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I found this interesting.
I figured maybe somebody else around here would think it was interesting as well.
http://toucharcade.com/2014/11/12/one-star-reviews-flood-monument-valley-following-paid-expansion-release/
http://toucharcade.com/2014/11/12/one-star-reviews-flood-monument-valley-following-paid-expansion-release/
Post edited by spinnytop on
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Then again, this is what happens when someone spends a greater part of the week sifting through research papers, you begin to question the bias of most things and possible ulterior motives. In any case, people are free to spend money however and make their irritation with a product known. I'm not sure what the guy is on about. Articles like that don't really help in the long run in regards to a neutral observer's (hello!) view of the game since it now makes me question the hell out of the reviews that are on there to begin with. It makes me wonder if other things and their reviews are artificially inflated because someone went to bat for someone in a "news" article. :rolleyes:
Maybe the expansion actually does suck? Just because one thing is good, doesn't mean everything made by the same people is gold. I mean, Robert Heinlein wrote The Rolling Stones and "All You Zombies -". He also wrote For Us, the Living and To Sail Beyond the Sunset. Everybody stumbles sometimes.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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cheap people are usually more vocal, they attempt to pay with their complaints
I dunno, a Twitter post by the developers about how everyone switched to one-star reviews is proof enough that it happened.
I haven't played the game but it looks beautiful, won a design award, and just based off of the screenshots, I want to play it.
I find this doubtful. Usually when people rate the game, they say why they're rating it what they are. Not all do, but I'm guessing a lot did.
The following review of the game on iTunes is basically what my first reaction was to this article:
It's all, "this one is free , so everything should be free." Wonder how many of those people would like to go to work and then get told.
Well he's volunteering, so you lot aren't getting paid either.
You want a reference, no problem . since you insisted on being paid, you get a bad one.
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That doesn't fly in a news article ("news"), especially when the developers stand to gain from people believing them. They are free to comment but the article should have made a greater effort to illustrate what they were taking about. I mean, the article is slanted enough as it is. Even if this were a straight-forward blog, the article is viewing a possible event (the low rating) and assigning causation without exploring whether this is indeed really the case or isolated incidents or the devs are lying to galvanize their user base (the devs stand to benefit), and does little to discuss the validity of these people's concerns(no discussion on whether or not people were justified or not in rating things as they did). To my latter point, if anything, the article mocks, chides, and slams said people but does little to explain why these people are wrong, unjustified, immoral, or anything else for that matter. In short, all I see is some guy tossing a hissy fit that people dislike something he likes and is trying to galvanize people into action. And while he is free to do that, that alone calls into question the validity of much of what he says and thus makes it hard for me (and I imagine some other people) to take anything said in the article with any hint of seriousness. It's an article to be taken with a boatload of salt.
In many ways, I'm also tired of people telling consumers how to spend their money and then getting mad at them when the consumer decides to spend their money as they see fit. I'm tired of people unnecessarily disrespecting consumers.
That's nice. I don't. It looks mediocre at best and this article in conjunction with everything else seems shady as hell. I feel very unsettled by this and this article did very little to help its case.
This honestly reminds me of Vibora Bay. Personally, this is why I commented on this thread.
Your position really relies on a lot of assumptions.
As opposed to the flip side of things. The article is very obviously biased and does a poor job presenting information and forces me to assume they are honest and not biased as well as the developer being unbiased and honest for anything they say to really work. I'd say there's quite a bit of assumptions right there. Some I'm amazed anyone would feel okay making given the nature of the article.
It's sad when being critical of information and its presentation is passed off as being too assumptive without a hint of irony. :rolleyes:
Being critical of something and assuming it's all BS is not really the same thing.
Read the reviews on iTunes, many of the 1-star reviews are complaining about paid levels. (It seems a lot of the 1-star reviews that complained about that have reconsidered and changed their reviews.)
Here, how about you read this article: http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/gaming/news/a609873/users-react-negatively-to-launch-of-monument-valleys-paid-dlc.html
Same subject, no bias. Now do you believe it's not just someone making a stink about a friend's game? Try also checking out their Twitter stream. Read the reviews. Look up some more articles on it, apparently this situation rocked the boat a little bit. Still require more proof?
