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>And yes, I know PSN supports less countries than Steam, but how many people on the internet really reside in one of those non-supported areas? I would bet it is less than 84,000 people. I don't think it's a very good point to make. "I'm a consumer, but it doesn't affect MY bottom line, so it's not anti-consumer". Well, sure, I guess. >I don't think it's a good thing to only point out a systematic issue when it's inconviient. That's how these "but it worked here" sorts of issues become abused. I'd rather point out how this snowball is rolling before it becomes a boulder later on, especially when boulders have already formed and gone not nearly as mentioned. That's how you appear tone deaf. You're making your "hot take" under a legitimate case of review systems working as they were intended, it's not part of the systematic issue. >Pet peeve: "anti-consumer" has lost all meaning. Paying $10 more was "anti consumer", downloading a store of your own preference is "anti-consumer". Now making an account you don't like is "anti-consumer"? You see how this word has gotten diluted in the gaming community, no?
I miss when inconveniences were just that, inconvient. Not a declaration of war for capitalism. I'm not sure what war you think anyone is declaring, this is merely a bunch of frustrated paid customers voicing their opinion. There are many things in gaming, and well everywhere else, that are indeed anti-consumer. I think it's why it may appear to you that the word is diluted. Ultimately, it's down to communication between the company and their customers: if the market views something anti-consumer as "acceptable", then those things would not cause a negative reaction of this scale. I'm not saying Sony was unjustified in requiring a PSN link, but it was communicated poorly and after the game has already been sold to people who would be losing their access a result of it. It's not a new practice either: many games do require you to create an account with their or someone else's service to enable different online features, like crossplay. It's not really a problem until it's handled in a way that it becomes one. |
That's my point. If "anti-consumer" means "whatever inconveniences me personally", nothing is pro-consumer once you have more than a dozen customers.
https://xkcd.com/1172/
We can't really define economic philosophy in this fashion.
>That's how you appear tone deaf.
So when a broken clock shows the corect time and you point out how the clock is broke, you're "tone deaf"? Maybe others need to widen their perspectives instead of cherry-picking the times it happened to work in their favor.
As far as I'm concerned, if you support a review bomb now, you support it when people use it to pretotest pro/anti-Taiwan, or when bigots protest some LGBT game, or when some personal drama happens and fans retaliate. It's all "their opinion", right?
But I've seen dozens of these and gamers pretend they can pick and choose when to open and close pandora's box. They chose poorly.
> There are many things in gaming, and well everywhere else, that are indeed anti-consumer. I think it's why it may appear to you that the word is diluted.
It's diluted because no one can even define what "anti-consumer" means. That's how buzzwords become created. If you use the same word to define needing an account to play on an online server and literal fraud, you only dilute the latter meaning by comparing a trivial issue with a serious (and illegal) one.
>if the market views something anti-consumer as "acceptable", then those things would not cause a negative reaction of this scale.
Yeah, because the market is a really good arbiter of morals. So what I get out of this is that releasing a broken game without promised content isn't "abti-consumer" because enough people bought it anyway. Aka "becsuse it's still fun".
If you don't understand how the above can happen and why I'm frustrated by how fickle the market is, we won't see eye to eye on this issue. I know nothing here will change with Steam or review bombs or the next gaming drama. But if they can rant on a place that impacts user decisions, I can rant at the bottom of a social media post on a technical forum, one that used to have more nuanced discussions of such issues.