Friday, August 3, 2012

Why I'm going to actively boycott publishers/developers

This more of a personal rant than anything objective.

I've been careful to not buy games that have always-on DRM as a form of protest against this particular form of 'punishment to legitimate gamers'. Ever since I learnt of the DRM for Assasin's Creed 2 (I think), I've stopped buying Ubisoft games at full price for PC, but probably only got 1 for the Wii. I bought Command and Conquer 4 from EA, not realizing that it had the same DRM and have since been weary of buying their games. I gave Blizzard a chance because I have always liked their games even though I was upset with Diablo 3's required online access and also the Real Money Auction House. I bought Capcom's fighting games for the PS3 even though I know they had a habit of making new versions and selling them as a new game instead of providing it as DLC for the older version. Even for some of the games I boycotted, I still ended up buying it at a Steam sale or when they finally removed the offending portions of the game.

What I'm starting to realize is that you can't have your cake and eat it (duh). Partial boycott doesn't help matters. Publishers will keep putting out such crap until gamers put their foot down and hit them in their wallets. I understand that what one person does is not going to do much, but I believe more and more gamers and fighting back against publishers. Bioware changing their ending and Capcom saying they'll change their stand on on-disk-dlc shows that gamers do have the power if they stand together (though I think Capcom will still make content and then not put it on the disk, but rather make people pay for it later so I don't believe them at all).

So I'm going to totally boycott games made by EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard and Capcom, and mind you, I have games from EA, Activision, Blizzard and Capcom that I really love. I would really love to continue following the story and playing the games (Starcraft, Warcraft and Diablo series) made by Blizzard, the various great games published by EA like Dead Space, and Capcom's fighting games and Resident Evil series (I love my survival horror if you haven't noticed, but those games are dying, being replaced by 'action-horror'), so this is really a painful choice for me. But it has to be done, and anyway, there will be people streaming if I'm really interested in the story. I am still interested in gaming though, and will look towards independent developers and other publishers like Paradox, THQ, CD Projekt and the like.

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