It took me awhile to find an image this “clean”.

But in all honesty, it’s been so long since I’ve played a Dead or Alive game – my last one was 2, for the Dreamcast – that I haven’t really gotten what the big deal is. Even that’s not an accurate statement; the last time I really did anything with Dead or Alive, it was on a shipmate’s XBox, and it was with Dead or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball. For those that don’t know what that is, it was Barbies for perverts, with a little bit of simple volleyball thrown in. This came after DoA3. A few years later, Dead or Alive 4 launched with the XBox 360, and was followed by Dead or Alive Xtreme 2, a game so flimsy it didn’t even pretend to advertise volleyball. Things were quiet until the release in 2010 of Dead or Alive Paradise, which was even flimsier than Xtreme 2 and suffered the indignity of getting a 1.0 from Destructoid. It was only with the release of the 3DS that Tecmo remembered that this was actually a fighting series, and here we are, finally, with the fifth installment.

I should note that I did not buy this, I rented it. What’s sad is that it took me a long time to get to the point of renting it, largely because my girlfriend won’t let it into her house. Literally, she refuses to have a Dead or Alive game in her house. At that point, it became a matter of curiosity to see if the actual fighting game was as bad as the spinoffs.

After playing a few days, it’s not bad, but it’s certainly not good.

For those who have never played a DoA game, or are like me and have forgotten how they play, Dead or Alive is basically Tekken for Horny Dummies. The four face buttons are for punching, kicking, blocking (which holding back also accomplishes), and throwing, with combos being strung off of those. Combos are the main way of doing damage, as they can be whipped together very quickly. Therefore, most Dead or Alive fights devolve into simple button-mashing affairs, with both players playing the role of drunken circus seals as they haphazardly slap the controller for fish and to see who gets the most five hit combos. Really, that’s all there is to the fighting. There isn’t any kind of deep combo or counter system like in BlazBlue or Persona 4 Arena. There’s no tight control or depth like in Tekken, and there isn’t even any strategic gameplay like in Soul Calibur. Slap, slap, slap.

I will say the base gameplay goes well with the story, which hits “so bad it’s good” territory, easily. I’m not far, but the general gist is that Ayane still wants to kill Kasumi, and something about another tournament, and Zack’s still a doofus, and honestly no one really cares because the men in this game seem to be little more than roster filler. Dead or Alive has always been about the ladies, and it’s to ridiculous lengths now. They feature more prominently, they get more marketing attention, they get the vast majority of the DLC costumes, for all we care, the men are just there as cannon fodder and story flags. Not that the story needs it; the general gist of the story goes like this: two characters have a random conversation, then they have a fight, then sometimes, they talk like nothing happened. Some of the things you see in the story make absolutely no sense, or have nothing to do with anything other than just being a way to justify having a fight. After Persona 4 Arena, this dreck just doesn’t cut it.

Of course, saying “I play Dead or Alive for the story and the fighting engine” is much like saying you read Playboy for the articles; maybe you do, but you can do better elsewhere, and you’re probably full of shit. This game is gorgeous, and the women have a lot to do with that, being rendered beautifully. Of course, in standard Dead or Alive fashion, their breasts seem to be sentient, going off in their own directions, and doing their own thing, completely independent of what the body they’re attached to is doing. I thought this was something they did only for Xtreme 2 and Paradise, games that exist solely for people to ogle said breasts, but they brought it over to a fighting game to boot. Combine the ridiculous breast physics – I can’t believe I just typed the phrase “breast physics” and meant it seriously – with the fact that some of the female characters are fighting in high heels, and things start to approach absurd levels. Of course, the really “good” costumes – see: bikinis – are locked away as paid DLC. I’ll bet it made Tecmo a boatload of money, too.

I’ve been rough on the game, but I have to stress that Dead or Alive 5 isn’t a *bad* game. It’s basically the popcorn flick of the video game fighting genre, though. It’s simple, flashy, there’s lots of explosions, and a lot of beautiful, half-naked women. I wouldn’t pay more than $20 for it, and that’s without considering the fact that my girlfriend would throw it at my head at 90MPH. If someone out there has a need for his masturbation fodder to beat each other up, then this is a good purchase, but otherwise, there are better options out there.

However, Electronic Arts won, and not only that, they won handily, beating Bank of America with almost 80% of the final vote.

Let’s look at the list of things each company is guilty of.

Bank of America
* Guilty of foreclosing the mortgages of military veterans who were actually paid up.
* Guilty of poisoning the waters regarding a government review of mortgage foreclosures
* Dead last in the American Customer Satisfaction Index survey.
* Participated in the bad debt swaps that helped crash the fucking economy in 2008.

Electronic Arts
* Cocked up a video game launch.
* Refused to give refunds regarding said launch.
* Threatened people with Origin account closures who went to the forums and complained.
* Charges microtransactions, along with virtually every other publisher in the world.

