Sunday 17 February 2008

the trouble with buying games

I live in England, so SOME people want to charge me twice as much for the same product. This is unacceptable. I understand it with retail products because you have to go through licensing rigamarole and sometimes produce new versions and documentation in all European languages and it does cost extra, but for a downloadable game that you are selling the exact same version of to someone else based on their IP? No. Unacceptable.

SOME game-selling sites want to tie you up in download-managers and separate programs to monitor everything you do and try to advertise new games at you all the time. No. If you want to put extra crap on my computer, you can pay ME for it.

SOME game-selling sites want to tie all your games to a separate control program and make your games stop working if the control program is turned off or removed. Absolutely no. I do not want to be held to ransom over things I've already paid for, should you decide later to ask for more money or claim that I have done something wrong.

SOME game-selling sites have so many protections on the payment they'll accept (no free email addresses, tricky details with credit card address matching which is a problem for me personally because the foreign address tends not to parse right in the different verification systems, various tricky session/hardware matching because they want detailed stats on their customers or have trouble linking paypal payments to accounts) that you can't get them to take your money!

Dammit, people, stop making piracy such an attractive option. I just want to give you my money and get a game in exchange. WHY SO DIFFICULT?

edit - Well, I found someone who wouldn't overcharge me or require a game manager, but they also happily say upfront that their registration codes are only good for 3 uses, no replacements. That's also a no-thanks. Also, their ordering system seems to want to draw from my bank account rather than my paypal balance, which is creepy. WILL SOMEONE JUST SELL ME THE GAME ALREADY?

second edit - By the time I figured out where I should be shopping from in order to not suffer from EVIL, I had been through enough free trials that I'd sort of lost interest in the game. If I do decide I want to play more of it, I think I know who to buy it from now. But the long and the short of it is that if the initial gameseller hadn't tried to squeeze extra money out of me for being British, they would have made a sale at the beginning of this rant, instead of, currently, no sale. And even if I do buy in the end, I'll have to buy through a portal and they'll get a much smaller cut.

2 comments:

Rio said...

I whole-heartedly agree. There were times when I wanted to buy from x company but they required one or the other of those you listed and it just sent me packing and going somewhere else or not buying the game at all if no others carried it.

It's a shame really and this is one of the reasons I still prefer consoles and handhelds.

K. Thor Jensen said...

Hey, my name's Thor Jensen, I handle a lot of the web stuff for Gamelab (maker of Jojo's Fashion Show) - could you drop me a line at support@gamelab.com regarding your specific problems (if you tried to buy it directly from us)? Our sales are handled by a third party and we're always trying to improve.