GameSided Roundtable: Things The Industry Gets Away With

Jon McSwain (Twitter)

The video game industry is a powerful, money making machine that generates billions of dollars in revenue each year. With that large amount of income, it is still shocking, (although it probably shouldn’t be) that some game developers and publishing companies will do just about anything, even at the expense of the quality of their products to milk even more money from the consumers. One in particular that has really been driving me crazy lately is the fact that developers/publishers are releasing games that have additional content for one or the other console.

The very publicized Bungie game Destiny has been given a literal “pass” for releasing extra content on the Sony versions of the game and not on the Xbox ones. Lets stop and think about this for a minute. Bungie, either on their own accord, or with the “gentle shove” of Activision, released a $59.99 game with more content on the PS4 than on the Xbox One. Which mind you was the same price! How in the hell is this okay? There has been some grumblings amongst the gaming community, but I would argue that not nearly enough has been said. In fact, Bungie, despite whatever additional monies it accepted from Sony, completely slapped every Xbox gamer in the face with such transgressions. Why, myself included, have the Xbox fan base not been screaming about this injustice?

We could even take this a step further. It has been known that Bungie plans on releasing the additional content sometime around August 2015 on the Xbox, but should we expect to have to pay for the extra content? I definitely wouldn’t put it past them. I mean lets be completely honest, Destiny shipped with an advertisement inside the packaging to purchase the first DLC. As we all know, Bungie deliberately left content out of the finished product to use, at least a portion of it, as a means to additional downloadable content. Just making tons of money within the first few weeks was just not enough. Bungie/Activision thought it necessary to swindle more money away from their loyal consumers. It is really gross and makes me reevaluate my love for them. I would have argued that they could do no wrong. Sadly, they could have cared less about me and the money I chose to spend on their games.

Rebekah Valentine (Twitter)

While it has been subject to some criticism, it still boggles me how okay we are okay with bad games being sold to the public in Alpha or Beta. These unfinished titles may be playable, but by their nature are missing tons of features, which developers excuse by shrugging and saying, “well, it isn’t finished yet.” The end result is that we pay 20 bucks for a game that may never be fully complete, with multiple recorded instances of developers taking money and walking, leaving behind a bad game and a lot of broken promises.

I indulge in such betas like everyone else– Starbound being a personal favorite of mine. I suppose the bad eggs get away with such scams because there are good early release games that do end up finished, or are complete enough as they are to be well worth the money. Nonetheless, such games that are released without review or scrutiny should not get the free pass that they do just because the word “beta” is slapped on them.