlash From Consumers

By Mike McGann
Posted Friday, December 15, 2006

It’s Christmas morning, you’ve upgraded your status as super-parent (and ate up no small amount of credit card space) by buying your kid the latest and greatest gaming platform and a handful of games.

You get everything all hooked up, power it up and drop in one of these new games that you plunked down $60 (US) to buy. And. It. Doesn’t. Work. Or maybe you bought a Nitendo Wii and junior threw the controller through your TV’s picture tube when the wrist strap broke.

While the Nintendo situation is more a case of a company underestimating how dumb people can be (and let’s face it, it pretty dumb), games routinely show up in stores and they either don’t work without turning your game or PC into a steaming pile of wreckage or they lack features claimed to be part of the game for months.

The disc isn’t damaged, they’re all alike. You end up downloading four or five patches and now the game plays, but it still causes the game machine to crash from time to time. One of the other games works fine, for the most part, just half the features you expected aren’t there and it seems like a warmed-over version of last year’s game, which since it cost a premium price. Somehow, this all seems wrong.

Welcome to the world of 21st Century video gaming. For sure, we’ve been evolving toward this issue, whether on platform games or those played on your PC or Mac for some time now. I can remember as a judge for the Codies, the old software awards, working on the gaming sector and shaking my head that companies had shipped semi-functional or non-functional products, let alone submitted them for awards.

And those were days before you release a game half done and then upgrade it via the Internet — there wasn’t enough bandwidth yet. Based on personal experience and reading various gaming user forums as many as half of all games are released in what used to be called “Beta” or test stage. As someone whose done more than his share of beta testing, I’m amazed that consumers put up with it. In fact, the prime ages for playing games, ages 15 to 25, now think nothing of downloading mods (short for modifications) to fix the shortcomings of the original games. More amazing is that these mods are often written by the gamers, not the company.

It is nothing short of an amazing that consumers put up with it and in many cases, see it as the price of having the latest and, uh, greatest. But it’s not right. I can say was pretty unimpressed when my first XBox 360 overheated and died — apparently because of design defect — or when various games (oddly, a large percentage of which were produced by Electronic Arts) caused the XBox to regularly crash and burn. It’s one thing to have software conflicts on a PC or Mac, when there are literally an infinite number of possibilities for software conflicts and another thing for it to happen on a supposedly closed system, such as XBox or PlayStation 3 which appears to be suffering from as many or more glitches as its Microsoft counterpart.

While some of the failures and glitches of the platforms are forgivable — Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft are attempting to not just create a new product, but a new category of product, extending well beyond mere gaming — the gaming software companies, especially the large ones, don’t deserve a break. Too often, especially when it comes to sports titles, the big guys wrap up a monopoly and then tell consumers to “take it or leave it” when it comes to their titles.

Read gaming forums around the Internet and you can see the frustration — and the anger — as these companies continue to take them for granted and quash competition. As you may remember, 2K Sports kicked the stuffing out of EA’s Madden football franchise, which is as moldy as month-old bread. So how did EA respond? Make their game better? Nope, they signed an exclusive deal with the NFL so 2K couldn’t sell a competing game. Yeah, that worked out well for consumers — and ended up shrinking the overall market for football games.

While Congress enjoys their corporate PAC donations —coughBribescough — there’s no way they’ll eliminate such sweetheart deals that stunt both competition and innovation. So that leaves you, the consumer, to do something about it. It’s simple: don’t buy lousy titles. Read reviews — especially user reviews, because publishing company Web sites tend to depend on gaming ads to survive and as such, can’t be trusted to offer brutally honest opinions on games and game hardware.

Do your homework before you run into GameSpot (and, c’mon, why are you going there? shopping at GameSpot is less enjoyable than being kneecapped) or BestBuy, credit card in hand. You’ll be happier and best of all, you’ll be forcing these gaming companies to produce working, entertaining games instead of much of crap they’ve been shoveling onto the market in recent years.

Take control. Believe it or not, you have the power to do something about it. Don’t buy the games and if you do, and get stuck with a stinker, complain, complain and complain some more. Write letters to company executives and post your opinion on Web forums like ours (and keep in mind, your opinion is protected by the First Amendment — despite that, some companies have sued posters to quash opposition, without success, so be warned, but also be aware some states offer protection from such litigation, find out if yours is one of them) and use word of mouth to tell people what happened to you.

Your money and your opinion count. Make these companies listen.