Leading the Sheep

According to a story posted today by MCV the Xbone TV input device is breaking pre-order records at Blockbuster.

Someone, please kill me now.

In all seriousness though, this is another instance of the gaming audience disappointingly acting like trained sheep by supporting the worst aspects of the AAA Gaemz Industree™. In all the years of gaming I've been aware that there are single platform loyalists; people who care more about the health of a specific console maker like Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft than they do about gaming in general. I've seen one guy who to this day refuses to touch a Nintendo or Sony platform because he blames those companies for Sega's exit of the console business and early demise of the Dreamcast. But how anyone, even the most diehard of Xbox-only gamers, can want to place a pre-order on a potentially DRM-infested and privacy invading TV switching box with an unknown price tag and an unknown release date following an unveiling that showed more footage of The Price is Right than actual in-game footage of all the announced games combined is beyond me.

Unfortunately this all falls in line with previous instances of the AAA Gaemz Industree™ training it's subjects so well that they seem to buy, support and validate some of the most ludicrous and awful cash-grabs one can imagine. Apparently with enough hype and a whole slew of corporate Gaemz Jurnalistz™ who do nothing but parrot publisher PR speak while receiving free consoles, games, paid expenses trips and bribery swag, you can get enough of the audience to plop down their cash and buy anything no matter how fucked up it is.

Beginning in the early life of the Xbox Live Marketplace when EA would sell downloadable content for the 360 version of The Godfather that was present and usable on the disc for free in the PS2 version of the game, which retailed for $10 cheaper, to modern times when we have an industry riddled with shitty season passes for DLC, DLC content on the disc locked behind a paywall and an attitude that says releasing a broken and buggy game only to patch it after the $60+ sale has been made is acceptable, it's become quite clear that it's not just the industry that's at fault, part of the blame also belongs to the consumers who put money into this machine.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not calling for people to not be able to spend their money how they want, but clearly there needs to be enough of a pushback against anti-consumer practices to counter the noise of the industry PR so that the audience is much better educated about how often they are getting the shaft from the companies whom they often defend quite vocally. The news of rapid uptake of pre-orders of the Xbone suggest there is a long ways to go.