OMTING52601 wrote...
Cybermortis wrote...
Veggiesofmanycolors wrote...
Why should it be free? Developing a product requires time and resources which in turn require money. Gaming is not charity, this is a business and they're entitled to sell what they work for.
Just because you were not satisfied with the product you purchased before does not entitle you to get their next product for free. You don't like it, don't buy it but don't think anyone is somehow entitled to a free service now.
Incorrect logic.
If I buy a new car and discover that the handbrake doesn't work I do not expect to be asked to pay more money to fix the problem...Or maybe a better analogy would be being told that I can buy my car any colour, then turning up and realising that they only have the cars in three colours and if I want something else I have to pay for it to be re-sprayed.
The REAL issue behind this is that Bioware have been caught out either being misleading or outright lying about aspects of the game and its ending. They have ALSO been caught out lying about DLC. If they now 'release' additional endings and force us to pay for them...well going off various internet polls they will have risk loosing more potential customers than bought Dragon Age 2....
I think this is the real point, from an objective perspective. I'm not trying to diminish the passion with which some consumers of this product have about paying for a 'fix', but I do feel like those positions are coming from a sympathetic place, really in regard to the individual creators of this product. And while that's a perfectly human response, to feel guilty about the prospect of causing another person distress through one's own actions, it also diverts focus. This is a commodity, it isn't a person, and it is produced by a company.
I wonder how many dissatisfied customers stating they should have to pay for whatever it is BW/EA could provide that would bring their satisfaction and consumer confidence back would be so quick to say the exact same when they go to dinner and find the food and service to be poor. How many have fussed and had a meal comped, received a gift voucher in the mail, or gotten a discount on a bill because the commodity they bought failed to satisfy?
The difference, so to speak, here has more to do with seeing this video game commodity as a group of people making it and identifying with those humans, IMO. I'd caution against those kinds of feelings, this is a company, a business, and they aren't feeling individual sympathy for the consumers. They see us as a group of potential sales and if they want to maintain those, then they need to do what they think best in order to regain confidence. I think a lot of people here are losing much more sleep than anyone directly involved with ME 3. You aren't wrong in your distress and I am not making light of how you feel in any way. Of course, IMO, YMMV, and FWIW.
Indeed.
If you look at things purely from the business prospective this is not a good position for Bioware to be in. All the online polls indicate that between 80 and 90% of players are unhappy at the ending of the game, and therefore are disatisfied with the product they bought. Regardless of what product you are talking about this is a disaster - to put this in prospective ME3 sold three and a half million copies on its first day in the USA alone. So even the lowest figure of 80% translates as some 2 million people...That is more people than bought Dragon Age 2 in its first month of release*. Worse is that these very people are likely to be Bioware's core customers, who were most likely to buy games simply because they were developed by Bioware. The only way a company can survive alienating 80% of their customer base is if they are the only ones producing that type of product...which certainly isn't the case in the gaming industry.
(*Note; Bioware shipped two million copies in the first month according to their statements. However shipping copies and selling them are two different things. It also doesn't account for the number of customers who were able to return DA2 for a full refund because the game, as released, was considered unplayable by several major stores)
The endings also make no business sense because new players are highly unlikely to go and buy either of the two earlier games or any DLC. Almost as mystifying is that all the endings eliminate any realistic potential to continue using the Mass Effect universe in future games because they destroyed the post-ME3 universe and anything set before it will be totally meaningless regardless of how well written the story might be. They *could* have continued to produce and sell games using the Mass Effect brand even without Shepard if they hadn't wrecked the entire universe.
Modifié par Cybermortis, 13 mars 2012 - 06:45 .
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