591–600 of 690 posts
The fact that the author is citing the freemium model of Rocket League as their reason for not playing it anymore make me lose all respect for their article.
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…
Just look up "Super Mario Run" on your favorite store and what you will see is "Free", not $10. In fact, I am not sure if the actual price is mentioned anywhere on the store page.
So of course people expected a F2P experience, because that's exactly what's on the store page. If Nintendo was honest, they would have published it as a paid app, with the price clearly visible on the store page. Maybe with a separate free and clearly labeled demo, as it is standard practice for one-time payment apps.
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> 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. Minecraft still gets significant updates. > 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 business. I think a lot of these companies have found that it's the oppo…
Minecraft also has a marketplace, and a "Realms" subscription, and you can purchase it on different platforms if you want to play like that so there's plenty of ways to keep revenue coming
And the whole lootbox thingy is... to be honest embarassing, look what they did to Gran Turismo :\
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Do you have to eat? Do you have to have a place to sleep? Seems to me like making a reasonable amount of money to help towards these goals is not an unreasonable thing to hope for. But maybe you can prove me wrong?
I chastised a friend for getting so upset after losing half a dozen travelers checks on vacation. Get a grip — it’s $2 worth of paper. If you can’t afford to replace that you can’t afford to be on vacation.
This seems like a good time to mention this site DarkPattern.games[0] which lists mobile games that utilize such things as loot boxes, etc. and actually has quite some granularity over the different types of mechanics and how that game rates for those. For example, games which force you to wait some duration of time before being able to proceed, or force you to watch an ad, or other things like that. "A gaming dark p…
I don't like how some of my favorite mechanics (grinding, guilds) are listed as dark patterns.
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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.
I disagree. There are previously popular genres that are either in sharp decline or basically dead (RTS comes to mind). Other genres (MMOs) have been almost completely taken over by games with freemium models and there are few options available if you're not into that. Finally, games on the world's most popular computing/gaming platform in the world (cell phones) are almost all freemium/gacha. This is extremely disap…
And other genres that are extremely popular that didn't exist a few years ago. Also, there are good new RTS titles out there, even if there's nothing with the popularity that Starcraft or whatever had back in the day.
> Other genres (MMOs) have been almost completely taken over by games with freemium models and there are few options available if you're not into that.
The most popular MMOs right now is likely FFXIV (not freemium), followed by WoW (not freemium). (Or it might still be the other way around; either way...) There are a lot of freemium model MMOs around, but most of them launched with a subscription model, failed to compete with the dominant subscription model MMOs, and fell back to freemium to try and survive. Taken as a whole, the genre is absolutely dominated by the subscription model; that's where the players and money is. And while no, there aren't a ton of subscription options, that's largely an inevitable consequence of the business model, which has vicious network effects.
There isn't a freemium MMO developer out there that wouldn't trade a kidney in a heartbeat to become the next Everquest/WoW/FFXIV. Conversely, if WoW ever went freemium, it would be universally recognised as a sign of abject failure and a last attempt to try and stabilise the game financially before the servers get shut down.
> there's a limit to the kinds of games that can come from a small team with a small budget
The limit exists, but it seems to be ever receding into the distance. Valheim or Rimworld are both stunning, developed on a shoestring budget by tiny teams.
> Meanwhile, extensive monetization is creeping into more and more big franchises and studios.
You don't have to play games from the big franchises or studios.
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Look good, feel good, play good? It seems to me that it definitely has a psychological impact for some folks (myself included) in both off-line and on-line competition.
Look “good”? Come on. If not having the Pickle Rick decal for your car makes you play worse it has nothing to do with looking “good”. Perhaps look “like I own this exclusive cosmetic”, which applies to offline as well, don’t you think? The real problem is that loot boxes are gambling, and are addictive, period. It triggers something in otherwise rational people, especially children, that makes it feel good to spend m…
And of course it's a vanity component (at least for me, though other posters have raised other factors). Everyone's different with different preferences and as long as there's not a problematic spending aspect I think it's fine...but this links back to the gambling issue. Personally I only buy cosmetics in a few games I play a lot and that don't use loot box mechanics.