I hate what video games have become
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For the same reason that people wear nice clothes in real life, why are you surprised that some people want to look cool in a video game? Are you surprised that people don’t just wear monochrome black shirts in real life? Likewise, you can resell RL items, there’s a market for that. Are you surprised when you can’t resell a shirt you wore for a year at the same price as when you bought it?
That’s not to say that games where progression is locked behind time gates where you need to buy 1000 Realm Warp Crystals or whatever just to actually play the game aren’t a toxic hell. But that doesn’t seem to be what the article is pushing against.
The standard multi ranked map sometimes feels boring and I've wondered why they don't add different types of maps to the mix; spheres, tubes, different physics, goals in the center, figure 8 map(?), embankments (like map in season 1), etc.
I guess it's simple and works but it'd be cool to see new gameplay related updates.
The complication when it comes to adding new features is that Rocket League is built on top of a bespoke scripting engine that was discontinued after Unreal Engine 3, so they have to fully recreate RL in UE5. Because of this they don't want to put any additional resources into new features for UE3 since it's wasted effort once the game transitions to the new engine.
I did like that game mode where the ball would gravitate towards the goal!
The only genuinely new one they've done for years was the NFL mode, which they presumably got paid for and wasn't very good.
I mean, how or why would they? You release something; it makes 90% of its lifetime revenue in year 1; if you continue working on it for 6 more years, you're out of business.
As for the ownership or survivability of in-game virtual goods -- I think the author is referring to Valve's hats in Team Fortress 2? -- to me it's nonsensical to complain that you don't own it outside of the game. It only has relevance in the game, and it would be silly to ask the company to develop some external service just for owning your object. The ones that have tried that kind of thing just fail and look silly. But wait! Along come NFTs, with potential permanent ownership... but gamers despise that idea, too.
Gamers are just eternally grumpy and conservative about changes and progress. (I say that as a grumpy gamer, myself.)
Now: Pay for game prior to its release, launch day, people will tell you the bugs are actually features, studio milks franchise forever.
Yep, nothing to see here, no regular, ongoing support to a 20 year old game of the non-subscription variety at all. Warcraft 3 (from 2003) was similarly updated well into 2019.
Now, most regular games only get 2 or 3 years of attention.
> Along come NFTs, with potential permanent ownership... but gamers despise that idea, too.
Oh no, how dare we despise things that anyone can see will not work as advertised.
Similarly Warcraft 3 had a 5 year gap between 1.26b in 2011 and 1.27a in 2016, which was probably about when they started development for Reforged, announced in 2018.
Minecraft still gets significant updates.
> I mean, how or why would they? You release something; it makes 90% of its lifetime revenue in year 1; if you continue working on it for 6 more years, you're out of business.
I think a lot of these companies have found that it's the opposite—that games make 90% of their revenue in year 1 because nobody continues working on them. If you keep working on it, however, you can continue to get sales, because the more you work on it, the better the game becomes, and so people buy it just to see what everyone else is talking about.
Permanent ownership of what? If the game servers shut down or you get banned[1] for some reason your permanent ownership is meaningless. Also how are NFTs different than the existing systems like the Steam marketplace in terms of functionality?
[1] Oh yeah, NFTs require you to have an online account for the game. I would argue my unlocks in SSBM are much more permanent than any game NFT because there's no account for Nintendo to ban that could cause me to lose access to them.
Personally I view games as art that's closer to food than a painting: ephemeral, may disappear after being consumed.
Plenty of games get regular patches and updates (Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition being one I recently played) and back in the day, games would release paid expansions. No reason that Rocket League couldn't sell a map pack, for example. Sure, its a similar idea as freemium (pay for more content), but at least the expansions used to be sizable packs with lots of content. Old school expansions, as well as expansions like those of The Witcher 3 or the FROM Software games (which are often lauded as better than the base game), that cost about 1/4 the price of the base game for a decent content boost extend the life of the game, provide the developer with continued income and feel a lot less scammy than fremium games do.
Ubisoft has announced NFT integration via their own platform. However, unlike an actual "I can do what I want with this" token, it may as well be a database entry in the company network: https://quartz.ubisoft.com/welcome/
I don't think there's any way to 'solve' NFTs in games right now: A true NFT can be moved anywhere on an open network (monkey jpeg receipts, etc), but a game-related NFT needs to be constrained to those users who play the game, otherwise it's even more useless.
It doesn't help that most things NFT-related are scams, hype bait, etc.
Agree totally. NFTs for games make quite literally no sense. You are buying an asset or whatever from a central authority (the developer/publisher) that only exists or makes any sense within their game/platform/ecosystem. What value could a token bring there? The only value add I could see is that your ability to buy and sell the asset is now out of the hands of the publisher... except it isn't since they still control access to the asset and can therefor constrain your use of it in any way they see fit.
This is really a problem with most of the NFT related ideas floating around. Once a central authority is involved your token ceases being meaningful and just becomes, like you said, an ID in a database somewhere.
They can create digital scarcity of in-game items using a centralised server. Any NFT linked to an in-game item will be just as worthless when the servers are eventually shut down. And they don't want players buying and selling items, they want to take a cut every time a player buys something.
You're never going to be taking your Fortnite skins into FIFA or your Gran Turismo cars into Mario Kart. Ain't going to happen for a multitude of reasons.
(And if one publisher/developer does something like that as a gimmick, allow importing items into a specific another game, they could do that with a centralised database too)
There's a lot of games that have a sort of boring standard (SC2's 1v1 ladder maps are all same-y, nobody competitive plays Smash with items on, etc.) and the fact that you see this pop up repeatedly in unrelated communities should probably tell you something.
IMO, when you have a game with sufficiently deep mechanics, wackiness tends to obscure that depth, resulting in an experience that's less interesting rather than more. Like if you added Mario Kart abilities to football/soccer and suddenly the winning team was getting regularly blue shelled, I don't think it would improve the experience, even if initially it'd be hilarious.
Now maybe it's still worth it to have "party game" modes in some cases, I'm just saying that these modes might not have legs, so to speak, and thus may not be worth the dev effort if hardly anyone plays them.
Anyway that's why I also used SC2 as an example. Blizzard's attempts to add more wackiness/variety to the 1v1 ladder maps have generally been poorly received.
Now, SC2's co-op mode has a bunch of wackiness and did great, but note that this is very VERY separate from standard ladder/melee games. It's not just "oh we changed a few rules" or "we took the base game and added wacky items" it's a much more fundamental rework than that, it's an entirely new 'vertical' for the game. And yeah, that kind of thing could probably work for a game like Rocket League.
If your primary audience is casual, like in the case of Nintendo games, then it makes all the sense in the world.
Obviously you could argue that Psyonix ought to be appealing to a casual audience. That's a separate conversation, and I'd argue that RL is a fundamentally bad fit for that sort of game, but given what they have been going for thus far, not introducing crazier modes makes a lot of sense.
They do that pretty regularly. Not in major ways, but the rules of football do change over time.
I personally am glad the developers have realized they have a game like this and haven’t killed their game through adding more for the sake of more.
They tried. Wasteland, Neo Tokyo, and Starbase ARC were non-standard maps. Players complained about it, and now they are changed to be standard.
They still keep adding other game modes some of which are only there for a few days.
They tried that with the original wasteland map and there was huge pushback from the community and people demanded the maps be standardized.
simply because it actually pays to play. I've made about $20 bucks this month from just selling cases given out randomly at the end of each match. It cost me nothing to buy yet the in game items (cosmetic skins that don't influence gameplay) regularly sell for good money.
it also make sense to buy the keys to unlock the cases sometimes simply because you might unlock a skin that fetches far more money. so it is a bit like gambling in that aspect.
i'm just constantly amazed how they were able to pull the economics behind this. clearly the ppl who expect a 10~100x ROI on their keys must outnumber those selling the cases. I mean I can imagine a bunch of people just farming cases day and night. Perhaps even a sophisticated AI could pull it off since the in game drops aren't even correlated with your performance.
even more impressive is how this is all legal since it really is gambling of sorts.
> ... so it is a bit like gambling ...
I hate what video games have become.
again this doesn't impact the gameplay at all and I'm happy to earn some money. was able to buy another title on steam with the money accrued
That doesn't mean it isn't fun to do so, although there's a very high chance you'll come to regret the number of hours pumped into such games and the way they kept you engaged in their dopamine loop.
I think this is more than anything, an app store sickness.
It has spread a little to consoles and desktop, but I can still buy a 100% offline, single player game, which has the main purpose of entertaining me.
It has a story, a point to it, a mystery often, fun things to do which aren't mining or grinding away.
I pay 80 bucks for the privilege, and am quite happy to do so. It is worth it, giving me many hours of entertainment.
Some boast "oh I finished the game first run through in 8 hours" Really? Such players just ignore all the scenery, don't really explore, don't grasp the full mystery, just... fast fast! Gotta get this over with!
I play and take in the scenery, and games like the Last of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn are fun, take 50 to 100 hours to play this way.
Just reading things in-games, clues, discovering how these worlds got this way was 1/2 the fun of the game!
So stop playing on your portable addiction device. Its hold is more devious too, as it is always in your pocket.
Your PC, console, are with you on the bus. At work. In the kitchen.
Return to us, good sir. Return to real gaming.
it just so happens that I seem to get good cases that I was able to sell for a bit of change but it is not like you can play 20 hours every week and make consistent money.
It's not a bit like gambling, it's exactly gambling and the predatory nature of it is what I hate about video games.
people bet on soccer too but that shouldn't stop you from getting excitement from it.
In my home country (Belgium) and my neigboring country (Netherlands) a lot of games their lootboxes are not available for us for the reason that the game-creators do not advertise the dropchances like the lottery, casino's and other gambling games are forced to do.
The reasoning is that the items that come out of the lootbox have a monetary value (as you need to pay to unlock a lootbox) so they fall under some of our gambling laws.
In my eyes, good riddance and I hope more countries will follow.
So Valve, EA Games,... just disabled opening lootboxes for us as they seem to be afraid to advertise the "drop chances" (but we can still buy and sell them)
With CSGO third parties were essentially selling games for actual currency instead of credit with Valve and using skins as currency for gambling on esports matches. A few of them also came up with other gambling games that didn't even involve esports.
It was also a great vehicle for money laundering: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2019/oct/30/counter-strike...
Wild times.
No, because the market for second-hand clothing is extremely oversaturated and clothing, particularly "fast fashion", simply does not last long enough to live a useful second life any more.
A video game skin however does not degrade, it will look the very same (or better) even in two decades.
No and thats why its silly to say rocket league items have no impact on gameplay, ofcourse its nicer play with hot wheels car that has animated decals than grey corolla.
I would like game to be more like "if you get this good, you get these cool items" instead of something like "if we put paid rewards right next to free rewards, then 15% of our playerbase is going to buy paid tier." :/
I had no problem with dlc cars, it felt like I was supporting the game, now it feels like I'm being manipulated to give money to somebody who owns rocket league.
Epic Games. Why are we surprised by this when they saw a cash cow when they bought it, and have done nothing but turn it into another Fortnite?
I think this type of game needs its own genre. Fortnite, RL, GTA Online, Warzone... They all follow the same model of "build a good multiplayer experience and "support it" perpetually by squeezing as much revenue as you can from your users".
I was a huge RL fan in 2015/16. It started going down hill sometime after that and EG has run it into the ground.
It's a viable business model and it allows players to enjoy the game for many years to come. What bothers me a little is that these revenue extracting schemes are usually very complicated and are probably complicated because it allows them to extract as much money as possible from a small subset of players. Like casino's and mobile games.
The game exists as a monetization engine. Some amount of fresh content is required to keep feeding the machine, but the goal is generally to let the machine run while dropping in bits of content and purchasable junk for the players to consume.
that's called "live service". In theory. A lot of games try to skip the "build a game that's actually fun and reasonably complete" part and just race to dump it on the market as soon as it's barely (or not even) playable and think they'll add content later. That's not live service, that's early access, and it's killed BFV and then BF2042 after it, Anthem, etc. EA is very very bad about this.
But yeah, when you hear a publisher say that a game is going to be a "live service", that's what it means, they want to do the fortnite model and squeeze ongoing revenue from the player base by whatever means. Sometimes it's cosmetic-only, sometimes it's not (R6: Siege), sometimes it starts one way and then becomes gameplay-affecting 6 months or 12 months down the road when they've got a player base who's attached to the game.
Of course, just like changing the game to add P2W elements after the fact, sometimes they won't. Valve basically abandoned TF2 about 5 years ago, they are still raking in money from it (it's still a top-10 game on steam...) but they won't even keep up with anti-cheat let alone continue development. Or even continue live service. No live service, only pay. And nor will they even allow the community to fix the game on their own, like Team Comtress 2...
It isn't like not being a live service game killed Quake 3, for example.
Obviously that would be a problem on the PC but games would remain popular and publishers would get paid without either of those things. Games as a whole wouldn't go anywhere. They just make more money this way.
Yes, obviously a big part of it is that every studio is hoping for their game to become the next WoW or Fortnite or Destiny— a franchise that will print money for a decade with not much more investment than a few content drops a year.
But I think the expectations of players have changed too, as far as matchmaking, leaderboards, progression, anti-cheat, anti-abuse, etc. You just can't deliver these things in a consistent way with the distributed client-server model, and companies needed to own the end-to-end experience vs farming out the community management side to faceless volunteer guild/clan/server operators.
> It isn't like not being a live service game killed Quake 3, for example.
Dead to who? It still has players, but it's "financially" dead, which is what the studio cares about when making these choices.
Keep in mind again that this is about the game surviving not about squeezing all the money possible out of their playerbase - after all the topic was about hating what video games have become.
The main reason I still play is to continue improving, and I don't think I could ever do that effectively if I was limited to only playing against people in my local sphere. My rank typically puts me somewhere in the top 1% of players (and honestly, I'm not even that good. The skill ceiling is insanely high), online match making may be frustrating sometimes but it's the easiest way to find opponents who will push those boundaries.
Would a hosted server work well for people who are much lower ranks who are primarily playing to just mess around with friends? Probably. I would quit tomorrow if online matchmaking went away though.
There are many different attempts at business models in games. Splitgate started with your suggestion and has since gone free to play. Numerous MMOs have tried subscriptions and have gone free to play. It's a sad state of affairs, but for every successful Minecraft, Stardew, or Valheim, there's thousands of failed attempts.
The point I'm trying to make is that these things have been tried by one game or another, and there's good reasons why the "run your own server" model died for the most popular games. Ignoring that is, I think, discarding a lot of historical evidence and nuance against blanket "why don't they just do X" arguments.
If there's a better way, it won't be a return to the past. It will be something new that no one has thought of yet.
> The items that you buy have absolutely no impact on gameplay and are just visuals
Cosmetic items are not just visual though. They are real elements in the game. Cosmetic items are interactive. They are unlockable, collectable, wearable items.