In no way are EA’s offences – which are legion in the video game industry, obviously – comparable to Bank of America’s. Hell, in no way are they comparable to third place Comcast’s, who hold selective monopolies on internet connectivity in many areas and routinely violate network neutrality principles to parlay their advantage in having an ownership stake in NBC. I’d wager, if put head to head, half the companies on the list – including every Internet Service Provider, who are willingly collecting personal information and transferring it over to lobbying groups such as the MPAA and RIAA, and every single oil company on the planet for reasons too numerous to list here – are worse than Electronic Arts, which says a lot because EA is in no way a good company to consumers.

With a silly little online poll, gamers proved only one thing, and no, they did not prove that EA is a terrible company. All they really did is show that no matter how bad of a company you are, you’ll escape scrutiny so long as you don’t piss off a bunch of basement dwellers with Asperger’s Syndrome who have the software means to stuff an online ballot. If anything, it justifies an outsider’s position on video gamers: it adds weight to the thought that we’re all losers with a complete lack of priorities and common sense, and that maybe we should do things like regulate violent games to the porno bins. After all, we can’t handle it, right?

Obviously, the typical warnings about these polls – they’re unscientific, EA’s an easy target, something something 4chan – apply. But it’s news – mainstream news – that a video game company beat arguably the worst example of corporate malfeasance outside of the Russian oligarchy. Video game comment boards are lighting up in celebration, but everyone else is looking at us and wondering why we’re so stupid.

Gamers really need to grow the hell up. This is much more pathetic than SimCity’s launch.

^{1 – No Zynga in the voting? My, how the mighty have fallen.}

^{2 – Actually, EA was doing this for awhile with Origin, too.}

EDIT @ 5:33PM EST – CEB: OK, so here’s the deal.

I do not take Asperger’s Syndrome seriously. However, the problem is that it is because 98% of the people I meet are what I’d call self-diagnosed. They use it as a crutch for simply being socially awkward, or worse. Asperger’s was removed from the list of diagnoses and put under the Autism umbrella.

THAT is what I would change. THAT is what I should have clarified. That’s an editing error on me. For THAT, I apologise to the people who have been to a doctor, been diagnosed, been medicated or given therapy, and are attempting to find help to play well in society.

However, my original opinion of Asperger’s – that it is not extremely serious, often self-diagnosed, and even when it’s not, is used as a crutch to euphemize “I don’t like people” – stands.

The other side is the “bros”. The “bros” – which feature a lot more industry people than I’m comfortable admitting – wonder what the big deal is. There’s women all over the industry! Like that one, and that other one, whats her name, and oh, that one with the tits that works with that company in Montreal! What was the big deal about the party? The women were there as art, and by art, we mean “art to masturbate to at the hotel later”! Besides, we have this one friend, who works as an entry level QA at Bioware, and she says it’s nonsense, so that speaks for the entirety of women in gaming!

The bros insist there’s no problem, but these people are either willfully ignorant, not paying attention, or intentionally glossing over facts to keep the all boys club in place.

Guys, there’s a lot of smoke. Eventually, you’re going to have to admit that something’s on fire. And when almost every woman in the industry on Twitter says that they have either been objectified, stared down, or outright discriminated against, that’s a really big fucking fire

Of course, the argument most of the bros come up with is that it’s a slippery slope. That meaning, it’s a slippery slope between not treating women like they interviewed for their job on a casting couch and eliminating all fun and sexuality from video games, and making the experience sterile. Essentially, these people looked at two or three extreme Tumblr blogs and panicked. This is a pedant’s argument, one step ahead of the guy who says that women belong in the kitchen like they were in the 50s. The women who are in the industry – from developers like Jade Raymond, Anna Marsh and Brenda Romero to press figures like Leigh Alexander, Kim Wallace and even my own former writers in Aileen Coe, Mel Ngai and Lilian Harle – all add a wholly different, unique perspective on issues such as this, but there is a subsection of men who belittle their accomplishments – accomplishments that measure up on any standard, not just in the proverbial “girls’ league” – just because of their gender. These are the same men who often state that women don’t play games as often as guys (wrong), and if they do, all of them are playing simple cell phone games (blatantly wrong), so facts aren’t on their side, just strength in numbers. For now.

Really, there hasn’t been an excuse for the kind of thinking that goes into the IGDA party, and the even more abominable Gameloft party, for years. In 2013, there’s even less than that. The perpetrators of this mindset – both the visible and the hidden, the latter of which infests too many board rooms – are holding back an industry that even Warren Spector recently called “immature”. Until we shun those that are dismissive of the concerns of others, the vast majority of which are entirely justified, we will continue to be regarded as an immature medium – a child to film and music – and will be treated accordingly.

^{1 – Before anyone calls Brenda Romero a bleeding heart, remember that she worked on Playboy: The Mansion, and wrote a book about the experience.}

It’s a decent game. As far as freemium stuff goes, it’s definitely one of the least offensive games out on the market, as I’ve been able to play with no problems despite my ardent “no money” policy at this point². In all honesty, I’ve been trying to get past my almost visceral hatred of the free-to-play school of video game design, even if my referring to Puzzle and Dragons as one of the “good ones” simulates the way a racist neighbor refers to the one black guy he can tolerate. But while the game is decent, two things stop me from diving in fully: waiting for the hammer, and a superior game.

