The Blog Subscribe

It is said that a company should never make enemies of Its customers in order to stay in business. Unfortunately for the whole video games business, the customers are indeed the worst enemy. Forget about the pirates, they're just a nuisance by comparison.

No, the real enemy is the gamer who is really into games. With a strong sense of self entitlement, they are often fast to anger and cheapskates extraordinarie. As a company, you had better give them everything served on a silver platter or suffer their Internet wrath of online petitions and hateful forum posts in abundance. Will they buy games? Occasionally, yes. But they appear to spend more time and effort on whining about games and how they feel mistreated by games companies.

To really mess everything up, they will gladly work in a store that sells video games, where they can make fun of people for playing anything except what they play and like. Quite the buying experience, right? Going to get a game you have been looking forward to, only to be ridiculed for your choice by the people who work in the store? Anyone really wondering why video game stores are shutting down with "customer service" like that? Ever wonder why people stop playing video games after experiences like this?

But there is one sub-category of gamer that can really make your head spin. If the gamer is a user of smartphones and tablet computers, expect to have them whine extra much about the pricing of conventional consoles. If it's more expensive than free, it better be one good game and if it's more expensive than $0.99 it's horribly overpriced, according to their logic. Naturally, they bring this attitude to any other games console they happen to own or want to look down upon.

Going into battle with a gamer, a company can never win. You either do too little or you are milking your franchise too much, never anything in between the two. Release as an exclusive on one console and you can expect the fanboys (and fangirls) to quickly come out of the woodwork and attack you with whatever weapon they have at their disposal. Go for a freemium business model and you'll be accused of sucking the money out of people's wallets, but sell it on a shelf in brick-and-mortar stores and your pricing is too expensive. See the jungle video games companies find themselves in?

Every now and then fanboys and fangirls can use their powers of annoyance and gather enough people to get games released in regions that the video games company had not originally intended, as was the case with The Last story in the US. But these are extremely far and few between. The verbal abuse dealt online does in no way make up for these brief glimpses of usefulness.

Gamers; easy to anger, cheapskates, and quick to launch hate campaigns. And people wonder why I just play video games and leave the "community" aspects alone?

Author

Robert Falck

Gold Subscriber : $20.00 USD - monthly Silver Subscriber : $10.00 USD - monthly Bronze Subscriber : $5.00 USD - monthly