The company doesn't care about you. And that is perfectly normal.

[KodiaX987]

It seems that lately, there have been some prissy little shits who believe that they are entitled to get patches and content upgrades to their video games. For some, it will hardly be a surprise and reading this will be a complete waste of time. For others, it will be a revelation bigger than God himself and your world will shatter around you. If you are part of the latter group, I suggest you start looking for razor blades immediately.

Now, somewhere down the line, gamers got it into their little heads that they were supposed to get patches for their games and that the publishers and developers had some sort of obligation to make their game as perfect as possible.

We'll get this out right away: a developer is not your bitch. A developer is not your pet. You don't have a leash around those guys and you sure as hell have no personal value to them aside from being a magnificent cash cow.

Companies do not care about you. They never have, and they never will. Their only interest is profit.

Why is a company only interested in profit? Because that is what a company does. Without profit, the company will close its doors.



We'll make a situation. A software has been published. People buy it and use it. Some make suggestions on additional features to be put in there.

You suggest the features, the company asks "How many people will buy the software after we've put in this feature?"

You want more content, the company asks "How many more people will buy the software if we introduce this content?"

You ask if the company cares about you, the company replies "This is our only goal in life: to satisfy you."

Meanwhile, the company thinks "How can we make more profits?"



The only reason patches are released is because the publisher believes the revenue from more people buying the game because of it outweighs the cost of developing the patch. That's it, that's all. On the front, the company appears to care "just enough" to keep their consumer base and the money rolling.

Everyone hates EA apparently. But everyone buys EA. EA has a market cap of 11 billion dollars and whenever a new Sims expansion or a Need For Speed game, everyone camps out to get it smoking hot from the delivery truck.

Everyone hates Microsoft too, apparently. But everyone buys Microsoft. Microsoft has generated a net income of nearly eighteen billion US dollars the spring-summer of this year. This is eighteen percent more than last year on the same period.

Surely those guys must be doing something right.

But they shouldn't. People hate these companies. EA and MS do not care about their customers. They don't care about the players, they don't care about anybody, they just want profits, profits and even more profits.

Welcome to business class. This is exactly how it's supposed to be. Because companies that have put care before cash have long gone down under. The only business models that stick to this philosophy are hobbyist game makers who wish to put forth a game and have no concern over money.

So to all of you out there who are yelling at devs to put up patches and fix bugs, good luck. You'll be yelling for one hell of a while. You can threaten them all you want, you can say they're going to lose a customer - it will not make them budge even one inch.



You wanna know how R&D goes where I work? It can go two ways. Either we take a leap of faith and develop something we know people we buy en masse, and recoup our spendings through sales, or we charge the customer up front for the feature they want us to make.

How much money does a new feature cost? Several thousand dollars, in my field.

Why does our customer want this? Because they believe that by using this feature, it will increase their profits. They believe that this spending of several thousand dollars will be worth it on the long run.

Right now, I am automatizing a process that is done by hand by our current customer. I am making a blazingly faster and less error-prone method than the way they've been doing it with a human, a spreadsheet and an unhealthy amount of number-tweaking.

And once the customer gets this feature, they'll be able to assign whoever used to be doing this to more important and challenging tasks than just mindlessly crunching numbers.

We have a customer who is angry at us too. He thinks we didn't do a good job. He refuses to pay. But we'll get paid, one way or another. The customer can yell all he wants, he will have to pay sooner or later.

Cold? Ignorant? Hardly. That is just financial know-how. We make products that are solid enough that customers will be coming back for more, but we will not solve every single bug we find. There is a threshold of quality where the work ceases to be worthwhile.



If you bought a buggy game and the publisher does not patch it, then you are screwed, plain and simple. Perhaps it worked on everyone else's machine. Hopefully, the company calculated its stuff well enough to make the game pull in money and to keep a good customer base. They have absolutely no obligation to serve your every need and to make the game work on your particular machine. If they had to do this, I could immediately loophole this rule by bringing an Amiga to Electronic Arts and order them to make their latest game work on it.



If you don't like the way things work, then too bad.

The company does not care. So long as it makes money.

[Vanzazikon]

Heh, that's absolutely true, Companies doesn't give a rat's ass about their customers. I'm tired of classmates and people with a fat mouth telling me that EA doesn't care about their customers because they failed to fix bugs or send patches to their games. Of course they don't, as long as you ignorant dumbasses buy their games, thus giving them profits, you already served your purpose to them(especially in this capitalist country), so why should they?

