War of words erupts between Gamer’s Voice and Pachter

A bitter war of words has erupted between Tom Watson’s gaming pressure group Gamer’s Voice and Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter.

Yesterday MCV reported that Gamer’s Voice is to send a petition to the Office of Fair Trading regarding complaints about alleged bugs in the PS3 and PC versions of Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops.

However, speaking to IncGamers, Pachter was dismissive of the action.

They sound like a crybaby to me," the analyst stated. "I suppose this helps to explain why the game sold only 20m copies instead of 25m, and why it received only a 90 per cent Metacritic rating instead of 95.

"All games are buggy, some more so than others. Have you tried Fallout: New Vegas? Buggiest game ever. If people don’t like it, they can take it back to retail for a refund. Most bugs are patched within a reasonable time, and any serious gamer expects bugs.

In my view, this is a blatant stunt by a politician to grab attention. He should probably pay more attention to keeping gaming jobs in the UK than to pissing off a large company that can create or eliminate UK jobs.”

Now Gamer’s Voice has responded with a strongly worded statement of its own.

"His comments are inaccurate and insulting to computer and video game consumers with his reaction describing Gamers’ Voice as little more than ‘cry babies’," it reads. "This presents the gaming industry as both arrogant and uncaring to the audience it serves.

"We are reacting to Activision because we’ve had many, many emails about the game crippling issues from British (and international) gamers who are unhappy with the buggy product and poor service Activision have provided to PC and PS3 gamers.

"His comments that it is the specialist press’ job to highlight errors in code to developers is also laughable. Would it be the job of a book critic to look for typographical errors?It is the job of the developer’s QA department to discover bugs and remove them before the game is published at all, not the media that reports on it.

"All we can say is that this response from someone who is deeply ensconced in the corporate side of the video game industry only adds fuel to our fire, to the point where we will continue to pursue this issue until it is brought to a satisfactory conclusion."