Another day, another mass shooting in the States. Thoughts and prayers are tweeted, hearts go out to those affected and pundits get busy figuring out how something so “shocking” could happen. It doesn’t take long before we end up with the usual suspects: Mental illness, lack of security and video games.
2013 saw a defining split in the gaming community. However noble the original intentions may have been, the senseless hate, vitriol, and cruelty that followed still linger around to this day, and we’ve seen the worst of it come out when the industry lost a great friend last year.
We’ve all heard it before: “Game developers should innovate.” – and when something finally changes, Gamers don’t like it. What gives?
I don’t want to get lost in semantics – because this title is already pretentious enough as it is – but “innovation” has become a blanket term used by people who are unable to name their actual complaint, and you should never take it at face value.
I’ve always thought of myself as an ambitious person, and I consider that to be one of my better traits. But my narrow interpretation of the word has made me burn bridges, and this post is about the lessons I had to learn the hard way.
For the uninitiated, MTX stands for microtransactions which have become a topic of somewhat heated discussion over the past few years. The release of Battlefront 2, generally considered the tipping point, sparked a large amount of consumer backlash prompting EA to backpedal on their in-game monetization. In this post, I’d like to present my personal view on the matter and hopefully clarify some misconceptions.
