I'm fighting for Suikoden week.
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John Walker's anti-BS SimCity news articles.
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I'm fighting for Suikoden week.
StevePharma
Member
Wat.
The hyperbole in their text is now complemented by their scores. I'm too lazy to make it right now but you could graph an inverse hyperbolic curve from those scores. Just like the quality of Polygon's writing and scoring.
Aight Kotaku is back on my list
Can't say enough how much the Kotaku folks have been impressing me on GAF recently. Kudos to you sir.
Aight Kotaku is back on my list
+1
You can't be serious? SURELY
Anyway - any UK GAF in here going to Rezzed this year?
What? Are you denying there is a cultural difference in the matter between Europe and the US? How the hell was I trolling?
I never claimed immunity.
I think the cultural difference is a little bit more complicated than your extreme over generalization.
The way your posts reads only adds logs to the UK vs US fire that somehow got started in this thread for no reason.
Going to have to elaborate on this fire, chum. Care to summarise for me?
Some notion that our press is somehow better than that in the US.
Jim Sterling
Member
Maybe if every single website applied pressure, we'd get something. Sadly, it's easy for them to paint a few vocal people as demagogues and lunatics.
If you saw what happened between Randy Pitchford and I, he quickly portrayed me as a vindictive man out to personally harm him, and was thus able to write me off pretty quickly. Same happened with Konami -- I kept on at them about their terrible marketing and shoddy PR to the point where they said, and I quote, "Fuck that guy" and decided I was mentally damaged in some way.
On a wider note, you saw this with Peter Moore recently. The narrative from EA is that, if you dislike the company, you're either a homophobe or you're pissed because of the choice of athlete on a Madden cover. Considering there is (currently, until the audience fragments some more) still enough of an audience supporting and praising these companies to where such a narrative can stick. You often hear "vocal minority" snorted with disdain from such people -- it's kind of true. Even though I personally think the gaming press has grown a lot more spine in the past year or two, there's still an army of writers who keep their head down and do "their job" of just writing about the software -- and that's fine, I'm not knocking them, they don't have to do anything else. But that is why there isn't enough pressure.
And as I said earlier, the readers themselves will always push back against a topic that's brought up too many times. Again, I don't exactly blame them -- the Internet is so rapidly moving that it's easy to get bored, and it's easy to go from being really into a story to suddenly getting sick of it. I had a hard time covering SOPA last year because gamers got really tired of it and started to get angry. Same was happening with Aliens toward the end. Apathy is a real roadblock in tackling these subjects.
And really, we're still small fries compared to the likes of IGN. I have a decent little audience, but my influence is enough to irritate people in the industry, not necessarily effect it tangibly.
None of this is to say one should not stop trying to shout from the rooftops. Walker does that spectacularly, Jason's had some great investigative stories, and I like to think my own brand of shout-ranty does *something* positive for the community, if only offer catharsis.
I saw the notion. It's more the year-long fire he spoke about.
Thanks for the detailed answer - it's kind of demoralising for me to see this kind of proper investigative journalism and pointed questioning so easily pushed aside.
I want to know why game teams are so enormous (bloated) to the point that budgets have been out of control - I want to know about Aliens, about Sim City, I want answers to the questions you guys are asking.
Are there any IGN fellows on here? Do they see themselves as game journalists? I always viewed IGN as a hug of game pages written by enthusiast press (no disrespect to them at all) so I wonder if their readership would respond poorly to suddenly being shown a bunch of articles that their favourite games are a bit shit and purporting shitty practices.
If GAF is any indicator I suppose you guys have your work cut out; an article about sexism? "Oh good, this again" - Aliens is relegated to the distant past, and some of the good work you guys do gets shoved to the back of old threads, this one being a case in point.
It'd be funny if it wasn't so depressing that gamers are willing other things ad nauseum (look how many threads there are about how Nintendo are going to recover/fall out of the gaming market) but issues like anti-consumerism, sexism and disdain for gamers are 'boring' and 'monotonous'.
