Sid Meier warns the games industry about monetisation
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But I also wonder sometimes: Who is spending money on all of these awful games? There's so much good stuff on Steam, GOG, the Switch eStore, etc. Wonderful games made by people who care, for a fair price, without exploitative monetisation, that I don't feel even remotely tempted to play whatever Ubisoft is currently peddling.
Some examples I've played in recent years are Celeste, Into the Breach, Hades, Slay the Spire, Ori and the Blind Forest, etc. These span every genre, and that's not even mentioning the PC back catalog which spans decades. What does it take for those games to win against the lootbox microtransaction garbage?
Maybe I am just stuck in 2012 but $2-3 is about the limit for me for a skin. "Unusual" hats (particle effects) in TF2 are basically the original NFT, they are unique items with a very limited number in existence, and they are worth more, but I'm not going to pay $10-20 for the same skin as a million other players.
Of course that's why they've started tying them to gameplay, like Rainbow 6 Siege and Battlefield 2042 "operators"... it's taken studios a long time but they've finally gotten us to bite on "pay to win" by framing it as player choice.
(although I guess DLCs/expansions having OP weapons that beat the base game is nothing new, but charging $10 or $20 a pop for each unit is new.)
I buy in game cosmetic items like skins occasionally. Are they bad value? Yes, however I don't consider that when I make the purchase. I've played this game so much and gotten so much enjoyment out of it I see the cosmetic purchases as a donation to the dev team for their time. If paying $30 for some fancy armor every so often helps fund ongoing development I'm happy to do it.
There is a line between "Pay to win" and "Purely cosmetic" microtransactions. I'm happy with the later but try to avoid games with the former.
Even this is way overpriced for me, I've never in my life paid for a DLC of a skin or item.
There are a few games that are popular in both camps like Tetris, but they're by and large the minority, though they also can be extremely successful as a result. Making a game approachable but deep is very tricky. Celeste for example isn't terribly approachable, which is appropriate given it's story and gameplay, which is likely to turn off most players who might try it casually.
World is big and people are numerous. Games can be more than text adventures, 90s era, shooters, or whatever pure-blood PC master race gray beards think they are/were/should be.
I have limited time, and have tried a few less famous games based on recommendation, and some I absolutely hated. However, I know if I buy say, Assassins Creed, I'm going to enjoy it.
So part of the problem your suggesting I guess is people like me. I don't buy the IAP/addons/microtransactions, but I do buy the games. So if I have time to sit and play a video game - do I scour the internet for recommendations, read reviews, watch trailers...or just buy a name brand I know I've enjoyed in the past? For me obviously, the latter.
I go to cinema to have some brainless fun. It works. I get out smiling and criticizing the dumb plot holes in the superhero movies. It makes for a great social interaction, too.
Life needs contrast. My life is busy and not easy so I need pass time that relaxes me. "The crappy superhero movies" are one of my venues towards relaxation.
Really if you ignore the 'axis of evil' publishers (Activision, EA, Ubisoft) /most/ AAA games are fine.
Also in any single player Ubisoft game I've played (so mostly Far Cry and Assassins creed + Ghost Recon Wildlands (which is great btw)) the microtransactions can be completely ignored, none of their games are balanced around people spending money like mobile games are, nor is any meaningful content locked behind a pay wall unless it's in the form of a proper expansion/stand alone spinoff.
There seems to be a commonly held opinion on HN threads like this that the gaming industry has failed beyond repair, and all AAA games are dark pattern riddled slot machines. But it's really not true outside of a handful of large bad actor publishers. Just open up Steam and read user reviews, it's pretty obvious when a game is a poor cash grab.
I echo the sentiment of another comment here, saying that the market for "good" games never went away (really it's grown). It's just that there's now also another market, serving different customers with casual games with gameplay related microtransactions - which you can completely ignore as a consumer.
Mobile games seems to just be flooded with copycat/clones with slight variations of the same game play with a lot looking like something that could be completed in a weekend or 2 or 3 weekends by someone looking for a quick buck. I've seen some games that look interesting, but their lootbox or other constant nagging for paid enhancements are really just a total turn off.
