Surprise! Protesting Video Games Only Makes Them Sell More

Blog Style or Sort By Most Bumps This... Day Week Month Life

Surprise! Protesting Video Games Only Makes Them Sell MorePosted 7:37pm Thu Nov 01, 2007 by Aaron Dunlap Tags: manhunt 2, rockstar, protests

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Manhunt 2, Bully, all three of those games have three things in common: first, they're all made by Rockstar (which makes the motivations for the second point a little transparent); second, they all had considerable uproar and protest around their release due to their violent or offensive content; and third, they sold (or probably will sell) around three hundred and forty five trillion copies.

It seems rather obvious, that all the continual media coverage given to the outrage over a game is nothing more than free advertising. The people protesting the game are actually increasing its exposure, defeating their own purpose.

Wired has a great article about this, following the trend back to games like Mortal Kombat and beyond.

Sociologists and psychologists will tell you that boycotts rarely work because the phrase "Don't buy _____" includes the words "buy _____" -- but protesting a game because of titilating content worsens the situation because the titilation is what most people want.

Imagine if there was an unmarked store on a street and as you were walking past it somebody grabbed you and said, "Don't go inside there, they have low priced pornography!" If that protester hadn't said anything, you would never have known about the cheap porn in that store and would have walked right by it. In the same way, people complaining about all of the sex and violence in these games just lets more people know that, hey, here's a game with sex and violence they can buy.

The real debate is whether Rockstar makes their games so prone to protest on purpose, knowing it's a great business model. If that were the case, would that be cheap or brilliant?