If we ran the world....Commandments of gaming: Part 1 - Publishers & Developers

And lo did the Gaming Anarchist revolution come to power and there much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the industry as their profiteering ways are forced to seek the moral ideals of creativity, value and worth, and ultimately they saw that it was good:

1. Thou shalt have no lord but thy customers
• Your product is produced for your customers and your pride in your work, profit is an ultimate pay off for any game worth it's salt but putting profit before the product is a cardinal sin and leads to fear of taking chances with creativity and turning a potential great game into a standard one
2. Thou shalt not worship thine IP above the artistic integrity of thy product
• Beware the cash in game, this includes 0.5 games (faux squeals  creating an improved version of the previous installment, with the notable exception of a few, e.g. GTA: San Andreas, these aren't full retail price games but overpriced add-ons, a particularly good example of these are Assassins Creed: Brotherhood & Revelations or Halo: ODST & Reach) and using your popular characters/personalities in cheap microwave games (games like the terrible Sonic Freeriders spring to mind or the "Clive Barker's...." formula where successful creative people from other industries front a weak game, stop this, Tony Hawk started off with some great games, American McGees Alice was brilliant but in general knock this off). This goes double for film/tv/comicbook game tie ins, with the notable exceptions of the Batman Arkham series, Telltale's The Walking Dead & Back to the future most are just terrible half-assed cash cows.
3. Thou shalt not release incomplete games
• Your game on release should be a complete product, if you have ideas for additional content within 6 months of release of a game it should be part of the initial release. Particularly nasty examples is the From Ashes dlc for Mass Effect 3 and the "true ending" for Asura's Wrath.  Dlc has it's place but it should not be a bribe to make people pre-order before they have a chance to know the quality of your product. A special mention to Capcom should be noted as they manage to comit both 2 and 3 at the same time, releasing complete retail games in order to add a couple of dlc characters and repair broken functions in the previous installments (in the case of Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom within 6 months).  Also see yesterday's blog regarding Activision.
4. Thy customer is thy friend and is to be trusted
• Piracy is of course the enemy of developers profit from a game but treating your customers with nothing but suspicion damages the relationship, practices like limiting the number of times a game can installed on a computer, forcing a computer or console to be permanently online in order to play offline content do nothing but damage the enjoyment of the player.  I for one will never forget the time I installed Dead Space on my PC, then for a reason of OS issue I needed to reformat so I installed again, when I bought a new machine that officially locked my disk and the brand new product became officially unusable 
5. Thou shalt not utilise false pretences of security to profiteer 
• Online passes, digital games, terms of service have all been promoted of sensible and appropriate ways to protect the security and ease of access of gamers but ultimately they all come down the the same thing, profit. Online passes, instead of preventing illegal pirating of games are in effect a tax of second hand games, digital games at release cost up to 25% more than games sold on disk, terms of service seem to become more and more about preventing litigation against the developer or making obscene abuses of power (such as Diablo III, where you agree that you do not own your game, you are simply allowed to hold a licence for as long as Blizzard want to keep you connecting to your server which is required to play even offline).  
6. Honour thy customer
• Some game developers are increasingly acting like rockstars, treating their customers like the worms they are, well let me just make this clear, you aren't the Ramones, you are game coding geeks, your veneration comes from your customers and every time you denegrate your customer base you lose respect and you risk being taken at face value, as an asshole who doesn't deserve attention or our money.  Your product isn't perfect and not everybody will like it, this can come in the form of mild criticism to genuine feelings of being cheated either through a game bring fundamentally broken, falsely advertised or being gouged for too much profit.  These people aren't "crying" they aren't "radical gamers" or "haters" or "babies" they don't deserve banning from your forums, or even from the games they paid for.  They are your customers, you listen to their comments, no matter how unfair you think they are, consider them, maybe act on them or maybe tell them why you won't but in a buyers market they are to be listened to 
7. Thou shalt not steal
• This one is pretty much exclusively aimed at EA, be it the dlc that was charged and not delivered, with no refunds offered or using Origin software as spyware to check third party software and even personal documents. Stop it, just stop it, that is all
8. Thou shalt not plagiarise your peers
• When a new game comes along that truly breaks boundaries, either in style, gameplay or setting and it does well you can set your watch for a huge number of games to pop up that clearly cashes in on this.  I am not talking about being influenced buy your peers or developers evolving their own formula, these are perfectly natural and lead to evolution of the industry. I am talking about every second third person action game since God of War containing huge QTE sequences, the huge number of shooters that took the formula of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare that practically every FPS is a tedious propaganda video directed by a second rate Micheal Bay, or even, God help us all, beat games with peripheries  Even if some of these games are decent in their own right for the God of War formula notable games like X-men Origins: Wolverine and Dante's Inferno but these are few and far between in a sea of "me too" trash.
9. Thou shalt not seek to bribe reviewers to sell your product
• Reviewers traditionally serve a vital role for the consumer, filtering out the dross and offering heart felt recommendations that can be trusted by gamers and non-gamers alike in order to make informed purchases.  It is hard not to spot the way that clear bias is being demonstrated and in situations where some reviewers have refused to give up their integrity being forced to give up their jobs (just look up Jeff Gerstmann if you don't believe me).
10. Thou shalt not fall back to annual instalments
• There is a particular kind of game on the market that lends itself to annual updates, sporting games, online shooters etc but with games like the WWE franchise, licenced EA game sport sims and COD, where in general the upgrade to the game is somewhere between negligible to nothing. All that is needed is a series of updates to amend rosters/maps perhaps patches for improved textures, fell free to charge an annual subscription but a full retail price for essentially the same shit every year plus huge amounts of dlc that is version specific so becomes obsolete every 12 months.  If you have a massive game changing engine/physics upgrade by all means release a new product but this method of cashing in on the christmas present market is a terrible practice.

