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I hate what video games have become

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Re: I hate what video games have become

#201

Post by Lazare »

I dunno.

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?

Re: I hate what video games have become

#202

Post by adrianh »

yourdeadneopet wrote: post #168

A few years ago, Nintendo made a wonderful game called Super Mario Run. It was simple - Mario automatically runs and you tap to jump - but surprisingly deep. The timing of the jumps and the height of jump was paramount, and there was a ton of replayability in trying to get out-of-reach coins and finding shortcuts. It also captured the aesthetic of the Mario World games with modern graphics. I was VERY skeptical of a…

Nintendo did the exact opposite with its subsequent mobile game Mario Kart Tour. It's free to play but has tons of optional paid upgrades plus an optional monthly subscription.

Re: I hate what video games have become

#203

Post by tpxl »

tomatowurst wrote: post #115
dado3212 wrote: post #7

I have basically the opposite opinion of this article. I often hold up Rocket League as an example of a great free-to-play game. 1) You 100% can unlock a lot of cosmetic items through free play. 2) The items that you buy have absolutely no impact on gameplay and are just visuals. 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? A…

it's also super hard to build a great f2p and i think CSGO easily is the best. they bootstrapped it for almost 2 decades from a mod made by Minh Le to what it is today and I must say it is the only f2p game I regularly play. 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…

> so it is a bit like gambling in that aspect

It's not a bit like gambling, it's exactly gambling and the predatory nature of it is what I hate about video games.

Re: I hate what video games have become

#204

Post by Lazare »

flohofwoe wrote: post #186

This is just a self-inflicted bubble problem. There are now so many interesting games without any dark patterns on Steam alone that one can spend an entire lifetime playing awesome games without ever encountering a single loot box, just step a bit outside the AAA and mobile bubbles.

Quite right.

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.

Re: I hate what video games have become

#205

Post by yomly »

soultrees wrote: post #161
Kiro wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing they have whales like me who will spend 100x of what you would have paid. They don't need you when they can milk me.

Genuine question out of curiosity - what do you get out spending that much on a game? I’ve heard some whales spending 10-20k a week and that’s probably not even the highest. Do you get genuine enjoyment out of it or do you ever feel fleeced at all?

I think those numbers are all relative?

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)

Re: I hate what video games have become

#206

Post by MaurizioPz »

For those that want the free games, but don't like the dark patterns, I feel like I need to mention https://f-droid.org/en/categories/games/index.html where you can find a lot of good games. Most are simple and with basic graphic, but for a quick time waster they are great. I've sunk a lot of time on these:

- https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.shatteredpixel.shattered...

- https://f-droid.org/en/packages/dev.lonami.klooni/

Re: I hate what video games have become

#207

Post by tomatowurst »

legalcorrection wrote: post #159
tomatowurst wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's also super hard to build a great f2p and i think CSGO easily is the best. they bootstrapped it for almost 2 decades from a mod made by Minh Le to what it is today and I must say it is the only f2p game I regularly play. 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…

As someone who once played a lot of counter strike, this comment is baffling. How about the part of the game where you try to shoot the people on the other team? Is that part fun or are you just in it for the casino mechanics?

I've been playing since 1.3, what part of it did you find baffling? you are not rewarded based on game performance, it is completely random to the point I don't even think about it and so I'm always focused on having fun.

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.

Re: I hate what video games have become

#208

Post by EugeneOZ »

prohobo wrote: post #183

This economic model for games is kind of required at this point, but the author is hitting on something true about the industry: it's not as good as it used to be. 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…

RDR2 was released in 2018, it's the best video game in the history of humanity, so your date of the golden age is not correct.

Re: I hate what video games have become

#209

Post by boomlinde »

015a wrote: post #59
lofatdairy wrote: post #23

Honest question: I understand the gripes about lootboxes being toxic because gambling systems are generally manipulative, but I don't know how to respond to "Just don't buy them". They don't affect gameplay, they're really just there as whale bait, but if you're invested in the game you don't necessarily have to get invested in cosmetics. The only two games I play these days both happen to be gacha games, and actuall…

My response to "just don't buy them": 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 enoug…

I don't think "just don't buy them" is meant as a wallet vote here. It looks more like a prompt to spend your resources on things you enjoy rather than things you don't enjoy. There is as far as I can tell no shortage of PC games that you only have to pay for once. I have hundreds of games on just my Steam account, of which only a handful will ask for change for some hats or whatever; things I deemed irrelevant to my enjoyment when I got them.

Re: I hate what video games have become

#210

Post by Semaphor »

sofixa wrote: post #163
OtomotO wrote: post #151

As a (non game) developer, I can say, thay free to play is instantly dead on arrival for me. 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 addictio…

I disagree. There are ways to do it in which it's obvious where the business model is, and it isn't too forceful or gambling. 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…

Isn’t WoT the game where you can pay to get slightly better bullets? Even if that’s just a small bonus, that makes it P2W instantly.
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