Thread: Why are some gaming companies so evil and don't care about customers?

I really can't understand this...

Let's take for example, Valve... Players have been expecting Half-life 3 for years. What they're doing, however, is placing jokes here and there, and when fanboys get optimistic ... another cold shower: "Sorry guys, we were just joking, we plan nothing for the future"

Or Blizzard. For years Blizzard has been mocking the Alliance and Alliance players. Blizzard has promised to give the good stuff in World of Warcraft for years, yet all expansions have turned out to be disappointing for Alliance players. Things went out of control during the latest Blizzard conference during which Cannibal corpse singer was allowed to bash Alliance players in sexist and homophobic way.

The question remains - I wonder why some gaming companies are trying to disappoint the loyal fans and care nothing about how they feel.

Maybe slightly different to your examples,but for me my biggest dissapointments are from Dice,and the recent direction they've taken BF in,going against what BF was about and pandering to the call of duty run and gun crowd.

Or Activision,i see them as a bigger evil than EA now,will do anything to squeeze the last drop of money from a players wallet,though EA is still a close second.

Stuff like i mentioned,it's all money money money.

Can't really comment on your part about valve releasing teasers then letting people down,maybe a sick sense of humour?:P

I think that RoR is greatly overpriced, Turbine is generally fairly bad at clear and honest communication, and LOTRO now seems to be store-driven more than anything else, but you're doing a disservice to the word "evil" by applying it to any video game company.

I say this as someone who spends way too much time playing video games, but step away from the PC and the console for a bit, do some reading about the atrocities committed on both small and large scales by individuals, heads of state, and countries, and then see if you really think that Valve teasing you and Turbine overcharging you really count as evil.

Money and profit are evil. Gaming companies have investors/owners who only care about the money. The investors/owners own the gaming company. The loyal fans are statistics on someone's spreadsheet. Like the Elder Scrolls hubbub when details were released released (I think it was Elder Scrolls and not SWTOR)--bloggers warning Bethesda that they shouldn't just assume they have their loyal fanbase already in the bank for an MMO.

What are you going to do. I'm not convinced that Rohan is overpriced now that they added the points and dungeons. Mounted combat has been in development for a long time, which means it was expensive. That feature alone could have cost $5+ per player who buys Rohan just to break even.

Originally Posted by Silverangel

Money and profit are evil.

No, they aren't.

Profit creates jobs, which provide us with profit that we use to buy things we need and want (like the games whose makers you flippantly and naively accuse of being evil), which allows the makers of these things to also profit, and spread profit to still others. If someone profits, it's unavoidable that others will profit too. I just got home from work, where I was busily trying to profit, so that I can buy things that will make others profit, so that they can buy things, and so on, and so on. Let me know when you get the point I'm making.

Profit produces wealth, which among other things provides charities with money they need to help others in various ways. Would anyone be giving money to charity if nobody profited? People like Bill Gates give millions to charities every year -- what percentage of your income do you give to charities? I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess zero.

Profit provides funding for medical research for things like heart disease, cancer, AIDS, and childhood leukemia, and has thus enabled many, many lives (including, no doubt, someone you love) to be saved by new treatments and procedures for countless health problems, some that only 50 years ago would have resulted in death. This has raised the average life expectancy to almost double what it used to be not that long ago. How many people wouldn't be alive now if no one profited from anything? And don't you think that people deserve to profit from beneficial things they provided to mankind? No? Who are you to decide that?

Profit provides financial backing for technological advancement, and is responsible for the fact that we no longer have to live in log cabins and hunt our own food. People made money from inventing new and cheaper materials for housing, as well as new ways of food processing, so that even poor people have greater access to homes and decent food than used to be the case.

Profit has provided mankind not only with what it needs, but also with levels of fulfillment, satisfaction, comfort and convenience that you now take for granted. Almost everything you have, from your house and your car down to your toilet paper, exists because people previously profited enough to put capital into the development of these things. Even your bloody computer, as well as the junk food you stuff your face with while using it, exists because people profited.


It is the grossest form of hypocrisy to condemn as evil the very thing that provides the quality of living that you obviously love and greedily indulge in. It is the height of arrogance and self importance to fancy yourself some all-knowing accuser of the good things that so many people have done because they profited.



Don't live your whole life in profound ignorance. Please, please make an effort to educate yourself by reading at least a book or two about economics, so that you're no longer spouting utter foolishness like your statement above.


Rip

Originally Posted by Rippentuck

No, they aren't.

