I hope this post doesn't give Netflix ideas. I could easily see an exec reading that and thinking "hey what if we charged extra for the directors cut and other scenes that weren't in the theatrical release". Would be a genius move tbh, and I would hate it.
I hate what video games have become
501–510 of 690 posts
Re: I hate what video games have become
#502Over the last few years I have gotten hundred of hours of enjoyment from games like League of Legends, Valorant and Halo Infinite and couldn't even tell you how to spend money on those games if I wanted to. I honestly doubt I would have ever picked up any of those games if they were not free and I'm guessing since many other would say the same thing the lobbies would be empty and the games would die. In those case th…
I'm in your camp. I'd posit an additional piece of my thinking. I feel like gaming, even with microtransactions, is probably one of the most affordable pieces of entertainment you can have. During covid, the height of my old-man gaming, I was probably playing an hour or two each day and 4 hours each weekend. That's about 700-800 hours a year I play. If I spent 200$ in skins on COD's battlepass, that is still an incre…
I think I saw that some of the old arcade games were actually rigged to get harder at certain points to get more quarters/tokens put in them, then there was the countdown timer after you died where you could continue if you put more money in.
Video games are for-profit companies and these days they are in heavy competition with each other and all the other distractions around.
I can easily spend about $40-50 to go to a movie with the family and if the movie sucks it feels like a waste of 2 hours. Same amount of money on a game will get you 10x plus more time of entertainment.
Re: I hate what video games have become
#503As 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…
For me the biggest negative to F2P is in competitive games, so especially Rocket League in this case, because being F2P means that the competitive element and matchmaking system is 100% worthless.
Many of the most popular esports are free to play. Is the competitive element and matchmaking system of TF2, DOTA2 or LoL worthless?
Re: I hate what video games have become
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, people blame the developers, blame the publishers, but I think the sad truth is, gamers themselves shoulder much of the blame. Somehow the public came to believe that everything should be free. Maybe it was the internet? Maybe it was sites/apps like Facebook? Regardless, when a great piece of software that happens to have a price tag fails to sell, whose fault is that? Don't blame developers/publishers for goin…
Why blame anyone? Gamers get the content they want in the way they prefer to pay for it, developers and publishers get paid. The market has pretty clearly spoken and decided that people prefer cosmetic micro transactions with free to play games. Just because it doesn’t match the Hacker News gaming utopia template doesn’t mean anyone is doing anything wrong. This is especially true for multiplayer games where a lot of…
> This is especially true for multiplayer games where a lot of children don't have money to buy the game but their presence on the platform adds value
Playing a competitive FPS game casually with all age groups is lot of more fun and attractive to most gamers a la Apex/Warzone/Fortnite/Valorant/CSGO.
By charging up front you remove an enormous player base and create a worse matchmaking experience for all players. Long gone are the days of buy a Call of Duty game for Christmas.
Re: I hate what video games have become
#505Earlier 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…
I don't trust AAA studios, or any game studio for that matter, to implement NFTs in a responsible and ethical manner. Ubisoft has announced NFT integration via their own platform. However, unlike an actual "I can do what I want with this" token, it may as well be a database entry in the company network: https://quartz.ubisoft.com/welcome/ I don't think there's any way to 'solve' NFTs in games right now: A true NFT ca…
They have no real reason to use NFTs right now.
They can create digital scarcity of in-game items using a centralised server. Any NFT linked to an in-game item will be just as worthless when the servers are eventually shut down. And they don't want players buying and selling items, they want to take a cut every time a player buys something.
You're never going to be taking your Fortnite skins into FIFA or your Gran Turismo cars into Mario Kart. Ain't going to happen for a multitude of reasons.
(And if one publisher/developer does something like that as a gimmick, allow importing items into a specific another game, they could do that with a centralised database too)
Re: I hate what video games have become
#506I 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…
The whole 'preying on the vulnerable' thing kind of puts me off. But I want to respond to this: > The items that you buy have absolutely no impact on gameplay and are just visuals Cosmetic items are not just visual though. They are real elements in the game. Cosmetic items are interactive. They are unlockable, collectable, wearable items. Further, visuals do impact the gameplay. You could argue about the difference b…
> Further, visuals do impact the gameplay.