History wise I suspect the micro monetized mobile apps trace their origins back to the “social platform” games of the 2000s ala Zynga, and the online “game platforms” of poker, faux-scrabble, etc of the yahoo era.
These are targeted directly at addicts (not just gambling) as the game play is rather basic and just entertaining enough to keep that tweaker mindset occupied.
Mobile's games that set the tone were ad-supported tchotchkes with microtransactions and the rest is history.
There's the problem. A new fickle breed of consumer that do not pay for software.
I know, they fall for the in-game content, but that is optional. A game purchase is money up front.
When you watch interviews with some of the early doom developers, the level designers could make a level a week. Now levels in Doom Eternal are years long collaborations between a team of people. Content costs have exploded.
There's an identical trend with ios apps btw: an email app in the late 1990s like Eudora cost $100 to $150 with paid updates. Now people expect email apps to cost under $10 with lifetime updates while doing 10x as much.
Have you ever played games like Rise of Kingdoms [1], or a lot of similar game of gathering resources, upgrading, attack etc. During one of cross server event you would see the whole server burning Millions ( USD ) worth of items within hours in just one battle. I still remember there was a whale working in investment bank ( or so he says ) that got $50k worth of whatever in-game resources wiped because he was busy in a meeting. He paid another $50K within a week to built back his troops.
These people easily spend $200K to million+ over their entire time in the game. And some will even help you to pay for resources in game as part of being the Guild.
And 80%+ of mobile game IAP revenues comes from just top 2-4% of players. So it isn't as another comment suggest lots of $20 to $50 dollars around from casual players.
Why do they do that? I dont know, I guess they want to be the king inside a virtual world. These freemium games means a lot of people gets to enjoy it without paying a cent. This also generate a feedback loop to the psychology of being king, after all what is the point of being King without followers?
It is unfortunate both Apple and Google are sucked into these money as part of their services revenue. Although I see this as an opportunity for a third mobile operating system. ( Hello Xbox Mobile? )
One example I can give is Post Malone in Apex Legends, I think people estimated that he spent $1,600, he buys every heirloom skin as soon as it comes out.
There are a lot of streamers out there who will spend at least $100 a month on skins just to keep their content fresh. Or they buy battle pass levels second it comes out so they can show them off. It's a huge revenue stream for AAA studios.
https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/t0m44q/post_ma...
As a side note, the only people pushing for NTFs in games are crypto enthusiasts or profit-seeking actors who do not care about game experience at all. Even gamers who are also into crypto do not advocate for NTF in games. The whole thing is a shit show IMO.
So juat like right now, you could buy a ship for 5 dollar, cheaply designed and thousands are available (or endless) or get a unique nice and good looking ship for ome thousand (or more?) because you need to pay the work of one guy for several days and its only one time available.
What get right now: bullshit, scams and everything controlled by the company selling the game.
Like in some sense all the NFT is to the game you develop is a minimal external yet-trustable representation of the existence of some in-game asset so people can then go and use all of these systems you don't have to worry about to trade it around and then anyone can provide the receipt back to your game later to be the potentially-new owner.
All blockchain gives you is the payment and settlement part of the process (a private key can reassign "ownership" of the pointer to your document), and it does so at the expense of any ability to reverse a fraudulent or accidental trade. Got a virus and lost your apes? Wow sucks to be you, if you're no longer the owner please take it out of your profile.
this is such a widespread misrepresentation/falsehood in crypto, that it makes all this other stuff go away, like we suddenly won't have any trading firms or crypto exchanges, therefore no need for buildings or employees or heating or lighting. I've literally had people on HN tell me that crypto was gonna mean no more "wasted power and heat" from financial services companies, like commodities or equity traders are just gonna disappear because we came up with a new mechanism for HFT.
Like I said they give you the trading platform too (the thing web app that issues the onchain transactions, and shows what's for sale) because you can use a third party one.
> and it does so at the expense of any ability to reverse a fraudulent or accidental trade.
That is mostly true now, but it doesn't have to be that way. We've come a long way with things like time locked transactions and social recovery features, but I agree it still needs to improve.
I don't think I'm under any misconceptions here, my work is related to crypto, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Each game does this differently, their code is not the same, their assets are managed in many ways. How do you propose to deal with this?
