Can you see why he is saying this?

Absolutely. We are not perfect beings. Outbursts happen. They should be discouraged and understood, as well as forgiven.

No. Though I can't say I agree with a laissez-faire economic model for a number of reasons.

Pardon me if I'm repeating something someone has already said, but after reading up to page three of this thread, I have a comment.

TotalBiscuit has a number of berserk buttons, but two of them are:
* Charging for a game that is not finished (in his words, "If I can pay for it, it's ready to review")
* Day-one DLC

Now, the latter does not apply here, but there is an extent to which the former does. I can imagine TB saying something along the lines of: "Is this game feature-complete? No. Then what are they doing selling a retail copy?"

If you insist on showing uninformed articles to me as REASONS for something that has stood strong for over 200 years without a violent exchange of power (the longest in the history of the entire human race, I might add) to be invalid, then we are done discussing this.

I bid you good night, sir.

I too, understand his outburst to some extent based on his previous content that I perused while researching Extra Credits. He just hasn't allowed himself to be flexible in his reasoning as time goes on - a crucial mistake that history reminds us constantly to NOT REPEAT.

Except that nothing has changed in the industry to warrant him making the change you feel he NEEDS to make. If anything it could be argued that things have gotten worse over time.

Mike

True.
I really am coming off rather forcefully, aren't I? D:

The rhetoric is blinding!

How do you mean, nothing has changed? It's been what, a few years? In the technology industry these days, that's a lifetime.

When was this about technology? This is about business practices, and it's not that nothing AT ALL has changed, just that nothing relevant to his opinion has changed and/or changed for the worse and only further re-enforced his opinion.

Mike

Hm. Fair enough. Did I agree with the move by Uber for an early retail release?

Not really. But from what I hear, they didn't have much of a choice. There was the matter of a contract with Nordic......afaik. Regardless. An outburst like TB's is just uncalled for. Get the facts. If they are killing babies, then you can start screaming. It's just a product, after all. No need to get all in a fuss over something that only exists in the bowels of electricity.

TotalBiscuit is an idealist. For him, ALL ideals are Serious Business. =)

Like I said earlier, I don't think we should read too much into his one singular comment unless he doesn't plan on commenting further on it which he probably will at some point.

Mike

The point still stands, Mike. Analysis should come first, before stating what you think.

How can you saw he hasn't already analyzed and this is just his super short form opinion?

Mike

That operates on the assumption that businesses don't just decide to all mutually start shifting towards uninformative and unreliable advertising, because when everyone else is doing it, they all benefit from not having to invest so much in quality control and being able to overstate their products' capabilities. As long as the barrier to entry into the market is sufficiently high, and consumers are not highly organized, nobody will be able to punish them for it.

That's why there are things like truth-in-advertising laws - because if there weren't, the largest entities in various markets could get away with outright lies due to the lack of credible competition. Since that hurts consumers, the consumers react via representative democracy.

Shifting back to the original topic, I'm leaning toward TotalBiscuit's PoV on this one - I certainly felt rather uneasy when I heard about the early-access boxed release. It's just that previously, boxed releases meant that a game was finished - it's a symbol of completion. By putting out an early-access game in a box, you're not only potentially giving people false impressions, you're also eroding the boundaries between early-access and a finished product. Already, there have been many games released with serious bugs. Weakening the separation between early-access and completion would only make this worse, and I'd rather not see Uber pushing things in that direction.

On the offtopic -
I believe you are referring to when businesses attempt to collaborate and rig the market to their own ends. This sometimes happens on accident or on purpose. That's why we have anti trust laws and the like, which have been enforced rather regularly.

Point taken. Sit tight, wait for his full opinion. We've only heard the title to his next video!

Such optimism!

The similar methods used don't have to be deliberate. If advertising with false or misleading statements is a legitimately effective tactic, then businesses will gravitate toward it naturally, without any direct collaboration. And once blatant lies become the norm, then things will probably stay that way, since anyone claiming honesty simply won't be believed by the jaded consumers.

Yet, this state of affairs is harmful to society as a whole, because it forces consumers to do lots of outside research in order to know what they're buying, reducing their productivity. Good inventions might not get made, because it's cheaper to make a lesser invention and then make wild claims about its capabilities. Alternatively, the true claims about that good invention's capabilities might get ignored, because jaded consumers assume those claims are hot air.

Government should exist to serve the good of society, and honest advertising serves society by letting consumers find what they want quickly and efficiently, and by letting inventors get their work seen by interested parties.

Government exists to protect its citizens. Not to preserve their well-being. Government does not mean GRANDMA.

While the situation you describe would be harmful to society, it'll never happen. (I say this because it never has happened, to my knowledge. If someone more read than I wishes to correct me, feel free). While groups of people are quite predictable compared to individuals, they cannot be duped in a large scale fashion indefinitely. There's a lot of civil unrest going around these days for this very reason. The government has been duping its citizens into believing they are here to serve them, lulling them into a peaceful existence with no purpose but to eat, sleep, screw around, and use the commode. The American Republic was not constructed with government as the center - it was built with a watchful citizenry at the head, letting government do what was necessary to keep their livelihood out of enemy hands, whilst also keeping government in check by reigning in the greedy politicians.

But this was an issue at one point
You do know that the U.S. has had laws protecting against this for over a century, right?

More interesting reading: http://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/WhatWeDo/History/FOrgsHistory/CFSAN/ucm083863.htm
Of course, this was before the internet, but either way you have to force a company to release that information somehow, and to make it easily accessible. Forcing them to put it on the packaging is the most reasonable way to do it, as there is no way they can try to use loopholes to obfuscate information.

I'll point out here that this was before the widespread use of the Internet