Profit creates jobs, which provide us with profit that we use to buy things we need and want (like the games whose makers you flippantly and naively accuse of being evil), which allows the makers of these things to also profit, and spread profit to still others. If someone profits, it's unavoidable that others will profit too. I just got home from work, where I was busily trying to profit, so that I can buy things that will make others profit, so that they can buy things, and so on, and so on. Let me know when you get the point I'm making.

Profit produces wealth, which among other things provides charities with money they need to help others in various ways. Would anyone be giving money to charity if nobody profited? People like Bill Gates give millions to charities every year -- what percentage of your income do you give to charities? I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess zero.

Profit provides funding for medical research for things like heart disease, cancer, AIDS, and childhood leukemia, and has thus enabled many, many lives (including, no doubt, someone you love) to be saved by new treatments and procedures for countless health problems, some that only 50 years ago would have resulted in death. This has raised the average life expectancy to almost double what it used to be not that long ago. How many people wouldn't be alive now if no one profited from anything? And don't you think that people deserve to profit from beneficial things they provided to mankind? No? Who are you to decide that?

Profit provides financial backing for technological advancement, and is responsible for the fact that we no longer have to live in log cabins and hunt our own food. People made money from inventing new and cheaper materials for housing, as well as new ways of food processing, so that even poor people have greater access to homes and decent food than used to be the case.

Profit has provided mankind not only with what it needs, but also with levels of fulfillment, satisfaction, comfort and convenience that you now take for granted. Almost everything you have, from your house and your car down to your toilet paper, exists because people previously profited enough to put capital into the development of these things. Even your bloody computer, as well as the junk food you stuff your face with while using it, exists because people profited.


It is the grossest form of hypocrisy to condemn as evil the very thing that provides the quality of living that you obviously love and greedily indulge in. It is the height of arrogance and self importance to fancy yourself some all-knowing accuser of the good things that so many people have done because they profited.



Don't live your whole life in profound ignorance. Please, please make an effort to educate yourself by reading at least a book or two about economics, so that you're no longer spouting utter foolishness like your statement above.


Rip

What a horrid, one dimensional view on the single worst human invention ever conceived: money. I'ts clear to me that you can't think outside the box, or have not had money troubles, else you begin to hate money with every fiber of your body. One starts to think about why we have to have money when you have to decide whether to get milk and bread or go to the doctor. Of course, when someone has lots of it, everything's nice and dandy, but when someone doesn't, then they come to the realization I posted above.

Bleh, posts like these make me really, really agitated. Please refrain from posting this kind of garbage again.

Originally Posted by Rippentuck

It is the grossest form of hypocrisy to condemn as evil the very thing that provides the quality of living that you obviously love and greedily indulge in.

I'm a Buddhist. I drive a 15-year old pickup truck. My computer is almost as old as my truck (exaggerating slightly.) I don't "stuff my face with junk food", unless you mean Ramen noodles and fruit from the Farmer's market. You don't know anything about me. I know a lot about American culture.

(How much rep do I need to neg someone? I thought I was over that hump already.)

Just stop it people!

(edit Rippentuck (^^) pls read a book or two yourself. Not just propaganda. I know its hard for you us americans to not act superficial and to not blame other people for delivering alternatives.

How is beeing greedy not the purest definition of evil?
Just think about it. People who want more for themself or think they deserve more then others are willing to kill torture and domiante others for that. Greed is the root of all evil.

If turbine was a real company they would try to offer something worth the money they are demanding.

But making revenue in this business comes down to releasing a picture of a mount and a catchy phrase and bam you have revenue for the next two weeks or so.

This is not business this is making as much money posible with fooling people. You will all want to pull you legs out if RoR comes out and you will realize how bad you where riped this time. But even then you will find superficial excuses why it was okay to spend 90dollars onto somezhing like 'this'.

This is not about economics, this is about supassing economics at all. If you cant understand this by now you are real addicts, sorry.

Lotro would have been out of business for long and good now if real life economics would play any role here.

FunFact: you dont even need to have a valid email adress any more to register an account here. This is really the lowest lows of account based services on the inernet.

In there greed to make money out of everything, they care about nothing anymore. YOU, the customer counts nothng to them anymore.

Best Regards

Originally Posted by Silverangel

Money and profit are evil.

Money and profit are not evil. They are inventions (like fire, gun powder and many others) that can be used for good or evil.

Money is a convenient way of transfering value between humans. Otherwise, you end up with frustations trying to convert beets into 10 gallons of gasoline. You have to find someone with gasoline that will accept your beets. Or go thru a multiple step process to convert your beets to gasoline.

