"The Question: Is Arkham City's 'Catwoman Pass' too much?"

[kane_magus]

I'll answer the questions posed here (though my answers should be easy to predict for anyone who has been paying attention).

So the first question, from the header: "Is Arkham City's 'Catwoman Pass' too much?"

Of course it is too much. That should be blatantly obvious. The fact that it isn't obvious to a lot of people (not the least of whom are Warner Bros. Interactive and Rocksteady themselves) is a big part of the problem. However, even though it's clearly a horrible thing that shouldn't have happened in the first place, that won't stop other devs/pubs from quickly following in their footsteps.(EDIT)[1](/EDIT) Then the whole thing will become an "accepted practice" by most gamers, and they will wonder why it was such a big deal "back in the day" and why some people were so pissed off by it. Then something even worse than this will be unveiled in the future and the whole cycle will just start all over again, with the exact same end result as before. That's how it has invariably gone since the beginning, whenever any sort of asinine thing like this has come up.

"Of course, there are those who will say, 'I'm online and buying new, so it's not a big deal.' Are they right?"

No, they are not. They may be apathetic (well, either that or they've just ingested too much of the Kool-Aid being force-fed to them by the game industry at large), but that doesn't make them correct. As for me, it doesn't matter that I already have this particular game pre-ordered and will be getting it new and thus won't be directly affected by this. It still pisses me off, regardless.

"If you're looked after, does it matter about anyone else?"

Well, it's all fun and games until you're not the one who is "looked after."(EDIT)[1](/EDIT) Then you're SOL and it's other people's turn to point and laugh at you because they're "looked after" and you're not. This is why, as owsf2000 has said repeatedly, we should protest this kind of thing, even if it doesn't directly affect us or doesn't seem "so bad" or whatever. That said, however, I don't think just raising a stink about it is enough by itself, because the big devs/pubs certainly don't listen, and about half of all gamers just seem to end up thinking you're crazy and/or stupid for ranting about it as well. And most people (myself included, in this particular case) are too weak-willed to flat-out boycott a game like this, even if this aspect of it enrages them. In fact, these days a lot of gamers just scoff at the idea of boycotts in general, as though any and all boycotters (or merely the complainers, even if they're not boycotting anything) are just whiny, entitled babies who don't actually ever have any legitimate grievances. (The Destructoid comment section of this very article is proof enough of this.)

"In lieu of an actual online mode in Batman, is Rocksteady correct to section off a portion of the single-player mode?"

Absolutely not, in no way, shape, or form. Except for sheer greed, there was no reason whatsoever for them to do it. Sure, they can and will and already have come up with plenty of bullshit justifications and rationalizations for it, but those don't matter. Well, I'd like to say they don't matter, but as I said above, a lot of gamers are actually falling for the nonsense about how used games are the devil or whatever. As I've said before, and as I'll probably say many times again, I will not ever understand why lately so many in the game industry seem to feel like they are entitled to a cut from used game sales at all (even though they are not) and are pulling all of these odious schemes out of their asses to get that cut, no matter what. And really, this is something that has only come up in the past two or three years or so, at most. When, where, why, and how did it suddenly become the case that second hand games are evil, and who started it all? (If I had to make a guess, I'd say it was EA, but I can't be certain of that. Either them or Activision, probably.)

"Is this the start of games locking even more content behind codes, and does it really matter in the grand scheme of things?"

God I certainly hope not, though I'm sure it will indeed become more prevalent now that this game has broken the ice. And if it does, I'll be ever more tempted to just join Mord in his overall boycott of further generations of games, and just stick to playing older games. Maybe finally work through my backlog, rather than continually increasing it in size.

(And, as always, the majority of commenters on Destructoid have proven themselves yet again to be the absolute nadir of all the gaming sites that I read. No surprise there at all.)

