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As a young girl, I was absolutely addicted to playing games. My drug of choice was Final Fantasy, because it allowed me an entirely new world to explore. I could escape the bullies; I could escape my father.

Yet, at some point in the past decade an insatiable greed appears to have taken over the industry. Take for example the microtransactions that so many gamers lament. What of a beautiful narrative, empathetic characters, and engaging gameplay (since they are games after all)? I'm not entirely certain of the correct path to take, but I know that appealing to the lowest common denominator will not allow gaming to become the grand artistic medium for the masses that so many hoped it could be.

The good news is that all of the great games are still around and it's easier than ever to play them on a PC. For the most part awesome immersive games that only charge users once upfront are a relic of the past.

But in some cases, recent past. Fallout 4 comes to mind.

What about recent games like:

- Heavy Rain

- Beyond 2 Souls

- Detroit: Become Human

- Witcher 3

- Horizon Zero Dawn

- Mass Effect Series

And then there are classic adventure type games from http://www.WadjetEyeGames.com

Those don't include any micro transaction and you pay once upfront.

While Horizon Zero Dawn is an Awesome game, and I did play it mostly on a PC through remote play, it does require a PS4 to play.

> For the most part awesome immersive games that only charge users once upfront are a relic of the past.

I completely disagree with you here. Yes there are games which have micro transactions, many of which did not have them in the past, but that doesn't mean that awesome immersice games that only charge users once are dead. They're even more available now. The Witcher is a usually touted as the prime example, although it's a few years old at this point. PS4 has a few exceptional titles like God of War, Horizon, Days Gone, Uncharted, Spiderman, Ni no Kuno, Shadow of the Colossus RDR 2, in the last year. The switch has games like Captain Toad, Mario Odyssey, breath of the Wild, Mario Kart, Case of Distrust, super smash Bros while PC had Frostpunk, Hitman 2, Battletech, Into the Breach.

All excellent games in their own right, all released in the last 12 months, as standalone experiences. If you want to you can jump into any number of paid for multiplayer (division 2, world of Warcraft, destiny, COD, PUBG) or f2p (Fortnite - disclaimer I work on it, Warframe, League of Legends, path of exile, PlanetSide, Apex Legends). Yes some of those games have micro transactions, but for the most part they don't actually interfere with the game. Yes you can cherry-pick some of my specific examples and tell me in wrong, but you can't even begin to claim that gaming is in a bad state right now.

Dude.. this comment is infuriating. You have a valid point, but you stuff your points justification with blatant lies AND you know they are lies. You ask us to call you out but the many of us who are not deeply knowledgeable about games would not know which examples are incorrect and how many are incorrect.

From skimming over your references roughly 40 percent of your examples have micro transactions and about 40 percent do not have rich narratives. Yes, I pulled these numbers out of my ass and you can nitpick them all you want, but I work in the gaming industry and know what I am talking about /s

I'm not sure what your point is - I was trying to say that there is a laundry list of narrative rich, mtx free titles, and that they exist beside more accessible options which _do_ have microtransactions, but he latter category existing doesn't detract from the former at all.

Well yes it does... if you lie about examples when proving your point you don’t think it detracts from your arguments credibility?

I appreciate that you framed this comment as if you're inviting discussion and subsequently shut down all responses by saying that they are "cherry-picking some of my specific examples" and re-claiming your standpoint without any additional evidence. This doesn't promote or invite healthy discussion, as you've essentially closed yourself to feedback before it is even given.

I really didn't mean to - I more meant that I am aware that games such as call of duty having microtransactions doesn't take away from all of the rest of the games. In previous discussions I've had on the topic, people just focus on one small point and take it as a reason to dismiss my entire argument, which is that games are in a healthy state overall, and there are plenty of narrative rich, mtx free games available. (which is what I really hoped to avoid). Unfortunately I can't edit my above comment to clarify or rephrase!

> but you can't even begin to claim that gaming is in a bad state right now

AAA gaming is in an ATROCIOUS state right now. The rest of the landscape is pretty alright, with the Epic store burgeoning a second wave of indie developers getting off the ground and making waves thanks to the much lower cost to them to publish, and with first-party publishers putting out consistently amazing experiences.

