If the industry 'surviving' means no used games and giving up physical property rights, then the industry does not deserve to survive. It's that simple.
IF the industry wants to...
...then maybe, before we get to this point where we give up our rights as consumers willingly for no appreciable return, it's time to re-evaluate the whole goddamn metric you used to determine the economics of making games in the first place, hm?
MAYBE it's time to fucking cut out those Willem Dafoe and Ellen Page starring roles, hm? Maybe it's time to STOP releasing every fucking goddamn game with some bullshit multiplayer mode nobody fucking wants on this goddamn fucking planet so that you don't have to keep spending money with servers and upkeep? Maybe it's time we get back to the old days, when you released a fucking game without a billion fucking bugs before it even comes out, and you let your consumers beta test the shit out of it for six months before the platform even gets a functional version? Hm, Bethesda? Perhaps it's time to drop the sixteen string orchestras and 9 hours of voiced cutscenes for your ego-driven abomination of a story if you're the type of business survival depends on whether or not your game sells 18 million units to break even? Maybe it's time to stop nickel and diming customers, so they don't get into the game expecting to be ass fucked with 19 paid on disc DLCs that you're shunting away from customers just to be a bunch of withering fuckwads? Hm, maybe you could do that between all the fucking whining and bullshit you've done this past week, blaming everyone else for your misfortune but your own goddamn self?
MAYBE, EA, as you fucking turned Dead Space 3 into a franchise nobody wanted; maybe, EA, as you release five hundred 'EA partner' titles with no marketing, no support, and ridiculous budgets considering their market appeal, you'd decide to change your strategy? MAYBE if we fucking did what they said, none of this would happen? MAYBE if Insomniac Games didn't focus test any personality out of their generic 4-team shooter that I already played sixteen other times this generation, it wouldn't be walking head long into super bomba territory?
Maybe SquareEnix would decide they didn't want to disembowel the Hitman franchise and everything it stood for? Maybe they wouldn't decide that it needed 5 million units, 'cause since when is that the fucking Hitman series sales ability? Don't even get me fucking started on Tomb Raider. Are you serious with this shit? Maybe stop hiring the Lara Croft models, the Californication actresses, maybe stop spend 100 goddamn million on a series that traditional sells 3 million like clockwork?
MAYBE if Activision didn't beat us over the head with a new Call of Duty game every other day, and maybe if half the industry didn't stumble over themselves trying to pathetically copy it to victory? When we're sitting here in seven years wondering why Call of Duty is no longer selling one trillion units every day, will we say it was the gamers fault for milking the shit out of the series until nobody ever cared anymore? I'm sure it was the gamers fault for all the other series they drove into the ground. No names required!
Perhaps if Ubisoft didn't spend year round molesting the Assassin's Creed franchise piece by piece with their behemoth 900 man teams clacking together soulless voyages down destroyed concepts, we'd have a more reasonable economic structure in place. Or delaying a complete game on platforms that were starving for titles for no reasonable return? Or turning Splinter Cell into a completely different series so all the good will for it evaporates? Are we responsible for that too?
But most of all... maybe if EVERY FUCKING STUDIO in this failed industry stopped wishing they were a fucking part of Hollywood, things would get simpler? You ain't hollywood, assholes.
I want big games. But not everyone can make big games and survive. And not only that, maybe some developers have completely misinterpreted what many of us meant by 'big games.' Perhaps it does not mean 500 person teams and celebrity roles, it means diverse gameplay opportunities presented in a nonlinear fashion. Maybe it means instead of corridors, you design more complicated structures for gameplay scenarios to play out... like games had in the 90s, when life was easier and things were cheaper.
And maybe I'm completely wrong. But what IS clear is that there is a billion different strategies developers and publishers could have adopted as things started heading down this path to avoid fucking us in the ass just so they could 'survive.' If we need to give up such basic fundamental rights in order to have the industry survive, then they need to die.