AnarchistRant - Activision thinks you are morons

Supprised to see the excitement surrounding the anouncement from Activision that Call of Duty Elite will now be free, previously in the UK this was £34.99 or $49.99.  In the couple of hours after the anouncement was made a quick google search showed almost 3 million hits, every one I have seen is praising their brave model of giving such a premium service away to their customers for nothing. 

As a footnote to this wonderful giveaway there were a further 2 anouncements with regards to their new release Black Ops 2.  Aparently having an Elite account no longer gives you access to the multiplayer maps in monthly installments, these are however available by purchasing a season pass!  Yes you read that right, they took away what was worth paying for Elite, offered the remains for you for free and instead charge you a season pass for the previously included DLC map packs for £34.99 or $50.  Unless you are a goldfish you would recognise those numbers as familiar because they are the same as the Elite subscription charge!

What this means is that in essence you are paying twice for your game, once for the game and again for anything beyond the bare bones maps.  Each year Activision have increased the amount and the cost of the DLC for this anual game, meaning you are paying through the nose for a few more maps that in essence become obsolete when the new installement and then you pay for a new game and new maps.  I say new maps, more often than not a fair number of these "new" maps are old maps that you got for free in earlier games.

Frankly Black Ops 2 is the first one in the series since World at War I won't be picking up on day one (or possibly ever) due to the compounded factors of paying Oliver North (if that doesn't make you spit teeth look him up) to promote the product and as I don't play multiplayer much (mostly prefering a game's narative to social online play) so the increasingly obsessive online community (split, as it is, mostly between children and people in their 30s/40s) that make any online play after week one pointless because the people who play it 24/7 gank your ass three seconds after spawning (don't even talk to me about the MW3 spawn camping!), one of my little brothers managed to clock up 38 days in online play in one year of MW2. 

I might have still invested my money in the latest installment, play the single player campaign then spend 20 hours or so over the next year in online play but this is really more than I can stomach, I am not sure what pisses me off more, the fact that Activision thought they could con everyone with such an obvious scam or that it actually seems to be working.