Optional Reality

As a grown man who has had a brief opportunity to run a business, the necessary evils required to be successful within a capitalist system are not lost on me. In order to truly prosper in such a jungle, one must be capable of not only revising some of their morals, but of bending their very perception of reality at times. Angry customers are really just "passionate about your product". Employees who know and exercise their rights under labor laws are "disengaged", and so forth. I get it. It's an ugly world out there, and there are infinity ways for the void to swallow you and your business up, which means you have to be willing to play a little ball in order to keep your head above water.

Someone needs to let Electronic Arts, and Taiwan based electronics manufacturer, Foxconn know that reality can only be bent so far.

Today, in a move that should surprise approximately NOBODY, Bioware, the formerly proud, independent studio turned EA sock puppet, announced that the PC version of their upcoming blockbuster-to-be, Mass Effect 3 would require EA's digital distribution platform, Origin in order to be played - regardless of whether it was purchased digitally or from a brick and mortar outfit. Despite the fact that Origin is a complete disaster of a service, this isn't the part that truly angers me.

No, the part that really gets my goat is Bioware towing the proverbial line for EA, claiming that Steam, the industry leading digital distribution service run by Valve, imposes Terms of Service (ToS) that are simply too obtrusive for them to be bothered with. This should be insulting to any video game fan with something grey and squishy between their ears. Not only is their statement a near word for word regurgitation of a statement EA made to defend their now famous snubbing of Steam during the release of Battlefield 3 last year, it also reeks of an incomprehensible disconnect from reality.

While EA has been quick to support other digital distribution services that they feel confident they can out-muscle, such as Impulse or Direct2Drive, the one they have chosen to exclude from their major releases for the better part of the last year is the only one with the user base to stand up to them. While I expect no less from a company that habitually buys it's way out of having to compete, it's astounding to me that they actually expect us to buy their ruse.

Publishers and developers in this industry don't exactly have muzzles on them when it comes to what they think about their business partnerships. For instance, it's common knowledge that Xbox Live can be a painful service to deal with, featuring regulations on everything from pricing to certification. So one would think that if Valve's service was as much of a hindrance to "directly supporting the players" as EA has repeatedly stated, someone (besides Valve's most well funded and devious competitor in digital distribution) might have said something. So far the only complaints are coming from the one company who stands to gain by making them.

For once, it isn't the corporate greed that's killing me here, it really isn't. If EA just came out themselves and said, "we have a competing product and it doesn't make sense for us to bolster our competitor's product with our software" I could entirely swallow that. It would still be an utterly moronic, short-sighted decision, but at least I wouldn't feel like EA was asking me to wear a baseball cap with a propeller on it while standing in the corner. But in this "no reality" zone EA exists in, hiding behind one of their wholly owned dev studios will TOTALLY throw us off the trail. I can see John Riccitiello giving the order, "Have the Bioware guys say it, nerds LIKE them. Don't they make all those games with the lightsabers and the dragon-elf-dwarf-whoosits?"

On a sadder note, some of you may have seen a story on the net over the past week about an electronics manufacturing plant in Wuhan, China, owned by Taiwanese manufacturing giant, Foxconn. Destructoid covered it in detail last week but the basics are as such: a large group of employees at this plant in Wuhan had been refused a pay raise and were given the option to either quit with compensation or continue working. 300 of them decided to leave, but were then refused the compensation promised, at which point they convened on the roof of the plant and threatened mass suicide. Thankfully, with the intervention of the town's Mayor, the crisis was averted.

It was a detail I found in 2 different articles covering the story that made it frightfully relevant to the post you are reading now.

Apparently, back in 2010, Foxconn experienced a rash of suicides. 14 men and women threw themselves from the top of their respective manufacturing plants and perished. One top ranking Foxconn employee was quoted as saying, "No matter how hard we try, such things will continue to happen." In that spirit, the company proceeded to put safety nets around the outside of all their manufacturing plants to prevent employees from voluntarily plummeting to their demise.

I would like to believe that I don't have to point out how shocking of a disconnect from reality that represents. But for those who are high ranking officers of a multi-national corporation, or are otherwise afflicted with some form of mental illness, I'll play through. At some point, in some cavernous conference room on the top floor of some corporate HQ in the sky, a VP of Foxconn raised his hand and said, "Excuse me sir, but I'm afraid that 14 of our employees felt so entrapped and undervalued that they committed suicide by jumping off the tops of some of our manufacturing plants." Then, some shriveled up prune of a man, probably wearing a robe of black sack-cloth, pondered for a moment, slowly sucked in what little air his decrepit lungs could hold and wheezed back, "Well, I guess we should put up some nets, so they can't do that any longer." Then a bunch of people, ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS, all looked at one another and nodded in agreement.

I guess severing your link to tangible, human reality is just the cost of entry if you wish to manufacture products for Apple, Microsoft and Sony. Success is apparently a rare strain of insanity.