When is Customer Appreciation Day for the game industry?

Interestingly, I've been mulling over which direction to take this week's blog post; my first idea was to recant a statement I made last week about adventure games needing to appeal to a wider audience.  Game initially started as a niche appeal, and by attempting to broaden the appeal of a particular genre too much will spread that genre's appeal too thin to for any audience to enjoy.  Then information about the new XBox and the resignation of Electronic Art's CEO came to light, so I figured why not talk about the state of the industry?  Perhaps my previous idea will come to fruition in the near future.

This information about the XBox came from an article on media news site The Escapist.  Previous articles about the XBox detailed that it would be available in different versions to suit the tastes of "casual" and "hardcore" audiences, and hints have been dropped on multiple occasions that Microsoft's new console would implement features to prevent used games from being played.  A recent article makes no mention of this, but it does detail how the new XBox (named "Durango") will not support play from game discs; instead, games must be installed to the hard drive before they can be played.

Putting aside the installation issue - for which there will be fixes, reportedly - the leak mentions that the console always has to be online.  Putting aside for a moment the issue of not everybody has internet, there's the issue of the recent SimCity debacle on the side of EA.  For those not familiar, Electronic Art's recent game SimCity forced the player to always be connected to the internet, even for single-player games.  Why this is bad is because you are always at the mercy of the company whose servers your game runs on; if the company's servers go down, you can't play your game.  The big problem with SimCity was that EA's servers couldn't handle the sheer volume of players logging on to play on the first day, resulting in people being unable to play because of EA's problem.

 

The icing on the cake is when modders removed two lines of code and could play the game perfectly fine offline, despite being told over and over that being online was a necessity because of the sheer enormity of SimCity's worlds.  It's damning evidence that EA just wanted the game to always be online so they could enforce their Digital Rights Management policies.

I know I just got done talking about Valve and their digital distribution platform Steam a few posts ago, but I really cannot emphasize how well they know both their customers and those who pirate.  Rather than tightening the leash by imposing a laundry list of DRM, Valve opened its doors to pirates and made buying games a quick procedure that ends when you download the game.  They won't stick around with fingers in your wallet, and you don't have to worry about them looming over you deprive you of time spent playing a game because their servers are down.

There's an incredibly sharp contrast between EA and Valve in the aspect of respect.  Valve respects its potential pirates' methods, and as a result attempts to make a system to better accommodate them.  EA's handling of SimCity and Microsoft's always online/rumored anti-used game policy won't make the customer want to buy their products because of how manipulative the whole process feels.  Given the current economy, these models simply are not sustainable for the game industry.  Industry commentators are predicting the console gaming market to crash, and honestly, I can see it happening given Microsoft's and EA's flagrant disrespect for their consumers.

The bottom line is that considering the enormous amounts of money that EA and Microsoft put into their franchises - Halo 4 is the most expensive video game made to date, weighing in with a budget of over $100 billion -  One has to imagine what Microsoft and EA will do when their practices alienate faithful and potential customers alike in the future.  Consistently working making games with these prices on a foundation of shaky business tactics simply won't pan out in the future, and the weight is on the developers' shoulders to make things work out.

Further reading:
Rumored information on the new XBox
The new XBox' supposed exact details
Resignation of EA's CEO, Jogn Riccitiello