Honestly, when your target audience are people so devoted to a frivolous activity that they willing buy devices with no other purpose than to consume carefully curated content, it becomes hard to see them as anything other than a paycheck.
when your target audience are people so devoted to a frivolous activity that they willing buy devices with no other purpose than to consume carefully curated content, it becomes hard to see them as anything other than a paycheck.
Mmmmmm, how deliciously condescending. I wonder if that's how musicians, actors, and iOS developers feel? I make software for desktops, so I respect my target audience (of course, frivolous workstation abuse is quite common, but it's too much effort to maintain a high horse for all those edge cases)
See, I know what you're trying here, but bear with me for a moment.
First, what is condescending about a simple statement of fact?
Games are frivolous (by definition, see http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/frivolous) activities which are pursued for pleasure; if you would like to argue about professional gaming, I'll posit that that applies to a small enough part of the target audience that we won't need to consider it--everybody else plays for fun.
Game consoles are single-function devices whose purpose is to consume carefully-curated content. They aren't made to write art, games, or software; they aren't made to help you create music; and they aren't made to help you pay rent.
Knowing this--and let's not even go into the absurd and abusive criticism that a lot of games get, for better or worse!--and knowing that your audience will never use what you've given them to create anything, and that you probably (given the deathgrip publishers/vendors have on the console industry) didn't even get a fair shake in the production of your title, why would you think of console gamers as anything else?
Seriously, why? Literally your entire interaction with them is that they buy consoles, buy games for the consoles, play the games, and then praise or damn those games on the internet. Oh, and probably trade in the game as soon as there is a reason for doing so.
Contrast this with, for example, how we treat other programmers. We submit bug reports, we release new code, we do things as a community. I believe that this is so because we know the people who receive our work are using it to do something, and that they are capable of creating their own things which one day we too may use. This is not the consumer relationship that console gamers enjoy with publishers.
iOS or mobile developers I would be hesitant to speculate on. I will, however, point out that a lot of freemium apps are driven by ad revenue, and a lot of games are monetized by clever application of psychology to trap the dollars of "whales"--so, please, draw your own conclusions about the sort of respect they must have for their consumers.
Actors and musicians I'll not speculate on either, mostly because there is a big difference to me between buying a device whose only purpose is consumption and buying a ticket to go enjoy an experience--the goods in question are a great deal different.
I would tend to agree, especially as the other pull models for content consumption are a lot better in every meaningful way.
TV's entire model is funded by advertising, the sole purpose of which is to get you to buy things. So, again, I wouldn't take it over, say, a PC where I occasionally stream/pirate videos or, even better, pay artists directly for the performances I enjoy.
Talking about frivolity on the internet while posting from a device with several editors open and getting work done. There is a large difference between choosing to do something fun and frivolous, and choosing to lock yourself into a platform that forces you to consume.
No there is no significant difference. Both are a choice to be frivolous. At least the gamers don't have your arrogance or cognitive dissonance to think otherwise.
So any consumer of content deserves simply scorn and
ridicule?
That's not what I said--please don't put words in my mouth. I did not expand my definition to include any consumer of content, and I did not suggest anything other than that developers have no reason to view their target audience as anything other than entities paying for their product--they have no reason to see them as people with feelings and emotions, they have no reason to see them as independent creative beings, they have no reason to see them as anything other than actors in a marketplace.
Forgive me for not according to gamers qualities that on the whole we can't know.
(and, hazarding a guess from your username: come now, what would Heinlen say about your imprecision of argument?)
No imprecision here. You scorned the users for being consumers of "carefully curated" content. I guess the only way I was imprecise at all was that I didn't cater for you respect of those on "non-carefully curated" content, but given how incendiary the original was, I figured this was just splitting hairs. But you still didn't answer the question as to why not just be open about your position.
Honestly, when your target audience are people so devoted to a frivolous activity that they willing buy devices with no other purpose than to consume carefully curated content, it becomes hard to see them as anything other than a paycheck.