Author Archives: Logokas

The cancer of the Game Industry – EA and Activision.

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So, this is an e-mail i sent to a man named TotalBiscuit, who you may know from youtube, the british fellow with a top hat who does video game commentaries.

I sent the e-mail in response to this video in particular – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri0vrJ-y2zM

In this video, TB explains the reasoning behind Bioware’s Day 1 DLC for Mass Effect 3. I felt that what he said lacked a bit of punch, and that the punch wasn’t really aimed at the right people, so thus, my rant in e-mail form. Here is what i wrote to him:

“Hello TB,

I watched your Mailbox, Feb 28, and it gave me quite a bit to think about, and thought perhaps you might get something out of this response to what you spoke of.

Your rant, impressive as it was, made me curious.

Have you really not noticed it yet? EA and Activision have become the living embodiments of corporate evil in the gaming industry.

We’ve known EA is a corrupt publisher that’s only out for the profit, for years now. The Sims is a perfect example, expansion after expansion, preying on the parents with little daughters who want to play with their virtual human dolls and amuse themselves, and who get ever so cranky when they do not buy them the new ‘Pets’ expansion. And then lets not forget Spore, which was dumbed down to 5 year old intellect level for the purpose of profit margins.

And Activision is just as bad, the horror stories simply haven’t gotten out about it. The Call of Duties, keeping WoW, which should’ve died off years ago, if you ask me, on life support with expansion packs, the next worse than the last, trying to lure people in with gimmicks like the Annual pack with Diablo 3 and PANDAS. I mean, REALLY?

And the general populous sees none of this, no harm. Honestly, EA and Activision are the Foxconns of the gaming industry, and it should be about time for people to figure this out.

So Bioware then, and ME3. This was a long time coming. I mean, have you SEEN what they did with Need For Speed: World? Blackbox is a decent studio who, for the most part, know what they’re doing when it comes to racing games. So what has EA done to this free to play title that, by concept, does absolutely everything right to please the fans?

It is a disaster. The game is littered with bugs that have been part of it since beta, and once it got OUT of beta, the game suddenly became a ridiculous pay-to-win monster. Everything, and i do mean EVERYTHING, that you can do wrong in a Freemium business model, has been done. Buying cars that are vastly superior than their ingame-money counterparts, buying EXCLUSIVE cars not available for purchase at ALL for ingame money, buying booster packs that contain VASTLY superior performance parts than are obtainable ingame, purposefully making the modification system so that if you REMOVE a performance item, it is GONE, forcing you to buy new boosters.

I TRIED to like that game, i really did, but it is clear that EA’s greed has ruined that game beyond repair. And the only thing keeping it running, is the mindless fanboys who flock to buy the special cars, buying power, and i should mention, the prices for these things are NOT cheap by any means.

EA has destroyed Black Box. And Bioware is next. Meanwhile, Activision is chipping away at Blizzard, who is forced to resort to gimmicky tactics, even going as far as to SUE Valve for the DOTA copyright. Apparently Activision lawyers are arrogant enough to believe that DOTA is somehow a Blizzard trademark.

It is sad, really, because we all know Bioware, Blizzard, and other companies now under the iron rule of these publisher giants, deep down they’re all good. They made great games, and for all intents and purposes, still do, to some extent, but because of said publishers, they are taking heavy abuse, and will end up dead in some way or another, be it developers leaving, or their IPs ruined.

The solution? Well, kill the publishers. That’s the only thing you CAN do, and frankly i don’t know why developers haven’t begun this already. The general public can’t do anything besides boycotts, and even those rarely work, you’ve said it yourself, Activision got away with it, and CONTINUES to get away with it, as does EA with their Battlefield IP. BF3 is TERRIBLE in comparison to Bad Company 2, yet the people suck it up and buy it anyway because the majority just doesn’t care and move to the ‘newest and greatest’, leaving the less popular, yet superior game, in the dust.

The only other thing is to raise awareness of these publishers wrongdoings in general. Make noise! EA is monetizing Bioware and laying off the workers, good people who want to make games? Get shouty! Apple is already feeling the effects it has gotten from the bad publicity it has received from its’ Foxconn fiasco, so no doubt it would work on publishers as well. The problem is of course, the people who do not understand the problem at hand, and who would not go along with an all out boycott of the publishers entire range of products. So, in the end, it seems that they have already won. The end.

Pity.

I leave you with a snippet off Reddit. Whether or not you believe the validity of it, is up to you. I found this a while ago, and it sheds light into EAs business practices.”

The aforementioned image has been uploaded here – http://imgur.com/aBXXN

Note: As of writing this, TotalBiscuit has not responded to me, but that is understandable, given that his mailbox is constantly bombarded by fans.

When it comes to publishers, hell hath no fury like mine. I fucking hate those faggots.

That is all.

The Internet is full of Cancer.

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I just want to know one thing.

Is mankind as a collective, screwed?

Every day on the internet you see the cancer of the unintelligent spread like wildfires in Australia. And there’s no stopping. You can be as smart as you want but they’ll just keep coming. It’s like a zombie apocalypse that you can’t win.

Things like “first” posts, trolls, haters, “likes” on facebook, /b/, griefers are just few of the things out there that are prevalent throughout the land of the digital. What the fuck, i say?

It’s as if a large part of the population on the internet lose half their IQ as soon as they sit behind that computer. Like neanderthals. This group of people is responsible for all the crap on the internet. The “likes” on facebook, the horrible Youtube videos that you come across that look, or sound like the work of a 9 year old ( thank god i haven’t seen any of those latel- Oh wait Rebecca Black ), the webpages that look like absolute shit, which have, thankfully, with the existence of GeoCities, mostly gone away, the “works of art” that you see on places on deviantART that are infantile and yet, they insist that they are awesome at art, the list goes on and on and on.