(EDIT)
[1] - For example, just fast forward from this post another four months and see what BioWare is doing with Mass Effect 3. In that case, everyone has to pay for the Day 1 DLC, across the board, regardless of whether the game is bought new or not, which makes it even worse than the crap mentioned here.
(/EDIT)

Comments

[hikarugenji.livejournal.com]

One thing that's tough about boycotts for video games is that the video game industry doesn't really seem to work like other industries because of the (relative) uniqueness of each product. That is, boycotting Starbucks might not be so hard because there are a lot of other places to buy coffee, and even if you like Starbucks coffee a lot, coffee is coffee. Gamers, on the other hand, don't usually just want "a video game", they want a specific game in a series or of a certain type, etc.

I think that's one reason why companies are able to continue successfully increasing the amount of DRM, annoying DLC, and other things like that. If your "upsetness" factor isn't greater than your desire to play the game, it's tough to avoid buying it.

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

Boycotting is easy for anyone who has the willpower to do so. It doesn't matter if it's a generic product like coffee or specific AAA hit titles. If you don't like what they're doing, you don't give them your money or your time. If enough people actually did this, you'd see the game industry turn around within half a year.

If they liked their jobs it would anyway. There are economic suicidal CEOs out there that would prefer bankruptcy I'm sure.

We live in an age where there is far more things to consume for entertainment than you could potentially enjoy in 100 lifetimes. Choice is there for those that care to look for it.

[hikarugenji.livejournal.com]

The main issue is just that the things the companies are doing aren't enough to push most people to boycott, since a lot of the ire is based on principle and slippery slope.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

Yeah, for me I guess the line was drawn with the "always connected" DRM, for which I'm refusing to buy Diablo III. But this stuff here just isn't quite "bad enough" to actively boycott, and is only worth just ranting about multiple times on the Internet (which I've already noted is just shy of completely useless, except as a catharsis). I think the way most gamers look at it is in a "Well, if nobody else is going to boycott the thing, a one-person boycott is going to accomplish jack all, so there's no point in me boycotting it either." sort of way.

This thing with Arkham City, though, is still in and of itself an objectively terrible dick move by the devs/pubs, even if you completely ignore the slippery slope arguments.

[hikarugenji.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I haven't played PC games in a long time (1999 was the last time I bought a new PC game) so I haven't had to deal with any of this DRM stuff.

Some of the DLC-related things annoy me, but not enough to actually avoid buying something I want to play. For Neptunia, I don't like the idea of having to pay to unlock things that are already on the disc, but the way I look at that is simply that the real price of the game is whatever they're asking for it + the cost of that DLC. If it's still worth it to me at that cost, I'll buy it.

The rest of Neptunia's DLC doesn't bother me at all; there are 16 free additional dungeons, 2 additional characters (which are actually new DLC and not just unlocking what's on the disc), raising the level cap to 999 (people who have platinumed the game say it's not necessary at all), and the usual "pay to get more xp/items", which I'm not going to do, but the existence of it doesn't bother me.

[hikarugenji.livejournal.com]

And actually, continuing with Neptunia, I notice that they didn't do the same thing with Neptunia Mk 2. The first game has 6 playable characters + the 2 that "join" your party but you can't use them until you pay, + 2 actual DLC characters (downloading them gives you new voiced events and such in addition to the 2 who don't appear at all in the game if you don't download them).

Mk 2 has 13 playable characters, plus 2 actual DLC characters. They don't have any of the "join but can't use them until you pay" from the first game. Now, of course you can take the cynical route and say that those 2 characters were "cut" from the game so they could make more money (since they were announced before the game came out). But 13 playable characters is a lot more than most JRPGs have, so it's not like the game seems noticeably eviscerated.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

Well, it's either that or a "Look, I just really want to beat up thugs with Batman, and if I have to eat a sandwich of wet dog turns smushed between two dried up cow patties and wash it down with a glass of piss in order to do that, then so be it!" sort of mentality. I guess I personally fall somewhere between those two.

Or, as I said earlier, there are some who just swallowed the industry line of "used games are bad" hook, line, and sinker, and thus have no qualms whatsoever over buying this, because they (mistakenly) believe that it is actually somehow a good thing. I definitely don't fall into that category, though.