I hate what video games have become

https://ivanca.tumblr.com/post/679923341152468992/i-hate-what-video-games-have-become

by mattigames • 4 years ago

436 667 4 years ago

ivanca.tumblr.com

Flankk• 4 years ago

Talk about entitled. Freemium exists because of piracy. Why blame the video game industry for something caused by criminals. Developers need to eat too.

mattigames• 4 years ago

Citation needed, a lot of the games sell pretty well without using freemium, things like Doom Eternal, Resident Evil 8, et al, plus a lot of games have fremium over already asking for full price, things like Call Of Duty Cold War.

serf• 4 years ago

Freemium exists because of piracy.

what horse-shit, let's see the numbers.

my personal take : freemium exists because the video game industry figured out to exploit the gambling bugs in the human psyche to leverage them to gain even further profit.

If piracy killed gaming so badly, how are the market numbers represented from now (when piracy is rampant and distribution is easy) from then (let's say the 80s or early 90s when distribution was near impossible and DRM wasn't needed as physical copying was prohibitive enough?)

Gee, a quick search shows me that the video game industry is bigger than it ever has been, and the growth hasn't ever plateau'd. In fact, if the industry was in danger from piracy destroying all revenue it'd be easy to show me the dip where freemium tactics began to help the recovery -- can you point that dip out to me?

I haven't been able to find that dip.

Hypothesis : the adoption of freemium tactics had nothing to do with loss-of-sales revenue and everything to do with increasing profits.

Ekaros2• 4 years ago

Wasn't piracy pretty rampant in 80s and 90s? At least on PC and other home computers? Ofc, it was not online, but friend to friend and via some BBS...

peepop62• 4 years ago

Completely wrong. It would exist either way because recurring revenue is better for business.

pmarreck5• 4 years ago

Let me correct you: Freemium exists because a bunch of nihilistic dipshits decided that it was OK to charge users not to endure a completely fabricated delay just because they knew they would pay to progress in the game. Also that people realized that things nonessential to game progression such as emotes and outfits were valuable to users in multiplayer games.

Piracy has existed as long as games have and continues to this day, and yet FOR SOME REASON, gaming (not the casino kind) is the most profitable entertainment industry in the world at this time.

Want to know the truth? Only poor people pirate (just like any criminal, you usually have to be poor to be motivated to be a bad actor), so the vast majority are not actually lost sales. As soon as game lovers get some cash, they throw down to get the games they want.

fifticon3• 4 years ago

I tend to not wholly agree. While I have spent insane amounts of money on both computer games and movies, some of us pirate simply to get rid of obnoxious DRM crap. As an example, I find it infuriating that my multimedia setup involves two separate but identical DVD players, just to get around DVD region crap. I regularly play minecraft together with my daughter on our LAN, but recently I've had to configure two extra dummy accounts just to be able to continue playing with her, to get around Microsoft now requiring all mojang accounts be 'migrated' to microsoft accounts. Including their dark pattern, where your initial account is locked and flagged for 'suspicious activity' (), so they can try to squeeze your mobile phone number out of you, if you want to play the game you BOUGHT, after 7 days have passed. () There IS no 'suspicious activity', their activity log indicated 5 logins FROM MY HOME ADDRESS, which by the way reveals that they are continously tracking the lat/lon coordinates of me playing the minecraft game I PAID FOR.

And not only poor people pirate, or commit any crime in general. It works in reverse. Activities by poor people, that rich people don't appreciate, is what our society labels 'crime'. When rich people commit unwanted activities, it is called 'privilege'. There is a reason poor people are incarcerated in prisons, whereas rich people are fined for their transgressions. I have yet to hear of more than a single person (a swiss guy) going to jail for what transpired in 2007 and 2008. If anybody got in prison for that in 2008, it was the victims. I too hate what modern games have become. And I hate that I used to be able to buy movies as perpetual DVDs, but that big business privilege in the intervening 20 years have changed the laws into "you have a right to RENT movies from us".

trinovantes4• 4 years ago

Not a big surprise that freemium games are a lot more profitable. A single whale provides more revenue than thousands of casual paying members and a smaller target audience is a lot easier to optimize for

dado32123• 4 years ago

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? Are you surprised that people don’t just wear monochrome black shirts in real life? Likewise, you can resell RL items, there’s a market for that. Are you surprised when you can’t resell a shirt you wore for a year at the same price as when you bought it?

That’s not to say that games where progression is locked behind time gates where you need to buy 1000 Realm Warp Crystals or whatever just to actually play the game aren’t a toxic hell. But that doesn’t seem to be what the article is pushing against.

Sebguer• 4 years ago

Is 1) actually still true? I haven't played recently, but I recall quite a few chests that you have to buy keys for in order to get items out of?

birdyrooster• 4 years ago

They got rid of keys a couple years ago. Now they have blueprints instead.

meonmyphone2• 4 years ago

Instead of crates, there are now blueprints. And instead of keys, there's credit to unlock the item of the blueprint. And instead of item drops, there are blueprints. There are still lootboxes, but these can be obtained only in events or challenges.

meonmyphone2• 4 years ago

While I agree Rocket League is a good example of a free to play with cosmetics, I think it got worse with the blueprint system. Now you're limited to one item per week (from the blue lootbox). And if you get the blueprint of item you want, you can't pay only for that item, you need to buy a package of credits, that may be more than you actually need.

holler4• 4 years ago

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 simple and works but it'd be cool to see new gameplay related updates.

Daneel_• 4 years ago

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 wasted effort once the game transitions to the new engine.

telchior3• 4 years ago

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 business.

As for the ownership or survivability of in-game virtual goods -- I think the author is referring to Valve's hats in Team Fortress 2? -- to me it's nonsensical to complain that you don't own it outside of the game. It only has relevance in the game, and it would be silly to ask the company to develop some external service just for owning your object. The ones that have tried that kind of thing just fail and look silly. But wait! Along come NFTs, with potential permanent ownership... but gamers despise that idea, too.

Gamers are just eternally grumpy and conservative about changes and progress. (I say that as a grumpy gamer, myself.)

TulliusCicero2• 4 years ago

Not that I'm outright opposed to this kind of thing, but often messing with core mechanics in wacky ways is a lot more fun on paper than in practice.

There's a lot of games that have a sort of boring standard (SC2's 1v1 ladder maps are all same-y, nobody competitive plays Smash with items on, etc.) and the fact that you see this pop up repeatedly in unrelated communities should probably tell you something.

IMO, when you have a game with sufficiently deep mechanics, wackiness tends to obscure that depth, resulting in an experience that's less interesting rather than more. Like if you added Mario Kart abilities to football/soccer and suddenly the winning team was getting regularly blue shelled, I don't think it would improve the experience, even if initially it'd be hilarious.

Now maybe it's still worth it to have "party game" modes in some cases, I'm just saying that these modes might not have legs, so to speak, and thus may not be worth the dev effort if hardly anyone plays them.

Kiro9• 4 years ago

That's like saying they should change the rules of football. Rocket League is a seriously competitive game and even the slightest change to the physics would have a big impact. I like that they have kept the core gameplay intact. It's beautiful and pure.

bhedgeoser2• 4 years ago

I think their dev team is too busy with the UE5 port.

bart_spoon• 4 years ago

The reason is because people absolutely hated that Tokyo map with the embankments, myself included. Rocket League is unique in that the core gameplay is so good, that messing around with it is just a bad idea. It’s like asking why there aren’t new pieces being released for Chess, or why people don’t start adding unconventional elements to a soccer field. It’s because novelties like those take away from what is already a solid experience. They have added some modes to that in non-competitive Rocket League, but RL is a unique game in that it seems like most players play the game in competitive modes, where those novelties are not appreciated, and so putting lots of work into those kinds of alternative arenas just doesn’t make a lot of sense.

I personally am glad the developers have realized they have a game like this and haven’t killed their game through adding more for the sake of more.

xboxnolifes• 4 years ago

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.

They tried. Wasteland, Neo Tokyo, and Starbase ARC were non-standard maps. Players complained about it, and now they are changed to be standard.

ajmurmann3• 4 years ago

They added those types of arenas years ago and removed them all. In the ranked games these honestly felt to gimmicky and I'm pleased that the differences between arenas are now only cosmetic.

They still keep adding other game modes some of which are only there for a few days.

evandale2• 4 years ago

The standard multi ranked map sometimes feels boring and I've wondered why they don't add different types of maps to the mix

They tried that with the original wasteland map and there was huge pushback from the community and people demanded the maps be standardized.

tomatowurst4• 4 years ago

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 (cosmetic skins that don't influence gameplay) regularly sell for good money.

it also make sense to buy the keys to unlock the cases sometimes simply because you might unlock a skin that fetches far more money. so it is a bit like gambling in that aspect.

i'm just constantly amazed how they were able to pull the economics behind this. clearly the ppl who expect a 10~100x ROI on their keys must outnumber those selling the cases. I mean I can imagine a bunch of people just farming cases day and night. Perhaps even a sophisticated AI could pull it off since the in game drops aren't even correlated with your performance.

