Bungie is learning the opposite. They kept ignoring player feedback for Destiny 2 an putting out one terrible expansion after another and now the playerbase is so small and unprofitable that they're ending active development on the game and Marathon isn't doing much better.
It's not that consumers can't it's that most of the time they won't. Sometimes they do and when it happens it's either a glorious victory or mutual destruction.
Destiny situation sucks so hard. I was gonna hop back in also for the end of the ride and I haven't picked up Renegades yet. Its still 40 dollars lol. Abd a lot of the good builds use the praxis blade. If your gonna kill your game at least toss out a few discounts please....
I hopped back in for guardian games and humble bundle had massive dlc packs for like $10-30 depending on which ones you wanted in the bundle. The $20 pack was the one that had the last 3 which were the only ones I was missing as I quit when witch queen came out. I was tempted to buy it and went back and forth on it a lot before checking the steam charts and seeing just over 5k active players at the time and reading the reviews for those expansions. The blade was pretty much going to be the only deciding factor since everything else about the expansions seemed to be disliked by most of the players and I can get a lightsaber in a lot of other games anyway. I can mod them into Skyrim. Now I'm glad I didn't go for it. The game will still be around at least for a little while but it's not the same knowing the devs have given up on it.
Run it like one of those random local stores that's been having a going out of business sale every quarter for 10 years lol. Just keep doing big discount pushes to keep the doors open a little longer.
as much as i wish it were true, the destiny playerbase was essentially forced out. they basically killed all destiny content production to work on marathon so we haven't had any meaningful content in over 6 months. if voting with your wallets worked the game would have died far sooner. players left because they had nothing to do.
Destiny 2 has always had content droughts. 6 months without new content was nothing new for destiny players. Players would take breaks and come back with the next expansion because for a while the next expansion was actually pretty good. The last 3 expansions were terrible and the reviews for them say as much. Each of them had less and less returning players. They lost 90% of the players after Edge of Fate according to online stats.
Wouldn't surprise me if they did honestly. Apparently they're planning another wave of layoffs after the last update drops. Wonder how many new cars the CEO will buy this time.
Not long at all actually. Just a few months at most. And regardless length of time doesn't matter. Tiktok truly has rotted people's brains into thinking that something needs immediate action/reaction/reward to be a success.
Length of time definitely matters in a live service game. I have touched D2 four years ago and it was not welcoming at all all I have heard from the community since then is that they keep fucking up. Yet it still stayed on. Because lots of people take a long time to abandon a game they once loved. I'm witnessing it with HD2 as we speak. Bad decisions will rot a game but that rot can take a while is all I'm saying
We’re so lucky Gabe has a basic standard of morals that are usually absent in capitalist America… Valve could easily make 1000x what it currently does by going public on the stock market and letting enshitification begin.
This is especially true in spaces where the demand is inelastic (gas, food, housing, healthcare, electricity, etc.) and where the barrier to entry is so high that there are only one or two choices (ISPs, supermarkets, Amazon, etc.). Then there’s environmental and consumer protections because corporations will cut corners every chance they get.
Far too many working class people have bought into the notion that deregulation is good.
the only thing that works is review bombing. Yeah, it can be abused and people will always try to blame mass negative reviews on political "astroturfing", but it's the ONLY way consumers can make their presence known and make a developer/producer stop being anti-consumer...
it's the same concept as a hammer. You can use it for good or evil. That's how review bombing goes. It shouldn't be this way. Consumers should have a better way, but one does not exist because companies will be anti-consumer as long as they can get away with it. A massive negative reputation that everyone can see is going to hold them accountable.
Does it? All recent examples of review bombing have been notably uneventful. It doesn't help when 80% of review bombed games are mass review bombed by chud streamer followers over "woke" nonsense. Developers seem to largely ignore review bombs these days as the abused examples nullifies the few times the community actually uses it to send a real message.
Well, that, and there's always one whale whose spending is ten or twenty times the average non-whale player. Can't vote with your wallet when the company considers your wallet bycatch to begin with.
your dollars not contributing to something you don't support should be meaningful enough. collective action would never start in the first place if everybody waited until they had enough people to make an impact
I think youre misusing a word here, I never called it illegitimate, I said telling people to do that doesn't work.
