Gamers’ Voice is a UK based consumer rights organisation focused on the video game market. The organisation has decided to take a stand against the shoddy, bug-ridden release of Black Ops, and they have taken Activision to task. Although this issue is playing out on the other side of the globe in relation to South Africa, gamers as a global collective are directly affected by the unpolished and bug ridden releases of video games.
A victory for consumer rights in the UK will hopefully have a ripple effect across the world of gaming. Knocking the behemoth of Activision down a peg and making them realise that consumers (gamers) won’t stand for rushed products will hopefully sink into the corporate culture of video game publishers.
Publishers are often guilty of squeezing out games in time to meet a sales window, to the detriment of the quality of the game. Efforts are often made to fix a game after its initial launch, but this patchwork affair makes one wonder if the game wouldn’t have been better overall if release was delayed to ensure a solid, quality experience from the outset.
MyGaming caught up with Paul Gibson, Chairman of Gamers’ Voice, to find out how things are progressing with their consumer rights complaint against Activision regarding Black Ops. Interestingly, Gibson believes that this is new territory for consumer rights. There is not much precedent for buggy game releases coming under review by a governmental consumer rights authority. Gibson began by bringing us up to speed on the process involved in submitting the complaint.
“The complaint has been sent to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) which is the UK’s consumer and competition authority under the Sale of Goods Act 1979. A copy of our letter can be found on our website,” said Gibson.
“The OFT has now passed our complaint on to its ‘preliminary investigations team to consider,” continued Gibson. “They will be looking into the scope of the alleged infringement in our complaint, confirming the involved parties, the relevant markets and the competitive conditions on those markets before deciding on what action to take further. The OFT is very focused in its investigation so we don’t have a timescale for this as of yet.”
Gibson went on to discuss the potential outcomes of this complaint process, and what Gamers’ Voice would ultimately like to see as a result.
“We can’t predict what the outcome will be, as this seems to be new territory for the OFT. Certainly, they are looking at our report very carefully; we are encouraged by these early signs and if more faulty games are released in 2011 this can’t be ignored by the OFT,” said Gibson.
“Should they proceed with this complaint it will make developers and publishers realise that games should not be rushed to release to make a certain sales window but instead released when in a fit and proper state,” he continued.
“There is not a worst case scenario from our perspective,” said Gibson. “If the OFT thinks there is not a case to answer, this will mean COD:BLOPS will remain in its current state.”
However, Gibson believes that their efforts to take Activision to task have already reaped rewards. “The backlash from our action can already be seen in the fact [that] the industry is reacting to buggy games. Treyarch has twice given interviews on the subject giving their side, something we have welcomed. Before our complaint this rarely happened,” illustrates Gibson.
As a further example of a shift in attitudes, Gibson highlights that “Other developers are going further; Test Drive Unlimited’s developers announced [last week] that as an apology for their game being released with fatal flaws they will give away the first DLC pack for free.”
“We doubt that a company like Activision would ever admit they were wrong and offer DLC as an apology, but ultimately all we want to achieve is to compel them to provide what Gamers across the globe have purchased: a game they can play online with friends free from game ruining bugs,” concludes Gibson.
Discuss the Gamers’ Voice Black Ops complaint on the MyGaming forum.
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