Bethesda as a company is awful (i.e, not customer friendly). They do produce some nice games but their corporate policies are among the worse (but not the worse). So you have to decide for yourself if you want to buy their games or not. I do tend to buy 'customer firendly' games at full price but as a policy do not buy 'customer unfriendly' games at full price no matter how good the game is (or might be). If you don't like the pricing pass there are plenty of good games on the market these days. If you like a game and find the company 'customer friendly' then by all means support that company products by buying it at a decent price.
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A few examples of unfriendly companies include UBI, Bethesda
A few examples of companies not so friendly include EA, Blizzard
A few example of friendly companies include: xile, larian
(your opinion might differ from mine).
Friendly means willing to support their product, provide reasonable value and generally have a policy that will allow helping the consumer when feasible.
Unfriendly means doing things that deliberately cheat the consumer, dropping buggy games without making any attempt to fixing them, having a policy to mislead customers and et all.
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Btw freedom of speech is also consumer friendly even if that speech is negative criticisim; HOWEVER freedom of speech does not require permitting personal attacks and threats.

I think you are giving piracy more credit than it deserves. Its about negative reviews and marketting, not the small amount of money "lost" to piracy between the review release and actual release.

Eh, hate to agree with…whatever that is, but with the current trend, there are no customer pros here.
Still, I can't blame Bethesda after Fallout IV for not having confidence in the quality of their games. :P

And shouldn't this be moved into News section?

The last Bethesda game I bought was Oblivion… have not been interested in any of their games after that. I have not trusted official reviews for years, those are a joke anyway. Most of the AAA games seemed to always get 90% or higher from review sites. In terms of affecting good and useful reviewers (however small their number, not many of them out there really) who are actually honest and objective, and review games from a player friendly perspective, yea, this sucks for them… but I usually don't buy games until a long time after they are released anyway. The only exceptions are when I back games on kickstarter, and those are old school rpgs from Inxile and Larian, the creme of the crop, basically.

So, yea, its a negative story, but for me, very minor… its not like I'm a fan of Bethesda anyway… and I don't trust official game journalism/review (like PC Gamer for example) sites anyway. They lost my trust a long time ago.

Oh hey! I remember when you laughed at me when I compared Skyrim sales to the movie Titanic. You said their final sales numbers would be would be a small fraction. Well we're up to 1.4 billion so far… :p

I don't recall that, but fine, whatever. I never saw the movie Titanic, just wasn't interested, (and I don't care how mega popular the movie was, sometimes that can even be a turn off to me when it comes to movies) and am not interested in Skyrim either, so that is something else they have in common.

If I had to guess, the conversation probably went something like this….

Those are some great search skills there Wisdom.

Big publishers no longer need the media anymore to marketing etc. Reviews were part of the marketing process. Exclusive review copies were used to keep some media people happy. In fact almost all the pre release reviews were usually very positive for big publisher games since they are essentially bribed (direct and indirect) marketing.

Take a look at the new Red Dead Redemption 2 announcement by Rockstar. They posted a single cryptic tweet and the whole thing exploded on social media and everybody and their mother was picking the story up. Free marketing.

In years past, a big release like this would first be announced via pres release and some big outlets might even get exclusives info to go alone with that. This is now becoming things of the past now.

No you are not a foolish lemming for pre ordering. However you are foolish lemming if you pre order and then claim the publisher mislead you since you no longer like the game now :)

This is true!

Ah. Thanks.

pibbur who usually doesn't blame anybody. Except himself.

take a look at Skyrim budget, it take millions to make such complex games, take a look at GTA VI cost around 400 million, gave more than 1 billion, but what if it was a flop? Making AAA games is a huge risk and gambling.

Complex? LOL
How about looking at Gothic budget?

While I replayed each and every Gothic (except abomination with #4) I'll never ever replay any TES game nor overhyped boredom GTA5 (and I suspect older Need4Speed with a story are the same bore).

Making any game is a risk, it doesn't have to be AAA.
If one does not want to take any risks, there are always phonegames idiots pay2win in.

Gothic is an exception though. It's flat out spectacular for the first game of a newly started studio with a small budget.

While witcher 3 budget was huge (but probably a lot less than skyrim); witcher 1 was a fantastic game with a relatively low budget.

the majority of which went into marketing, PR and hollywood (voice) actors

Vanilla Skyrim ran on ancient and horrid FPU code from the mid-1990s (introduced with Pentium 3) and devs compiled the game initially without optimization flags


they are lazy/sloppy or greedy, but probably both

http://www.pcgamer.com/elder-scrolls…-hall-of-fame/

What do you say about that? Make products fans have to fix themselves and you get yourself an award. For what? New cheap labor strategy I guess.

First world problems. Us gamers are an entitled bunch.