I’ll expound on just how Puzzle and Dragons works before I go into my problems. If Pokemon got drunk and had sex with Bejewled, nine months later Puzzle and Dragons would be what popped out. Players are given a starter – water, plant or water, no surprise – but unlike Pokemon, there’s only a few elements – just lightning and darkness on top of the big three – and most of the monsters are just effectively palette swaps, with slight tweaks for element. On the other half are what the player does in the dungeons. PAD is a match 3, but there are no real rules as to where you can move pieces. Any piece can be moved anywhere, which counts as a move; monsters have numbers over their heads corresponding to how many turns there are before they attack. There are guides showing how moves can be strung together into massive combos, but ultimately, it’s match 3 with all of the difficulty removed. In fact, unless the player can string together some serious combos that multiply damage to ridiculous levels, winning stages is simply a matter of power; if the player has stronger monsters than the dungeon, the player will win, and if not, the player will lose.

This is where my fear of the hammer comes in. See, PAD has all sorts of artificial limits put in. When entering a dungeon, you lose a set amount of energy. Beginning dungeons cost three stamina, but bigger dungeons can take anywhere up to 30. That’s important to note because it takes 10 minutes to regain one point of stamina, so by going in that later, 30 stamina dungeon, you have to wait around for five hours to get that stamina back. How do you regain that stamina immediately? There’s an app purchase for that! One nice option is the ability to take “helper” monsters into battle with your team, which are monsters that other people own. Those people can later be befriended. Of course, there’s a set limit on how many people you can friend; one guess how to increase that. Also, there are a lot of monsters that can either be found in dungeons, bought with Pal Points (a really nice option; pal points are gathered by either using helpers, having your monster be used as a helper, or logging in on consecutive days), evolved, or bought with Magic Stones (more on these in a bit). However, there’s a limit; the only way I know of to increase that limit is to spend magic stones, which are the game’s effective currency (there’s also coins, but in fairness, these come easy enough and can’t be purchased). Magic stones are somewhat rare to come across most of the time, but like any freemium game, they can be purchased in packs of various sizes. So far, I haven’t had to spend a dime, but I know the difficulty’s going to spike once I’m fully invested in the game, at which point I’ll be more or less forced into either spending money, or letting all of the time I will have invested into this game go for naught. For a game with no ending, no real goal other than catching lots of monsters and lots of loot, that seems onerous. Therefore, despite the game being tolerable to this point, I can’t really say I’m excited by it. It’s a generic version of two other games, and one that I know is going to get expensive if I want to do anything of note.

So after all that, is there a reason to continue to play Puzzle and Dragons? Honestly, that’s a good question, because in addition to all of the points mentioned above, it’s not even the best match 3 released in the past year. It’s not the best game, in its own genre, that I’ve downloaded to my phone in the past month.

On the other side of the divide is 10000000. Created by two people, it is, itself, a combination of multiple genres: match 3, endless runners (Canabalt, Jetpack Joyride) and role playing games. Instead of moving everything around wherever you want, the option is to move an entire row vertically or horizontally to match up pieces, while attacking monsters, unlocking chests and doors, and acquiring materials to upgrade the areas in what can best be described as your jail cell. Eventually, the player will grow strong enough to score 10,000,000 points, which grants the avatar his freedom.

What’s great about this game is the tension to it. Not only does time always pass when you’re at an obstacle, but enemies can hit you, knocking you back farther. Despite that, the avatar doesn’t die so much as get knocked back into his cell, with the caveat that he keeps the gold (purchase weapon/armour upgrades), stone and wood (open up and upgrade “shops”) he collected. Therefore, “losing” isn’t a punishment. This is unlike PAD, where death is highly costly; if you die in a dungeon, you’re given the option of continuing at the cost of – wait for it – a Magic Stone. If you don’t have one, no problem, you can IAP it right away! Of course, if you don’t want to do that, you lose everything you gained, and also lose the stamina you spent, so if you went into a higher level dungeon – especially one where the healing tiles are useless – and lost, and didn’t want to spend money, you’re effectively done playing PAD for the rest of the day. Even in a “good” game – and let’s face it, PAD is one of the better freemium games on the market, which is why it’s making money hand over fist – the carrot and stick are the name of the game; give the carrot for awhile, then beat those that don’t assimilate with a stick.

