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As far as I'm concerned, virtual applause is even more meaningless than achievements/trophies, and I already (mostly) don't care about those. (Besides, the Super Smash Bros games already had the virtual crowd reactions thing long before Super Mario 3D Land, so this isn't really anything amazing and new either.) I mean, it's not something that will prevent me from playing a game, obviously, but it's still something that simply doesn't matter to me, outside of when it gets explicitly talked about in articles like this.
If people feel like they must have achievements or applause or whatever in their games before they feel like they're worth their time to play (and some of the commenters under that article explicitly and depressingly stated this was the case), then, well... I feel like that's just one more bullet point to go on my "Things I Find Sad And Wrong About The Video Game Industry/Community Today" list. A minor one, mind you, but it still goes on there. If playing the game isn't innately its own reward, then perhaps they should reevaluate why they play video games at all to begin with.
Really, I've long felt that people actively seeking out incredibly crappy games that they otherwise wouldn't have touched with a ten-foot pole, just because those games allow them to get easy achievements scores, is bad enough. But if the opposite is true and people are actively avoiding games, no matter how awesome they may be, merely because they don't have achievements... well, that's even more retarded, in my not at all humble opinion.
Also, on a related note since it was mentioned in the article/comments as well, I think the very concept of being able to redeem achievements for tangible, real life rewards is an abominable one, and I hope it never becomes a realit- oops, too late. Huh... it never really occurred to me until this moment, but... why does it seem like it's Ubisoft lately, more so even than the more likely suspects of EA or Activision, who are the ones actually pioneering a lot of these incredibly terrible new ideas such as this and, of course, the always online DRM crap that we've seen way too much of lately? Seriously... Ubisoft came up with that asinine always-connected-even-for-singleplayer crap, and people justifiably went apeshit over it. But later, Blizzard comes along and does pretty much the exact same thing, and yet now people are actively defending their decision to do it as though it's all of a sudden somehow a good thing just because it's Blizzard doing it. What the hell?! The Uplay achievements-for-rewards thing isn't nearly as obnoxious as the always online crap is. Why couldn't the others have latched onto that, as dumb as it is, rather than the other, which is many orders of magnitude worse?
If people feel like they must have achievements or applause or whatever in their games before they feel like they're worth their time to play (and some of the commenters under that article explicitly and depressingly stated this was the case), then, well... I feel like that's just one more bullet point to go on my "Things I Find Sad And Wrong About The Video Game Industry/Community Today" list. A minor one, mind you, but it still goes on there. If playing the game isn't innately its own reward, then perhaps they should reevaluate why they play video games at all to begin with.
Really, I've long felt that people actively seeking out incredibly crappy games that they otherwise wouldn't have touched with a ten-foot pole, just because those games allow them to get easy achievements scores, is bad enough. But if the opposite is true and people are actively avoiding games, no matter how awesome they may be, merely because they don't have achievements... well, that's even more retarded, in my not at all humble opinion.
Also, on a related note since it was mentioned in the article/comments as well, I think the very concept of being able to redeem achievements for tangible, real life rewards is an abominable one, and I hope it never becomes a realit- oops, too late. Huh... it never really occurred to me until this moment, but... why does it seem like it's Ubisoft lately, more so even than the more likely suspects of EA or Activision, who are the ones actually pioneering a lot of these incredibly terrible new ideas such as this and, of course, the always online DRM crap that we've seen way too much of lately? Seriously... Ubisoft came up with that asinine always-connected-even-for-singleplayer crap, and people justifiably went apeshit over it. But later, Blizzard comes along and does pretty much the exact same thing, and yet now people are actively defending their decision to do it as though it's all of a sudden somehow a good thing just because it's Blizzard doing it. What the hell?! The Uplay achievements-for-rewards thing isn't nearly as obnoxious as the always online crap is. Why couldn't the others have latched onto that, as dumb as it is, rather than the other, which is many orders of magnitude worse?