Further, visuals do impact the gameplay. You could argue about the difference between "gameplay" and "visuals" but each supports/influences the other and both are critical elements of almost every videogame. However you divide up the parts of a game, they all affect each other. Generally speaking, having all of the elements working together makes for a better game.
Monetisation strategies like microtransactions, loot boxes, etc. are also part of the game. However, the goal of such parts is not aligned with that of the others. The game is compromised by the introduction of the monetisation strategies.
> why are you surprised that some people want to look cool in a video game?
Nobody is surprised by this.
Yes, I really hate this argument that cosmetics are not gameplay. Visuals are a huge part of what makes a game, no one would be happy if games shipped without textures and shaders and people would have to pay to unlock them.
It seems to me that it definitely has a psychological impact for some folks (myself included) in both off-line and on-line competition.
The real problem is that loot boxes are gambling, and are addictive, period. It triggers something in otherwise rational people, especially children, that makes it feel good to spend money on mostly non-gameplay-altering cosmetics.
As a medic in team fortress 2, I usually pocket and ubercharge the players with cosmetics. It's an important team resource, and the odds of someone with a "default" skin making good use of it are fairly low. Much like plumage for a bird it's a reliable signal of "virility" - if you're invested enough in the game to own a $200 hat and a coordinated outfit then you've probably played it long enough for me to trust you sight-unseen.
http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f278/katietiedrich/comic26...
If you're a pro player with the default skin, you're gonna have a bad fucking time, because you're last priority for heals, you're not getting an ubercharge, etc. That is gameplay-affecting even if the cosmetic itself is not.
And of course it's a vanity component (at least for me, though other posters have raised other factors). Everyone's different with different preferences and as long as there's not a problematic spending aspect I think it's fine...but this links back to the gambling issue. Personally I only buy cosmetics in a few games I play a lot and that don't use loot box mechanics.
OP is just ranting about people who pay more getting a better experience, making paying such a central part of gaming. They just hate this, which I agree with, although I know others don't.
In a way, getting a better experience just for being able and willing to pay more is a basic feature of our society. Why should we expect videogames, being as expensive and lucrative, to be radically different from the rest of society?
I'll just continue appreciating those games who are, those who actually work more like art. If I ever decide to try a F2P loot-box generator-style game, it generally puts me off quickly.
Because it determines whether free players can still compete with paying customers.
There's no problem with a paid weapon skin that just looks cool since everyone is still on a level playing field. If that paid skin gives the user double damage then you've created 2 classes of players and one of them is superior. In such cases, the only reason free players even exist is to serve as fodder for your paying customers. They're there to get wrecked.
Because unlike the real world, we expect games to be inherently fair and meritocratic. In a competitive game, we expect that no matter how somebody looks or what they may say, the only thing that matters is their ability to perform. This is comparable to why people get upset about, say, the speed-enhancing swimwear for the Olympic games but don't have any problem with that swimwear existing.
One of the central functions of games is to level the playing field, or at least to reduce the dimensionality to such a degree that it is possible to be focused on all influencing factors in a game within the confines of that game. A closed-system, when we're usually all stuck playing in an open-system. Since all real-world closed-systems actually exist within an open-system, of course there could be external influences, but gamers generally have an expectation that attempts will be made to make a game as self-contained and closed as is possible. Pay-to-win games break this contract to make those unwilling to pay into unwitting tools for the enjoyment of the paying customer. They are open-systems under the guise of being closed-systems.
Granted, the category referred to as "Games" now includes many different things, including "Experiences" that aren't really games at all. And there are so many games today that it's pretty easy to find games that are actually games at their core. But there's also plenty of games that are marketed as games but turn out to be significantly about art / fashion to such a degree that they can no longer really be classified as games.
I've got call out Roblox for playing the meta-game here in a way that all gamers frustrated by pay-to-win will appreciate. It takes the idea of a closed system being broken into an open system, and makes that (making F2P games) into a closed system that breaks into an open system: you get to pay-to-win at creating pay-to-win games. A beautiful pyramid scheme that even your 11-yo child can enjoy being exploited within!
If these had no “gameplay” effect or “competitive advantage” based on environment, why do nation states spend money developing them and equip troops differently based on biome?
And why have some games had to patch their PvP to “outline” opposing players with a visibility border in the patches that follow certain “cosmetics”?
A more subtle advantage can arise from hitboxes in both hitscan and projectile games with customizers or cosmetics that change the mesh. There’s a reason some games are predominantly female characters in close fit gear.
Finally, even games that insist no gameplay or competitive advantage, are fully aware of “the meta”.
In Fallout 76, for example, PvP players learned to hotkey the “Nuka-Cola” drinks with special benefits. In a for money store, Bethesda allows you to purchase a robot junk collector that gathers Nuka-Colas for free. Rationale is it is just a QoL (quality of life) benefit, but in reality, it allows stockpiling a combat advantage to last longer in combat than the opponent. Same store also allows you to purchase “repair kits” for weapons and “bubble gum” that suppresses the survival mechanism around eating/drinking for an hour of game play.
Again, Bethesda’s claim is QoL not pay-to-win, but weapons repairable mid-battle away from one’s base certainly affects winning, and level of hunger/thirst affects damage multipliers and action point refresh (aka ‘mana’).
Lines keep moving.
Not a meaningful comparison. A game without textures would be hardly playable at all. The same can't be said for skins or accessories to your character/vehicle. You don't get eye-cancer with the default skin. If you feel you need that virtual Louis Vuitton bag to fully enjoy the game then well be a sucker and pay for it and pretend the game was just a little more expensive. I've yet to encounter a game where I feel like I'm missing out on anything with the default player model/skin/car.
So where do we stop? This is just one more way, in addition to the thousands we already have, in which peer pressure and status symbols manifest.
I don't really muss with my car too much anymore, instead I just click "Equip Now" every time I can and slowly modify it over time.
It'd be fine. No textures doesn't mean everything is gray.
I don't disagree that they do add something, but theses ones are not something that I want, nor that I need.
> if games shipped without textures and shaders and people would have to pay to unlock them.
I do have to pay for the textures and shaders... I did pay for them as a matter of fact. I didn't pay for the one not included, as I didn't want them. Some did want them, and did pay for them individually. Just like I didn't pay for Elden Ring but plenty did...
Now, when you bought that game, if you were expecting a specific amount of content, and you didn't get that content without paying more, I agree completely, that would be false advertising and that would be definitely wrong.
False advertising is definitely an issue in video games, there's so much overpromising and under-delivering but IAP isn't the issue there (though it definitely can be the reason for your false advertising). Until that part is handled correctly, the market did alleviate most of the false advertising by having an abundant amount of reviews and to me that's a not so bad way to deal with this.
That of course assumes that the game isn't sold to me with these "better" visuals as included.
Back in the days we used mods and texture packs to remove (hardware) expensive textures from the game so we get more FPS. I'm not sure if your argument applies to all games. For many games there is a competitive scene that usually don't give a shit about visuals and would trade most visual features for more frames per second.
https://worldofwarships.com/en/news/sales-and-events/arpeggi...
[1] https://support.rocketleague.com/hc/en-us/articles/360029832...
see: Halo Infinite
Want to be black? that will be $10 please
This is an interesting point. I think it begs the question, what _is_ the goal of a game? 10 years ago I would have said that broadly, the goal of a video game is to create an experience the player will enjoy. Perhaps now it's more simple though, maybe the goal of the vast majority of games today is to create a model in which money is willingly transferred from the player to the publisher.
The reality is that commercial experience games - where the goal is trigger the imagination and guide the player to a rich experience - are much rarer than commercial extraction games, where the goal is to create addictive engagement and spending patterns which can be monetised.
This isn't nearly as true for tangible commercial board games, especially those that promote strategic and imaginative thinking. You can get started in chess with a chess board and a rule book. You do not have to keep spending money on nicer-looking pieces, and your board will not be monetised with pop-up ads. (Chess sites may be, but chess kept developing for hundreds of years without them.)
D&D and more obscure games like Carcassone are similar. You can spend extra on expansion packs, but even if you buy everything the expansion space is small and bounded. The physical costs of board game dev and distribution keep that true.
Electronic games have a virtually infinite potential expansion space, so the economics are drastically different. The temptation to turn every last thing into a monetisation engine is hard to avoid - to the extent that monetisation design has become a meta-game in its own right.
Yup, I think this gets lost in the "visual-only cosmetics are fine/gameplay-affecting is bad" position. The problem is that in most cases, even if the cosmetic is purely visual, games are now being designed around "how do we incorporate cosmetics" which is constraining the types of experiences that are being made and the mechanics they allow.
Battlefield 2042 is an example of a game that completely upended its traditional mechanics to pull in the concept of "operators" (like R6: Siege) because they knew they could make more money selling operators. And at some level that's gameplay affecting, maybe not the ideal picture of what happens when MTX gets involved, but that's always the temptation - "we'll make it gameplay-affecting, but it'll be fair". Once you bring money into the picture you are reliant on developers to take the high road - not just today, but for as long as the game is active/you're interested.
Its predecessor, BFV, was skin-based and it was still controversial not just that you had random Fortnite-style nazi characters running around the Pacific Theater or Japanese Rambo Lady running around Norway, but because they started to introduce tons of animations so that players could at least see the skins they paid $20 a pop for - and that is a basic game-design thing that affects everyone regardless of whether you yourself pay up or not.
At a more basic level, the single-player RPG is essentially dead because it's the most difficult to introduce MTX mechanics into those genre of games. And sure you can point to Elden Ring but even then they are using "cooperative" or "inter-session" mechanics that fundamentally exist as a way to get an "always-online" server system into the picture as a platform for MTX. You've got forced Denuvo on everything. Etc etc.
And again, even when it's done right, there is still an incentive to make the "free" mechanisms grindy so that players feel the urge to pay IRL money. LOTR: Shadow of War was an example of that where the game could technically be finished without MTX, but at a certain point the game ramped the difficulty so hard that it was virtually impossible, certainly impossible without suddenly turning the game into a second job. Many games similarly force hundreds of hours of grinding or... you can just pay and go play with your friends! You can get bait-and-switched once you are into the game and emotionally attached - and that can even occur after release/after reviews have been written, or even just so far into the game that most reviewers don't reach it in their 5 hours of gameplay on their pre-release copy.
Those MTX mechanism are still shaping gameplay mechanics even if they are "purely cosmetic" - and in many cases they are not, they are definitely gameplay-affecting by design (in major AAA/e-sports titles even, this isn't just random mobile crapware, R6:Siege is one of the most popular e-sports titles, LOTR is a mega-IP, etc). Games being designed around "how do we pump the player for cash most efficiently and with the least ability for them to hack around us" is itself a problem either way though, that's a corrosive mindset for game design as a whole that is enabled and encouraged by allowing MTX at all. Either you keep that camel out nose and all, or as soon as that nose is under the tent it's always going to be an insidious urge, and in many cases an explicit mandate from publishers to the studio.
Also, yes, in anything where you interact with another player, your interactions are shaped by the other player's responses to you, which is determined by your cosmetics. I posted this deeper in the thread but to bring it back here:
> As a medic in team fortress 2, I usually pocket and ubercharge the players with cosmetics. It's an important team resource, and the odds of someone with a "default" skin making good use of it are fairly low. Much like plumage for a bird it's a reliable signal of "virility" - if you're invested enough in the game to own a $200 hat and a coordinated outfit then you've probably played it long enough for me to trust you sight-unseen.
> http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f278/katietiedrich/comic26...
> If you're a pro player with the default skin, you're gonna have a bad fucking time, because you're last priority for heals, you're not getting an ubercharge, etc. That is gameplay-affecting even if the cosmetic itself is not.
Paper that might be enlightening for those who haven't partaken: https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:901463/FULLTEXT0...
(I should add that as medic, I had a golden medigun for a while too, and that was an extremely bad time for me, because every single roamer was absolutely gunning for the medic with the $100 item. Sometimes it pays to have some restraint in your plumage when you happen to be a particularly delicious and defenseless target...)
I have such mixed feelings about TF2, because it was such a fantastic game, but it pioneered all these exploitative MTX mechanisms. The game itself was actually one of the better examples of how to do MTX properly (cosmetic only, tradeable by players, etc) but it immediately showed there was a lot more money in MTX than in making games, and opened the door to other actors to exploit much more heavily (compare the Overwatch model and its non-tradeability/gacha mechanics, R6:S with its gameplay-affecting operators, etc). It's also disgusting the way they've just continued to let the game rot without even basic bugfixes, it's been completely overwhelmed by hackers for 4 or 5 years now because they just won't patch their shit. Nor will they let the community patch their shit, like Team Comtress 2...
If I were on an actual team of people, I'd expect cosmetics to only matter for at-a-glance identification of a specific player.
Most games you will play with 23 other randoms who you will never see again after a couple hours. And that is actually the problem - on an actual competitive team your entire team would be decent and everyone would be there to play seriously and get stuff done. But in public games you need some kind of fitness signal to figure out which players are going to be a waste of a team's scarcest resource. How do you tell that from a bunch of players jumping around a spawn room like monkeys for a minute during the setup countdown? Cosmetics. Plumage.
(and actually Valve have gone out of their way over the years to remove other potential signals, like sprays and chat...)
Plumage evolved in nature for a reason, it's still functional and important even though it's "cosmetic-only". Games are a social phenomenon and plumage is still important to them too and that still affects your gameplay too.
I usually play Deep Rock Galactic, which has some non-cosmetic ways to judge people's experience. Promotion(like prestige) of a class is indicated by a border color and number of stars, and indicates someone has played a character for promotion25 levels. Bronze stars are okay, silver stars should be decent.
'Blue Levels' are also present. They serve as an indicator of how many times that player has leveled up any* character. So, someone with blue level 100 and only one promotion star should still be considered experienced in terms of game sense, but not necessarily an expert on their character.
Someone with low 'blue levels' and no stars is just a greenbeard, and should not be expected to be great.
There is a similar player level mechanism in TF2 but not tied to classes at all, just a blue level type thing. That works in the starter room, but it's not a solution for the "I have two seconds to choose which of these players to uber before that soldier finishes bombing me"/"I need to pick one of these players to pocket to try and stay alive to keep the uber up for the team".
Plumage works, you can instantly make a call that this is a default player and that one has cosmetics, or recognize the cosmetics of a person who has played well previously/who you gave a chance and they did something antisocial/stupid. Trying to identify a player name, finding them on the scoreboard, and then re-syncing with what has happened in the game in the last 5 seconds just isn't practical.
Like, TF2 has been f2p for 10+ years now, random HNers aren't going to come up with the magic solution here, this is how the game plays regardless of whether you think it should be. It's not a problem, and it's actually one of the least-exploitative MTX mechanisms on the market, but you can't eliminate the effects of cosmetics on gameplay in many situations because plumage is such an important social cue.
https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:901463/FULLTEXT0...
