When you formally organize not buying and demand others do the same, it is a boycott.  When you decide to pass on a product quietly, it isn't.  What is generally more effective is if a bunch of people do the later, and sales tank a lot.  Then developers/publishers may decide to change things.  But, if they look at their bottom line and see more money can be added by the changes, they will ignore the protests.

I cant read 200 posts, but did someone already explain that online user rankings consist of:

1) 10's for those who approve of the title.
2) 0's for those who do not.

Thus when theres controversy amongst many of the most vocal internet fans this happens.

Very rarely does someone vote based on an intelligent thoughtout system. Its a twitch system of 10's and 0's.

Yes, clearly keeping quiet about it will bring the publisher to their knees.

Nothing scares publishers more than apathy towards their product.  Well, outright bans selling are worse, but beyond that, the world not caring one bit about a game is what scares them.  They will do just about anything to not have their product ignored, including staging fake protests, as was seen with Dante's Inferno.  Large scale stealth lack of sales, and a game bombing without a clue as to what happened is what the publishers are most concerned about.  When you decide to do large scale boycotts and hope the world knows it, and others spread the word, you give publishers free publicity for their game, and have the game rise above the normal level of white noise that prevents them from standing out.

In the end, what counts is the game selling or not selling.  If you explain to the publisher why you aren't buying, you are doing them a favor.  In regards to Modern Warfare 2, what do you think most of the world thinks of the game?  How about, "Wow, it must be something.  It broke sales records on the first day!"  Go ahead and try to stage a protest against that and tell the world you aren't going to buy it due to a lack of dedicated servers.  The world will go, "Dedicated what?" and "Don't you have other things better to do with you life, like find a job?  Or take up another hobby?"

Sales records due to console.

Vibe I am getting from most of the casual FPS community is "meh". Ofc a sizable portion of the hardcore CoD guys ended up breaking down and getting it... which was easily predictable.

But so far the evidence, both anecdotal and steam player stats say " the casual FPS multiplayer gamer" has largely stayed away from this title. Mission accomplished I'd say.

And richard, for the millionth time : the reason the outcry was important and needed was to alert the more casual people who had no clue what was going on, and would have plunked down 60$ expecting a MW2 that was like MW1..... IW let the cat out of the bag at the 11th hour, and probably on accident.

IF.... IW had done things properly and announced the changes 8 months ago like they should have, then the 0 ratings, the threads, the outcry etc could then be called unwarranted. BUT, IW was shady and tried to pull a fast one on the casual FPS PC gamer - the folk who dont follow every forum and FPS news site - and sell them something they , generally speaking, do not want. IW had actually "confirmed" that MW2 would be like MW1 , with DS and such..... then switched stride less than a month until release.

Honestly, I have not seen anyone come close to making any type of rational argument against the outcry and super low reviews, when you take that into consideration.

Only if IW had been forthright and honest, and not tried to pull a bait and switch would your arguments, and the arguments of other PC-gamer-haters start to obtain even the slightest amount of validity.

 EDIT: MW2 PC version...... 6% according to the news post on this very site. Outcry definatly had an effect, no doubts anymore, considering CoD4 was much higher %, most decent multiplat games are a higher %... its pretty much proven now that the people (including myself) who were reporting lots of people  cancelling preorders or not buying where they otherwise would have, is not overblown or wishful thinking. Naysayers can officially shove it.. nor will the game have much legs on the PC from what I can tell... people who didnt get the memo or decided to try IWnet are not trying to draw in more players/guildies/buddies to come play.. not on PC anyhow. GG IW, you might be rolling in bank from the console versions, but you still missed out on tens of millions you would have had, had you not been so arrogant.That revenue will be sorely missed as Actis rhythm games start tanking next year.

What a load of crap. There's a world of difference between generating a fake controversy to whip up hype and having your game trashed as being broken and not worth buying.

Internet petitions and the like don't mean much in the grand scheme of things, but at least in this case Activision are left in absolutely no doubt why PC sales have tanked. It's now up to them to decide whether or not it's worth their while shoehorning future PC games into their forthcoming pay-to-play model, not bothering and abandoning the PC, or spending a bit of extra effort in making a game with acceptable multiplayer. Hopefully, a boycott will make them realise that the first option won't be viable.  Frankly, I don't care which of the other two options they go for- there are plenty of other, better games out there anyway.

Talking of which, L4D2's here.

^ Well L4D2 is better than MW2 atm. But judged on its own merits, the game is crap :D

And OT. It can only be a pro console gamer in this (pc vs console) discussion to claim that these boycotts are something good, and that they are staged for success :D I've said it before.. i dont know why he fights so hard to try and prove something, when he obviously isn't up to speed on why the PC community is furious. He's not a PC gamers, and probably never been one, atleast not in the last decade or so.

Would others agree that this has gone for too long? It's like nothing you say will get through and the conversation keeps going around and around.

We are likely near the end with this thread here.  I have noticed that my subject header can be a sweeping generalization, rather than a comment on some of the extremes out there.  One needs to see what will happen in the future, in regards to sales for the Modern Warfare franchise, and if the PC market is now a lost cause.  If Activison decides that a unfied development for the game is the right way to go, and the PC version is like the console version, and the PC version tanks, then Modern Warfare may just end up jumping to the console and we are done.  Lost sales = stop development, not going back.

And I have been in places where a game went in directions I didn't expect.  Madden fit into that category for me, for multiple reasons.

What 10s of millions were going to buy Modern Warfare 2?  How copies of the PC version of COD4 were sold?  Someone here said it outsold the console versions, making COD4 a 20+ million total sales title, which it hasn't shown to me.  Millions of pirated copies of a gamer doesn't matter to a game company at all.  And if a game is pirated at a rate of 10 copies for every sale, then that is a pandemic problem. 

Have any idea what the total sales for COD4 were on the PC?  There is indication that piracy was rampant though:

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2008/01/17/call_of_duty_4_piracy_is_rampant/1