A Message to Cliff Blezinski: "TOO BAD MOTHERFUCKER!"

 "TOO BAD MOTHERFUCKER!" -Cliff Bleszinski, in a post on NeoGAF responding to a critic

So today on Twitter former Epic games designer Cliff Bleszinski took to defending Microsoft's anti-consumer bullshit in a series of Tweets that demonstrates just how fucked up the thinking is of the people who are part of the AAA Gaemz Industree™ culture.

"You cannot have game and marketing budgets this high while also having used and rental games existing. The numbers do NOT work people."

Bullshit Alert! Bullshit Alert!
The truth is that nearly 70% of the money Gamestop pays out in the US to people selling their disc games is used by those same customers to pay for copies of new games. The truth is that there is no causal evidence showing that used games significantly disrupt the sales of new games enough to cause the financial hemorrhaging the games industry is seeing in recent years. If there were we wouldn't see things like each Call of Duty title stay at the top of NPD's top 10 for months on end while used copies occupy space on Gamestoip's shelves at prices far less than MSRP.

Used games are not responsible for marketing budgets so large that they in many instances double or triple the cost of releasing a big-budget title. Used games are not responsible for developers and publishers deciding to take franchises with a historic sales ceiling of less than 2-3 million units per release, spending $50-$100 million in trying to capture the sales numbers seen only by the likes of Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto or Halo, and then scrambling to find any excuse they can as to why they're in the red when they don't meet sales numbers that were unrealistic to start with.

"The visual fidelity and feature sets we expect from games now come with sky high costs. Assasins Creed games are made by thousands of devs."

I'm sorry, but this is more total bullshit. Graphics are important, yes, but to say you need a team of thousands to make a nice-looking game is ridiculous. Dark Souls is a very pretty game with amazing art direction, and it costs a fraction of what comes out of the mega-publishers like EA. The Witcher 2 was allegedly made for less than $15 million, it's got far superior graphics to any console game of this current generation, and the developer made quite a bit of money selling the game DRM-free and not treating it's paying customers like potential thieves like so many in the industry want to do.

And just what is this about "feature sets we expect"? Nobody asked for multiplayer in the Uncharted games, Bioshock 2, God of War: Ascension or the Tomb Raider reboot, but the developers spent time and money putting it in anyways. Nobody asked for Resident Evil 6 to become even more scripted and "cinematic" on a scale requiring hundreds of developers to create an interactive film, thus leading to Capcom needing a base of more than 6 million unit sales just to break even. Game developers and publishers are in a self-created arms race to outdo the other mega-publishers as they overspend on things they think will get them higher Metacritic ratings and trying to ram their way to the top of the AAA heap. Instead of being smarter, they just spend harder and cast blame on the gamers for being "entitled" or "too demanding".

"Newsflash. This is why you’re seeing free to play and microtransactions everywhere. The disc based day one $60 model is crumbling."

Oh my, did he actually finally say something in his Twitter spree that makes logical sense? Could it be that he's realizing that trying to sell every game imaginable at $60 is not sustainable?

"Those of you telling me “then just lower game budgets” do understand how silly you sound, right?"

Nope, guess I was wrong!
He immediately follows that Tweet that showed hints of mental clarity with this dud. Apparently to Cliff, proud alumni of the AAA Gaemz Industree™, the very idea of spending realistic amounts on a game is unthinkable! We need moar and moar money to sell our homogenized, overpriced and uninspired products! We need moar restrictions on gamer freedoms as we ram in things they didn't ask for! We need moar and moar money to hit 9-10 scores on Metacritic!

Won't someone please think of the poor developers!? For only $60 per non-transferrable disc plus the price of DLC, you too can help keep a starving AAA Gaemz Industree™ developer from having to sell their sports cars! Please, think of the poor CEOs and staff at the mega-publishers, and donate today!

What Bleszinki seems to not grasp is that most of the problems the publishers and developers face are things they imposed on themselves instead of working smarter, analyzing the marketplace conditions better, understanding the actual value their IP holds rather than the inflated value they think it holds and budgeting according to realistic sales and production goals. The industry bigshots instead continue to over-extend themselves trying to hit 10 million in sales for franchises with a maximum ability to appeal to maybe 2-3 million customers. So given all of that, and the notorious efforts of so many industry shills and puppets doing whatever they can to blame and pass the cost off to us, all I can say about the negative reaction to DRM and the financial bleedout seen by AAA Gaemz Industree™ publishers is "TOO BAD MOTHERFUCKER!"