Hyperbole (or more appropriately BS) if I ever saw one. Being concerned about bias in an article presented with obvious bias is not BS. But I'm sure its only critical if it fits your definition. That said I simply said I wonder. I questioned what I was seeing. Apparently that's offensive to some people. Maybe I should just listen and believe everything being presented to me. Or check with you before I decide to question something. My word. :rolleyes:
Then the article should present examples of the reviews, rather than expecting us to take their word for it BECAUSE THEY ALREADY SHOWED THEMSELVES TO BE BIASED. They like the game, both the author there and another person on his staff, and now are brow-beating consumers for disliking an aspect of the game/marketing of the game. They would be better off providing examples of some reviews and letting the readers decide for themselves whether or not consumers are justified in rating the game as they see fit. Instead we're getting second-hand info from the company. And while we can go look and find some reviews, the article attempts to color these reviews rather than letting people decide for themselves.
There is bias, just not a lot. It's better presented. It reads less like an OpEd like the first article but still suffers from problem. Much of the article is presenting the information from one point of view, taking a company's assessment of the situation and their view of the consumers as canon as opposed to showing examples that may run counter or better illustrate these concerns. The concerns of numerous consumers being condensed to second-hand blurbs. Imagine the ruckus that would cause if that happened here. But I give them credit for pulling back on brow-beating and so on.
What makes you think I did not look at those things before hand? Why do you think I am carrying on about bias and so forth if a number of the articles I came across made the same mistake? Make the same mistake on other issues and other games? When people act like this with even important things like research papers? That said, why does it bother you that someone wants a more balanced or factual presentation of information? Does that offend you? I'm not so foolish to think these things don't exist and see nothing wrong with a bit of healthy skepticism when presented with a heavily biased article that can be written with considerable less bias.
I haven't played the game, but $2 for that seems like a very reasonable deal. I've seen DLC offers that don't add much to the game but are set a price that doesn't seem to justify the amount of content offered.
The combined pice of the base game + DLC amounts to $6. That's pretty cheap compared to a whole lot of other paid-for games.
I'm talking about the actual situation, not the article. Yeah, the article is biased; they made no attempt to hide that. I didn't make any arguments about it either. When I replied to you initially, I was talking about how the situation itself seems legitimate.
You said, in so many words, that you won't take the article seriously because it seems dubious, and I simply said that the developer post itself adds validity to the claims of this event. If the developer's claims were false, I think that's the part that would make the news; "Sheepish Developer Takes Back Post About Players Not Wanting to Pay for their DLC."
Remember how you said it's "news" and not actual news? You're completely right in that aspect. It's a blog, not news. I'm not defending the article in any way, but expecting a blogger to do a lot of legwork for you is a bit silly. I personally don't take any bloggers' words for anything other than an opinion. I form my own opinions on their subjects, based on my own findings.
If you were to write the article, how would you write it, then? You've done your legwork, you know the situation is legitimate, and apparently worth writing about (it obviously got some clicks, yeah?), so now that you know the ins and outs of it, what examples that run counter or better illustrate the situation would you use?
If you did indeed do those things, then why are you arguing with me? As I said before, I'm talking about the situation, not the article. Yet you still seem to doubt the authenticity of the article based on a bit of bias, based on the fact that you're still providing argument to a situation that seems completely legitimate.
Not sure why you're coming to this conclusion about me. I'm providing discussion (it's pretty much the entire purpose of a forum). I'm sure you've had discussions with people who did not share your opinion, and you provided your own without feeling bothered or offended. Why do you keep coming back to this?
And I'm referring to the article mostly, which is why I keep referring to the presentation of the information in the original article. It casts doubt on a situation and doesn't help the article (and the people writing it). When I was done reading it, it made me wonder if he was pissy that people disliked something he liked or something dubious occurred. In the end, the main issue was how poorly done the article was, which is something I referred to in each post I made in this thread.
