I think some of the recent defenders of Watchdogs might be interested in this article. Really good article pointing out why fanboys telling everyone to shut up and not play the game or 'vote with your wallet' is bad for the gaming industry as a whole.

The Escapist’s Jim Sterling posted an excellent video recently on the concept of “caveat emptor”—or “buyer beware”—in the video game industry.

Essentially, Jim argues that not all customers can be aware of every issue with a game, that the majority of video game consumers aren’t active NeoGaf users and forum participants, and that the enormous marketing machinery of the industry obfuscates truth, spins misinformation, and makes it all but impossible for average consumers to be well informed, whether or not they ought to be in an ideal world.

More to the point, Jim argues that it isn’t the customer’s job to run quality control to begin with—that’s the job of actual quality control departments at the companies who make the games. Reading reviews should help customers decide if a game is up their alley, but we shouldn’t have to constantly question whether the video games we’re purchasing are even going to work (let alone look) as advertised.

I couldn’t agree more. The argument came up during the Mass Effect 3 controversy that consumers ought to “vote with their wallets” and simply not buy the game if they don’t like it. Naturally, if one buys a game that they find out they don’t like, they’ve already voted with their wallet, making this sort of reasoning problematic.

Mass-Effect-3

More importantly, this logic only works for the relatively small slice of consumers who are actively monitoring games as they develop. For everyone else, simply reading reviews at major gaming outlets wouldn’t have shied anyone away from making a purchase of Mass Effect 3. The reviews all raved about the game, or at least all the early ones did.

Naturally, many consumers don’t even read reviews, they just read blurbs on video game trailers they see on TV.

This is because of the millions of gamers out there, most don’t have the time or the interest in keeping up to date on the industry the same way that say, much of my own readership does (I’ve come to the belief that many of my readers spend more time reading, playing, and thinking about video games than I do actually.)

Many just buy the latest cool-looking game, the latest Call of Duty or Titanfall or whatever other major, AAA software is flashing across their HDTVs during the commercial break, or that their friends are raving about.

This is the case across most industries; it’s why advertising is so important, even if it often comes across as heavy-handed and vapid. Some people read a lot about cars or smartphones or cigars—most people rely on salespeople and advertising, brand recognition, and word of mouth.

So What Do Video Game Journalists Actually Do?

This is where the big questions surrounding video game journalism arise. Do video game journalists serve as consumer advocates, diligently informing consumers of the problems with upcoming games, business practices, and so forth, or are we simply an extension of the hype machine, legitimizing PR efforts by the industry? Are we critics or salespeople?

Naturally, the answer is “both.” Despite all of its problems with things like day-one DLC, noxious micro-transactions, and always-online DRM, the video game industry still puts out many great games each year. As someone writing about video games, it’s very rewarding to see this creativity take flight, and it’s easy to get caught up in the hype ourselves, especially when we’re excited by a title. I’m very excited about games like The Witcher 3 and that excitement will translate into my writing. (On the other hand, I have fewer reasons to critique Witcher 3 developer CD Projekt RED because they making typically high-quality products and don’t employ crappy business practices like so many in the industry, so there’s that.)

SimCity Meteor

Film critics like Roger Ebert were huge fans of cinema; it’s why Ebert wrote about it in the first place, and why his writing is both critical and often something of a love letter to film all at once.

You can’t just complain all the time, but you can’t just peddle hype either. Balancing the love of the medium with a healthy distrust of the industry, as well as balancing relationships with industry people and PR and maintaining an adversarial stance with those same people, can be an enormously difficult task.

I’m guilty of being a massive fan of Dark Souls, and while I think I offered up plenty of valid (and some less valid) criticisms of the game as I played it, I did approach the graphics downgrade too uncritically even though I think many gamers were too bent out of shape over it. (Though in my defense, I attempted to follow this up with some actual digging.)

I may not care about the graphics personally—and honestly didn’t even notice the changes at first, I was so caught up in the play—but it’s absolutely in the interests of the consumer to know what’s going on when a game is advertised one way and delivered in another—Aliens: Colonial Marines being one of the worst, but far from the only, examples of this.

Moving back to the point at hand, it’s crazy to think that all consumers in any industry can be informed enough about every purchase that simply hand-waving caveat emptor at them is enough to justify horrible business practices, buggy games, and misinformation.

Gamer Entitlement

The flipside to all of this is the fanboy—perhaps the most vocal and persistent defender of brands and corporations out there. As a critic, I can’t count the number of times I’ve been told to either “shutup and just don’t play if you don’t like it” or to “just try and make your own game/TV show/movie and see how it turns out.”

Fanboys are the unwitting foot soldiers of the PR machine, hollering and pouncing on anyone who doesn’t line up with their devotion to a product, silencing dissenting opinions, and generally making the internet as inhospitable as possible to any sort of critical thinking.

aliens_colonial_marines

Which brings me to yet another excellent video by Jim Sterling, this time on the concept of “gamer entitlement” in which he gives yours truly a couple very nice shout-outs and then proceeds to correct my two-year-old article on the “myth” of gamer entitlement.

The phrase “gamer entitlement” is a label used to shutdown criticism of games by vocal consumers by both industry people and members of the press. When Mass Effect 3 launched it was tossed around a lot by people who wanted critics of the game to just shut up and go home. The other things people said a lot? Vote with your wallet. Caveat emptor.

You can see a trend here. Don’t critique, don’t “whine”, if you don’t like it just don’t buy it...
The article is too long for a single post, so just hit up the link for the rest of it.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain...d-video-games/

It's like that thing Eugene was talking about earlier this week when he said one of the most dangerous things in the gaming industry is fanboys telling everyone else to shut up and stop whining when it comes to serious issues.