Therefore, whereas in PAD, I never feel like I’m really accomplishing anything, every single run through the dungeon in 10000000 – even those that don’t go particularly well – means I’ve accomplished something. It’s almost impossible to get out of the dungeon without at least some gold, or some building material, and at the stage I’m at, I really don’t need anymore building material, so thankfully, there are potions that allow me to turn that into gold and experience, both of which I need in abundance. It’s a more fulfilling experience. Granted, I’ve paid more for 10000000 than I will for PAD – two separate versions cost me about $4 thanks to a Steam sale – but that’s fine. I don’t *want* the freemium experience, where I will be assaulted with constant reminders that I can be better if I just dip into my wallet. If I want constant attempts to reach into my bank account, I don’t need a video game – my escape, and my favorite hobby – to do that, I just have to walk down a busy street in a city. I rather like the model where someone makes a game, and we pay money for that game. It’s only worked for me for the twenty or so years that I’ve actually been purchasing video games.

It’s too bad that GungHo – a company that has, under its’ umbrella, everything from Ragnarok Online (an early MMO pioneer) to Game Arts (Grandia) – had to compromise their game design for this model. Considering how inoffensive PAD is, imagine how great it would have been had in-game revenue distribution not been the main driving point of the game’s design. That was the case with 10000000, and that’s why Eighty Eight Games will continue to get my money, and GungHo won’t see a dime.

^{1 – Personally, I think it’s adorable that 27 year old Aileen still calls her brothers – a 31 year old animator and a 35 year old doctor – “Dude” and “Fluff”.}

^{2 – That’s not a hard-and-fast rule; I’ve spent money on Jetpack Joyride with no qualms, and don’t regret it. But even that’s only $4.}

I couldn’t help but think of that as I heard the news that Wada had “stepped down” (read: Humpty Dumpty was pushed) as the CEO of SquareEnix. For the thirteen years that Wada has been a senior executive at the company – twelve of those as its CEO – Squeenix has been in a spiral downwards in virtually every metric, both hard and subjective. Square Enix’s financials have been a mess, with no fact showing that as clearly as the fact that Tomb Raider, which has so far sold 3.4m copies and is the best selling game of 2013 as of this writing, underperformed expectations¹; when a game sells three and a half million copies in a month and it still isn’t good enough, you have a serious management problem on your hands.

However, Square Enix has also had a problem managing their reputation with gamers. Very few gamers are as dedicated in our business as those who support Japanese role playing games. Typically the milieu of the dedicated to begin with, Square’s past games raised a generation of gamers, one in which I was a part of, and therefore raised the bar for everything bearing the company’s name, sometimes to absurd levels. As the PlayStation 2 hit, the company could do very little wrong; even their failed experiments, like The Bouncer, did well for themselves. However, a combination of substandard games, questionable localization decisions, and in more recent years, outright contempt for their fans² have led to the brand being damaged, especially in areas they’re trying to expand in like the MMO market. As time has passed, the relationship between the consumer and the company became badly damaged, and while that would normally not be entirely permanent – Electronic Arts is still in a very strong position despite executives from the company pretty much telling longtime fans to shut up and stop being a vocal minority – it’s different with the kind of fans that Square’s games have. I’ve mentioned that they’re overly dedicated, but that also means they’re overly attached, and when you mistreat someone who’s a little too invested in the relationship, they lash out. The problem with vocal minorities is that eventually, they become loud enough to become a very vocal majority, and that’s what has largely happened in the current generation of consoles. When I purchase anything from Square Enix, I expect a large amount of frustration that has nothing to do with the game to come along with it – be it an over inflated price, or extra hoops such as the ridiculous PC port of Final Fantasy VII that I discussed on Twitter recently – and after awhile, I just get sick of dealing with the bullshit. If I am sick of them, how many millions more are in my boat with me?

Unfortunately for Square Enix, being such a large company, “nimble” is the last word to come to mind. They’re getting assaulted on all fronts, and yet their major game in Japan is Dragon Quest X, a subscription based MMO on the Wii. That game has zero chance of success in America. But in other areas, they are suffering as well. Arguably the best thing the company has done is their work relating to Eidos, who was a breath away from liquidation when Square Enix bought them out. Since then, that arm of the group has produced some outstanding games such as Deus Ex, Hitman and Tomb Raider. However, all three of their games have underperformed their expectations in the upcoming quarterly report, which indicts poor management and runaway development costs. On the mobile front, they’re getting swallowed alive in Japan by DeNA and GREE, and their combination of premium (in the literal sense of the word) priced ports of 25 year old games and atrocious, borderline scandalous “freemium” experiments that happen to cost money are not exactly setting the world on fire. In terms of their bread and butter – Japanese role playing games brought over to the Western world – they’re a mess. Final Fantasy XIV was an abomination that never should have been released in the state it was. Final Fantasy XIII Versus and Type-0 have just about hit vaporware status, a word previously synonymous with the likes of Duke Nukem Forever. And while the localization of Bravely Default is a step in the right direction, that’s still a niche game for a company that needs to start making serious mainstream profits, immediately.

