Shannow said:
Davaris said:
Shannow said:
And here we're back at the specifics which started the whole argument and indicate that a significant portion of their fans/customers/potential customers for DA2 want to be able to chose their race (and backround) as they could in DA:O instead of having it shoved down their throats.
What is it with you guys and circles.
Where's your market research to prove that statement? Big companies do market research before all of their ventures, because they have shareholders to answer to.
All that has happened, is they believe they have found a more profitable market and they've thrown the old one under a bus. To these people you are not a person or a fan, you are just a potential income source. If they find a more profitable one, they'll change their products accordingly.
I'm not saying I like it, but that's capitalism.
See, that's much better. Now you're not simply going around in circles trying to argue something that has already been covered. Now you're following the logical tangent:
Does a majority of potential customers really prefer customization over non-customization? And how can "we" determine an answer? How can Bio determine an answer?
The rest of your post is pretty much inane summation of stuff we already mentioned or stuff that's so obvious nobody bothered before you.
A few points though:
Bio won't do market research on every little design feature. Market research is not an accurate science and costs money and they can simply use past experience.
As whorish as Bioware and industry itself is seen, they still have stuff
they want to do. That's how niches come into existence. Otherwise everybody would be trying to do the same thing at the same time.
Bio know from experience that both a customizable backround and a cinematic experience can sell.
People, even big companies are far from infallible, the financial crisis should have given you a hint.
People have this weird assumption of corporate infallibility. Companies simply do not have market research available for every choice they're making. What's more, they're ultimately staffed and run by PEOPLE. People can make stupid decisions. Companies do put out products because of an executive's whim, they do drill deep sea oil reservoirs without a plan in te event of a spill, they skimp on necessary safety precautions, and they occasionally make shit that nobody wants to buy.
Market research is a lot harder than what most people think - it isn't just about getting a whole bunch of surveys done. You need to make sure that you've got a representative sample - and that is very fucking hard, especially if you don't already have solid and up to date data on who your customers are (again, not easy to get with any reliability - some demographics are more likely to send in their customer satisfaction forms than others, skewing the percentages badly).
Who do you think has the more competent management when it comes to marketing and market research - Bioware...or Coca-FUCKING-Cola? Or more precisely, Coca-cola Amatil. Because coca-cola has made enough marketing fuckups to fill uni courses, and they're one of the 'greats' at marketing - most companies are worse. The most famous, of course, is New Coke. People look back at that and laugh, thinking 'what were they thinking?'. I'll tell you what they were thinking: Pepsi was beating them in sales and popularity, pepsi was kicking their ass in blind taste tests, then Coke developed 'New Coke' and new coke thoroughly smashed both old coke and pepsi in blind taste tests. And you can bet that if any company ever did mass market research, coke's market research spending on that decision would have been enormous. Some of the biggest blind taste testing and preference surveys in the history of marketing. And new coke was clearly the most popular tasting drink. Should have been a sure winner, right?
What Coke didn't take into account was the way that market research can mislead. Sure, most folks preferred new coke. But out of those, most of them were either pepsi drinkers or didn't buy much coke. Say that 60% prefer new coke. But 90% of that 60% are either Pepsi fans or hardly ever buy cola. That means that out of Coke's own fans, most prefer old coke to new coke. They probably should have worked that out. But how could they have known what proportion would stop buying coke altogether if new coke replaced old? Or what proportion would switch from Pepsi to new coke if given the chance?
The info isn't magically there - sometimes it just doesn't matter how much cash a company can spend, the data isn't available, or it's only available in a massively skewed form (worse than having no data). Then you get limited time and unlimited stupidity - plenty of major business decisions are made by an unresearched and poorly informed vote.
I read a few years ago that only about 1/3 of the board members of the top 100 public companies have university degrees (granted, the source was the local financial newspaper, not Time magazine or anything, so take that with a few grains of salt). Doesn't mean they aren't intelligent, but it does tell you something about the basis for their selection. Very few are selected because of industry expertise. Entertainment industries are notorious for being the worst in that regard - decisions on games and movies are made by folks who made their money in coal mining and mobile phones. Maybe a couple of board members oversaw the publishing of a software for publising legal documents a few years back, and they'll be seen as the industry expert voices on the board.
I think the corporate infallibility notion is popular amongst folk who have never worked in a corporate environment and don't know many people who do. Once you've stripped out the notion of some mysteriously competent super-exec, and replaced it with someone with similar expertise to yourself or folks you play cards with, you get a lot less confident. Fuck, just follow the stock market, or read the business news on a regular basis. - it won't take long for you to find plenty of mindbogglingly stupid decisions. During my time as a lawyer I even found the public sector to be more competently managed than large corporate. Hell, in my state the last few heads of healthcare have been folks who the private sector thought of as infallible super-execs, and they crashed and burnt with news headlines of their incompetence within a year each of no longer having the commercial confidentiality of private business to hide their screwups.
Doesn't mean they're all morons either - by and large folks get to be successful in the corporate world because they're good at what they do (inherited wealth tends to stick to investment rather than running a business). But don't go assuming that every decision is perfectly researched and thought out. Especially when they're playing with shareholders' money rather than their own.
), he might admire him for producing that work in a commercial environment. Heck, I can respect folks that manage to get good work put into bad games - they're fighting the good fight and I can appreciate that. But being a fan of the company itself is bizarre - regardless of whether any indvidual employee wants to make good games, the company as a whole is there to sell. Anything good made by the individuals who comprise the company is work done in spite of their setting, not because of it.
about it.
