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Comment by iamdave | Hacker News Reader

A nasty side effect of consumer-inherent complacency. As long as you keep consumers' appetites satiated just enough for them to want more, this sort of thing by and large will go condoned. People who don't develop Apps on the iPhone didn't care about the crappy developer agreement. People who just log onto Facebook to gossip about Johnny and Chachi didn't care about openGraph. People who only bought Starcraft to build pylons wont care about this.

The casual gamers and casual consumers outnumber power users at least 5:1, and that's what allows these sort of things to perpetuate and continue on the rate that they are.

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It's not casual gamers, it's gamers in general. All of my friends who have bought this game ignore issues with it because "IT'S STARCRAFT II!!!!!!!!". Gamers are the weak, and easy to manipulate, they give in, boycotts aren't effective, and for video games you can forget about having any sort of unified front. Back when I still read reddit's /r/pics there'd be a weekly posting of BOYCOTT MWII steam group of some sort and everyon was playing MWII.

I think that's kind of a woeful generalization. The most vocal members of the population certainly have something like that, but plenty of people who play games (myself included) bought SC2 because they were happy enough with the content and not dissuaded enough by the downsides - I'm sure plenty of other people quietly went about their business, passing it up because of the various issues discussed in this thread.

For most gamers the upside of playing the game overrules the downside all the time. Me? I haven't bought SC2, L4D2 or MW2, because all of them disrespect the platform, and it's users. I want more features than I had in 1995, not less, I want companies to stand by their promises, and I don't want some neutered 1:1 console port, respectively. I also don't want Blizzard controlling the upstream of game content. Bobby Kiotik will want to monetize that, I'm not stupid. There's going to be Starcraft 10$ map packs soon. I refuse to relinquish my rights to companies who have proven that they are untrustworthy, even with entertainment.

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