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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

#61

Post by TeMPOraL »

einr wrote: post #53
seventhtiger wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Exactly.

Also, in the old days of early Internet era, we used to buy games not based on some marketing (in my parts of the world, US videogame marketing didn't really exist anyway), but based on reviews in videogame magazines. Those were pretty honest, and if they weren't, we'd blame the magazine. It was entirely expected that games have varying quality and plenty of bugs. People didn't have a problem with that.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#62

Post by TeMPOraL »

seventhtiger wrote: post #35
Spedeman1 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every way to monetize a game will be interpreted with hostility. I would say that in almost any business there is always small amount of people who intrepret the pricing and/or the business model of the business with hostility. I think it is quite natural - people would rather not pay for things. However the majority of people are not the ones bitching loudly about it, they pay for services happily and are somewhat…

This is the dominant tone of discussion in video game communities. I certainly haven't seen that in other places. No one accused Disney of using cliff hangers to scam them.

> No one accused Disney of using cliff hangers to scam them.

Well, yes and no. When it comes to movies in general and movie adaptations of books in particular, like recently the Hobbit, number one complaint I heard (and expressed myself at times) is that they're so desperate for money that it's pathetic, stringing a short book for three movies ending in a way that ensures people will have to go to the cinema not just to continue watching, but also to rewatch the old movies upon release of the new one.

From what I can tell, the sentiment for now is that it's pathetic, not abusive.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#63

Post by TeMPOraL »

Spedeman1 wrote: post #31
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…

> Every way to monetize a game will be interpreted with hostility. I would say that in almost any business there is always small amount of people who intrepret the pricing and/or the business model of the business with hostility. I think it is quite natural - people would rather not pay for things. However the majority of people are not the ones bitching loudly about it, they pay for services happily and are somewhat…

That's because ultimately people have no choice but to either agree to the demands of the vendors or forgo a good or service ("voting with your wallet" doesn't work unless goods are trivial or substitutable, and games are neither). Most of them don't say a thing, because this is how things work and people have a life to live.

That doesn't change the fact that some business models are more abusive and deserving criticism than others, though.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#64

Post by seventhtiger »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #62
seventhtiger wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the dominant tone of discussion in video game communities. I certainly haven't seen that in other places. No one accused Disney of using cliff hangers to scam them.

> No one accused Disney of using cliff hangers to scam them. Well, yes and no. When it comes to movies in general and movie adaptations of books in particular, like recently the Hobbit , number one complaint I heard (and expressed myself at times) is that they're so desperate for money that it's pathetic, stringing a short book for three movies ending in a way that ensures people will have to go to the cinema not jus…

As a creator would you rather be viewed as incompetent or malevolent?

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#65

Post by skohan »

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…

A couple things I want to respond to:

> I wouldn't mind DLC and virtual slots model, if only it delivered better games in the end.

I think this is fundamentally a problem, because the psychological pressures a game applies to get people to pay for microtranactions are intrinsically opposed to fun and satisfying experiences. Games that successfully monetize on microtransactions do so by putting the "fun" just out of reach, and annoy and bore their users into putting money into the slot to get the result they want.

> 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, except priorities change in the industry.

I think the single-pay model might very well have been an accident of history. Before we had home consoles and PC gaming, the business model for video games was based on recurring revenue: in that case in the form of coin-operated games. Before digital distribution, the only way to monetize a game for PC or home console was to sell a game in a box with enough value inside that customers would be willing to pay outright for it. That was the age of the gaming experience as a development priority: the game itself had to be good enough that players would be willing to pay $50 for the next title.

But now that digital distribution is the norm, it's again possible for game developers to extract revenue from users on a recurring basis, and since that is wildly more profitable and less risky than relying on one-time-purchases, that's what developers are going to focus on. That's only accelerated by the cost of content creation: in order to build a AAA game these days, it takes an army of artists many years to deliver a product. That's a far cry from something like the original Diablo which was made by a handful of people. With that level of financial investment, studios are much less likely to take risks on new ideas, and are more likely to seek alternative means to monetize that investment.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#66

Post by TeMPOraL »

sien wrote: post #25
xg15 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the article provides some good points why a free market system does not work. The basis of free markets is that participants act rational and have full knowledge. Yet here we are researching increasingly sophisticated ways to undercut their rationality...