Visual design is such a core aspect of (good) games to begin with, it's basically impossible to divorce that from the gameplay effects it has.
https://dc.uwm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3499&context=...
If you want an example of cosmetics that don't affect anything - Battlefield 1 has a fixed selection of guns and then each gun has some skins. Nobody else can really see the particular skin at range anyway so no real gameplay effect. This was done deliberately to allow the character design to be visually distinctive - a british medic runs around with crutches on their back for example, and the british scout wears a cape. Can't have that with cosmetics unless they're so trivial that nobody can tell they're there (BF1), or you go to great efforts to preserve character silhouettes (TF2). In BFV it's much much more difficult to tell the classes apart - any class can run around with a medic hat on for example! An elite skin can be any class - you have to visually identify what guns and items they're carrying, which is more challenging even if it's "just cosmetic" - a mere cosmetic gives you a tactical advantage, you know what your enemy is carrying and they have to guess about you.
And that's obviously because BFV was much more oriented around MTX sales, while BF1 focused on an "expansion pack" model.
So MTX clearly affects that aspect of game design even if it's "only cosmetic".
The holster is rare, and maybe you recognize that it's rare, but they could have just gotten it out of a drop and kept it. The Heavy with the funny flip-flops and sunglasses is probable more recognizable at-a-glance, but could have bought a bunch of cheap cosmetics for a few dollars on the market.
And in the case of keeping an uber ready, won't you have to stay pocketed long enough to learn if someone is a good or less-good choice? Even if it's raining hell on your position, you'd have a rough view of the Heavy and a kill feed that highlights the assists you're getting from them. What more is there to look for?
As for the Battlefield games you mention, my biggest issue in 5 was that all of the player models seemed to blend into the background. Most of the time, I wasn't able to spend brainpower trying to figure out who is which type of class, simply because I was too busy trying to figure out if some dull, misshapen blob was part of the map or trying to kill me. Combined with the general feel of the game (poor, imo), I was never motivated to spend enough time on it to get into anything serious. Haven't bought another Battlefield game since, and BF5 was on a steep sale at the time.
What? Co-op/PvP has been a major part of From Software's souls games going back to Demon's Souls in 2009. They can also be played entirely offline if you wish and have zero microtransactions or Denuvo.
Have you ever heard of thing called fashion souls? A lot of times I wear armour (pick and choose pieces) because it looks cool not because it have bigger numbers.
Not only that, sometimes they can affect the basic mechanics too. For example, some guns in Destiny 2 the range is measured from the end of the weapon model, and some skins extend the model out so the gun is further from the player. This in a one v. one scenario can give you a slight edge on one shot kill distance if you have the skin, so you can shoot earlier than an opponent without it.
the more regularly occuring thing is probably that parent's don't properly set up their kids phones and then they buy a few hundred or worse thousands bucks of something they shouldn't. but again those occurances are rare and don't cause really cause any actual damage, especially since you can get refunds for this stuff if it gets expensive very easily. kids regularly do stuff a lot more expensive than that. in fact kids themselves are a lot more expensive than that as a baseline.
the supposed exploitation of things like loot boxes has literally zero evidence behind it. all you will find are a few genuinely bottom of the barrel studies (as in that australian government study from some years ago, should literally be taken as an example in a book of how not to run a study).
and the constant comparison to gambling is really tiresome, because it's obviously not the same. people play themselves out of all their belongigs regularly with actual gambling, because their goal is to make a profit with gambling and their last gamble will surely turn it around. such a thing isn't possible even in the few online gaming markets remaining where you can resell your items for real money because its a big hazzle to liquidize all your assets.
Also, games are supposed to be a form of escapism, where the gameplay matters, not who you are and how much money your parents make.
You can argue in favor of the game itself being free allowing people to save 10 or 20 bucks. But gameplaywise Microtransactions inevitably make the gameplay experience worse, without exceptions.
Nothing that can be purchased in the game affects gameplay, it's all just cosmetics.
I have bought some items, but only by trading free drops for keys/credits.
As far as I know all custom cars have the same hitbox as one of the freely available cars.
The biggest issue I have with free to play is there's virtually no barrier for smurf accounts.
Paying for items that impact the game balance turns them into spending competitions: whoever pays the company the most money wins. Games designed like this are not even worth playing. I fell for one of these money sinks once, never again.
The complaint isn't about depreciation but rather the inability sell the items at all.
IMO the big change is to do with the lifecycle of games. Previously you release a new title, maybe a few DLCs, and then you move on. The game is done, you have to do something else, a sequel, a new IP, whatever. That was true for all games, multiplayer included. Now (for multiplayer) the idea is to try different releases until one sticks, and then try and make that game evergreen. The dream being something like League of Legends, which has been printing money for over a decade.
Whether that's a good or bad thing is up for debate I suppose.
Cosmetics are not nearly that resource intensive to produce, so its not about 'wearing nice clothes' a-la real life, where good materials are more expensive to produce. Attaching a price tag is PURELY for the benefit of the publisher.
Attaching real world costs to purchases in games also disproportionately targets neurodivergent and fiscally uneducated people. That seems like a fairly malicious business practice.
Microtransaction apologism is not a tractable stance, ever.
Why does attaching real world costs to purchases in-game strike you as “malicious” but not the real world cost of buying the game?
The first issue is that like I originally mentioned, microtransactions disproportionately affect neurodivergent individuals because of the addictive mechanics used to implement them. The concept of 'whales' is a term used to refer to big spenders in a game economy without fully examining the reason they are spending so much. For example, where you can only buy one copy of Elden Ring, you could easily buy a new copy of Forza every year and buy each car, which may be a compulsion if you have OCD, for example. The same argument could be (and should be) made against tiered subscription services in games. If there is a lootbox mechanic involved, the issue is only compounded further as it is an introduction of gambling mechanics. In some cases, it can be worth examining the presence of envy economics 'Oooh I want was they have! How much is it? Oh I want it more now I know!'.
The second issue is the scale difference is ridiculous. The amount of dev and artist time to produce a game sits at around 1.5 to 4 years and sometimes much more. There is a large number of artistic assets that are used in combination with code when making a game and those assets are paid for using the proceeds from the game sales. When micro transactions are produced, a fraction of those assets are divided out of the main game (or less often, added later) and can be produced on a 6 month cycle to be sold separately. To be explicit, the amount of assets made in a microtransaction is FAR less than those used to make the game, but often the price of the microtransaction does not reflect this (again, refer to Forza and the $200 car dlc for a minimum-$100 game). This means that either the publisher or the developer team (including art team) is receiving that margin, and if you think the developers are receiving a proportionate amount of that margin then I have some bad news for you.
To be clear, I think game monetisation is OK. But that does not mean all forms of monetisation are OK, and it definitely does not mean that diluting a product in a harmful way is OK.
Not to say that micro transactions are good practice or that they can’t be dealt with independently, but micro transactions are a very similar problem to real world cosmetics.
Sure you could argue that just having some correlation between true quality and perceived value is good enough, but I’d argue that charging for more visually appealing and better designed models ALSO is not zero correlation.
Nintendo charged $9.99 for this game. The response was absolute evisceration in the ratings. Mobile game players EXPECTED a F2P experience that would waste their time with energy charge ups, loot boxes, etc. and were upset when Nintendo didn't do that. In response, Nintendo switched to this type of experience for their next release, Fire Emblem, which performed much better.
The Wikipedia article for Super Mario Run explains in detail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Run#Commercial
A select quote - '[Nintendo President] Kimishima said that "we honestly prefer the Super Mario Run model", though in a June 2017 investor question-and-answer session, he said "in the future we will consider not only a single set price, but other methods that incorporate a wider variety of elements that allow as many consumers as possible to play"'
And most people didn’t get that you could buy it and not worry about needing to buy berries or diamonds for real world money. Not worry about your child spending hundreds of real world dollars when playing on your phone.
People just hated the fact that they had to pay for the cheapest priced Mario game ever.
I can't say I'm not biased here, I basically hate 95% of all the mobile games I ever tried, or at least stopped playing after an hour - so a 10$ purchase for me would simply never happen, because I don't like the platform. On the other hand I did do the "paid unlock" after trying it out for a few. (Ignore this if they had a demo, I never tried it, wasn't it iphone only?)
Kind of crazy that the whole market was defined by shovelware
Ironically, this used to be the norm when the iPhone's app store came out. For example, Super Monkey Ball was $10 in 2008. Over time, there was a race to the bottom, and then F2P became the norm when Apple introduced IAP.
People already figured how to not allow kids to pay real money in games. They don't worry about that. You just don't attach card to account or require password.
Touch controls and IAP impose serious constraints on the mobile game market still. There are some gems, but it seems like the golden age of gaming is occurring outside of mobile games.
Super Mario Run: $60 million total by July 2018
Fire Emblem Heroes: $656 million by January 2020
An order of magnitude. Incentives are everything.
Iirc, they released a 3DS game with DLC, where you could haggle the price down in-game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty%27s_Real_Deal_Baseball
Just look up "Super Mario Run" on your favorite store and what you will see is "Free", not $10. In fact, I am not sure if the actual price is mentioned anywhere on the store page.
So of course people expected a F2P experience, because that's exactly what's on the store page. If Nintendo was honest, they would have published it as a paid app, with the price clearly visible on the store page. Maybe with a separate free and clearly labeled demo, as it is standard practice for one-time payment apps.
Users were annoyed by the bait and switch. Nintendo should have charged $9.99 in the store and been done with it. Instead they tried to straddle some line between freemium, paid, and demo.
In addition, Nintendo added always-on DRM so that even those who fully paid for the game were dealing with silly issues that you would only expect in a freemium game.
“While still using the freemium model, Nintendo eschewed requiring players to keep paying to access more levels, instead offering the game as a free demo with the first three levels unlocked and requiring a one-time payment to unlock the rest of the game.[12] Part of the reason for this pricing scheme was to make it transparent to parents who may be purchasing the game for their children so that they would not incur further costs.[42] Fearing piracy of the game, Nintendo added always-on DRM, which requires that players have a persistent Internet connection to play.”
The moment something is known to become or becomes free to play is the moment I lose all interest.
The dishonesty in the system itself is what makes this unbearable for me.
Developers need to eat, Managers need to eat, Marketeers need to eat... And sometimes psychologists doing evil mindtricks and supporting gambling addictions need to eat too... Or buy a lambo, or two.
I don't care whether it's only cosmetic or not, I have and will never support that business model
For P2W it's a treat after I've been grinding freemium for a while. It's like opening a beer on Friday after work. I don't spend 10-20k a week but I do occasionally spend that amount on one game during its whole lifetime. However, that also means I've gotten thousands of hours of enjoyment out of it.
But yes, while I'm only a 1000x (1000x compared to someone who just pays $20 upfront) there are certainly people who are 1000000x and much bigger whales than me. I can't speak for them.
If you're a bored prince with billions of liquid cash and even more billions of yielding assets, do you really care about 10-20k of weekly outlays?
Or reduce the scale, if you have 100k annual salary, do you miss that $3 a day you spend on coffee or $5 a week you spend on mobile gaming? ... or $15.99 a month you spend on Netflix?
Everyone has a thing and a threshold they are comfortable spending on. Some people want 4 wheels that will take them from A to B and other people are willing to spend $500 a month to get a Tesla.
We focus on digital goods because they have a perceived cost of zero to manufacture and are transient (one day the game will no longer work) but fail to spot that the value we heap on many material goods are social and most of us do not buy goods for life (hence why r/BuyItForLife is a subculture rather than conventional wisdom)
They don't consider the opportunity cost or feel the pain of lost potential, but get a rush of "feeling rich" whenever they spend $50 on a T-shirt they'll wear once.
It's cross-cultural, natural psychology, and I doubt it'll go anywhere.
I actually live a fairly frugal life, and I think acknowledging this is important: "do I really want or need this or am I just making myself feel better for a few hours?"
Just like some people dropping 100k in Vegas in a weekend are paying for the experience and VIP treatment and others just need one more bet to replenish Johnnys college fund.
I could see <18s getting into trouble but are there adults legit bankrupting themselves from paid-for cosmetics?
How common is the pattern for paid-for lootbox cosmetics (as compared to buy-it-now) cosmetics? Wouldn't say I'm particularly deep in either the RL/Fortnite ecosystem..!
But Pay-To-Win games like Clash of Clans? I don't have any research, but if I was a gambling man, I'd bet at least a few thousand.
So speaking from experience: there's probably a finite sum you can spend on Clash Royale. I found the beginning highly addictive and I did spend hundreds when I probably shouldn't have, but the acceleration/frustration and advantage you can buy is very quickly eroded by skill. Once you have a maxed deck, it's pretty hard to buy victories and any new card might buy you some wins but will quickly get nerfed, and players better than you will still beat you (and matchmaking will converge you onto that 49% win rate).
I doubt I'm a typical player but at this stage I've probably extracted more value (by time) from clash than they've extracted from me - even if I spent 2k (a very very generous estimate), amortised over 5-6 years of play, that's not a lot of money (30 a month which is a AAA game every other month, less than a coffee a day) and has definitely given me more than that in enjoyment. And at this point my expenditure has completely plateaued.
Can I see people staying in that honeymoon phase moving from game to game? Yes maybe - I suppose by law of large numbers it's more likely than not Clash Royale peaked at like 100M players so 1k having issues is believable.
I'm all for regulation in this space (it's pretty crazy that it's not that regulated) but without data, my own personal experience feels like this is not nearly as dangerous as gambling or alcohol/drugs. The game milks you of money but doesn't create those boom-bust cycles that the traditional vices do
Getting addicted to an F2P game and losing your time, while sad, is not within the scope of this discussion
I mean, sometimes they are kids (or the developmentally challenged)[1] but adults [2] too. There are more sad stories. One I recall was a developer who invited their superwhales to a launch of the new beta expansion in person. (All expenses paid) They sent one a plane ticket, but the the player never showed because they couldn't afford to get to the airport. I wish I could find that story online.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48925623
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2014/03/01/why-its-s...
> losing your time, while sad, is not within the scope of this discussion
I very clearly and explicitly said "money they didn't have" in my first post and was talking about financial costs.
fair - I missed that context when reading the immediate response replying to.
Thanks for sharing your anecdata - the industry is definitely in need of regulation something I've long believed. The ubiquity and ease of access is probably the most dangerous bit. It's astounding that mobile games were able to copy/hire all the knowledge acquired in building slot machines to create an industry that doesn't even have to pay out..!
Me and the kid got into Roblox entirely for free. Beyond all the games she enjoys even without any paid features, we got a dead-simple game creation platform with world-class MMO built in. I thought that was nice enough to warrant buying a few gift cards for her and the peers.
We got into GI for free as well. I was apprehensive at first because I heard from friends that GI is an evil gacha game preying on addict personalities. But once we started it we enjoyed the artwork and the game so much through the hours of main quest lines and beautiful content that I thought it was as good or better than Zelda BOTW so why not kick back at least the BOTW purchase price?