Feel free to read whatever you desire in my posts.
Harlock
Member
This was a rumour a while ago. Not only for PC, but next-gen consoles too. It is not hard Ubisoft put some online features and say that the games are build from the start for an "online experience".
Yup, Ubisoft already did that with the Anno 2070 series on the PC (on top of the DRM) - 'Arks' (your main base in the game) can have persistent upgrades installed, but they're only accessible if you're online.
Wouldn't surprise me if nextgen gives them the opportunity to launch more always-online incentives across all platforms. I think the only thing publishers learnt from the Sim City mess was that they have to be smarter and armed with better PR when implementing these types of policies - not that they should avoid them.
Why exactly is this such a bad thing? Didn't they mentions scores being flexible post release as being a main tenant of their review process when the site launched for situations exactly like this? If your pre-release review code functions fundamentally different than post-release code doesn't it make sense to change the score? Now in this particular case the score only going backup to a 6.5 is rather odd, but say we were talking about an MMO which changes dramatically over time. Those scores should change too. Or say Trackmania 2, which Jeff Gerstmann has mentioned basically broke their server system the score should drop. I don't see whats so bad about having flexible review scores.
It would not be a bad thing if applied to MMOs, but Sim City is not an MMO.
Why this specific case of score changing is a bad thing is because Polygon is employing a basic false flag stratagem. They post a 9.5 and then schmucks believed them, believed that their review was anything but bought and paid for, and that's false flag #1. But then the game comes out and, through either the handful of reviewers with integrity, through seeing the holes poked on NeoGAF or youtube, or through their own experience with the game, the schmucks, in realizing they were lied to, start to suspect that Polygon is a bunch of industry shills. Since it's bad for business if the schmucks wise up, Polygon lowers their review score to convince them "hey, we're on your side here, just stick with it for a bit," and that's false flag #2. Then they lower the score again because the schmucks are still suspicious, and that's wearing a tee shirt that reads "Totally Not a Shill." And now that the heat has died down and nobody's paying attention, they've started to move back in and are testing the waters by raising the score just slightly, probably with the prepared excuse that the toothpaste DLC really adds to the game etc etc, but, really, they're going to have that score back above 9 before they're through.
I feel that they're basically using it as an excuse to publish a review before it's ready.
Changing the score once in significant circumstances may be acceptable, changing it 3 times (almost all over the entire scale) just makes you look like you have no idea what you're doing.
And to be fair, they have shown that they don't.
I don't think flexible review scoring is a bad idea, I think giving readers the impression that you are incompetent is.
In my mind John Walker is a bit beating a dead horse here.
The game's reputation is tarnished beyond recovery. No one's talking about it - games web sites or EA - because there's nothing more to talk about. Yeah, it sold 1.1 million copies in its first two weeks. But then by the end of its first full month, it only sold 200,000 more. Not small numbers, but hardly the numbers it would have reached if it had actually gotten good word of mouth.
What does John expect sites to do? Continue spamming people with more SimCity articles day-in day-out even though EA's never going to say anything about it? The damage is already done. Its place in history is forever cemented. The sales dropped off like a rock unlike what highly-reviewed games tend to do these days. Everyone who cares about the online requirement knows that it's purely DRM.
The game's reputation is tarnished beyond recovery. No one's talking about it - games web sites or EA - because there's nothing more to talk about. Yeah, it sold 1.1 million copies in its first two weeks. But then by the end of its first full month, it only sold 200,000 more. Not small numbers, but hardly the numbers it would have reached if it had actually gotten good word of mouth.
What does John expect sites to do? Continue spamming people with more SimCity articles day-in day-out even though EA's never going to say anything about it? The damage is already done. Its place in history is forever cemented. The sales dropped off like a rock unlike what highly-reviewed games tend to do these days. Everyone who cares about the online requirement knows that it's purely DRM.
Not allow people to forget this when the next example comes along.