As one of millions of people across the world who grew up in love with Square Soft, it’s almost tragic to see what has happened during Yoichi Wada’s term as Chief Executive Officer. It’s easy to blame him for the company’s failures, but the rot goes so deep – arguably to the root of Japanese culture in and of itself, a culture that, especially in the corporate world, abhors change and resists evolution – that it’s impossible to really know where to begin to clean up the mess. Like Electronic Arts, they’ve let their CEO go, but unlike EA, they don’t have any solid ground to stand on for the future. They are in the position that no large, publicly traded company wants to be in: their main business drying up or being relegated to irrelevance, and unable to make a foothold in emerging markets that have been staked out by smaller, more nimble companies. Such words are usually the beginning of a company’s obituary, and if Squeenix’s incoming CEO doesn’t have the temerity to change the company’s root culture with near immediacy, we could be reading that obituary sooner than any of us wants to admit.

^{1 – Leaked numbers indicate that the expectation floor – the break even, minimum number – was five million copies; they were expecting closer to six. This, for a series that had been a critical failure in the West for years, and for whom 3.4m copies was the largest launch in its history. Who is doing Squeenix’s projections, Don Quixote?}

^{2 – When asked if a sequel to Chrono Trigger was coming, Shinji Hashimoto stated , in an exasperated tone, that there wouldn’t be anything in the near future for Chrono Trigger because fans weren’t buying the remake, stating bluntly “If people want a sequel, they should buy more!”. It should be noted that at the time it was released, the Chrono Trigger remake – more of a port than a remake, only really featuring a better translation and a couple of extra side quests – was priced at $40, literally the most expensive DS game on the market. Even Pokemon games released at the time, save for HeartGold and SoulSilver (which came with pedometers), cost $35.}

For the six of you still here, I’ve actually been a defender of Riccitiello in the past. People don’t quite realize what he brought to the company when he came on in 2007. EA at that time was *the* preeminent industry bad guy back then, putting out substandard licensed stuff while getting rocked by the ea_spouse controversy, which put the spotlight on how the company treated its developers. For people accusing EA of being franchise happy now, it was way worse in those days. Riccitiello came on, and one of the first things he did was clean up the corporate culture, reducing overtime and improving morale at both the publisher and its developers. He also bemoaned the company’s past practices of purchasing and subsequently destroying in-house developers, such as Bullfrog, like the spoiled child from the first Toy Story destroying his toys. He even made cursory statements about dropping the then-novel $60 price point for AAA games. Lastly, during his tenure, Riccitiello, along with Zynga, has been the industry leader in lobbying for full rights to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered community.

Most notably, he was at the helm of an experimentation with new ideas and new intellectual properties. Mirror’s Edge wasn’t a good game, but it was a brilliant idea that I would love to see cooked better. Dead Space was a very good horror game until the company intentionally took it in a more generic direction in an attempt to drive mainstream sales. EA Sports also did a lot of amazing things, including allowing for full 11 on 11 football matches, the logistics of which are often lost on the casual fan. Many other EA-published products, such as the little-known Create, were outstanding ideas. For all the stick the company gets lately, most of it justified, John Riccitiello was the CEO at a time when EA was legitimately making inroads to address their previously atrocious reputation.

The previous two paragraphs are why this one is going to be so painful to write: eventually, Riccitiello had to adjust to what the market – the NASDAQ, literally the only one that matters – wanted. Jim Sterling of Destructoid held Riccitiello responsible for all of the anti-consumer practices that EA has been stepped in the past few years, but in all honesty, if he didn’t go forward with them, this would have happened years ago. The shift to freemium in the mobile market, the proliferation of microtransactions, Origin’s existence and the ornerous DRM that comes with it, all of that wasn’t chosen by EA so much as foisted upon him by investors that want their stock price up by hell or high water. A recurring theme of my writing is that public ownership is never good for a creative endeavor, and EA is patient zero in this debate. No developer designs games with these hooks in mind; they’re put in there because business suits reacting to investors want them there. Riccitiello pulling back on his initial positions from 2007 wasn’t a case of him being dishonest, it was a case of trying to keep his job.

Riccitiello’s dismissal – and let’s call a spade a spade, Humpty Dumpty was pushed – is a further indictment of just where the video game industry is in a business sense. New IPs and games that challenge the gamer’s thought process and try to advance AAA gaming as a medium are out, plain and simple. it’s not about making a profit, it’s about making fuck-you money and increasing that stock price. Games can’t just be good anymore; Resident Evil 6 and Dead Space 3 were considered commercial failures for not selling 5 million copies, a number that would have been considered astronomical just a few years back. The name of the game, at least in the heavily corporate, publicly traded part of the industry, is wringing literally every dollar out of gamers that can be wrung, to the point where playing the game is secondary to being hit with sales pitches to buy even more of the game. Virtually every AAA game exists with the sole purpose of being a $60 hook into a further $30 – $50.

That’s going to get ten times worse at Electronic Arts – already voted the worst company in America in a heavily astroturfed vote – now that they’ve essentially thrown their CEO overboard. Whoever Larry Probst – a man, I remind everyone again, who essentially oversaw the video game equivalent of a sweat shop – decides will be the next CEO will be under a mandate to increase shareholder value, by any means necessary. The name of the new CEO, be it Peter Moore, Eric Brown, Bing Gordon or Flash Gordon, is irrelevant. The mandate is clear, and whoever’s selected will be selected for their ability to do just that.

