Re: Mass Effect 3 DRM, DLC, and multiplayer
I think corporations just fail at making good games, I blame banks, and corporate structure. Banks you say? Allow me to explain.
Banks and hedge funds make up a substantial portion (if not majority) of the board of every major video game publisher. They pressure the CEO to deliver good earnings every quarter instead of in the long haul, and since they vote on his compensation this pressure carries plenty of weight. As a result the CEO puts budgetary, feature inclusion, and scheduling pressure on developers and subsidiarity studios to deliver mass market games with heavy monetization in a short time frame. Instead of thinking, "If we strip stuff out of the base game and sell it as DLC, it willl hurt sales of the next game in the franchise" they think, "Kaching!".
The success of Valve and Bethesda, both privately held, says much about the state of the industry. It's not that the corporations are inherently evil, or that they don't understand on some level that taking risks and treating your customers well is good business sense. It's that video games are art, and they cannot be designed by a committee of people that are not artists (market researchers, financiers, businessmen) or gamers. When they are, it shows. The only time studios flourish under corporate rule is when the corporation takes a very hands off approach and doesn't "suggest" or "push" for certain things while holding the purse captive.
If a good game comes out of a corporation, it's in spite of the corporate structure; not because of it.
"The argument that “people now have more freedom than ever” is based on the fact that we are allowed to do almost anything we please as long as it has no practical consequences."