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

mnsc2• 4 years ago

... i think CSGO easily is the best ...
... so it is a bit like gambling ...

I hate what video games have become.

legalcorrection4• 4 years ago

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?

tpxl• 4 years ago

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.

878654Tom• 4 years ago

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)

rak• 4 years ago

It gets even better.

With CSGO third parties were essentially selling games for actual currency instead of credit with Valve and using skins as currency for gambling on esports matches. A few of them also came up with other gambling games that didn't even involve esports.

It was also a great vehicle for money laundering: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2019/oct/30/counter-strike...

Wild times.

mschuster912• 4 years ago

Are you surprised when you can’t resell a shirt you wore for a year at the same price as when you bought it?

No, because the market for second-hand clothing is extremely oversaturated and clothing, particularly "fast fashion", simply does not last long enough to live a useful second life any more.

A video game skin however does not degrade, it will look the very same (or better) even in two decades.

therouwboat• 4 years ago

"Are you surprised that people don’t just wear monochrome black shirts in real life?"

No and thats why its silly to say rocket league items have no impact on gameplay, ofcourse its nicer play with hot wheels car that has animated decals than grey corolla.

I would like game to be more like "if you get this good, you get these cool items" instead of something like "if we put paid rewards right next to free rewards, then 15% of our playerbase is going to buy paid tier." :/

I had no problem with dlc cars, it felt like I was supporting the game, now it feels like I'm being manipulated to give money to somebody who owns rocket league.

imiric• 4 years ago

now it feels like I'm being manipulated to give money to somebody who owns rocket league.

Epic Games. Why are we surprised by this when they saw a cash cow when they bought it, and have done nothing but turn it into another Fortnite?

I think this type of game needs its own genre. Fortnite, RL, GTA Online, Warzone... They all follow the same model of "build a good multiplayer experience and "support it" perpetually by squeezing as much revenue as you can from your users".

I was a huge RL fan in 2015/16. It started going down hill sometime after that and EG has run it into the ground.

madrox3• 4 years ago

I think a lot of people naively think of moves like this as pure money grabs and don’t appreciate that a lot of these moves are out of survival…especially for games like Rocket League that require a sufficient player base to even be a viable live service game.

badsectoracula7• 4 years ago

Well, Rocket League doesn't need to be a "viable live service game", it could just be a regular multiplayer game that gives you a client and server executable to run your own.

It isn't like not being a live service game killed Quake 3, for example.

ricardobeat• 4 years ago

Rocket League reached something like 50 million players in its first year. They’ve likely earned over a billion dollars so far. This is not about survival, just squeezing your cash cows.

qwery2• 4 years ago

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 between "gameplay" and "visuals" but each supports/influences the other and both are critical elements of almost every videogame. However you divide up the parts of a game, they all affect each other. Generally speaking, having all of the elements working together makes for a better game.

Monetisation strategies like microtransactions, loot boxes, etc. are also part of the game. However, the goal of such parts is not aligned with that of the others. The game is compromised by the introduction of the monetisation strategies.

why are you surprised that some people want to look cool in a video game?

Nobody is surprised by this.

SentientNo4• 4 years ago

Cosmetic items are not just visual though. They are real elements in the game.

Yes, I really hate this argument that cosmetics are not gameplay. Visuals are a huge part of what makes a game, no one would be happy if games shipped without textures and shaders and people would have to pay to unlock them.

honkdaddy• 4 years ago

Monetisation strategies like microtransactions, loot boxes, etc. are also part of the game. However, the goal of such parts is not aligned with that of the others. The game is compromised by the introduction of the monetisation strategies.

This is an interesting point. I think it begs the question, what _is_ the goal of a game? 10 years ago I would have said that broadly, the goal of a video game is to create an experience the player will enjoy. Perhaps now it's more simple though, maybe the goal of the vast majority of games today is to create a model in which money is willingly transferred from the player to the publisher.

paulmd6• 4 years ago

Monetisation strategies like microtransactions, loot boxes, etc. are also part of the game. However, the goal of such parts is not aligned with that of the others. The game is compromised by the introduction of the monetisation strategies.

Yup, I think this gets lost in the "visual-only cosmetics are fine/gameplay-affecting is bad" position. The problem is that in most cases, even if the cosmetic is purely visual, games are now being designed around "how do we incorporate cosmetics" which is constraining the types of experiences that are being made and the mechanics they allow.

Battlefield 2042 is an example of a game that completely upended its traditional mechanics to pull in the concept of "operators" (like R6: Siege) because they knew they could make more money selling operators. And at some level that's gameplay affecting, maybe not the ideal picture of what happens when MTX gets involved, but that's always the temptation - "we'll make it gameplay-affecting, but it'll be fair". Once you bring money into the picture you are reliant on developers to take the high road - not just today, but for as long as the game is active/you're interested.

Its predecessor, BFV, was skin-based and it was still controversial not just that you had random Fortnite-style nazi characters running around the Pacific Theater or Japanese Rambo Lady running around Norway, but because they started to introduce tons of animations so that players could at least see the skins they paid $20 a pop for - and that is a basic game-design thing that affects everyone regardless of whether you yourself pay up or not.

At a more basic level, the single-player RPG is essentially dead because it's the most difficult to introduce MTX mechanics into those genre of games. And sure you can point to Elden Ring but even then they are using "cooperative" or "inter-session" mechanics that fundamentally exist as a way to get an "always-online" server system into the picture as a platform for MTX. You've got forced Denuvo on everything. Etc etc.

And again, even when it's done right, there is still an incentive to make the "free" mechanisms grindy so that players feel the urge to pay IRL money. LOTR: Shadow of War was an example of that where the game could technically be finished without MTX, but at a certain point the game ramped the difficulty so hard that it was virtually impossible, certainly impossible without suddenly turning the game into a second job. Many games similarly force hundreds of hours of grinding or... you can just pay and go play with your friends! You can get bait-and-switched once you are into the game and emotionally attached - and that can even occur after release/after reviews have been written, or even just so far into the game that most reviewers don't reach it in their 5 hours of gameplay on their pre-release copy.

Those MTX mechanism are still shaping gameplay mechanics even if they are "purely cosmetic" - and in many cases they are not, they are definitely gameplay-affecting by design (in major AAA/e-sports titles even, this isn't just random mobile crapware, R6:Siege is one of the most popular e-sports titles, LOTR is a mega-IP, etc). Games being designed around "how do we pump the player for cash most efficiently and with the least ability for them to hack around us" is itself a problem either way though, that's a corrosive mindset for game design as a whole that is enabled and encouraged by allowing MTX at all. Either you keep that camel out nose and all, or as soon as that nose is under the tent it's always going to be an insidious urge, and in many cases an explicit mandate from publishers to the studio.

Also, yes, in anything where you interact with another player, your interactions are shaped by the other player's responses to you, which is determined by your cosmetics. I posted this deeper in the thread but to bring it back here:

As a medic in team fortress 2, I usually pocket and ubercharge the players with cosmetics. It's an important team resource, and the odds of someone with a "default" skin making good use of it are fairly low. Much like plumage for a bird it's a reliable signal of "virility" - if you're invested enough in the game to own a $200 hat and a coordinated outfit then you've probably played it long enough for me to trust you sight-unseen.
http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f278/katietiedrich/comic26...
If you're a pro player with the default skin, you're gonna have a bad fucking time, because you're last priority for heals, you're not getting an ubercharge, etc. That is gameplay-affecting even if the cosmetic itself is not.

Paper that might be enlightening for those who haven't partaken: https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:901463/FULLTEXT0...

(I should add that as medic, I had a golden medigun for a while too, and that was an extremely bad time for me, because every single roamer was absolutely gunning for the medic with the $100 item. Sometimes it pays to have some restraint in your plumage when you happen to be a particularly delicious and defenseless target...)

