To quote Mr. Horse (Ren & Stimpy)… “No sir, I don’t like it!”
In the past few years, PC and console gaming have become truly big business. Game companies are no longer run by people who are gamers at heart, but instead by businessmen motivated by stockholders and greed. (This means you, Bobby Kotick). Things have gotten out of hand with “Limited Edition” or “Collectors Edition” or “Limited Collectors Editions” as I pointed out in a previous blog about the Modern Warfare 2 and the working night vision goggles included with “Prestige Edition” games. These were neat in the past… perhaps a glimpse into the development with a “Making of” DVD, or an art book detailing the early sketches of the characters and environments. After that it progressed to “display case knick-knacks” like coins in Oblivion, or die-cast figures. Then it got ridiculous with helmets and night vision goggles. But through all of it, it was all essentially random junk that you really didn’t need.
And then came Forza. While there may be other games that do it, Forza is the one that I’m most aware of. Forza 2 had a Limited Collectors Edition that included exclusive cars that you could only unlock if you bought the LCE. The problem with that was, it wasn’t sold in America. Americans got TOTALLY screwed out of cars that were on their install media, but couldn’t be played since we had not shelled out more money. The tradition continued with Forza 3 which had exclusive cars that were, once again, included on the physical media we paid $60 for… but could only be unlocked through the LCE, which was actually sold in America this time… but only at GameStop. At the point when it becomes about exclusive game content, especially game content that exists on our DVDs, but is unusable… I take offense to the idea of collectors editions.
Move onto the consolization of of the PC world, as I’ll call it. Modern Warfare 2 was a sure-fire hit for Infinity Ward. Call of Duty 4 was a killer game and a must-have, and the sequel was sure to be even better…. until Oct 17th. On Oct 17th, community manager “fourzerotwo” dropped the bombshell on the PC community that our tried-and-true dedicated server model was being tossed out for an Xbox Live style “IW.Net” implemented through peer-to-peer servers. Dedicated servers have been around since the days of Quake and Quakeworld… and have worked damn well through that period of time. Dedicated servers build communities of players who come together either as competitive clans, or simply as a gaming community who make friends and play together frequently on the same server or group of servers. Think of it as your local playground, where you can walk down to the basketball court and typically find the same people hanging around playing or waiting for a 3-on-3 pickup game. Even better, you can join a game in progress, even if it’s already 20 vs 20, as soon as you show up. The IW.Net/Xbox Live models require P2P serving, joining lobbies, setting up a game beforehand, and playing to completion. Once that’s done, you sit in the lobby and organize another game. The P2P aspect hosting off of residential connections will also limit the number of people who can participate to a small group, unlike the 48+ player servers in Call of Duty 4 or 64 player servers in Battlefield 2.
Along with IW.Net destroying the existing modus operandi of PC gaming, IW/Activision saw fit to jack the price up on us to console prices. The pricepoint for most PC games has been $50 or below for a while now. Xbox 360 and PS3 games are typically $60 due to licensing fees paid to Microsoft and Sony to publish on their platforms. Now we’re expected to pay the console prices for a PC game… and quite likely pay for downloadable content since the removal of dedicated servers removed the ability of the community to create and share maps, a LONGSTANDING standard in PC gaming.
And while we’re on milking customers for money with a broken system that nobody asked for, there’s Monte Cristo’s city-builder Cities XL. Cities XL was a game with great potential, a spiritual successor to the aging but fun SimCity 4 which promised to not flop as horribly as SimCity Societies had. Unfortunately, MC got greedy during development and decided to merge the genre with MMOs, which lead to a game that’s confused about what it’s supposed to be and customers that are even more confused. The “Planet Offer” mode (the MMO mode) features online city building with… a chat room. That’s basically it, at the moment. Cities in Cities XL can trade commodities with other cities. Some cities lack oil, others lack water, and you can buy and sell “tokens” on the in-game free market. That works in Planet Offer mode… somewhat. The game is still experiencing its glitches with it. There are promises of additional content available only to PO subscribers in the future, but no timeline on when that will actually be delivered. But what about those that don’t want to pay for the PO, as we were promised we would be able to. We’re left with a botched single player game with trading limited to an in-game trader that has a 1-4 buy to sell ratio, effectively killing the ability to build large or specialized cities due to the inability to acquire goods at a reasonable price, and without even the option to purchase the additonal content for offline play in the future. Pay us constantly, and when you stop paying us, your game reverts back to what it was on day 1.
All in all, gaming is moving away from its roots. It has become too much of a big money business, and many developers are looking at us not as a community, not as peers as they once did, and not even as customers… but only as cash cows waiting to be milked for more of the green stuff.
