April 22, 2010

Printed Manuals No More?

No more man­u­als? Ubisoft announced this week that they will be ditch­ing the trend of print­ing instruc­tion man­u­als for new games under the “green” ini­tia­tive.  While no other pub­lish­ers have jumped on that “green” train just yet it is likely that oth­ers will fol­low suit.

Printed man­u­als have been part of gam­ing since you bought PC games in plas­tic bags.  There have been many stand out eras for man­u­als such as the NES-era book­lets to the man­u­als that accom­pa­nied Elec­tronic Arts vinyl-sized game sleeves.  Some may argue that the advance­ment in on screen con­tex­tual com­mands, first level tuto­ri­als have made the man­ual point­less but is this really the case?

“It’s yet another exam­ple of the anti-consumer ten­den­cies of big com­pa­nies under the guise of fic­tional “green ini­tia­tives,” and I don’t want any­one to get it mixed up. Apart from the use of instruc­tion man­u­als, and what they may mean (or not mean) to us, let’s get one thing straight: any pub­lisher who decides to forego includ­ing printed instruc­tion man­u­als with their games will save the money they have to spend on author­ship of the doc­u­ment, putting it together, pub­lish­ing it, et cetera and so on. And you bet­ter believe that none of that sav­ings will be passed on to the con­sumer. You can take that to the bank.” Say Colin Mori­arty at IGN.

Anti-Consumer ten­den­cies are start­ing to become the trend with big pub­lish­ers, MW2 is a prime exam­ple of this, strip­ping every­thing out of the PC ver­sion that made it a “PC” title and then charg­ing $10 dol­lars more to boot.

Thank­fully, I think con­sumers are start­ing to catch on to these trends and start­ing to speak out against them.  The out­rage over Ubisofts recent DRM fiasco shows what out­raged cus­tomers will do.

On  a per­sonal level this will be sad­den­ing for me to see go.  Even now at the age of 25 when I? get a new game that I am excited about I make my wife drive me home and I read the instruc­tion man­ual on the way there like a giddy school girl.  I also think, espe­cially in some of com­pli­cated games, that in game man­u­als pro­vide a much more in depth look at that game.  They give far more com­mands and but­ton con­fig­u­ra­tions that the player oth­er­wise would have to fig­ure out.  NHL 10 has 5 pages of just dif­fer­ent com­mands you can do.  You can’t cover all that in a “In Game Tutorial”.