I have such mixed feelings about TF2, because it was such a fantastic game, but it pioneered all these exploitative MTX mechanisms. The game itself was actually one of the better examples of how to do MTX properly (cosmetic only, tradeable by players, etc) but it immediately showed there was a lot more money in MTX than in making games, and opened the door to other actors to exploit much more heavily (compare the Overwatch model and its non-tradeability/gacha mechanics, R6:S with its gameplay-affecting operators, etc). It's also disgusting the way they've just continued to let the game rot without even basic bugfixes, it's been completely overwhelmed by hackers for 4 or 5 years now because they just won't patch their shit. Nor will they let the community patch their shit, like Team Comtress 2...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnBDMZ-9-Dw

bbarn• 4 years ago

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.

lol_what• 4 years ago

you and everyone else concerned about the preying on vulnerable thing should be aware that we have literally no evidence that such a thing is happening. the absolute worst thing we know off in practice are extreme edge cases (i.e. not applying to 99% of people even within the whale demographic) of above average earners spending their money on waifu shit instead of buying themselves a car they don't need.

the more regularly occuring thing is probably that parent's don't properly set up their kids phones and then they buy a few hundred or worse thousands bucks of something they shouldn't. but again those occurances are rare and don't cause really cause any actual damage, especially since you can get refunds for this stuff if it gets expensive very easily. kids regularly do stuff a lot more expensive than that. in fact kids themselves are a lot more expensive than that as a baseline.

the supposed exploitation of things like loot boxes has literally zero evidence behind it. all you will find are a few genuinely bottom of the barrel studies (as in that australian government study from some years ago, should literally be taken as an example in a book of how not to run a study).

and the constant comparison to gambling is really tiresome, because it's obviously not the same. people play themselves out of all their belongigs regularly with actual gambling, because their goal is to make a profit with gambling and their last gamble will surely turn it around. such a thing isn't possible even in the few online gaming markets remaining where you can resell your items for real money because its a big hazzle to liquidize all your assets.

Yizahi• 4 years ago

"It's only cosmetics shop" is a cancer that's killing AAA game industry. Games are designed from ground up not being fun themselves but to be filled with dark patterns, ads, artificial focus on the shop items and so on.

somedude8952• 4 years ago

Even with Rocket League microtransactions are a bad idea. It incentivizes the developer to make attaining items through gameplay a slog in order to get you to skip that by paying up. If there was no way to get those items through mtx, they'd make the process of getting them fun.

Also, games are supposed to be a form of escapism, where the gameplay matters, not who you are and how much money your parents make.

You can argue in favor of the game itself being free allowing people to save 10 or 20 bucks. But gameplaywise Microtransactions inevitably make the gameplay experience worse, without exceptions.

tjader5• 4 years ago

Anectdata: I have over 2000 hours of Rocket League, never once spent any money on it after purchasing it and never one have I felt that my fun was impacted by the available microtransactions.

Nothing that can be purchased in the game affects gameplay, it's all just cosmetics.

onpensionsterm• 4 years ago

But I paid for a game that wasn't free-to-play

phelm• 4 years ago

I can't believe how many people care about the cosmetics, I've been playing RL for years, unlocked heaps of things to wear but never changed the appearance of my car once. All I really care about is playing and trying to win, although sometimes other peoples cars do look cool, I have no desire to update mine.

matheusmoreira2• 4 years ago

Yeah, cosmetic items are the least bad solution to this problem since they provide zero advantage to players. They're there for people who want to look cool online which is fine.

Paying for items that impact the game balance turns them into spending competitions: whoever pays the company the most money wins. Games designed like this are not even worth playing. I fell for one of these money sinks once, never again.

3a2d29• 4 years ago

Plus having cosmetic items essentially subsidizes the game for everyone, aka its free because money can be made off those that want to spend on cosmetics.

criddell• 4 years ago

Are you surprised when you can’t resell a shirt you wore for a year at the same price as when you bought it?

The complaint isn't about depreciation but rather the inability sell the items at all.

dado32123• 4 years ago

There are market places for selling items, both for in game cash and real money. I agree that it’s a legitimate criticism that it’s not in actual game itself, but then you develop weird incentive structures like FIFA’s pack openings taking precedence over actually playing soccer, which also feels bad, and potentially more exploitative (if I just hit this rare car I could turn a profit!!)

ericsoderstrom• 4 years ago

I think it is a problem though when a game's revenue mostly comes from cosmetics, as it shifts the developer incentives away from "developing a game that lots of people want to buy and play" to "making the type of game that lends itself well to lots of cosmetic micro transactions". These are often pretty different types of games and it would be sad if the former were entirely replaced by the latter.

tomtheelder4• 4 years ago

Fundamentally the biggest driver of selling cosmetics is still just the size of your player base. Companies are still really out there trying to make sure people play their games. Exceptions exist (I'm looking at you mobile games), but for the most part I don't see a massive shift in incentives.

IMO the big change is to do with the lifecycle of games. Previously you release a new title, maybe a few DLCs, and then you move on. The game is done, you have to do something else, a sequel, a new IP, whatever. That was true for all games, multiplayer included. Now (for multiplayer) the idea is to try different releases until one sticks, and then try and make that game evergreen. The dream being something like League of Legends, which has been printing money for over a decade.

Whether that's a good or bad thing is up for debate I suppose.

AlwaysRock• 4 years ago

Yeah but if the game isnt interesting than the cosmetics dont sell.

skazazes• 4 years ago

This reminds me of an old trick from the Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare days. You could edit the player model skins locally if you had the correct Photoshop plugins installed. Players would just spray over the character model skins with blaze orange so you could pick people out from across the map, even if they were hiding in deep vegetation. Eventually the 'pro-mod' developers caught on and implemented some client side hash checking but the public non 'pro-mod' servers were never protected against this afaik

plaguepilled2• 4 years ago

This arguments premise is flawed.

Cosmetics are not nearly that resource intensive to produce, so its not about 'wearing nice clothes' a-la real life, where good materials are more expensive to produce. Attaching a price tag is PURELY for the benefit of the publisher.

Attaching real world costs to purchases in games also disproportionately targets neurodivergent and fiscally uneducated people. That seems like a fairly malicious business practice.

Microtransaction apologism is not a tractable stance, ever.

dado32123• 4 years ago

There is still the value of creating the model asset, though I agree that it’s a cost that doesn’t scale with how many people buy it (except for maybe some of the song packs, not sure how RL’s royalty package is structured).

Why does attaching real world costs to purchases in-game strike you as “malicious” but not the real world cost of buying the game?

ratorx• 4 years ago

There is a real world equivalent which affects many more people. Wearing nice clothes might mean wearing well-made clothes, or wearing branded clothes. Although there is some correlation, there are definitely examples of moderate quality clothes being sold for insane prices because of a brand.

Not to say that micro transactions are good practice or that they can’t be dealt with independently, but micro transactions are a very similar problem to real world cosmetics.

Sure you could argue that just having some correlation between true quality and perceived value is good enough, but I’d argue that charging for more visually appealing and better designed models ALSO is not zero correlation.

onedognight• 4 years ago

I hate that this site breaks the back button to keep on people on their site. That’s worse than loot boxes in my mind.

devoutsalsa• 4 years ago

You have a chance to win a functioning back button in a loot box.

JKCalhoun5• 4 years ago

I'd buy that for a dollar.

notreallyserio• 4 years ago

Complaining that games use dark patterns while posting on a site that uses even worse patterns. That's a paddlin'.

Gigachad2• 4 years ago

I can't imagine this ever being intentional. No one tries to leave a site and goes "Well the button didn't work, guess I'll keep browsing".

It's pretty much always the result of a broken redirect / history api usage. You go back to the page which redirected causing it to redirect again.

pmarreck5• 4 years ago

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...

Wowfunhappy4• 4 years ago

Right, I've been playing Kirby and the Forgotten Land for the past hour. No microtransactions to speak of.

pmarreck5• 4 years ago

I have 424 Steam games and not a single one is a freemium game, funny how that works

fifticon3• 4 years ago

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.

pmarreck5• 4 years ago

Why do people blame Minecraft for this and not Microsoft? Microsoft has been pulling these sorts of quasi-ethical moves for decades now

pengaru2• 4 years ago

There's a lot to dislike, but my gripes as a developer who occasionally dabbles in games are more along the lines of "this puzzle game prototype is interesting and may be worth polishing up and tossing on steam, but oh right, it won't even pay for itself unless I turn it into yet another gambling machine."

Then I go back to writing system software.

JKCalhoun5• 4 years ago

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 going instead to the only model that pays the bills these days.

greggsy• 4 years ago

IMO, it’s the platforms that turn down novel ideas in preference for money making products, resulting in less visibility for the underdog. Apple’s App Store routinely promotes paid for apps over free ones. Steam does the same. Google search is obviously the worst offender.

Gigachad2• 4 years ago

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 children don’t have money to buy the game but their presence on the platform adds value to the people who do have money to spend on it.

thot_experiment4• 4 years ago

Artificial scarcity is bad, actually. Things that don't cost money to duplicate should be free, we need UBI and maybe a general shift to patronage-based models, luckily this is starting to happen.

There are also plenty of games that implement a cometic lootboxes that don't impact gameplay model that are totally fine.

apatters• 4 years ago

This is like saying we should blame the smoker, the junkie, or the gambling addict. The latter is an especially accurate comparison because these companies turn their games into gambling machines.

Sure, personal responsibility is important. In the end the only person who can free an addict from the quagmire of addiction is them. But that doesn't stop us from regulating the fuck out of tobacco companies, heroin dealers or casinos to reduce the harm they do to their victims.

