Customer goodwill is not an endless resource

Hello.

In a changing world, not much stands still, and that includes newsletters, especially this one, which shall now be known as The Destructoid Checkpoint. The main change is that it will now be written by me, Aidan O’Brien, and from this shall all other changes flow. I’ve been playing games for about thirty-five years, and I have been writing about them for close to a decade. I hope you have enjoyed what this newsletter has been until now, and continue to enjoy what it will become over time.

That said, let’s get stuck in.

It’s an odd time in the games industry right now. If you, as a customer, are feeling disrespected, it’s likely because people are being disrespectful. I’m the kinda guy who expects companies to act like companies, so I’m not usually all that surprised when they put profits first because that is kinda what they are supposed to do. Lately, however, it all feels kind of brazen.

Instead of trying to entice me into spending my money with them, a lot of companies seem to be very happy to churn me out of their customer base. Sometimes, it’s a price point. Sometimes, it’s an attitude. Sometimes, it’s a suspect business decision, but the message is always the same.

“You’ll buy it, or you won’t. And if you don’t, someone will.”

Nvidia broke the covenant

If there’s one thing PC gamers will spend as much money as they can on, it’s their GPU. Many will dedicate the majority of their budget to it, as it is the most gaming-related part of a gaming-related build. You want to future-proof your GPU as much as you can, and then you want to fall victim to shiny marketing next year and replace it much sooner than you need to. We’ve all done it, because we’re all silly.

To at least maintain the illusion of choice and informed decisions, companies like Nvidia and AMD allow access to GPUs early to various YouTubers, tech writers, and interested parties to ensure everything is up to snuff. The CUDAs are gooda. The teraflops don’t, in fact, flop. That VRAM? That is definitely a positive thing that rhymes with RAM. This is all stuff that I and many other customers need people who are passionate about this stuff to find out on our behalf. 

Nvidia does this because all companies do this, regardless of product or target demographic. The review process is the bridge between what corporations want and what consumers need. They want money, and we need to make informed decisions about what we do with ours. I need someone, anyone, to put a card through its paces and do all the things I don’t want to do. I do not want to benchmark it in 20 different games and then compare those results to twenty different cards, but Steve from Gamers Nexus does.

I say, let Steve do it. Nvidia says, nope! The RTX 5060 went to market with no reviews, and even at the time of writing this, a full 24 hours after launch, they are few and far between on the internet because everyone is scrambling to do good work and get information out there for customers. 

Gamers Nexus claims Nvidia has applied pressure to have certain metrics highlighted to maintain access to certain members of their team for interviews. I suggest you watch their video in full to get all the details. And they’re not alone, Hardware Unboxed, and VideoCardz have both said the same thing.

The simple truth is Nvidia is making more than enough money from its support of the AI industry that the last thing it needs to do is trick some teenager working weekends into buying a GPU that underperforms, but by golly, that appears to be what they are trying to do here.

Real fans find a way

Because most gamers are human beings with bills and lives and dreams they would love to finance that don’t involve executives for gaming companies being able to expand their collections of cars, people are worried that $80 games are poised to become a thing.

Many people in the games industry are acting like kiss-shy debutantes when asked about it, squirming about like a worm on a hook in an attempt to not give an answer. GTA VI was supposed to do the dirty work and make an increased Triple A price the new normal, but Rockstar and Take-Two have delayed the game until next year, leaving someone else to carry the can for why you’re gonna have less cheese in your pocket sandwich. 

But that’s okay. When the games industry needs someone to act the fool, it can always rely on Randy Pitchford to fire himself out of a cannon and into a pool of secondhand embarrassment. 

When queried by a fan about the potential cost of the upcoming Borderlands 4 and whether it might reach the $80 mark for the standard version, Pitchford decided it was time to break out a story that was the gaming equivalent of your granny telling you she used to walk uphill to school on her bare feet when she was a kid, just for a chance that she’d get to read the one math book they shared between a dozen students. 

Randy paid $80 for Starflight for the Sega Genesis in 1991, don’t you know? He had a minimum-wage job! He found a way. And you will, too. Or so he says. 

The issue here is not that it looks like games will go up in price. We asked Destructoid readers what they thought about game pricing, and the results were about what you’d expect.

They’re not fans of the idea of paying more for games. Even more than that, most answers were long. People went into DETAIL about why they didn’t want to, and if there is one thing I have learned in my 44 years on this cursed orb, people give details when they are worried. 

This would not just be games getting more expensive; it would be yet another thing squeezing them. Yet another hand in their pocket. Yet another thing they love that seems to delight in pricing them out. 

The reason for all that concern is that games will, 100%, go up in price. We all know it. We’re just waiting for the trigger to be pulled. What we don’t need is Randy Pitchford coming off like a goddamn goof with a stupid story that doesn’t help anyone at all. 

When given the chance to connect with another human and imply that ,yeah, price hikes might well be coming, but that’s the world right now. More powerful people than most of us are playing silly games, and our lives are becoming that bit harder, Randy fumbles the ball. Instead, we get the implication that, hey, you should have been paying more for Borderlands this entire time. 

Randy, ever the magician, pulls yet another dead rabbit out of his hat. Can’t wait to see the splatter as he tries to saw a woman in half.

Doom: The Empty Disk

For the last decade or so, the big push has been the idea that we will, none of us, own anything. Instead, we will pay for access to things but shall not own them. You shall pay subscription fees and buy licenses, and in return, you will get access but not ownership. 

It’s a great idea in a world that has already invested heavily in the concept of planned obsolescence and where one of the biggest issues for most corporations is how they can continue to exercise control over something that they have already sold us. You cannot remaster a vinyl on my shelf, but you can certainly do it to a file on Spotify. Looking for the original, unaltered Return of the Jedi? Good luck with that.

In the games industry, this means a growing trend of disks with nothing on them. This does a wonderful job of ensuring that the potential to play and resell something, or even loan it to a friend, is limited. It’s also where the business of games runs headfirst into the art of games and kicks it squarely in the groin.

Video game preservation is a vital concern for folks who hold the pesky belief that this medium has artistic value and that the efforts of the people who make games are worth remembering. The Video Game History Foundation is working hard to try and improve the playing field a little here, but publishers just no longer putting game files on disks will make preservation all but impossible.

You cannot preserve, via means that do not open you up to legal action, something that is only available on a server owned by Microsoft. 

While this was not the only issue with the launch of Doom: The Dark Ages (I am coming for baked-in raytracing in a future installment), it is, in my opinion, one of the most egregious. It just shows how far these companies are from a shared experience with the average consumer. 

One of the main reasons people want to buy physical editions is to avoid having to download things due to slow or maybe even no internet. This is once again just carving off a slice of potential gamers and letting them know they are not welcome.

What’s a gamer to do?

Ultimately, this is not a call for revolution. I enjoy games, and I enjoy Triple-A games, and I think the gaming industry can be a positive in the world and “do art,” as they say. I also try to understand the need to do product. 

I think it’s important for consumers to keep informed, have their lines in the sand, and understand that not buying something is not the end of the world. 

A common solution for price-concerned consumers is to wait for the sale, and that included the readers we asked about game pricing. Patience can be a virtue when it comes to looking for deals, and anyone with a backlog of games should really be asking themselves what the drive is to add to it forever instead of experiencing it. 

Mostly, you just need to spend your goodwill on companies that you think will appreciate it. There are many teams of developers out there who can have their lives changed if we throw the right support their way, so don’t feel like you need to waste your passion on people who take you for granted.

I’ll be back next week with more ramblings. Until then, stay gold.