I don't take the article seriously because it's obviously biased and presented the information in what appears to be a biased manner, even if it was tagged as news. My issue with using the devs words bothered me because they're pulling from one source and not even bothering to show the other, expecting us the reader to believe them on good faith. It's kind of hard to do that when each party, that is, the devs and the article author stand to gain from presenting information with their own spin. It doesn't mean they are necessarily working together, but the devs could be blowing things out of proportion. The issue is, that possibility is the reason why the author should have made a better effort explore the issue as opposed to brow-beating the consumers and going along with what the dev said. In other words, they're free to trust the dev but they should verify that really is the issue, and the article gave little indication that such was done. In that case then, presenting the info upfront would balance things out as would not brow-beating consumers and obviously taking a side.
Oh dear, this excuse. If someone is going to present info about something, they should make an effort to present it well or properly. I don't think there is anything silly in that regard. That said though, the apparent lack of such is why I was critical of this article in the first place and regarded it with a jaundiced eye. It's like if someone were cooking something and they had no salt. If it tastes bad due to not having salt, I'd say it tastes bad to not having salt. There's no salt in the house, yes, but that's why it tastes bad.
Good for you. I do the same.
I actually covered this in some of my previous posts, addressing the language and such. The second article is better, but was bare bones and we only got to hear from the dev, via tweets. It's a shallow investigation. One would say yes, that is to be expected and that may be true, but it does not change the fact that it is a shallow investigation. I can't call a shallow investigation a good investigation because it is still a shallow investigation.
I feel like you grabbed one sentence in all the posts I made and ran away with the wrong impression. I said that the biased nature of the article can make one wonder and part of the reason why such was a problem. I said this in my first post and I'm pretty sure I repeated myself over and over and over again. My issue was with the article and its presentation. PRESENTATION. This is why I keep commenting on bias and so forth. That said, concerning the situation, I can't up and accept the word of a company who looks to gain from presenting a narrative that favors them without wondering if this is truly the case. The issue I had with various articles was that many did not look deeper than the dev's tweets and comments. And this is apparent in the presentation of the information. It makes no sense to only interview one source when that source can benefit from the information/narrative they are presenting. I just can't bring myself to accept the dev's word as law, not because I'm weird or because I think the devs are horrible people but because at the end of the day, their a business, a small one, so anything they say that pertains to their bottom line has to be viewed with a healthy amount of suspicion. This applies to any business, not just these guys. I don't think it is a good practice to take them on their word or assume it is law. Even on an internal issue. The first article does no one any favors other than galvanizing less critical people or people who are fans of this game to begin with. But I guess that is the whole point.
Because the presentation of the information has been my main point. Questioning the depth of investigation concerning the issue was a secondary concern. As I said in my first post, maybe it is due to combing through a ton of research papers that has left me in a more critical "mood" concerning things, but I feel like the investigation done on this issue was rather shallow. I can understand why this is but, as far as the first article, laying on the brow-beating was unnecessary and makes an already biased article seem like some kind of infomercial. This helps no one because it just makes it look like something shady is going on, even if there isn't or makes the author look like a bum-rustled dude mad that people disliked something he liked. Whether this is indeed the case or not, it takes away from the article since he does make some valid points, especially near the end.
Wow, I say that I'm not defending the article in any way, and you dismiss it as an excuse.
I'm not going to bother replying to the rest of your posts because I'm clearly commenting on the situation and you are only commenting on the presentation of the blog post. You posted about the representation of the facts in the article. I posted about the legitimacy of the facts regarding the situation. You argued with me based on your view of the representation of the article, which is of no concern to the opinion I posted. There's a clear disconnect, so our discussion is over, especially since part of your discussion involves assumptions about how bothered and offended I am about it.
:biggrin:
Well yes, that was my original point.
Goodness gracious. Come now, that was an obviously provocative and somewhat fun statement made to force you to clarify your point in regards to what I had been talking about...in each post....in this thread.......(ellipses are fun).
But yeah, there's no real point in continued discussion. I'm glad we agree it was a pretty bad article.
Don't stroke your ego too hard, you might break it.
The whole idea of giving a negative review for a product because you like it sufficiently that you want access to subsequent releases but are not willing to pay for them is alien to me. I avoid using the whole, "entitlement," argument generally because I feel that it is used inaccurately all too often. Here it seems appropriate.
