Thursday, June 30, 2011

Capcom

From Eurogamer:
It is impossible to delete save data from upcoming Nintendo 3DS game Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D, according to a new report.

No sale, assholes.

This was an admittedly ingenious move by Capcom to gut used game sales of their product.

Of course, Capcom denies this, in spectacularly convoluted fashion:
In a post on the Capcom Unity blog, community manager Shawn Baxter explained that the move wasn't an attempt to curtail used game sales, but is in fact in keeping with the title's "arcade fighting game" feel.

"There was no intention of lessening the experience of the game," read the post.

"Essentially, RE Mercs was treated like an arcade fighting game. You unlock characters, levels, etc and they just stay unlocked as they would in an arcade machine.

"There was no hidden motive to prevent buying used copies. It's not some secret form of DRM. It's simply the way we designed the save system to work with the arcade type of gameplay."

This is equivalent to finding a bag of dogshit on my porch, and when I confront the owner, he blames the dog.

Okay, maybe it's not exactly equivalent to that, but having a dog put his own shit in a bag and leave it on someone's porch is more likely than Capcom's explanation.

Why? Because if it was such a unique and fantastic feature, they would have mentioned it before now. Seriously, they didn't mention this--once--until now. And if this had nothing to do with used game sales, why change the experience for someone buying the game used by having everything already available that was unlocked by the previous player?

Here's how stupid this is, and believe me, it's stupid. Let's say that this was an age-appropriate game for Eli 9.10, and he really wanted to play.

He couldn't.

He couldn't have his own game. Or, if he did, I couldn't. That is just f-ing ridiculous.

Here's the other big lie: cutting down used game sales would save the consumer money, because more new copies would be bought, and games would cost less. Remember that industry trope? Two words to that: horse and shit.

New prices are never going to be reduced due to a reduction in used game sales. They will never be reduced due to fewer pirated copies. That is a fairy tale.

Someone e-mailed me last week and said they felt that all the game industry was trying to do now was strip value from their games.

Boy, that feels true right now.

Site Meter