LogFAQs > #965811861

Cruddy_horse posted...

it's so easy to regain favor with the general public and gamers especially, if blizzard can largely get away from all the sexual harrasment, abuse issues and supporting an authoritarian regime then a s***ty mobile game is nothing.

Not at all. Gamers are exceptionally quick to forget or ignore blatant abuses by their favourite game companies, often angrily trying to shut down even the initial reports because they don't want to hear about it. Producing a bad game, though, means companies have to work a lot harder to earn The Gamers' forgiveness.

See: Cyberpunk 2077. Pre-release reports suggesting workers were being unhealthily crunched? Aggressively ignored and dismissed by The Gamers. Pre-release concerns about the game fetishizing trans people? Aggressively ignored and dismissed by The Gamers. Pre-release reviews said anything more negative than "this game is perfect and the world is a purer place for being graced with its presence"? The Gamers send death threats to reviewers. An epileptic reviewer issues a seizure warning because the game is particularly bad for that and gave her a seizure, despite generally having and expressing a favourable impression of the game as a whole? The Gamers assault her by sending seizure trigger videos disguised as something innoncuous.

The game actually comes out and is a buggy mess that barely runs on most consoles currently in people's homes? That's when The Gamers start calling for blood, because the only thing they care about is the game that lands in front of them.

Similarly, Blizzard is revealed to have a long history of sexism and harassment that has infested its entire corporate culture, including driving one worker to kill herself? "Shut up and let me enjoy my games." Blizzard doesn't even have to try to get away from that because The Gamers will shut it down for them. But releasing an entry this terrible in a beloved franchise? The Gamers are not so quick to forgive such a sin, and Blizzard will need to distance D4 considerably from Immortal if they want to regain their favour.

As I said, though, I fully expect this is a form of anchoring: D4 will be monetized much more heavily than D3 was (even with the RMAH), and the fact that whatever they do will look tame by comparison to Immortal is going to let them get away with much, much more. The Gamers may not forgive a bad game easily, but they're also not a particularly perceptive bunch, so it'll be pretty easy to dupe them into accepting more predatory monetization.