Help Bungie help Haiti~
 

Do you have one of these?

http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e2...0-versions.jpg

Do you also have either of these?

http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e2...Halo3Cover.jpg • http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e2...3ODSTCover.jpg

Are you one of us overexcited and vicariously angry fucks who spends his/her time playing either of the above?

http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e2...Junk/croyt.jpg

Do you consider yourself a charitable person but have one of the following apply to you?

• I'm broke
• I'm too lazy to find a paying job
• Mom won't give me my allowance
• I'm a drug dealer and my job that does not pay taxes and therefore not tax-deductible

Circle one, please.


Good. You can help Bungie help Haiti. As noted by Terminus and SailorDaravon's journal entries, Bungie is donating $77k to help the out this cursed country get back on its godless feet. Let's organize a nice little clusterfuck of online Halo, set up our emblems and give what little help we can give.

So I guess we can discuss schedules so we can at least gather some troops to shoot out in a smorgasbord of Spartan armor destruction. This goes down at 0:01AM PST Wednesday, 1/20, through 23:59PM PST Thursday 1/21. Teams would probably be pretty cool so that the good players can gangrape the people who suck; all in the name of charity and good will.

I noticed a similar thing with Modern Warfare 2 over christmas. A company decides to take advantage of the tax breaks associated with charitable donations but rather than just give the money straight to charity, they dress it up in some stupid pay-per-play thing, thereby turning the worthy act of charitable giving into a semi-decent advertising scheme. I think it's fucking cynical and pretty low to be honest, even for ad-men.

I feel the same way about a lot of these donation schemes which ask you to do something which seems unrelated to giving money. If they have the money to give, why not give it anyway?

That said, I would seriously do this if I'd ever played a Halo game on the circlebox. I don't own either, sadly. Hardly seems worth a rental when there are bound to be plenty of players and I could just make a donation of whatever I can afford anyway.

I think the idea of raising awareness of something to people who would otherwise not care through an otherwise unconventional medium is rather good. But I don't know, I'm just a dick like that.

Be A Hero!

by getting Bungie to donate 10 cents on your behalf

Eh... OK you have a point there.

Raise awareness sure but don't pretend like any of the kids who'll be picking up Halo 3 for a few games this weekend instead of glitching their way through a few MW2 matches are going to donate any money as a result and frankly, with the news coverage the earthquake is getting you'd pretty much have to be living in a box not to know about it and then how would you know about Bungie's "Charitable event".

This really is the lowest form of advertising in my opinion and it's not just Bungie who do it. Tesco do it all the time and I can think of at least three products you can buy at the moment that'll give a couple of pence to charity if you do.

$70,000 or whatever they say the maximum they'll give out is is pretty much peanuts to Bungie and is tax deductible so will only cost them half that in real terms. I'm sure the revenue from people buying the latest map packs to play Halo 3 online over the weekend will more than cover that, which of course is why they did it, along with getting a few more Halo 3 players to buy ODST.

If you really want to help earthquake victims, be a hero and give money to Oxfam.

Man, if only I had that gif of Dawson crying. That's pretty much Shin right now.

I would also be down for playing some Halo 3 and or ODST, since I have both already. Maybe I should go out and buy another copy though just to see if Shin explodes in bitch rage.

I already got my points card, gonna buy all the map packs AGAIN, it's going to be so fucking ballin'.

Protip: Bungie doesn't own Halo anymore; even in the highly unlikely scenario this actually inspires anyone to buy map packs or the game (hahaha, really who the fuck would be stupid enough to think that), Bungie doesn't see any of that money. And there's been no press release or any pimpage of this at all from Microsoft, and they would be the people actually benefiting from all these phat copies of Halo 3 and ODST that people are going to start buying now.

Fine, whatever. It's a time honoured marketing ploy, used repeatedly by large corporations the world over but don't let that influence you. I'm not saying don't play Halo, I'm just saying don't make out like Bungie are doing something worthy here purely out of the goodness of their own hearts and I'll say again, if you really want to do something to help the earthquake victims, send some money to a charity. Why not send the $60 you were going to spend on Halo Reach for example?

