I’ve been somewhat keeping up with the hullabaloo on the Mass Effect/BioWare fiasco and wasn’t sure how I could possibly add to the very cerebral examinations of these recent issues, particularly when people like MrBTongue have packaged their perspectives so succinctly. Look him up on YouTube if you care to watch something bound to make you think a little.
Then I remembered that I am Old, and began to do what old people do: I reminisced. In taking this route, I found an avenue that was at least interesting to myself.

From my point of observation, something is happening to BioWare that has been unprecedented in video games, and that at least is worth talking about. But first, some of that reminiscing.

Being born in 1983 put me in the position of being just old enough to have cognitive, analytical function - even if only just barely - near the beginning of what is known as the third generation of video game consoles, borne out of the ashes of the Atari-ending crash of my birth year. Though the NES was released in the U.S. in 1985, it did not come into its recognition until 1987/1988 with an ever-expanding library of games and the release of the Action Set, which is the package deal that included Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt, the Zapper, yadda yadda yadda - that’s the version that I ended up owning, and is probably what you had as well. This was an incredible thing to own - my older brother and I had an Atari 2600 prior to getting an NES, and the difference was ridiculously obvious even to a six-year-old. The 2600 did not see much action after that.
About a year later, I discovered something else: Nintendo Power. I’d already become fairly-well acquainted with the basics of the NES library by that point, but had not considered the possibility of an entire publication devoted to video games - the idea seemed preposterous and took me completely off-guard when I was introduced to it at issue 14. A subscription soon followed that lasted so long that when payments stopped getting sent, we ended up getting free issues for six months anyway.
The early issues of such magazines are worth re-reading today, if only for an examination of who their target audiences obviously were - their pages are splashed with liberal applications of garishly colorful images and descriptions, the reviews are often trite; overwhelmingly positive for the games that are now regarded as classics, and purposely ambiguous (though still generally positive) when regarding the games that were obviously shit. Above all, the writing in these magazines is boring - an aim had obviously been made to sterilize and homogenize every single line, and while the final product lacks passion, it is also something that the parents can be satisfied with their children reading, which was the whole point - the publishers had to ensure that their product was something that parents were 100% comfortable with their children reading so as to approve its continued circulation, and the readers (the overwhelming percentage of which were children and adolescents) had ensure that as little disapproval as possible was met with their parents, who possessed the actual buying power. What is almost as interesting as this is the fact that at this time, the consumers were unquestioningly these publications’ greatest assets as well as targets; none of the bureaucracies of review-buying or company reps keeping up appearances really existed - E3 wasn’t even a thing until 1995 - and so even though reviews were carefully worded so as to not directly trash on many games, a savvy reader could still see between the lines and form an impression based on subtleties, such as the amount of space devoted or how LESS positive something was being described when compared to others. This was a surprisingly easy quality to intuit.
By 1992, I could often determine whether or not a game was going to stink based on the publisher. I may not have known shit about Squaresoft at that point, but based on personal experience and the nuances of the magazines I was reading, I knew enough about brand recognition that games released by Capcom or Konami were generally decent, and games by LJN or Hudson Soft were generally shit. Say what you will - except for Bomberman, I fucking hated Hudson Soft games. I know that I’m far from being the only one to reach this conclusion through these methods, because both of those shitty companies have long since kicked the bucket.

And this is the point that I’ve been leading up to: In the past, the measure of a company and the estimation of its viability in both the short- and long-term was judged by the overall quality of its games. A company that consistently made crap was going to die, while a company that consistently made gold was going to stick around. No number of movie licenses or clammed-up game reviewers has ever been able to stop this. If there was ever a Golden Rule to making video games, this was it.

Why is the current situation interesting, then? Because the circulation of video-game publications and the potential for word-of-mouth discussion of games has never been so powerful or widespread as it is right now; because the buying power now solidly belongs to the people who are reading and circulating information about games, rather than their parents; because video games stand to make so much more money now than they ever have. With all of this, you would think that the reward system based on consistently good/consistently shitty games and brand recognition would be as strong as it ever was, but what is interesting is that the exact opposite appears to be the case as far as BioWare is concerned.

BioWare HAS consistently released good games; their brand recognition is an ultimately positive one. Despite this, an ever-greater number of consumers have sworn to boycott the company for their recent errors. Not because of bad games, but rather because of bad aspects of very good games. Not because of bad reviews, but rather because of bad business practices with reviewers. Not because of aggressively bad public relations, but rather because of little-to-nonexistent public relations, passively allowing the rot to set in.

This is very much worth my time as an observer because I see it as what appears to be the first example of large-scale negative response against a video game company for acting like jerkasses, despite the fact that they have consistently managed to deliver on that Golden Rule. If this comes to impact BioWare or EA on a significant, company/policy-changing level (to say nothing of the members of the media who have been quick to denounce this response as the product of entitled babymen and malcontents), then holy shit.
A new way of doing things may be sneaking up on us.