However, behind that you have the larger, multiplatform, absolutely bank-breaking budget weilding AAA developers, putting out your CODs and your FIFAs, one of which happens to hold exclusive rights to Star Wars, all of them making cookie cutter, focus group tested, streamline developed S-H-I-T. The same damn games, over and over, ad nauseum, all of which are now pivoting to chase the Battle Royale fad because everybody wants to now be Fortnite despite the fact that Fortnite already exists and is being played, and the people who have that don't need or want another Fortnite.

Most games are still 'pay once upfront'.

Out of curiosity, which final fantasy games were you playing ?

I always felt that the grinding in the early games was as frustrating as the looting that came after.

I used to play MapleStory in my teenage years. I would wake from 7AM, grind-grind-grind all day with friends (socialise, communicate, learn) and then sleep at anywhere from 9PM to 1AM.

I did that for years and I never batted an eyelid. I enjoyed the levelling and the returns those gave, I enjoyed the mindless attacking sprites all-day and the optimisation that allowed me, I enjoyed sharing that load with friends (new and old, real and digital).

I'm not your OP but I can absolutely say I would love to relive a year of that life given genie-magic.

Ah, I see. Thanks for sharing.

I remember spending some summer days like that from time to time.

We see that there is a clear aspiration for publishers to make development of games more predictable and reliable. That is why we see more subscription models that aren't tied to any specific games (PS Plus, Origin, etc.).

While I can understand the motivation, I do think it does indeed have a strong negative effect on games. Best games come from creative people that are willing to take a risk. Others games will end up like you said, on the lowest common denominator, mass appeal being the primary goal.

I can also understand game developers wanting to have at least some form of job security. Although certainly interesting, I really don't envy developers of large game publishers from what we heard in some reports.

Cinemas are more successful than theatres... Maybe games that we remember fondly and think are representative for games will be pushed into a market for connoisseurs.

> Yet, at some point in the past decade an insatiable greed appears to have taken over the industry.

I'm not saying that there aren't greedy game companies, or outright nefarious practices; but speaking as an industry insider I can at least understand why the entire industry has lurched this way.

There's 3 things that you must take on faith are true:

1) Microtransactions bring in money.

2) Games cost more to produce than they ever have.

3) Roughly 90% of gamers are very price sensitive.

So, if you leave out micro transactions, then your budget is slashed and you have to make a lesser game, you might think this is fine, but our competitors will (and do, because we have a very tight policy regarding microtransactions) walk all over us in terms of budget. R&D is expensive and we'll be playing catch-up for years.

You could of course, attempt to keep the budget and not introduce micro-transactions. You could argue that our games make a modest profit even without monetisation but that's certainly not always true, and the closer we move to operating on the breadline the more likely we are to make "safe" choices because risking anything could put hundreds of people out of work (and, we are guilty of this in some cases; see: Assassins Creed)

Finally you could say: well, if the cost of producing games has increased, why not increase the base price instead of chopping it up into add-ons to create special editions and in-game content that needs to be purchased. The answer is of course that if we raise the base price people will be outraged, games can be expensive (if you only play a handful of hours they are more expensive than a movie ticket, but obviously the cost-per-hour of entertainment goes down if you enjoy the game- still, there is personal risk for this) so people aren't willing to risk $100-$120 for a base game, in fact, many people wait for the game to come down in price before buying (as high as 15% of players based on the last time I looked at our market segmentation).

I mean, I understand, it's not enriching your experience to have paywalled content inside the game. But what you don't realise is that a lot of the content that even made it in to the base game, made it in on the fact that there are people who _really_ want to buy a special hat.

If gamers are all that price sensitive, why are they buying new games at all? Wait a few years for the price to drop in half. It seems to me that the solution to this problem should be either:

• Make newly-released games cost $80+

• Stop the price from dropping so quickly

Everyone seems to think the former will be catastrophic, but consider that after adjusting for inflation, game prices have fallen significantly over the past 15 years or so.