Someone was suggesting that F2P is inherently dishonest because "developers need to eat" and clearly there are unethical moneymaking behaviors happening.
Kiro is saying "No, it isn't inherently unethical, and there are people like me willing to spend the money on cosmetics and lootboxes to cover the development of the game".
You are making the same logical fallacy (or simple opinion) that "There is no way for F2P is ethical".
The World of Tanks/Battleships/Warplanes series, are free to play, with progression through experience ( you unlock higher level machines based on xp points you accumulate through playing and success at it), or through paying to go up the ladder faster or unlock special machines. You can play the free version just fine ( a paying user against you doesn't have a serious advantage), and the developers make enough money from the paying users who enjoy the exclusive machines or earning xp faster. Why shouldn't i enjoy a free game i know someone pays for ( and that someone needs me there too, if there aren't adversaries you can't play)?
That is, instead of the game being balanced for what feels good to play, they are balanced so that they feel good when you pay more and otherwise are not so annoying that you quit, but annoying enough to push you to pay.
Its not: here's a good game, but you can buy these things with real money. Its: here's a game that we purposely made a bit too time consuming and annoying, but you can buy these "time savers" to make it be fun all the time instead. Any game that sells real-money "time savers" is by definition a badly balanced game. The solution to a badly balanced game that becomes tedious is not to sell "time savers" (or skips: "buy the tank now and skip the grind for it"), its to rebalance the game to remove or reduce the tedium.
It is an ongoing massively multiplayer game which also incurs server costs, so I don't think asking for a voluntary subscription is too much.
Is it dishonest? I don't know. But the tactics are similar.
I'm not big on games, and even less so on mobile, but I remember that the ones I've tried to kill time during my commute, I could basically play them for 5 minutes if I didn't want to buy gems or whatever.
This, to me, looks much more like the "shareware" / demo versions of old than "free to play". And I think I'd see them in a better light if they were upfront about it.
To compare this with an "open source with paid features" product I'm familiar with, Elasticsearch, they're much more clear about it. At the time, it didn't even support TLS, no authentication, etc. You were of course on your own if you couldn't figure something out. But you'd know this upfront, and you didn't have to reboot the cluster every 10 minutes or 100 searches.
That’s closer to the “free tier” stuff, and a very different model to modern “freenium” games.
The full game included a Part 2 and Part 3.
I think the latter business model is very respectable because it’s not sneaky and it isn’t manipulating me nearly as much. You can have hardly any money at all, play on a crappy computer, and still have a huge amount of fun in the game. You could even be very competitive. And all for free! Not even at a cost to your privacy! And you can optionally “donate” money to the project if you want to support the game and get a neat cosmetic. How is that not a great business model for me as a consumer?
I want to pay once for a game the same way I want to pay once for a car. Elden Ring is a perfect example.
I understand others feel differently. To each their own.
These "games" are HIGHLY MANIPULATIVE. They use bullying, false cult inclusion, peer pressure, gambling reward ration, false emotional and time investment, and outright slot machine tactics to extract money from players.
They are worse than Las Vegas gambling by a country mile, since at least Las Vegas gambling is open and honest about the fact that the house wins and has established rules.
The social bullying that comes from "fake players" that are paid employees of the company is among the most disturbing aspect of these games. They exists to "shake down" players to upgrade with paid upgrades, to sow conflict, etc.
The rules of these "games", including the value of in-game currencies of dizzying types, is routinely nerfed/devalued at rates similar to the more comical instances of hyperinflation in the real world.
These "games" are at the extreme end of the spectrum for now. What is truly disturbing is that practically every "platform" of gaming drools over the revenue streams they produce. It is a sad dark gravity hole that is sucking the entire industry towards it. It is the depravity of capitalism in action, the almighty dollar destroys any idealism.
Aside from that, the appalling ad and currency extraction tactics used by virtually every "free to play" kids game is perhaps more distrubing, not because of the extreme tactics of the MZ games, but because the target audience is young children with demonstrably biological inability to properly regulate the addiction and investment behaviors involved.
Rather than a 10 second toy ad "hooking" a kid, you have a program that can spend an hour or more "hooking" a kid with tactics that aren't as immediately apparent to regulators in their manipulation.
Fun fact, in the US it was not permitted to advertise to children on TV at all between the late ‘40s and early ‘80s. It was only because Reagan reversed these laws that advertising to children because permissible and common on tv.
Many other countries still prohibit or limit advertising to children today.
Any kind of store experience inside of an experience is just as annoying as any other kind of popup ad except it usually causes the devs to change the nature of the game to cause people to lean toward using the store, making things grindy like enemies have more hit points or have greater difficulty than they would have otherwise for example in candy crush there are levels that are unbeatable unless you pay for help.
Free software is not the same as a freemium game, they don't make the software more difficult to use, make the responsiveness of it slower and have it riddled with popups in the middle of use, or even fake you out with being unable to complete something until you pay. It would be like photoshop allowing you to design something then not letting you export print or save but only right as you were about to complete it, and this wouldn't happen every time, maybe on like the 5th time you use it, it's that kind of annoyance.
If it's an F2P MMO then it's not a decision on a whim by the studio/publisher - it's been the default for a few years and good luck launching a subscription MMO in the last few years.
If it's an AAA single player title and you have loot boxes then it's just someone being greedy.
If it's a mobile game then it would probably not exist without f2p.
But I get your point, I used to not like this F2P trend but over the years I actually like to not completely stop playing some MMOs because I don't want to pay the sub. With F2P I can login three times per month and play for an hour. This might be different if I was willing to pay 10$ for 3h of play.
How is it dishonest? F2P does not automatically mean using dark patterns or openly making it Pay2win. Cosmetics are the prime example of an honest F2P, as they have zero impact on the game and still allow the developers to eat.
Do you consider demos also dishonest?
To have zero impact on the game, they'd have to not be a part of the game. Or have ever existed at all, really.
But if you think they are so meaningless, why do you think people buy them? Also, don't you think convincing someone to buy nothing sounds like something a con artist would do?
> allow the developers to eat
How do microtransactions feed developers? Do you just mean because its their job to build the game? (which necessarily includes the various monetisation systems)
Because they're fun.
Some people are willing to spend $5 so that their Rocket League car is the Batmobile. It has no effect on the mechanics of the game (Your car's hitbox is still the same, and it has the same speed/acceleration), but makes the game that much more enjoyable for the player.
In Splitgate (F2P FPS), I bought the battle pass for $10 because I wanted my assault rifle to look like it was made of cardboard. The damage and accuracy didn't change. It's a purely cosmetic effect that I thought was amusing.
> How do microtransactions feed developers? Do you just mean because its their job to build the game? (which necessarily includes the various monetisation systems)
Don't act like you think you know what was meant. It's annoying and smells like bad faith.
Now, since you don't want to spend hundreds of hours unlocking the ability to play the game on a level playing field, you will probably want to spend money to unlock these things. This will costs hundreds of dollars, far more than you would pay for an actual real game. Even if you unlock them the free way, there's a high chance your account eventually gets banned. As, once again, the studio has no experience in anything other than skin design, and have no idea how their game actually works and will cave in to every single basic cheating allegation and social crap like "he was in my game therefore he stream sniped me". Again, if you have ever played a game in the last 30 years, you would be well aware that most people in charge do not understand very basics like how you could infer an enemy is near you because you heard him behind the wall, or he triggered something on the map somewhere that tells the other player that trigger was indeed triggered across the map.
> zero impact
Obviously false unless you have never played a game before.
If there's a golden age of video gaming, we're living in it now. The sheer quantity of quality, innovative games out there is almost absurd.
The daily amount of creativity, talent and technical ability blows my mind!
The indie scene is, indeed, vibrant - but there's a limit to the kinds of games that can come from a small team with a small budget. Meanwhile, extensive monetization is creeping into more and more big franchises and studios. See: the recent Gran Turismo 7 controversy.
Who needs modernity?
And other genres that are extremely popular that didn't exist a few years ago. Also, there are good new RTS titles out there, even if there's nothing with the popularity that Starcraft or whatever had back in the day.
> Other genres (MMOs) have been almost completely taken over by games with freemium models and there are few options available if you're not into that.
The most popular MMOs right now is likely FFXIV (not freemium), followed by WoW (not freemium). (Or it might still be the other way around; either way...) There are a lot of freemium model MMOs around, but most of them launched with a subscription model, failed to compete with the dominant subscription model MMOs, and fell back to freemium to try and survive. Taken as a whole, the genre is absolutely dominated by the subscription model; that's where the players and money is. And while no, there aren't a ton of subscription options, that's largely an inevitable consequence of the business model, which has vicious network effects.
There isn't a freemium MMO developer out there that wouldn't trade a kidney in a heartbeat to become the next Everquest/WoW/FFXIV. Conversely, if WoW ever went freemium, it would be universally recognised as a sign of abject failure and a last attempt to try and stabilise the game financially before the servers get shut down.
> there's a limit to the kinds of games that can come from a small team with a small budget
The limit exists, but it seems to be ever receding into the distance. Valheim or Rimworld are both stunning, developed on a shoestring budget by tiny teams.
> Meanwhile, extensive monetization is creeping into more and more big franchises and studios.
You don't have to play games from the big franchises or studios.
I guess the Ouya tried to replicate this but the ease of development hurt the console in my opinion. Too much software mixed with the same 24 hours in a day that everyone has leads to much of it never being experienced.
Everyone is playing Elden Ring. If I wanted to play it, but disagreed with the same things, I couldn't play other games and get the same experience.
If you gets years of enjoyment out of a game you spent $20 on, I think you've come out ahead in all measures. I think that's the most important thing to not lose sight of. Now, I totally get expressing disagreement over the direction of a game, but at the end of the day it's probably unreasonable to expect to enjoy the experience of a particular game (or any single thing, really) forever. Games change, gamers change.
However, seeing my favorite franchises go down the drain when I would have loved to keep immersing myself in those worlds still makes me bitter over the direction the AAA gaming industry is taking. So I get that people complain.
Kena Bridge of Spirits and Tony Hawk 1 + 2 HD are amazing games and have no DLC.
It's a very complicated problem to solve, on some level adults have the freedom to be self-destructive. In another business case, dating apps are known to knowingly allow fake profiles to roam to encourage people to subscribe. And even after that, you have various freemium add-ons.
Between this, and a very scary experience, I haven't used an app in years and I actually meet much higher quality people now.
But adults have a right to spend their money whichever way they choose, if you enjoy spending 200$ or $300 a month on free to play games, and chatting with bots, enjoy yourself.
The bigger issue with much of this stuff is there's no clear cap on how much money you can spend, so the bulk of freemium revenue comes from a tiny percentage of consumers.
Like an addict will steal to finance their addiction, you'll have cases where someone will just steal their mom's credit card to buy Fortnite skins or Tinder boosts.
I think a good compromise would be to restrict games with free to play mechanics to adults, as in if you're not at least 18 you're not allowed to play games with loot boxes. Once you're an adult, gambling is fine.
At the same time, I also respect the countries who have just banned this form of gambling outright. As it appears the Netherlands has.
https://screenrant.com/lootbox-gambling-microtransactions-il...
Yes. As it stands many of these games are simply an end-run around gambling laws. It would be nice if games with these mechanics were clearly labelled (ESRB is showing its conflict of interest here) and rated 18+.
I personally think the legal age to gamble or drink should be 18, but to comply with state law it's not unreasonable to say restrict boxes to those 21 and over.
I buy a game, and unless I get the DLC(s)/Expanions pack(s), that’s all I’ll ever have to pay. Civilization V: Over 2000 hours. Pathfinder: Kingmaker/Wrath of the righteous: Over 1000 hours each. Stellaris [0]: Almost 1000 hours.
[0]: Some people hate the Paradox DLC style, personally I think it’s amazing. Content DLCs are accompanied by free feature patches, cosmetic/minor DLCs are well, minor. No one forces you to get all of them. And thanks to this DLC policy, Stellaris will soon turn 6 years old while still getting regular updates.
I wouldn't say Vanilla Civ V was bad, but it wasn't great. I probably wouldn't recommend it without the two expansions. I guess it's a moot point these days though since it's all sold together.
Without this mod I’d have long stopped playing Civ V, and the lack of such a fix/balance mod (Civ V had an official source release and SDK which is what made the mod possible) is why I can’t get into Civ VI
[0]: https://civmodding.wordpress.com/2010/10/17/balance-units/
[1]: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/community-patch-how-t...
I just remember picking up Civ V when it came out and going back to Civ IV because it got boring after a while. I loved the main changes (more vibrant and realistic graphics style, one unit per tile combat), but the systems didn't seem that fleshed out yet and the games were a bit repetitive. I don't think the game really hit it's stride until the first expansion, so it felt a bit like having to buy the game twice just to get a good product.
Yep. Some people might argue that this or that mechanic should be in the base game because it's too important, but in general the Paradox model is great. Games get interesting new content many years after release, which you have to pay for, but it enables Paradox to actually do the work. The latest DLC for Hearts of Iron 4 took more than a year to develop and drastically changed the game ( it added logistics, trains, depos) for the better. If it were not paid, they wouldn't have been able to afford it.
And people who can’t or don’t want to pay still get some benefit as part of the features are always public and not DLC-only.
In addition, I noticed every new paradox release their base game tends to be broad, but shallow; almost as if it was intentional. They fill in depth with DLCs which one could argue should've been there in the first place. Try playing any of their recent games without DLC.
Similar to things happening in MMOs with extensions. A new extension usually forces most players to buy it fast, so they can continue to play with the other players, access new raids, skills and gain from the new items on the market.
https://www.humblebundle.com/games/europa-universalis-iv-com...
Huh.
Also the large number of DLC makes it difficult to determine what set I may have do give a canonical experience or if it is even viable gameplay wise.
I like this about Paradox games. When you buy a DLC, it doesn't merely expand the game, it totally alters it. I can see why people don't like this, but sometimes, a total reimagining of a game is fun. Especially in strategy games.
Why is it problematic that they include extra music in expansions? They're not leaving out an essential part of the game you bought, just adding more of it when you buy DLC. The base game soundtrack is so good that there are times I just pause the game and listen to the music.
The milk only seems to sour once there is a significant multiplayer component. GT7 sticks out as a recent example where the presence of multiplayer negatively impacts single player as well.
I think those cases are different than the mobile app style which makes no sense to me since many of the games are single player so nobody will see the skins or whatever anyway.
Otherwise as someone noted it's just price discrimination, and in a way that lets people try and play games for free. Really I love what video games have become.
And with a game like Lol, where it is literally pay to win, I wouldn't be surprised if it were more.
When I used to play LoL, like 5-7 years ago, I was playing a rate of like 3-4 hours daily, which barely scraped by the amount of essence needed to buy the next releases champion, let alone the runes system they had introduced at the time (don’t know if it’s still around) which had a fairly dramatic impact on the early game especially for specific characters.
