Per Wikipedia:
The Oxford English Dictionary defines grok as “to understand intuitively or by empathy; to establish rapport with” and “to empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment”.
I was looking over the new Assassin’s Creed Black Flag game today, and started descending towards anger. Why is there so much separate content available out there? As of right now, Ubisoft is advertising pre-orders and incentives for their new AC game at Gamespot, Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, and Target. Each supplier will have it’s own unique content: a different combination of missions, skins, items.
Not that long ago, being a gamer was inconvenient. If you wanted a game you had to drive down to the store the night of the release, and wait in line for however many hours (depending on the popularity of the title) to come home with your game. After enough people got robbed and shot, stores started offering pre-orders. Put money down, and pick it up the night of launch. It was still inconvenient, but at least you knew you had a copy waiting on you if you showed up. Now, there’s a real system: you pre-order, and you have a few days to pick it up. Which means your life doesn’t have to be put on hold, and it’s the best thing ever. In retrospect, this took way too long to figure out.
Which brings us to our modern schemes. Today, we live in some bizarro world, where sharing games has become the worst thing imaginable for a developer. Therefore, to entice gamers, publishers will hold back some features, or add extra features. Let me give examples of where this works beautifully, and where it’s absolutely stupid (from a consumer’s stand-point):
Perfection:
Naughty Dog gives you the full single-player game for The Last of Us, but locks you out of multiplayer unless you have a code to do so. If you bought this game pre-owned, or borrowed it from a friend, you’ll have to buy the download portion separately.
Balls:
Ubisoft gives you the full game for Assassin’s Creed 4, but if you pre-order it from Gamestop you get a new mission. There are other missions available you won’t have access to that are available day of launch. I imagine you can pay to unlock those missions, making your $60 game a $70 or $80 game, for an extra (I’m guessing) 4 hours of content per mission. OR, if you’re an absolute sucker, maybe you preordered your game from Target, and you got no extra missions. Well, I’m sure you can pay for those three other missions at $5-15 a pop (whatever it is). So, your $60 game will cost you $80 or $90. For content already available? No, there’s too much backlash out there within the gaming community to pay for content that’s available on launch day. Isn’t there?
Keep micro transactions out of our console games…. your Farmvilles out of our Assassin Creeds.
Suggestions:
I don’t speak for everybody, but I’m going to pretend that I do. If developers are so concerned about 2nd-hand games, and want to do something about it, take the Naughty Dog approach and lock out the online portion of the game. Give every game a multiplayer. It doesn’t have to be anything crazy like Call of Duty, it can be as simplistic, or HIGHLY innovative like Watch Dog’s or Dark Souls.
I know I’m harping on a total of 1 game here, but it’s not just them. So, I apologize for making it my scape goat. This was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back here. Also, I’m passionate, so I care. If I didn’t give two shits, I wouldn’t have put my day on hold to complain.
The post I Grok: Pre-Orders and Incentives appeared first on sai tyrus.