Stats Don’t Lie: Sensitivity Edition

“Mommy, why would Santa deliver a present that’s broken?”

What you’re looking at are incoming search queries hitting Games Are Evil on Christmas Day 2008, courtesy of our Woopra stat tracking software. (Woopra is incredible by the way, and blows away Analytics.)

These search queries tell me that someone failed miserably in Activision’s quality control department. Granted, I’ve been aware of this problem since late October. But the article on our site snagging all of those searches has been the most read post for a week straight…

Let me fill in the shadowy details:

We live in an on-demand, short-attention-span, instant gratification world, and the console game industry has taken a page from it’s bitter rival, the PC, and since the arrival of the Xbox has been pushing incomplete & buggy games on our laps. Now, it’s being extended to hardware and peripherals.

Consumers have, as of this writing, had to endure abysmal failure rates from Microsoft’s Xbox 360 – and now the equally disastrous “Red Ring of Zune.” Microsoft: Was your Entertainment & Devices Division all stoned in 2005 and 2006?

Video Game publishers consistently ship titles that are knowingly broken or buggy, with promised patches just a few days out from the release date. Too bad the folks without internet connections are screwed. (I work for Gamestop – and believe me that’s a large number of consumers.)

And on October 28th, 2008, rumblings started rising from the depths of Guitar Hero’s community forums, hinting that ALL of “Guitar Hero World Tour’s” drumkits were broken. The specific problem with this $189 purchase was that the red snare was not sensitive enough to detect each hit, resulting in massive fail. The developers quickly addressed the issue and released software to fix the problem…

Except, that software required a PC…to which you connected your fake plastic drumkit…with a USB Midi cable. Because everyone has a USB Midi cable lying around, right?

So, flash forward to Christmas Day 2008. I peered into our Woopra stats, seeing the ridiculous amount of Guitar Hero related searches (cool that we’re almost the #1 Google result, not cool that we even had to write the article), and imagined 100’s of 1000’s of children AND adults wondering why Santa had delivered a broken present!

See, for the average consumer (if you’re reading this, you’re likely not one of them) who isn’t glued to RSS feeds and gaming blogs, it’s preposterous to be expected to jump through so many hoops to fix a product that NEVER should have shipped in it’s current condition. I’m looking at you Guitar Hero, 360, Zune, select Macbook products, numerous laptop batteries and even dozens of car models over the past 4 decades.

When casual gamers and everyday consumers have to go googling to find out why their $200 toy doesn’t work, it’s time to consider the fact that the game MAKERS and publishers are the ones who are broken.

Will I be buying a Zune? Or another Guitar Hero product? Or even recommend a used Xbox 360 to anyone who isn’t comfortable with a soldering iron? No way. And neither should you.

-Jason Evangelho is familiar with the phrase “implied warranty,” and he’s not afraid to use it…