User blog comment:Traditionalfire/Perspective: Mass Effect 3/@comment-1786741-20130325014137

Eh, by now I'm just completely cynical on the whole fiasco. I'm just going to say this: the retakers were neither being entitled whiners or were completely justified in their campaign. I'm one of those huge proponents that video games are art, but they're also considered a product. So while a video game creatively belongs to the developer, that doesn't mean they should do whatever they want with it and not expect some sort of fan outcry. They need to temper their creative process with the mindset they are creating a piece of entertainment. ME3 isn't the first to have something changed because of massive fan outcry either. Sherlock Holmes was one of the first, fans were somewhat disappointed when Doyle killed him off but later brought him back to life when he knew he couldn't just end Sherlock's story like that. Movies do something similar to this all the time too, they have the benefit of screening movies to the audience in order to gauge their reactions. The changes can vary from minute details to a radically different ending, sometimes more than one. ME3 simply changed HOW the ending was changed. In this day and age, we have the benefit of constant internet connectivity. Bugs can be easily fixed through online patches and DLC can extend the lifetime of these games. This is a slippery slope though, and just like the controversial use of microtransactions, should be tempered by common sense. What made ME3 special though to elicit such outrage? It wasn't just a single aspect, but a whole mess of issues with varying degrees. The phrase "taken down by mosquito bites" comes to mind. There was just so much subjectively wrong and the right amount of popularity to the point it wasn't something Bioware could ignore. One could argue the fans couldn't really "demand" anything. It was a case of Bioware placating some of the fans' complaints or lose a large portion of customers, it wasn't something they HAD to do but it was in their best interest to do so. There are the few that sued and took it waaaaaay out of hand but they didn't represent the group as a whole in the slightest.