Have you tried to develop a game? It's much more complex than most applications. There are no standard libraries or APIs for this type of thing.
But this wasn't just the same company, it was, with some incremental modifications, the same game engine, and by the time the last entries came out, it was showing its age. There's no way you could have taken, say, a character—or even an item—from a completely different game like Ultima VI and turned it into an NFT that could then be added seamlessly into SSI's Secret of the Silver Blades. The two games, despite both being RPGs that came out the same year, are just so completely different that it wouldn't make any sense even if Origin and SSI did want to collaborate on making that possible.
NFTs would still be a "thing of value" and still be beholden to all the same rules as other things of value.
You still have AML issues.
Unity / Unreal Engine asset stores are just that aren't they?
My point was though that interoperable game assets aren't farfetched, they already exist.
Every NFT requires the work.
We are talking a couple of hours per NFT - and ongoing work and testing.
There's a reason most games only have a few outfits or a handful of cars players can choose. Every model, skin and so on is a pile of regular, ongoing work.
Even SecondLife required per-model import work, rigging, custom scripting, etc.
FALSE. The assets from the games are not being traded in your hypothetical. The NFTs are.
> minimal external yet-trustable representation of the existence of some in-game asset
TRUE, BUT all it does is confirm someone calls dibs on something. Actually integrating those dibs in any sensible way is a huge task. It might be the "Deluxe Crystal AstroBlaster9000" in one game, but due to trademark issues, you might have to settle for "1 Ripe Banana" in another.
> so people can then go and use all of these systems you don't have to worry about
UNLIKELY. Developers would be one hashtag away from the Internet mob demanding they not allow people to use items pointed to by NFTs purchased with Dunning-Kruggerands that have dirty histories. The whitepapers might say you don't have to worry about it, but the users will.
Then there are security concerns. There will be a bad contract. There will be a phishing scam. The whitepaper might say code is law, but the users are still going to want the developer to make it right, or they'll walk.
In the steam marketplace, the developer can change things easily, like changing a super rare card in a collectable card game to a common card.
We already know in game items that affect gameplay basically ruin the game for anyone that isn't a whale. The NFT proponents think they can get everyone emotionally invested like the whales are, but good luck catering to the masses to keep them happy. It's only possible with whales because there aren't many of them and they're the largest source of revenue.
Once you realize that blockchain and NFTs are about charging processing fees for every single event that happens the whole thing looks terrible. Eventually you'll be paying fees to track your items stats, so every time you click or tap it costs money.
NFT doesn't block this at all. Just because an attribute on the token specifies it's rarity, doesn't mean there aren't a gajillion other tokens pointing to the same thing. Or that someone won't just tweak things on the server so that token_url /foo/92 isn't legendary magic beans anymore but common turd burgers instead.
Uh, is that fun or am I back in economics class?
People like their stores and skins, they just don't want to have to gamble to get them or be tricked into pay-to-play.
I tried a popular mobile game for the first time recently and almost immediately uninstalled it. As a new player I was overwhelmed with freebies, but every action funneled me back to the store or demanded some kind of worthless interaction. I was horrified at the thought that I might ever allow myself to get used to it and just how many people already had.
Two types of people here, too.
Those who bought "Horse Armor" and those who thought it was the most ridiculous thing they had ever heard of.
Personally I dislike the move towards every game being a live service to justify the presence of a store with skins and emotes and such.
I'm getting sick of always online, seasonal event driven live service games where the game balance constantly changes and new stuff is funnelled into it constantly. It is such a relief to me when a game just is released in a mostly final shape, with maybe some QoL patches and an expansion dlc or two.
Destiny 2 ruined this for me in a big way with how they are not just introducing new content but also removing old content, content I paid for and now can never access again.
It has set a terrible precedent and I'm just not going to use my money on games like that anymore.
There are good reasons why this can be healthy for a game that's constantly evolving with new content and is intended to be live for like a decade+ like Destiny. By sunsetting old content periodically they have a much easier time balancing everything, and making sure the world is consistent. They can also do visual improvements over time without having to polish an ever increasing pile of old content.
