The Backhand of Pachter
Many gamers hate Michael Pachter. It seems whenever there’s some high-level analysis that needs doin’, there’s a quote from Pachter. A lot of times he can be pretty brutal in his assessments, statements, or predictions, and if there’s one thing that many gamers don’t take kindly to, it’s being told anything contrary to their rosy opinions on gaming. The problem is, Pachter doesn’t talk to gamers, he talks about gaming, and he doesn’t talk to gamers, he talks to investors. It’s his job to tell people outside the gaming industry who want to put their money into the gaming industry where to put that money…or where not to put that money. Investors aren’t there to just hand out freebies, after all. They want to know where they can put their money so that it makes them even more money, and where not to put it where it won’t lose them any money. That’s Pachter’s job: to analyze not only the past and current financial numbers in the industry, but to extrapolate where the industry is going (prognostication is never an exact science). And like it or not, it’s also Pachter’s job to comment on the state of the consumers within the industry. It’s the consumer’s behavior that’s the real driver of industry performance. Hardware and software are neutral; opinions and spending habits are not.
Many gamers will still only attach to controversial statements, however, instead of the man’s actual task.
When one is on the ground and surrounded by…things…it’s difficult to have perspective. I remember when I was in New York City for the first time, I had no idea how big the Empire State Building really was. It just kind of tapered off into the sky. But when one takes a real sky-eye view of the landscape, things become clearer. This is the Achilles Heel of all opinions: the closer one is to the subject matter, the less clearly the person can see the forest for the trees. In the case of Pachter’s latest statements, I’m certain that there are many gamers who will quickly agree that dubbing EA “The Word Company In America” is a no-brainer, mainly because of the Mass Effect 3 dust-up, but the same crowd will take umbrage with Pacheter’s calling them out as “whiners”, or his deflection of the Worst Company label for EA.
I agree with what Pachter says, because it’s his job to represent investment opportunities to non-gamer Moneybags. He needs to soften the focus on EA and to bring to light the bad behavior of the consumers that have driven the award to EA’s doorstep. It’s not that EA is a “bad company” – certainly not when compared to companies that have wrecked world economics. It’s that this “vocal minority” has raised a stink out of all proportion to the size of their numbers…why, exactly? Because they didn’t like the product they bought? Who hasn’t bought a product they were less than happy with? I know I have, and my response is either to return it, or if that is not possible, to shrug and to try not to make the same mistake again. Quietly. But some will say that the outrage over ME3 actually “did some good”. I disagree:
“Unfortunately, appeasing the whiners here will only encourage fans to be even more vocal next time, so the lingering issue is that gamers will feel even more entitled and empowered than they have in the past, and will be even more demanding about changes to future games.”
BioWare is doing angry ME3 players a solid by “fixing” something which technically doesn’t need to be fixed, but is more about giving people what they want. I agree with Pachter’s assessment that this is a bad precedent. No novels are written by consensus. No movies are created by consensus. Therefor, no games should be created – or altered – by consensus. What if one day a game is released that you’re perfectly happy with (or ambivalent about), but which some “vocal minority” dislikes? What if the company changes the game out from under you to keep those people quiet? Your game just got re-written by a committee of people that you might not agree with, and was done specifically to shut them up. You can’t please all of the people all of the time, and considering the tendency of the gaming community to splinter along some very fine lines, I think that any company that back peddles on it’s decisions is training consumers that if they bitch, they win. It really doesn’t matter that the ME3 “fix” will be optional; that the company bowed to the pressure, and still earned the Worst Company award is a tea-bagging from the community.
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