If you’re a fan of games, this is horrible news. It’s especially troublesome if you’re a sports fan. Horror fans angry at what EA did to Dead Space 3 can just as easily turn to Lone Survivor, Amnesia or Corpse Party to get their horror fix. Anyone who thought SimCity was a disaster can always play Ciivlization to get similar gameplay. Battlefield haters are overflowing with choice. Sports gamers? Madden has an exclusive license, NHL might as well, and the only game in their sports lineup that has shown any kind of improvement in the past few years is FIFA (who has competition from Pro Evolution). If you’re dissatisfied with any of these, you have no choice. For people like me, this is depressing.

A lot of gamers are giving Riccitiello stick because of the things that have been in the news, but if they want to direct their ire, they should direct it at themselves. With their dollars, they have proven that they will buy the very things they dislike, and that they will not take risks on anything that isn’t safe and familiar. Because of this, the most progressive AAA CEO we could have asked for is gone, likely to return to venture capital, and the resulting changes are going to make the past couple of years seem like a pleasant dream.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, to tell the truth. The difference is that we finally have a game big – and messy – enough to point out just how hard it is to do a classic review nowadays.

In a sense, the “classic” review is going the way of the “classic” game. It used to be, the game was released, complete, and a reviewer completed a review, using the game’s final code. This system worked since the dawning of the games press. Then, post-release support became possible, as the internet allowed us to patch PC games, and later console games, after release. Unfortunately, what was at one time a convenience soon became a crutch, as publishers started getting games out first and worrying about patching them up later, if and when it was convenient.

Despite this, reviews have still been done the classic way of reviewing the finished code – even if “finished” is a laughable term – as close to the day of release as possible, preferably before it. There are a lot of reasons for this, mainly having to do with maximum visibility. Reviews of a game before it’s released are highly valuable to both the company behind the game (to grow hype, if it’s good) and the people publishing the review (to get the maximum views); after the first few days, reviews get less and less attention, and a week or so after release, sites might as well throw their reviews in the incinerator because no one cares, and the few that do comment just to say the review is old. While these are all legitimate reasons to have a review out, from a practical standpoint, it hasn’t worked out well from the perspective of giving the definitive word of a game’s quality, only the perceived quality on release day.

As a sports gamer, this is an issue near and dear to my heart. I cannot count the times I’ve seen reviews for games that rated high where the online features were bunk. There’s also the problem of EA Sports games, where the blessing of tuner sets and a heavy patching process – a place where EA admittedly blows 2K out of the water – means that the game that’s out two weeks after release is often vastly different than the one two weeks prior, or even two weeks after. What do you do? Do you wait to put out your review until well after the game’s been released and bought up? Do you put out a crappy review initially? Do you put out impressions of the game as you go along? I’m still trying to figure that out, and from the looks of it, the industry is, too.

As always-on DRM and other online-centric systems become more and more ubiquitous¹, the journalistic practice of reviewing these games is going to have to adapt if what we care about is getting it right. In some corners of the internet – some very large, well populated ones – getting the pageviews is literally the only thing that matters, accuracy be damned. But readers will gravitate to the better sources, and the sooner the better sources figure out how to do reviews in the new era, the more relevant they’ll become.

^{1 – As I stated a month ago, get comfy, because this isn’t going away.}

What just happened to JManga should reignite the question.

JManga, launched in 2011 as a way to legally read manga and support publishers – many of whom were getting destroyed by scanlations and other forms of piracy – announced yesterday that they were shutting down their service on May 30th. Sites close all the time, but the notable thing is that all manga is unviewable after that date, including manga purchased.

2. What will happen to the manga on My Page? – Digital manga content will be viewable until May 30th 2013 at 11:59pm. You will not be able to view digital manga content beyond this time.
…
7. Is there a way to download the manga I have purchased? – It is not possible to download manga from My Page. All digital manga content will no longer be viewable after May 30th 2013 at 11:59pm (US Pacific Time)

So basically, long story short, if you purchased manga to read at JManga, legally, without resorting to piracy, you just got slapped in the face. Everything you spent money for is gone, or disappearing. You have no recourse. You have no rights. You only have anger, indignation, and regrets.

Meanwhile, anyone downloading or reading at one of the many manga reading and downloading sites on the Internet that don’t charge money are doing just fine. Once again, piracy wins.

At least for manga, it’s possible to get manga from other sources, even if they’re not legal¹. Video gamers – and here, I’m speaking for console gamers – don’t really have that option. That’s been to the larger benefit of the industry, with PC gaming and the sales that brings driving down the cost of mid-tier game. But XBox Live and the PlayStation Network – for the good things those services have brought – are both closed down services. If you’re not playing by their rules, on their systems, you cannot play their games. If something were to happen, and either XBox Live or the PlayStation Network were to close – either to playing, or to downloading – all of the money people have spent on those games – in my case, thousands of dollars – would go to waste. This is in addition to people being kicked from the service for whatever reason – something an Origin rep clearly told a customer they would do to their PC games – or other assorted reasons for blocking an account or access from said account.