See also: leagues in Path of Exile, set rotation in trading card games.
Destiny is an MMO, you should know going in that it's a live, evolving beast. Not something that you can rely on staying the same forever.
I suppose it was my first "MMO" because I certainly hadn't played anything with that type of model before.
As for the rest of the article, he could be talking about me. I've basically given up on PC gaming. I used to love gaming and now it feels like a second job. It feels like I'm being forced to "accomplish" a bunch of in game goals because the developer thinks "engaging" me like that is going to lead to a microtransaction.
I thought I'm probably just getting older and grumpier, but I bought an Oculus Quest before Christmas and it's been a blast. Games like The Room had me feeling like a kid who just got their first PC game. I think a lot of it has to do with VR being a new platform and there's less focus on developers squeezing every penny out of you and more incentive for them to build small, fun games that help discover what makes sense in VR.
The craziest part is that I've spent several hundred dollars on VR games in a few months which is more than I've spent on PC games in the last 5 years combined. I know it's popular to trash Meta/Facebook, but I think they did a really good job of pricing VR games. It's <$30 on the high end and they have frequent sales, but the sales aren't such deep discounts that I feel bad for buying something at full price.
I also think microtransactions can make sense. GGG did a good job with Path of Exile. I've played that game on and off and every time I pick it back up I play for a bit and if my stash starts getting disorganized with items that have a convenience stash tab as a microtransaction I'll buy that stash tab. It's always after I've spent a weekend playing and it's only $20, so I don't feel like I've gotten ripped off or forced into buying something. I've probably spent twice as much on that game as any other in recent memory.
None of them have significant money sinks with add on purchases. Most are modable, adding to their appeal and longevity.
over-monetization is actually one of the things that's ruining modding, because if you let players mod whatever they want there's no way to get them to pay 10 bucks for a vorpal sword +3 when they could just mod it in.
this is one of the major pushes away from story-driven offline single-player content at present, there's no safe way to monetize it. To monetize it safely you need always-online, DRM, and ideally it would be better if there was some minimal amount of "multiplayer" interaction (but not so much that you have to spend a bunch of money on servers).
the titles you've named are mostly old titles (Skyrim) before monetization really took off, or indie titles. To get an AAA developed these days it pretty much needs an online component.
Anyone who grew up playing arcade games knows that, for the vast majority of cases, the pre-console arcade world was about finding the best way to keep you feeding quarters to a machine. Difficult, almost beating the boss, but ultimately simple games ruled the day. Some are classics now but many were very meh.
The early home console years, when reviews were still hard to come by and rentals weren't a thing yet, were flooded with tons of pure trash games. Everyone knows how awful any licensed game was, but it didn't matter because all they had to do was to get you (or more often parents/grandparents) to buy the game. By the time you got home and realized the game was garbage it was already too late. I remember owning far more horrible games as a kid than good ones.
The late 1990s and early 2000s were a great time for gaming because it was much easier to determine if a game was quality or not before buying, and for a brief window of time the only really great way to make money was to just make a compelling game that got good reviews.
We've since seen gaming become a major industry, where heavy marketing can play just as big a factor as initial reviews. With the massive growth of online gaming and digital downloads it's much easier to make a game that is really about a million microtransaction (remember when people used to think that would save the internet?)
The truth is games have always been structured in a way to optimizer revenue, it's just that we remember a period when the best way to make money in a game was to actually make a game good.
Every game needs live service, seasons, and a battle pass. While I appreciate that it can keep the game fresh and evolving over time, I think a lot of times its harmful. Sometimes a relatively simple game is blown out of proportion over time and id almost rather a stagnant game. Furthermore, gameplay can suffer too. In my opinion R6 siege started really strong, but has gone downhill recently, most obviously in operator design. Real power creep is sometimes an issue as well, somewhat recently I remember there were one or two operators added that felt like almost direct upgrades to base game ones. In its case, both the art style and operator design suffered from being stretched out for so long. Or RDR2, who sells most of the content through their premium currency and whose movement between the single player and online is so drastically different that fights online look like smash bros melee matches with frantic strafing and rolling. Compare this to titanfall 2’s design, which has remained stagnant (because it was killed a long time ago), but incredibly successful maintaining a large player base to this day.
