Gaming Quotables of the Day: Corporate Greed Edition
What is slowly becoming common practice in the gaming industry is once again coming under fire because, honestly, it deserves to be abolished like a money draining asshole on your elbow. What are we talking about? On-disc downloadable content. How do we feel about it? Well, not great:
“Yeah, it’s just plain greed. The answer is that simple. I think that DLC has been so successful that publishers are trying to get a jumpstart and if you put it on the disc it allows them to unlock it when they feel like it.”
-Michael Pachter, industry analyst
You can read more of Pachter’s musings on the matter here. He gathers that while DLC will and should remain in the market, locked content’s days are numbered (we’re already seeing progress on that front). Of particular note, Pachter questioned the legality of, say, a consumer hacking into their copy of a game and unlocking stashed away content. “I’m not even sure that’s stealing because you did, in fact, buy the disc. That’s about as close as you can get to legal piracy.” Next time you get into trouble for hacking into a game you bought and paid for, tell them the Pach-Attack told you to do it.
Another money racket the current generation is both simultaneously blessed and cursed with is the advent of HD re-releases – opinions are mostly skewed between Hooray-for-Nostalgia and Stop-Selling-Me-Things-I’ve-Already-Bought. The latter encampment seems to oft win the argument especially when companies like Konami dish out horrid, buggy ports that de-improve a title’s quality. Case in point: the Silent Hill HD Collection.
"We got all the source code that Konami had on file – which it turns out wasn’t the final release version of the games. So during debug we didn’t just have to deal with the expected ‘porting’ bugs, but also had to squash some bugs that the original team obviously removed prior to release, but we’d never seen before…We certainly had our hands full. I think at one point Heather was blue.”
-Series producer, Tomm Hulett
So that’s why Silent Hill 2 and 3 were actually worse than I remember them a full generation ago! All is forgiven Konami. I can enjoy these broken, technically incomplete versions fully now that I know a lack of quality won’t stop you from cashing in on a property you’re brutally flogging. Out of all the missteps taken, I think I actually might’ve wanted to see Blue Heather kept.