The Entitlement of Totilo

Stephen Totilo is complaining. That's the best way to explain his article entitled "A Price of Games Journalism". For two years Bethesda and Ubisoft have been blacklisting Kotaku, apparently over the outlet's habit of leaking upcoming projects.

While I can understand the annoyance at this making things harder for them there is an underlying sense of entitlement in this article. And it starts in the third paragraph:

"Neither company has officially told us that we’ve been cut off. For a time, it was possible to make a good-faith assumption that this was just a short-term disagreement. Maybe their spam filters were misplacing our emails. Maybe they’d get over it. Or perhaps they feared a repeat of 2007, when then-Kotaku editor-in-chief Brian Crecente embarrassed Sony out of blacklisting this outlet for reporting the existence of then-unannounced PlayStation projects."

(Hyperlink removed)

Essentially, Totilo wants to be able to write whatever stories he wants and still get the benefits of toeing the line like a good PR outlet. The problem is that it's not 2007, the rise of Let's Players or independent commentary from people like Totalbiscuit has put huge pressure on the "journalistic outlets" like Kotaku since game companies can get widespread coverage at a fraction of the cost.

And it's clear that they know this. Back in 2007 when the independent coverage was still in its infancy it was wise not to anger outlets like Kotaku. While the publishers had money to influence coverage the outlets still maintained some power since they were nominally independent of the publishers. In 2007 losing Kotaku coverage would have been terrible, in 2013? Not so much.
For the price of getting positive coverage from Kotaku, Bethesda and Ubisoft could potentially get far more from the Youtube creators.


All this means Totilo has a choice. It's publish what you want and face the ire of the publishers and the consequences of their actions, or you can be a good little PR outlet and get all the help and support you want.

While the latter turns you into an untrustworthy shill, the former means you have to do more work in order to publish stories.

And that also seems to be what scares him.

More on Ubisoft's DRM

If you're reading this then you've most likely read my previous post regarding Ubisoft's DRM for Assassin's Creed II.

I want to write my own review of the game, but I don't know how many spoilers I want to include (if any) but I want to get this out there.

First off, my opinion of the DRM now that I've actually got the game is that it's not as bad as I first thought.

It doesn't use that much bandwidth, probably because I've turned off the cloud saving.

But it still sucks and I still don't like it. Right now I have to make sure that anything else that's downloading isn't, and that includes Windows updates, so no downloading pod- or vodcasts while playing single player games, or frankly, downloading anything because the game becomes a little glitchy.

At one point I wanted to play the game and had to spend some time figuring out why my internet connection wasn't working properly, which if I was playing any other single player game, even those using Steam, I could play offline without worrying.

But the most annoying thing is being interrupted in cutscenes or a fight where all of a sudden you get a message telling you that it's trying to re-connect to the server. Then I have to see what is causing the problem, if it's indeed something on my end or actually just some stupid thing out of my control.

It ruins the experience. Especially when you're at say, the pivotal moment of the reveal and then you're given the crappy gaming equivalent of the intermission in Monty Python, only with fewer colours and no organ music.

But if this Escapist article is anything to go by, other people are just as annoyed when the server happens to go down. That is something beyond their control.

Personally I believe that Ubisoft should not take the stance that those of us who bought/received legitimate copies of this game as our approval of the DRM. The reason that there are people who aren't pirating the game is because they want to acknowledge the work of the programmers, not the idiots who thought the DRM would be a good idea.

At least Steam give us an offline mode.