A Gamer's Bill of Rights

Yes, one of the unfortunate aspects of modern corporate culture and a real waste of cash; golden handshakes for professional scoundrels. However, as has been stated by others, people at that level of operations rarely get fired, so these resignations are the best we get, and it's not like they suffer much in return by way of severance bonuses they receive. Somewhere in this equation, something does need to be rectified because it's not like they're giving an individual some buffer funds so he/she isn't left to languish on the streets; these are very well-positioned individuals who are more or less set for life while being rewarded exorbitant sums for leaving.

 

Also if you resign after doing a terrible job, you often get tens if not hundreds in millions in bonuses for a job done very badly. It's weird.

Lose 8 billion dollars, you get rewarded 150 million. Merrill Lynch CEO resigns after losing company $8 billion | Mail Online

We live in a very strange world. You would think he would have gotten life sentence in prison instead. So will not surprise me if EA's exec severance package is worth tens of millions easily.

 

Strange, though I think the logic behind it is "We'd rather give this guy a few million to leave, versus bringing down the whole company a la THQ".

 

For regular preorders I can see that there is no real reason. But now they offer incentives like with Bioshock Unlimited based on number of pre-orders the pre-order bonuses get better and better. Like getting XCOM with Bioshock Unlimited. or getting the game for $50 with all DLC, instead of $50-$60 for game at launch +$10-15 per DLC. But that's even more reason for a pre-order to have a mandated stipulation of some sort of return policy. More crap you promise, the more you have to deliver. It's called false advertising.

 

They promise that you'll get Bioshock Unlimited and preorder bonuses. They make no guarantees of quality for any of the products they're offering. Don't get me wrong, even though I rarely buy games within the first year of release (much less prerelease or day one), I would appreciate publishers offering some kind of return options like the two-hour trial I suggested a few pages ago. The fact is, however, that even Sim City and Aliens: Colonial Marines fulfilled every promise they made to buyers: that those buyers would have access to play those games under the publishers' terms of service. If the quality of the game is suspect or the terms of service are restrictive, it's a shady move but not a breach of contract.

I would support mandated return procedures for games that don't run on hardware that is within their system requirements, but that would likely lead publishers to publish inflated system requirements and claim that anything under those requirements was unsupported. Besides, those problems are often due to driver issues and as such are technically out of the publishers' hands.

 

To me those are all excuses. Even have a 15-25% return fee policy. I can return anything I want to pretty much any brick and mortar or online store with no penalty or at worse a 15% "restocking fee", even if I just don't like it. For some reason people find it perfectly fine for software not to offer the same policies as everything else. Heck I can even get my money back from a movie if I walk out in 30 minutes because it's garbage. I'd be fine with a two hour time window, or a single level window and then stop the game saying you have to buy the whole thing to continue. At least that would let you check if it works with your hardware, how buggy it is, and if the gameplay suits your tastes. Every game should be like that.

 

Agreed with the green.

The problem is that brick-and-mortar stores are not a good analogy to game publishers. B&M retailers (and online retailers as well) are selling largely non-unique products, and the consumer knows this. If no retailers offered returns, the first one to do so would steal a significant market share from its competitors, which are selling the same products. As such, (almost) all retailers offer returns on their merchandise in order to maintain a competitive foothold. It's an opt-in thing, though - they aren't legally compelled to do so, but the market compels them to.

Meanwhile, game publishers produce only unique goods. If you want to buy Battlefield 3, you have to buy the version produced by DICE and published by EA - there's not an alternative version published by Valve. Thus, EA stands to gain little competitive advantage over other publishers by offering returns. Even if they did offer returns, the likely result is gamers returning EA games and, in many cases, using that money to buy games from competitors, effectively causing EA to lose money and competitive ground as their competitors gain money. And for the record, yes, I am aware the Battlefield 3 is not a very good example of the unique nature of individual video game titles; that's part of the reason I picked it: because even though it's pretty cookie-cutter there are hundreds of thousands of gamers who will accept no substitute.

The retail equivalent of the "unique goods" argument comes down to designer items, but if GAP doesn't offer returns on their "unique" jeans, a lot of people are just going to start buying at A&F or Hollister (or whatever brand names are cool these days).

Don't get me wrong; in all this, I would certainly prefer for the customer to have more power in his transactions rather than less, but that's totally in the hands of the publishers, and from a layman's perspective, it's hard to justify that as a business decision for them.

 

It's not really in the hands of the publishers but in the hands of the consumers. With all the purchases at launch or pre-order it only reinforces their strategy. Product returns would be a business strategy, it's called good will and product confidence. So many people here swear by the brands of laptops or electronics they buy based on their warranty. A certain laptop could be an awesome piece of hardware, but if they only offered a 90 day warranty nobody would care to buy it, why, because it shows no confidence in their product. It leaves them without any liability or responsibility. Yet the same crowd are OK with the software they buy for their laptops use a completely different set of rules. Saying you can't return something, or even resell it for that matter, just screams customer abuse all over the place. I'd love to be able to sell stuff to people and tell them no returns, no sharing, no reselling.

There's lots of "unique" artwork that's sold all the time. Yet you could return it or at worse, resell it and recoup some or all costs. Heck unlike original artwork, software can be duplicated infinitely. Even books and video can at least be resold to recover some costs, yet you can't even do that with games. It's not about the customer in any way, shape or form. It's completely about the greedy pockets of the corporate conglomerate.