The latter option is easier said than done (since the price is still largely determined by the used resale market), but Nintendo always manages it somehow, so I'm inclined to think it's possible.

> If gamers are all that price sensitive, why are they buying new games at all? Wait a few years for the price to drop in half.

fwiw I'm referring to the people who wait for the first price drop (which is roughly 20%), but there are a larger amount of people doing as you say, often waiting a full year. But the picture isn't clear on why they wait- it could easily be that they're waiting for the game to be in a good state and it's hubristic to assume intent like that.

Regardless, I think your broader point isn't echoed in the sentiment from gamers at large. I say "I think" because I'm a technologist and it's not my business to know, although I sit on the same floor as our Consumer Market Knowledge team, and I pick up some things. -- but I can see clearly what I have described just by taking a cursory look at any discussion gamers have regarding the price of games and monetisation.

It's a hotly discussed topic, especially on reddit where there are good examples that you can find immediately[0][1]

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/blsmca/should_o...

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/bbl4cd/how_have_gam...

If you ask people "would you prefer to pay more or pay less", they're going to say "we'd rather pay less".

We're not going to know how consumers actually respond until someone has the guts to try raising prices on a sufficiently large scale.

Mind, I think the better strategy might be to just stop game prices from dropping so quickly. Again, this seems to work extremely well for Nintendo.

I'm past the edit window, but I wanted to add:

> But the picture isn't clear on why they wait- it could easily be that they're waiting for the game to be in a good state and it's hubristic to assume intent like that.

This is its own problem—why are you giving consumers an extra incentive to wait until the game costs less and you will make less money?

Release dates ought to be pushed back by however long is necessary to fix essential problems. This would ultimately benefit both developers and players.

There are, of course, some bugs that will not be discovered until a game has been played by lots of people, so patches will always be desirable. But this is not how post-release game patches are being used today.

> Release dates ought to be pushed back by however long is necessary to fix essential problems. This would ultimately benefit both developers and players.

Depends what you define as "essential", most problems evolve due to a meta that exists in a game, or is otherwise subjective or only appearing at grand scale.

Others (bugs, mostly) can have a reproduction rate of 1:500,000; We will never find those issues until millions of people have crossed that exact path.

I agree to the principle.

Anyway, when it comes to discounting the game publishers actually don't get much choice, nintendo can do their own thing because they own the platform and the IP; but Sony, Microsoft and especially Valve are absolutely punishing in pushing game costs down shortly after a release. For them, selling more units before the IP is out of the public mind is much more important than having some kind of bigger profit over a longer term.

But this is getting incredibly off-topic.

> Wait a few years for the price to drop in half.

I'm only familiar with PS4, but it's much, much quicker than that today.

Battlefield V [1] was released Nov 20 2018 for $60, in Dec 6 it was $36 (60% of original in 16 days), and in Dec 18 it was $30 (50% in 28 days) with PS Plus, which you need anyway to play multiplayer.

God of War [2], to take another example not plagued by BFV's troubled release and also being a single-player game, it took at bit longer to go down. It was released in April 20 2018, was down to $50 (83%) in June 8, $34 (58%) with PS+ in Aug 17, and $22 (37%) in Nov 16.

You really pay a premium to play at launch day or a couple of days early by pre-ordering. If you wait a month you usually have the first discount.

There's a nice community at Reddit called Patient Gamers [3]. You don't have to take vow to never buy new games, but people there usually wait at least six months before buying a game. Three super nice benefits of that:

1. Games are cheaper.

2. The game has been patched to fix bugs or add more content.

3. You can read reviews or check the Metacritic page to see if the game is actually as good as claimed or if it's hype based on the trailer. You can watch some real gameplay not carefully produced by the designers.

Still, a lot of people apparently pre-order games or buy mega-deluxe editions for $100, so game companies can get money from that group and then lower the prize a month later for the rest of the gamers.

[1] https://psprices.com/region-us/game/2347184/battlefield-v

[2] https://psprices.com/region-us/game/1382035/god-of-war

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/

2) Games cost more to produce than they ever have.

Why is this? Where is the increased cost coming from?

Complexity of a game increases complexity of all elements, engine development, testing, asset creation, narrative design.