The elephant in the room is that we as an industry hold the power to alter people's psychology on a greater scale than any drug. But people stay silent because it delivers the paychecks and the shareholder returns...

shusaku• 4 years ago

The other option is to apparently blanket your game with advertisements. I spent some time yesterday looking for word games in the iOS store, and it seems like everything was “free”, but had non stop, unskippable ads. One offered to remove ads for a fee, but even after paying they remained in various parts of the game.

temp89642• 4 years ago

Almost all top iOS games are like this now, iPhone App Store is an extremely toxic market for games.

samatman• 4 years ago

Some of that is that Apple's App Store search remains the worst search engine I'm forced to use, but some of it is evaporative cooling from Apple Arcade.

Most of the decent games have migrated there. I barely use it, but I think it works out to two bucks with the other iStuff I'm happy to pay for, and having a few games on my tablet or phone can be nice when I'm traveling.

rstupek• 4 years ago

what type of word game were you looking for?

hypertele-Xii5• 4 years ago

What exactly makes you think as someone who "dabbles in games" to be entitled to profit?

AFAIK it costs $100 +30% to publish on Steam. It only takes 260 people to buy your game at 50 cents to break even. If your game can't sell 260 copies at 50 cents then it's just that, worthless.

Why not just release your game for free, for free? Does it have to be on Steam? Does it have to make money?

pengaru2• 4 years ago

AFAIK it costs $100 +30% to publish on Steam. It only takes 260 people to buy your game at 50 cents to break even. If your game can't sell 260 copies at 50 cents then it's just that, worthless.

It doesn't take zero time to ship a bespoke finished game, your calculus is asinine.

temp89642• 4 years ago

How is that break even? Don’t you need to invest time/money to make a game?

bccdee7• 4 years ago

The difference between someone who "dabbles in games" and a professional is that the professional polishes up the prototype and sells it on Steam. The commenter above explained why the state of the industry has prevented them from doing that. Your weird tangent asking "why do you feel entitled to make money for your work?" isn't really relevant to the conversation.

bradknowles3• 4 years ago

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?

moron4hire• 4 years ago

Weird take to make on a site about entrepreneurship

Wowfunhappy4• 4 years ago

That depends on how good the concept is! Plenty of indie games have succeeded without gambling mechanics, look at something like Baba Is You for instance. I don’t know that the developer became rich off of it but be seems to have done well enough.

techdragon• 4 years ago

This only works if you either already have a brand like Zachatronics or if you have the patience to support/polish these small games for years till the random slot machine of the universe drops you enough reviews that you get critical mass and decent sales… or you pay for PR and you can successfully profit from even a shit game with enough PR money so why bother at that point…

Your right about a good concept winning a lot of good will and making success possible with less polish, but these days it doesn’t subtract the “risk of never being discovered” if you make an iOS app your just one of millions in the App Store if it’s on steam the shovelware isn’t as bad and discovery is better but it still requires market understanding in order to stand out.

silisili2• 4 years ago

There are still a ton of solid games that aren't constantly asking for money. TLOU, Elden Ring, RDR2 to name three huge ones. I'm 50/50 on Ubisoft because their games are still great standalone, but do offer IAP that I just ignore.

I'm OK with those offering freemium and such so long as it doesn't kill off the old model. I don't think it will.

brootstrap• 4 years ago

There are countless indie games out there too worth all your time and more. If you like elden ring you need to experience the whole soulsborne series. AAA games are as trash as they've ever been.

jimmaswell• 4 years ago

Is Elden Ring not a AAA game?

s-lambert• 4 years ago

Elden Ring is published by Bandai Namco, which makes it an AAA game; Bandai Namco is larger than Ubisoft which is where most of the "AAA = bad" games are from.

supramouse• 4 years ago

I'm not 50/50 on ubisoft, they sell level boosts and stat upgrades in a singleplayer games (assassins creed) it's hilarious

silisili2• 4 years ago

I've played every Far Cry and AC game. Never did I buy an upgrade or boost, or feel that one was needed to be honest.

trinovantes4• 4 years ago

The problem with Ubisoft's model is that it affects game balance. Before when there's a problem with a game, the developers will patch it for free. Now, solutions are sold as IAP. It's even worse when the problems are now intentional.

catlifeonmars• 4 years ago

Wait, what? You have to pay for bugfixes?

cercatrova4• 4 years ago

Game trainers exist, at least on PC and Android. I feel no qualms about using trainers to grant myself unlimited in-game currency rather than buying their IAP ones.

bikingbismuth• 4 years ago

I agree re: Ubisoft. I played through Far Cry 6 and never felt like I was missing out by avoiding the micro transactions.

kevinventullo• 4 years ago

I will say that RDR Online pushes you hard towards micro transactions. That said, the single player game is worth $60 on its own, so I don’t mind just skipping the online.

pevey• 4 years ago

I’m not a fan of loot boxes or “free to play,” but it’s hard to take this complaint about dark patterns seriously on a site with a blocking popup and back-button jankiness.

josephg2• 4 years ago

Yeah I always wonder about the click-through rates of popovers asking users to install a native app. They have to be tiny.

“Like our content? Install our app so we can send you notifications and monetise you better!” - no, I’m not enjoying your content. I haven’t even read any of it yet. Your obnoxious pop up is the only content I’ve seen so far and it makes me want to pour water in your server rack. I’m not going to install your app.

andrewclunn• 4 years ago

The old ways persist. Good games are easier than ever to find and in great quantity. So what, now you want lawsuits and legislation to destroy the fremium model? I'll just be over hear playing games I want to play, unaffected by the network effect because I don't care what strangers play. I play with my friends and we play games that are old, indie, fun, run on anyone's machine, and can be played in person on a couch if we want. There's free bots for discord poker with friends. There's countless pick up and play fremium online titles to chose from. There's decades' worth of system's libraries available on emulators. What are you complaining about again?

lofatdairy• 4 years ago

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 actually I see a lot less complaints about the toxicity of these luck-based systems in those communities. Maybe it's because they're more used to them, maybe it's because most other gacha games include pity systems, but it seems weird to me that the most vocal complaints are over systems with no bearing on gameplay when gacha games limit free access to new characters and, by extension, progress.

josephg2• 4 years ago

They don't affect gameplay

This opinion might vary by the person and the game. I was playing some free-to-play game the other day which was like you described - it had a store and some tokens, and a way to slowly gain the premium token as you played.

But I found there to be something deeply gross about it which did impact my gameplay experience. I’m playing a game (rather than doing something else) because I want a curated experience of fun. Tokens like this make the relationship adversarial. In this case, the game has some mechanics which it keeps waving in your face - “quick! Click now to spend 2 whatevers to have a 4 hour boost!” And I have to actively avoid the shiny fun part because it costs real money to do. It makes the experience tiring in the same way shopping is tiring. Is the game trying to be fun or not? Pick a lane.

That said, I enjoyed Dota2 for many years even though it had hat stores and loot boxes full of art. I’m not sure what the difference is - I think I just never really had to resist the pull to pull out my credit card in dota. And I payed way more as a result! I chipped in a few dollars each year for the international prize pool, and that was a blast.

claaams• 4 years ago

The difference is that the game was competitive and the cosmetics had 0 impact on the game mechanics itself. Other games like you describe constantly remind you that you don't have enough credits to buy the thing, you're earning them just at a rate too slow to matter. You're always being nudged to think about the mtx system and it's a core aspect of the gameplay and it's exhausting.

For me it makes a game feel like a second job. I'm not wealthy so I'm trying to save and make something for myself but playing these games just feels like experience the same dread and fear i have in reality.

015a• 4 years ago

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 enough people don't buy it, and are missing out on a piece of the game due to not buying it, while the elite 0.1% buy everything.

2) "They don't alter gameplay". That's an interesting argument. Take a game like Animal Crossing; would being able to buy a sweet ass new table for your house "alter gameplay"? Isn't aesthetic the gameplay? I truly and deeply believe that its difficult to draw this line in any game; where the "gameplay" stops and suddenly the "stuff that doesn't matter so sell it" starts; if the product has value, such that people buy it, then it must be an important part of the game. It may not affect the competitive balance, but that isn't the entire game; the developers put time into the visual aesthetic of the game, and to assert that the items are ok to sell simply because they don't affect the gameplay trivializes the items' importance.

Moreover, in a much smaller way; in every game I've played, these items do affect competitive balance. Often in subtle ways. In Valorant, having a cool gun skin can often mean eight year olds on your team asking for you to buy the gun for them, so they can use it (sometimes, promising a re-buy in return, then not doing it lol). In Apex Legends, some hero outfits legitimately camouflage you with the environment than others. In Dead By Daylight, the Feng Ming wearing the bright pink jacket will be tunneled by the killer more than everyone else wearing drab browns and torn jeans. To assert "the way you look doesn't impact the gameplay" is trivially and wholly, if not sometimes subtly, incorrect; games are visual, looking good asserts a socioeconomic power structure which can impact team cooperation, all of this does matter.

