A strange taste always fills my mouth whenever I hear the phrase “entitled gamer”. Bitter like poorly made coffee and sickening like the taste of that coffee after it leaves your insides via projectile vomit are the two best ways to describe that taste.

It has become the cultural norm for that phrase to be uttered at the time of writing this, as gamers are seen as spoiled infants who do not even deserve half of what they get given to them by the AAA gaming industry. Are we complaining about the quality of our game? Entitled. Are we complaining about the abhorrent lack of quality control on the day of release because “it can get patched out later”? Entitled. Are we complaining because we just spent $60 USD on a game only to discover it has paid microtransactions littered within, with some of these even affecting the actual progression of the game?

Entitled.

If it hasn’t been made clear by this point, I loathe the phrase “entitled gamers” purely for what it stands for and not necessarily the literal meaning of the phrase, as it has been twisted around into an almost unrecognizable version of itself anymore with developers, publishers and gaming “journalists” being the major offenders of using this phrase and beating it into the ground to make it yet another phrase that no longer has any true meaning in this day and age except for being a passive-aggressive insult towards those who openly complain about their poor practices.

Today I ask an important question, though: Why is it so wrong to be an “entitled gamer”?

At first, this may sound like I am openly acknowledging that we gamers are just the whiny, entitled assholes that the top men of the Big Three (Developers, publishers and “journalists”) have been making us out to be. I promise this is not the case.

Think about this from another point of view. Let’s say you go and get a burger from a fast food place. You go up to the counter, order your hamburger, pay the cashier and wait for it to be made only to discover you were instead given a frozen meat patty with a moldy bun. Would this be something worth complaining to the manager of the restaraunt about, or would that make you seem like an “entitled consumer”?

If you are like me, you’d probably go and ask them to replace the burger with something you would actually eat, right?

While I admit this analogy is not truly comparable to buying a game at the store, that doesn’t change what it means in the spirit of it all, in my personal opinion. Why is it reasonable for us to ask for our food to be handled with care but not our entertainment? Why can I get a replacement for my less-than-expected meal from almost every restaurant but asking for better games for what be pay for them makes us that phrase that spoils the coffee in my stomach even as I type this out? Better yet, why do we not dare to call any of the Big Three themselves, especially the publishers, entitled? Are they not the demanding, whiny children throwing a tantrum about not having all the money in the whole wide world? Are they not the ones who deem a game a “failure” because it did not live up to the sales expectations of greedy men in suits? How is their entitlement any better than ours?

Or to word this a bit more accurately to how I feel, how can no one else tell that our entitlement is far more deserved than theirs? Yes, I am a pissed off gamer. Yes, I deserve to be entitled. I do not pay an average of $40-$60 USD per game for someone to simply tell me that I need to like what is given to me and be thankful I got what I did. As gamers and as consumers, we deserve to be given the best we can possibly be given for what we put into a game, because if you are anything like me, a bad game is much more than a waste of money; it is also a waste of time, energy and dare I say, even life.

Yes, I get pissed off when I spend $60 USD on a buggy mess that I can barely play. Yes, I get pissed off when franchises I love are mutilated by publishers and developers chasing the latest trends to make yet another quick buck. Yes, I get pissed off when I am given the same game every year by a “AAA” publisher who dares to keep the price up because of a few small tweaks. Yes, I get pissed off when my full-priced game has micro-transactions built in to demand even more of my hard earned money. Yes, I get pissed when I am called entitled by the most self-entitled people in this whole industry.

Yes, I am pissed off, I deserve to be entitled to a good product as a consumer and yes, you should be, too.

Thankfully, even as I type this out in a caffeine-fueled haze, there is still glimmers of hope. Amazing games like Persona 5, God of War, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Splatoon 2, Octopath Traveler and more have appeared recently to challenge the bland mediocrity that has polluted gaming recently. Indie developers have begun making huge strides as well, with some of the most popular games in recent memories being created by small teams or even a single developer making amazing games full of charm and emotion that captivate and enthrall us. Even quite recently to the time of writing this, Bungie has left Activision/Blizzard, reigniting new hope into Destiny. Not everything is bad, but if we lose our passion and our voice it can start to become that way again.

I encourage anyone who reads this to never shy away from calling out one of the Big Three I mentioned above. Slam a publisher when a game comes out like shit. Criticize developers constructively but firmly. Call out a games “journalist” who ignores the real story to mold it into a awful piece of propaganda for their personal agendas. Above all, be entitled. We’re the consumers. We’re the gamers. We deserve that right to be entitled to a game that’s worth it.

Game on, gamers.

-Vox Ludio