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I hate what video games have become

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Re: I hate what video games have become

#261

Post by 878654Tom »

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…

> even more impressive is how this is all legal since it really is gambling of sorts.

In my home country (Belgium) and my neigboring country (Netherlands) a lot of games their lootboxes are not available for us for the reason that the game-creators do not advertise the dropchances like the lottery, casino's and other gambling games are forced to do.

The reasoning is that the items that come out of the lootbox have a monetary value (as you need to pay to unlock a lootbox) so they fall under some of our gambling laws.

In my eyes, good riddance and I hope more countries will follow.

So Valve, EA Games,... just disabled opening lootboxes for us as they seem to be afraid to advertise the "drop chances" (but we can still buy and sell them)

Re: I hate what video games have become

#263

Post by fifticon »

pmarreck wrote: post #12

Yeah, I just avoid sucky games that do shit like that. You should too. Those "video games have become" apparently the ones you chose to play and not the ones you didn't choose to play...

Not always true. Minecraft started out as a great game, and parts of it still is, but Microsoft bought it up and is busy stuffing it full of crap.

Re: I hate what video games have become

#264

Post by mcv »

mrjangles wrote: post #98
bccdee wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually there's a strong power law going on with microtransactions. Most players don't spend any money at all on them; some spend a couple bucks on an item or two. The model becomes profitable because of the top 1% of spenders — "whales," in industry parlance — some of whom have deeply unhealthy relationships to the gambling mechanics and social pressures underlying microtransaction economies. So it's not exactly tr…

It sounds to me like what you are saying is that developers have discovered it is best to offer an amazing free product to the whole world in order to get them involved in the game, and then this attracts rich people, who then go ahead and pay for the whole things themselves. But if you don't attract the little guy with free stuff, you don't get a great game, and so you don't attract the rich people. Seems like a goo…

Reminds me again of "when you don't have to pay for it, you're the product, not the customer". Here, all the free players are opponents necessary to attract the whales.

Re: I hate what video games have become

#265

Post by ThatPlayer »

hamandcheese wrote: post #114
mrjangles wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds to me like what you are saying is that developers have discovered it is best to offer an amazing free product to the whole world in order to get them involved in the game, and then this attracts rich people, who then go ahead and pay for the whole things themselves. But if you don't attract the little guy with free stuff, you don't get a great game, and so you don't attract the rich people. Seems like a goo…

They don’t attract rich people, they attract gamblers. And they are incentivized to convert more people into becoming gamblers.

Some games are starting to remove the gambling. The article's author is outdated on Rocket League which has since removed the lootboxes. Valorant never had any.

Re: I hate what video games have become

#266

Post by codebolt »

wink wrote: post #221
wodenokoto wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super Mario Run, on top of being a great game at a great price is basically single payment f2p. And most people didn’t get that you could buy it and not worry about needing to buy berries or diamonds for real world money. Not worry about your child spending hundreds of real world dollars when playing on your phone. People just hated the fact that they had to pay for the cheapest priced Mario game ever.

It's based on the platform. Nobody would've bat an eye at a Switch or PC game for an upfront cost, but asking 10$ for a mobile game was kinda unheard of. I think they misjudged the market response there. I can't say I'm not biased here, I basically hate 95% of all the mobile games I ever tried, or at least stopped playing after an hour - so a 10$ purchase for me would simply never happen, because I don't like the pla…

You could play the first 4 levels for free, like classical shareware. And it was released on both iPhone and Android.

Re: I hate what video games have become

#267

Post by ThatPlayer »

mcv wrote: post #264
mrjangles wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds to me like what you are saying is that developers have discovered it is best to offer an amazing free product to the whole world in order to get them involved in the game, and then this attracts rich people, who then go ahead and pay for the whole things themselves. But if you don't attract the little guy with free stuff, you don't get a great game, and so you don't attract the rich people. Seems like a goo…

Reminds me again of "when you don't have to pay for it, you're the product, not the customer". Here, all the free players are opponents necessary to attract the whales.

But that applies even to paid games. It's very hard to attract players to games if it's mainly multiplayer and there's no one to play against. Both players and developers do want an active playerbase, and free to play significantly lowers the barrier of entry for potential players.

Re: I hate what video games have become

#268

Post by jsnell »

> Can you imagine if other art mediums where this ridiculous? Like you are watching Avengers End game in Netflix and they ask you if you wanna pay 5 dollars more to watch Captain America use his well known outfit instead of regular clothes? Or you are reading a cooking e-book that asks you for one dollar for each desert decoration recipe you want to unlock?

We don't need to imagine it, this is happening all over the place. Board game kickstarters will have tiers with upgrade components that don't change the gameplay but just upgrade the cosmetics. Movie releases on optical disks have "collector's editions", where the DVD/blueray is bundled with all kinds of useless junk. Limited edition sneakers; foil MTG cards; trade-paperback books; concert tickets with a "band T-shirt" tier.

Yes, those are mostly physical goods that could in theory hold their value and eventually be resold. But in practice they aren't. They're things whose value is entirely bound in you liking that thing, and wanting a fancier version.

Re: I hate what video games have become

#269

Post by dtech »

saithir wrote: post #188
telchior wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair criticism, but one that is only relevant in the first place because of freemium. Prior to that business model, there was no such thing as a company continuing to provide regular, ongoing support to a 7 year old game of the non-subscription variety. I mean, how or why would they? You release something; it makes 90% of its lifetime revenue in year 1; if you continue working on it for 6 more years, you're out of bu…

https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Patches Yep, nothing to see here, no regular, ongoing support to a 20 year old game of the non-subscription variety at all. Warcraft 3 (from 2003) was similarly updated well into 2019. Now, most regular games only get 2 or 3 years of attention. > Along come NFTs, with potential permanent ownership... but gamers despise that idea, too. Oh no, how dare we despise things that anyone can…

Starcraft is the exception rather than the rule. If you take a random sample of 20 year old games I'd wager that in the vast majority of samples none of them will have received updates in the last 15 years.

Re: I hate what video games have become

#270

Post by Semaphor »

Sander_Marechal wrote: post #224
sofixa wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some people hate the Paradox DLC style, personally I think it’s amazing Yep. Some people might argue that this or that mechanic should be in the base game because it's too important, but in general the Paradox model is great. Games get interesting new content many years after release, which you have to pay for, but it enables Paradox to actually do the work. The latest DLC for Hearts of Iron 4 took more than a year…

From an engineering perspective I wonder how sustainable that is. For every new DLC X you need to test with (X-1)! combinations of previous DLCs. Sure, not all DLCs interact with each other but many will in some limited way.

They have been following this model for years, CK 1-3, EU 1-4, Victoria 1-2, Stellaris. So it seems to be pretty sustainable?
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