I am going to try my best to avoid invoking Natural's Law in this post, but we'll see how it goes.
Let's start at the beginning.
No one denies that businesses exist to make money. The entire point of the position you're arguing against is that there are
good ways to make money and
bad ways to make money. There are are business models that a pro-consumer and anti-consumer. The problem arises when you start to use the "free market" as a "free pass." The mere fact that a business needs to make money is not an inherent and impenetrable defense for all of the actions that business decides to take in order to further that goal. Snake oil salesmen were trying to make money as well.
This "free market" defense is tied to Cliffy's later argument, so I'll save the rest of the problems with that for later.
This is not because developers and publishers are doing gamers a favor by releasing cheap games. It's because:
1. Demand for video games is relatively elastic, particularly in the weak economy of the past few years. This is also why used game sales are so popular. If publishers thought they could get away with a higher sticker price, they would hike that price up.
2. Older game prices were artificially inflated by the costs of the cartridge media they were shipped on.
This is a cute comparison game makers love to make, largely because movies are the only form of entertainment media with which the value comparison works. Unfortunately, the comparison completely falls apart when you bring television or books into the equation, let alone service-based entertainment like Netflix or Hulu.
Aside from a brief moment where Cliffy confuses extravagance of budget for quality of content, a misconception shared by movie titans like Michael Bay, this is basically just saying that games are expensive to make, and therefore companies need to make money.
Of course they do. But again, no one is saying they don't. There are good ways to go about it, and bad ways to go about it.
This is where we can see CliffyB's unwillingness to look past the most obvious surface similarities coming back to bite him. Yes, Valve and EA are both companies. Yes, they both conduct business with the goal of making money. If you want to put more thought into this subject than a third-grader, however, it's quite easy to see where the difference lies.
1.There is a difference between adding microtransactions to a free product in order to make money from it and adding microtransactions to a product for which the customer has already paid 60 dollars. This should be self-evident.
2. There is also a difference between charging for optional cosmetic items and charging for game content. Video games are an interactive medium. This means content that effects the interactivity of the game is fundamentally different from content that only effects the visual look of the game. In Team Fortress 2, for example, Valve makes all items that effect the interactivity of the game (weapons, maps, game modes) available to players for free. The "ring" you're speaking of is an example of the
cosmetic items Valve sells that have no impact on the actual
gameplay.
Valve put up
this web page detailing the
119 free updates (both patches and increased content) they had made to Team Fortress 2.
That was three years ago, and they still haven't stopped.
We know exactly how EA responds in a similar situation. Battlefield 3 was a 60 dollar product, and they ask the user base to pay for every additional set of maps and content.
If you bought TF2 on day one, it's price was 20 bucks. Final price for experiencing all of its content is 20 bucks. If you bought Battlefield 3 on day one, its price was 60 bucks. Final price for experiencing all of its content is upwards of 110 bucks.
But nope, no difference there.
Another strawman. No one's saying that making money is inherently evil. It's not an inherent
good, either. Commerce is,
in and of itself, a morally neutral concept. It comes down to the way you go about it.
I do find it interesting that CliffyB lambasts those who think that running a business is inherently evil, while using "it's a business" as an inherent good that supposedly makes complaints irrelevant.
Yes. Steam sucked at first. People hated it at first. So why are you surprised that people hate EA's offering at first?
Also, two things:
1. Origin is not competing with the Steam of 2004. It's competing with the Steam of 2013. "They also had crappy service nearly a decade ago" is not a valid defense of current product/platform policies, prices and performance.
2. Origin isn't that new. Everybody in the games press and industry fell for the rebranding, I guess. I still remember EA Download Manager, even if you guys don't.
Different people, obviously, than the ones complaining about it. This is just more "don't like it, don't buy it" nonsense, though.
"A lot of people don't care" is not a statement that has any bearing on the rightness or wrongness of
any situation.
I love Free 2 Play. I've got no less than 5 F2P games installed on my hard drive right now.
Just like everything else, there's a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it.
And
all of it is different than adding microtransactions to a game that the customer is already paying money for.
The games industry is not the same as the music industry, first of all. I hate to break it to you. There are many, many ways in which they have faced and will face entirely different situations. This post is already long as hell so I won't go into them.
Another strawman. No one is suggesting that all games should be used games. (Not that this makes sense even as a hypothetical. If everyone bought games used, there'd be no new buyers to get used games from.) However, as I've said before,
there's a right way and a wrong way.
People didn't have to buy snake oil, either. That doesn't mean the snake oil salesman wasn't shady for selling it.
I don't think you're remembering this correctly, Cliff.
Great.
Also irrelevant.
Hey, uh...
Arcades are dead, man. A very large reason for that because people realized that it was more convenient for them to go buy the home console version of the arcade game, pay that
one-time fee and access everything at their own pace.
So here's his bottom line: if you don't like it, don't buy it. The implication is that if everyone votes with their dollars, the free market will take care of itself.
The only problem is that it doesn't work that way, has
never worked that way, and will never work that way.
The free market is not a perfect self-correcting entity. If you think a business is being scummy about what they're offering, the correct response is to
both not buy what they're selling
and spread the word that they're being scummy and why.
Ask yourself this: why do organisms like the Food and Drug Administration and the SEC exist, accusations of corruption aside? Why do we try to break up monopolies whenever possible? It's because there are certain things the free market is not good at,
protecting consumers chief among them.
There are many, MANY things that "vote with your wallet" will not solve. In theory, the free market should weed out any unsafe medicines that make it to store shelves eventually, so let's get rid of all safety checks and vote with our wallets. Companies defrauding people on a scale to match Enron? Don't like it, don't buy the stock. It'll work itself out eventually. A company has a monopoly on a necessary product? Don't worry about it, you don't need oil anyway. Vote with your wallet. That guy's running a pyramid scheme? Whatever, man. No need to get your panties all in a bunch. Don't like it, don't join it. No need to broadcast why it's a bad idea or anything.
