Fuck Videogames
Fuck videogames.
Fuck developers. Fuck them for not giving a shit about their consumers. Fuck them for instating draconian DRM that seems to get worse and worse every year. Fuck them for requiring people have an always-on connection to the internet in order to play a fucking single-player game. Fuck developers for paying voice actors as little as $250 for voicing the principal character in their AAA game, for not paying residuals, and for convicing SAG that they don’t need to pay residuals because “games don’t make money.” Fuck developers for not giving a fuck. Fuck developers for slapping a new coat of paint on an old game and selling it at full price. Fuck them for doing this every year, like clockwork, for the better part of two decades. Fuck developers for not taking risks.
Fuck publishers for mandating developers do much of the above. Fuck publishers for pushing for annualization, for ruining great ideas by interfering with them, for not letting developers take risks, for killing great games’ potential with awful, awful marketing. Fuck publishers for not asking CryTek UK to make a new TimeSplitters game. Fuck publishers for charging $60+ for games that lose 70% of their value as soon as you walk out of the store with them, then having the temerity to blame used game sales for “destroying the industry.” Fuck publishers for buying developers, gutting them of their resources and culture, then shuttering them when their next game isn’t the runaway success you inexplicably expected it to be. Fuck publishers for milking franchises to death, for over-saturating the market, then acting shocked when people don’t want to buy your games anymore.
Fuck videogame journalists for letting developers and publishers get away with this shit. Fuck videogame news sites, blogs and magazines for being so utterly dependent on ad revenue that they daren’t say anything negative lest the publishers pull their advertising. Fuck them for being so dependent on ad revenue they’ll post anything, anything to get pageviews. Fuck videogame journalists who actually consider themselves to be journalists. Fuck critics who think 7 out of 10 is an appropriate score for a mediocre game. Fuck critics who wax lyrical about a game throughout a review only to include it in their “Most Disappointing Games of the Year” list come December. Fuck videogame journalists for hooting and hollering like drunken fratboys during press conferences and trade shows. Fuck the gaming press for being part of the machine they’re supposed to be reporting on.
Fuck gamers. Fuck gamers for vocally complaining about this bullshit but doing absolutely nothing about it. Fuck gamers for complaining about DRM in one breath, then offering developers your money in the next. Fuck gamers for acting like they give a shit, but then voting in favour of the shit they claim to give a shit about with their wallets. Fuck gamers for not demanding better. Fuck gamers for not deserving better.
Fuck me for thinking they did. Fuck me for imagining that maybe someone else out there actually gave a fuck. Fuck me for writing this, for giving the games industry so much of my money over the last twenty years, and for thinking that maybe things could - and would - improve in time.
Fuck videogames.
QUOTED FOR TRUTH: Jeroen Amin, Piki Geek: Editorial: On Crytek, Opinions, and Official Statements [April 30th, 2012]
More to the point, is this how we want it to work? Is this what we’re content with? Because it seems very much that we are, and that’s perhaps even more depressing.
Read this article. It’s heartbreaking to anybody who actually gives a shit about games as opposed to, y’know, pageviews.
Joystiq, Arthur Gies: Anonymous Tumblr account accuses Crytek of employee mistreatment [September 5th, 2011]
Well you can’t blame us for reaching that conclusion when you includes links to a bunch of shit relating to Team fucking Bondi, can you?
![Game trailers don’t exist to sell you the specifics of a game. Game trailers exist to sell you the idea. Unfortunately the idea they’re trying to sell is “You don’t need to see what the game looks like to know you want it.”
This is a problem that largely carries over into the gaming press as well, who are given assets and access to early content in exchange for building up hype for these games. The journalists give critique-free “previews” of in-development titles that don’t really explain what the game is, how it works, or why we should give anything vaguely resembling a shit about it when it finally hits store shelves.
Despite all this, gamers can’t get enough of this bullshit. We can’t wait to digest the latest uninformative trailer or promotional fluff piece. A trailer for a new Call of Duty game? Wow! What’s, uh… what’s the game like? Oh, you don’t know? Because it was just a CG video of a guy with a gun walking pensively towards the camera as things you probably won’t ever see in the game explode behind him? Just like every other damned FPS trailer you’ve ever seen in your entire life? Okay. I suppose I should make the twenty-minute drive to my nearest GameStop to preorder the damned thing, then.
Even worse than trailers for FPS titles are trailers for fighting games, showing characters who might not be playable in the final game pulling off moves you’ll never see in a fight that entirely fails to represent the nature of the game itself. I was looking forward to Mortal Kombat this year, but only because I’d had a rare opportunity to actually get my hands on the game and try it for myself at a time when most of the public were digesting videos establishing character origins and motivations, as if needing to know why Scorpion wants you to Get Over Here is the primary driving force behind the average fighting game enthusiast’s decision to purchase the game.