And then there’s /b/. The shithole of the internet. You want cancer? There’s a thousand different variations of it displayed there every 10 seconds. If there is a worse place out there, i want to congratulate it on beating the odds. The only thing about that place is, that sometimes, it’s funny to observe, which is the bottom line purpose of the board in question, but often hidden under the waves of shit piling over it.

Another thing. I was under the impression that kids weren’t supposed to be allowed on the internet ’till 13. Ignoring the fact that i believe they should not be allowed on it ’till the age of 15 and should pass a test to make sure they’re not retards, why do i see kids with single digit ages running around? At least, they appear to be so, and i feel sorry if someone’s past their adulthood and still types like an infant.

Which brings me to my next point. How. Fucking. Hard. Is it to maintain proper punctuation, and basic grammar, on the 21st century? The biggest thing that irks me in this category? The issue with YOU and YOU’RE. People just don’t fucking learn. At least some of them have discovered the wonders of automated spell-checks, but they don’t exist everywhere ( That said, Google, please, for the love of god, put a spell check on Youtube comments ). I can forgive the occasional mistake or two ( There’s bound to be a few in this very article ), because nobody’s perfect, but let me demonstrate how bad this stuff gets:

“ur Asian wt do u knw about nollywood plz stick to Bollywood”

That one “sentence” just violated about 10 rules out there. It has the “YOUR” mistake, it does the classical “U” ( Which i have seen on actual, legitimate advertisement boards IN A SHOPPING CENTER. What the fuck?! ), the mainstream “plz” and missing letters here and there. How did this guy get through grammar lessons in school? Is this how low the education in the world has gotten? We’re not typing on brick sized Nokias with number keys for fuck’s sake, every letter in the message does not count towards a limit, you won’t miss out on anything spending a few extra seconds typing it properly, it is NOT A FUCKING INCONVENIENCE TO DO THAT. Life doesn’t go that fast. You’ll be fine.

Furthermore, i’d like to point out that English is not my first language whereas most of these people come from English speaking countries. What’s THEIR fucking excuse? My bet is that they’re just half-assed people with half-assed education.

That reminds of one other type of this cancerous bullshit. This shit they’re calling sexting. This links to the whole kid paragraph but fuck consistency, this is a rant.

I heard of this stuff a looong while ago, but it has recently come into my attention again because the local news agencies just found out it existed and felt that they should let the whole world know. Well, too fucking bad, the whole world’s already doing it on a daily basis. Ever heard of Chatroulette? Yeah, it’s far worse than your ( <— LOOK RETARDS, THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT. I BET YOU WOULD’VE WRITTEN YOURE, WITHOUT EVEN AN APOSTROPHE. ) “sexting” problem, in fact it’s probably a small percentage of the whole genre of this “phenomenon”.

You know who’se fault most of this shit is? Parents. Parents who spoil their kids, buy them expensive shit ( And subsequently, buy them new shit when they “break” their old ones ), don’t even try to discipline, or teach them, because heaven forbid, we are not even allowed to do that anymore, child service might get right up in our grill about it. The result are douchebag kids who dress like shit, talk like shit, drink and smoke shit, do shitty things and end up being shit people overall. 20 years ago, all that stuff would’ve earned them a month of constant whipping of their ass and probably would’ve been grounded for their entire childhood. But today they steal someone’s stuff, and subsequently get their ass kicked by their owner, and end up being painted as the “victim” because the other guy “went too far”.

Teach your fucking kids some discipline and respect. And some work ethics so they don’t waste taxpayer money.

Other shit that makes my shit boil but i can’t be fucked ranting too much about:

-Theft of others work ( e.g. taking a flash movie, recording it with shitty quality and reuploading to Youtube with your own watermarks and other crap )
-Uploading of total crap ( nobody wants to see your 3 second shitty ass movie maker video, get something worthwhile before you put it up (( mummy saying it’s great doesn’t count, idiot )) )
-Baby stuff ( Excuse me but a facebook page for your kid and a dozen pictures for all to see is just bullshit. Your kid is NOTHING to show and tell about. Unless they have extra limbs or hearts. But they make documentaries about those. )
-one year stars ( I’m talking about the Justin Biebers and Rebecca Blacks. Jesus Christ. )
-shitty trolls ( They just add to the cancer. )
-griefers ( This is a subspecies of trolls, and to this day, one of the more successful ones thanks to the existence of Minecraft, and similar things. In real life circumstances, a griefer would get a punch in the face for ruining your awesome sand castle at the beach. I say every internet griefer should get their ass kicked, too. )
-the clueless people ( Wikipedia, and similar databases of information have existed for several years. If they tell you you’re an idiot and don’t know what you’re talking about, don’t talk shit back calling them trolls until you’ve seen proper evidence of your statement being the correct one )
-the debates ( Windows vs Linux, PC vs Mac, PS3 vs Xbox360 vs PC, all this stuff is bullshit thanks to biased opinions )
-fanboys ( Look above. They give me the shits. )
-shit usernames ( I’m talking about the xXxfalloutboy2kxXx faggots. Fucking teenagers. )

The sad thing is, this could all be remedied with some good old fashioned education. But that’s too much to ask from mankind. We see this shit going on in a daily fashion, without stop, and we’re not doing a goddamn thing about it. The smart ones are fighting the good fight and not taking this shit ( e.g. Maddox ), but ultimately all that does is earn hatemail from the masses of sheep that do not have the mental capacity to accept the problem.

Sheep. That just reminded me what i saw last night. iPhone 5. Words cannot express the hatred i bear for Mac fanboys that get up in everybodys face about how good their overpriced piece of shit Apple products that lack common sense features, are. And they’re gonna buy this new one. Sight unseen.

Fucking hipsters.