| RolStoppable said: The self-inflicted favoritism for console manufacturers is a necessity because attacks happen each and every week due to this site being built around console sales. Third party publishers only take the spotlight every now and then, and in general any thread about them that contains multiple attacks is a topic of anti-consumer practices. Meanwhile, attacks on console manufacturers are commonly cases of hypocrisy where users nitpick things that they let slide for their prefered console manufacturer. There is plenty of reason to treat console manufacturers and third party publishers differently when it comes to moderation. You commit a big error by saying that positivity and negativity are equal. Granted, both things can be and are driven by selfishness, but the big catch with negativity is this: "For me to be happy, somebody else needs to get hurt." This in turn means that your post can be summed up as: "I want to be an asshole without having to worry about consequences." Your proposal isn't new on this website. Very similar reasoning has been brought up in the past and it has always come from people who had the traits of an asshole. Yes, the forum rules are biased against assholes, that cannot be denied. But this is an utmost necessity to fulfill the primary goal of the moderation team: Create, foster and maintain an environment where intelligent discussion takes place. If assholes were able to have the same rights as the people who don't want and don't need anyone to get hurt, then pretty much every thread would start to revolve around assholes because their hatred leads to massive derailment. I certainly give you that you are a better asshole than most. You are upfront about it and don't maintain a facade that you are a pleasant person or that your wishes and desires are a noble cause instead of the utter selfishness that they really are. In fact, I consider it admirable that we can have this kind of open discourse because this is what moves things forward. Addressing your wish for an ideal future, there are tremendous flaws in it. Your wish sounds good in theory, but when critical thinking is applied, there are a lot of drawbacks that come with it. Conversely, the arbitrary walls you despise aren't exclusively negative things. For example, an arbitrary wall creates the value of ease of use which in turn increases the amount of potential customers dramatically. You can even witness this on the PC, which is an open platform, where Valve created Steam that imposes restrictions, yet it's incredibly successful. In general, a higher pool of consumers reduces financial risk for game development which spawns more creativity and variety in game output. Your wish isn't unlike a teenager being convinced of a solution for a political issue; the teenager believes that it's so simple to solve everything, but reality is a lot more complex. |
Your portrayal of positive vs negative posts ignores that wishing for positive things can and is hurting other things just as well as negative things. Not to mention that both negative and positive can be entirely subjective. Democracy has shown that even things that are seen as positive by a majority of people may not actually be positive for the majority of people.
As for the ideal future, I do believe that success and creativity will always pull through one way or another when there is demand. I don't know why you think that a single open platform will somehow have significantly less customers than splitting the whole base in 4. There is still a lot of room for big entities to create their own little walls, but those walls won't apply to the platform itself, which is my goal. As far as I'm concerned Sony and whoever can create their own client and put their exclusive games on that client. They can even sell their own hardware with their client already installed. That's the beauty of the open platform. It doesn't close off portions of the consumer base but rather converges everyone on a single point.
I haven't yet found a good counter point to not having exclusive hardware and let everyone basically be 3rd party. One could argue that exclusive hardware with exclusive content is subsidizing hardware costs and allows a lower cost of entry but that, while true, is unnecessary. In fact I believe an open platform will even lower the cost of entry. Firstly because there will be a lot more competition and secondly there will finally be entry points below the mainstream because not everyone needs high end or even midrange hardware. If this forum has taught me anything then that the vast majority does not give a crap about performance and visual fidelity. We see the same thing on other open platforms like PC and Android. People who want cheap, will buy cheap and will still be happy.
Of course I am under no illusion that my dream will come true in the near future or even at all. Nobody gives a shit. But that doesn't mean that nobody would want it or appreciate the result. As someone working in IT I know the power of open standards and how attractive they can be for investors. Android wouldn't have been able to take on iOS if it wasn't for its openness, making available a wide range of choice for consumers of all demographics. If somehow all consoles fail, an open platform will be the best result for everyone. And since Nintendo and Sony won't step down anytime soon I just have to wish as hard as possible for them to fail. So that something better can grow from their ashes.
If you demand respect or gratitude for your volunteer work, you're doing volunteering wrong.
