Reading the replies there tells me I did the right thing when I decided against a career in game development over a decade ago. It looks like a constant war between developers and gamers now. Developers are investing a lot of time into making their games literally addictive in the worst way possible, and not even remotely by making it fun - it's all about overpriced DLC, gambling and weird reward systems. Which has r…
It doesn't always have to be like this though. Look at Factorio – the devs are happy (looking from the outside, but they are always very enthusiastic about how they love the game), the community loves it (there are infinite remarks of people who sunk thousands of hours into this game, all for a single payment of 25 €), and they don't seem to have any financial issues either. I have not seen many disappointed people a…
CD Projekt Red has been subject to a cyber attack and ransom demand
131–140 of 252 posts
Re: CD Projekt Red has been subject to a cyber attack and ransom demand
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a different kind of addiction. Factorio is the ultimate nerd-snipe[0] for a large class of people who enjoy flexing their brains. The addictiveness is a side effect the developers maximizing having fun (for the aforementioned subset of the population). When people talk about "making games as addictive as possible" in the general and pejorative sense, they usually mean something else: they mean that the optimizat…
I disagree with this notion. The primary reason why Factorio doesn't feel unethical or exploitative is because the kind of addictiveness it exploits is one that uses your brain, whereas the kind of addictiveness these "unethical" games exploit is one that feels more dumb and low brow. It has nothing to do with it being win-win like you mentioned. There's this bias where games that are extremely addicting but that app…
Re: CD Projekt Red has been subject to a cyber attack and ransom demand
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't always have to be like this though. Look at Factorio – the devs are happy (looking from the outside, but they are always very enthusiastic about how they love the game), the community loves it (there are infinite remarks of people who sunk thousands of hours into this game, all for a single payment of 25 €), and they don't seem to have any financial issues either. I have not seen many disappointed people a…
Same with Hades by Supergiant Games. Its an amazing game and the company is proudly kicking people out if they try to stay after hours. It is possible but you can also squeeze the life out of your replaceable staff and hold them guilt hostage (if you don't work as hard as everyone else then you are making them work harder). If the project has crunch time for the most development time then its not a crunch its the nor…
Re: CD Projekt Red has been subject to a cyber attack and ransom demand
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, exactly. I just played a mobile game, and as usual it has a hundred different in-game currencies that you can buy with real money. Every time I finish a level there's an endless parade of meaningless "rewards", and I see some coins going into a piggybank. When it was full, I clicked it, and the game congratulated me for now being eligible to buy the contents. The game is a clone of puzzle bobble. Like you said,…
I think a tell-tale feature of manipulative games is Farmville-style time-gating. They structure their progress around meaningless actions like clicking upgrade buttons, but you can only press that button every couple hours. So playing optimally isn't so much about strategy or skill, but more about incorporating the game into your daily routine. The intent is of course to form a habit, so that players habitually play…
You, personally, don't like time-gated content. That's fine. But it's another thing entirely to say that because you don't like it it's morally wrong. Tons of people have no problem with it and in fact enjoy being limited by how much time they can play a game per day and to slowly build up their progress over time.
Plus, for many games these things are this way for multiple reasons. For instance, Genshin Impact, a very popular game released recently has time-gated content in the way you mentioned. But it's also a game made in China, where there are rules stating that kids can't play games for too many hours during a single day. In such an environment, time-gating is a perfect solution for both the legal problem of not encouraging people to play for too long in a single day, but also as a way to prevent people from levelling too fast beyond what the game has to offer. In this latter case it's just another way of keeping people engaged until you release new content.
Re: CD Projekt Red has been subject to a cyber attack and ransom demand
#135It's probably too early to know for sure, but do 'we' know that it was just data taken, not data modified / added? I really hope they take proper measures to quarantine, re-validate, etc.
Re: CD Projekt Red has been subject to a cyber attack and ransom demand
#136Reading the replies there tells me I did the right thing when I decided against a career in game development over a decade ago. It looks like a constant war between developers and gamers now. Developers are investing a lot of time into making their games literally addictive in the worst way possible, and not even remotely by making it fun - it's all about overpriced DLC, gambling and weird reward systems. Which has r…
Re: CD Projekt Red has been subject to a cyber attack and ransom demand
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disclaimer: Supergiant also sold out to Epic Games, one of the game industry harbingers of doom and workplace abuse(together with Activision-Blizzard). Might not want to give those any money.
I waited and got it on steam. You can't blame them for taking time exclusive money, they are a business afterall. And its not like they support their practices.
Re: CD Projekt Red has been subject to a cyber attack and ransom demand
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree with this notion. The primary reason why Factorio doesn't feel unethical or exploitative is because the kind of addictiveness it exploits is one that uses your brain, whereas the kind of addictiveness these "unethical" games exploit is one that feels more dumb and low brow. It has nothing to do with it being win-win like you mentioned. There's this bias where games that are extremely addicting but that app…
Is there a better word to use than "addictive" to describe the brainy one over the unethical one?
Engrossing
Captivating
Re: CD Projekt Red has been subject to a cyber attack and ransom demand
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree with this notion. The primary reason why Factorio doesn't feel unethical or exploitative is because the kind of addictiveness it exploits is one that uses your brain, whereas the kind of addictiveness these "unethical" games exploit is one that feels more dumb and low brow. It has nothing to do with it being win-win like you mentioned. There's this bias where games that are extremely addicting but that app…
Is there a better word to use than "addictive" to describe the brainy one over the unethical one?
Re: CD Projekt Red has been subject to a cyber attack and ransom demand
#140Reading the replies there tells me I did the right thing when I decided against a career in game development over a decade ago. It looks like a constant war between developers and gamers now. Developers are investing a lot of time into making their games literally addictive in the worst way possible, and not even remotely by making it fun - it's all about overpriced DLC, gambling and weird reward systems. Which has r…