But, to clarify; gaming companies need to make money. For online service games, its not enough to just sell the game for $70 and call it good for life; even doing so can be a death sentence for the game, as the barrier to entry is so high no one joins in to even play. Loot boxes are extremely bad, and games which sell them should be held to the same legal standards as gambling (Overwatch, Apex Legends, Rocket League, DOTA2, CS:GO, etc). A cash-for-item storefront is better (Fortnite, Valorant, Warzone, Dead by Daylight, Sea of Thieves, Halo Infinite, etc). Battle Passes are probably one of the best solutions I've seen yet; they're effectively an optional subscription service to the game, with resetting progression (players love progression). Pure subscription services are rare, but also a great solution; CS:GO has one, but WoW was the better example; there was a time when you simply paid to play, and everything cool you could get was bundled into that subscription. Today, things have changed, and they're double-dipping revenue models, like most of the games listed above.

boomlinde• 4 years ago

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.

emilsedgh• 4 years ago

I only play Dota and no other game and I think how the game works is extremely fair. It's free to play. For all. Can you believe that? And it only charges you for skins that have no competitive edge. How is that not fair? I mean there's not a single dark ui pattern to trick you into doing it.

I honestly think we've become too entitled.

tsimionescu6• 4 years ago

If you only care about yourself, sure - "just don't buy them" is a good answer. The problem comes when you look at the industry level, at the games that get allowed to be made, and at the people they hurt.

The vast majority of "free to play" games would not be able to make a profit of they didn't find a few players willing to spend huge amounts of money on them. Thousands of dollars, from people who often can't afford to spend thousands of dollars on a hobby.

And not only are these games sustained by such people, they actively seek to find and exploit them, with game mechanics and presentation designed to hook a certain kind of psyche - people with gambling or other mental issues, and children.

sidlls3• 4 years ago

Video games are like this because people pay for it. It didn’t start like this. Back when packaged games (i.e. shrink-wrapped cd/dvd cases) were the way games were delivered we had “online” modes that generally cost a fixed amount (including $0) to access. Then someone would experiment with something like a power up or level up for some tiny cost, or a “bundle” of them, etc. and guess what: the market overwhelmingly went for it. It made more money because it both had higher per-transaction revenue and more people converting to pay it. Then came the whales (things like Saudi princes blowing $10s or $100s of thousands on FIFA cards or whatever) and the industry never looked back.

Video games are what they are for the same reason Marvel Character CGI-fest Sequel/Spinoff X blows away the box office every summer.

bccdee7• 4 years ago

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 true that the public are voting with their wallets here. It's a profitable business model, but the majority of people do not engage with it, and consumers as a whole would be better-off if it died out.

cercatrova4• 4 years ago

They are voting with their wallets. It's just that not every vote has a value of 1; their vote is the number of dollars they spend.

mrjangles• 4 years ago

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 good system that everyone happy with. If they weren't happy they would go play other games that aren't free.

danybittel• 4 years ago

It is almost like the business models are adjusting to the reality of the world. With massive inequality, especially in a global market. And an "entitlement" that digital products should be free or dirt cheap. If you think about it it's sort of a wealth redestribution. One extreme example was that Movie ticket business, that basically paid movie tickets with investor money.

elefanten• 4 years ago

The megawhale point is a bit overmade. F2p games have vastly different payer distributions by genre, platform, business model, monetization strategy and other factors.

Addictiveness and addiction are issues with and around gaming, for sure. But the reliance of f2p games on entranced, pixel-charmed addicts is also overstated. A good number of free to play games have lifespans measured in decades, they can function like a highly social, off-and-on hobby. People are willing to spend $20 to go to the movies a few times per year. How’s it different to spend that on a game you get hundreds of hours of entertainment from?

slightwinder3• 4 years ago

It's not always gambling. There are also collectors and people who just like to show off. Also, the usually f*ing rich dude who has no understanding on the difference between $2 and $20k. Games today are the new social club, where you go and meet and show off your life. And as there are corners for the average people, there are also corners for the rich and powerful. There are some games which really just exist so rich dudes can casually meet and show off how much money they spend on some stupid skin. Similar, some other games have pay2win, because enough rich people live by the philosophy that money can buy you anything, including an easy win.

The gambling-games are only the most obvious whale-traps, and they usually not even aim for the filthy rich, but the middle class rich. The rich rich-games are less obvious, because the casuals are not rich enough to even get high enough in that game to gain access to the juicy parts.

sidlls3• 4 years ago

Whales are outsized in many games, but non-whales contribute substantially to this model.

rockbruno• 4 years ago

Video games are like this because people pay for it.

I hate this argument because it implies you have any power in this situation. They don't do this because the majority likes it, they do it because there's a select group of whales that are willing to spend ungodly amounts of money on this crap. They're the ones who dictate how these games operate and no amount of "vote with your wallet" would change it.

BlargMcLarg• 4 years ago

Yeah no. There are still plenty of games, both indie and non-indie, which millions of players who don't whale can play, containing at most DLC which is effectively an expansion on top of an otherwise complete base game. If you don't want to play these games, there are still plenty of options. Enough developers haven't sold their souls yet, either.

Reality is, the market meets a demand where there is a demand. The developers are not the sole responsible people for choosing to put in gambling gimmicks, incomplete games for 25-60 bucks, DLC which should've been base, P2W, etc. There is just as much of a responsibility on customers to vote with their money, or vote for laws to ban this shit if it becomes evident people can't control themselves as a whole. We haven't reached the critical mass where you don't have other options yet, and it looks like we won't for quite some time.

Meanwhile almost every indie trying to fit in the market and come with their passionate solution is met with a dire reality that selling games takes a tremendous amount of effort for anyone who doesn't have a giant brand behind them.

jeegsy2• 4 years ago

I hate this argument because it implies you have any power in this situation.

Yes you do. While there is little we actually control in our complex world, we are at least in control of our discretionary purchasing decisions. Sure, you as an individual might not make a dent in the company's profits but thats not the point. You are making a decision on principle, thats all that matters.

If we cant get this part right, what hope do we have for more important stuff like voting in actual elections?

antisthenes• 4 years ago

I'll be the first person to jump on the hatewagon towards pay2win and lootbox gacha games, but...hear me out. You can just NOT play those games.

The amount of games available on Steam is such that you can play indie games, old classics and anything to your liking for decades, while completely avoiding the types of game the author laments about.

There were plenty of just horrible, bad games back in the day too. Games that would crash all the time, had terrible gameplay, graphics, story, you name it. You just avoided the bad ones.

soared• 4 years ago

1. Most art is like the example given, not just video games. For the avengers, you can watch the movies at the theatre but you need to pay another $10/mo for Disney+ to watch their tv series. Art, NFTs. Etc.

2. There are many games that aren’t loot box-esque. To say “video games have become this” is very unfair.

arealaccount• 4 years ago

Just started playing fortnite after resisting cause free to play rules. Its a really fun game, and theres no buying competitive advantage.

I bought a skin to support the devs, just like I did on Among Us.

As a generally “always by the cart” type of person, I think I'm starting to come around to the “pay what you want” model.

nstart• 4 years ago

There's definitely a tasteful way to do this model. Dota 2, Fortnite, and Brawlhalla are examples of good ways to do this. To me, it comes down to two things:

1. Should not be able to purchase a competitive advantage

2. Should be able to purchase the item you want.

Re the second point, if you want the rare items and that involves gambling random item opaque loot boxes, that's an abusive relationship. If it involves purchasing the item directly, or buying a box where you can see all the items inside of it, that's a respectful relationship. Purchasing the item directly is the most preferred.

Games that do this entire model badly involve Hearthstone and any number of mobile games made by Supercell.

Some people might balk at the idea of purchasing any further items, but personally, I don't see anything particularly wrong with allowing cosmetics to be purchased and applied as a model that enables people to have a great free experience.

bccdee7• 4 years ago

Fortnite's a good example about how your two rules aren't enough, actually. Because of the way the game's designed, it pressures its audience (of primarily children) into purchasing microtransactions, to the point where there's been widespread bulling of kids who don't pay for premium Fortnite skins [1].

For a more detailed exploration of the dark side of Fortnite's monetization model, check out "Manufactured Discontent and Fortnite" [2].

[1] https://www.polygon.com/2019/5/7/18534431/fortnite-rare-defa... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0

stodor89• 4 years ago

Games are many things to many people. Don't play the ones that go against your personal values.

JetAlone2• 4 years ago

One interesting thing I've heard when working for a company that had microtransaction mechanics is, "Non paying players create content". By engaging in the community, even if in isolation they cost the devs money to host, they create the content and also the audience for the whale's behaviour.

I think a lot of us have a vision of a childlike, halcyon "purity" of experience, in the joy of gameplay itself, that we would seek and enjoy with or without other people's presence, with or without money. We want to experience that, we also as programmers (who may have learned to code because we like games) often have a deep desire to create that, to give it to others. It's like the "Beatific Vision" in the life of one who likes games.

