121–130 of 164 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is another area where the arbitrariness of the 18 year majority limit is exposed: 18 year olds are not neurologically adults. That doesn’t happen until like 25-29.
As I understand it, it's 25-29 for men specifically, and women reach maturity much faster.
I’m the parent of a teenager who has struggled with an unhealthy obsession with features like this. A kid who is 14 or 15 is able to intellectually understand how to use these game systems, but at the same time he or she is often lacking the type of sophisticated understanding that an adult would have (e.g. that gambling can be addictive and therefore restraint and self-observation is required). They greatly overesti…
This is another area where the arbitrariness of the 18 year majority limit is exposed: 18 year olds are not neurologically adults. That doesn’t happen until like 25-29.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I have been thinking this for a while as well. The issue isn't the microtransactions themselves, but the natural incentives associated with them. If you are old enough to remember coin operated arcades, they operated on the same principle. Just one more coin and you can beat this boss! It really hurt the game mechanic in a lot of cases, but I'm sure it improved profitability. I really hate seeing this trend come…
> If you are old enough to remember coin operated arcades, they operated on the same principle. Just one more coin and you can beat this boss! It really hurt the game mechanic in a lot of cases, but I'm sure it improved profitability. I beg to differ. Most of the arcade games of yore were gated on skill; you could avoid having to pop in another quarter if you played well enough, and that was where the fun came from.…
Sure, but that's a rather charitable way to describe it. What you're talking about is basically breaking or mastering the system by sheer force of will. And there is fun in that. But how much did it cost you to get to the point where you were able to play longer than a few minutes?
Arcade games were specifically designed to extract as many quarters as possible from players. That was the stated goal. If a game wasn't able to extract N quarters per hour, it didn't last long.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I have been thinking this for a while as well. The issue isn't the microtransactions themselves, but the natural incentives associated with them. If you are old enough to remember coin operated arcades, they operated on the same principle. Just one more coin and you can beat this boss! It really hurt the game mechanic in a lot of cases, but I'm sure it improved profitability. I really hate seeing this trend come…
> If you are old enough to remember coin operated arcades, they operated on the same principle. Just one more coin and you can beat this boss! It really hurt the game mechanic in a lot of cases, but I'm sure it improved profitability. I beg to differ. Most of the arcade games of yore were gated on skill; you could avoid having to pop in another quarter if you played well enough, and that was where the fun came from.…
I'll admit that it may just be that I don't have the proficiency required, but after playing it again recently it seems that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was simply designed to quickly drain your health as soon as you got to a boss.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is another area where the arbitrariness of the 18 year majority limit is exposed: 18 year olds are not neurologically adults. That doesn’t happen until like 25-29.
Agreed; this should be made illegal entirely – this mechanic benefits no one except the game publisher.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you are old enough to remember coin operated arcades, they operated on the same principle. Just one more coin and you can beat this boss! It really hurt the game mechanic in a lot of cases, but I'm sure it improved profitability. I beg to differ. Most of the arcade games of yore were gated on skill; you could avoid having to pop in another quarter if you played well enough, and that was where the fun came from.…
> I beg to differ. Most of the arcade games of yore were gated on skill; you could avoid having to pop in another quarter if you played well enough, and that was where the fun came from. Sure, but that's a rather charitable way to describe it. What you're talking about is basically breaking or mastering the system by sheer force of will. And there is fun in that. But how much did it cost you to get to the point where…
Ah, but how is that different from, say, swimming, golf, tennis, or racing where one must rent a course or court in order to practice their skill? Yes, arcade games weren't called quarter munchers for nothing but, for the most part, they offered a reasonably fair deal.
In contrast, there's no analogy to be made between those sports and loot-box based game. One doesn't toss money into a sports equipment store until one randomly gets a drastically better golf club.
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That’s not true at all. Video Games have been growing with such a strong trajectory that what consumers expect at a bare minimum in a new release is a large increase in risk for a game publisher. For example Super Mario World was made by less than 20 people and sold for $69.99 at launch in 1990. That’s nearly $140 in today’s dollars. Now take into account that a modern AAA game has at a minimum a 150 person staff, wi…
Something that's not brought up often with this argument - the sales scope for modern games. Super Mario World was doing well if it broke 10,000 or 100,000 sales. In contrast a major game these days will break 100,000,000 sales. $60 is also a bit of a red herring, since $60 is the base price for a game - when you start throwing in all of the special features, the price of a game climbs to over twice that amount. And…
Your numbers are way off. Super Mario World sold over 20 million copies worldwide. Every full Super Mario release has sold millions of copies.
Conversely, even the most popular franchises sell in the tens of millions range. GTA V is one of the few approaching the 100 million mark.
Back in the day games were in fact more expensive, but a lot of the cost was in the cartridge. Games were certainly much less expensive in development costs. Modern console game prices have been locked at around $60 for well over a decade. These games are hideously expensive to develop so publishers have resorted to gaining revenue via DLC, microtransactions and loot boxes.
Naturally, publishers have become greedy in this environment and are using these deceptive revenue streams to pad their profits. And really, these practices probably would've arisen even if the price of games kept pace with inflation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity:_What%27s_Inside_the...
Curiosity - what's inside the cube winner video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhzb9OUWrXU
>"I said there's something amazing inside. Something life changing inside. Well, this is what this video is about. After 25 BILLION cubelets have been destroyed, over 150 days, after 4 million people have downloaded it onto their various devices, and after hosting tens of thousands of simultaneous concurrent users, we have reached the end, and one lucky person has reached the rewards of their hard efforts. How can anything be worth all that effort?"
Well what was in the cube? A broken promise.
Curiosity Winner Has Received Nothing - 2 Years Later:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SejMdncxbnk
>Curiosity Winner, Once Promised a "Life Changing" Prize by Peter Molyneux, Has Received Nothing:
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/curiosity-winner-once-prom...
Peter Molyneux A Pathological Liar? | Feature Creep:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efeq_9XwU7s
>"This week on Feature Creep I discuss the recent controversy about 22Cans head Peter Molyneux, the failure of the GODUS God of Gods plan and how Bryan Henderson, the winner of the Curiosity competition has been ignored."
They were also heavily criticized for adopting this game mechanic in star wars battlefront and eventually decided to drop it. I don't even understand the appeal of wanting to play games that have this sort of predatory feature. It's been around for a while and I've honestly never even been remotely attracted to games like that. I definitely feel like this has exponentially increased since iOS games called 'freemium'.…
I mean, it's not like you get to choose between the version of the game that has this vs the one that doesn't.
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Arguments like this is what I find entertaining about (pure) free-market advocates. They argue that regulation is not needed because, if there is a problem, consumers would vote with their wallets to remove it - and when the consumers inexplicably fail to do so, the advocates get mad and blame the consumers instead of adjusting their theory.
Who specifically? You're just building a strawman to attack, while framing it as us-vs-them. Comments like these lower the quality of discussion by removing nuance and pushing people into tribalism.