Cod and pubg have sacrificed their art style and aesthetic, MW went from “realistic” tactical characters to jigsaw puppets and neon, out of place outfits. It’s like power creep, but for ridiculousness, skins have to get crazier and crazier because sometimes it keeps people buying them because its funny. It fit in fortnite because it was cartoonish and ridiculous from the beginning, but through MW and CW lifespan you can see the art style gradually decay. These game aren’t really meant to be taken seriously, but it always kinda put me off. Not necessarily making an argument about my taste, but rather how the games stray more and more from their original vision, driven by micro transactions.
Battlefield has thrown out their traditional classes for specialists following in r6 and other hero shooters footsteps, part of me always kinda felt like it was to sell skins for each specialist, but I might be wrong here.
This isnt the biggest deal, especially not within the games industry, but frustrating to see innovation slowly be stamped back into the mold. There are many games that hold true to their visions or fill these voids, but the state of AAA gaming and how it molds to the market is a little disappointing to me.
Your choice is usually limited to: 1) spend money, 2) be unable to get all cosmetics, and occasionally 3) spend hundreds to thousands of hours to obtain the skins.
The worst part is that the average player seems to be fine with this, since it's not selling power - as if power's the only thing that matters in a game.
Even Animal Crossing on the switch gated its expansion behind the new, expensive subscription.
I’m replying to this specifically, not monetization schemes in general. WoW has/had subscription too.
ps. the Animal Crossing expansion can also be bought for a fixed price.
For a triple a game and decent comparison to WOW, Destiny. I would spend time hunting down exotics/cosmetics, with very minor flair items offered for real money. You can buy dlc or battlepass, but usually these end up being pretty big events adding a lot to the game
I've only bought a single skin (Blizzard donated 100% of the proceeds to Breast Cancer Research Foundation), and every other cosmetic was "free". I have nearly all the cosmetics in the game and have spent about 1000 hours (spread over 5 years since launch).
Compared to current games it's a very generous model that I think will end up going away when the sequel launches in the next year or two.
Additionally everything you can pay for is purely cosmetic (there are no weapons or characters to unlock) so even if you got the game today you're not at a disadvantage.
All off the games you mention seem to be FPS games, perhaps that segment and the sport games suffer segment the most from Pay to Keep Playing schemes.
But yeah the indie and smaller dev scene is going great, I play all those games mentioned and countless more that don't fall to the problems
A year or two ago, I watched @shroud (on Twitch) play Squad. I'm not a fan of playing shooter games, but wow it was quite a spectacle to watch! There were tiers leaders on your team to report to and receive orders. Anyone could pin enemy locations on the map. Every squad worked as a team to capture territory. The play development was entirely organic. etc. etc.
If anything, I hope someone carves out the 'old school' market from the belly of the beast and creates a name or brand that that market can rally around. It seems unnecessary to be concerned by the modern video game market. They are catering to an entirely different type of player. It doesn't matter that it's more profitable if they aren't taking away your audience.
The problem is that more publishers who hold well beloved IPs are moving in that direction, see for example Bethesda. So I think it's fair to be concerned.
But 10+ years ago we had Farmville and then on mobile we had thing slike Candy Crush, Clash of Clans and so on.
These aren't games. They're A/B tested addiction loops optimized to extract as much money from you as possible.
You can see the impact of this on World of Warcraft, which is >17 years old at this point. In its original form it had traditional RPG game loops. Over the years it has become increasingly dominatded by "micro-transactions". These includes services like character transfers, boosts, racce changes and name changes. It also includes a bunch of cosmetics.
Some people are most OK with cosmetics for monetization but this still has a problem. It creates an incentive for the game designers to make paid cosmetics better than in-game cosmetics to encourage you to buy them. You see this in WoW where in-game mounts sometimes look like they're made of 7 triangles while store mounts are rendered in semi-translucent 3D with particle effects, modern textures, large triangle counts and special moves. More importantly though cosmetics matter. The ability to flex through cosmetics is a huge motivator to players. The fact that someone can swipe a credit card and devalue in-game accomplishments really destroys any incentives to work towards in-game goals.
