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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

#91

Post by Ntrails »

vinceguidry wrote: post #80

One of my favorite Minecraft Mods was equivalent exchange. It foretold the coming of modern idle games. You work hard in the beginning to earn your first magical item, that gives you some sorcery that lets you spend less time gathering resources. A small amount of time later, you get another magical item that lets you transmute a little more efficiently. A few dozen grinding hours later and you've acquired an array o…

Weirdly I've only played vanilla survival but this genuinely sounds precisely like my experience. First we built a zombie farm. Which gave us some weapons and xp. Then a chicken farm, for food. Then a spider farm. Then we found an underwater temple. Guardian farm time! Oooh, and an ender pearl/xp farm, iron farm, gold farm etc etc etc.

We spent days and days in game automating away as much resource gathering as we could. Until the server was basically finished - there really were no more farms to build.

So we started a new one :)

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#92

Post by lostphilosopher »

jgtrosh wrote: post #83
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…

> If you want to make a game just for the passion of it, if you want to have a healthy relationship with gamers, you are literally not allowed to monetize. You have to give it away fully for free. You are literally allowed to do it. It does mean more effort to preserve the desired healthy relationships. I don't think free games actually tend to result in perfectly healthy relationships either; but monetisation just p…

Yeah, giving away your game completely free has similar problems to being a maintainer of free open source software.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#93

Post by noirbot »

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.

I've certainly seen this opinion around Disney, especially around how much they're milking Star Wars releases, and the recent run of live-action remakes. It's not a universal thing, but "Enormous media company Disney churns out nostalgia-baiting cash-ins" is definitely a complaint that you even see among fairly reputable reviewers.

The biggest example of this was the "rerelease" of Infinity War to add a couple new scenes, and charging full price for people to rewatch a multi-hour movie for 5-10 mins more content.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#94

Post by blaser-waffle »

bloopernova wrote: post #87

This brings to mind a very recent dilemma of sorts that I have been experiencing. I love strategy games. From Carrier Command back in the 80s to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri to Stellaris . I've recently picked up Surviving Mars in the Steam sale and it doesn't appear to be holding my attention as well as Stellaris does. Why? It probably can be reduced down to the reward factor. In Stellaris the galaxy is pretty huge, t…

> The experience feels the same, and there's no real novelty

That sounds like Stellaris, tbh. Eventually it just turns into waiting for things to complete so you can launch the next war. And without the historical immersion (EUIV, VIC II), or personal connection (CKII) of other Paradox games it just feels like a complicated menu simulator.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#95

Post by Sawamara »

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…

If you are honest in your approach to selling games, you will not get overwhelming criticism about ANY of the above game modes.

Full-priced games have tens of millions of sales regularly. Games that do not hide content behind paywalls can sell cosmetic microtransactions all day long (see: League of Legends or Path of Exile).

Its transparent "money grab for the sake of money grabbing" that gets the rightful criticism. Besides, I have literally never seen any complex indie game being attacked for releasing in the 9.99$-19.99$ space. Never.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#96

Post by Sawamara »

ps101 wrote: post #29
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…

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

Exactly. It is only when upfront sale gets combined with season passes AND microtransactions AND lootbox-systems is when criticism gets to arise. Rightfully.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#97

Post by vinceguidry »

Ntrails wrote: post #91
vinceguidry wrote: post #80

One of my favorite Minecraft Mods was equivalent exchange. It foretold the coming of modern idle games. You work hard in the beginning to earn your first magical item, that gives you some sorcery that lets you spend less time gathering resources. A small amount of time later, you get another magical item that lets you transmute a little more efficiently. A few dozen grinding hours later and you've acquired an array o…

Weirdly I've only played vanilla survival but this genuinely sounds precisely like my experience. First we built a zombie farm. Which gave us some weapons and xp. Then a chicken farm, for food. Then a spider farm. Then we found an underwater temple. Guardian farm time! Oooh, and an ender pearl/xp farm, iron farm, gold farm etc etc etc. We spent days and days in game automating away as much resource gathering as we co…

Yeah my next big rush was Factorio. More concentration on the mechanics of building and scaling, less on the awesome graphics and immersion that Minecraft offers.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#99

Post by simonebrunozzi »

stillsut wrote: post #98

Me: I can't see how people can put money into a slot machine or a video game and take pleasure from that. Also me: gcp compute model.fit(epochs=20) watches error trend downwards

Most people find pleasure in it once they do it. But perhaps it's not for everybody.

Have you ever tried?

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#100

Post by p1mrx »

Compare this to a game like Beat Saber, where you can play any level, at any difficulty, in any order, and the computer just keeps track of your score. 99% of the game state is in your brain, so the only way to progress is by learning how to interpret the patterns and coordinate your body. It's also anti-addictive, because playing for more than a few hours is physically exhausting.
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