these companies don’t have the gall to complain about a lack of manpower or expertise availability a few years down the line
Of course they will. It’s all driven by investor money and C-suite bonuses, the rest of managed just bends over and pulls down their pants. If the investors think gaming is hot, everyone will desperately hire. If they are meh on it, everyone shuts down.
You might think this sounds like an unhealthy company model to let investors run everything like that. And you might be right! But we also created a system where the people making these decisions are monetarily involved with the investors, not opposed to them. Hence what hte investors say goes.
Oh no, we might be making marginally less profit than we told our investors we’d be making, and none of us have the backbone to just tell them that you know, sometimes you gamble money and get little in return.
Of course, but that’s not on a personal insults level, after all. It’s on a professional, “product unfit for purpose”, level. As part of a commercial transaction, a goods purchase.
Hence your course of action would be:
Refund the product.
As deemed necessary, avoid that brand in the future.
But just like when your power drill doesn’t work, calling the helpline then verbally abusing the call center person gets you nowhere, and just ruins someone else’s day who had no say in the product disappointing you. And you didn’t really improve your own situation either, you feel briefly improved by being able to vent but you are still sitting on having spent X money for an unfit product. At least get that money back, that’s some genuinely action being taken.
Eh, for game-released-in-a-disappointing state there’s always two points for me:
A personal thing, learn to not buy day 1 or even before. Let other people do that, then avoid ever putting yourself in a frustrated position by simply never buying the broken/unfinished game to begin with. Money - and time - better spent on other hobbies, or well, other games.
On a specific level, I always feel that just saying “I’m sorry, but because of X, Y and Z I don’t feel like the game is in any shape to be worth the money asked” and then refunding it is the only real proper feedback to go about it. Voice your reasoning, then undo the purchase to withhold the money. That’s more than enough brain space wasted on an unfinished game you’re not enjoying, anyways.
What you say actually mixes two quite distinct things, I feel:
Video game studios are not respecting players. It fuels hate speech.
I disagree with this, and quite harshly so. Independent of what companies do, and some of the releases very much fit the “not respecting” part, that’s not in any way, shape or form an excuse to be abuse to some poor support or outreach rep who has to read your shit. They’re just doing their job, they haven’t even gotten to the playing-a-video-game-in-my-leisure-time part of the day yet.
Most social media are also optimized for hateful speech because it increases engagement.
That is however quite true, and leads to an extreme echo chamber enforcing and reinforcing negative and abuse comments. It gets clicks, which is ad impressions, so it gets lifted to the top.
Hrm, fair enough, although I will say for it’s nearly opposite.
I expected it to be pretty meh, for those very reasons.
In practice, it makes me realize that when I play city builders, only a brief moment in an empty map is actually interesting to me, then it’s just hours upon hours of prettification and optimizing for the sake of optimizing, so here something gives me just an endless randomized sequence of those beginning minutes and eshews the parts after that.
But I can very easily see why someone would dislike it, after all I thought I would, too.
I wish you had kept the original title, because that has significantly more content than yours.
Anyhow, getting back to:
Ubisoft Exec Says Gamers Need to Get ‘Comfortable’ Not Owning Their Games for Subscriptions to Take Off
That’s hilarious, because as usual Ubisoft is blaming anybody but themselves. Subscriptions did take off. GamePass is quite popular overall. Not owning your games is completely normal, look at how many games everyone has on platforms such as Steam et al.
It’s just that Ubisoft’s absolutely shitty subscription for their absolutely shitty games, Ubisoft+, has not taken off, because surprise, you only get Ubisoft’s shitty games with that, not all kinds of games like on GamePass. It’s almost like they’re trying to jump the enshittifcation-process that video streaming sites were and still are going through, jump straight to single-publisher services with tiny catalogues, then wonder why nobody would want to pay for that when the service where you get games from ~everyone still exists as a competing service.
It’s just an exec trying to justify why they want their bonuses despite failing to meet targets. And blaming gamers, of course. They’re always at fault, never the bad execs making stupid decisions that completely fail to capture the amrket.