The basis of free markets is that on balance people with radically different preferences will make better choices more aligned with their preferences and local knowledge than other systems do. Markets perform better than other allocation systems for many things. It's an observed principle rather than something that was directed from above. Some economic models assume people are rational because on aggregate it works…

If you take a descriptive (vs. prescriptive) view of the free market, you have to include all observations.

Yes, we've observed that under free market, "people with radically different preferences will make better choices more aligned with their preferences and local knowledge", at least on many occasions. We've also observed countless of occasions when they'll make a worse choice. Sometimes idiotically worse choice. We've observed the cases where those choices, aggregated, cause wide-spread suffering.

So many people were asking a question - why does free market work perfectly in some cases, but fails so badly in others? That's where the "rationality" and "full knowledge" things come from. Economists have figured out that these are necessary conditions for the free market model to work the best. When you make people behave irrationally, or refuse to give them full knowledge, the free market model results in suboptimal outcomes.

Free market isn't a silver bullet. It's a process that gives particular outputs for particular inputs, and we've been mapping the relationship between its domain and codomain for a while now. We know that the more rational participants and the more symmetrical information come in, the more ethically positive transactions come out. This can be seen in both theoretical models and in practice.

Now when the game industry is "researching increasingly sophisticated ways to undercut [players'] rationality", what that means is that they're weaponizing the free market to fuck fellow human beings over.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#67

Post by Dylan16807 »

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #52
seventhtiger wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 media…

They did finally implement the multiplayer among other things.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#68

Post by TeMPOraL »

socialist_coder wrote: post #16
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #14

Suppose the people who hate free to play games win the argument and get rid of microtransactions. Suppose they change the laws so you have to get your looter shooter Destiny/Anthem/Division dopamine drip for one fair fixed price. So you're grinding hundreds of hours to get better armor, but you aren't spending more money. Just time. If it’s a single fixed price, what is incentivizing the developer to make the game mo…

If your game only has 10 hours of gameplay, people will complain that it's too short. Then your game gets bad reviews and you don't eat. So you need to have more gameplay, and that's either through cleverly addictive game mechanics or a ton of expensive to produce content.

That's only if you didn't tell the players your game has 10 hours of gameplay, and made them expect it to have much more. I.e. you engaged in dishonest marketing.

If you present the game honestly, then people can evaluate the price you're asking for vs. what's being offered, and they have no reason to complain that it was too short.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#69

Post by TeMPOraL »

seventhtiger wrote: post #64
TeMPOraL wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one accused Disney of using cliff hangers to scam them. Well, yes and no. When it comes to movies in general and movie adaptations of books in particular, like recently the Hobbit , number one complaint I heard (and expressed myself at times) is that they're so desperate for money that it's pathetic, stringing a short book for three movies ending in a way that ensures people will have to go to the cinema not jus…

As a creator would you rather be viewed as incompetent or malevolent?

The former.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#70

Post by HeadsUpHigh »

taneq wrote: post #4

> Now, of course, we designers know to make the upgrades come in a constant flow of smaller improvements. A host of bars slowly filling up and numbers increasing, so that the warm feeling never stops. I don't think that's necessarily true. WoW moved more and more towards this model and all it did was make the game predictable and grindy. You need big chunks of uncertainty (will we kill the boss? will it drop what I'm…

100% agree on your point about WoW and MMORPGs in general. Progress shouldn't be so formulaic and you need "asymmetries" of sorts between classes and tiers of progression to make every step memorable. I remember how grand raiding and high end content felt in the past but with how accessible that stuff is today( in fact you are expected to raid) the whole game just feels so much smaller despite having more stuff to do.
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