I don't like writing game reviews. I'm a news guy, comfortable moving within and reporting on the binary conclusions of business in the video game industry. Reviews are emotional. Always have been. With SimCity and Diablo 3 Gold, I think the already tempestuous machine of game reviews in this industry has changed forever, and as a collective we haven't yet determined how to proceed.
Massively Multiplayer Online games have been judged for years by critics separately from the state of their servers and customer service experience. Top tier multiplayer shooters also suffer from server issues at launch, like EA's Battlefield franchise and Activision's Call of Duty. Popular games often have issues carrying the load of a massive launch. Of course, in the case of those shooters, there's still the chips and salsa of the offline single-player experience.
Comparing this to the restaurant industry, the game is the food and the internet-required connection is the table service. Back of the house and front of the house. What we've seen following the launches of Diablo 3 Gold and SimCity are people paying money to walk into the restaurant on opening day and not being served a meal.
In a restaurant there would be immediate and dire consequences for such poor customer service. In the video game industry, there's no shortage of apologists justifying the outcome. Nobody genuflects to poor customer service excuses in a restaurant. Any restaurant review would treat the meal and service as one singular expression of the experience.
In our conversations about always-on internet connections we keep getting caught up in debates about digital rights management (DRM), the idea that people should "just get over it" and similar capitulations that the system can't be beat so we might as well give in. I want to remove all of that from the equation and let's focus on service.Cheap Diablo 3 Gold.