There is precedent for all of this outside of the video game industry, and Amazon – historically seen as a good option for everything from buying video games to buying tablets – shows us some of the most extreme among them. Back in 2009, they angered customers by deleting purchased books from customers Kindle devices overnight and refunding them the purchase price, a move that goes from upsetting to laughable once it’s remembered that the books were George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four². Last year, the case of Linn Nygaard was brought to the forefront, as Amazon deleted her account – and with it, access to her purchased books – without any explanation. Attempts to gain insight as to what happened were fruitless; they simply sent her and her money down the memory hole.

It’s important to remember that technically, every single company that sells us digital video games has the same rights. If Microsoft wants to disable access to your games on the Live Arcade, they can, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it except hope the story goes viral. If Steam wants to disable all of your games, poof; they’re gone. Furthermore, the industry is going more and more digital, so the carrots are guarded by more and more sticks. With few exceptions, the companies holding the sticks have shown they’re willing to use them whenever it’s convenient to them. Regardless of the circumstances, the fact is that every single games service out there has the same control of our product that JManga did.

This is a future that’s becoming increasingly relevant. We are no longer able to purchase our product; we’re merely renting it, for the same price of course. Unless gamers, as consumers, band together and let it be known – with our money, because executives don’t care about bitchy website and forum posts – that this is unacceptable, instances like this will become more common. These companies do not deserve our blind trust. Manga readers who wanted to stay on the right side of the law gave that to them, and look where it got them.

^{1 – There are many arguments to be made that the ease the Internet gives in both downloading and “scanlating” – basically, Photoshopping the Japanese out and the English in – manga and anime have led to a lot of hardships in that industry. But increasingly anti-consumer practices are not the answer. The horse has left the barn; no sense closing the door now.}

^{2 – Doubly ironic: while the copyright to Nineteen Eighty-Four doesn’t expire in the United States until 2044, it’s public domain in Canada and Australia.}

Already, people are qualifying this. Despite the fact that Valve invested in this, as a part of their own ideal of a PC being made to fit in the living room and play games on Steam, the Piston isn’t being called a Steam Box; instead, Xi3 is careful to note that in addition to Steam, Origin and other services can be played on it. Many commentators are stating that other devices can come out with the “Steam Box” moniker, including something put out by Valve itself.

This is largely noise, and the noise has to be cleared soon, because if this is the future of the Steam Box – a $1,000 PC with a small form factor – then the future is grim.

The Steam Box was conceived for one reason: to put PC gaming in the living room alongside – or in place of – a console like a PlayStation or a Wii. Therefore, it’s not competing just against other gaming PCs – let’s face it, I can go to Best Buy right now, buy a desktop PC, slap it onto an HDMI port, run Steam in Big Picture mode and call it a “Steam Box” – but against consoles as well. Right now, the newest console on the market, the Wii U, costs $350 for the Deluxe Set¹, and even with that, analysts are calling for price cuts. The comfort zone for consoles is generally in the $250 – $350 range depending on the age of the hardware, the specs, and other ancillary factors.

With that in mind, what consumer is going to buy a thousand dollar console? I don’t care what it does; no consumer is going to purchase something for a thousand dollars that, at first glance, does less than a personal computer that’s priced even lower. “But it’s more powerful than a typical PC!” Great, now explain that to your least technically savvy friend; that’s what you’re dealing with. If they cared about typical PC specs, they would be PC gaming.

What’s more worrisome is the effect this could have on public perception of the Steam Box, whatever that concept is. If this is indeed the future of the Steam Box, then the Steam Box is dead. But if Valve and others come out with cheaper Steam Boxes, with varying price points, then you start to get into market fragmentation, much like Android’s early days. No one wants to deal with that, especially if the “real” Steam Box by Valve is running Linux and the others aren’t running the same operating system; some might even be running Windows. Once that happens, updates and other sundry issues become a legitimate problem, especially if games start to be optimized to Valve’s hardware, and not just the software.

In my eyes, the Piston is dead on arrival. When a product comes out searching for a market, that’s usually not a good thing, and a $1,000 PC for your living room definitely qualifies. Beyond that, if this continues, Valve is in trouble of letting public perception be clouded. “Open” hardware and “open” ideals are wonderful, but they don’t work commercially, and Valve needs to hit a commercial home run on this. They might be best served closing ranks, taking control of both the message and the nuts-and-bolts of the Steam Box, and leading from their position of strength, because if this is truly where the Steam Box is going, it doesn’t stand a chance in Hell.

EDIT: Looks like Steam is doing just that. In a statement to Eurogamer, Valve’s Dean Lombardi noted that “Valve began some exploratory work with Xi3 last year, but currently has no involvement in any product of theirs”. Personally, I think they should go farther to distance themselves from this device, to stay ahead of public perception.