That is, while technically the game could be played purely on free tier and eliminate any competitive advantage… it requires a lot of effort to keep up. Not nearly as bad things like FarmVille used to pull, but definitely enough to say that ponying up cash is eventually needed.
And having more options available to you (both characters and runesets or whatever they do now) is definitely an advantage, and a significant one at that
I had a lot of luck with Sona, for instance, who I got for free right away.
(Sometimes I think it would be fun to play League again but I can't stand the thought of being tied up for 45 minutes)
Unlocking new characters with RMT is not pay-to-win, because all the characters are obtainable for free without requiring unreasonable effort. You're not forced to get them from random lootboxes like Gacha games, and having every character doesn't give you an appreciable advantage except at perhaps the highest level of play.
Edit: Further, here is an article[1] breaking down how long it would take to unlock all champions without paying money. 9.5 years playing 1 game/day. It's absurd to pretend that isn't "pay to win". By that definition, Clash of Clans isn't pay to win either, because technically you could grind the game for 100 years without paying for anything and get really far.
[1] https://www.dexerto.com/league-of-legends/lol-fan-works-out-...
At 1 game a day, it will take you far longer than 9.5 years to learn to play every champion in the game, so it is irrelevant how long it would take to get all of them. You could play more than 300 hours on a single character before it would benefit you to add a second one.
Best players in the world start new accounts with no champions and are still able to climb to the top of the ladder.
Also, since a few years the game literally give you tons of content such as champion and cosmetics for free.
The irony is that if gun skins were all $5-10, I'd probably have already spent over $100 on them. Oh well, time to queue up again and contribute nothing back.
But how could you have spent thousands? Original Halos don’t have micro transactions.
I feel like gaming, even with microtransactions, is probably one of the most affordable pieces of entertainment you can have.
During covid, the height of my old-man gaming, I was probably playing an hour or two each day and 4 hours each weekend. That's about 700-800 hours a year I play. If I spent 200$ in skins on COD's battlepass, that is still an incredibly cheap amount of fun I've gotten for a whole year when the entire world was closed and I couldn't get out and have fun. I really don't see why people complain so much. Coin-operated arcades were literally a microtransaction model from the 70s and 80s!
I'm paying 25 cents an hour on a game with a lot more labor involved than an old arcade game.
Video games are for-profit companies and these days they are in heavy competition with each other and all the other distractions around.
I can easily spend about $40-50 to go to a movie with the family and if the movie sucks it feels like a waste of 2 hours. Same amount of money on a game will get you 10x plus more time of entertainment.
Looking at my Steam library, I only regret the $60 AAA titles I've bought and never found interesting enough to play beyond a few hours. $60 for 15 hours of gameplay, or an optional $100 after 150 (or 1500) hours? I know which I prefer.
I vastly prefer the freemium model because of this. It's great compared to before when we had sequels, expansion packs or even map packs that was the only way to get new content. But that new content wasn't available to people who didn't buy it, so now the playerbase will be split each time new content is released.
I will say it sucks when the cosmetic item you want is only available via lootbox, but at least for Counter-Strike Global Offensive (another Valve title) you can buy either boxes or the exact item you want. I think Valve is pretty far from the worst offender here.
If you pay, you're a member of the community, if not, you're not
It’s like, $1 for an arbitrary skin, no?
I haven't played Call of Duty in a long time, but when I heard that Modern Warfare Remastered would have some maps locked behind a DLC[0] (along with the rest of the shitshow surrounding its release), I knew that I'd probably never buy another one of those titles again. I think the last I bought was MW2 or BO2.
On PC, in Modern Warfare 1, the maps were made available for free, while they cost extra for consoles. Modern Warfare Remastered 'conveniently' left them out of the base game, but charged a higher-than-original price for the pack, for all platforms. Consider that a remaster is generally supposed to contain all content (i.e. game + DLC), and this was a slap in the face to my younger self.
Video games are what they are for the same reason Marvel Character CGI-fest Sequel/Spinoff X blows away the box office every summer.
So it's not exactly true that the public are voting with their wallets here. It's a profitable business model, but the majority of people do not engage with it, and consumers as a whole would be better-off if it died out.
Seems like a good system that everyone happy with. If they weren't happy they would go play other games that aren't free.
Frankly I'm torn: people can buy digital stickerbomb skins if they want, but it's obviously a bit of a "cheat code" to a profitable game and probably takes a lot of developers/money away from more interesting parts of the industry.
It'd also be more forgivable if it didn't seem popularity creates nearly immortal games that too often become stagnant and overrun with toxic players despite still being profitable enough to "keep alive", i.e. payday 2, planetside 2
And yet they put me off because you're constantly confronted with mechanisms designed to make you pay. I don't mind paying for a game, but once I'm playing, I want to focus on the game, not the payment.
It’s not a healthy business model for consumers, but ever since I saw the start of this industry trend I’ve come to view consumers of it (in aggregate) as being of poor judgement if not outright stupid. So they kind of reap what they sew, and the rest of us must work harder to find quality. Just like in everything else really.
Addictiveness and addiction are issues with and around gaming, for sure. But the reliance of f2p games on entranced, pixel-charmed addicts is also overstated. A good number of free to play games have lifespans measured in decades, they can function like a highly social, off-and-on hobby. People are willing to spend $20 to go to the movies a few times per year. How’s it different to spend that on a game you get hundreds of hours of entertainment from?
The gambling-games are only the most obvious whale-traps, and they usually not even aim for the filthy rich, but the middle class rich. The rich rich-games are less obvious, because the casuals are not rich enough to even get high enough in that game to gain access to the juicy parts.
Possibly, but not in the mainstream market. I'm not concerned with some weird niche luxury thing that 8 rich guys are doing. And as far as the mainstream market goes, the "rich guy to whom money means nothing" is not the average whale. Most whales (as I recall) are of fairly average means.
I hate this argument because it implies you have any power in this situation. They don't do this because the majority likes it, they do it because there's a select group of whales that are willing to spend ungodly amounts of money on this crap. They're the ones who dictate how these games operate and no amount of "vote with your wallet" would change it.
Reality is, the market meets a demand where there is a demand. The developers are not the sole responsible people for choosing to put in gambling gimmicks, incomplete games for 25-60 bucks, DLC which should've been base, P2W, etc. There is just as much of a responsibility on customers to vote with their money, or vote for laws to ban this shit if it becomes evident people can't control themselves as a whole. We haven't reached the critical mass where you don't have other options yet, and it looks like we won't for quite some time.
Meanwhile almost every indie trying to fit in the market and come with their passionate solution is met with a dire reality that selling games takes a tremendous amount of effort for anyone who doesn't have a giant brand behind them.
Yes you do. While there is little we actually control in our complex world, we are at least in control of our discretionary purchasing decisions. Sure, you as an individual might not make a dent in the company's profits but thats not the point. You are making a decision on principle, thats all that matters.
If we cant get this part right, what hope do we have for more important stuff like voting in actual elections?
Edit: People tried to fight this in court, with basically zero results: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2022-03-09-eas-10m-dutch-...
What does the game look like with base F2P characters vs top tier characters? Are they just laughably faster on the field?
Additionally, there are daily/weekly/monthly challenges that require you to do certain things, like score a goal with a player from the Belgian league in 10 different games. So players will score to achieve their goal and then disconnect, and just waste everybody's time. Or the objective will be "Win 10 games", and the community has decided that if you give up the first goal during one of these challenges, you're expected to just concede immediately. Otherwise the opposing player will take long pauses, perform every goal celebration and replay, anything to annoy you into quitting. It's become really toxic, all because of the rewards that are at stake.
Please tell me they’re doing a gacha Christmas alt of top tier soccer players
Then I go back to writing system software.
Regardless, when a great piece of software that happens to have a price tag fails to sell, whose fault is that?
Don't blame developers/publishers for going instead to the only model that pays the bills these days.
The market has pretty clearly spoken and decided that people prefer cosmetic micro transactions with free to play games. Just because it doesn’t match the Hacker News gaming utopia template doesn’t mean anyone is doing anything wrong.
This is especially true for multiplayer games where a lot of children don’t have money to buy the game but their presence on the platform adds value to the people who do have money to spend on it.
You could be right though, and it is addiction. That would in fact be uncool.
My only data-point though is a friend of mine who has spent hundreds of dollars (or more?) on Star Citizen ships and he is the disposable-income kind of gamer.
All that the market discovered is that there is a huge number of "whales" that can be exploited. The "fun" will begin once the whales have squandered their money and will either leave entirely or, and that's the scenario I fear, some (or someone's relatives) will raise a sob story in front of their local newspaper or politician... ending in a repeat of the early 2000s with videogames being blamed as a whole for the excesses of a few, and religious and other moral fundamentalists getting ahead.
Markets are powered by billions of instances of “what someone wants” but that doesn’t mean the resulting market movements are always a good indicator of what everyone wants as an environment. Sometimes aggregate human activity results in a crappy experience for most participants. “The market has spoken” is a glib, ideological phrase that can be used to dismiss any discussion about ways we could steer and improve markets to make them do a better job at facilitating human happiness and flourishing.
My critique, pushing as much of the blame onto the gamers, was meant to point out that everyone/no one is to blame.
Playing a competitive FPS game casually with all age groups is lot of more fun and attractive to most gamers a la Apex/Warzone/Fortnite/Valorant/CSGO.
By charging up front you remove an enormous player base and create a worse matchmaking experience for all players. Long gone are the days of buy a Call of Duty game for Christmas.
I wonder how many people on HN complaining about this model actually even consider themselves gamers.
I'm a gamer. I spend 30-40 hours/week on PC games. I think the "Free-to-play with paid cosmetics" (Apex Legends, Rocket League, Splitgate, tons of other games that follow this model) is perfectly fine.
I think part of the problem is that it's hard to have a conversation about this model because someone will always make references to games that are pay-to-win (Most mobile games) or gate content behind a paywall (Not sure which games do this today), which are an entirely different beast and not a part of the conversation.
EDIT: Just remembered League of Legends. It gates content (characters to play) behind progression, or you can pay money to unlock them immediately. But paid characters aren't necessarily more powerful, and they're constantly making adjustments to characters to try to keep them balanced. Any experienced player will tell you that paying money for a character perceived as being overpowered is foolish as it's guaranteed they'll eventually get nerfed.
There are also plenty of games that implement a cometic lootboxes that don't impact gameplay model that are totally fine.
That being said I'll stand by artificial scarcity being bad thing and clarify that while I don't have some master plan on how to create a functioning society where we don't have to impose artificial scarcity on the digital world; I absolutely think that is something we should be dedicating a lot of effort to. I reject the premise that we need to deny some people things that can be copied essentially for free.
Again this just sounds like an emotional argument -- you seem convinced on a purely intuitive level that artificial scarcity is bad without actually explaining rationally how the harm it does outweighs the benefits.
There is a _very simple_ argument (which I'm not claiming is _true_ in all cases, but it is at least compelling, so anyone claiming the contrary needs to address it) in favor of artificial scarcity: taking away a major monetization strategy (often the only viable one) massively reduces the incentive to create high-quality products and we all end up poorer for those cultural outputs not existing.
Ahahaha, to be quite honest I don't find that argument compelling at all. Profit motives seem to be making software much much worse, not better, compared to what I know is possible. I'm often finding myself reverse engineering/hacking things just to make them usable. From where I'm standing the current system is not doing a very good job. I can often make notable usability improvements in the systems I interact with and IP laws, the main driver of digital artificial scarcity generally prevent me from sharing them. I feel like I'm constantly fighting hostile software that's just trying to extract value from me in some way rather than actually solving my problems.
The patronage "platform" would be the new Apple/Google and would likely be riddled with corruption
Sure, personal responsibility is important. In the end the only person who can free an addict from the quagmire of addiction is them. But that doesn't stop us from regulating the fuck out of tobacco companies, heroin dealers or casinos to reduce the harm they do to their victims.
The elephant in the room is that we as an industry hold the power to alter people's psychology on a greater scale than any drug. But people stay silent because it delivers the paychecks and the shareholder returns...
Most of the decent games have migrated there. I barely use it, but I think it works out to two bucks with the other iStuff I'm happy to pay for, and having a few games on my tablet or phone can be nice when I'm traveling.
AFAIK it costs $100 +30% to publish on Steam. It only takes 260 people to buy your game at 50 cents to break even. If your game can't sell 260 copies at 50 cents then it's just that, worthless.
Why not just release your game for free, for free? Does it have to be on Steam? Does it have to make money?
It doesn't take zero time to ship a bespoke finished game, your calculus is asinine.
Do you have to have a place to sleep?
Seems to me like making a reasonable amount of money to help towards these goals is not an unreasonable thing to hope for. But maybe you can prove me wrong?
Thanks for the clarification!
Also free health care, electricity, water, and Internet.
Your right about a good concept winning a lot of good will and making success possible with less polish, but these days it doesn’t subtract the “risk of never being discovered” if you make an iOS app your just one of millions in the App Store if it’s on steam the shovelware isn’t as bad and discovery is better but it still requires market understanding in order to stand out.
Discovering a game concept like that is hard, but it does happen.
Coupled with that is the horrible viewpoint that the money for your game is now "wasted", which assumes that most everything we buy is kept, when in reality, most of what we buy is transient: food, energy, garments.
Then again, Roblox has kids literally "working" for each other. So, what do I know?
As you say, many new things are being created, and the solution for the most part is simple: Don't buy AAA. It has almost no appeal to me anymore, and even when I hear about some franchise I like or used to like, I just assume the worst if it's making the leap to AAA, and to be honest, that metric hasn't failed me in a while.
I'm late to the bandwagon and just bought Slay the Spire for $10. No microtransactions, no unlocks, no AAA garbage at all. Just money for fun. That's the solution. Don't play games that are just platforms to deliver psychological manipulation to extract money from you when there are games that will deliver the same basic dopamine hits for defined amounts of money, and for goodness' sake, don't pay money for things that are just platforms to psychologically manipulate you into giving them money. And often, frankly, aren't as good at the dopamine hits anyhow since they have to wrap them around manipulation.
It seems like it's really easy to avoid microtransactions, etc.
And on top of all that, there's also innovation in the underlying business models. F2P games that are morally dubious and depend on hapless whales that get addicted to your product and subsidize it for the rest of the playerbase? Sure! Single $60 or $70 purchase without DLCs? Contrary to the author's insinuation, there are plenty of games that still follow that model. Expansion packs! Monthly subscriptions! There's just no other kind of media that even comes close -- where else can you spend $50 and potentially get hundreds or even thousands of hours of entertainment?
The industry has begun splintering in the same manner as Hollywood. Disney releases popcorn-entertainment and makes money off merchandise. Indie studios are creating quality movies of a tier that we never used to see before. Lastly, have some quirky bigwigs (wes anderson, Edgar Wright) who reliably create highly-stylized memorable if familiar works.