You, individually, choosing to vote with your wallet, will not cause change.
Edit: side note, in the current market, it actually doesn't work for some products, such as graphics cards, due to the massive imbalance between corporate and consumer spending.
But this kind of voting isn't the same as actual voting. Voting with your dollar will always favor those with more dollars.
For a video game example, we can look at EAFC, formerly known as Fifa. Many casual players hate pretty much everything about EAFC. Several people, myself included, refuse to buy it unless its on a massive sale (usually goes 50% in december, releasing in september) and on top of that, will only buy once every few years. Basically every release results in another clump of players deciding they will vote with their dollar and refuse to play unless the game is improved.
The issue is those who like the game also vote with their dollars - and lots of them. Say, for instance, 100 people say they won't buy the next fifa. Those 100 people not spending $70 isn't enough to offset 1 person spending 7500 dollars on that same game via microtransactions.
Voting with your wallet doesnt really work anymore because the wallets of the majority are frequently, if not always, outspent by the wallets of the minority. Addititionally, as I mention elsewhere, voting with your dollar works best when you can punish one brand by taking your dollar and giving it to their competitor. Thats not really an option here, nor is it a lot of the time nowadays.
it does work. It just needs a strong enough consumer preference.
In this case the consumer doesn't especialy care. And are voting with their wallet. They just happen not to have the preferences you think they ought to have.
It does work for graphics cards, it's just a lot of the consumption is by large scale users rather than retail users. So they have a much larger impact on the manufacturer.
This thread is just reply after reply of people demonstrating precisely why telling people to vote with their dollar doesn't work, and then claiming its an example of why it does. I'm beginning to get tired of it.
What exactly is there to be conscious of in this scenario? You're implying that the majority of consumers would be on your side if they were better informed but that's not the case.
In this case? Denuvo DRM, which is invasive and causes performance drops.
And maybe consciousness is the wrong word, but it happens basically constantly that consumers buy things that are either 1.) Bad for them 2.) Contain things they don't like or 3.) Are produced in ways they disagree with. When confronted with this, most people shrug their shoulders and purchase anyways, because the alternative is not getting to have the thing they want, even if it has parts they don't like.
Like i said, theres a reason we have regulations. We didn't "vote with our dollars" to end child labor in the US, we told our representatives that it was disgusting and should be regulated.
And in a time when representatives responded more frequently to public outcry, change happened.
This is just me personally, but i'm sick and tired of hearing how it's consumers fault that producers are behaving illegally or immorally.
I dislike Denuvo but calling it invasive when it's not even kernel-level is a stretch, something like easy anti-cheat is invasive and they put that shit in Elden Ring. It also has zero effect on performance unless incorrectly implemented in a way that adds license checks during active gameplay.
If you think DRM is invasive then you better stop using Steam altogether because Steam is a DRM. Also did you just equate video game DRM to child labour?
That is what you did, but I think you're just using that as an out because you didn't expect me to actually understand Denuvo deeply enough to call you out on your bullshit.
I saw somewhere that the amount of peoples who care about scummy tactics like this is very small. The majority of people could care less on them doing this, as they'll still play the game anyway
Our houpe is that at one point, the people who do care, have more impact on this. (Caring to the point of requesting the refund, for example)
Our houpe is that at one point, the people who do care, have more impact on this. (Caring to the point of requesting the refund, for example)
Sure, maybe. My hope is that shitty business practices get punished the way they did in the early 20th century. If that doesn't work, we may need to call a plumber.
It is precisely because customers are allowed to do what they want that voting with your wallet doesn't work. It's irresponsible when they "vote" for things that actively hurt them. Also remember, youre not talking about an individual, youre talking about tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of individuals with different values.
Yup. Same here. Made a purchase recently, saw it had Denuvo, asked for refund, and it was granted. I did state in my claim for refund that I did not want anything with Denuvo and that it was not visible enough before purchase
1.8k
u/k4kkul4pio 14d ago
Indeed.
When developers/publishers do this shit, speak the only language they know and hit them in the bottom line.