Without profit, there is no reason to do anything. You tell me that I will lose net worth or money on every transaction. The best I can hope for is to end up where I started. I am not putting any resources into the project.

Morale problems that can be defined as evil occur when humans use money and profit in a way to hurt other humans. Humans have been abusing and making victims of other humans as long as humans have been interacting with each other. It did not take money, profit, fire and gun powder to fuel humsnity being bad to humanity.

All these inventions did was give us new and more effective ways to be nice or mean. The more useful an invention in generating good for society - it tends to have an equal usefulness in pain and suffering (evil) generation.

Bottom Line - We don't need to get rid of these inventions. We need to change people.

IMHO - The pace of technology improvement has greatly out stripped the ability of humanity and our society to use them wisely. Obviously a person with a sharp wooden stick that wants to stab me is not a concern as long as there is no accessible technology that always the stick wielder to get to my house.in South Florida. It would be even better if there was no accessible technology that would give the stick wielder the idea that stabbing the Yula Bunny is something that needs to be done.

Originally Posted by Yula_the_Mighty

Money and profit are not evil. They are inventions (like fire, gun powder and many others) that can be used for good or evil.

Of course. Thanks for interpreting what I meant to say instead of attempting to pontificate economic theory to a raving idiot. So...I've spent my afternoon adding to the uncountable hours I've spent on my LotRO interface. (Trying to make it less amateurish is like water wearing away stone.) This work is free for all players to use, of course, like the works of all of the other modders.

I'm happy. This is the way creativity should be.

Originally Posted by Silverangel

Money and profit are evil

Utter nonsense. Please explain what you would use as an alternative medium of exchange, or how the economy would work without a medium of exchange.

Beyond that, I've long noticed that the people who say "money & profit are evil" change their tunes very quickly when it's THEIR money & THEIR profit being discussed.

For those who equate "money & profit" with "greed," please just stop. That's emotional hissy-fit garbage masquerading as an argument.

Originally Posted by Lestache

I think that RoR is greatly overpriced, Turbine is generally fairly bad at clear and honest communication, and LOTRO now seems to be store-driven more than anything else, but you're doing a disservice to the word "evil" by applying it to any video game company.

I say this as someone who spends way too much time playing video games, but step away from the PC and the console for a bit, do some reading about the atrocities committed on both small and large scales by individuals, heads of state, and countries, and then see if you really think that Valve teasing you and Turbine overcharging you really count as evil.

Agreed. I think that RoR is over priced and $70 is just lame, and the 6th bag should be part of the expansion period, and I agree that Turbine is bad at communication. But evil? No. Evil is like the 3rd Reich or something like that. This is just a company over charging a product to see how much $$$ it can get.

I do the same thing at the AH. I know it's just play money but still.

Originally Posted by Nymphonic

Agreed. I think that RoR is over priced and $70 is just lame, and the 6th bag should be part of the expansion period, and I agree that Turbine is bad at communication. But evil? No. Evil is like the 3rd Reich or something like that. This is just a company over charging a product to see how much $$$ it can get.

I do the same thing at the AH. I know it's just play money but still.

They're not evil, just greedy, and it's the greediness that makes them look evil.

Originally Posted by Stevo6

They're not evil, just greedy, and it's the greediness that makes them look evil.

I can go along with that.

Originally Posted by SvetPandaren

I really can't understand this...

Let's take for example, Valve... Players have been expecting Half-life 3 for years. What they're doing, however, is placing jokes here and there, and when fanboys get optimistic ... another cold shower: "Sorry guys, we were just joking, we plan nothing for the future"

Or Blizzard. For years Blizzard has been mocking the Alliance and Alliance players. Blizzard has promised to give the good stuff in World of Warcraft for years, yet all expansions have turned out to be disappointing for Alliance players. Things went out of control during the latest Blizzard conference during which Cannibal corpse singer was allowed to bash Alliance players in sexist and homophobic way.

The question remains - I wonder why some gaming companies are trying to disappoint the loyal fans and care nothing about how they feel.

In Valve's case, they are probably working on it, but Valve like trolling people and like being secretive.

Plus, now a days making money is the primary objective, whether to break even, or to just make money for the sake of making mula.

Originally Posted by SvetPandaren

The question remains - I wonder why some gaming companies are trying to disappoint the loyal fans and care nothing about how they feel.

You certainly posted this on the right site, hopefully Turbine will explain why the behave like this.