[Tetsaru]

Every time I see this issue come up amongst the PSU playerbase, I am reminded of this one poster I saw in the break room of Sam Walton while I was working at Wal-Mart:

"The Customer Is the Boss"

He argued that, whether you're the CEO of the biggest corporation in the world, or shine shoes for a living, there are going to be customers who want your service. They don't care about how long it has been around, or how well it works for other people - they want to see how well it works for THEM; and the moment that that service starts treating them badly, they'll "fire" the people running it. How, you ask? That's easy - they spend their money somewhere else.

If you go to a fast food restaurant several times and they constantly mess up your order, you probably wouldn't eat there anymore, right? If you take your car to a repair shop, and they don't fix it properly, you'd probably take it somewhere else, right?? It's the same concept with Sega right now - they established a unique online gaming experience with PSO, as well as with the Sonic the Hedgehog series, and now they can't satisfy the needs of the PSU playerbase who are demanding better management of the game, or Sonic fans who are tired of the random bullshit Sega keeps throwing into the newer games to "make them better."

Personally, if someone was going to pay me directly to do something for them, I'd do my best to cater to their needs, so long as they were respectful and willing to explain to me what would work better for them, or how I should go about it. If I didn't please the customer, I wouldn't get any money, now would I?

It's a very simple and critical concept, and I think it should motivate people to only do the jobs you ENJOY rather than do them for money - such greed is what is destroying the economy right now. So long as you enjoy the work you do, and enjoy serving your customers, then the money should come naturally.

[Tessu]

I love your posts, Shuri.

[TheOneHero]

I love your posts, Shuri.

I just love Shuri.

Tets: What you're saying is, "If you're going to do something, do it right", correct? I believe the same way. However, there's a point where that philosophy no longer is worth it to achieve a profit or would achieve a profit. You better have a back up plan since the business might not last long. (Or just charge more money for the quality.) >_>;

[KodiaX987]

(Or just charge more money for the quality.) >_>;

I'll expand on this a bit because the piece of work I'm doing is special.

I'm doing a module that the customer base has been wanting for for a long time and they've been frustrated by what other companies have put up or how their own attempts have given out miserable results.

This isn't just a problem among our established customers. We believe our prospects have the same problem too.

Hence, I am actually giving my module extra bells and whistles, tons of visual cues and other fancy things. Technically, they weren't part of the project's plan but the sales department wants these extra features in because they believe they'll pull more customers into our grasp. The sales department calls my module sex. And that's exactly what it is: something that will give boners to those who look at it and will make them buy our product right away. The videos I've prepared for the sales pitch show that it's now possible to do in less than three minutes a thing that would've taken three hours by hand. I've spent my normal time making the thing work. Now I'm spending extra time making it look like it's the best thing since the coming of Jesus. We believe it'll be worth the time spent paying me to do that.

[Randomness]

Welcome to America 101.

And its true. The closest a company will come to doing things out of concern for its customers is releasing fixes or something to maintain the loyalty of the customers. Which still boils down to profiting on future products.

[Aisha379]

PSU aside, I'm quite happy with this system anyway.

As long as the product does what its advertised to do and thats something I want, I don't mind spending the money to purchase it. Company takes that money, and later on they might release something else I need or want. Thats fine by me.


I think Tetsaru has a point, but really that line of thinking only goes for smaller businesses and stuff. The larger the corporation gets, the more "mechanical" their thinking.


And Kodia, what company do you work for? =O

[W0LB0T]

Money. it makes the world go around

[rogue_robot]

My 2 meseta - it really all comes down to a balance between Kodia's and Tetsaru's statements. The bigger the company gets, the more accurately Kodia's statement describes it.

This, really, is only natural - the company only has so much time to spend on any product. More customers means that time must be split between a greater number of concerns. Eventually, the company will have to start tuning the customers out, or the decision-makers would quickly lose their sanity from the innumerable requests (requests which, at times, may even conflict with or oppose one another).

At this point, the action that yields the most profit becomes the obvious choice, for the most impersonal and the most customer-oriented businesses alike: profit is the only reliable gauge of customer satisfaction a large company truly possesses. Any number of random anecdotes can be drawn from just anywhere and tossed around - but anecdotes say nothing about how most of the customers feel. When people keep buying from the company, however, that says that the company must at least be doing something right.