The thing that bothers me the most about this interview... (Destiny)

by Miguel Chavez, Tuesday, June 23, 2015, 08:36 (3526 days ago) @ Fuertisimo

As an aspiring journalist I gotta jump in here. It's part of your job as an interviewer to ask people questions that are uncomfortable, even adversarial at times, and if the questions he was asking were "pissing him off" so to speak, then odds are good that the interviewer was striking a chord. As long as Luke was going to keep talking about it, the interviewer was going to keep asking questions, as is his job.

Luke would have been better off just saying that decisions about value and cost weren't his department, unless of course he was specifically given instruction to go into the interview trying to persuade people of The taken Kings value, which I think is a pretty good bet considering how much effort is put into getting employees to respond "on message" so to speak.

The most bizarre portion of the interview:

Luke Smith: Okay, but first I want to poke at you on this a little bit.

Eurogamer: Poke at me?

Luke Smith: You're feeling anxious because you want this exclusive content but you don't know yet how much you want it. The notion of spending this money is making you anxious, I can see it -

Is just a really strange moment. The fact that he felt he needed to go on the offensive at that point and dictate to the interviewer what they were feeling is a really strange way of trying to establish dominance over the interviewer.

Luke's gambit ultimately backfired as this followed:

Eurogamer: What I'm saying is that fan frustration is not because they don't understand the proposition. It comes regardless of how cool the exclusive content is. The frustration - and mine as a fan - is that the method of acquiring it requires me to re-buy content I bought a year ago.

Luke Smith: [Long pause] It's about value. The player's assessment of the value of the content.

Which is essentially saying we think you're going to want the content bad enough that you will end up paying for things you already own anyhow, and that doesn't really bother us, because it's about what the players valuation, not ours. Which I doubt is the message that the PR team wanted him to convey, considering how exploitative that might appear to people.

Gambit? Please.

The 'journalist' reveals his bias when he says he's a fan. My take on this is that Luke could tell this kid was upset and agitated. That's no way to conduct yourself professionally. So he decided 'fuck this, this interview's already going to be biased from the get-go' And he just let the honesty fly. How much more honest can you be when you say "It's about value" - and the pause is probably because he saw this kid about to start crying.

Go Luke go!

What really makes me crack up is how now the PS4 folks are getting all up in arms - like they completely forgot that for a YEAR they've had exclusive access to content that XBone folks were denied.

Like others have (rightly) said - and I'll rephrase the words to how it *should* be stated: All this about some dance moves? ABSURD! If some stupid dance moves is how we now see as 'exploitative' for the core audience - I don't want to be associated with a bunch of needy whiners as the core audience. It's embarrassing.

- M