One always-online game with shit sales is an anomaly, and people forget. Several always-online games with shit sales is a message.
But who's forgotten? And why will more articles help? I'm not getting that.
Real irreparable damage has been done to the game. Its sales seem to have cratered as a result. The (much-deserved) horrible publicity seems to have accomplish the objectives of those who wanted the game to fail because of its DRM problems and design problems.
People complained about the online requirement for a year before the game's release, and EA did not change their mind. What actually matters is the game's sales, and those sales seem to have been significantly affected.
No one needs to be "reminded" by this because no one's forgotten.
Real irreparable damage has been done to the game. Its sales seem to have cratered as a result. The (much-deserved) horrible publicity seems to have accomplish the objectives of those who wanted the game to fail because of its DRM problems and design problems.
People complained about the online requirement for a year before the game's release, and EA did not change their mind. What actually matters is the game's sales, and those sales seem to have been significantly affected.
No one needs to be "reminded" by this because no one's forgotten.
No one has forgotten yet, but no other game with always-online (that isn't an MMO obviously) has come out yet, has it? Keeping it fresh in our minds make it harder to sweep under the rug of history.
That's exactly what happened with Diablo 3 before SimCity came out. No one "forgot" about Diablo 3's launch, even though constant articles weren't written about it. No one hesitated worrying about and complaining about SimCity's online requirement before it came out.
And yet, it seems to have affected sales of SimCity simply because of the quality of the launch and the game itself.
Continuing to post the same thing over and over again with absolutely nothing new to say about it does nothing but fatigue and annoy the readers who might otherwise care when it actually can have an effect - when there's actually something new announced, something, anything new to think about or consider buying.
Still, Anno 2070 functions offline... only slightly gimped, but I do mean slightly, the upgrades you get aren't all that.
I keep my point that this game made me like Uplay a bit more. I thought it was a nice way to put online features on a single-player experience in a way that doesn't demand me to be online, which is the whole problem.
Open Source
Banned
Hey, it works in politics, too!
Real journalism is about knowing what a politician's perfect Sunday is.
I disagree about the part where he says not to call the woman from Maxis a liar. She may not have known but the fact is that we have the evidence now and if they continue to spew the bullshit they should be called out as being liars. If she actually doesn't know anything than that is pretty pathetic how little workers really know about the workings of their games.
I'd like to believe he's right. The few things I've heard about Lucy Bradshaw prior to this were very complimentary.
Nealand Liquor
Member
Sorry but I disagree. I find the 'EA lied and won't answer us' quite a compelling angle to cover. I'm curious why when the evidence is there on the table and the guilty party is red handed is the position being trumpeted to wait until the next time?
I don't know about anyone else here, but waiting until the next time feels an awful lot like giving them a free pass down a slippery slope of anti-consumerism.
I can see your point. While I do think journalists have an obligation to call out the ills of the industry they are covering, there is only so much they can do. As you point out, no site can keep posting the same kind of articles over and over.
However, it's still doesn't change the fact that initially, when the problem was there, a handful of major sites WERE silent. And I think that's the real issue here. I applaud Walker, Sterling, and you for covering it. I still think you guys should bring it up again in the future (for their products). Until they are willing to fix their bad business practices, this should be noted in future reviews, or coverage of their games. I agree that you can't make up articles just for the sake of reminding people that they lied. But I also don't think it should be forgotten.
I think it's possible to turn EA's non responsiveness into a running joke. You see it a lot in the coverage of politics or in satirical magazines like Private Eye. If your site had a policy of changing every mention of EA into "...EA, those wacky liars,..." with a hyperlink to an appropriate Sim City write up, you would be able to keep up the pressure without necessarily annoying your readership. I'm pretty sure they would be unable to tolerate any positive coverage or preview of their upcoming games being compromised in this way for any length of time.
The greatest danger would be derailing normal coverage, or pissing off EA too much.
The greatest danger would be derailing normal coverage, or pissing off EA too much.
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