We all know there always was a need for money, and passionate creativity exists in its margin. I think the complaint here really is that this margin seems to have less room in the eyes of the complainers, because the pull for money is present in virtually every game loop now, as opposed to being outside of the box...

A question I want to ask is, for newest generation of whales, is there a memory of some great, memorable exploratory rush in the big spend for them, part of a broader set of social interactions that gave them great joy and built them up in their community? Would their experience with the game due to this purchased power inspire them in any way, maybe to make some potentially positive, impactful life decisions? Or is it literally just a borderline scam at every single possible level?

I dislike microtransactions of any kind strongly, but I am at least trying here to be open to the possibility that someone who did them was able to feel something similar in relationship to them somehow.

wincy• 4 years ago

I guess I’m not quite a whale but for a brief period of time I was spending several hundred dollars a week to run contests and pay for ships and game time for an Eve: Echoes (the mobile version, although I did play the original) corporation. We had 100+ people playing, I was their fearless leader, we had a war at one point, lots of fun. I knew once I stopped all the spending a lot of people would just leave and I wanted the party to keep going for a little while longer. I bought an iPad Pro so it’d be easier for me to administer my corporation. It was during COVID and it made me feel important and felt like I had friends. I couldn’t keep it up though, and maybe 75 people evaporated to wherever they came from.

We ended up with about 25 people sticking around, people idolized me and it was fun for awhile. Eventually (after a few months) I got bored and gave the reins over to a much less “fearless leader founder” person and much more “I am an accountant irl and Eve sounds neat” type person, which worked out pretty well, and the corporation thrived. I think back fondly to that and felt like it was worth it.

Alternatively, maybe ten years ago I spent a similar amount of money on this mobile game that was like sim city and Pokémon and time lapse command and conquer all rolled into one. I hate that I played that and hate how they managed to get my addiction loop just right and I was spending most of my paycheck on this stupid game. I had a guild and “friends” there too but it just felt like we were a bunch of addicts justifying each other’s spending habits. We knew what the in app purchase limits were for apple and how to get around them and stuff that just seems insane to me now.

JetAlone2• 4 years ago

Thank you, this is a very interesting answer.

lilgreenland• 4 years ago

The indie game scene is still pretty great. Tunic just came out last week. It's super fun and basically a single dev.

I wrote my own free open source browser game. https://landgreen.github.io/sidescroller/

"N-gon is a physics-based single player 2-d platformer shooter with hundreds of different power ups. You move with the keyboard and aim with the mouse. The core game is done, but I'm still adding new content.

You can play here for free. It's open source, no ads, no tracking, no data harvesting, no crypto-mining, no DLCs, no freemium, no microtransactions, no gacha."

exodust• 4 years ago

They raise an interesting point I've wondered about, in regards to movies:

"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?"

While that example is unlikely, we may in the future see paid narrative arcs. The base movie might be free, taking you to a certain point in story where you're presented a fork in road. One path is free with low budget action, the other paid and contains more action, more sex and big budget scenes!

augstein• 4 years ago

Maybe some use case for NFTs after all. Link the stuff you can get through playing a game or buy ingame for cash to a NFT and boom, players really own that stuff and are free to sell it on the secondary market.

bccdee7• 4 years ago

You're describing Diablo 3's famously unpopular and disastrous auction house. Adding resale would just make everything worse — especially if you rope NFTs into it for no reason.

Ekaros2• 4 years ago

On other hand Valve's model doesn't seem too hated. And I got my Steam Deck out of it. I much prefer some chance to get money I invested back, even as only store credit.

exdsq• 4 years ago

Thankfully there are games like the Soulsbourne series! I found Japanese studios are the better ones nowadays for 'genuine' games based on a one-time sale. GTA V is releasing a $5.99 subscription service that basically lets you buy micro transactions at a discount.

tyrfing• 4 years ago

It's a great business model for multiplayer games. They live and die on the basis of network effects, and gating access behind a $25-60 upfront payment means most games die from gradual attrition - which is just sad to watch happen when it's an enjoyable but niche game. Subscriptions are dead, with even Blizzard struggling to make it work, and most DLC models just don't work for multiplayer.

Looking at my Steam library, I only regret the $60 AAA titles I've bought and never found interesting enough to play beyond a few hours. $60 for 15 hours of gameplay, or an optional $100 after 150 (or 1500) hours? I know which I prefer.

ThatPlayer4• 4 years ago

most DLC models just don't work for multiplayer.

I vastly prefer the freemium model because of this. It's great compared to before when we had sequels, expansion packs or even map packs that was the only way to get new content. But that new content wasn't available to people who didn't buy it, so now the playerbase will be split each time new content is released.

midasuni2• 4 years ago

Back when I played games we used to make our own maps, and share them for free on various sites

the_jeremy• 4 years ago

To expand, DLC models for multiplayer either split the community (only people who purchased the DLC can join this lobby) or they inevitably make the game pay-to-win. If I'm going to get shot by a $20 sniper rifle, I'd rather it have the same stats as the one I have access to.

I will say it sucks when the cosmetic item you want is only available via lootbox, but at least for Counter-Strike Global Offensive (another Valve title) you can buy either boxes or the exact item you want. I think Valve is pretty far from the worst offender here.

8note• 4 years ago

The most famous one, fortnite, splits users by being able to express themselves or not.

If you pay, you're a member of the community, if not, you're not

tsimionescu6• 4 years ago

It's a business model that works off of whales. It's predatory and exploits the same people that gambling does.

Kiro9• 4 years ago

I'm a whale and I don't feel exploited. I don't like gambling but I like buying chests. People spending money on trips or cars, things I have no interest in, are also exploited in that case.

ridgered42• 4 years ago

I'm always the wrong guy to ask as a customer what business model to use to make money, but I remember reading some Call of Duty required people to buy maps or else you couldn't join multiplayer servers with them. There was a lot of predictable complaining that there weren't many players on the servers using the new maps. It honestly sounded exhausting to keep track of as a player to me and like it would server to repeatedly split the player base until the population died out.

gigaflop8• 4 years ago

I'm not a console user, but ran into this when Modern Warfare 2 brought it to the PC (I think. If not MW2, then one of the early Black Ops titles). I was too young to have my own way to purchase them, but never felt the motivation to pay up, so I'd just get auto-kicked by the system if a lobby started with a map I didn't have access to.

I haven't played Call of Duty in a long time, but when I heard that Modern Warfare Remastered would have some maps locked behind a DLC[0] (along with the rest of the shitshow surrounding its release), I knew that I'd probably never buy another one of those titles again. I think the last I bought was MW2 or BO2.

On PC, in Modern Warfare 1, the maps were made available for free, while they cost extra for consoles. Modern Warfare Remastered 'conveniently' left them out of the base game, but charged a higher-than-original price for the pack, for all platforms. Consider that a remaster is generally supposed to contain all content (i.e. game + DLC), and this was a slap in the face to my younger self.

[0]https://callofduty.fandom.com/wiki/Variety_Map_Pack

keithnz• 4 years ago

I mostly don't really mind, there is just so many games out there these days, and so many ways to play lots and lots of games for very little money. Mostly the extras are not pay to win, but there are a number that are pay to fast forward. Some are pay to fast forward and no reasonable way to earn the thing in a game in a reasonable time, those ones are a bit evil (GT7 being the latest version of that ). Overall though, for far less $s than in the past, you can play a heck of a lot games if you don't get sucked into paying for loot boxes / upgrades / cosmetics.

falcolas• 4 years ago

I have to admit, I’m not a huge fan of the “it’s fine because it’s just cosmetics, and it doesn’t affect the game” line of reasoning.

Because that’s patently not true. If cosmetics didn’t affect the gaming experience, they wouldn’t be worth anything. Certainly not worth paying above and beyond the purchase price for.

Cosmetics are just the easiest to monetize and normalize, to the point where players will now defend full priced games for offering cosmetic microtransactions. It’s a shame. Likely a windmill-tilting cause, but a shame nonetheless.

telchior3• 4 years ago

As someone who has worked in F2P games: you're quite wrong that cosmetics are "easy to monetize". Good god, it's HARD.

Because the only way it works, at a scale that can support a studio, is if people really, really love the game. Even something that can capture attention for dozens of hours may not be good enough.

As a gamer, you're looking at something like Rocket League and going "oh yeah, it's so easy! They just make a skin and it sells!" But, uh, no. It's the 0.001% elite of all games. And they only have an "easy" time selling cosmetics in the sense that they already did the much harder work of making something amazing. Kinda like it's easy for Google to make money from ads; you need the killer product first.

tsimionescu6• 4 years ago

They said "easiest to monetize and normalize", not "easy to monetize".