Not only that, sometimes they can affect the basic mechanics too. For example, some guns in Destiny 2 the range is measured from the end of the weapon model, and some skins extend the model out so the gun is further from the player. This in a one v. one scenario can give you a slight edge on one shot kill distance if you have the skin, so you can shoot earlier than an opponent without it.
Re: I hate what video games have become
#507This is how I feel about "growth" as a business function.
Obviously growth is desirable, but "growth engineers" and "growth" teams, in my experience, tend to create and/or operate within perverse incentive structures, and tend to focus more on gimmicks and trivialities than on core product/user value.
Re: I hate what video games have become
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, people blame the developers, blame the publishers, but I think the sad truth is, gamers themselves shoulder much of the blame. Somehow the public came to believe that everything should be free. Maybe it was the internet? Maybe it was sites/apps like Facebook? Regardless, when a great piece of software that happens to have a price tag fails to sell, whose fault is that? Don't blame developers/publishers for goin…
Why blame anyone? Gamers get the content they want in the way they prefer to pay for it, developers and publishers get paid. The market has pretty clearly spoken and decided that people prefer cosmetic micro transactions with free to play games. Just because it doesn’t match the Hacker News gaming utopia template doesn’t mean anyone is doing anything wrong. This is especially true for multiplayer games where a lot of…
> The market has pretty clearly spoken and decided that people prefer cosmetic micro transactions with free to play games.
I wonder how many people on HN complaining about this model actually even consider themselves gamers.
I'm a gamer. I spend 30-40 hours/week on PC games. I think the "Free-to-play with paid cosmetics" (Apex Legends, Rocket League, Splitgate, tons of other games that follow this model) is perfectly fine.
I think part of the problem is that it's hard to have a conversation about this model because someone will always make references to games that are pay-to-win (Most mobile games) or gate content behind a paywall (Not sure which games do this today), which are an entirely different beast and not a part of the conversation.
EDIT: Just remembered League of Legends. It gates content (characters to play) behind progression, or you can pay money to unlock them immediately. But paid characters aren't necessarily more powerful, and they're constantly making adjustments to characters to try to keep them balanced. Any experienced player will tell you that paying money for a character perceived as being overpowered is foolish as it's guaranteed they'll eventually get nerfed.
Re: I hate what video games have become
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
One complaint I've had with RL recently is that it seems like they've put all their energy into new visuals and cosmetics while leaving the game mostly unchanged. The standard multi ranked map sometimes feels boring and I've wondered why they don't add different types of maps to the mix; spheres, tubes, different physics, goals in the center, figure 8 map(?), embankments (like map in season 1), etc. I guess it's simp…
They did this a long time in the past (See: Rocket League Rocket Labs) and it was near-universally disliked. The complication when it comes to adding new features is that Rocket League is built on top of a bespoke scripting engine that was discontinued after Unreal Engine 3, so they have to fully recreate RL in UE5. Because of this they don't want to put any additional resources into new features for UE3 since it's w…
I know I was always in the minority, but I loved the Rocket Labs maps and wished for more funky, mind bending ones.
Re: I hate what video games have become
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not true though. No game lives off the general public buying a few cosmetics. It lives off a few addicted people buying thousands of dollars worth, while the vast majority pay nothing. It's a terrible business model that will hopefully be outlawed in the coming decade.
I had assumed those "few addicted people buying thousands of dollars worth" were instead just people with a lot of disposable income. You could be right though, and it is addiction. That would in fact be uncool. My only data-point though is a friend of mine who has spent hundreds of dollars (or more?) on Star Citizen ships and he is the disposable-income kind of gamer.
There are combinations of both, for sure. But there was an interview some time ago on Eurogamer about a super spender (thousands of pounds) on Candy Crush who was awarded some airplane tickets to attend a Candy Crush convention, but she couldn't afford tickets to get to the airport...