If you don't want to buy something, don't. Simple enough. Badmouthing something that you actually like or want for yourself in order to pressure the company into giving it to you for free is awful.
Oh, and the article....
Very obviously biased, read it as more of a forum post by a fan than anything else.
'Caine, miss you bud. Fly high.
Too many people don't consider the details, that expanding on content is work, and that work needs to be paid for. Considering the outcome (that many people revised their ratings) I think it's more ignorance than self-entitlement.
I saw it as the same argument as when people claim that "free" games are a scam because you "need" to purchase premium currency in order to get everything or just get everything and/or get it all faster. They don't realize how quickly a company can go bankrupt by supporting a free game full-time and expecting zero back in exchange for their work.
I read some reviews that mentioned how other developers release free content for paid games, and my first thought was Angry Birds, but even they pad their paid games with optional in-app purchases (in addition to having a runaway success that buried them in a mountain of cash, anyway).
The point the article is making is that there are people out there who will get upset and give bad reviews to something because they're expected to pay for it. This is not unique to the game mentioned in the article either, this happens to other games as well (hint hint). In this situation, the thing they're being expected to pay for is a thing for which they will already have a good idea what quality level they can expect.
The customer in question enjoyed the initial game, which is why they even care that the expansion is something they have to pay for (if they hated the game, why would they care?).
These customers then rated the expansion negatively because they have to pay for it (stating so in their review, that's why this whole thing is an issue, they directly stated that they are 1-starring it because it has a cost). Essentially they are saying, "Yes, I enjoy your work, I enjoy what you have produced, but I am not willing to support you so that you can create more of it".
More customers nowadays are too focused on "How dare they expect me to pay my money", and we're seeing more and more examples of people completely ignoring the fact that the people creating these bits of entertainment also need to pay for things. They're not some big money hungry corporation. They're an individual or a small group of individuals who are trying to be game developers full time - the only thing they're hungry for is food.
This "how dare they" attitude is currently killing off the indie games market. These very same customers are helping to destroy the thing they are getting enjoyment out of.
Too many people now see "corporate cash grabs" any time someone asks them to take a dollar out of their wallet. The irony is, if this continues, then the only game developers still in business will be the big corporate ones.
People will drop a huge load of cash to buy an iPad. Then they'll be outraged that someone expects them to pay a few bucks to play games on that iPad.
PS - anyone who reads the article I linked and immediately thinks it's some sort of "conspiracy" by the game's developers to make money...
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In any case I don't see this kind of thing getting better. You can only shame and brow-beat people into acting the way you want for so long until it stops being effective and people start ignoring you. Games and their echochambers instead of actual communities lol. The article is biased but like I said before, I do agree with many of the points. I just understand where the other side is coming from with this issue and see little effort or indication that people on the other side of that either understand or are seeking to understand where they are coming from. Such a disconnect is not a good thing and helps no one.
This case with Monument Valley is entirely different. A flat payment of $4 is all that's needed to play the game's base content, not a recurring monthly payment of $15. The DLC costing $2 that, as described in the articles, doubles the amount of game content with 8 new chapters. Not exactly comparable to Vibora Pay.
In any case, $2 for the kind of content being described is dirt cheap. There are game companies out there that charge you 5 - 10 bucks for new weapons without adding any kind of new playable content. The one-star reviews complaining about having to spend $2 for what they would get really come off as whiny and self-entitlted.
Doing a little research I looked up full gameplay videos. The base game has 10 chapters (levels) and it takes an hour to complete 9 of them and roughly 20 mins for the last one. Keep in mind that it's a puzzle game and the person doing the playthrough looks like they've already mastered the game beforehand. I'd imagine anyone during their first playthrough would take longer times to figure out each level. $2 is for eight more levels seems like a steal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hltcmGAW0Kg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hltcmGAW0Kg
It's funny, people get so used to free apps and $1 apps, that anything more is seen as ridiculous. It happened to me. I gladly buy console games on launch day for 60 bucks, but an app comes out that's like 3 bucks, and WHOA STOP THE PRESSES. I realized how absolutely stupid I was being. The problem is that Apple set a standard of games for a buck* that anything more seems outrageous. Going even further, there are people who complain about paid games, but then they download freemium games and spend 5 (or much, much more) bucks on premium currency without a second thought.