Also, your argument seems irrelevant. Making a successful anything is hard. The fact that you may make money off of a mediocre shrink wrapped clone of a clone of a clone when you hook a few suckers selling time crystals for hundreds of dollars is not an achievement, and not something that anyone should feel entitled to. And yet, it's 99.99% of the mobile "gaming" market...

andrewstuart• 4 years ago

Another way of looking at it is that there is a vast, almost infinite quantity of quality games being created by independent studios.

If you don't like one game, there's vast, vast choice.

Go support the little guy by exploring the games on Steam and become happy again with what games have become.

I don't think many of the independent games have microtransactions. They might have ads.

tsimionescu6• 4 years ago

Choice that's full of crap is worse than no choice at all - it completely buries any decent game in a mountain of unplayable garbage that's not even worth the free wifi to download. PC and Console are not at that level yet, but mobile gaming is impossible to access, as for any 1 decent or good game that might exist, there are literally thousands of crap ones that try to waste your time, get you addicted, and make you pay hundreds of dollars (!!!) to survive.

peepop62• 4 years ago

There are games like Elden Ring that are purely addictive and immersive through great game design.

And then there are MMOs and mobile games that are purely addictive through dirty psychological and immoral tricks.

Just don't play the latter. Those games (like modern WoW, HS, gacha games, etc) are garbage that will be looked at in disgust in the future.

auriplane• 4 years ago

Rocket League is both at the same time, an absolutely brilliant core game (albeit with extreme QA problems), with manipulative and unethical business practices layered on top, both to keep people playing and to monetize those people.

bhedgeoser2• 4 years ago

I use a stocktane and still buy stuff from time to time cos I know that money for the servers has to come from somewhere.

arrakis2021• 4 years ago

Elden Ring has given us a new hope.

tomc1985• 4 years ago

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?

Jesus Christ don't give those fucks any ideas

meibo• 4 years ago

Support real independent studios and self-publishing developers, they're the ones with the creativity and freedom to advance the medium.

Aissen• 4 years ago

Before they were bought-out, Psyonix (Rocket League Studio) was a real independent, self-publishing studio. They created something unique that still has no equivalent.

quxbar• 4 years ago

Modern AAA games are like Opera - marvelous and the pinnacle of human creativity and talent at some moments, and at other times a freakin' slog through boring ceremony gated by overt classism.

toastar• 4 years ago

I don't engage with purchasable wearables (or super hero movies) but I do like the Captain America example buried in this post. A more practical offering like the choice to pay a tiny fee to unlock a few supplementary scenes about a character's back story while streaming something seems like an inevitability - unless I'm missing something and it's already been done?

dehrmann• 4 years ago

What you do is show a QR code in the theater, make people scan it, and if enough people in that showing do, you get the bonus scene.

homerhomer• 4 years ago

Steam is the best thing to happen to gaming. My library is always updated. I'm able to play most of my catalog of games on Windows, Linux and here soon on Chromebooks. Since I started to use Steam I have amassed a HUGE library that I periodically have dig into and find stuff. It's really is amazing. Yep, I can't sell old games and yes there's a bunch of freemium games that are focused on addicts but who cares. Yep Rocket League you changed. I still play it but if I decide not to there's a ton of other games for my attention.

vpilcx• 4 years ago

I think the number one thing, at least for me, that keeps Steam so competitive is its refund policy. Devs, especially indie devs who make short games, hate it, but I don't know any other platform that has something like it.

For those unfamiliar, you can return and refund any game that you've played less than 2 hours. Now this obviously sucks for any games that are less than 2 hours in their entireity. (Maybe they need to adjust it to less than an hour?)

But for someone like who can't afford to waste money on games that they aren't going to play, this is great. I just bought a game (Phantom Doctrine) on Playstation. It was $6 which is a really good price. I'd been wanting to play it for a very long time. I was very disappointed. It's like X-Com with a spycraft theme but much worse gameplay. Played an hour and knew I'd probably never play again.

I've bought four games on Steam and returned all of them. Most because they just didn't run on my computer. The fourth one, I just didn't like very much after about ten minutes.

One thing that does suck, if you're not aware of it, is Early Access games that just get dropped. I can name half a dozen games off the top of my head that I spent good money for and the dev just dropped development halfway through or released a shitty buggy product. But I think as long as you wait at least a year to buy an Early Access game, you should be fine.

ddaalluu26• 4 years ago

Yet you can't sell off old games and you can't speak freely about their shortcomings

iswu• 4 years ago

I am a game developer. I have been part of the industry for a few years now.

I am working on a product with a new company I formed.

The economics are interesting. I pay, upfront, all capital required to get the product ready for viewing.

Hackers and exploiters can probably destroy the experience for players because an indie studio is going to struggle to have any proactive anticheat.

Lag, poor networking, and poor performance can also kill the experience fir players and result in a negative review.

Delivering a game that covers the bases here well enough to not be turned into a meme or review bombed is a scarey endeavor.

Who knows, maybe the market looks and decides the game just isn't cool enough?

I hope for success on my project. I wont be doing any microtransactions initially because I am too focused on the other considerations.

Semaphor9• 4 years ago

I’m glad there is this whole parallel universe of amazing single player (or MP-optional) games with absolutely no dark patterns, loot boxes or any of the shit people who play MP games have to put up with.

I buy a game, and unless I get the DLC(s)/Expanions pack(s), that’s all I’ll ever have to pay. Civilization V: Over 2000 hours. Pathfinder: Kingmaker/Wrath of the righteous: Over 1000 hours each. Stellaris [0]: Almost 1000 hours.

[0]: Some people hate the Paradox DLC style, personally I think it’s amazing. Content DLCs are accompanied by free feature patches, cosmetic/minor DLCs are well, minor. No one forces you to get all of them. And thanks to this DLC policy, Stellaris will soon turn 6 years old while still getting regular updates.

BigJono2• 4 years ago

Civ V is an interesting case, since there's another thread in here somewhere about companies charging to fix design mistakes, and Civilization was really one of the OGs when it comes to that.

I wouldn't say Vanilla Civ V was bad, but it wasn't great. I probably wouldn't recommend it without the two expansions. I guess it's a moot point these days though since it's all sold together.

Semaphor9• 4 years ago

A mod from the early days of Civ V was Communitas [0], it became the Community Balance Patch and is nowadays called Vox Populi [1]. It vastly improves AI, balance and adds a ton of features. There is still regular development, with stable versions being released every 1-2 months.

Without this mod I’d have long stopped playing Civ V, and the lack of such a fix/balance mod (Civ V had an official source release and SDK which is what made the mod possible) is why I can’t get into Civ VI

[0] https://civmodding.wordpress.com/2010/10/17/balance-units/

[1] https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/community-patch-how-t...

sofixa3• 4 years ago

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 to develop and drastically changed the game ( it added logistics, trains, depos) for the better. If it were not paid, they wouldn't have been able to afford it.

Semaphor9• 4 years ago

Often, content also does end up in the base game after some time. It happened with Utopia for Stellaris, most of what it initially offered is now included in the base game.

And people who can’t or don’t want to pay still get some benefit as part of the features are always public and not DLC-only.

Sander_Marechal• 4 years ago

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.

Neivis• 4 years ago

It's true that they add more content per DLC, but I question the amount it adds versus the price they include.

In addition, I noticed every new paradox release their base game tends to be broad, but shallow; almost as if it was intentional. They fill in depth with DLCs which one could argue should've been there in the first place. Try playing any of their recent games without DLC.

slightwinder3• 4 years ago

Hasn't Paradox this sneaky thing going, where they put new mechanics from DLCs into the main game, but only useable by the AI? Thus shifting the balance slowly against the player and forcing them on the long run to buy DLCs to get a fair balanced game again.

Similar to things happening in MMOs with extensions. A new extension usually forces most players to buy it fast, so they can continue to play with the other players, access new raids, skills and gain from the new items on the market.

Semaphor9• 4 years ago

Not for Stellaris, but considering that their games are pretty much about emergent stories, I wouldn’t even complain about it. For MP only the host needs to have the DLCs.

nprateem• 4 years ago

Speaking of which EU4 is currently on humble bundle. You can get it and all DLC for £20

https://www.humblebundle.com/games/europa-universalis-iv-com...

mcphage6• 4 years ago

Or... you could just buy it all from Steam, where right now it's going for only... $384.89.

Huh.

BatteryMountain• 4 years ago

Grim Dawn also has a ton of content without any psycho crap built-in. MP is optional but adds fun and has a good community too.

ridgered42• 4 years ago

Honestly, these are a lot closer to "Expansion Packs" of the old days than what a lot of people think of as DLC. It's maybe a distinction without a difference, but expansion packs didn't sell you horse armor they sold horse armor+a new campaign+some new player classes or something.

billfruit• 4 years ago

Paradox DLC policy is problematic I feel: they gate some of the visual flair and more troublingly some of the soundtrack behind payed DLC. How would it be if a movie charged you extra for listening to its score?