Outside of FPS games there are depressingly few actual games out there (as opposed to addiction pay-to-win treadmills). I like computer adaptations of board games for this reason because at least these games tend to stay true to being "games".
WoW still has some of the best raid encounter design out right now.
I’m not disagreeing about the effect of performance marketing/aggressive growth strategies on the industry but this idea that there are “true” games and then everything else is like playing mindless slot machines doesn’t really make sense to me
It does not take long for me to come to the realization: WOW, these games are all employing addiction triggers, are all manipulative, are all without depth, and the two major app stores are 100% in cahoots with these parasites.
In the dawn of the TV age there was so much handwringing about children's programming, advertising. Where are the regulators? I'm not even concerned about depictions of violence or sex or drugs or hedonism. What concerns me the most is the outright psychological manipulation of dopamine triggers and other manipulations.
And having played a Machine Zone game (thankfully for not a lot of money) I am familiar with the graduated versions of the childrens "programming": illusory emotional investment, bullying, false group dynamics, fake peer pressure, harassment, direct addiction, rapidly changing economics/devaluation, and other tactics to get you to pony up an endless stream of money.
Obviously the app stores won't police this to even a small degree, too much 30% sweet commission involved.
I'm going to have to setup a retro emulator for my kid so they can play games that aren't riddled with ads and are designed around manipulation.
Roblox is evil of course with it's micro transactions, but simple rule of never buying robux kinda fixes that.
But I was happy to pay for a DLC that gave Commonwealth countries unique focuses.
I like that their DLC model gives them the opportunity to support and expand games for so long. I don't like that their base games pretty much stink until they get at least the first few DLC though - there's not much reason to play CK3 when it's so content-bare and CK2 exists as a "complete" game with tons of content.
Can you imagine if you could only join fork knife games with your Spiderman skin if and only if every other player already in the game also owned it?
Can you imagine paying $5 for you favorite LoL character then the game rejecting you because you got matched with a player who is only using the free ones?
Dawn of War 2 didn't have this issue. You could choose to not buy chaos but still play against chaos players online.
They're all just garbage, and they all follow the same dark patterns: Incessant ads and prompts to buy in-game items, interspersed with short bits of gameplay here and there.
Gameplay and original game design have taken a backseat to increasingly hostile monetization schemes, lazy/safe/rehashed game loops and marketing/shareholder driven development for at least a decade now. The amount of AAA titles built on hype and released broken at launch, with promises of future patches, is too long to list. With some notable exceptions, most of the innovation and interesting game design is done by indie developers and smaller studios.
This video sums it up nicely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q38fjcyP1IQ
Lex even proposed an alternative of a closet that you only pay for once, but updates with a basic style over time. The suggestion was mostly dismissed by Zuckerberg.
Way too late to be talking about video games, this stuff is about to hit many other aspects of human interaction.
"Her date doesn't look half bad himself. The other girl is a Brandy. Her date is a Clint. Brandy and Clint are both popular, off-the-shelf models. When white trash high school girls are going on a date in the Metaverse, they invariably run down to the computer-games section of the local Wal-Mart and buy a copy of Brandy. The user can select three breast sizes: improbable, impossible, and ludicrous. Brandy has a limited repertoire of facial expressions: cute and pouty; cute and sultry; perky and interested; smiling and receptive; cute and spacy. Her eyelashes are half an inch long, and the software is so cheap that they are rendered as solid ebony chips. When a Brandy flutters her eyelashes, you can almost feel the breeze. Clint is just the male counterpart of Brandy. He is craggy and handsome and has an extremely limited range of facial expressions." --Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (whence the term "metaverse").
Zuckerberg is a case of an elite dumbass surrounded by yes men where everyone in the room has so much money they can't fathom the idea of needing to choose what to spend it on. In their world, you simply buy everything you want.
I think it would be neat to see an attempt at it though. I would love to go into a VR world where I could see how many people are wearing the default clothes and haircuts vs people paying for virtual goods.
Is a virtual suit tax deductible? Imagine creating a virtual clothing manufacturer in a tax haven and having your US company buy $2k virtual suits for the entire staff. That's instant profit shifting and tax avoidance.