I'm really glad that so many people revised their reviews after receiving some common sense.
*I could be wrong about it being Apple, but I worked in mobile gaming before the iPhone and App store even existed, and cell phone games were way over a buck.
For all I know it is ignorance rather than self-entitlement but it seems to me that it would need to be an almost obscene level of willful ignorance to not understand that it takes money and people working to produce things.
Indeed.
'Caine, miss you bud. Fly high.
If I go to the movie theater down the street, I can pay 18$ to watch a one and a half hour movie. A non-interactive, one-time, passive experience. (NOTE: It's been years since I actually went to a theater to watch a movie... I wouldn't be surprised if it costs a lot more now).
Going by that standard, a 4$ app should only have to provide 20 minutes worth of entertainment. As AshenSnow pointed out, this one gives an hour and a half if the person playing is some sort of puzzle wiz and just blazes through the levels... likely, it's going to give someone more than an hour and a half.
The 2$ expansion, going by the same standard, should only have to provide 10 minutes of entertainment. Instead it gives the same amount as the base game.
That same person who gave a 1 star review because of a 2$ cost could very well, while posting the review on their 200-300 dollar corporate-produced i-Phone, have been in line at McDonalds about to drop 8$ on a bag full of corporate-produced garbage that will shorten their life, while wearing some ridiculously expensive corporate-produced plain-quality name brand clothing that will wear out in a year, and thinking about how excited they are to get home and play their sixty dollar copy of a corporate produced first person shooter that comes out with a new, slightly different version every year.... and all the while have a smug, satisfied look on their face about how they just "stuck it to those money hungry app developers".
And yes, I'm biased. Hard working game developers > ignorant self-entitled d-bags.
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Yep... it's really all about perspective, and when you figure out how silly you're being, admitting you were looking at things a little sideways.
The 1-star ratings on the game for the current update are pretty low; it shows people have seen that their initial opinions were hasty and not very well thought-out.
Yes. It's just sad that people apparently have to be shamed and brow-beaten into acting like rational intelligent human beings, because apparently their gut instincts tell them to do otherwise. I blame whatever parents razed this generation. And no, there are no typos in that sentence. u3u
PS - why are you up this late... are you making sure we don't get attacked by "hot dogs"? o3o
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
I think by and large it's not just people being irrational, but rather being uneducated. People have expectations. They react when those expectations aren't met. It's not always because they disagree, but because they don't understand. They don't have to be shamed or brow-beaten, just educated. We're most likely talking about casual mobile gamers in this particular instance. Many of those people are 30+ females who have no history in gaming or knowledge of how the gaming industry works. (Mind, I'm not using females in conjunction with ignorance - it's just a very large demographic of the free-to-play casual gaming industry) Everyone's ignorant of something. We can't all pretend to know the ins and outs of everything. I have no idea how math works!
A lot of people are used to the idea that if they pay for something, they should receive the whole package. On the same front, if a game is free, it should be available completely for free, forever. These aren't people who know the culture of gaming, who know how the business works. They're uneducated consumers with an opinion, and in this case I'm very glad that their opinions were, for the most part, turned around by people who gave them the facts. I hope more people react positively to this kind of behavior in the future.
And also, I'm up this late because I know you're up to no good.
The guy was literally going to pirate my friend's one dollar app right in front of him.
On a completely unrelated note, coming to theaters this summer, it's...
And yes I am up to no good... n_n and there's nothing you can do to stop me!
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
You know how they say that you should never ask a girl if she's pregnant? But then there's still some people who don't understand why, and they do so anyway? That might have been one of those people, the kind that don't think much farther than the present. That or he had a complete lack of tact and amazing levels of audacity.
I still put the blame on ignorance. I don't think the guy really considered that he's literally stealing from the guy he's talking to. The same kind of person who complains that free games are a scam because they offer microtransactions.