Epic, EA and Ubisoft are the Disney equivalents. Nintendo, CDPR, Naughty Dog, Kojima, From Software are your quirky stylized studios. Then you have indie studios making games like Hades, CupHead and Hollow Knight that provide excellent & complete experiences at the fraction of the investment. You get to pick which one you want.
Microtransactions are mostly restricted to the big studios. Restricting core gameplay aspects via microtransactions or Pay-2-win setups are pretty scummy. But, MMORPGS had those problems in the late 90s. So, it isn't new by any means. In cases where smaller games have microtransactions, they tend to be limited and exclusively cosmetic. The fact that I have played hundreds of hours of Rocket league and Dota without spending a single dollar, is a testament to how secondary the cosmetics are to the core gameplay loop.
I actually wonder if systems built to exploit whales are unethical. In some sense, the poor get to enjoy polished games because the rich are willing to pay an exponentially greater sum to look pretty in game. I don't think that's entirely bad.
Now, I do dislike 'loot boxes' with a passion. They play with our 'monkey brain', forcing us to buy more before our consciousness is able to intervene. Younger kids are even more susceptible and it serves as a gateway into gambling addictions. This part of dota and rocket league is reprehensible.
Penguinz0 has a whole series on youtube as to why they're a terrible company.
You also left out Activision/Blizzard, which is not yet M$ property, and is arguably a Disney, far more than Epic.
For those unfamiliar, you can return and refund any game that you've played less than 2 hours. Now this obviously sucks for any games that are less than 2 hours in their entireity. (Maybe they need to adjust it to less than an hour?)
But for someone like who can't afford to waste money on games that they aren't going to play, this is great. I just bought a game (Phantom Doctrine) on Playstation. It was $6 which is a really good price. I'd been wanting to play it for a very long time. I was very disappointed. It's like X-Com with a spycraft theme but much worse gameplay. Played an hour and knew I'd probably never play again.
I've bought four games on Steam and returned all of them. Most because they just didn't run on my computer. The fourth one, I just didn't like very much after about ten minutes.
One thing that does suck, if you're not aware of it, is Early Access games that just get dropped. I can name half a dozen games off the top of my head that I spent good money for and the dev just dropped development halfway through or released a shitty buggy product. But I think as long as you wait at least a year to buy an Early Access game, you should be fine.
It's pretty much always the result of a broken redirect / history api usage. You go back to the page which redirected causing it to redirect again.
I have seen the damage that compulsive behaviour can do to our most vulnerable in society. Lives ruined, homelessness, suicide, familial dissolution, the list goes on. Children, people with mental dysfunctions, suffers of brain injuries, even people with Parkinson's disease (on l-dopa).
All the people in our society that can control themselves the least are the target. And these people are precisely the target, specifically these people, the 0.001% of players that make up the majority of their revenue. Some companies find out who they are and continually and specifically court them with free t-shirts, beta access, 'free' in-game gifts, etc. In some companies its a whole department that do this kind of customer management. Developing personal relationships all to keep them hooked.
Now most companies don't do this, its much more automated and in-game that this Catfishing, if I can use a term like that.
At the fundamental level predatory games are not actually games they are variable ratio reinforcement schedule machines. Think Guinea pigs in a lab being rewarded for pushing a button. An ultra advanced slot machine that continually changes it's odd's depending on what the app thinks you will be vulnerable too. And it attacks. Now, if you aren't a vulnerable person you will see the obvious things like the pop-ups asking you to spend money or a timer mechanism. And you might think how stupid people must be to fall for that, but you wont see the game's dynamic balancing, because you are not the target. If you're not the target you will never progress further up the attack protocol. So it will always just look like an innocent game to most people.
Its insidious and immoral. (I'm mostly talking about mobile games...mostly)
Most f2p games are targeting a % mix of whales, dolphins, flounders, guppies. You might shoot for 0.1% whales, 10% dolphins,40% flounders, 50% guppies.
The whales will have an outsized impact on revenue for their count, and you largely can't plan for them to arrive. They're typically (very) wealthy people for whom spending $10,000 on a game is cheaper than the watch on their arm. Game companies absolutely set up a VIP customer service team for these players, this is the experience they expect everywhere in life. It's the difference between them playing your game for 2 months or 6 with a significant revenue impact.
Dolphins will be upper-middle class big spenders. They might try to collect every premium hat in your game, or regularly spend during special events. Again to them dropping $200/month in a game is not a hardship. In fact it's cheaper than most other hobbies they could do with their affluence like golf or skiing.
Next is the flounders, the goal is just to get them to spend at all. There might be some singular obviously valuable purchase in the game such as a season pass. This is basically game subscription services repackaged for the modern day.
The rest don't pay. You keep guppies around in hopes you can graduate them to flounders at some point down the line. In the meantime, they are cannon fodder for your matchmaking queues.
None of these psychographic groupings aim to exploit easily manipulated people. Rather the pay bands expand to match the disposable income of various economic classes. This is the same thing that has happened in other industries for a very long time. Some people rent skis, some bring their own, others hire personal trainers, and some rent the entire ski club for a private event. Go to a concert and some have nosebleed seats, others are front row, some watch from boxes, others pay to meet & greet the band after the show.
I know I won't convince you one way or the other. I've seen statements eerily similar to yours before, that I feel that it might be a regurgitation from some article or book somewhere.
Note the use of dehumanising terms, literally calling customers animals and 'cannon fodder'.
This is what this (part of the) industry thinks of the people that play their games, cattle.
SaaS companies call customers Users, talks about Activating and Retaining them, put them in Buckets. If this is your bar for dehumanizing then this must be a very frustrating website for you to visit.
Do you not shop at grocery stores? They put the milk and eggs in the back to psychologically manipulate you into walking past other items. And you're stored in their database as nothing but a phone number! So dehumanizing.
Horrible behaviour is not acceptable because other companies do it. What kind of argument is that?
Calling customers a User, is calling them a human being with a certain behaviour attached (using your app/service).
Naming your customers animals is a reflection of attitudes towards these customers. A hostile attitude I have tackled multiple times and every time I have called out, walked out, or changed the company. Its hard, not for everyone and I cant recommend it. I am just too aware of the tragic social impact of these tactics, and I have to try and not make the world a worse place.
I think a lot of us have a vision of a childlike, halcyon "purity" of experience, in the joy of gameplay itself, that we would seek and enjoy with or without other people's presence, with or without money. We want to experience that, we also as programmers (who may have learned to code because we like games) often have a deep desire to create that, to give it to others. It's like the "Beatific Vision" in the life of one who likes games.
We all know there always was a need for money, and passionate creativity exists in its margin. I think the complaint here really is that this margin seems to have less room in the eyes of the complainers, because the pull for money is present in virtually every game loop now, as opposed to being outside of the box...
A question I want to ask is, for newest generation of whales, is there a memory of some great, memorable exploratory rush in the big spend for them, part of a broader set of social interactions that gave them great joy and built them up in their community? Would their experience with the game due to this purchased power inspire them in any way, maybe to make some potentially positive, impactful life decisions? Or is it literally just a borderline scam at every single possible level?
I dislike microtransactions of any kind strongly, but I am at least trying here to be open to the possibility that someone who did them was able to feel something similar in relationship to them somehow.
We ended up with about 25 people sticking around, people idolized me and it was fun for awhile. Eventually (after a few months) I got bored and gave the reins over to a much less “fearless leader founder” person and much more “I am an accountant irl and Eve sounds neat” type person, which worked out pretty well, and the corporation thrived. I think back fondly to that and felt like it was worth it.
Alternatively, maybe ten years ago I spent a similar amount of money on this mobile game that was like sim city and Pokémon and time lapse command and conquer all rolled into one. I hate that I played that and hate how they managed to get my addiction loop just right and I was spending most of my paycheck on this stupid game. I had a guild and “friends” there too but it just felt like we were a bunch of addicts justifying each other’s spending habits. We knew what the in app purchase limits were for apple and how to get around them and stuff that just seems insane to me now.
I'm OK with those offering freemium and such so long as it doesn't kill off the old model. I don't think it will.
I find giving myself unlimited resources (e.g. with cheat codes in the old days or with credit cards today) greatly diminishes the experience. At that point, why even bother playing? There's other mediums of entertainment that makes colors splash on monitors.
First, there's more non free-to-play games out there than ever before, and some are truly amazing and innovative, so I'm not sure about what "games have become". In the last couple of years my top games by hours spent have probably been...
1) Valheim, a truly lovely indie game with a traditional "buy it upfront" model. Don't regret that purchase at all, great game.
2) Final Fantasy XIV, a traditional MMO model with a mind blowing storyline, often considered to be the best story of all the FF games. Don't regret the monthly fee at all; also a great game.
3) Apex Legends, a F2P game that I've spent uh...exactly $0 dollars on in the last year. (Sometimes the F in F2P really does mean "free"!) It's worth significantly more than I've paid for it. (And the only reason I play Apex is to play with a couple of friends, one of whom is a struggling student who couldn't easily afford to buy the latest COD or whatever. The low barriers to entry to F2P games can have real benefits.)
4) Europa Universalis IV, which has a fairly traditional "buy it upfront" model along with various expansions and DLC, except like most Paradox games, it has a simply absurd number, and they're pretty pricy, which means I've spent a uh.....let's just say a lot money on EUIV. Significantly more than the other three games combined. And I have spent a somewhat ridiculous number of hours on it, and I did enjoy them, but was it worth it? Hard question.
So while it's a great rant about how video games have become nothing but loot boxes, but my personal experience is that the overwhelming majority of games I play are not F2P, the only F2P game I play I've spent $0 on in the last year (and lifetime something like $20?), and the only game I feel a little exploited by has a traditional "pay upfront" business model.
OP asks how you'd feel if you were asked for extra money while watching a movie, but actually, if you go to a movie theatre and the popcorn and sodas are stupidly expensive. But...you don't have to buy them?
I've also spent roughly $1000 dollars in it too to get the "cool" skins. But I don't mind this since I've also subsidized many free players to pay $0 and enjoy it with me and there's no gameplay advantage so I don't feel like it's cheating (and it means there aren't any gross practices)
Now, World of Tanks, there's a game full of dark patterns and gross monetization.
I compare it to the cost of other forms entertainment (cinema, theme park, gocarting, sports event, …)
But then in-app purchases happened and we got to see first hand what happens with developers have seamless integration into a payments infrastructure combined with the ability to push updates constantly and easily. This really should've been no surprise because the addiction-loop of Farmville and the like were already established. Even so, I was surprised.
"Gaming" is now about "micro" (they're not that micro) transactions and a highly-A/B-tested loop optimized to get users to log on every day, do some menial task, get th eillusion of a reward and to want tomsething that is in the distance and only a few dollars away.
I can't necessarily blame game developers for this. We as users are really to blame ultimately. But it means that games that are actually games where you just buy the game and play the game without spending additional money are a rarity.
And that is sad.
it might look like a rarity, but it's not imho. The absolute amount of indie games that come out, even if you don't include the free ones (which would only push the numbers higher) is absurd. have a look on itch.io, let a lone steam.
The quality varies, but it's acceptable. The "golden age" of gaming, back in the 70's, 80's, and 90's, don't compare to today in terms of quality and amount.
It's only a rarity if you count monetary successes and the ratio of commercial successes vs the number of games. Success is always a rarity, and it's sad that exploitative games tend to be more successful - but they aren't the only ones with success.
And these mobile exploitative games aren't all that different from the arcades of yester-decades. I do agree that the arcades require honed skills, where as today's mobile pay to win games cannot be won via pure skill - the key differentiating factor.
https://www.escapistmagazine.com/what-the-hell-happened-to-m...
The amount of games available on Steam is such that you can play indie games, old classics and anything to your liking for decades, while completely avoiding the types of game the author laments about.
There were plenty of just horrible, bad games back in the day too. Games that would crash all the time, had terrible gameplay, graphics, story, you name it. You just avoided the bad ones.
"A gaming dark pattern is something that is deliberately added to a game to cause an unwanted negative experience for the player with a positive outcome for the game developer."
The site also lists games which rank very well in this regard, and _don't_ contain such dark patterns. IMO a great place to find some games which actually show some respect for the person playing the game. :)
These things are specifically made to create a strong addiction and wring the max possible amount of money out of people whether they can afford it or not. If you are in the former camp then you do you, but it doesn't make them not dark.
The rest of the mechanics (especially the ones making me spend money) I have no problem calling dark patterns.
Unlike in the days of olde where ads had to look better than the game, the games in the mobile ads look like real games that would be fun to play
If you don't like one game, there's vast, vast choice.
Go support the little guy by exploring the games on Steam and become happy again with what games have become.
I don't think many of the independent games have microtransactions. They might have ads.
“Like our content? Install our app so we can send you notifications and monetise you better!” - no, I’m not enjoying your content. I haven’t even read any of it yet. Your obnoxious pop up is the only content I’ve seen so far and it makes me want to pour water in your server rack. I’m not going to install your app.
The golden age of gaming ended somewhere in 2005-ish, and now the vast majority of games are derivative and often worse than the originals in terms of gameplay. They sell because people like new content. They are also less about the art, and more about the money. That may have always been the case in some sense, but I know that studios used to be very proud of their achievements and had ambitious visions for their IP.
As far as I'm concerned, the gaming "industry" is basically dead. The few exceptions are games like Dank Souls and Path of Exile, which bring something new to their respective genres. I know Dark Souls is technically a sequel, but that's the version of the game that first went mainstream, and is considered the corner-stone of the franchise. The point is, those are the kinds of games that actually matter to me, everything else is content.
Rocket League is one of the "real" games, and yeah the micro-transactions are annoying but it works well for that specific game. I'm not sure how to improve the monetization to make it feel more fair to consumers, and the developers need money, so what's the alternative? Keep cranking out crappy sequels?
This kind of statement definitely requires a source.
>They are also less about the art, and more about the money.
There have never been more experimental and indie games released than now.
I wouldn't call it the best video game in the history of humanity. Certainly the most immersive open world game in the history of humanity with a story and cinematic flair on par with the best films from Hollywood. An achievement by rockstar that has yet to be toppled. No other open world game including their own GTAV even comes close. Not even elden ring beats it.
Major studios produce derivative, uninspired, and stale sequels. Much like the movie and television industries. They're in it to make money. So their products will be interesting enough, and often show the desires of the creative employees. But their decisions are strongly driven by profit, and they have to regularly publish something even if their creatives have writer's block or a desire to totally pivot a project.
Real gems are produced by the middle-sized studios that grew from talented developers and great designers. I've only ever learned of them through word of mouth, and even then I only enjoy half the games I try.