It takes roughly 1,000 people 7+ years to make a "new IP" game, or the same number of people 3-5 years for a decent sequel.

Check the number of people credited in a game from 20 years ago and compare it to the latest AAA's, it's an order of magnitude or two different.

GTA1 took 50 people to make[0]

The Division took 1,083 to make[1]

Yet the price of games has not increased in real terms in that time. (although, yes, the sales have increased, but not enough)

[0]: https://www.giantbomb.com/grand-theft-auto/3030-13567/credit...

[1]: https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/tom-clancys-the-divis...

I'm not taking on faith that that games have to be more complex today than they ever were.

Yet the price of games has not increased in real terms in that time.

The "price" of a game isn't a good measurement, as people are paying on top of that via microtransactions.

It's an arms race situation; games, or at least AAA games, have to be more complex because they have to be more complex or they won't sell like the previous complex game. I think you're picking up on the circularity there, which I fully agree with, but it doesn't stop it from existing. (Technically back in the past there is a recursion base case for all this, somewhere around when the hobbyiest-level game scene, where 1 person could create a professional-quality game, and where professional-quality games took a staff to exist at all. This would be in the late 8-bit era; by the 16-bit era, a professional game took a staff.)

I'm not sure I can Google this up, but I remember when the PS4 era was just starting up, Shamus Young (http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/ ) hypothesized that the gaming industry was going to have an even harder time justifying the expense of a "true" PS4 game because of the yet-again increased expense of the asset pipeline. Assets are technically getting cheaper to generate over time, but they're not getting cheaper faster than they're getting more expensive. The PS5 may yet make this worse again, and the continuous PC market is definitely getting crazy to build for the top end. Eventually, even microtransactions aren't going to be able to cover this, and the only games that can be made are going to be so "safe" that nobody at all will like them. This is a sort of bubble that is going to burst at some point. It's arguable that it's already starting to burst; it seems like we're seeing a slowly increasing number of very high-profile, very expensive failures, and that can't continue forever. Keep an eye on Nintendo's strategy (if they continue making boatloads of money with their Switch on the complexity foothills while the rest of market is climbing so high up the complexity mountain that they are gasping for breath, eventually people with lots of initials in their titles in other companies are going to start asking why they can't do what Nintendo is doing), and the indie market.

I do sometimes wonder if movies will see this as well. Right now, most movies that cost significant fractions of a billion dollars will make it back, but as that number goes up, it takes proportionally less and less to screw up things really quickly, even if you're profitable most of the time. Star Wars, for instance, is quite unexpectedly in a dangerous spot right now, profit-wise. If for instance the Marvel movies had the same problems, we could see a sea change in movie finances in a few years. But it doesn't seem to be happening yet.

I recently got into playing Dark Souls 3, Fromsoftware is definitely not garnering to the lowest common denominator.

Fromsoft is a great example of how you don't HAVE to make cheap, lowest common denominator shit and you can still be really successful. But it takes a lot more work and arguably a genius at the helm (Miyazaki) so we're going to keep seeing most companies take the cheap route.

This is exactly why I played World of Warcraft so much. I used it as an escape from my problems in life. One day I realized I achieve more with my character than I do in my own life. That was a huge turning point that made me deal with my various life problems.

I mean isn't this true of any game? At night I can race across abandoned mines with 11 other people around the world, fight pink blobs at the Fountain of Dreams and adventure across medieval lands with mithril swords. I don't do any of this in real life.

With WoW, you can end up doing things like "running a guild" that is not entirely dissimilar from "running a business or an office of a business" and training up other real skills that are valuable to real business. I can well believe there's some people who just sort of slid into doing that sort of thing, and one day had the revelation that if they can do this, they must be more capable than various other elements of their life had been telling them they were.

I'm not sure I'd recommend it as a path to explicitly seek out per se, but if it's one you're already walking, it's a great thing to realize and be empowered by.

This is part of what finally broke my gaming habit actually.

The other part was a resentment at constantly having things changed out from under you as a player.

