The past few days lurking the Ooblets discord have really made me critical of the culture that’s been born of self-identifying as a ‘consumer’. The language around it is beginning to give me chills. Not sure how to put it into words, and maybe it’s been growing in the back of my mind whenever I watch a video from someone like Jim Sterling, but I feel some type of way about it.
As perplamps’ blog post points out, in this context they aren’t even actually consumers - customers - as of yet since they could not purchase the game. And that is certainly true.
the people using the terms consumers and potential customers here are doing so specifically because we’ve never actually sold them anything and don’t owe them anything at all
But I guess I’m wondering if it’s even healthy to even call yourself that if you have bought it. It reminds me of working retail, in all of the wrong ways. The dehumanising language managers and training videos have, like people are but needy worms who do nothing but consume. But also the entitlement and the anti-labour sentiments of the person who called themselves a customer to remind you that they ‘are always right’.
At best, it has eerie echoes of “my refund on this $2 box of sharpies I bought in clearance and have no receipt for should be taken out of your paycheck”. And at worst, it feels like it’s not far off from self-identifying as a ‘whale’ if you are someone who buys a load of microtransactions.
I imagine is just an extremely toxic capitalism thing. I mean you can scream about Epic all you want, but Tim Sweeney has more money then every hater combined, so it’s pretty much useless. But the ooblets developers, well honestly as indie devs they barely have any power, I mean in the mind of someone with extreme capitalism poisoning, you as a fan have more power, they have a product that you (cause you are a gamer man who else would someone make a game for if not someone like you). And so you can’t make epic pay, but the couple who makes ooblets? Oh you can certainly use what little power you have to make them suffer.
I looked into the alleged region-locking issue I mentioned earlier, it turns out the post in question was taken wildly out of context from a conversation the developers had with a Malaysian backer of their Patreon over a misunderstanding of the regional pricing.
Honestly, I know a lot of people took their initial announcement as condescending, but from a developer that has seen how fucking shitty Gamers™ are, all that letter sounded like to me was two developers trying desperately to use humour to prevent this level of harassment from happening.
Like, the harassment was coming either way, because, you know, Gamers™ fucking suck, but the fact that the tone was a convenient excuse for the harassment is the real reason it fucking blew up so bad.
The way a lot of people are responding to the Epic Vs Steam battle gives me the creeps.
People feel the need to pick the side of one of two large corporations, both with obscene amounts of cash, and defend their chosen corporation loudly online.
That’s why I almost didn’t post earlier about my misgivings with Epic’s indie strategy, which can only really be talked about in relation to Steam. I don’t want to side with the mob of net-monsters, or with Valve’s ridiculous neglect of their store and rotten (as in decay and disease) social network. And I also don’t want to let the narrative of Epic as friend to all the indies (that matter) go by without speaking up. Anything that can be said about this subject without a tightrope-walk of both-sides qualifiers reads as taking the side of a company whose policies and structures are doing harm to the community of small developers it claims to want to help. Can everyone just all agree to use itch instead? That’d be cool.
Can’t wait for my service in the first war of the storefronts to be recognised with a “True Gamer” apartment - subsidised furnishings included - in Epic’s new Pro-level “Hub Town” in suburban Delaware.
I’ll look back fondly on the time when corporations just sold us shit instead of mobilising armies of brand loyal fanatics to overthrow world governments.
Coming to this issue as a primary console player and having experienced the height of the console wars, all this just seems so small and petty to demand the outrage. Like, why isn’t there a corresponding rage at the developers for making Ooblets an Xbox exclusive? At least in that case it would make some sense, as PS4 and Switch owners would need to spend hundreds to get a platform to play the game. But on PC, where all you need to do is download another launcher? It just feels like an mole hill made into Mount Everest. I just don’t get gamer logic I guess.
I wish that was an answer, but not enough people use it for most commercial indie projects to make profit just selling there. Steam was valuable because you could connect with a wider market, but that’s shot in the foot. Epic at the moment is just eating the sunk cost, but they’re not actually offering a larger market, which is something to watch as they make moves into the future.
I’m part of the Ooblets Patreon. On the initial EGS exclusivity announcement, there were maybe 5 comments out of 100 where people expressed unhappiness. Those people were - without having to ask - given refunds for their last three months. When I checked the follow-up post a couple hours ago, there were zero negative comments out of 145. There is no tier which promises a copy of the game, much less on any specific platform. This dust-up has entirely been a brigading by people who either have an axe to grind over EGS or are just shitty people who like attacking strangers on the internet. Any claim to care about the plight of the Ooblet’s Patrons is a pure fabrication.
I’m astounded by the cognitive dissonance it takes to get personally, rage-inducingly offended at a general blog post intended for no particular person, while simultaneously believing that individual people should silently accept direct vitriol from thousands of other people. All because they might, possibly, maybe consider tossing them $20 in exchange for a product someday.
I'm not going to try to assume Epic's motives. Yes, Epic is a business. Businesses are not sentient. They're run by people and, despite how much fun it might be to imagine, every person at every business (I would guess most people at most businesses) aren't looking to forward their own self-interest to the exclusion of all else, all the time. I would wager to say the world would be *a lot* worse than it is if that were actually the case. Even if they are looking out for their own self-interest, being "the business people actually like to partner with" can be a pretty effective, mutually beneficial way of doing it.
I’m also not going to pretend I’m some kind of insider - everything I’m about to say comes from publicly available comments, from first- and second-hand accounts on podcasts to comments from the Ooblets folks themselves - but from what I’ve heard, developers love working with Epic Games Store, especially in comparison to the utter lack of support they’re used to getting from Steam. They don’t just get money or technical support with the store, they get support from actual people at Epic to make their game.
On the other hand, and the single biggest reason I will never trust Epic:
Also remember, there was a time that developers were excited to work with Valve. Things change, and that usually happens when you find success and suddenly don’t have to try. Sony has regular cycles of making terrible business decisions whenever they have a super successful console, Nintendo only innovates when resting on their laurels backfires, ect. We see this same cycle time and time again.
Epic is good in the short term, but no gaming industry giant is good in the long term.
So the thing about that tag… is that it’s supposed to be for games that feature puzzles with like… hm. It’s supposed to be like blow darts and spike pits and not the other thing, but people are misusing the tag.
Itch should probably rename it but I don’t know what they would change it to.
It doesn’t seem like it’s really being misused like that? Looking at the games with that tag, unless I missed anything none seem to use the transphobic use of the word. Might just be that they’re moderating it to make sure that it isn’t used as a slur but still. Though regardless it would be better to rename it. Especially with how widespread the transphobic use of the word is at this point.
Anyway yeah people should absolutely be using itch more.
Has Valve put out a statement about this? I feel like folks should be getting Steam suspensions and bans for harassment and threats. Like I get it’s not happening on their platform, but it’s happening on their behalf.
Valve does not care. They wouldn’t do anything even if the harassment was done on their platform (and historically they haven’t, unless it came under media scrutiny).