>Path of Exile
Best example of freemium, IMO. Cosmetics are a big source of income, but the developers still put out new game mechanics every couple of months. Bug and quality-of-life patches are frequent. There is a category of real-money purchases that affect gameplay (storage tabs to help organize items you collect), but I don't mind it. Once bought, they're available to all your characters forever. Not having those tabs only became a problem after many (>100) hours in the game. So I saw it as upgrading from the trial version. I've spent less than $100 on it, but have played for almost a decade.
I bought a skin to support the devs, just like I did on Among Us.
As a generally “always by the cart” type of person, I think I'm starting to come around to the “pay what you want” model.
1. Should not be able to purchase a competitive advantage
2. Should be able to purchase the item you want.
Re the second point, if you want the rare items and that involves gambling random item opaque loot boxes, that's an abusive relationship. If it involves purchasing the item directly, or buying a box where you can see all the items inside of it, that's a respectful relationship. Purchasing the item directly is the most preferred.
Games that do this entire model badly involve Hearthstone and any number of mobile games made by Supercell.
Some people might balk at the idea of purchasing any further items, but personally, I don't see anything particularly wrong with allowing cosmetics to be purchased and applied as a model that enables people to have a great free experience.
For a more detailed exploration of the dark side of Fortnite's monetization model, check out "Manufactured Discontent and Fortnite" [2].
[1]: https://www.polygon.com/2019/5/7/18534431/fortnite-rare-defa... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0
If not that, they'd bully each other about something else. When I was growing up, us kids who played Battletech and had a Nintendo were cool, and the Robotech kids with their Segas were the jerks (of course they'd say the opposite). Kids who weren't into games would pick on each other over other stuff, like having a generic notebook instead of a Trapper Keeper with a cool design.
The idea that Fortnite is pressuring kids to be mean to each other is just as overblown as all the other "think of the children!" claims. From "Rock n Roll is the devil's music!" to the Satanic Panic over Dungeons and Dragons and beyond. People will always claim that something is making the kids bad, but no, that's just how kids are. Old people have just forgotten what kids are like.
You can also find plenty of anecdotes of kids helping each other out in team mode, or building creative mode areas in games where they can cooperate and have fun, giving an escape and some camaraderie to other kids who don't normally have that in their lives.
Also, "children will bully each other no matter what" is not a rational response to something which exacerbates bullying. That's like saying "accidents happen no matter what, this is no worse than normal" with respect to a defective car with broken airbags.
I'm 41 years old and have fond memories of the old days of packaged buy-once games, but the modern battle pass/cosmetic standard seems like a much more realistic way of having a consistently updated experience with strong engagement year-round.
However Warzone is a prime example of cosmetics affecting the game - remember any of the scandals (DMR-gate of Dec 2020), when the desire to sell weapon blueprints / Battle Pass pushes the designers overpower the new weapons. It’s subtle but very toxic. Or the Roze skin. Even if that one wasn’t intentional they can’t change/remove it now because people paid for it.
Most blueprints effectively just make levelling up new weapons a more pleasant experience, maybe saving you 1 - 2 hours for $20.
We don't need to imagine it, this is happening all over the place. Board game kickstarters will have tiers with upgrade components that don't change the gameplay but just upgrade the cosmetics. Movie releases on optical disks have "collector's editions", where the DVD/blueray is bundled with all kinds of useless junk. Limited edition sneakers; foil MTG cards; trade-paperback books; concert tickets with a "band T-shirt" tier.
Yes, those are mostly physical goods that could in theory hold their value and eventually be resold. But in practice they aren't. They're things whose value is entirely bound in you liking that thing, and wanting a fancier version.
Well, we're getting there. Streaming services, and all subscription offerings, are systems where you don't own anything, and you lose everything the moment you stop paying.
Clearly, that's not the case. You're not buying IP rights of those assets. You only buy a license to consume those assets.
I think you might be on to something with this. "Big Art" is out to make sure I can't own anything. At all.
That's why netflix made sure that you can't go to the store and buy movies anymore.
And then there are MMOs and mobile games that are purely addictive through dirty psychological and immoral tricks.
Just don't play the latter. Those games (like modern WoW, HS, gacha games, etc) are garbage that will be looked at in disgust in the future.
I remember when I was a kid/teenager I just didn't have much money, so if I wanted a game I either had to save for it or ask my parents. But if a game was free, then no problem, right? Just download and enjoy! And the microtransaction-based content addition is much more allowance-friendly than a monthly subscription or a large (for a kid) upfront cost.
I played yesterday night couch coop rocketleague with my friends (my daughter, me, my wife and 2 friends), we have the basic cars and had a great time with that game.
And yes, bought the game for super cheap long time ago
I was never a small studio lover, until all the large studios started really sucking.
Tunic, Subnautica, Hollowknight, Outer Wilds are absolutely must plays. Tunic being the latest which has been the closest I’ll ever get to playing A Link To The Past for the first time again.
FTL: Faster Than Light
Ori and the Blind Forest (doesn't count as indie)
Ori and the Will of the Wisps
Invisible Inc.
Hollow Knight
XCOM
Dyson Sphere Program
Kerbal Space Program (to be fair, this is not really for everyone)
XCOM 2
Assault Android Cactus (great for coop!)
Factorio
Dark Souls 1 and 3 (big studio)
Frostpunk
Hellpoint
Sundered
Starsector
EXAPUNKS
Monster Hunter World: Iceborne (yeah, this is from a big studio)
They don't survive if they don't do something right. Compare that to the big studios who churn out their yearly releases, and get by because they're still milking a cash cow that dominates the 'gaming' headspace for people who prefer to turn on a console and stay busy.
I wrote my own free open source browser game. https://landgreen.github.io/sidescroller/
"N-gon is a physics-based single player 2-d platformer shooter with hundreds of different power ups. You move with the keyboard and aim with the mouse. The core game is done, but I'm still adding new content.
You can play here for free. It's open source, no ads, no tracking, no data harvesting, no crypto-mining, no DLCs, no freemium, no microtransactions, no gacha."
Jesus Christ don't give those fucks any ideas
Yes, they don't have an income so they are at least 10 years behind on tech and generally have less good assets (textures, shaders, sound) (there are exceptions), yes, the player base is more on the 10,000s at best than on the million (an obvious problem for multiplayer games), but on the bright side their decisions are not tainted by profitability or business model considerations.
For instance, to replace Rocket League, OP could try the soccer mode of SuperTuxKart.
You can't withdraw the money from steam, you can only spend it on other games or the market, but there are some 3rd party sites that you to sell these cosmetics and withdraw the money, but thrusting them is up to you.
Meanwhile, Im realizing blizzard encourage smurfing, meaning have several accounts, to constantly win against lower skilled players in competitive, instead of playing against players of their own skills.
You now see entire teams "deranking" meaning losing on purpose, to lose skill rating, so they can climb all over again. It ruins the game.
Other games add barriers, like sms, or scanning for ip.
Blizzard does make a lot of money that way.
Why fix it if its not broken? Buying another copy of overwatch is a drop in the bucket for players who have already invested thousands of hours.
Have you played for very long? I originally got into it several years ago, a little before Moira was announced. After a while, it felt like everything devolved into samey-ness, especially when the maps stagnated.
Not long after the hamster showed up, my whole group of friends had also gotten bored of it.
My opinion is, the game should be made to be standalone. No internet connection should be required for the game to work (unless you wish to join an official tournament that runs using the internet, perhaps). It should be independent of the time, date, etc. It should be independent of other instances of the same game on the computer.
There are other problems too with some games, such as some are too easy. Some have too many cutscenes. Some take up too much disk space and/or RAM. etc.
Fortunately, there are still some good ones. One case of this is some people will write a computer game for older systems (e.g. NES/Famicom) and then you can run in an emulator of your choice (or on the real hardware if you have it); the emulator may include capabilities such as controls remapping, save states, etc. But there are also games written for native code too, that can also be good.
See comment 30827853 (and its replies) for some comments about dark patterns; I will write a comment there, too (later today, probably).
Don't give managers bad ideas.
Obviously growth is desirable, but "growth engineers" and "growth" teams, in my experience, tend to create and/or operate within perverse incentive structures, and tend to focus more on gimmicks and trivialities than on core product/user value.
There was an excellent game released recently called Chivalry 2. It was an extremely fun "realistic-ish" sword fighting game with huge servers and excellent implementation.
Last time I checked, nobody was playing. This is true for SO MANY interesting multiplayer games.
So I feel what this person is saying. Popular multiplayer games are not to my taste these days ( I miss Quake III ). And there isn't a huge community for a lot of the games I am interested in. So it goes.
Another thing is: A lot of these games are made for young people. So yes they do dumb dances and are cringe-y but you have to just get over that. I very normal and was really into zombies when I was 11, I'm sure I would be doing the Fortnite dances as well. Though I may have been contrarian and into PUBG...
- https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.shatteredpixel.shattered...
Also - old-school games, people... by now, there are over 40 years of games if you count old-time stand-alone consoles (Galaxian anyone?) that's probably more than you could play in a lifetime of gaming. Ok, maybe not, but more than you could play in a lifetime of gaming in your spare time if you are actually holding down a job :-P And the best thing is that those games either don't have a way to scam you, and the ones which do (say online games with vanity item monetization) from 10 years ago probably don't work anyway these days.
You can't lend IP you've purchased to a friend. You can't resell your content to others. Even consumer electronics are becoming increasingly worthless, as they require perpetual internet connection so they can rent seek via subscriptions and ads for a device you already paid for.
The idea of ownership is being destroyed, and consumers' ambivalence to this is extremely disappointing to me.
It should be illegal to have "buy" button when the purchaser doesn't really own anything.
I am working on a product with a new company I formed.
The economics are interesting. I pay, upfront, all capital required to get the product ready for viewing.
Hackers and exploiters can probably destroy the experience for players because an indie studio is going to struggle to have any proactive anticheat.
Lag, poor networking, and poor performance can also kill the experience fir players and result in a negative review.
Delivering a game that covers the bases here well enough to not be turned into a meme or review bombed is a scarey endeavor.
Who knows, maybe the market looks and decides the game just isn't cool enough?
I hope for success on my project. I wont be doing any microtransactions initially because I am too focused on the other considerations.
I get pressing back against what seems like to be a growing trend of exploiting whales (although that doesn't seem to be the exact point they're trying to make), but on the other hand there are a few Castlevania games I can play on my 3DS that I missed when they first came out. I'd just as soon play one of those than worry about what's on Steam.
And on the other finger, even if you only care for contemporary games, Elden Ring just came out and has a TON of content before having to buy any DLC/whatever.
I don't think that's a fair comparison. It's more like offering to have him use a special limited edition outfit rather than his well known outfit. And I don't see what the big deal is. You can get the standard cost experience, or the higher fee, upsell experience. It's not uncommon, and it's not a major problem. Just pay for what you want. (And learn to want less).
> "Like you are watching Avengers End game in Netflix and they ask you if you wanna pay 5 dollars more to watch Captain America use his well known outfit instead of regular clothes?"
While that example is unlikely, we may in the future see paid narrative arcs. The base movie might be free, taking you to a certain point in story where you're presented a fork in road. One path is free with low budget action, the other paid and contains more action, more sex and big budget scenes!
Because that’s patently not true. If cosmetics didn’t affect the gaming experience, they wouldn’t be worth anything. Certainly not worth paying above and beyond the purchase price for.
Cosmetics are just the easiest to monetize and normalize, to the point where players will now defend full priced games for offering cosmetic microtransactions. It’s a shame. Likely a windmill-tilting cause, but a shame nonetheless.
Because the only way it works, at a scale that can support a studio, is if people really, really love the game. Even something that can capture attention for dozens of hours may not be good enough.
As a gamer, you're looking at something like Rocket League and going "oh yeah, it's so easy! They just make a skin and it sells!" But, uh, no. It's the 0.001% elite of all games. And they only have an "easy" time selling cosmetics in the sense that they already did the much harder work of making something amazing. Kinda like it's easy for Google to make money from ads; you need the killer product first.
Also, your argument seems irrelevant. Making a successful anything is hard. The fact that you may make money off of a mediocre shrink wrapped clone of a clone of a clone when you hook a few suckers selling time crystals for hundreds of dollars is not an achievement, and not something that anyone should feel entitled to. And yet, it's 99.99% of the mobile "gaming" market...
Take Guild Wars 2 for example, it used to be Buy To Play with an excessive ingame shop that sells not only cosmetics but also quality of life improvements, but no 'power items'. I love this model, I bought it years ago on a sale and was happy to give them money for expansions and cash shop items because it's a nice game with an MMO scope, I want it to survive.
Star Wars: The Old Republic launched as a subscription game and went F2P but with certain benefits once you had subbed for a month once. Many people were upset about some of the things they locked and you only get the full experience (or the newest expansion) if you subscribe, but over the years I did spend some time in f2p and I think it's fine.
I guess in general I don't have a problem with free games with a big cash shop (unless it's pay to win), but maybe that's because I either play a game for 10h and then not touch it again (so free would be... I don't see the limitations before I stop) or I'm playing it for years (then I pay hundreds in subscription fees or if it was a one-time purchase and I feel bad not giving them money after a while).
I only buy quality games that are worth the money spent. Bought Factorio in Early Access, paid money for Rogue Tower the other day. Come to think of it, maybe games have taken a turn for the worse. I'm spending less on games over time at least.
They've chosen a very narrow definition of video games to be disappointed over.
I buy the pass every season, even though I've been wearing the same things for years, because I can afford it, and would like to see the game (more specifically, the servers) live forever.
90+ hours into the game. 100% pure joy.
> a game I spend more than 2000 hours is now a game I hate -and don’t play, of course-.
2000 hours is quite a lot of time to invest in a game. I imagine the longevity for the game is because the developers were updating the game, which was funded by the very things the author is complaining about.
2. There are many games that aren’t loot box-esque. To say “video games have become this” is very unfair.
[1] : https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/05/27/mobile...
I do agree with the underlying sentiment. But these pay for play schemes are so easy to ignore. I play CS:GO and get a lot of enjoyment out of it without paying for skins or special weapons or whatever.
Gambling mechanics (loot boxes) are having a similar psychological effect to regular gambling and “self regulation” means those at risk are unprotected. Is there a way to setup gambling limits on FIFA loot boxes right now? What about children who haven’t the cognitive ability to reason about these things, are they barred like a casino?
Again don’t want to block innovation and alternative monetisation opportunities, but we should do better at protecting the vulnerable.
I feel a visceral repulsion against any game with a buyable virtual currency. It’s such a blatant manipulation tactic. And then there’s loot boxes, which is gambling. Usually targeting teenagers or children. It’s disgusting.
There's still tons of world class story driven games that don't have loot boxes or similar mechanics. I think I paid $19 for a used copy of horizon zero dawn and enjoyed it immensely.
However, most of the people criticizing this did not grow up poor. When I was a kid, there were a ton of video games I would have loved to play, but my family couldn't afford it.
