Meep wrote:OrangeRKN wrote:Preezy wrote:But surely if you're paying $60 (or $200 in AJ's case) for a game are you not owed a game that meets most reasonable expectations of quality and performance?
No, you shouldn't spend that money on blind faith, there are plenty of accessible sources for information on games that you can check out before buying. There is no standard of quality that a game has to meet, just as there is no standard of quality for music, books or films, partly because these things are subjective.
No, sorry, this is simply wrong. If you advertise a product as delivering certain things that the person buying that product has the right to expect it to deliver what is advertised. I can't build a car and advertise it as a good drive when it actaully breaks down every other week and left the plant with massive design flaws that cause it to drive erratically and crash. If you bought such a vehicle any reasonable person would demand their money back. There is nothing 'subjective' about reliability. You know when it works and when it doesn't.
If Bethesda PR had launched a campaign stating that Fallout 76 was a buggy mess then, sure, anyone who bought it only had themselves to blame. They didn't do that, however. Todd Howard and the rest of Bethesda went on and about the amazing features of Fallout 76, how the graphics and engine had been improved ("it just works!"), how seamlessly the experience would be (claiming you woudln't even notice the servers). They sold it that way and anyone buying it had a reasonable expectation for it to perform as advertised. It doesn't matter that journalists pointing out the reality. It is not the job of the consumer to make sure the company they are dealing with is not straight up lying to their faces. Not everyone is a hardcore gamer like us who browses review sites with a critical eye.
It's okay if some people like the game but please do not try to defend the bullshit of these companies who straight up lie about the performance of their products. By doing so they are more less cheating people out of their money.
We have the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK. With No Man's Sky, which had a somewhat similar launch reception, the ASA investigated the marketing and found it not to be misleading. I haven't seen any marketing for Fallout 76 that would suggest to me an investigation would conclude any differently.
We also have the consumer rights act, which lays out that a product must be of "satisfactory quality", "fit for purpose" and "as described". From what I'm aware "satisfactory quality" is a very low barrier that deals mainly with products not being damaged or defective. I'm not aware of any videogame being pulled up on it for being deemed unsatisfactory quality (although I admittedly don't know how to find that out, consumer law makes it a responsibility of the retailer not the manufacturer, so any dispute of that point would be taken up against the shop you bought the game from, and they all have their own differing return policies).
As I mentioned (and you conveniently removed from the quote), there is and should be an expectation that the product will /work/, i.e. be fit for purpose. The game outright crashing is a pretty clear example of it not working, but in my experience it does not do so on a level that makes it unplayable. All software, especially with games, is sold with the explicit legal statement that it will probably contain bugs and that should be (and is) something that consumers are aware of, so a game sometimes crashing does not necessarily reach a reasonable threshold to call it unfit for purpose and mis-sold. Where that exact threshold lies is a more complex question and that link Monkey Man posted is interesting in that respect, even if coming at it from a US perspective.
All said this is not me launching a specific defence of Fallout 76, it is me rebuking the general notion that gamers are owed good games by developers. It's not the case, the only thing owed to the consumer is that the product is not mis-sold and that it works, and any expectation of "reasonable quality" is both nebulous and targeted at the retailer, not the developer. A consumer is very free and welcome to be disappointed with a game, in which case I would suggest they may take it upon themselves to not buy from that developer again and to do better research into what they are buying the next time. There are countless games out there that I would deem unworthy of my time or money, and occasionally I might buy one with the mistaken hope or expectation it is better than it turns out, but that doesn't give me the right to be angry at the developers of it. They don't owe me anything. Better to just move on.
The car analogy is an ill fitting one because there are numerous other objective standards that motor vehicles must comply to, for reasons of public safety. These standards do not exist for videogames.
LewisD wrote:OrangeRKN wrote:No, you shouldn't spend that money on blind faith, there are plenty of accessible sources for information on games that you can check out before buying..
But then we're scalded for going along with the "popular opinion" of reviewers and also not being allowed an opinion without having playing it... :/
Not by me you're not!