Mousers wrote...
No missunderstanding at all, I knew what you were trying to explain and commend you for your efforts. Another part of marketing is word-of-mouth which ties into customer base. Their experience with the game, patches in a timely manner, feedback to customers, et al. A good case in point is Turbine. They were on the gold train but didn't listen or pay attention to their customer base. Over time they were heading downhill fast all attributed to poor customer relations, patches, etc. Finally someone had the intelligence to turn them around by listening to their customers, understanding what they were concerned about. Made changes and started the uphill climb. Whether they still can climb all the way back up only time will tell for their popular franchise. But they are working darn hard at repairing and getting back the initial customer support. There are other companies and I don't care to do the research,Vmode wrote...
Don't missunderstand me here, I am in no way condoning this sort of corporate behavior. Personally, I detest it and it's one of the reasons I don't work in marketing or sales anymore. I'm just trying to get people to understand how things often work behind the scenes so they don't get their hopes up to much or go all crazy with their speculation.
You do make a good point about about the long term effects of such a decision and its result on long term reputation loss leading to future loss or revenue. However, gamers are nutrious for their knee jerk reactions and being quick to forget past hostilities when being tempted by a new hot tripple A game on the horizon. I remember Kotaku running a story complete with a screenshot from the boycott Left 4 Dead 2 steam group where pretty much all of them had "Playing: Left 4 Dead 2" as their status.
Therefore, companies like EA do not put much stock into gamers opinions unless it proves to actually have a detremental effect to sales. Here, such an effect would be minor at most and as such I doubt the people making the decisions about this put much stock into the idea of this leading to future loss of revenue due to a sullied reputation. This all sucks for gamers like you and me who actually do follow through and in the future will show our disscontent with our wallets and who prefer frequent news and uppdates, even bad ones, and can handle it without going balistic and cursing out everyone and their mother.
Like I said, I admit that it can certainly be an issue. However, EA it quite a massive company with an already somewhat tarnished image. They also have a massive marketing department they they love to use frequently to try and make people forget all past missgivings.
This is why I think that, even though long term negative effects can prove disastrous in certain situations, whoever is making these kinds of calls over there see any such potential occurrences in this specific matter as something so small they consider it largely irrelevant.
And yes, I agree a few of us will show our distaste to the actions with our wallets, and spread the word on the trust issue. Will it impact the sales revenue for this game? Nope, but over time history proves it will show a decline. They might get away with propitiating with verbal cookies here, but the adults that have the bucks and the bucks for their kids, can easily see lack of customer service, avoidence of point blank questions, etc and decide not to financially support a company with no intregrity. Word of mouth marketing and its strength, don't bite the hand that feeds you, it is a no-win everytime.
I'm with you all the way. Enough straws will eventually break the camels back. And whilst some of my gaming friends may have the moral integrity of a wet paper bag, I prefer to stand by my principles and do what I feel is the right thing, even if no one notices (or cares for that matter).
I do hope they will respond soon with useful data and not a pitance of propitiation. Hope you are wrong also that they are going to put their full focus on upcoming titles and a small crew on fixing the problems with this release. Maybe they are intelligent enough to get their priorities straight. This isn't a strong economy, anywhere, like it was before when you did business/marketing as you said. Customers count now more than ever because they have to carefully budget that extra entertainment expense. Would they buy from a company that is known for releasing unfinished games with maybe a patch to fix it 6 mo to 1 yr later, if that? Doubtful. I'd rather spend the money on a proven house that puts out close to perfect releases and patches any fix within a week.
Again, I didn't say how anything was I just speculated on what would make most sense business wise. But yeah, I'm kind of hoping that my hypothetical scenario in no way turns out to be true.
Regarding your question in there, look at what happened with Fallout: New Vegas. Obsidian Entertainment has a long history of releasing buggy games and being bad with realeasing fixes and patches. F:NV was no exception since for many the game was nigh unplayable in its release form. This was very public information, gaming news site fetured articles about it, game review sites always commented on it and even the developer was forces to admit the game was a technical nightmare (of course, they downplayed it as much as they could).
Yet the game still sold well. Maybe some of it was because of brand recognition, but I've noticed that a lot of gamers are willing to ignore all evidence to the contrary and buy a game because they let their desire for the game to be good block out everything else, letting publishers get away with much more then they should.
Heh, Speaking of Obsidian Entertainment, IIRC they actually deleted comments of mine when I started asking questions about some things they where doing and how they where going to handle it. One I particulary remember was their handling of retail exclusive DLC across varying regions.
(Edit: Though it might have been Sega, since I think it was on the Alpha Protocol site)
(Edit: My posts keep getting way longer then I intend them to be.. Maybe I should just change my screen name to "tl;dr")
Modifié par Vmode, 08 mars 2011 - 09:06 .
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