When will enough be enough? When do we, as the collective customer base of gaming publishers, decide that the line has been crossed, that we won’t accept certain kinds of bullshit behavior any longer? How many day-1 DLC packages locked away on the disc does it take? How many infuriating pre-order campaigns that will eventually leave a customer without some part of the game unless that game is bought several times from several retailers? How many implementations of microtransactions in full priced games? How many always-online requiring “services” that are just thinly veiled digital rights management measures, ruining the game whenever there is a server hiccup?
As things go, we are incredibly patient. We take a lot of beatings, and boy are we grateful for those. If anyone dares to question the validity of pre-order exclusive DLC, some commenter is always ready to pounce into the fray. Not that big a deal. There will be a GOTY edition with all the DLC included anyway. Not missing out on much without the retailer exclusive DLC cause that one chapter of the game isn’t going to make or break the experience. Get with the times I’m told, it’s not like the 90s anymore where you can buy a game and that’s it. Yeah maybe. But maybe it’s just time we stop accepting the marketing bullshit that’s being thrown at us and simply refuse to partake in it.
The straw breaking the camel’s back here is the recent announcement of Electronic Arts that upcoming Dead Space 3 will include microtransactions to essentially spend real money in the game on in-game weapons that otherwise have to be unlocked by grinding. At least, that is what this sounds like. At this point, Dead Space 3 is a game you should not buy. Regardless of what you think about the game itself or the decisions that were made for it. I sure was ready to bail on the game when they announced that whole co-op thing. I loathe perfectly fine single player series suddenly having to have multiplayer, and when perfectly fine single player series are built around co-op… Well traditionally those experiences suffer badly from it.
But I admit Visceral made the right noises about the way they were doing things, making co-op essentially an unreliable thing, where one player would see things, enemies the other one wouldn’t, upping the ante, and essentially doing really interesting things with the co-op feature that other developers haven’t done yet. I still would prefer the game to be single player first, because that is the way I prefer my games to be, but I was warming up to the idea. And now this.
EA has achieved some notoriety for being at the forefront of all the horrible things done to AAA distribution in the recent years. First there was ‘Project $10’, aimed at the used games market with ‘bundled DLC’ that came with any EA game from about 2010 on, and it’s been downhill since. Pre-order exclusive DLC, timed pre-order exclusive DLC, and now microtransactions in a full price game. I am aware that EA is by far not alone, and that essentially every big publisher is doing this.
But I think it is time to finally draw the line, to say ‘this is far enough!’ and stop playing ball. I’m not encouraging piracy either, mind you. I’m encouraging you to at least think critically about what you’re enabling when you purchase this game, or any game, that essentially undermines what it means to purchase a game. Yes, you essentially do purchase just a ‘license’ to use this piece of interactive software. But that doesn’t mean that you have to just accept any and all bullshit marketing ideas the industry throws at you. I know I like to preach a lot, and I also know that I will eventually, inevitably end up buying a game that does exactly the things I openly decry here. But hey, at least I feel bad about it, and also increasingly just not buy certain games. And so should you.
