We pay for a service ... not seats on the board, not shareholder voting rights ... you don't like the product, then go somewhere else ... that's how consumers vote.
Yup, but actually AH is in a unique market position that gives HiTech a lot of room to "fudge" the importance of customer satisfaction's influence on design and gameplay changes. There is no real contender for this genre right now. AH is really the only product like this that's worth a damn available to us currently, so has practically a 100% market share. So, instead of customers being able to just migrate with their money to a reasonable facsimile of AH if dissatisfied, we have only a choice to suffer with whatever we have in AH or quit the genre altogether. There's really is no market force to balance this out for the AH customer at this time.
It's not like laundry detergent. If I don't like Tide I can just stop buying Tide and buy Cheer instead, if everyone did that Tide would soon be out of business. However, if Tide were the only detergent there was, we'd either have to stop washing our clothes altogether or keep giving Tide our money. The makers of Tide would probably assume their product was flawless and in no need of change. But really people just wanted to wash their clothes and had no other choice but to buy Tide. Tide would soon learn of their HUGELY erroneous misconception, based on the monopolistic nature of the market conditions, if another detergent suddenly became available.
This makes HTC much more prone to saying something dangerous like, "Well I had X number of subscribers last year and I have X+500 this year, therefore my game design must be perfect in every way with no room for improvement...Anyone who thinks it's not perfect in one respect or another or could be improved in some way(s) must just be a whiner" (I am not saying he necessarily thinks like this at all). It doesn't take into account other possibilities.
For example, had the game design been improved in certain ways, instead of X+500 this year we might have had X+3000, because those dissatisfied may not have left the genre and we may have retained many more that tried it but did not like it enough to subscribe. Or, had gameplay been improved so that instead of attracting and retaining predominantly Y type of players we may have attracted or retained Z type of players. The Z types in turn would've helped improve gameplay further by virtue of their proclivities toward certain gameplay enhancing behaviors thereby attracting even more players of the same persuasion in snowball fashion.
So, given that HTC currently has a virtual monopoly right now, market forces that would normally apply in a competitive market to influence design and gameplay changes do not exist. We are at the mercy of the benevolent wisdom of HTC. AH customers currently have no recourse to appeal for gameplay changes, short of quitting the genre altogether, other than suggestions and comments on his forums. HTC in turn finds itself afforded the rare luxury of the viable option of ignoring those appeals entirely or even deny there's any problems at all with very little risk of any significant negative impact on their bottom line in the short-term. The danger of this laissez-faire approach is that it is incredibly unlikely the AH customer will be left without another palatable option indefinitely as the internet generation ages and obtains disposable income for game subscriptions and hardware. As that happens, some opportunistic company will see this niche market as lucrative enough to put in a serious bid for a market share just like HTC itself did years ago.
