Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_management

This is sort of an open ended question. I have a couple of thoughts to hopefully spark some discussion up:

1) Have you ever gotten so disastisfied with a company that you finally say "This is the last straw!" and claim to never buy a product from the said company? Do you think that this is a real danger that companies face, or do you think that people don't have the commitment to carry through with their threats?

My personal opinion is that a bad game/action by a firm probably won't completely stop a person from buying a game in the short term, or even in the long term. However, I have an image in my head where people basically have some kind of minimum requirement/threshold a game would have to reach, before they become hyped about it. I think that a consistently bad experience will either increase this minimum level, or make the good qualities of a game seem less impressive (people will essentially doubt what's being promissed). Therefore, it's important for companies like EA and Activision to re-consider their strategies and reverse the tide of negative customer opinion that's building up against them.

On the other hand, it seems like more people hate on companies like Sony, Microsoft, Valve, Nintendo, etc with the development of the internet. And it seems like developers like EA DICE have taken up the position that only a few vocal people are disatisfied with companies and games. So maybe it's not a big issue from that perspective.

2) I'm not a huge fan of Rockstar games, so I'm not really following what's going on with Max Payne and GTA V, but apparently Rockstar wants to interconnect the two game's online components more. My question is whether or not this type of strategy would be carried out in even larger scales in the future.

For example, Ubisoft is trying to create one united Tom Clancy universe. Activision unveiled Call of Duty Elite, and EA is trying to do something similar as well. Do you think that more and more developers will try to create a "family" of games that are some how interconnected with each other? And if so, how should they do it? In a sense, I feel like Sony has created a weird sense of "family" with its first party games, offering betas for each major release in order for each game to promote each other.

3) I got an interesting e-mail from EA a couple of months ago. I stopped playing Battlefield 3 (because it was an awful game), and the e-mail asked me to fill our a survey why I stopped playing the game. This brings up 2 questions in my mind.

First, will firms take an active approach in finding out why their games failed, especially for online centric games? And will they actually use this information to fix the game?

Second, do firms have a way to keep track of player activity (obviously EA did with Battlefield 3), and how sophisticated is it? Did EA know that I've been playing Battlefield as a teenager since BF2: MC was released on the PS2, or did they only know me as an Battlefield 3 player that stopped playing after release? If I played other EA games (I don't), like Madden for example, would they have a "library" of games that I play on their data base to find out how they can better market games towards me?

Please feel free to bring up anything you find interesting. I think that CRM is something that hasn't really been developed in the video game industry though, and that I think it has HUGE potential benefits. I mean, just imagine what Sony or Microsoft can do if they were to share your video gaming activity (maybe they already do) with other video game firms? You could have ads that specificly target you based on that information (play lots of Uncharated? Uncharted 3 DLC you haven't bought already is advertised, as well as an ad for Lara Croft).