Shake Appeal
Member
This remark, and your whole conversation with Ryaaan14, is interesting to me, and pretty much on the button for the stuff I'm writing my dissertation about. I think in terms of 'transparency', there are a few interrelated issues, and I'd be curious to see how you, or anyone else, feels about them.
The first is to what extent, if any, 343 owe us any sort of explanation or justification of their choices. From the point of view of a developer, there's often a nice dovetail in explaining and marketing, right? In many ways any sort of reveal of a feature or game mechanics is also a happy advertisement for the game, which serves to grow sales. In people like Frankie or David, of course, we are fortunate to have authentic fans who authentically enjoy these games and authentically enjoy talking about them -- which is good for all stakeholders, including Frankie and David -- but is this something they are actually obliged to do for their community? If you put their involvement along a spectrum with other developers, they're pretty far toward 'maximum' already. Now, you can draw a distinction between their involvement here and what they're allowed to say (in accordance with the dictates of Microsoft), and demand that the latter be more expansive, but that's trying to upend the traditional marketing paradigm for a franchise like this, for a product like this.
It's interesting that you mentioned League of Legends, because that's an indie-ish PC success, and that's a platform where these sort of demands are more expected and more accommodated than the traditionally closed console space. That's changing as consoles become more PC-like, of course, but it's still a slow transition under a goliath and highly protective platform-holder like Microsoft.
I think with LoL, or Starcraft, there's also a stronger understanding on the part of all stakeholders that these are games in a very classical sense -- they have rules that need to be available and transparent to players, and these are even shaped by those players because as games depend on players for their very existence. On this view, held by some developers and publishers (the biggest of whom would be Valve and Blizzard), multiplayer videogames are constituted by the people who play them; there would literally be no game if the game were not played. Others still hold to a very traditional understanding: they create the game in an ivory development tower, they disseminate said game to an audience that should feel lucky to receive it, and then they walk away and count the cash. Now, there's obviously a tension and a balance between these views, and it shifts back and forth across time and across companies and across products, but the way these issues are being hashed out right now within the Halo community -- especially in the aftermath of Reach, which is widely understood, at least among the 'hardcore', to have been a 'failure' in some respects -- is fascinating to me.
Short version: I'm increasingly curious where people within HaloGAF stand on the idea that developers owe them anything, least of all an explanation. I think it's pretty clear that we're more towards the "we make the game, at least the multiplayer portion of it, by the very act of our purchasing and playing it, so tell us how you are going to curate it and cater to us", and I think the good faith of people like Frankie and David helps to smooth over the fact that Microsoft, and probably plenty of people within 343, feel strongly that the license is theirs, the game is theirs, and our 'rights' as a receptive community extend only as far as the point of sale; every moment of community interaction is only and solely another kind of marketing.
