Who buys bad games?
Paul struggles with his bemusement
Of course, despite all of that the idea that people regularly shell out over £30 based on screenshots and a licence still fills me with as much dread as it does game publishers with glee. There's really no excuse for such folly considering the easy availability of reviews on and offline. That is of course unless you're not really a gamer and you're buying for someone else. Games as presents probably seem like a great idea to the un-initiated out there, an easy buy for the friend or relative who has everything, yet for those of us on the receiving end there's something very scary about being handed a game shaped present by an aging relative that leaves you missing the days when a simple Boots voucher was the height of excitement. Licences and all their sins come into play here too, Granny being far more likely to buy something with that nice Mr Beckham on the front than she will the beefcake marine tooled up to the eyeballs. Younger gamers suffer from this kind of lazy purchasing more than most, partly because the ratio of good to bad children's games is weighted so heavily in favour of the latter and partly because adults seem much more willing to subject their children to bad games than they would themselves. To be fair kids games are also the one area where basing purchasing decisions solely on reviews may not be the ultimate failsafe. When it comes to sorting the wheat from the chaff adult reviewers are perhaps far harder on such titles than a child would be, especially one who's currently obsessed with the licence in question.
Entertaining, for a moment, the potential for reviews being wrong opens up another debate, perhaps not all badly reviewed games are actually bad. Beauty is, after all, in the eye of the beholder and what one person may find game breakingly frustrating may simply be an enjoyably rewarding challenge for another. It's also possible (whisper it) that reviewers as a breed are just a tiny bit more jaded than the rest of the world and love nothing more than laying into a perfectly decent game upon the discovery of a minor flaw or two. Such accusations of whole hearted cynicism may be largely unfair but also probably contain a degree of truth, reviewers play a lot of games and while that may sound like unadulterated fun to most people it's considerably less so when you're forced to spend a similar amount of time plugging through games like Xiaolin Showdown and Ford Street Racing as you would God of War 2. Sure, such tests of endurance may generate a certain pessimism that's prone to creep into our writing, especially when the latest all singing all dancing game arrives claiming to change the very fabric of time and space not to mention bring about world peace and make a cracking cup of tea only for it to turn out to be a dull uninspired mess, but generally I like to think the positive flip side of that is that it makes the fact that some games get great reviews all the more impressive. We're a tough lot to impress so trust us, when we love something its worth playing. Sometimes of course it's possible to read a bad review and still decide a game is for you, if you're a fan of a particular genre or series there may be enough plus points hidden inside to outweigh the negatives. Less experienced gamers may also find reviewers' perceived lack of complexity or originality isn't as crippling to the experience as a more seasoned gamer may, while others will have been so drawn in by the pre-release hype that they'll simply not believe anything negative they read. However, despite these justifications the feeling remains that with triple-A titles appearing regularly on all systems and reviews readily available to tell you the good from the bad there's really no need to waste money even on average games much less terrible ones.
The question of who buys these bad games would be a moot point however if they didn't exist in the first place and for that the developers and publishers need to take a fair chunk of the blame. I'd like to believe not even the most money grabbing of developers sets out to spend what can turn into years of their lives making a bad game, but still they continue appear with alarming frequency. Sometimes things are so bad it's hard to imagine how a game idea made it off the drawing board, but for others there's a depressing sense of an initially good idea gone bad or worse cruelly restricted by pressing release dates. It's those games that are the most tragic, rushed out of the door unpolished rather than risk missing a launch window in order to give them another six months development time to realise their full potential. Other games that may be perfectly decent for the most part are crippled by bugs and glaringly obvious gameplay and camera flaws that you feel really should have been picked up and fixed way before release by any kind of vaguely competent play testing. Such an apparent distain for any kind of meaningful quality control leads you to wonder if someone somewhere along the line with a calculator has realised it's more cost effective to release a large number of under developed below average titles into the marketplace than it is to focus on creating fewer truly groundbreaking titles.
For all the questions and theories raised in this article as to why bad games sell the real truth will always remain a mystery, people will continue to be suckered in by licences and screenshots, poor games will still be bought as presents by unsuspecting friends and relatives and some people will just refuse to believe the negative reviews of a game they've waited ages for. For those amongst us who take the time to read reviews and do their research it won't be a problem, in fact there's an element of preaching to the converted here anyway, if you're reading Play.tm then the chances are you're armed with enough information to avoid these games already. The real tragedy for everyone involved is that while bad games continue to sell and make money the people in charge of the purse strings are under no fiscal pressure to try and stop them getting onto shelves in the first place. With the new generation of consoles promising to push gaming even further into the mainstream, publishers who saturate the market with large quantities of below par titles risk creating a sense of apathy and disappointment amongst those new consumers they so want to embrace that will harm long term profits far more than a smaller more impressive roster of games would ever do.
