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| Maybe if the $129 one sells better they'll release data favoring less stupid by dev-written fanfics -fucking newbie 10/16/2013, 3:21pm PDT | ||||
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| It's unlikely since this Brad guy you're referring to is probably their lead guy who posts on Draginol, but he authored a pretty punchy attack on DRM a while back, nobody who makes industry-level decisions listened to it but it's there for the smart up-and-comers if they look for it I guess, and like DRM, devs writing bad content or hiring fanfic writers to supplant their shitty storytelling with even lower standards is one of the big goddamn bugbears of vidya games whether we're talking about the faggy art form argument or just about them being decent entertainment.
It's true from Bioware to Blizzard to Crowd Control Productions with their south american hired lead writer and his fan-novel-cum-curriculum-vitae, and it's become the unspoken assumption that any story a video game tells you will be no more complex than anything off the back of a box of kid's cereal and certainly barely more offensive (Worm's comments on jelly donut 'gore' come to mind here, before you pull out your ESRB ratings and whatever shrill nonsense the Tipper Gore Foundation For Underemployed Parents came out with last month). Nobody expects Torment, nobody expects Orc Knight, maybe in some ways I'd be willing to accept that that's fine - certainly both have their flaws, certainly every game can't be a standout - but these developers are at this point now where they think that it's okay to hike the price for a fucking stupid novel instead of selling it separately like decent people, or serializing it Dickens-style to enhance their following by giving an eager audience a piece of content they're looking for as a teaser. Certainly seems to've worked for Endless Space, with it's maybe halfway decent fluff. DEFINITELY would've worked for Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. I guess these guys don't think the book's good enough for that, though, it's not gonna be a freight-pusher, it's not gonna deliver customers to the sales department so why front-load - it'll only lower expectations, so throw it in as a bone on one of the deluxe packages, but not the very top one where the most loyal fans with the biggest disposable incomes and probably the best educations go when they want to buy a collector's edition to put on the shelf, it'll lower the opinion of THAT demographic, THOSE guys might've read some Shakespeare and understood it or at least seen the Godfather once in their lives or something. Not that Stardock will release anything really, the anti-DRM thing was a post-victory announcement on the head guy's personal blog and probably done out of ego more than anything else so of course if his brilliant little fanfiction composition he whipped up for NaNoWriMo last year starts getting shat on by his forum users after they paid money expecting something a little lighter on the pulp, maybe up near Fifty Shades of Grey levels, that's not going to be something he comes out and apologizes for because there's only one John Carmack in gaming and everyone else will just defend their ground as creatives under siege. Who am I kidding, his mouth-breathing fans are going to eat that shit up like the unthinking assholes waiting in line to eat at the Heart Attack Grill in Vegas and then suing the establishment after the goddamn coronary. But really, does Brad honestly think he's working on a SMAC successor? Does the rest of Stardock share that opinion? Christ. |
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