1 William Shannon Professor Grant 4/07/2014 English 1102-094

Video Game Publishers and Consumers Do Not Agree Major business trends such as deregulation, globalization, technological convergence, and the rapid evolution of the Internet have transformed the roles that companies play in their dealings with other companies. Business practitioners and scholars talk about alliances, networks, and collaboration among companies, but managers and researchers have largely ignored the agent that is most dramatically transforming the industrial systems as we know it: the consumer. (Prahalad) Over the last few years the video game industry has adopted several anticonsumer business practices. While practices including, but not limited to, downloadable content (DLC), collectors editions, digital rights management, and patches (Dane) are not necessarily reprehensible in nature. The way publishers have chosen to implement these policies is certainly disturbing. While it would be understandable if consumers simply stopped buying video games and let the market correct itself over time; some consumers appear to be willing to work with publishers to an extent. However, these same consumers do not always communicate in a friendly manner, which, on its own, has created more tension between consumers and publishers. From the publishers point of view consumers have behaved very poorly and created an atmosphere of entitlement. While the mainstream market has been experiencing all of these

2 issues, independent video game developers have received a surge of attention. This paper will examine the problems described in the mainstream video game market, the independent markets increased popularity, the differences between mainstream game development and independent development, and the relationship between publishers and consumers. Customers become annoyed and vocal when they perceive that a company, or companies, is behaving in an exploitive manner, which is what it seems as though the video game industry is attempting to do with many of the policies that it has implemented in recent years. The main point of contention, regarding DLC is that publishers often cut content or features from a game and make them available at an additional cost. Frequently the content being sold is already in the game files, meaning the consumer is being charged additionally for something that was already purchased. A recent example of this was when Street Fighter X Tekken was released. Consumers had objections about the number of characters and costumes that were locked. However, they could be unlocked for an additional twenty dollars, while all of the data for those character assets were already included on the disc consumers had already paid for (Conway). The reasons consumers tend to get upset about exploitative DLC are fairly similar to what has made collectors editions an underhanded tactic. When Elder Scrolls Online announced its collectors edition bonuses, which essentially amounted to removing gameplay restrictions related to character creation (Good). These restrictions did not serve any realistic purpose in the first place. It is curious as to why the restriction is there at all if the developer is content with being paid extra for it to be ignored. So why does the consumer need to pay an additional fee for the game to be more functional? The core principal is almost identical to DLC, breaking pieces of the finished product off and selling it back to the consumer for an additional cost.

3 It has been argued by game publishers that policies like DLC and collectors editions are needed to incentivize customers to keep the game after they have finished with it and to not give the game away or resell it thereby cutting into the revenue the publisher would otherwise gain. Another tool publishers have at their disposal to combat resale and piracy is Digital Rights Management (DRM) (Kain) as an idea is completely reasonable. Companies have the right to protect their intellectual property. However, requiring customers to have a stable connection to host servers in order to use a product they have paid for is somewhat unreasonable for a couple of reasons. Some people live in areas where reliable telecommunication service is not available, meaning any time that individuals internet has a connectivity hiccup that individual cannot play the game. Another point that has been made is sometimes the games publisher will not or cannot maintain stable service. The second issue has become far more problematic after the releases of Diablo 3 (Hachman) and SimCity (Orland) when people could not access the host servers to play for extended periods of time. Even more recently, there have been groups of people who, for various reasons, decide to use Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks against these companies (Gaston). A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is one in which a multitude of compromised systems attack a single target, thereby causing denial of service for users of the targeted system. The flood of incoming messages to the target system essentially forces it to shut down, thereby denying service to the system to legitimate users. (Rouse) In addition to poor service being provided by these companies, games frequently do not get nearly enough quality assurance before being released onto the market. Recently there has been a surge of poorly developed or tested games released onto the market. The issue becomes exacerbated when publishers include exclusive content for a game when it is pre-purchased. If the content offered was purely cosmetic or novelty items, the arguments against the practice

4 would not be as prevalent as they are. However, the content is generally relevant to the game itself (Good). The problem with pre-purchasing games is there is very little information about a game until it is released. If a game is released in an unfinished state there is really no way to know about the lack of testing until after its release. While the game can be fixed, this approach is not a sustainable business model. Consumers should not need to buy something only to have to wait an unspecified amount of time before it works properly. There is a running joke in the gaming community about Diablo 3 taking an additional two years before it actually released, because of bad design choices and a severe lack in quality assurance. Independent video game development is a fundamentally different environment compared to mainstream video game development. Independent game development enjoys more creative freedom compared to mainstream projects, and are usually made by small groups of people in a less formal environment. The games made by these groups have been getting increasingly more popular due to the homogeneity in the mainstream market, and it is because of the creative freedom small companies have that allows so much diversity within the marketplace. However, since these people do not have the same kinds of resources large companies do marketing their product can be difficult. One such attempt was an Indie Game Jam which was going to be a series on YouTube detailing how independent games are made. While everything started out fine, as more sponsors and outside interests got involved the project became more like a reality show than anything truly informative. While it is unfortunate that an interesting idea became something of a cautionary tale, it helped to solidify further the identity of the independent game development scene (Rosen). The independent development community is generally elated to share their vision with people. Independent games get publicity mostly by word of mouth; independent developers give

