It's a common and accepted notion. Monolithic publisher empire-corporations swallow independent developers, strip them of their merit and force them to mass-produce substandard variations on their profitable IPs. Yet these megapublishers seem to make vast profits and are by all accounts generally successful. Since they seem to spend all their money on acquiring (and subsequently destroying) indie developers, how can this be? What black magic or tax dodge are they employing?

The most well known example of this thinking (and the company I expect sprang into the minds of almost everyone reading the previous paragraph) is Electronic Arts. Personally, I'm still harbouring a grudge over their dismantling of Westwood, the studio behind the Command and Conquer series. I viewed their recent acquisition of popular RPG developers Bioware with alarm. Despite this, EA seems the perfect place to begin questioning the Evil Monolithic Megacorp concept.

If this view is correct, EA is using an irreparably faulty business model, and is kept afloat only by the mindless sheep who keep buying their games year-on-year because EA tells them to. It is their fault for keeping this Spawn of Satan afloat, and soon EA will own the entire world and we'll all be forced to play nothing but Sims: Clown Outfits IV, Battlefield: Snowball Conflict and Need for Speed: Slightly Different Cars Since the Last One.

We must all boycott this devil company! Use the collective power of keeping our money to put them out of business for good! But wait! What's this... A revitalised C&C series, Spore, Battlefield games not simply being cardboard cut-outs of previous games, Mass Effect for PC and the Half Life Episodes published under EA's name... Oh, well. They'll probably all be rubbish anyway.

Sarcasm aside, the view of EA and other such companies being black holes of creativity, serving only to suck the life out of our games is fundamentally flawed. It's true that their influence has had a negative effect on some games and has destroyed some good studios, but it's equally true that they have contributed to the gaming world. God knows I never thought I'd find myself defending this company or this business model, but I am sick and tired of the endless, unreasoning hatred. EA is not a black hole of doom. I don't believe it's a net benefit to the gaming industry - that's an opinion, by the way - but it has it's moments. If you disagree with some of its practices or with the quality of some of its products (as I do), the solution is not to somehow destroy the corporation. This is a goal that is unrealistic, and almost childish in its intention. If you hate all a publisher's games, don't buy any of them. That's fine. If you're like me, there will be good quality games that you will want. Buy them! The solution is not to avoid everything from a publisher, but to avoid impulse buying. Read a review. Talk to a friend. Carefully avoid buying low-quality games while continuing to purchase those good-quality titles which have had a sufficiently long development cycle.

Large corporations generally are run for profit. If a corporation sees one line of games performing poorly, and another line (hopefully in our scenario the high end games) selling well, this is what will motivate their commissioning decisions in the future. Send a well reasoned and concise e-mail or letter to a company telling them why you don't appreciate certain decisions and why you believe a different course of action would be better. Make no mistake, your individual action will very likely not have any effect - I don't expect a summons to the CEOs office, asking to discuss my ideas for his business. Our power is not in individual action, but in mass. The more well-reasoned (and not spammy or abusive) arguments they get, the more seriously they will take the idea that they are upsetting some of their client base. The more people buy the high quality products and avoid the poor ones, the more clearly they will understand.

And please, for God's sake, stop the senseless hatred, you'll achieve nothing. Stop spamming message boards with "ea sux lol", because no-one will pay you any attention and you'll achieve nothing. Stop boycotting good games that you'd normally buy if they didn't have the EA logo on them. You won't put them out of business, you won't encourage them to improve and you've accomplished nothing!

The path to positive change isn't exactly easy. We have the power to make it happen if we'll just be about it with reason and patience instead of anger and fear. Are you afraid of the Big Bad Megacorp? I'm not.

-PsyW

As a resident of the UK, I have had it with articles and editorials on how video games are destroying our youth and are responsible for every single crime committed since 1985. I had assumed that such was the case with all media, but it seems like journalistic idiocy is a British trait. For example, the Telegraph's rail against insufficient censorship (all games should be banned!), and the unknown UK newspaper advertising for people who have been turned to crime by games (because I'm sure EVERYONE on this site has some kind of drug-addled criminal past). Even the normally impartial BBC managed to infuriate me a few years back in their coverage of the 2006 E3. They made up for their normal standard coverage by writing one of the most terribly biased 'news' articles I have ever had the displeasure of reading.

I actually formally complained, something I never do. I should note at this point that the BBC is a public broadcaster, bound by law to provide coverage that is as impartial as possible. Seeing as this article is a thinly-veiled opinionated editorial and not what could be described as impartial coverage my complaint was justified. The BBC's policy is always to reply to complaints if requested.

I never received a reply.

