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The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

jeff-vogel.blogspot.com

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Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#51

Post by cousin_it »

akozak wrote: post #6

A lot of what we do can be explained (or "reduced") to chemical processes that reward or reinforce behavior. Is there a chemical difference between this and the pleasure some get from reading great literary works, building a birdhouse, playing with your kids, etc? A key question on the ethics of it all is - I think - whether there is some externality from the behavior that leads to social utility. Reading literature…

> Is there a chemical difference between this and the pleasure some get from reading great literary works

Yes, and that difference is the whole point of art vs entertainment. After consuming entertainment, you want more entertainment. But after consuming art - after reading The Great Gatsby - your eyes get yanked back to your own life. You start thinking "what doomed dreams do I have?", not "when will they release Great Gatsby 2?"

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#52

Post by blackbrokkoli »

seventhtiger wrote: post #48
cthor wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you sell games for $60 upfront then your marketing will be perceived as a scam in the face of any failures or shortcomings in your game. You're trying to hype people up and sell them something bad. Between Steam's refund policy and review system this is basically a solved problem.

No Man's Sky developers can't say the same.

Oh no, making millions with a literal scam gets you criticized?

Please just stop bringing this up in this context. They literally sold a single player game as multiplayer, along with a plethora of features which were said to be in the game at launch day which where never implemented. See yourself at [0].

The only reason this keeps being brought up is because Sean Murray has extraordinary talent at tickling the medias gamers-are-evil trope. This has nothing to do with payment methods.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/4y1h9i/wheres_the_no...

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#53

Post by einr »

seventhtiger wrote: post #30
ps101 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upfront sale is not like the others at all because it doesn't interact with addictive behaviour in the same way.

It doesn't relate to addictive behavior, but there's still continuous uproar about deceptive marketing and lack of support. Developer interviews are picked around and lists of promises are made. Any monetary incentive a developer has will be viewed through a bad faith lens at every turn. That can't win.

There is only uproar about deceptive marketing and lack of support if the marketing is actually deceptive and if there is an actual lack of support.

People have been burned a few too many times by less reputable developers (EA) selling unfinished, deceptive garbage (SimCity 2013) at full price, so a certain amount of uproar and skepticism when it happens again and again is to be expected, I think.

But there are good, reputable companies too who are doing honest business by selling quality games for a reasonable up-front price. I don't generally see people having an issue with that.

See if you can find a lot of people who are unhappy with dropping $60 on Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Super Mario Odyssey, for instance.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#54

Post by ehnto »

john_minsk wrote: post #44

I wouldn't mind DLC and virtual slots model, if only it delivered better games in the end. In reality games became just a gateway to these slot machines or DLCs. i.e. development happened only in one direction: money. There is no way to explain how 15 years ago developers were able to build incredible open worlds with hours of dialog and tons of possibilities worth 100s of hours of gameplay on a single pay model, exc…

I would also point the finger at Free to Play games simply undercutting the single purchase games and diluting the market for AAA studios big budget games.

One more thought is the idea of the "Forever Game". It seems the longtail development cost of already released games keeps growing. So how do you fund it? Is that a cause or a symptom of the drive toward profit?

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#55

Post by torben-friis »

john_minsk wrote: post #44

I wouldn't mind DLC and virtual slots model, if only it delivered better games in the end. In reality games became just a gateway to these slot machines or DLCs. i.e. development happened only in one direction: money. There is no way to explain how 15 years ago developers were able to build incredible open worlds with hours of dialog and tons of possibilities worth 100s of hours of gameplay on a single pay model, exc…

Sony is going in the opposite direction ( single player, story based games with rich content).

Their logic is quite flawless:

Online games depend on a large userbase to be successful, which forces them (or at least greatly pressures them) to be multiplatform. That's a bad direction to move towards if your business is selling a console and its walled garden - so they are pushing for content that is more compatible with console exclusives, ie. single player games.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#56

Post by ehnto »

rosser wrote: post #13
girvo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note: This is likely not as neat an analogy/example as I would like, but it seems relevant. I used to be an actual heroin addict, many many years ago. Finding the next hit every day/every couple of days was nearly as satisfying as the actual rush of the drug itself. In fact, this effect was so powerful, that the "come thru" message from my dealer, and driving over to his, would make my withdrawal symptoms subside nea…

I imagine you saw a bit of a dopamine spike when that message came in. Was it enough to mitigate the physical symptoms at all, or was that purely mental, I wonder?