5 a copy of their game to popular YouTube content creators or YouTubers, for review or simply for publicity of any kind (Letourneau). If the game gets a poor assessment by the YouTuber playing it, the game will generally not sell well. To avoid such circumstances good independent developers are very open about what they wanted to do with their game and why they made certain design or artistic decisions. Due to the vast disparity in the amount of resources independent developers have, compared to larger companies, it could be argued that independent developers are forced to show off their product and network with others to even have a hope of selling their game. However, it does raise one question: Is transparency is conducive to the wellbeing of the marketplace as a whole? Mainstream companies are generally far less open about the decisions they make. For whatever reason publishers do not like to share information; they dislike it so much some companies will not even share the number of people who worked on a particular project (Schreier). There was a game being developed by Blizzard Entertainment called Project Titan; announced in 2007, Project Titan was going to be a new next-gen massively multiplayer online game based on entirely new intellectual property (Prescott). All that is known about the game to this day is the project was restarted in the middle of 2013, six years of work and nothing was ever talked about publicly. It seems strange how something so important to Blizzard is not allowed to have any information released. There is a growing tension between publishers due to how publishers interact with their customers. Those same customers tend to react badly to such treatment which only exacerbates the issue. The idea of transparency within the industry relates to a term referred to as gamer entitlement. Do gamers have a right to know anything and everything related to the inner workings of a company? Consumers have a right to know what they are buying, but they do not

6 have a right to demand information regarding a companys decision making as it pertains to project development (Kain). For a business relationship to work smoothly and efficiently, both parties need to be able to trust one another (Merlino). However, what is very apparent is consumers do not trust these companies to have their interest in mind; consumers then get upset and communicate their concerns in an inappropriate manner. There are huge disconnects between the individuals running these mainstream companies and their customer base. To run a company as large as video game publishers have become the people in charge need to have a business oriented outlook. However, while the people in these positions understand business; they do not seem to understand the first thing about the industry they work in. To guide their decision making they seek information from people equally limited in their knowledge of the video game industry (Sterling). This trend only lends itself to a negative outcome. If the management structure of video game publishers does not understand at least what their consumers want then they should at least listen when there are so many voices saying what they want. Gamers tend to be very outspoken about what they want to see and what they do not want to see in the games they care about. They do not always communicate civilly which really does not help their cause. If gamers want to be heard and taken seriously by the wealthy business people leading mainstream game companies, gamers need to at the very least present themselves in a way that does not resemble a whiny child upset about not getting what they want. There needs to be a little give and take, the people producing games really need to listen to what their consumer base wants. At the same time when consumers have strong feelings about a topic they need to conduct themselves in a productive manner. All of that said it is impossible to please everyone and there will always be someone that feels left out or disgruntled over the matter.

7 Video gaming as an industry is relatively young. There is still time for all of the growing pains it is experiencing to be sorted out over time. However, it could easily get worse before it gets better. In a lot of ways the video game companies have a lot more to consider when they take steps to ensure the safety of themselves and their products. For things to work moving forward both the suppliers and the consumers need to be willing to listen and work with the other party. Otherwise the industry will continue on its downward spiral until another group disrupts the marketplace by delivering more efficiently and effectively to its consumers.

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9 Good, Owen. "$100 Special Edition For The Elder Scrolls Online Comes With A Lot." Kotaku (2014). Web. 27 Apr. 2014. Schreier, Jason. "Gaming's Biggest Problem Is That Nobody Wants To Talk." Kotaku (2012). Web. 27 Apr. 2014. Kain, Erik. "Spoiled Little Emperors: Mass Effect And The Three Other Most Severe Cases Of 'Gamer Entitlement'." Forbes(2012). Web. 27 Apr. 2014. Prescott, Shaun. "Blizzard's Titan MMO is being overhauled; won't see light of day until 2016." PC Gamer (2013). Web. 27 Apr. 2014. Rouse, Margret. "distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS)." Search Security. N.p., May 2013. Web. 27 Apr. 2014. Conway, Ryan. "Street Fighter X Tekken's "controversial" 12 coming later this month." Screw Attack. N.p., 7 July 2012. Web. 27 Apr. 2014. Rosen, Jared. "How The Most Expensive Game Jam In History Crashed And Burned In A Single Day." Indie Statik (2014). Web. 27 Apr. 2014.