Gamers’ Voice has today issued a response to Michael Pachter’s comments that the group are ‘crybabies’, citing him as an ‘apologist for Activision’.
Following Patcher’s remarks yesterday where he condemned the group for campaigning against Activision and their buggy versions of Black Ops on PC and PS3, the gamers’ organisation is not too happy about Pachter’s ‘inaccurate’ comments.
Speaking to IncGamers, the group’s Thomas Williams said: “I see you have been covering our ongoing complaint against Activision over Call of Duty: Black Ops and that Michael Pachter has passed comment. Our Committee has drawn up this response should you wish to us it.”
Below is Gamers’ Voice response in full:-
Gamers’ Voice responds to Pachters “crybabies” comment over reporting Activision for Call of Duty bugs.
It has come to our attention that industry analyst; Michael Pachter has passed comment on Gamers’ Voice’s campaign against Activision over the poor performance of Call of Duty: Black Ops for the PS3 and PC at Incgamers.com
His comments are inaccurate, inflammatory and insulting to computer and video game consumers. Indeed, he comes across as an apologist for Activision to the point where he suggests the company will pull out of the UK should this campaign be successful. His reaction is to describe Gamers’ Voice as little more than ‘cry babies’. This presents the gaming industry as both arrogant and uncaring to the audience it serves.
He hasn’t even bothered to do any research into who we are, or what we do. This is clearly evident in the final piece of the Inc Gamers piece in which Pachter refers to Tom Watson MP.
“In my view, this is a blatant stunt by a politician to grab attention. He should probably pay more attention to keeping gaming jobs in the UK than to pissing off a large company that can create or eliminate UK jobs.”
Tom Watson did found Gamers’ Voice but what Pachter is obviously unaware of is that he did so in response to another political stunt by another MP called Keith Vaz. Since founding Gamers’ Voice Tom Watson has not been involved in the day to day running of our group since he is far too busy doing his actual job of being a politician and representing the people who elected him.
We are an independent group of gamers from all walks of life who decide our own policy. We are not influenced by politicians; we represent gamers who have a variety of concerns. We are reacting to Activision because we’ve had many, many emails about the game crippling issues from British (and international) gamers who are unhappy with the buggy product and poor service Activision have provided to PC and PS3 gamers.
He also talks about how people should take the game back to retailers if they are not happy with it. This is not acceptable as the game shouldn’t have been offered for sale in the first place, hence our campaign.. In the era of game patches, why can’t Activision rectify the fatal bugs in the game now? On a related note, he talks about seasoned video game fans expect there to be errors in games and that they are patched out in a reasonable amount of time. Again, his comments are arrogant and short sighted to the point of insulting to the end consumer. The ‘bugs’ in Call of Duty: Black Ops are actually show-stopping ones. Fundamental elements of the game do not function at all and it is this reason we are taking Activision to task over it.
Mr Pachter also mentions Fallout: New Vegas and asks why we haven’t done anything about it. Again, if he’d done some research on our group he would understand that we’re a small group of volunteers who fit our Gamers’ Voice commitments around full-time jobs. We don’t have dozens of peons to do our work Mr Pachter, although if you would like to lend us some of your own minions to help we’d be very grateful. Gamers’ Voice will be contacting Bethesda Softworks on how this game came to be released in such a state in due course.
His comments that it is the specialist press’ job to highlight errors in code to developers is also laughable, would it be the job of a book critic to look for typographical errors? It is the job of the developer’s quality assurance (QA) department to discover bugs and remove them before the game is published at all, not the media that reports on it!
All we can say is that this response from someone who is deeply ensconced in the corporate side of the video game industry only adds fuel to our fire, to the point where we will continue to pursue this issue until it is brought to a satisfactory conclusion.
