This guy used the EECB strategy (Executive Email Carpet Bomb) to get a refund. Doubt it will work for anyone else now.
Not only was FO3 was an extremely well-reviewed game, it was bought and played by many people who’d never played the first two games — heck, a lot of them probably hadn’t even heard of Fallout. I simply can’t imagine that a significant proportion of customers didn’t like the game because it was insufficiently like FO1 and 2 (not the least because most players seemed to like the game full stop). Using the franchise bought Bethesda some buzz and maybe nostalgic goodwill amongst the hardcore, but you’re giving brand loyalty way too much importance here.
Anyway. What’s important to you can’t necessarily be extrapolated to most people. You care about a now 15 year old game, a fact which alone puts you in a very niche group, but it’s true for everyone. Thus:
That’s perfectly valid. You shouldn’t purchase something you won’t enjoy or get use out of. But as homes (and individual people) become more and more wired the cost of being always-online continues to decline, and I suspect your own desires here aren’t as universalizable as you hope.
And if you’re right, it’ll work itself out in the end, won’t it? Modulo some crappy games in the interim.
It counts, and its importance is growing, not shrinking. Video games are not really a booming market. It does grow over time, but not like the early years when sales increased every single year, and companies were often pretty short-lived, or jumped from genre to genre. Precisely because A-list titles are more complex and more expensive, and studios are more focused on particular genres and developing expertise with them. It’s a lot harder to make startups (though kickstarter has helped) and now the emphasis is less on building the next “killer app” than on consistent delivery. This is what EA still doesn’t quite understand, despite having a big lead in that department:
In business terms, it’s entered the early stages of maturity. EA’s advantage in business comes down to exactly one thing: the big yearly products. It can survive as long as it churns out these reliably. If it stumbles, the going will get very, very rough. In just the last few years, they’ve had multiple high-profile disasters, two of which turned into major PR nightmares.
This matters, because you can no longer attract customers nearly as easily. Burn a customer now, and they’re likely quite willing to jump ship to a competitor now or in the future. Or they just won’t buy at all, which is just as bad from EA’s perspective. If you released a shitty game in 1983, you could easily turn it around with hit in 1985, when your market would be bigger, you would have some more breathing room to develop, you’ll only have spent a couple hendred thousand at most, and at least the bad press would be minimal. If you release a shitting game in 2013, your market won’t be noticably bigger in 2015, you’ve pissed off a lot of potential customers who will now demand freebies, more assurance they’re getting a quality product, millions upon millions of dollars, and endless mockery of the next claim you make.
This word does not exist, and should not be permitted to exist.
I believe so; I’ve been watching a UK-based Kickstarter project and I live in the US.
Side note: Most people I know who got Diablo 3 did so for free. They’re World of Warcraft players who got the game pre-ordered free as an incentive for buying a full year’s subscription to WoW. Since they all had been playing for years and a year subscription is cheaper than a month or a quarter at a time, it was a deal for them.
Also, none of them are still playing Diablo 3. They are still playing WoW, though.
There’s no point in paying for servers that will only be used for the first week or so when everyone is trying to play the game all at once. I wonder how many more years until gamers stop being shocked that online only games have connectivity problems at launch.
Eh, it seems most MMO launches nowadays have seemed to handle initial launch problems better–there’s often still long queues on day 1, but they usually get things sorted out by the second or at worst third day.
EA seemed to be fumbling about too much with this–they knew how many people pre-ordered, and for all their time in the business, they should be able to get a good estimate of how many people are going to buy in the first day or two–even if they made the executive decision to not have enough server power for the first few days, you’d think they’d have had a better plan.
And it seems like they claim to be upgrading capacity, which suggests they are actually paying for the extra capacity, just a week after it would have done them the most good.
I’m one of those people who got Diablo 3 free and quit playing fairly early on, while still playing WoW fairly regularly. I have been playing Torchlight 2 a lot, but I’ll be back-burnering that to play Starcraft now.
Actually I see more disappointment and anger than shock e.g. the OP
And the property of being “online only” is quickly becoming shared by all full-price games.
So what are we saying: If you really want to play a game that’s just come out – don’t: wait a week or maybe two to be safe?
But…do buy the game because often titles have special extras if you pre-order or buy in the first weekend, to entice early-adopters.
Just leave it on your shelf for a couple of weeks until the servers are just right. And don’t complain.
A recent RockPaperShotgun article corroborates this. I retract that specific paper-thin defence of this practice I mentioned upthread.
Not really true.
First, servers are cheap compared to the bad press that a company will get in these situations. Secondly, server space can be easily “rented” from a number of different places; there are whole companies built around providing servers that scale as the load requires.
I think the quickness with which EA/Maxis has tripled or quadrupled the number of servers within a short time pretty much proves that it’s worth it for a company to make sure their launches go smoothly.
What’s hilarious is that right now, a lot of people are thinking that the the only way to play SimCity reliably is with a pirated version that has the online requirement removed.
So, creating a need for a pirated version the game may not have been EA’s best strategy in retrospect.
Most of the original PC game cracks were no-CD cracks for people who lost discs or scratched them or whatever.
The thing is DRM won’t work - it just won’t. Designers just need to make games that people want to to buy and find ways to make them not suck.
Maybe EA’s real goal is to make games so bad that no one will want to steal them.
I would think EA would have already made a bundle of money if they had released a good solid game with optional online multiplayer and none of this DRM crap. Running their crappy servers, all the tech support, trying to fix the servers, and all this bad press has to be costing them. Didn’t they learn with Spore?
Well, maybe not.
This leads us to an interesting examination of the history of Maxis as a game studio. If you really examine the Maxis line critically… I mean, really honestly look at their lineup of games, it’s more miss than hit.
SimCity was a wonderful game, a revolutionary game, a game that deserved every ounce of hype it got. And the three followups were pretty good. None were really perfect, but good enough.
And of course The Sims was pretty fun for a lot of people. I hated it, but hey, millions of copies sold can’t be wrong.
But if one examines the Maxis lineup that’s really about it. SimCity and The Sims essentially encompass everything the studio has ever done right, and they have done a LOT wrong. Most of their other Sim games were buggy, ill-conceived, and of varying quality; SimEarth was interesting, I guess, but SimGolf was a peice of crap, SimFarm was too easy, etc. etc. Simcopter sucked. Spore sucked all the suck out of suck. When you get right down to it, Maxis has been riding SimCity for almost 25 years.
Really, maybe Maxis is just running out of gas.
For those who don’t mind Kickstarter, there is Civitas, a indie city building game. It is not the most well run Kickstarter ever (if you are comparing with say Numerna : Tides of Torment), and there was a lack of info at the start, which raises a couple of red flags. The most recent updates have more on the developers, so you have to decide for yourself whether they are deliver.
SimTower was fun. Kind of.
The 3D JNUG-like SimGolf, the isometric SimGolf with Sims speaking Simlish, or both?
As was Streets of SimCity, which would have been better had it been able to properly render highways rather than leave them flat.
Literally, in the case of SimAnt…
And you haven’t even mentioned SimHealth.