It’s luxury item so there isn’t a great reason to care; but the underlying reason that makes us consider all goods and services we buy still remains relevant. If we can’t do it ourselves, we have to consider the time effort and resources we suspect someone else used to make something we need or would like to have before we determine how much of our money give for it.
It’s this consumer mindset that leads to THQ going bankrupt and Tomb Raider selling 3.4 million in 1 month and considered a failure. Dudes want everything and the kitchen sink thrown in for dirt cheap and don’t look into how the sausage is made to understand if it’s a reasonable expectation or not.
Who said we wanted the game for dirt cheap?
It’s baffling that mikeZ didn’t include a single big man character from the release. He is legendary for representing that character archetype. Considering how popular male characters are in general…is anyone really surprised that the game doesn’t appeal to the average fighting game fan?
Nah, most here know about the FGC and women.
THQ went bankrupt because of a series of jaw dropping bad decisions, espeically uDraw on PS3/360 and the dildo nonsense in Saints Row the Third. Tomb Raider selling 3.4 million in 1 month was considered a failure by SE because these guys are jokers who were expecting Eidos to make up for how much resource FFXIV reborn is sucking from the company. Why should we consumers pay the price for bad decisions made by game devs/publishers? Why should they be treated like some charity organization?
THQ went bankrupt because they sunk their money into terrible ideas like the uDraw tablet and Homefront.
It’s not the consumer’s job to worry or care about the time and effort that goes into making something. Though appeals to our sympathy can sometimes work to sell a product (like paying more for buying American), the end product still needs to be something that consumers are willing to pay for. In the case of Skullgirls, the desire simply isn’t there. It’s a niche release for a niche market. No amount of respect for the craft is going to suddenly make an army of untapped consumers willing to disregard how much the title just doesn’t attract their attention.
This isn’t a case of consumers wanting too much. This is a case of consumers just not wanting Skullgirls.
We all know they aren’t a charity organization. Just like it is up to us as consumers to think about what we should expect for value in a product it is up to the producer to think hard about what a buyer would see is valuable. If a consumer miscalculates their penalty is overpaying. If a seller guesses wrong their penalty is bankruptcy eventually.
I don’t play skullgirls because the roster is whack as fuck and there is no real Magneto character. I did play it when it was new but no new 360 version, STILL?! so I have stopped playing.
If they add some of those guys in it’d be better, but it is very difficult for a FG to come back after it has fallen off so badly like sg has so there is the added problem of there not being much reason to play, because nobody else is either
I’m not arguing for pity sales. I’m arguing that ignorance isn’t something to be defended.
What if Marvel players found Marvel more fun than Skullgirls?
That is easily one if the dumbest sentences I’ve had the displeasure of reading. If the consumer wasn’t supposed to care how something is made or how long it took, everything in this country would be cheap Chinese knock offs or nonfunctional at best. Phones would be exploding in peoples ears and shoes would fall apart when you tie the laces.
So for example if I tried to sell you a car where the design concepts were created in a half hour, and they had done absolutely no crash or quality testing on the car, you would buy it? As opposed to a car that spent years being designed, tested, and refined?
It would also be like paying a construction company to build you a house and not caring that the foreman was drunk the entire time. You’d rather take the house as is design flaws and all, and have it collapse a month after you moved in. Your not supposed to care how a product is made right?
And there’s no ignorance here, people just don’t give a damn about how much a game or a character cost. They give a damn about the whole package at the end, and the number of characters is going to be part of it.
The crash and quality testing is part of the package you are selling to me, I won’t buy a car with absolutely no crash or quality testing. Just like how I wouldn’t buy a fighting game that doesn’t have enough characters for me. Do you think telling me how much testing cost is a good excuse for not having them?
And that’s part of why fighting games are so hard to get into, and why there’s almost never any new blood in the genre. Fighting games now are all made by established companies with deep enough pockets to spoil the consumer base with “40+ characters!” And anything with a smaller amount is considered average at best and unforgettable. granted there are some games with smaller rosters that have stayed afloat like blazblue, but even then it isn’t the most popular series.
We have the FDA, the FCC, the BBB, a bunch of other inspection and safety and materials/ingredients protocols on consumer goods BECAUSE the consumers want to know what they are getting themselves into.
Don’t you research computer parts and other technological goods to see what you’re getting for your money?
Don’t you want to know the primary focus of development? I like to know before I grab a game if they spent more time/money/effort on the story or the gameplay so I can minimize my chances of being unhappy with my purchase. If I was @scytheavatar, I would’ve grabbed DmC because lolignorance and been unhappy but I didn’t because I knew before hand the studio puts stories over gameplay and were bragging about all the money spent on the Avatar mocap technology so I clearly saw where they had their heads at. Knowing the budget/costs let’s me set my expectations accordingly and let me determine myself if it’s worth the asking price.
So y’all think a $15 downloadable title should have a budget in the tens of millions just so it can have enough characters. Well fuck it, when the genre implodes on itself once again in a few years 'cuz all you are playing are increasingly shitty fighters from the big developers, because no one else can afford to develops stuff up to your standards, you’ve only yourselves to blame.
There have only been two fighting games that I regretted purchasing: pre-2013 SFxT and pre-patch Skullgirls. Thanks to the glory of the internet, I now don’t regret either, but those two will forever be scarred with that title of ‘regrettable’ from me.
5 characters is pretty big, though. 13 is definitely a reasonably sized roster, so that at least gets rid of that complaint once all 5 are done. #vote4beowulf
I got like 20 dreamcasts and 3 american cabs with this game, why bother with anything else? The all female cast has creeper status all over it though.
You guys are misunderstanding what he is saying. We don’t give a fuck about pity as a consumer, all we care about is how the end product stacks up. When he says “we don’t care how it’s made” he means we don’t care about the woes that you had to go through to make the game. It sucks and i might feel some pity here and there, but in the end if the end product, (which does not include not doing research on the game btw, because that’s completely different from now caring about coding and who does it.) does not hold up to what we might hae liked, then we won’t buy it. It’s that simple.
If someone doesn’t like the end product, and i am sure mike z will agree with me, that is being fair to every game on the market. He isn’t going to get some kind of pty sales because he makes people feel bad about how much characters cost. He’s doing that for you guys.
I grabbed DmC because I knew that it’s going to end up being an above average game if you see it as a brand new game rather than anything related to the Devil May Cry series. And it ended up meeting my expectations. I research computer parts and other technological goods to see if the final product meets my expectations, I am not going to give a damn about how much money Samsung spent making the camera in my Note 2.
When I play indie games I am not going to expect AAA $50 million budget level of graphics, for the simple reason that I am an old school gamer who don’t give a damn about graphics. But I am not going to lower my content standards because your game is indie and you don’t have a budget. That’s the challenge which is facing indie games ATM, the whole idea that AAA games are shit and yet indie games should be held at a lower standard is ridiculous. I massively prefer Torchlight 2 to Diablo 3 because it’s a better game with better content, not because it’s indie while Diablo 3 is made by the evil Blizzard Activision.