After a certain point, I realized I could probably put a bit more effort into making my mark on the real world, where at least I had the satisfaction of knowing I'd accomplished something that wouldn't disappear just because some 0's and 1's got jumbled.

Yet, at some point in the past decade an insatiable greed appears to have taken over the industry.

I don't think the industry changed in that regard. Its goal was always to make as much money as possible. What changed is that there are a lot more tools now to make money.

I'm not entirely certain of the correct path to take, but I know that appealing to the lowest common denominator will not allow gaming to become the grand artistic medium for the masses that so many hoped it could be.

There's more to gaming than AAA mainstream titles. Just like film has its summer blockbusters and also art house films and genre pieces, etc. If you're fed up with the current offerings, I'm sure there are a ton of classics you've yet to consume as well.

From what I recall correctly, Cigarette corporations also argued that only addicts would become addicted to cigarettes.

Casinos and the gambling industry is also trying to argue only addicts will become addicted to their products.

I don't think we should believe the people who make a product or are paid by said people when they say the product isn't addictive or not harmful. We need independent research.

That's probably true, but the issue is that everyone is an addict to some extent.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. Having recently finished reading Natash Dow Schüll's excellent _Addiction By Design_ it's startling to read this take on where ethical responsibility lies; it's startlingly similar to the attitudes of the machine gambling industry (and the alcohol industry for that matter) customers are pathologized in favour of addressing the toxic choice architecture that the systems confront their users with.

> Parents need to balance their children's potential for overplaying games with a legitimate need to socialise online (and in games).

I doubt that current and upcoming generations of parents will be able to easily address the problems because they're already inside players group, because computer gaming is even more integral part of our entertainment than ever before and adults are first to struggle with the issues including addiction. She seems to be ignoring that and overall, still talking more as the industry member than one who gracefully decided to fight it and show the problems that exist.

I think it's also an issue because everyone in a kid's friend group will be playing online all the time. If you try to regulate their time in game, you risk them becoming ostracised in the group of friends they have at school. Unless -everyone- does the same thing, it's going to be extremely difficult to do anything about it. I say this as a step-parent of four, two of who are male and game a lot, and one of whom I now think is suffering the consequences of being online too much - despite my best attempts to teach (and demonstrate) what I consider to be a decent balance between on and offline. I hate to think what the effect on the younger boy will be as everything is even more weaponised against him than the older (they are 17 and 12).

"If you try to regulate their time in game, you risk them becoming ostracised in the group of friends they have at school."

I acknowledge this isn't 100% fair, but I don't know how to put words together to shape the exact point I'm trying to make, but: This sounds perilously close to me to "If you try to regulate the drugs your children do, they risk becoming ostracized in the group of friends they have at school."

Well... yeah. It will.

That's overdoing it, because I don't think these games are quite on par with drugs... although as they continue to be tuned and refined by lots of smart people with effectively unlimited budgets to make more addictive things, combined with the less-developed brains of people in school (human brains aren't really fully grown until 25 years or so), I get less certain in that assessment. Still, I'm going to go with saying it's overdoing it at least a little. Nothing I would consider precisely analogous to gaming leaps to mind.

But, well... maybe that's part of my job as a parent, to exercise and instill the judgment my children don't yet have, even if all the other parents decline to do it themselves?

I don't isolate my kids from everything that didn't exist in my youth by any means, but I do find myself exercising a lot of judgment. I do steer pretty hard away from anything that involves a lot of advertising, which has gotten a lot smarter and more targeted since I was a kid. I steer away from anything involving many microtransactions. And that's not 100% either; they've put their toes in and bought a couple of Minecraft packs, but I'm regulating this so they don't go crazy one day and buy all the things with all their money, but have time to evaluate what they really purchased and how satisfactory the purchase was based on their limited funds. I tend to focus on the still-multitudinous games that are up-front purchases. I don't really see this as any sort of Puritanism, though; the mental image that comes to mind is shielding them from a pack of wolves more than shielding them from evil, morality-rotting pleasures or something.

The advertisers and crafters of addictive experiences have gotten wildly more powerful since my youth, and I think parenting practice has not caught up to that. Not only that, but the gap is opening wider every day, too; the first derivative of this difference is still solidly in the advertiser's favor. I'm not trying to isolate them, but I am trying to guide them down the paths where the bang-for-the-buck is much, much greater.

