Vote with your wallet

I suck at the whole voting with my wallet concept. It’s the idea that you show your opposition or inability to tolerate something about a game by abstaining from purchasing said game. The adage started becoming relevant to games, especially MMOs in this sphere, because of the fact that gamers (like me) tend to just buy everything new regardless of the games questionable development. A few weeks later we quit, probably have buyer’s remorse, then complain about the game until we repeat the process again.

I knew WildStar would tank. I pushed myself into it anyway. I knew ESO was going to be ‘meh’ but I pushed myself into it anyway. I do rationalize some of it by saying to myself, “Hey self, you can play and write about the game so it’s not a total loss.” It’s just an excuse.

ArcheAge started today for those willing to spend money. I didn’t pull the trigger. I’m willing to try the game as a F2P game, but can’t see myself putting money into a game that I know deep down won’t make it past the 3 month mark for 90% of the initial players.  Still… to see all those live streams and think, “Maybe there will be grand adventures on the high seas with players pillaging villages and sinking ships and pirating trade routes! It’ll be a marvelous adventure!” (That’s my imagination getting away from me).

It’s the whole idea of missing out. I hate missing out on things, and sometimes I would rather grumble about $60 wasted than having not picked up the next best thing. A huge part of the problem is my inability to trust my instincts. I have amazing instincts — a golden gut — that tell me exactly how something will turn out.  I need to learn to have confidence in those instincts and allow them to serve me well.

Yes, if we could all vote with our wallets maybe crap would stop making it to the shelves with AAA budgets. I do believe in and agree with the sentiment. If only it was easy.

  • You have a really clear idea of what MMORPGs should be and its one that I share, by and large. I wish MMORPGs were like that too, but no-one is making MMORPGs like that any more. No-one has made one for, what, ten years? There’s a very good chance no-one is going to make one in the immediate future and an outside chance no-one will make one ever again.

    It seems the only MMORPGs you still enjoy playing are grey-market reproductions of the ones you played ten to fifteen years ago but even those can’t hold your attention for very long because when all’s said and done you’ve been there and done that and you want something fresh. You haven’t really seemed to be grabbed by any of the new MMORPGs that have launched since I started reading K&G maybe five years ago and although you give some (FFXIV for example) a good go, none of them seem to stick. Nor do you want to go on playing the current versions of older MMORPgs that you used to enjoy because you don’t appreciate the way they have changed.

    Where we differ, I think, is that I’m more able to enjoy the MMORPGs we get for what they are rather than feel let down by what they aren’t. GW2, for example, is a piss-poor implementation of the game ANet said it was going to be. It would be very easy to get angry over how much of a mess they have made of “breaking the paradigm” and how desperately compromised their vision has become. I could do that. Or I could go with the flow and appreciate the game for what it is rather than what it might have been.

    Yes, most MMORPGs could be *much* better than they are but I suspect that if everyone who feels that way stopped paying for the ones we have and found other things to do while they waited for better MMORPGs to come along it would be a very long wait, at least as far as the mass market is concerned. MMORPGs are expensive. If the audience appears to be backing off then so will capital investment.

    I don’t see it as much different from movies or books or music. Most of all of it isn’t as good as you wish it was but you can still get plenty of entertainment out of a lot of it all the same. Maybe I just have low standards…I know I’m easily amused.

  • When you start voting with your wallet, like I did, you stop playing all these games. And with EQ next starting to look like vaporware…

  • The problem with voting with your wallet is that there’s thousands upon thousands of 14 through 20 -year-old people with disposable income coming into the market every year. And these poor inexperienced MMO players have no past experience to draw upon when playing these new games. To them they are awesome, shiny, new, colorful and exciting. To those of us “old-timers” They are rehash, dull, retread, boring, been-there-done-that-had-the-therapy Experience. We have the past experience from 10 to 15 years ago of what it was like to be truly afraid to die, to lose something permanently. This next generation is born with the reset button Under their thumb. Born with a cheat code to get God mode. Raised with the lack of appreciation for anything. Because nowadays everything is recycled rehashed and replaced with new. Those of us that care about MMO’s, real role-playing, seeking adventure and the threat of fear of failure are being quickly outnumbered by the next-generation each year. So the vote with our veteran wallet becomes less and less significant as it is replaced by the next Mountain dew generation.
    I honestly feel that in order to get the MMO game that you really want, it will have to be created as an add-on mod to an Original game. Just like Arma II and the DayZ mod. We will have to be on our own server creating our own style of rules with mods.

