Our votes aren't worth enough

The concept of dollar voting, or voting with your wallet, does not apply to gamers. Whether you like it or not, we’re the minority. When a game comes out that we don’t want to support for whatever reasons, it will sell with the right marketing. The publishers weren’t making that game for us anyway.

50 Cent: Bulletproof sold well although panned by critics

Gamers tend to get swept up in fanboyism and loyalties that average consumers don’t. Do you think every customer who purchased Call of Duty: Black Ops knows about the Infinity Ward/Activision scandal? Or even noticed that it was made by a different developer that its predecessor, which was released only a year prior? More importantly, do you think they’d even care? Publishers know this, and will sell the game regardless of what gamers think as long as it produces sales.

When you choose not to purchase an annual installment of a franchise so that a publisher is discouraged from doing it again, you’re not proving anything to anyone. Millions of other consumers will purchase the game as soon as it’s available. The publisher won’t miss the $60 you didn’t spend. The industry will keep pushing forward without you.

Call of Duty Black Ops: Annihalation Map pack priced at $15

It’s too late to change many of the current industry trends. We can no longer vote “against” many trends, so we might as well accept them and try to vote “for” the ones that can change things.

So how many votes is a free game worth?

Tags: Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops Annihilation, 50 Cent: Bulletproof

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Jason Lomberg

July 07, 2011

I couldn't disagree more. I think critics and gamer word-of-mouth play a much larger role in gaming than any entertainment medium. The reason for this is simple: games cost a lot of money. We're talking $60 vs. $8-12 for a movie ticket, $10-30 for a blu-ray, and $8-25 for a book.

I've been one of the most vocal critics of the Modern Warfare series, inasmuch as its bombastic storyline defies belief. But the reason it continues to top the charts (and critics continue to heap praise upon it) is that the games are well-made, with superior design and gameplay. Black Ops achieved 20+ million units sold on the basis of this legacy (and in no small part due to its own merits).

A prime example of the power exercised by the gaming press (and consumers) is the 3DS. In the months leading up to launch, critics proclaimed it the second coming, but then abruptly changed their tone once they realized how temperamental and unreliable the autostereoscopic effect was. The drubbing by critics, combined with a weak launch lineup, and the myriad of health warnings, colluded to make the 3DS a relative failure for Nintendo, selling about 3.5 million out of the expected 4 million units.

Plenty of shitty games/movies/books sell handsomely. One need only look at the box office returns for Michael Bay's Transformers franchise. 50 Cent: Bulletproof sold over a million copies, a respectable number, but not comprehensive enough to prove the point that "voting with our wallets" is a dead concept.