Gaming Society

[Nanashi22]

I'm going to apologize straightforward for how long this became. It was a rant I typed up on wordpad(no spellcheck sorry) and I kinda just went with it. SO A FOREWARNING TO ALL THIS IS EXTREMELY LONG. IF YOU DON'T LIKE THAT DON'T READ AND KEEP GOING ABOUT YOUR DAY. DO NOT WRITE COMMENTS ABOUT LENGTH UNLESS IS CONSTRUCTIVE OR I'VE VIOLATED FORUM POLICY.

Pardon me if I my grammar isn't on par but I had a strong urge to write a rant(something I've never done before as I hate writing). I've been reading a lot of forums in the internet, from steam, nexus, and various game forums. The topic, sense of entitlement that most gamers and in general, most people in society have. Then I look at some of the counter arguements to these issues and I want to break these down a bit. First, "well, they're just generalizing the whole population and that isn't fair. I'm different because of x y z." The hole in this arguement already begins when you try to distance yourself from "said group" even though you clearly interact and could very well define yourself within it. This is a key point, they feel that as long as they aren't causing the direct issue they're not part of the problem. This couldn't be further from the truth. Playing ignorant to an issue is no way to solve it and if enough people are saying something is wrong, something is wrong! standing by idly is only allowing the problem to grow. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not telling you to attack every troll, whiner, or griefer you meet, but I'm willing to bet you have a friend who's attitude online is far from desirable. Just taking the 5 minutes to tell him to chill out when they get out of line could make all the difference. Think about it, they're more likely to listen to someone close than some a**hole like me writing an rant and if everyone were to do this, the effect could be tremendous. Done on beating on that and onto the next point. Another arguement that comes up is "The video game companies treat us like crap and never listen to us!", perfectly understandable. These large companies seem like ominous gods to us mere mortals. Releasing whatever they craft on their large mountains and only if many sacrifices of hard earned money are given. Yes, businesses have become a bit disconnected from their markets and I don't want this to slip into a debate on what they can do better. This article is a self reflection of gamers mentallity and not business trespasses. Many decisions companies make generally are in the best interest of their customers, granted with intention to increase profits. This logic cannot be argued. Happy customers = Increased Profits. Obviously if you really like something and it brings you joy, you'll pay money for it. Hence why we continue to buy games like Battlefield, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft expansions, Tropico, Company of Heroes, Civilation and many others. Here we complain that they feed us the same game over and over "Stop tricking me into paying you for the same product!". Okay, so yes the games are very similar to their predecessor but the developers could never win here. We loved what made game A great, right? They can't keep this game out forever though, because we'll complain about new graphics, items and other bulls***. We cry about needing a new "fix" and then they release game B. well, game B has everything we loved in game A, a couple additional feature and better graphics. Now we're complaining the game is unoriginal. Okay, the game company mess up, huge blunder, try again. They release game C. This contains very few of game A's and B's features and more additional content. "What is this now. "This isn't what I bought game A for, why did you change it so much it's literally a totally different game!" And so they never stood a chance as I BELIEVE us as gamers never truelly understand what we want. EA was questioned about why they wouldn't release Bad Company 3 despite past success. Their response was they couldn't figure out what people liked about the previous titles. I believe the most ignorant thing I've read was this statement "Video game developers need to stop appealing to the broad market and focus on us dedicated players, that'll fix a lot of issues." I can't even comprehend how small minded thinking this is. First off, dedication does not equal quality player. Second, this clearly demonstrates a entitled mindset. Third, in order to appeal to your small market the company would need to significantly downsize. This means decreased profits and the snowball effect begins. Small profits leads to employee downsizing, stock values decrease and many investors lose money and now tons of people are out of the job. Developers, marketters, secretaries, customer service, server technicians, IT workers, factory workers(since there's less demand for product) and i'm sure all this reverbs through our economy as a whole. "Sorry we could'n't cater directly to you, let us ruin quite a few peoples' lives so we may be better at YOUR service." I'm going to end this long ass whatever the f*** it is rant with this last issue, Free to Play. This has probably got to be the craziest debate at the moment. I think the issue is we have a single expectation of what Free to Play is. We must remember that nothing good in life is truelly free. We don't get full meal samples, high quality items from donations, tons of money from welfare, or full games without a catch. Pay to play should always have a clear advantage for content and gameplay, no trickery here. Free to players need to realise that they're not contributing to the game and this is regardless if they could be a future customer(another arguement). You are given a sample and it's up to you whether you want to make the full purchase or move on. No one forces you to play and it's ridiculous to expect the developers to give you more content, keeping you from subscribing and benefitting them. If you truelly want free to play, build your own game and stop trolling developers for their hard work. Im going to end this here since this is long enough but one final note.

We may think that this feeling of entitlement is societies issue as a whole but who's to say we can't set the standard and show the world that it was gamers who made a substantial change in the way we function. End Rant

Feel free to provide constructive criticism of my ideals, my grammar and punctuation(as I hate writing but need to improve this ability) or anything that is relevant to the rant. I want to see how others feel and engage in nonhostile debate. Thank you!