Would they have IP protections for virtual goods? Who owns a plain black tee shirt in VR? What's the difference between a designer purse and a knockoff in VR? Will people inspect my avatar to make sure I'm wearing genuine Calvin Klein (TM) (C) (NFT) underwear?
Maybe this is a result of it being hard to estimate and budget new releases, rather than being explicitly consumer hostile (though it may well be as you say).
[edit] I suppose it would actually have to be X copies at $Y to be fully specified.
More like one sequel, SMAC, and five remakes.
they are after NFTs nowadays, the sooner that shit gets banned, the better the western developers will live, not having to kill their brands and reputation to compete with shitty KR and SEA brands in general
one can dream
What I don't agree with is this simplistic narrative by gamers on how how very evil and greedy game producers are. Because gamers themselves play a significant role in that.
As an example, mobile game developers largely switched to in-game purchases not because they want to, instead because it's the only model that works to even get back their investment. Even asking as little as 3-5$ for a high quality game means most people skip it, even though they would love the game and could easily afford it. Apple Arcade is a counter act against this very perverse market dynamic.
Gamers created this dynamic. For being cheap. And please don't respond to say that you're not cheap, it's not a personal comment.
Next example. As a Battlefield fan, let's take good old ultra evil EA. Let's restrict this to the monetization part. Upon launch, Battlefield typically costs about 60€ where I live. And it doesn't take very long for this to significantly drop. IF you want to go crazy, you can go for some ultimate version, for about 100€.
59.99€ for some mysterious reason is carved in stone. Games have costs this amount (or less) since forever. Inflation seems to have no grip at all on game prices, nor does the price reflect the explosion in complexity, scope and upkeep (servers, anti-cheat, more bugs due to complexity, etc).
I guess this is some gamers' "value treshold". A game just can't be priced any higher no matter the value on offer.
Let's talk value. If you're a fan of the series, it has almost infinite replay value, as is the point of an online shooter. You can play the game for years, for thousands of hours. People are still playing BF4, which is from 2013.
And still gamers complain that it's expensive. The reality is that at least for this game, it's a steal. Extraordinarily cheap highly engaging entertainment in limitless supply. Thousands of hours compared to about the cost of going out for dinner.
The low price of 59.99, enforced by irrational gamers, likely is subsidized by optional in-game purchases that do not affect gameplay. In other words, people wanting a fancy soldier's coat in the game are basically paying to keep 59.99 steady, seemingly forever. And in this magic gamers world, ongoing costs somehow don't exist. Basically, any method to monetize is evil.
All of this is to say that game producers use the model that works. If you refuse to pay for fair value and sabotage every reasonable method, this is what you get. Gamers need to look in the mirror.
Actually, this makes me more ok with the situation.
> Let's talk value. If you're a fan of the series, it has almost infinite replay value, as is the point of an online shooter. You can play the game for years, for thousands of hours. People are still playing BF4, which is from 2013.
> Let's talk value. If you're a fan of the series, it has almost infinite replay value, as is the point of an online shooter. You can play the game for years, for thousands of hours. People are still playing BF4, which is from 2013.
> And still gamers complain that it's expensive. The reality is that at least for this game, it's a steal. Extraordinarily cheap highly engaging entertainment in limitless supply. Thousands of hours compared to about the cost of going out for dinner.
But you can't know that at launch time, and with the hit-based dynamic that the publishers have set up, they need a lot of buyers on launch day. Reviewers are completely in the industry's pocket and everyone knows it. So it's a complete lemon market.
59.99€ isn't the price because it's what the good games are worth. It's the price because it's what gamers are willing to risk losing if the game turns out to suck. And that part is very much on the industry's side - pre-orders, day 0 patches, lack of credible criticism and a very limited ability to get refunds are big factors in this dynamic.
In the process the games themselves degrade. Addictive mechanisms are added, stories are dragged out or split into DLCs, money distorts competition between players, games are designed to waste the players time, and so forth.
And the problem is not just the industry or 'capitalism' or whatever, I think culturally we also have lost the ability to talk about entertainment critically. Games that are glorified slot machines should be called out for it, parents should tell their kids not to play them, and people need to start valuing their attention.