It's mental either way.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#57

Post by ehnto »

seventhtiger wrote: post #26

I've thought about this a lot. Every way to monetize a game will be interpreted with hostility. If you sell games for $60 upfront then your marketing will be perceived as a scam in the face of any failures or shortcomings in your game. You're trying to hype people up and sell them something bad. If you sell attempts, or lives, like an arcade or candy crush, then when players lose a level they think you're extorting t…

I hear you on all points. But I would argue that for your last sentence, mature people at least would be satisfied with an upfront cost and a truthful marketing campaign. I think we can all understand that it costs money to make a game.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#58

Post by zahrc »

john_minsk wrote: post #44

I wouldn't mind DLC and virtual slots model, if only it delivered better games in the end. In reality games became just a gateway to these slot machines or DLCs. i.e. development happened only in one direction: money. There is no way to explain how 15 years ago developers were able to build incredible open worlds with hours of dialog and tons of possibilities worth 100s of hours of gameplay on a single pay model, exc…

The difference from now to then is, that games offer endless online service and these also needs neverending development, bug fixing and people even demand new content. These costs are not simply covered by retail price.

It's not that I disagree with you, but some payment models are justified and comprehensible. On the other site, its pretty obvious that especially companies like EA make use of that and try to gate it's users behind those walls on purpose to get big buck for small bang.

For me, personally, I will never buy a game if it has some connection to EA ever. These guys are toxic and just hurt the industry. But people buy and EA delivers. And obviously people don't learn, EA got so much shit from the internet community and people still don't stop buying there games, which, for me, is incomprehensible.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#59

Post by ardani »

torben-friis wrote: post #55
john_minsk wrote: post #44

I wouldn't mind DLC and virtual slots model, if only it delivered better games in the end. In reality games became just a gateway to these slot machines or DLCs. i.e. development happened only in one direction: money. There is no way to explain how 15 years ago developers were able to build incredible open worlds with hours of dialog and tons of possibilities worth 100s of hours of gameplay on a single pay model, exc…

Sony is going in the opposite direction ( single player, story based games with rich content). Their logic is quite flawless: Online games depend on a large userbase to be successful, which forces them (or at least greatly pressures them) to be multiplatform. That's a bad direction to move towards if your business is selling a console and its walled garden - so they are pushing for content that is more compatible wit…

I hope they develop more splitscreen games! That's really the main edge to consoles for me.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#60

Post by TeMPOraL »

zahrc wrote: post #58
john_minsk wrote: post #44

I wouldn't mind DLC and virtual slots model, if only it delivered better games in the end. In reality games became just a gateway to these slot machines or DLCs. i.e. development happened only in one direction: money. There is no way to explain how 15 years ago developers were able to build incredible open worlds with hours of dialog and tons of possibilities worth 100s of hours of gameplay on a single pay model, exc…

The difference from now to then is, that games offer endless online service and these also needs neverending development, bug fixing and people even demand new content. These costs are not simply covered by retail price. It's not that I disagree with you, but some payment models are justified and comprehensible. On the other site, its pretty obvious that especially companies like EA make use of that and try to gate i…

> The difference from now to then is, that games offer endless online service and these also needs neverending development, bug fixing and people even demand new content. These costs are not simply covered by retail price.

It's a problem they created on purpose, so they shouldn't get to use it as a justification for their practices. It's not that players need "endless online service"[0] that needs "neverending development, bug fixing"[1]. It's that the companies figured out doing it this way gives them access to much more money, so they created the problem and used their marketing budgets to make it a new normal.

> but some payment models are justified and comprehensible

Yeah, but some feel like they're justified by self-serving arguments, in a case of creating a problem to justify getting paid for solving it.

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[0] - Which actually isn't endless, but works just for couple years until the next game in the franchise is made, or the studio gets bored, or bought out, or...

[1] - Tangential, but I still don't buy the whole "bit rot" thing as a natural phenomenon. I'm starting to believe that our industry has accidentally become good at making everything so fragile that it justifies endless work just to keep things running.

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