> It's not that games are addictive, it's that addicts are playing games

Don't companies like Blizzard keep psychologists on staff specifically to make the games more addictive?

That, and they purposely match people who buy lootboxes, etc to people who don't so that those people, being at a disadvantage, loose and are then pressurised to buy them.

I don't believe Epic or Blizzard have any games with non cosmetic items in loot boxes. Perhaps they "purposely match players with cool skins with those who don't" to make them want to buy them though.

Hearthstone packs definitely affect gameplay. Most of their other games are cosmetic-only, though.

It's been a long time since I played the Ultima series, but it would be refreshing if they could incorporate character-building (in the moral sense) into a modern game.

That's a really cool idea. As I am secretly (read: slowly to the point that nobody could tell that I was actually doing it) writing a game, I wonder if you wouldn't mind expanding on that idea. I probably only ever played the first Ultima game and I totally forget it :-) I'd be grateful for some insight since it's a mechanism I was hoping to incorporate. Feel free to ping me at my email address in my profile.

It's been a long time and I worry that looking back, the material might not hold up. Here is a short interview I found about some of the machinations behind the series (although it doesn't seem very subtle): https://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-ultima-s-morality-182729...

Wow! That article is gold! Thank you so much for linking it. I'm going to have to find a way to play at least Ultima IV (Edit: GOG has Ultima IV available for free. It seems to work well under wine, but you have to use the offline installer list just under the "Download" button). Some choice quotes:

- I realized that in all three Ultimas [before IV], I had created games in which the best way to min-max the game was to be un-virtuous. [...] I was not going to allow that ever again!

- I have and continue to find that headlines, and especially things that give me a sense of moral outrage happening in the world around me, are the best sources of plot ideas for the games I work on.

- Most game villains, he said, just “wait in the final level for you to come kill them,” sitting patiently on their thrones while you min-max and level up by killing NPCs. “I wanted my new villains to be worthy of your hatred!”

- Far too many perpetual conflicts in the world are sustained generation after generation due to these deeply held beliefs and grudges that prevent any real progress from being made [...] Honestly I don’t know how we are going to solve this in the real world, but I think it’s important to play out in a fictional world, so we think about it.

This is pretty much exactly what motivates me to write a game. I remember someone (probably on HN) saying that they had to kill some insects as a child before they understood what death was. You can't learn without experience, but there are some things that you don't want to learn from experience (as my ex-paratrooper friend likes to say, "like how to pack a parachute"). I really want to create a safe place for people to experiment and learn, but most games actually reward being a jerk ;-)

I also find it interesting that he singles out "outrage" as being the best way to create villains. It's one of the things we are explicitly encouraged to avoid in conversations on HN. The conflict and drama in the game comes from the justified hatred and outrage in the villains. I'm sure there is a lesson in there somewhere...

And healthy behaviors like eating fruits and vegetables.

Minecraft has some of this mechanic built in as the benefit from eating sugary foods (cake, pumpkin pie, etc.) is much shorter than eating protein-rich foods. Since players stop healing as they experience hunger there is a real benefit to having better foods to eat.

"America's Army" has that.

It's classic 4 dog defense.

My dog couldn't have bit you, I don't even have a dog. Okay well I do have a dog but it never bit anyone. Okay it had bitten other people but it didn't bite you. Okay it did bite you but you must have provoked it.

> - Game companies can't reasonably opt out of offering "engaging" behaviour because if their competition offers it, they will lose money.

Excellent summary. This, at least is the excuse capitalism has used since the beginning of time for every unethical practice harming humanity, whether it's privacy invasion, environmental ruination, lazy worker protections, poor compensation for talent, or providing addictive services.

the problem is also people expecting company to "self-regulate" instead of going directly to the legislative branch and pushing the issue there.

Yet some products are clearly, specifically designed and marketed to addicts. Consider fortified wines (aka “bum wines”). Night train. MD2020. Thunderbird. I think it's possible to do the same with any product, including video games.