Can You Have Your Cake and Eat It Too?

I don't think that you can have your cake and eat it too when it comes to the game industry, but what does that mean for gamers? There are just two examples of this in the last week which I want to use to highlight my point. The first one being the Stalker patch not allowing you to use your existing save games and the second involving the possibility of having to pay for more content to play Crackdown.

There has been a lot of positive and negative feedback with regards to Stalker. I am enjoying the game and will continue to play it through to its completion (just wish I had more time to do it). Usually the release of a game patch is good news for gamers. Bugs can be fixed, compatibility issues resolved and hopefully gamers end up with a better playing experience. However, there is a catch to the Stalker patch. You can install the patch, but you cannot play any of your old save games. That is not a very good catch. Once again, people have invested time in to a game not to see any potential for reward without reinvesting the time. This is frustrating and it is understandable that some people are upset about it. However, the bad thing is that there are people who are writing and saying that they regret purchasing the game and that I feel that this sort of thing reflects negatively on the smaller, more independent developers. As for those people who say they regret purchasing the game due to the patch not being backward compatible with their save games then I don't think they were happy playing the game to start with. I don't believe that a patch would fix the problems they have with the game. However, people believe that games should be released finished to begin with. They don't believe that they should have to endure the patch and repatch routine in order to get a product which plays the way they believe it should. GSC aren't responsible for this, but most developers are. I don't believe that PC gamers can be completely ignorant to the problems associated with developing a game across multiple platform types to work on completely different hardware bases and not have any issues. Games for consoles should not necessarily require patching upon release as they don't have to program the games for different hardware configurations. PC Games have to work on a number of different platforms. I don't believe it is possible to stress test every single game on every conceivable PC configuration. Patching is a reality of PC gaming and will be while PC games exist. However, not allowing gamers to patch the game and continue to play their old save games is a backwards step. It means that those gamers who have already invested their time in a game have to go back and replay the game in order to get the benefit of using the patch. This is not fair and not a good indictment on game development. While there used to be a time when this was more common, I don't believe that it should start to be that way again. If it meant waiting a week or two before they got the patch to run with the old save games then they should not have released the patch so quickly. I would prefer to wait for the patch rather than have it forced on me with these conditions. Unfortunately, with PC Gaming this is a matter of you can't have your cake and eat it too. Some of those games, such as X3, which are excellent games but buggy to the point of being unplayable upon release mean that you have to wait before you can enjoy the game.

Crackdown is another kettle of fish. It was obvious that with only 8 or so hours of gameplay that they were going to release purchasable downloadable content for the game. While a recent interview did not confirm or deny that this would happen if you read between the lines it seems most likely. At what point in time do gamers consider they have received good value for money on what they have purchased? What possibilities are there for them to take any action in this regard? There aren't any really. With MMOs taking a fair share of the revenue pie it is obvious that developers are going to look at other ways of making more money out of their product. Bethesda did this quite effectively with Oblivion. They released purchasable downloadable content to enhance the gaming experience. However, Oblivion had hundreds of hours of gameplay to start with. So, the notion of purchasing further content does not seem so bad as you believe that you have received your value for money to begin with. Gamers can't do to much with regards to changing this besides not purchasing the product. Then you have the problem that I have where I really like the product but believe that it is just light in content knowing that they are going to charge me more to get more content at a later date.

These two problems seem to be two very different aspects of the gaming industry which we have to live with and don't really have any chance to change.