Nowadays, everyone can play. The difference between the haves and have-nots are cosmetics. Better than that: in most games, the best cosmetics can often be unlocked purely (and only) by skill. A poor kid may not have as many skins or whatever, but they can still unlock things.
I agree AAA big budget games suck, but there's soo many good indie titles that can be much more fun than them.
You don't gotta only eat at mc donalds.
“The worst part of this trend to me is how many games sacrifice their identity to fit the mold that is now most profitable, it feels so soulless. This is all from my own experience/memory.
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 especially in the indie scene but the state of AAA gaming and how it molds to the market is a little disappointing to me.”
Isn't valve the only company that lets you resell cosmetics?
I've learned in this thread that there are games where most or all of the IAPs are cosmetic, and don't give players significant advantages. My son already plays Rocket League. Can anyone recommend other good games where you don't have to buy your way to competitiveness?
Single-player games, and a handful of MMORPGs.
Minecraft and Terraria would both probably be good for an 11-year-old. CS:Go of course if you want an actual competitive game.
And Dota 2, if you're OK with your son becoming an addicted degenerate.
Deep Rock Galactic for Coop mining fun.
Did they purposefully push the loot box model by promoting games that were doing it because they took a cut on every transaction?
that seems to be what video games have become.
I remember the days of tombraider and all the skins, and modding kits available. this was grassroots stuff to begin with.
eventually the industry realized that server subscriptions were not enough, and commercialized the elements of the gameplay.
ive never purchased a console, and i think Torchlight [0] is the most recent game i have in the MAME machine.
the last 20 years of gaming is mostly gone in this direction and has little appeal, other than hacking around in a graciously received console from the closet, that was designated as {bookend} .
i think GOG is about as good as it gets now.
Not true. It had crates that dropped and you had to buy keys to unlock them for randomized drops. At least now you know what you're buying if you choose to unlock an item.
"a game I spend more than 2000 hours is now a game I hate -and don’t play, of course-."
This seems ridiculous to me. The game is the same, if you love the game, why would you stop playing because of cosmetics? Just don't buy them, use the free ones they give out. Or, rid yourself of the notion you must have every cosmetic, and kick a game you love that is also a live service a few bucks now and again for something you particularly like.
There's so many terrible free to play games out there with dark patterns and predatory tactics, Rocket League is hardly the enemy here.
I don't think it would be this exactly, but I can absolutely see this type of thing happening.
For the love of whatever-god-or-not-you-believe, don't give them ideas
And the whole lootbox thingy is... to be honest embarassing, look what they did to Gran Turismo :\
There are varying tiers of support of the developer which only provide you with quality of life improvements, such as a larger backpack (stash) for storing items between sessions ('raids'). All of those gains are achievable in-game with no requirement to purchase anything but the base video game.
It's quite an achievement, and very fun. I can say that as someone who's played video games since monitors had two colours. It's not your average video game, but it's base recipe are already being copied out to new games (The Cycle). The idea of persistence of character is quite refreshing in a die-and-respawn-without-consequence state of the FPS world.
Also I just wanted to point out from the article:
> We used to laugh of people buying hats for barbie and now we are bigger fools than them, at least you can resell your barbie and resell the hat but we don’t have that privilege because Valve determined we are not worthy of it, once you stop playing a game 100% of the money you spend on it disappears, you can’t recover any of it, not 50%, not 20%, just nothing, doesn’t matter if you already spend $20 bucks on it or $3000.
That is more or less incorrect to state. Valve may not offer a way to redeem in-game loot back to real dollars, but you can sell in-game loot on the steam marketplace for valvebucks. It's up to the developer to implement. But for example, you can sell your PUBG skins on the marketplace. So while the money is still "gone" from your "real world wallet", it's not locked out of having "value" which restores the value back into the "steam wallet", which can be used in lieu of "real world" money in the future.
I once sold an in-game item for $40 in valvebucks. Not exactly the $1,000 CS:GO knife skins, but hey, it's not nothing.
It's actually interesting to see how much the gaming industry doesn't give 2 squats about what online chat says. The gaming industry has dealt with online chat since basically forever. I remember counterstrike 1.5 pre-steam in the early 2000s and learning all kinds of new pejoratives. Gaming industry understood that the 12 year old edgy angsty teens are going to say all kinds of idiotic stuff. I am guilty of this indictment for when I was 12.
This is something a ton of other industries have not learnt yet. These other industries are looking at what is being said online and are responding like they need to take those opinions as truth.
Then again that's also why Elon Musk is mocking Netflix: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1503287788652871680
1 million likes and 150,000 retweets because he's not wrong.
The only two games I play these days both happen to be gacha games, and actually I see a lot less complaints about the toxicity of these luck-based systems in those communities. Maybe it's because they're more used to them, maybe it's because most other gacha games include pity systems, but it seems weird to me that the most vocal complaints are over systems with no bearing on gameplay when gacha games limit free access to new characters and, by extension, progress.
This opinion might vary by the person and the game. I was playing some free-to-play game the other day which was like you described - it had a store and some tokens, and a way to slowly gain the premium token as you played.
But I found there to be something deeply gross about it which did impact my gameplay experience. I’m playing a game (rather than doing something else) because I want a curated experience of fun. Tokens like this make the relationship adversarial. In this case, the game has some mechanics which it keeps waving in your face - “quick! Click now to spend 2 whatevers to have a 4 hour boost!” And I have to actively avoid the shiny fun part because it costs real money to do. It makes the experience tiring in the same way shopping is tiring. Is the game trying to be fun or not? Pick a lane.
That said, I enjoyed Dota2 for many years even though it had hat stores and loot boxes full of art. I’m not sure what the difference is - I think I just never really had to resist the pull to pull out my credit card in dota. And I payed way more as a result! I chipped in a few dollars each year for the international prize pool, and that was a blast.
For me it makes a game feel like a second job. I'm not wealthy so I'm trying to save and make something for myself but playing these games just feels like experience the same dread and fear i have in reality.
1) "Whales" keep nearly all of these games going. "Vote with your wallet" is a misnomer because in typical democratic systems a vote is a vote; but capitalism isn't a democracy and a very small portion of the playerbase will actually sustain the game near-singlehandedly. Its not a situation where enough people don't buy it and the game company changes; its a situation where enough people don't buy it, and are missing out on a piece of the game due to not buying it, while the elite 0.1% buy everything.
2) "They don't alter gameplay". That's an interesting argument. Take a game like Animal Crossing; would being able to buy a sweet ass new table for your house "alter gameplay"? Isn't aesthetic the gameplay? I truly and deeply believe that its difficult to draw this line in any game; where the "gameplay" stops and suddenly the "stuff that doesn't matter so sell it" starts; if the product has value, such that people buy it, then it must be an important part of the game. It may not affect the competitive balance, but that isn't the entire game; the developers put time into the visual aesthetic of the game, and to assert that the items are ok to sell simply because they don't affect the gameplay trivializes the items' importance.
Moreover, in a much smaller way; in every game I've played, these items do affect competitive balance. Often in subtle ways. In Valorant, having a cool gun skin can often mean eight year olds on your team asking for you to buy the gun for them, so they can use it (sometimes, promising a re-buy in return, then not doing it lol). In Apex Legends, some hero outfits legitimately camouflage you with the environment than others. In Dead By Daylight, the Feng Ming wearing the bright pink jacket will be tunneled by the killer more than everyone else wearing drab browns and torn jeans. To assert "the way you look doesn't impact the gameplay" is trivially and wholly, if not sometimes subtly, incorrect; games are visual, looking good asserts a socioeconomic power structure which can impact team cooperation, all of this does matter.
But, to clarify; gaming companies need to make money. For online service games, its not enough to just sell the game for $70 and call it good for life; even doing so can be a death sentence for the game, as the barrier to entry is so high no one joins in to even play. Loot boxes are extremely bad, and games which sell them should be held to the same legal standards as gambling (Overwatch, Apex Legends, Rocket League, DOTA2, CS:GO, etc). A cash-for-item storefront is better (Fortnite, Valorant, Warzone, Dead by Daylight, Sea of Thieves, Halo Infinite, etc). Battle Passes are probably one of the best solutions I've seen yet; they're effectively an optional subscription service to the game, with resetting progression (players love progression). Pure subscription services are rare, but also a great solution; CS:GO has one, but WoW was the better example; there was a time when you simply paid to play, and everything cool you could get was bundled into that subscription. Today, things have changed, and they're double-dipping revenue models, like most of the games listed above.
I honestly think we've become too entitled.
The vast majority of "free to play" games would not be able to make a profit of they didn't find a few players willing to spend huge amounts of money on them. Thousands of dollars, from people who often can't afford to spend thousands of dollars on a hobby.
And not only are these games sustained by such people, they actively seek to find and exploit them, with game mechanics and presentation designed to hook a certain kind of psyche - people with gambling or other mental issues, and children.
First paragraph is a 135 word sentence. Two of the other paragraphs are a single meandering sentence. Questions are the only break in the exception.
Come on.
"video games" have not "become" anything, they're basically the same, unless you choose to play exclusively AAA blockbusters and online free2play.
But since gamers are uniquely price sensitive for prices that haven’t changed in 30 years, for an entertainment form that last longer than pretty much all other forms
Then you have micropayments to nickel and dime gamers to reach the same result
Also, $20 for 2,000 hours of entertainment is a pretty good deal right? Go to see a movie and that's about $20 for 1.5 - 2.5 hours entertainment.
I suppose after your purchase the company running and developing Rocket League who hire real people to work on the game, who host servers to facilitate the multiplayer experience are expected to run until bankruptcy?
The part about targeting lootboxes towards children (cosmetic only or not) is valid though because (cosmetic or not) that, to a child, helps develop gambling addiction or tendencies. However, for adults cosmetic-only lootboxes are fine and a perfectly reasonable strategy to ensure you can support a game in the long term for people who are entitled enough to think a one-time $20 purchase means someone has to host them a server, and employ a development team for at least 2,000 hours of gameplay.
I would happily have this be an option if it meant that Netflix was free. I wouldn’t spend a dime.
where the "trading items" aspect adds a lot of fun to the game. I am generally skeptical of "the metaverse" but Krunker shows that item trading can be fun, you just don't need a blockchain to do it.
The fact that the author is citing the freemium model of Rocket League as their reason for not playing it anymore make me lose all respect for their article.
Ouch. Who cares about loot boxes when the opportunity cost of playing a silly game like that is equal to a years worth of their wages.
A "better" example are games that have the goal of progression (e.g. city builders, like Clash of Clans) and then simply lock that progression behind a paywall, giving you the option to either wait for hours or pay a "small" amount to skip waiting.
At first coming with "old gamer mindset" I also thought "who would ever pay for that nonsense". But now I simply see it as supporting a creation I enjoy. I buy the "battle pass" every season (maybe 8$), and every couple of months perhaps a funny skin.
Back in the day, I think a World of Warcraft subscription was 15$ per month, so I still pay far, far less than I would have paid for WoW.
There are other games that annoy me, as they basically push gambling onto my kids. They will literally have a push notification telling them to try a spin on the lucky wheel.
Elden Ring is the opposite of everything OP mentioned and you can't criticize the industry without bringing up the IT game that is literally the opposite of the entire article.
The golden age of the gaming industry is right now. That goes for triple A games AND indie games.
The whole DLC BS is this annoying side thing among triple A studios but it has nothing to do with overall trend of the industry.
Valve's Steam is extra predatory and anti consumer. A little story. Back in the day I was very active at the game Meridian 59, the 1st MMORPG. But not on the official side, on the reverse engineering side. Later when it got abandoned by 3do a compiled server exe leaked along with resources and configuration. We learned a lot from that, wrote tools, created new art, etc. My point is I knew a lot about the software, so I posted on Valve Steam's Meridian 59 forum with detailed knowledge about something only someone familiar with the software could know, which lead to a ban, because someone was apparently harassing the moderator there and he thought I was him. So I was unjustly banned because the moderator saw ghosts where none were and I appealed to Valve. The response was "be that as it may there's nothing we will do about it". So the case was clearly in my favor but Valve hands all power to the forum moderators. And the rule like dictators. One especially terrible Dictator is SamBC terror moderating 2k affiliated forums. If you write anything negative about a game of theirs and see all the paid white knights jumping in to defend the company sales and you call them out for what they are you will get banned. Accumulate a few bans and you will get an account ban. But to finish the story, I then contacted the moderator outside the game and the ban was lifted, not by Valve but by him. That didn't change the fact though that it counted as 1 ban point towards an account ban, which eventually lead to a 1 year ban on Steam.
I'm 47 years old now and I will not be silenced or told what to write especially if what I write is not offensive.
I once got a ban for disagreeing with the choice of a female protagonist in the "For Honor" game, because it's so far from historical facts that I cringed every time I tried to play the game. When something is so wrong that it upsets me I have to write about it. And the moderators there didn't like that I returned to the thread and continued to write about how historically inaccurate it was and how unrealistic this was. Nope can't have someone voicing their opinion and literally telling them what a shitshow their produced. That's bad for business and must be banned.
I for one am done with buying games and you can thank your overzealous moderators for that, game industry.
what horse-shit, let's see the numbers.
my personal take : freemium exists because the video game industry figured out to exploit the gambling bugs in the human psyche to leverage them to gain even further profit.
If piracy killed gaming so badly, how are the market numbers represented from now (when piracy is rampant and distribution is easy) from then (let's say the 80s or early 90s when distribution was near impossible and DRM wasn't needed as physical copying was prohibitive enough?)
Gee, a quick search shows me that the video game industry is bigger than it ever has been, and the growth hasn't ever plateau'd. In fact, if the industry was in danger from piracy destroying all revenue it'd be easy to show me the dip where freemium tactics began to help the recovery -- can you point that dip out to me?
I haven't been able to find that dip.
Hypothesis : the adoption of freemium tactics had nothing to do with loss-of-sales revenue and everything to do with increasing profits.
Piracy has existed as long as games have and continues to this day, and yet FOR SOME REASON, gaming (not the casino kind) is the most profitable entertainment industry in the world at this time.
Want to know the truth? Only poor people pirate (just like any criminal, you usually have to be poor to be motivated to be a bad actor), so the vast majority are not actually lost sales. As soon as game lovers get some cash, they throw down to get the games they want.
And not only poor people pirate, or commit any crime in general. It works in reverse. Activities by poor people, that rich people don't appreciate, is what our society labels 'crime'. When rich people commit unwanted activities, it is called 'privilege'. There is a reason poor people are incarcerated in prisons, whereas rich people are fined for their transgressions. I have yet to hear of more than a single person (a swiss guy) going to jail for what transpired in 2007 and 2008. If anybody got in prison for that in 2008, it was the victims. I too hate what modern games have become. And I hate that I used to be able to buy movies as perpetual DVDs, but that big business privilege in the intervening 20 years have changed the laws into "you have a right to RENT movies from us".
The public votes with their dollars - and judging by the popularity of these "features" - people are more than okay with it.