Even on the rare occasion when a videogame is advertised on TV, we rarely see any gameplay footage. The only thing we get these days that’s even vaguely close to “actual gameplay footage” is those stupid machinima GameStop ads that usually go for a lame joke (their Dead Space 2 ”No one pukes on me!” commercial sticks out in my mind as possibly one of the most ill-advised ad campaigns ever devised for a Horror game).
It’s all part of a crooked and broken business model - the press overhypes the games, the marketing departments produce marketing materials that look astounding but don’t need to accurately represent the game they’re pushing, and then they sell the game for nigh on seventy fucking dollars at day one.
It’s a flimsy matchstick house of a business model that could collapse at any moment - indeed, that rather aptly sums up why so many developers go tits-up shortly after their latest game flops. Haze should not have been the end of Free Radical Design, and yet mere months after the game failed to wow its potential audience the company was being stripped and sold to CryTek. Bizarre Creations produced some cracking games, and yet because Blur didn’t sell as well as Activision would have liked the company gets shuttered. That’s not right at all, and any industry that allows creative companies like Bizarre and FRD to fup out of existence after a single failure is built upon fucking dodgy foundation.
[Image source: Reddit, via GameFreaks]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lprywvZQop1qzlgbao1_500.png)
Game trailers don’t exist to sell you the specifics of a game. Game trailers exist to sell you the idea. Unfortunately the idea they’re trying to sell is “You don’t need to see what the game looks like to know you want it.”
This is a problem that largely carries over into the gaming press as well, who are given assets and access to early content in exchange for building up hype for these games. The journalists give critique-free “previews” of in-development titles that don’t really explain what the game is, how it works, or why we should give anything vaguely resembling a shit about it when it finally hits store shelves.
Despite all this, gamers can’t get enough of this bullshit. We can’t wait to digest the latest uninformative trailer or promotional fluff piece. A trailer for a new Call of Duty game? Wow! What’s, uh… what’s the game like? Oh, you don’t know? Because it was just a CG video of a guy with a gun walking pensively towards the camera as things you probably won’t ever see in the game explode behind him? Just like every other damned FPS trailer you’ve ever seen in your entire life? Okay. I suppose I should make the twenty-minute drive to my nearest GameStop to preorder the damned thing, then.
Even worse than trailers for FPS titles are trailers for fighting games, showing characters who might not be playable in the final game pulling off moves you’ll never see in a fight that entirely fails to represent the nature of the game itself. I was looking forward to Mortal Kombat this year, but only because I’d had a rare opportunity to actually get my hands on the game and try it for myself at a time when most of the public were digesting videos establishing character origins and motivations, as if needing to know why Scorpion wants you to Get Over Here is the primary driving force behind the average fighting game enthusiast’s decision to purchase the game.
Even on the rare occasion when a videogame is advertised on TV, we rarely see any gameplay footage. The only thing we get these days that’s even vaguely close to “actual gameplay footage” is those stupid machinima GameStop ads that usually go for a lame joke (their Dead Space 2 ”No one pukes on me!” commercial sticks out in my mind as possibly one of the most ill-advised ad campaigns ever devised for a Horror game).
It’s all part of a crooked and broken business model - the press overhypes the games, the marketing departments produce marketing materials that look astounding but don’t need to accurately represent the game they’re pushing, and then they sell the game for nigh on seventy fucking dollars at day one.
It’s a flimsy matchstick house of a business model that could collapse at any moment - indeed, that rather aptly sums up why so many developers go tits-up shortly after their latest game flops. Haze should not have been the end of Free Radical Design, and yet mere months after the game failed to wow its potential audience the company was being stripped and sold to CryTek. Bizarre Creations produced some cracking games, and yet because Blur didn’t sell as well as Activision would have liked the company gets shuttered. That’s not right at all, and any industry that allows creative companies like Bizarre and FRD to fup out of existence after a single failure is built upon fucking dodgy foundation.
[Image source: Reddit, via GameFreaks]
VG247’s staff apparently can’t type “CryTek”
On Monday I saw that VG247’s Stephany Nunneley had accidentally mis-typed “CryTek” as “CyrTek”. Today, Johnny Cullen did the same thing. A quick search on their website reveals that Stephany made the same mistake last July. Noen None of these typos have been corrected yet.
This is what I’m going to refer to as the “Three Strikes” rule - misspell a company name three times, get your arse posted on this blog. Well, not literally - I don’t have access to those photos - but you know what I mean.
Interesting Sidenote: Back in the day, Amiga Power routinely referred to Acclaim as “Akklaim” because they were confused by the company’s logo. Konami was also occasionally referred to as “Kjonami” for reasons I’ve never quite understood.
