Hiya everyone,

In today's world, playing video games isn't as easy as just buying a game and installing it; at least, not if you care about your consumer rights or don't feel like being taken adventage of.

Thing is, there are so many factors to consider! Things like different types of DRM, DLC plans and Season Passes, Day 1 problems with games, deluxe and super deluxe editions and etc etc etc.

So, imagine the perfect, smartest consumer of video games. Someone who definitely loves playing games, but wants to do everything 'right' to support good business practices and create a better future with their wallet.

What does that consumer do? How does he inform him/herself? Where and when does it buy games? Who does it consider to be a trustworthy source for everything video games? Does he/she boycott any companies or consider that childish? What are that consumer's moral boundaries (for example: game has been taken off store - pirate or not?). When is the consumer happy? When is the consumer mad? How much and how does he/she complain about stuff? What stuff would he/she be bothered by?

Just tell me what that perfect version of a consumer looks like!

You don't have to keep yourself to those boundaries when answering the questions, and it doesn't have to be about PC Gaming in particular; heck, it doesn't have to be only about gaming either! Write me long responses that explain how smart consumers act, think, and examples of what products it would support or not. Inspire us all, be a crazy elitist, or tell us all to come off our high horse and just enjoy games rather than worry about businesses and consumer rights.

Thank you :)

For the most part, just go back to gOg circa 2013 or so, before regional pricing started the downward slide toward... what we have today.

And the perfect version of a consumer looks exactly like me. Because I'm so damn lovable.

Buy whatever the hell you want, where ever you want to, play it.

Simple as that.

If you want to read some reviews first then go ahead, I don't usually bother any more unless a game is a complete unknown and even then I wouldn't read a 'proper' review as many are biased one way or another. Plus these days mist games are so cheap (or you can wait till they are so cheap) that it doesn't matter if you pick up the odd dud.

I'm playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild at the moment. It's one of the best games I've played in years. Sure, it has some flaws, but they are small and do not detract from the experience as a whole.
But it was £50 (ish), region locked, DRM'd (presumably, most console games are) and has DLC available for it. So presumably 'smart consumers' should avoid buying it, or any Nintendo game.

I love Gog for being DRM free and will happily buy games here when possible but if Gog wasn't around I would be buying from Steam like everyone else without a second thought. The only reason I don't buy more from Steam is that between consoles and Gog I have too many games to play anyway and Steam's auto updating annoys me (but I seem to remember reading they are actually dropping forced updating and will allow you to properly turn it off) so I only usually get freebies on Steam at the moment.

Bottom line is I play games to get away from life and politics and the rest of the world. I don't really want my choice of what games to buy and where to buy them to be a moral and ethical labyrinth.

I am certainly not above sneering when my elite level gaming mouse starts tingling and a dirty hypetrain comes into my FOV (85).

And let everything go to shit. Because nothing matters as much, as just getting whatever you want.

That's the blight of this world, ladies and gentlemen. The model consumer. Someone who won't let anything get in the way of his having fun.

If I sound angry and bitter, but well... that's becuase I am. It is thanks people who think like that, can't deny themselves some game and play another one whose publishers aren't screwing people over, that I can no longer walk into a store and take a game off a shelf and buy that, and see my collection grow, add another box to my own shelf, becuase they are all locked with Steam, Origin, Uplay or some other crap. An important part of my hobby died, because haven forbid they don't get the new shiny toy right now. And eventually all DRM-free gaming will die, again, thanks to them.

No idea, honestly. Gaming is one area where for me the only concerns about "doing it right" are pretty much: am I interested in it, and can I run it? I honestly don't care about a company's politics or whether or not they're green or use the proper DRM or use it at all. That stuff is not why I buy games.

Sure, the immediate gratification of GOG and Steam can be great for scratching an itch, but I do miss buying boxed copies (real ones, not with like a dumb code in them or something). If I could still do that, then "right" for me would be bypassing digital altogether and buying physical. But for the most part that's kind of out of the question these days.

This would be my idea of a smart consumer.

After you find out about a game you are interested in:

- NEVER preorder (discounts and bonuses are not worth it)
- Wait for a bunch of reviews OR pirate the game to see for yourself (it's the only way to be sure)
- Buy the game if you like it and want to see more of its type

Simple and effective. Of course, some will say pirating is immoral and illegal. While they may be right, so is lying and hyping and slicing up a game for DLC chunks.

I am sorry to say that I'm not a smart consumer and have bought too many games on impulse. I regret buying most of them and if I could do it all over, I would just buy less games but at full price.

AND NOW - this is a perfect consumer from a company's point:

- OMG NEW GAEM ONLY 100$ PREORDER FTW BUY BUY BUY BUY PLZ SELL ME MOAR DLC I LIEK YOU [COMPANY] AND WILL DEFEND YOU LIKE MY OWN CHILD AGAINST THE HATERZ

Yeah, right. Nothing at all. Consumer's acquiescence is in no way responsible for anything. Keep telling yourself that. No, they will do what they can get away with. It's simple logic. They will only do what consumer accept, or they will lose money. However, thanks to people like you, that does mean "every damn thing". No. I don't even know what you're talking about. There is nothing "rose tinted" about it. It's a bloody fact, that I used to be able to buy a game in a store that worked without any clients or accounts or online checks. It's not some nostalgic delusion. And the GOG compromising it's DRM-free policy because of people who think like you and will just buy whatever, wherever, on whatever terms is also a sad fact. You can try to wash your hands of any responsibility for the state of the gaming industry, but in the end it is the consumers who are at fault.

