44 replies to this topic

[MadcatX]

Appogee, on 03 October 2019 - 08:33 PM, said:

Many businesses around the world have realised that being transparent - ie. open and honest - with their customers, with good news and bad, is the most sustainable business model. Aside from being straight out ethical, it earns loyalty and repeat purchase.

Businesses which try to hide, obfuscate, string customers along with visions they don't intend to fulfil, providing fluffy PR spin instead of honest adult customer engagement, end up with toxic brands and failed business ventures.

PGI's deceptive practices already cost you heavily through the Transverse debacle. It's time to take the higher path.

tl;dr: Disagree with openness and honesty being the most sustainable business model in general because if that were the case, we'd have a lot of businesses go under or be much less profitable then they currently are. Businesses, especially the ones with shareholders, employ very shady practices to keep the price of their products competitive as well as ensuring a rather healthy profit margin or straight up monopoly.


I agree with your take regarding PGI's mistake as well as openness and honesty being of greater importance to smaller companies. Disagree with openness and honesty being the most sustainable business model in general because if that were the case, we'd have a lot of businesses go under or be much less profitable then they currently are. Businesses, especially the ones with shareholders, employ very shady practices to keep the price of their products competitive as well as ensuring a rather healthy profit margin or straight up monopoly. Amazon is not going to give you an honest answer if you ask them how they treat their employees. Retail stores arn't going to tell you that they raise the price of everything to be able to provide items that go on "sale" (JC Penny actually tried being open and honest for a bit... they lost a lot of money). Apple isn't entirely honest regarding how they rip off customers at Genius Bars by claiming to fix problem which either don't exist or will not impact the use of the device. Even some small business that have great reviews on the internet are not going to be quite open about the fact that in more cases that I'd like to admit, they simply created a lot of fake accounts and wrote up their own reviews.

As for all the companies that have had data breaches in the last year alone caused by a hacker(s)... no chance they'll tell you that the breach was preventable if they had invested more in securing their network. Working in IT I know that one first-hand and it pisses me off that companies have a mindset that it costs less to do damage control after a breach then it does to implement industry best-practices that would have prevented them in the first place!

Companies are generally open and honest when government laws force them to be. An open company would not use fine print.

It's only when companies REALLY screw up... and get caught screwing up... that they can start to get a toxic brand. But then they'll just re-brand and most people will be none the wiser.

PGI really screwed up with how they handled informing the customer about the distribution platforms. How many people who'll buy MW5, either on Epic or Steam, will even know that there was an announcement debacle to being with? If MW5 ends up being a good product, how many people will care about PGI's past record and instead want to get their hands on a good MW game? Will it be enough people to put a serious dent in sales? Time will tell regarding that.

Edited by MadcatX, 04 October 2019 - 03:48 AM.

[Anomalocaris]

Openness and honesty, in the corporate world, works on a relative scale. You don't have to be perfectly open and transparent, just noticeably more so than your competitors. Look at Apple. They ganked their older phones whenever new phones were released (cause battery life they say). They have some very anti-competitive practices in their app store. But they are far more open and transparent about stuff than most of their competition, so people see them as being the paragon in their space, even though in reality they're just a little less shady than the rest.

[Karl Streiger]

MadcatX, on 04 October 2019 - 03:47 AM, said:

PGI really screwed up with how they handled informing the customer about the distribution platforms. How many people who'll buy MW5, either on Epic or Steam, will even know that there was an announcement debacle to being with? If MW5 ends up being a good product, how many people will care about PGI's past record and instead want to get their hands on a good MW game? Will it be enough people to put a serious dent in sales? Time will tell regarding that.

Time will tell us that MW5 will be several steps behind the first announcements with hardly acceptable quality.
Why? Because the XO jumped the gun and announced a epic game with the state of the art buss-words
procedural destructable terrain, modding.... this alone would have cost the lion share of time and money and i'm totally convinced given the former features will not work properly or offer any worth.

Some predefined large maps - (ARMA) would have been enough, destruction of objects only if it has impact on the game (fee for destruction, tactics etc.)

[MadcatX]

Karl Streiger, on 05 October 2019 - 12:06 PM, said:

Time will tell us that MW5 will be several steps behind the first announcements with hardly acceptable quality.
Why? Because the XO jumped the gun and announced a epic game with the state of the art buss-words
procedural destructable terrain, modding.... this alone would have cost the lion share of time and money and i'm totally convinced given the former features will not work properly or offer any worth.

Ten years ago I would have agreed with you. Back in the day where you could be mostly confident that a good dev team would churn out quality products and bad dev team would churn out sub-par products. But now... now you can't tell. The three polar opposite examples I always use:

Back in 2011, Star Citizen kickstarter was announced as a single player space sim akin to Wing Commander. The person in charge was none other then the person who created the original Wing Commander series. The kickstarter hit it's goal and then some, many of the original cast members were coming back. Release date of around 2014, there is no way this could go wrong!

It went wrong.

Back in 2016, No Man's Sky came out with a very critical reception. People would have called me crazy if I would have told them that the devs would actually take the time to fix their mess and that, as of today, the game has a 53% approval rating on steam, and that includes all the negative reviews of the game when it first launched.

Also in 2016, we saw Doom (2016). Nobody saw this one coming, especially from the same ID that released Doom 3. But it ended up being a beautiful return-to-form. Also in 2016, Quake Champions was announced. Awesome, ID is back to making great games! Unlike Doom's "very positive" Steam ranking, it's currently sitting at "mixed".

I don't even try to predict the quality of a product based on previous experience anymore.

[FlareUKCS]

Russ, gamers have passed the EA and Activision school of BS, we know BS when we hear it so please dont insult us that way, be honest Epic slapped you with a big wad of cash and you caved.
If yo had simply said PGi will get a load of cash in the deal, most of us would of said... fair enough, its at least honest.

Most of us want to know what is going to happen with MWO, the game we have invested time and cash into, what's going to happen to that ? The player count has decreased so what are you planning to do about that ? What are you doing to make MWO live ? Thats what we want to know.
MW5, cool for single players, I hope it is all they wanted but for me at least I want to know what you are doing about MWO... and I dont want to hear about MWO2, I aint paying for mechs again in the next installment... I aint a EA Fifa player.

Russ, a piece of advice, don't imagine your playerbase as a bunch of idiots, we are more canny that you think.
Be honest, or it will bite you in the arse.