  • What I cannot tolerate with is bad character models, combat/animation and ffa pvp. All other things I can tolerate with and be patient about. I try all games on open beta and if I like my avatar, the combat/animation are fluid and the game is not forcing pvp on me then I buy the game the very next second, even if I am gonna play it for 3 months.

    I did not bought Wildstar and ESO…On wildstar I did not liked my avatars and in general the theme of the game, but avatars was the critical part for me. I did not either got excited by combat since I am not fun of action combat, although I played GW2 cause it had all the rest. On ESO, both avatar and combat was not good for me.

    Now Archeage, I like my avatar and I like the combat. I like the virtual world and all the potential adventures but I don’t put my money on it unless Trion will make a pve server…I can spend 3 months gathering wood to build my boat/house but I will not spend half a second in a game that someone else has the power to ruin my joyment/fun.

  • SWTOR taught me to vote with my wallet. Before then I was buying every MMORPG, but it took a game that bad to shock my system into realizing what was going on. Since then the only MMORPG I’ve bought has been FFXIV ARR, which I quite enjoyed as sort of a throwback to vanilla WoW gameplay. Had they been released before 2011 I surely would have wasted time and money on Archeage, Wildstar, ESO, DCUO, TSW, Guild Wars, and Neverwinter just as I had done with so many mediocre games before them.

  • Pathfinder Online is the next big thing…at least for those of us old school players. I’m currently in pre-alpha and the direction this game is going on so many different areas are all going the right way.

    It’s truly blowing my mind and it’s only pre-alpha.

  • What it really boils down to is not buying into the consumerism song and dance. All of these companies spend huge sums of their budget on marketing for a reason. They know there are enough people out there that will submit to the hype of the next big thing to at least recoup a decent portion of their investment should the entire thing go pear shaped. They don’t need anything original as long as their marketing and PR departments do their job. Just look at the saturation Titanfall earlier this year. For a few glimmering weeks that game was the best thing since sliced bread until the veneer wore off; now you hardly hear anything about it. But I’m sure they made a decent amount of return on their investment to call it a win for the developer/publisher/shareholders.

    That pang of imagined guilt or of being left behind because you aren’t in on the next big thing. That’s the symptom of heavy consumerism. Let it go, resist the hype train and really vote with your wallet which means saying no to A LOT of the crap that is being scholcked around as games these days. I think that fostering a healthy case of anti-consumerism is something the gaming public is finally maturing into after all these years. This is a very new industry and we the consumers as well as the developers have a maturation process to go though and it’s become painfully obvious in the last few years.

  • I’d rather be playing Darkfall 2009 than ArcheAge. Luckily I pre-ordered Wildstar so paid $5 from Gamestop and then decided I hated it so I never bought the game. Wildstar will be my last MMO for a very very long time.

  • From the videos ArcheAge resembles someone tore out bits and pieces from different MMOs of the past and assembled it with Elmer’s glue. This is also true for how the game is being described and sold.

    @Keen do you think there will be an overall game collapse coming soon? Not only for MMOs but, for the gaming industry in general? It just seems like a bubble in gaming is about to burst. Or maybe it already has.

  • I for once am glad you buy and play all those games Keen.
    If only to read about it later on your blog so my gut feeling says: See I where right all along!!

    i will probably give archeage a f2p try.
    Knowing full well this game took a nosedive towards P2W by changing the labor points per day system.
    Of the max number of labor points per day 90% comes from potions bought with real money in the ingame store.

    Yeah.. I dunno. I just want to see what they did do right in the game I guess.

  • I’m glad I inspired a blog post. Can I put that on my resume ? I’m sure I could spin that as ‘being an inspiration to people’ 😉

    I would add the whole concept is not specific to gaming. Voting with your wallet is not easy for many people in several fields (people complaining about large discount stores treatment of their staff but still shopping there, sponsors publicly saying a pro sports league moral code is not good enough while still putting the cash in, etc.)

  • I’ve read your blog for years and nearly always agree with your thoughts on the mmo genre as whole and love of a bit of a sandbox. Surprised you are not checking it out already.

    I hope I lot of the usual merry go round of people drop away to be honest, once they understand that after level 30 it is not a themepark. The depth of the game constantly surprises me, and amount of things to do are fantastic – it is hitting most of my old SWG itches and hoepfully stays that way.

    However hold off trying it as the queues are ridiculously bad at present…..