I just can't believe especially how the younger crowd, and I see it more and more as I get older, are brainwashed by the entire "it's just business" mentality. Like it's OK for a corporation to do illegal and immoral things because it makes the company money. It's OK because it's a "good business decision". It's OK that I take money from you because I want it and you can't do anything about it. Until people change their way of thinking, it will never change, and likely migrate into every other business and aspect of life.

 

As sad as that sounds, I have to agree with you. I think it's already migrated and aspects of their lives.

 

I think I need to step out of this thread. Grumpy old man syndrome is taking over.

 

I agree 100%. If I hadn't already repped you for another post today, I would definitely rep this one.

My posts above are not intended to support or condone the publishers, but to analyze why these policies make sense for them. Maybe I took a few statements too far in that sense, but I was just getting into it. Without venturing too far into politics, I'm not certain that government regulation is the right solution, but the optimal solution - a concerted effort from gamers to use our voices and our wallets to communicate our displeasure with game companies' (lack of) return policies is simply not going to happen.

I support the phrase caveat emptor from a consumer side: I think it is important for buyers to recognize that the people selling them goods are not their friends and they are not concerned with the consumers' best interests, but rather their own profit margins and bottom lines - they serve not the customer, but the shareholder and themselves. That's why I compared preordering a game to gambling: by doing so, you are inherently accepting the risk that the game will not live up to your expectations, and in return you often receive perks such as discounts, free copies of other games, or extra game content. If you get burned by a crappy game, you lost the bet. It's not that it should be this way, but it is this way, so there's no use bellyaching when you get burned - you already cast your vote in favor of the system that burned you.

Without trying to get too political, I'm not a big fan of unrestrained capitalism. It depends too much on the goodwill of the people whose work, connections, and luck put them on the top of the heap. I'm actually embroiled in a situation where monetary interest is trumping the best interests of several hundred people, and it sucks:

The school I for for used to be run by the owners of a manufacturer - they opened a school for the children of employees at their factories. By offering rock bottom tuition for a top-quality education, they were able to attract a lot of well-qualified employees to work at an unproven factory for less than they might make elsewhere. However, they recently sold the factory, so they decided to sell the school as well. Now, instead of an education-first service operated at a loss, it's going to be a purely for-profit enterprise under the new owners. In the kindergarten, where I work, that just means higher tuition and less money for development and materials, but for the elementary school (which was about to expand to include Jr. High, then High School), it's being converted into a five-days-a-week boarding school (charge more for boarding than it costs to put the kids up, rope teachers into the 24/5 caretaker role with a minimal raise), where the unique (and sometimes expensive) elements of the curriculum are culled out and kids as young as six go through some of the most important years of their development in the Lord of the Flies elementary school.

In short, I'm not a big fan of people doing things just for money. I don't support that mentality; sometimes it even makes me feel physically ill like with my school. I do, however, recognize that you have to understand why someone does what they do if you want to get them to change it. I'm not an activist; I'm not going to lead the charge to make game publishers offer refunds (first world problem anyway), but if there are any activists here, you have to know the why in order to change the what. That's all I'm suggesting.

 

The problem is with the interest we have in this field. For example, let us consider a crappy chair manufacturer. And let us assume that we really really like the chair they produce, not because we like the product (it is awful), but we are really interested in the concept of this particular chair (we like chairs). So what should be the reason that the chair manufacturer to quit business or change the way they produce these damn chairs? Constantly complaining consumer (that is actually purchasing the product) or shortage of demand? We are purchasing a chair which repeatedly breaks apart while we are on top of it, I mean, really? Certainly, a major change in strategy is based on the sales numbers. They won't change anything as long as they sell the crappy product (that is cheaper / less sophisticated to produce).

Nobody is responsible of producing the games that we like. They have the right to produce whatever they want. As long as the product is not defective (doesn't work on our pc that meets requirements, hardware and software-wise), we cannot change their strategy of producing cheap games, if we don't think with our wallet. Sadly, end of story.

 

This.

If people quit pre-ordering games or buying them at midnight releases--if gamers committed to waiting to see if a game was good before buying it--developers couldn't get away with releasing games like Colonial Marines or SimCity 5. The market would solve that problem right quick.

 

It would theoretically, but we have a bit of a Catch-22 on our hands already. Because of the rise of DLC and microtransactions, often we are seeing many games that have items/classes/etc only available by pre-ordering (or available first/limited time). A personal example would be Borderlands 2. I read about the mechro class and knew that was the class I wanted to play first. I've succumbed to BL1's first DLC and found them to be worth it, so despite still hating the idea, I still preordered the game. Fortunately, the game was what I expected and I had a blast.

There is one good thing that has arisen out of all this DLC, MTs, etc for me personally. It has truly altered my buying habits, and for the better. Except for one or two games a year that I really know I will enjoy, I buy nothing new. I purchase only GOTY/Complete editions and only when they go on sale. I consistently purchase Humble Bundles and the like. I end up spending less money and getting more games overall. I wonder if I am alone in this, and if the publishers/devs will ever catch on.

 

You didn't need to preorder to get the Mechromancer. I got BL2 months after it came out and then ordered the mechro separately.

Companies can still profit from DLC, and gamers can still enjoy quality DLC, if gamers don't purchase day one. The company just needs to make sure that the game itself is quality, and that the DLC is quality (don't preorder DLC, just like don't preorder games). Good DLC on top of a fundamentally broken game isn't going to make anyone happy. So if gamers don't buy on day one, the company can release a good game and still make some extra money off DLC and microtransactions...but they first need to make sure the core game is quality.