The No-Buy List - Why Gamers Should Exercise the Vote of the Wallet More Often

There’s plenty wrong with gaming. Always has, always will be. There never is such a thing as perfection. But especially when you look at the industry side of things, beyond the glamor, the artwork and developer diaries, things start to look garish. Horrible even.

Which is not to say that it’s any better in any other part of the entertainment industry. Movies have their studios doing all kinds of more or less criminal things to maximize profits–be it investing only in creatively bankrupt but financially safe (well, relatively) franchises, or the system of creating companies to produce a movie, have them go bankrupt and keep the profits for the studio. Or take the ludicrous price hike for 3D movies which is another way to milk the customer as much as possible.

Every part of big entertainment has dirty laundry and shady practices. No exceptions. And in gaming things are getting uglier—and not only with the buyouts of developers who then get scattered across a whole publisher’s other studios.

One practice that has come into widespread use in the very recent past is my personal favorite, and that’s the magical world of downloadable content (DLC). In the happy days of old—yes now THAT part starts—we could go into a game store and buy a game. And that was it. Maybe, a year or so later, an expansion pack to that game was released. And that was that.

Downloadable content is starting to really mess things up.

Nowadays, if you want to make sure you have the absolute best, all inclusive edition of a game that really features everything, every mission, every costume, skin, character, everything—in other words the whole complete game—you have to probably buy several copies at several places.

Downloadable content is starting to really mess things up. There’s pre-order bonus DLC. Which sometimes is just a cool hat, which is fine by me mostly, and which is sometimes an extra character or even an extra mission. Which for all intents and purposes is NOT fine.

Forerunner of this whole cascade of consumer trickery is Electronic Arts. They spearheaded this with their infamous “project 10$”, which added DLC content to every game (or rather, removed content from every game and put it up as DLC) as day 1 activation with a code card included with the actual game disc. This was initially to curb used game sales, since once that day 1 DLC was activated, it could no longer be transferred and sold. The game thereby lost value when begin re-sold/bought used, since the buyer of the used game then would have to pay 10$ for the DLC the first customer got for “free”.

Then last year, EA took things up a notch, when they announced a bunch of DLC addons as pre-order exclusives for Dragon Age 2. The catch? Most of the stuff was only available to those people pre-ordering the game three months in advance.

At that moment I decided not to buy that game. And that’s really the only thing we can do. The publishers —and especially EA it seems—pull of ever more jarring practices regarding extra downloadable content for their games. But EA is not alone.

There are elaborate tables available online to figure out, which DLC comes with which retailer version of Rocksteady’s latest Batman game. It’s a huge mess.

There are elaborate tables available online to figure out, which DLC comes with which retailer version of Rocksteady’s latest Batman game. It’s a huge mess. Luckily, these DLCs are mostly just costumes and small addons. But still it’s a crazy affair. It seems every retailer in every country has another exclusive costume, with some costumes not even available in specific regions—well unless for paid download that is.

It's a practice that has to stop. It's only a matter of time before GameStop becomes the only retailer to have their version of Mortal Kombat to include Scorpion as a playable character. And it is in our hands to stop them.

The problem is, in order to do that, we will have to skip some games. Or even worse—buy them used. Or play them as rentals. As long as the publishers don’t get our money, we’ll be fine. We’ll have made our statement.

I for one firmly believe in voting with my wallet. Which is why I will vote firmly against Mass Effect 3 and Kingdoms of Amalor. Which is why both of these games are officially on my “no-buy” list. Which is a list of games that would potentially interest me, but which I will not buy due to one reason or the other.

I urge you to do the same. Not necessarily with these games (well actually, yes with these games). But we need to send a signal that we as the consumer base will not let any bullshit pass, slap our flippers together, oink and wait for the next stinking fish. We have to be better than that. Even if it means that we may miss out on something we love. Consider it a sacrifice for the greater good, and more importantly, don’t be one of those people crying boycott and then get caught playing the game anyway on release day.