Conversely, I'm not aware of any UK paper providing coverage for the University of Middlesex study indicating that those who play violent games (although is WoW really that violent?) are actually more relaxed. Admittedly, it's not a wide-ranging or definitive study, but you can bet that if the Nursery School of Frisby On The Wreake (population: 3) produced a study saying that games were responsible for both Gulf Wars, it would be plastered all over the damned place.

Video games don't make me want to commit crime. Appalling journalism does...

-PsyW

It's been a while since I last made a post on here. I've been pretty busy lately, and I've only just found the time to start using the site again recently.

Seems like it's been an interesting few months for the gamespot community. At any rate, I'll post something a little longer up soon, once I've worked out where to start.

-PsyW

I must say, I am utterly amazed by VALVe's marketing for the Orange Box at this point. Firstly, they're encouraging preorders with their TF2 beta scheme (it's not really a Beta, but an early launch for pre-orderers on steam) but more impressive even than that is the fact that they are offering to allow all current HL2 and Ep1 owners to give away their existing copies to a friend when they buy the Orange Box (which already includes these games).

Absolutely amazing! People who weren't previously interested in the HL2 universe get a copy of the game and episode one, want to play the next episode and they buy the orange box, pass their copies on and the cycle perpetuates itself. It's very sophisticated marketing although it slightly irritates me that I now have to buy two games I've already got. I now understand why they scrapped the Black Box, but I fear that some people will not feel as tolerant as me of having to buy games they already own.

We'll see how it develops.

-PsyW

EDIT: My calculations place the Orange Box price over steam (in GBP) as £22.14 + tax which is dead cheap for all the stuff you get. Absolute bargain. The problem is, I already HAVE two of the games I'm paying for, which makes it a little bit less good value for money. It doesn't matter how many free gifts you give to my friends, I'm STILL paying for two games I've already paid for.

To be realistic for a second: I'm still going to buy it because I want Episode 2, TF2 and Portal, and this is the only option for getting them. I fear that this may actually cost Valve sales, though, as irritated people who already own HL2 and Ep1 refuse to pay for them twice. This is more cynical than I would have expected from Valve, and I have to say I'm disappointed.

EDIT EDIT: It actually occurs to me that I was expecting to pay £25-30 anyway, just for ep2, TF2 and Portal, and at £26 (inc tax) HL2 and Ep1 are essentially free anyway. So all's well that ends well, I suppose...

I give up!

It's taken me two days to get past the second loadpoint of the bioshock demo, only to find that it crashes near to the end. Complete lock-up in roughly the same place each time.

Apparently, I'm not the only one. There are 40 pages of people on the official forums with the same or similar issues to what I have experienced, and so far the official word from 2k is... nothing. Nothing at all.

It seems rediculous when every other game I've played in my recent memory has worked flawlessly - from Half Life 2 through to C&C3. I have a modern PC that exceeds the minimum requirements, so why should a game demo give me this much trouble? I saw a friend of mine play it through in about 15 minutes, yet it's taken me two days to simply make it crash a bit later.

From what I've seen so far, it's a beautiful, immersive, atmospheric game. However, I see no reason to part with my money for a product that I'm fairly certain won't work, no matter how good it is on the rare occasions where it does.

-PsyW

I did manage to finish DarkStar One, and the review is online now. You can read it either here at gamespot via my profile, or HERE at the New Alliance ComNet. I recommend the ComNet version, as it has better formatting.

I also finally got through that last C&C3 mission by capturing every production building on the map at the same time before GDI managed to wipe everything out or randomly start shooting my men. The final mission was actually MUCH easier, and simply required a fleet of 75 aircraft and 3 special edition infinate-range Juggernaughts (makes me wonder why GDI doesn't make ALL their juggernaughts with infinate range)...

I also took the time to read the C&C3 book, by prolific sci-fi author Keith R.A. DeCandido. It's short, but it brings out a lot of the background to the conflict. DeCandido seems to have a strange idea about how promotion and ranks work in the military, however. If you're a C&C fan, it's worth a look although it still won't take you as deep as the Halo novels did.

I also finally found time to load up the Bioshock demo, and while it seems incredibly immersive, my game crashes at the second load-point when the bathysphere enters Rapture. Every single time, crash to desktop with the standard windows "bioshock.exe has generated errors and must be closed" message. I'm on up to date drivers, so right now I'm redownloading. My maximum speed is around 90kbps, so it might take a while

Even so, it's probably much faster to download the bioshock demo again - or even to download the entire game - than it is to try and get the original Command and Conquer for free. I've seen reports of around 5kbps download speeds, and random disconnects during the download. Way to go, EA, release the original C&C as a free game, and then put the files up on the shoddiest server possible

-PsyW