So, that whole voting with your wallet thing. The boycotting Steam (and now Gog) that many people are doing. How's that going?
What rights and benefits have we won back? How has the gaming world improved because of it?
Maybe we should never have bought any games at all. Maybe we should have boycotted the games that came with code wheels and words you had to look up in manuals (just as annoying as online checks are in this day and age). Maybe we should have boycotted the games that used Gamespy for multiplayer, or MSN Gaming Zone or Battlenet.

And by that logic we have already lost, because the consumer will accept anything. There is no rebellion, no push back for anti DRM. The people who care, and I do count myself among them, are a tiny fraction of the people buying games.
The consumer will never win any battle. If you want to change things there is only one way; open a store or make a game.
Except people are doing that.
Gog is doing that, the indie developers are doing that and people shit all over them for even trying because nothing will ever be good enough. Ever since Galaxy was first announced there has been nothing but doom and gloom over how Gog will no longer be DRM free. Yet here we are, 2 and a half years later and Gog is still DRM free. You might complain about various decisions they have made, but other than Gwent (which is still in Beta and will get an offline single player when fully released) every game on Gog has a DRM free offline installer.
Indie developers have risen up and made games. Some of them are brilliant, some of them merely enjoyable. Yet every one that get's released here is met with a wall of apathy; 'too pixelated', 'too roguelike', 'too expensive', 'not old enough'.

And you wonder why nothing changes for the better? Why bother being good when whatever you do is met with resistance and hatred?

You're right, you did used to be able to go into a store and buy a game. But you used to pay £30 - £60 for the privilege, and you had to download a crack to play it without the CD or on two computers at once. Now you can have a game withing minutes of it's release, and very few games sell for over £30 any more (and none for long before they get heavy discounts). There is no limited stock, no wondering if the local store even stocks the game you want.
More games are available now, DRM free, then ever were when most of the games Gog sells were released.

The state of the gaming industry is that it is booming. It is no longer a niche hobby for spotty geeks and nerds that even admitting to enjoying was shameful. Now everyone is a gamer. There are games to cater for everyone whether you want FPSs, RTSs, RPGs, sports sims, racing games, city builders, management sims or anything else. You could spend a lifetime gaming without even spending a penny thanks to countless free games.

So I'm sorry if I don't agree, but I see nothing wrong with enjoying the absolute wealth of games available to us today in anyway you see fit.

Not so well, thanks to people who think like you.

Now there's the joke that made my day:D

Indeed. That is exactly what I'm talking about.

Not with your fighting spirit and spine made of jelly they won't.

Yes. And those are the ones I support. And you're the one who says we should just buy whatever, wherever.

That's an interesting definition of "nothing will ever be good enough" you have- pointing at a specific point in time when things change, therefore indicating (rightly so) that up until that point things were, in fact, good enough.

With exceptions and a major push to make Galaxy unavoidable that only got partially stopped because people for once showed some balls.

Was there actually an official announcment to that effect?

If you are now somehow trying to make me into an enemy of DRM-free indie games, which happen to be the chief thing that brought me to GOG in the first place, than I don't even know what to say.

Just because something is more popular, booming and caters to everyone doesn't have to mean it's better. That last one in particular is rarely the sign of improvement.

Still, I was never arguing that games are worse now, I'm only arguing that the industry could be made to treat the consumers better if the consumers had enough brains and self control to support those developers and publishers who deserve it.

No, I didn't expect you would. Me, I'm gonna choose those games and developers from among that very wealth you speak of who in turn choose to treat consumers best. Which, I think, is the only logical way to proceed, having more games to choose from then one has time and funds for.

Yes. Yes it is. It has never been easier.

I absolutely agree with your statement. If anything the gaming market is in a better place then it was 20 or even 10 years ago. Today we have one thing we never really had back in the good old days. Options, we can choose where or how we buy our games. Most games still come as a retail version. A lot of games come without DRM nowadays, and you can choose to buy them from an online distributor or directly from the developer. And we can still choose how we want to support developers.

Back in the old days you just had the choice where to buy but that always meant you had to wait for the mail order or go to a store. Of course you could "buy" them online as well but that meant buying them illegally, which I condemn wholeheartedly.

Regarding the so called evil things about today's business. You really have to ask yourself if they are all evil just because they exist and put money in the developers/publishers hand. Is preordering a game a bad thing? It is not in my opinion, because it is a way to support a developer, just like Early Access or crowdfunding. The problem of course is that these things can be used many wrong ways, but everything can. All we have to do is to make a choice if we want to support this or not for each case. Just saying preorder is bad and everyone should stop preordering games is just as wrong. Same goes for all the rest, may it be DLCs, microtransactions and whatnot. And we can make our concerns be heard, easier now then ever before. And it does help, anyone remember this silly preoder for Deus Ex Mandkind Divided? People expressed their concerns and Eidos listened.

As for the smart consumer. It's quite simple. Just use your brain before you purchase something. But in the end it's each persons own choice what to do.

I purchase only non-GMO, RBST-free, fair trade, free range, vegan-fed games, developed and produced locally by minority veteran gender-neutral handicapped ex-con programmers, and sold at the neighborhood pixel market.

Truly, a model we should all aspire to.