My name is not Andrew Ryan; but I'm still here to ask you a question: Are gamers not entitled to the game they paid for? That's the question that I want you to rattle about in your head for a little bit. Now you'll often hear the word 'entitled' chucked around as an insult quite a bit around the world of gaming, but if we disregard it's negative connotations and look at the literal definition and then think about it; why shouldn't folk be entitled to receive goods equal to the value that they paid for it? Well, if you find yourself on a marketing team and approached with the question than the rebuttal is easy; because value is subjective and it's often impossible to compare and contrast amid the myriad of purchaseables that dominate our world. But what if we pull back to a more nuanced approached and compare the value of what is offered in one game with what is offered by another; when does the discrepancy between them become egregious to the point where frustration is validated?
I find myself pondering this as we hear about the latest puddle to splash across gaming news relating to Sega's outstanding Yakuza franchise. Their latest title; 'Yakuza: Like a Dragon', is soon to release and it promises a reinvention of the tried and true formula indicative of the Yakuza license. Rather than an action adventure beat 'em up title, this game will adopt a JRPG stance which one could argue is a dime-a-dozen in Japan but to be fair I've never seen it done where every single party member is wearing a cheap suit. Amidst one of the many huge departures from the Yakuza formula that 'Like a Dragon' is instituting, one which has triggered the audience is the exclusion of the highest difficulty mode and a New Game + mode. Oh sorry, let me correct myself; the transplantation of the said modes outside of the base game and into DLC which SEGA then expect people to shell out for at a later date.
Now personally I don't usually get down with a New Game + mode, but difficulty modes are my jam so this does somewhat upset me. (And I am actually a fan of the franchise, so this will inconvenience me when I get around to it. I'm still on Yakuza 0, however, so that's probably going to be a while.) This news is slightly undercut by a few factors of course; one of them being the price. The DLC will only be $0.60 at launch, but that's only for a limited time after which it will receive a 10x price hike to $6.00. (What the heck, guys?) Then there is the fact that as the game is launching in Japan right now, this little trick is only being pulled there. Surely they wouldn't think this would fly in the West? The answer to that is "Of course they would" and this little experiment shouldn't even just be looked at as a trial run for the West but likely for every SEGA Yakuza game to follow. (Especially the one's that haven't been officially released with English translations yet.)
But if we circle back to the original question that I purposed, then we can address this from the angle of: Why should people be upset about this retroactive exclusion from the game? (We've no actual confirmation that this is a retroactive removal but come on, we aren't idiots here.) At what point does the contract between the developer and the consumer become sullied by the removal of features to the point at which we are being ripped off? For some folk, they could say that it comes from the moment this title starts pawning off features that earlier games offered for free; but then one could point out that the entire structure of this particular entry is vastly different to those earlier games, so you might say that the value of those modes has similarly shifted. Others still could rebut that it happens once content is knowingly cut from the final product, but the creators could argue that the package is full without this content, it's just a bonus. (To be clear, I'm playing devil's advocate with all of this, I'm just curious about how far this train of thought can stretch.)
In a way this is the same tug-of-war at the heart of every microtransaction argument between purchaser and provider. When the offered content is perceived as something so insignificantly minuscule that it could have been cobbled together in less than a week, it's hard for people to come to terms with the idea of having to pay for it. Add ontop of that the dilemma of pricing for such content and things become overly complicated. Take Anthem for example; in that game Bioware started off their content support by charging £15 for new skins on one's Javelin. So did that mean that this single skin was 1/4 as valuable as the entire base game? These are the sorts of equations that publishers invite by introducing such measures, and then discourage us from actually going through. This sort of mentality can be best summed up in Pete Hines' notoriously victim-playing Fallout 76 interview the other week. (You know; the one where he moronically claimed that people were picking on the game just because they hated Bethesda?) There he defended the much-chided Fallout 1st subscription by calling it false equivalence to compare the price of their service with the price of Netflix. Their offer was for sustained private servers (even then, still vastly overpriced) whilst Netflix is offering streaming to thousands of movies and TV. There's an argument to be had there, but maybe between people a little more down-to-earth than ol' Pete.
Taking things back to the concept of selling difficulty modes, 'Like a Dragon' isn't actually the first of it's kind to do that. If I take you all the way back to 2013, there was a bit of hubbub around a little game called 'Metro: Last Light' when they had the audacity to announce a Ranger mode alongside the release of the game. This pack would include exclusive access to the Ranger difficulty mode which was advertised as "The way Metro was meant to be played." As a huge fan of Metro I can actually attest to the fact that Metro is an experience that is indeed meant to be played in Ranger mode, wherein difficulty is ramped, resources are scarce and you have no HUD or tutorials to play with. In fact, when I first played Metro 2033 I went through the whole thing in Ranger mode. (PSA: Yes, that was as dumb of an idea as it sounds. I ended up getting stuck half way through because of gameplay mechanics that I didn't even know existed, such as using the lighter.)
The level of discourse from that event was much the same it was know; "why is Ranger Mode blocked off for this entry when it was part of the original game for free?" Again, the insult wasn't from the price of the content (which was minuscule) but rather from the audacity of having been asked to pay for something that many considered to be a part of the base package. A bulletpoint under the 'promised goods' that one expects to receive when they purchase the game. (It surely didn't help their case the Deep Silver went around claiming how essential the mode was to experience the game as designed) But at the end of the day without any genuine physical contract to the effect, all anyone could really argue was that they were 'entitled' to this mode; and that doesn't really sound too good in a debate, now does it?
When it's all said and done I don't believe there's an actual answer to this conundrum, as it would require the conjuring of a question that could be answered. The consumer is entitled to absolutely nothing beyond what they strictly pay for and if the providers decided to slice away at their original deal then what we are owed reduces in kind. So does that mean we should be contented when companies cut out game modes and charge us for the privilege? Of course not. As beyond the basic confines of legal entitlement lies the desire of what customers deserve, and if what is offered is undeserving of the consumer then it really is one's duty to let these companies know about it. So what is a consumer entitled to? Absolutely nothing. But what do we deserve? Exactly what we paid for and not a single difficulty mode less.
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