No matter how you spin it, even with the tax thing Bungie (who again is an independent studio now, and not sitting on fat moneybags from MS anymore) is still donating money out of their own pocket at the end of the day, and creating awareness that hopefully encourages people to donate. For example, I donated through work (and my employer put out a press release, what a bunch of DICKS am I rite) but I also bought one of the Bungie shirts, and that's actual additional money I would not have donated otherwise. If you're thinking that people were going to donate money, but are just going to see this and decide to play Halo instead of donating directly, I think that's crazy. Again, this has ONLY been mentioned on one Bungie website post, so except for people spreading the word, anyone they would be "advertising" to already has all of the products in question.

I don't disagree with the general cynicism regarding companies and donations (again, my employer put out a Press Release -_-), but in this particular case I have no idea where all the sand in your vagina is coming from.

This isn't unique to this particular situation. He's like this all the time. It's a British thing.

I just think it's abig wrong of companies to use human suffering as an advertising ploy is all.

Fair enough, they're not overly publicising this like happened with MW2 (TV ads for a couple of weeks) but it's definitly a publicity stunt. That they're donating the money at all is of course a good thing but personally, I'd see it as a more charitable thing if they didn't dress it up in this whole play our game and we'll donate thing. That this nicely bridges the publicity gap between ODST coming out and Reach coming out in a few months is convenient for them as they can get more people playing Halo and in the mood for the next game.

And yes, Tails is right, unbridled cynicism is a national passtime here. Omagnus seems to have picked up on your American seeing only the good in people gene but the rest of us are more or less like me.

And you know all this talk of playing Halo has made me really tempted to buy ODST...

Look Shin, regardless of Bungie's motives, one of the worst things you can do to a fellow human being is piss on their sense of heroic sacrifice.

It was a polite way of saying "Childlike naivity".

:tpg:

Anyway, I'm probably as cynical or even moreso then you Shin, at least about certain things (I work in the healthcare industry for fucks sake), but in this particular case I'm not quite sure what the problem is. The people who are seeing this are the people who are going to buy Reach anyway, and anyone who wasn't won't remember this 8 months from now anyway. The emphasis seems to be on the shirt and store profits going to charity, so I don't know if the playing thing was to help support that or get people in the mood to buy that stuff maybe? In this particular case I just don't see any overt way in which Bungie "profits" from this situation, and again I personally know dudes over there and I don't get that impression from them either. I think the fact that they have to specify that anything on the Bungie store they don't directly own (i.e. MS products) don't have their profits donated speaks volumes as well.

OK guys... I think we can all agree that Bungie is a bunch of self-lauding knobslobbers for putting together a self-serving, tax-exempting publicity stunt. Now, for those of us who are "falling" for their two-faced loopholing, I would suggest we start putting together parties to get in on come Wednesday. Now, I know I haven't seen any other vitriol from anyone yet but don't start now unless you'd like a nice little thread ban.

And Shin, come on, mate... You know better than this. I couldn't thread ban you if I wanted to but, seriously, let the rest of us plebs do what we damn please with our so-called charity time, yeah?

I'm down. I don't have ODST though but I've got all the OTHER map packs available for h3.

Ok, ok, I'm sorry for coming across as a dick. It's a personal bug bear of mine and Daravon does have a point.

At the risk of sounding like the biggest hypocrite of all time, playing Halo with a bunch of people again would be fun, with or without the allusions of charity.

There ya go big fella! I knew you'd come around eventually.

Hopefully there'll be more "watching people get Spartan lasered from relative safety" laughs to be had.

Of course, if I have to buy any map-packs to make my game current I reserve the right for at least a quiet "I told you so". :)

ODST is available new from Amazon for £20 at the moment if anyone (In the UK) is like me tempted to pick it up. I can't see it getting much cheaper than that and GAME's second hand copies cost more than that at the moment.

Edit: Or £15 on Ebay, score! I did use Paypal's donate button to send a fiver to the Earthquake appeal while I was there though. I figured after this thread it was the least I could do.

ODST for £20 is a bargain, so £15 is a real deal, and since it gives you the Halo 3 MP disc with all the maps included, that should make things even easier.

I'm down for firing up Halo 3 MP at some point this week if a big party is being put together for this.