Entitlement

Tobold touched on the subject a little last Saturday, and while I left my comments there I really wanted to delve deeper on the matter.

Some gamers have this weird sense of entitlement when it comes to videogames. They feel as if developers must cater specifically to their wants over anyone else’s. I've always found this behavior strange, because it's something you don't really see in other entertainment industries. (Maybe the music industry to some extent)

Just look at the hoopla surrounding Modern Warfare 2. For those of you not following the game, the PC version of the game was stripped of several features which are usually standard in a PC FPS. The game also doesn't support dedicated servers; instead Infinity Ward is running what they call IWNet, which functions like Xbox Live's matchmaking service for games. (You could compare it to a more restricted version of the old Battle.net for the Warcraft games.)

PC gamers upon hearing this went into an uproar. A boycott was launched. Forum blood was spilled. Blogs went into a riot. Cries that the game was ruined rang out. IW was accused of "selling out" to their evil overlords. People ranted about how IW was built upon the backs of PC gamers, therefore IW owed them. It was just a huge debacle.

Does any of this really have any merit though? IW is a business. As a business IW deemed it a good course of action to change the way their game worked. They did in fact take away features that you'd expect to be in a PC FPS, and if I were a PC gamer that would make me think twice about buying the game. With that said however, Infinity Ward does not owe PC gamers a damn thing.

Now I suspect the reasons for many of the feature cuts were because IW essentially ported the console version of the game over to the PC. Whether PC gamers like it or not they are a small subset of IW's consumer base, and IW focusing on the console version first and then porting directly over makes sense business wise. Consoles are their bread and butter right now, and the console version is the version that IW cannot screw up if they hope to make money.

After porting the game over why didn't IW simply add on the features they were missing? Your guess is as good as mine here. Money? Time? Maybe they just didn't see it as a big issue? Maybe they didn't feel it was worth the work?

What the reason is doesn't really matter though. IW made the decision to cut these features and that’s that.

Now I understand the complaint PC gamers have, but the sense of entitlement coming from them does not get my support. IW owes them nothing. They made a product and it's up to the PC gamer to buy it or not.

Pretend I go into a Toyota dealership. I walk up to the salesmen and get him to show me a car. The car itself is fully functional, but doesn't come with AC, and can't be upgraded to have an AC unit. Would it make sense for me to go into a fit and rant about how every other car has an AC and Toyota owes me and should put AC in the car, because I have been buying Toyotas for years? Of course not. Everyone there would think I'm insane. All I can do as a car buyer is choose not to buy the car and move on to another one.