Quote Originally Posted by TonyTheTiger View Post
But, see, you're defending their interests, not yours. Something like the massive anti-used games movement is constantly defended at the consumer level as "It's business! Companies want to make money!" Except that's not the consumer's job to defend a company's business practices. Their job is to set standards and have certain demands while the businesses do what they need to do to succeed. Then both sides meet in the middle at some mutually beneficial compromise. It's an adversarial system for a reason. When it stops being adversarial, when one side starts to make excuses for the other, it becomes outright antagonistic.

Let's not pretend that there isn't a connection between production costs and all the things that have been pissing people off lately. We didn't pull this out of our asses here. Everywhere you turn there's someone else in the business bitching about how expensive game production is and holding that over our heads. They constantly bring it up to defend whatever DLC or DRM shenanigans that they're looking to employ. The industry seems to love playing the production cost card to elicit some sympathy from consumers despite also being an industry that is notorious for abusing its workforce. Well, they can't have it both ways. They can't use "we're broke" as an excuse but then be immune to any accusations regarding why they don't have their shit together. If they're making the claim that something is wrong then it's on them to fix it, not us.


http://www.gamepolitics.com/2012/07/...h#.UrC0nCKA3cs

http://www.polygon.com/2012/10/1/343...s-state-of-aaa

http://thegamesofchance.blogspot.com...y-defends.html
Not even an explanation. Just a dismissive "how silly." What this basically says is that publishers are in dire straits and all the sacrifice has to be made on the consumer end...because they say so. They're the ones predicting doom, not us. They're the ones who keep saying "Oh no, if consumers don't accept the things we say we need to do (just say, not prove) then we won't be able to bestow these games upon them. There is no alternative and you're silly for suggesting we're responsible for our situation."

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...-of-used-games
See? More guys on the inside predicting terrible things. "Used games kill the mid-tier publisher." Somehow the lack of a mid-tier (certainly a bad thing) gets spun into our problem by default. We're expected to just accept the current industry standards as an absolute and then make whatever changes on our end are necessary to keep them going as they are instead of anyone asking "Well, why is GameStop automatically the problem? What is the game industry doing wrong that keeps mid-tier publishers from thriving?"

So, yeah. I'm not the one saying games cost too much to make. They are. I'm just responding to their incessant bitching.
I'm not defending anyone's interests. I'm simply explaining why your theory that games are too expensive to make is ridiculous and why there is no impending collapse as various pundits have speculated about for the past decade or more. A business is solely in existence for the purpose of making money. If a business has no such interest, there are other avenues they can take such as becoming a non-profit or simply providing their product for free. Nobody is being forced to sell games for a living just like nobody is being forced to buy them.

Capitalism is not inherently adversarial, at least not when it comes to the relationship between customers and businesses. Businesses that are responsive to consumer demands typically do better than those that don't, but it's not the obligation of any business to be in either a cooperative or an adversarial relationship with its customers or the marketplace.

I won't dispute that big budget games are becoming more and more expensive to make. I also won't dispute that things like DLC, trying to control used sales, season passes and other means of generating revenue are being used by publishers to offset some of those production costs. That doesn't necessarily mean that games are too expensive to make or that the growth in budgets is a bad thing. It simply means that charging a consumer $60 for a new big budget game may not produce sufficient profit in and of itself to satisfy the investors and shareholders in big publishers. If consumers decide that games are too expensive or that they won't buy DLC, then publishers may be faced with the crisis you seem so concerned about. Until that happens, this is just the same exact speculation that has been happening for the past decade or more.