You are here: "For some reason or another, the gaming industry has grown used to the idea that a game can ship with some bugs and that this is somehow an excusable side effect of dealing with computer software," Silverman contends.
If a CD doesn't play the last track, you go get your money back. If a DVD is missing a chapter, you go get your money back. If the display on your television doesn't work properly, you go get your money back. If a car company forgets — I don't know, the seat belts, you go get your money back (assuming you were dumb enough to buy a car without seat belts in the first place). Moreover, if one particular company keeps releasing CDs or DVDs or TVs or cars with bugs in them, swg credits people start to avoid that company like the plague because they're releasing "incomplete" products.
Of course, this is not only a problem with Sony Online Entertainment. It has infested the entire gaming industry.
Despite a multitude of furious postings at the Star Wars Galaxies forums about the NGE, Smedley told me the postings are only a vocal minority. Most players, he said, are in the game.
Now, I am strongly in favor of common sense, honesty and decency (which undoubtedly bars me from holding public office), but it's hard not to wonder whether Smedley's vocal minority contention is spin — counter-clockwise to Richard Nixon's "silent majority."
This is not to suggest in any way that Smedley is Nixonian, but there is the matter of logic and numbers.
Copyright © 2009-2010,