^{1 – I know the Basic Set is $300, but the Basic Set is virtually useless, so I don’t count it.}

If this sounds familiar, it should be: another ostensibly single player game, Diablo III, launched last year. Just like with SimCity now, Diablo III had some major issues at launch, all revolving around – surprise – DRM server load issues for a game that should never need a perpetual connection in order to play it. Of course, when one considers why a perpetual connection was added – Diablo’s real world auction, SimCity’s slew of coming microtransactions, and something something pirates – it’s easy to see why they were shoehorned in, despite the fact that they add literally nothing advantageous for consumers, and in fact actively hurt them in many cases.

So we have two games, hotly anticipated properties, having terrible launches for predictable reasons. Gamers are complaining up a storm. One can say they’re justified. I, however, take a different tack: not only are people who complain not justified, but they deserve every bit of pain they get.

Here’s what Joshua Moore wrote when it was announced in 2011 that Diablo III would not have an offline mode:

I’m not going to mince words here — the exclusion of an offline mode is fucking asinine. Their reasoning holds little substance at best. I will fully admit they are correct that it is impossible to allow the transfer of offline characters to online gameplay; it’s impossible to verify without being connected to an authentication server while the character is being leveled. However, this does not mean offline should be ditched entirely! I don’t care if I can’t transfer my character; I still want to be able to play the game offline, and I don’t appreciate Blizzard making that decision for me.

Despite knowing what they were getting into from a DRM perspective (gamers had been complaining about Ubisoft’s persistent online authentication system for some time already), and despite knowing that online servers almost always have issues at launch due to the stresses of player demand, people bought the game at launch. At the time, I said it was understandable to not be able to anticipate such a deluge of people, but at the same time, it was foolish for people to buy into such a program on the first day.

Now, I’m even less receptive to the idea. People had hindsight in their corner this time, knowing that the Diablo launch was garbage. They also knew that they had the restrictive DRM on top of other restrictive DRM (Origin). And they knew that EA has a habit of sloppy launches when it comes to online play, owing back to sports games that already have established and tested infrastructures, something SimCity didn’t have the advantage of. In fact, let’s look at a list of the pros and cons of purchasing SimCity:

CONS:

* Always-on DRM for a game that has never required a social element.
* Cloud saves that can’t be transferred or altered.
* Microtransactions out the wazoo.
* Initial demand for server space would far outstrip supply, just like with Diablo III.
* EA as a company has a bad habit of closing down online servers for games that are no longer convenient to them. Doing so here could render the entire game unplayable.¹

PROS:

* It’s SimCity
* It’s pretty

Despite knowing everything I listed above, all of which simply came off the top of my head, people still queued for the game, gleefully spending $60 for what was largely an unknown quantity. Now, they have the nerve to be shocked that they can’t play the game because – surprise! – EA wasn’t prepared?

Don’t say you weren’t warned, people.

Ultimately, the only thing that will stop EA, Activision-Blizzard, Ubisoft, and other companies who continue to turn the screws to their customers is if their bottom line suffers. But Diablo III sold 12 million copies as of the end of 2012. Activision didn’t care how many people bitched on their forums; they were too busy swimming in money. The same thing will happen here; initial sales of SimCity are expected to be extraordinary, and while things will taper off now due to the bad PR and Amazon pulling the digital version, they will pick back up once these issues are mitigated and gamers forget they ever happened, proving once again that gamers – never ones for impulse control – are just mouth-breathing cash registers with easy access. Electronic Arts does not care how many people complain in comment threads, how many one star reviews they get on Amazon, or how many 1s they get in Metacritic’s user reviews. They literally only care about the money they bring in, and until that dries up, they will continue to do what works, because gamers are telling them that they will buy it, sight unseen.

At this point, there is enough data on how these games work – the DRM schemes², the early adoption issues, the complete and total lack of customer support by EA³, and everything else that now comes with our $60 purchases – to make it so that we know damn well what we’re getting into. Still, people decide to buy early anyway. Fools and their money are easily parted, and the people who bought SimCity before launch are fools. I’m beyond just shaking my head at their misfortune; I hope these problems persist. I am smiling because people are angry. I hope that the fools who bought this game are unable to play it for weeks, even months. I hope they lose their saves. I hope this experience perpetuates and ruins the game. I hope children who received it as a gift cry.. I hope this turns out to be the worst $60 they spend all year, because then, and ONLY then, will we train these Lemmings into actually showing a modicum of restraint, and maybe, just maybe, we can do enough damage to these companies to make them pull back and start treating their paying customers with a little dignity and respect.

^{1 – Meanwhile, I can still play SimCity 4 right now if I want to.}

^{2 – By the way, anyone remember the DRM kerfluffle that revolved around Spore? Didn’t think so; gamers were full of sound and fury, but after impressive sales figures, all of it signified nothing.}

^{3 – This is unverified, but if it’s true, holy shit.}