User blog comment:The Milkman/Everybody Shut Up./@comment-1763991-20120423080644/@comment-1726879-20120424172646

@The Milkman. I believe that a man from the interwebs found a perfect analogy for what this is. This is your best friend (whom you'd trust to look after your children) stealing your shoes (special £40-£70 ones that you bought for yourself) and then saying "yeah, I stole your shoes, and I'm proud of it, I may have said that I was coming over to your house to talk, but I planned to steal them the whole time. But seeing as you're sad, I'll tell you what. I'll take you for a meal, I'll pay, but I'm still not giving you your shoes back, no, their mine now." What the immediate emotion running through your head should be is betrayal. You've been betrayed by someone you trust, who you've known for years, and they've spat in your face and not given you back what you wanted, just given you something that you didn't want to try to "smooth things over". They not only lied in a way that even an Aes-Sedai would be proud of, but then they sit on a pile of our money and say that they need to maintain "Artistic Integrity".

By the way, for all those who don't know it: "Gamer Entitlement" is as viable in this world as "Artistic Integrity" is. Think about that next time you start supporting either side of it. We, as gamers, are not entitled to have a product changed because we demand it, but looking at it from absolutely any perspective, (other than that of a whiny child who gave in a piece of paper with seven words on it as a 500 word essay) it is stupid to not listen to the upset fans. Why? Because they're your primary, and pretty much their only, form of revenue. If you irritate loyal fans, they will just leave, and begin playing the hundreds of other games that offer the same things, but without the bad points. That means your income drops in the future, which then means that your budget falls, which then means that your products also take a dive. The system repeats itself, again and again, until you either go bust, or resolve the issues you've made, which is far more difficult to do. Keeping hold of loyal fans is far easier than trying to get hold of new people for the game, and as such, once they're gone, it's going to be bloody hard to get them back, and equally hard to get more people to replace them. In ultimatum, actually appealing to the upset fans, giving them what they want, and actually treating them properly and respecting them will help you greatly in the future, as not only do you have happy fans, but you have more income, and as such more budget, and as such far more to work with to attract more consumers and keep those you currently have. In other words: from an industrial standpoint, an economical standpoint and a consumer standpoint, it is a really, really bad idea to ignore irritated fans, and actually getting them on your side will greater help your PR, your income, and your company in general.

TL;DR: Ignoring the fanbase is the worst idea ever thought of by a games developer. Bioware just ignored the fanbase. Results: they lose profit, which makes future games even worse.