Also the large number of DLC makes it difficult to determine what set I may have do give a canonical experience or if it is even viable gameplay wise.

mywittyname• 4 years ago

Also the large number of DLC makes it difficult to determine what set I may have do give a canonical experience or if it is even viable gameplay wise.

I like this about Paradox games. When you buy a DLC, it doesn't merely expand the game, it totally alters it. I can see why people don't like this, but sometimes, a total reimagining of a game is fun. Especially in strategy games.

jorams• 4 years ago

and more troublingly some of the soundtrack behind payed DLC. How would it be if a movie charged you extra for listening to its score?

Why is it problematic that they include extra music in expansions? They're not leaving out an essential part of the game you bought, just adding more of it when you buy DLC. The base game soundtrack is so good that there are times I just pause the game and listen to the music.

ajmurmann3• 4 years ago

The same is true for most AAA single player games as well. God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Zelda Breath of the Wild, Souls games. None of these have microtransactions.

The milk only seems to sour once there is a significant multiplayer component. GT7 sticks out as a recent example where the presence of multiplayer negatively impacts single player as well.

Semaphor9• 4 years ago

I wouldn't know, I hate action games and I'm not sure there are other AAA games ;)

farzher• 4 years ago

cosmetic cash shops is actually the best thing to happen to video games. i remember back when most multiplayer games were pay2win! now that's not a common thing anymore thanks to people paying for cosmetics

cletus• 4 years ago

In the early smartphone era I was extremely bullish on mobile gaming. I expected a creative explosion and a golden age of gaming due to the power, convenience and (inevitable) ubiqutity.

But then in-app purchases happened and we got to see first hand what happens with developers have seamless integration into a payments infrastructure combined with the ability to push updates constantly and easily. This really should've been no surprise because the addiction-loop of Farmville and the like were already established. Even so, I was surprised.

"Gaming" is now about "micro" (they're not that micro) transactions and a highly-A/B-tested loop optimized to get users to log on every day, do some menial task, get th eillusion of a reward and to want tomsething that is in the distance and only a few dollars away.

I can't necessarily blame game developers for this. We as users are really to blame ultimately. But it means that games that are actually games where you just buy the game and play the game without spending additional money are a rarity.

And that is sad.

chii• 4 years ago

games where you just buy the game and play the game without spending additional money are a rarity.

it might look like a rarity, but it's not imho. The absolute amount of indie games that come out, even if you don't include the free ones (which would only push the numbers higher) is absurd. have a look on itch.io, let a lone steam.

The quality varies, but it's acceptable. The "golden age" of gaming, back in the 70's, 80's, and 90's, don't compare to today in terms of quality and amount.

It's only a rarity if you count monetary successes and the ratio of commercial successes vs the number of games. Success is always a rarity, and it's sad that exploitative games tend to be more successful - but they aren't the only ones with success.

And these mobile exploitative games aren't all that different from the arcades of yester-decades. I do agree that the arcades require honed skills, where as today's mobile pay to win games cannot be won via pure skill - the key differentiating factor.

teddyh• 4 years ago

Benjamin Richard “Yahtzee” Croshaw (of Zero Punctuation) agree with you:

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/what-the-hell-happened-to-m...

EugeneOZ2• 4 years ago

The author expects too much for $20 per few years.

fifticon3• 4 years ago

No, we just prefer games not structured to suck :-)

SuperSandro2000• 4 years ago

I still don't regret buying Factorio for a whopping 1 Cent per hour.

d--b• 4 years ago

Is Apple partially to blame?

Did they purposefully push the loot box model by promoting games that were doing it because they took a cut on every transaction?

sircastor• 4 years ago

I can’t speak to the historical component of this, but I suspect that this came about as a natural evolution of in-app purchases. As soon as players could spend money in game, game companies had an additional revenue stream. I doubt we can blame Apple any more than Microsoft or Sony.

yuzugit• 4 years ago

Apple is now pushing against it. For legal and marketing reasons. The apple arcade model is the opposite of that: no online required, no IAP. I think the loot boxes model is slowly dying in flavor of subscriptions, battle pass and other mecanisms like that.

vparikh• 4 years ago

In the end - I don't blame the developers. They are a business and in it for the profits. The game is just a byproduct.

The public votes with their dollars - and judging by the popularity of these "features" - people are more than okay with it.

otikik• 4 years ago

Agree 100% with OP.

I feel a visceral repulsion against any game with a buyable virtual currency. It’s such a blatant manipulation tactic. And then there’s loot boxes, which is gambling. Usually targeting teenagers or children. It’s disgusting.

rafadc• 4 years ago

IMHO the video game scene is better than ever. Maybe you don't like what 90% games have become and that is fair. But go to itch.io and you will find a wide array of different games that will for sure suit your tastes. Maybe they are not that popular.

amatecha• 4 years ago

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 pattern is something that is deliberately added to a game to cause an unwanted negative experience for the player with a positive outcome for the game developer."

The site also lists games which rank very well in this regard, and _don't_ contain such dark patterns. IMO a great place to find some games which actually show some respect for the person playing the game. :)

[0] https://www.darkpattern.games/

Kiro9• 4 years ago

I don't like how some of my favorite mechanics (grinding, guilds) are listed as dark patterns.

j_42• 4 years ago

In another comment you've admitted to spending $10k on some games, so clearly the patterns are doing their job.

These things are specifically made to create a strong addiction and wring the max possible amount of money out of people whether they can afford it or not. If you are in the former camp then you do you, but it doesn't make them not dark.

greazy• 4 years ago

You like grinding? Never heard anyone say this!

vmception2• 4 years ago

I just wish someone would make the mobile game shown in the ads

Unlike in the days of olde where ads had to look better than the game, the games in the mobile ads look like real games that would be fun to play

zzo38computer3• 4 years ago

Some of these are not specific to computer games, some not specific to games (in general), and some are OK in some circumstances (but they often do it worse). Some are common even in older games, and aren't new. If the game is properly isolated, if you do not have to pay every time, if the documentation could be improved, could improve some things. Many kinds of games should not require an internet connection to work. However, these are not the only problems with computer games. In addition to unskippable advertisements, there are games with unskippable cutscenes, slow animations, etc. FOSS can also usually avoid such thing, fortunately. I make up computer games too and it avoids them.

OtomotO2• 4 years ago

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 addictions need to eat too... Or buy a lambo, or two.

I don't care whether it's only cosmetic or not, I have and will never support that business model

Kiro9• 4 years ago

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.

soultrees• 4 years ago

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?

legalcorrection4• 4 years ago

This is like bragging about being in the demographic that keeps celebrity gossip tabloids afloat. Do you also lose a lot of money on MLM schemes? Are Vegas casinos comping week-long stays for you?

sofixa3• 4 years ago

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 the free version just fine ( a paying user against you doesn't have a serious advantage), and the developers make enough money from the paying users who enjoy the exclusive machines or earning xp faster. Why shouldn't i enjoy a free game i know someone pays for ( and that someone needs me there too, if there aren't adversaries you can't play)?

Semaphor9• 4 years ago

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.

dkersten5• 4 years ago

The problem I have with these games is they are almost universally tuned to make them very time consuming and grindy if you don't pay.

That is, instead of the game being balanced for what feels good to play, they are balanced so that they feel good when you pay more and otherwise are not so annoying that you quit, but annoying enough to push you to pay.

Its not: here's a good game, but you can buy these things with real money. Its: here's a game that we purposely made a bit too time consuming and annoying, but you can buy these "time savers" to make it be fun all the time instead. Any game that sells real-money "time savers" is by definition a badly balanced game. The solution to a badly balanced game that becomes tedious is not to sell "time savers" (or skips: "buy the tank now and skip the grind for it"), its to rebalance the game to remove or reduce the tedium.

some_random3• 4 years ago

Those games absolutely nickel and dime you. Get a new tank? Want to use your old, well trained crew? Pay up premium currency. Garage slots cost money, crew quarters cost money, they have that weird experience system that costs money, etc. Not to mention that the grind gets insane at high tiers, you certainly _can_ play exclusively f2p but there are a shit ton of hooks to get you to pay up.

freedom20992• 4 years ago

I hear you! Same goes for me… if a game is free to play for me it’s a NO GO!

duckmysick• 4 years ago

I've been wondering why we have such different reactions to free to play games and free software. I know gaming has different value proposition, but free software and services share a lot of similarities. It's not just feeding the creators. There are tricks and "addictions" too. Do you like the free version but want to scale up, remove that restrictive license, or unlock new features? No problem, just pay up a bit. It's no big deal; look at our landing page where you can see other players - I'm sorry, other businesses - who happily have done that. Some even do cosmetics too (we'll show your logo and remove ours in the UI facing your customers).

Is it dishonest? I don't know. But the tactics are similar.

vladvasiliu• 4 years ago

I think the issue is that it doesn't do what it says on the box, or if it does, there are disclaimers in super-tiny print.

I'm not big on games, and even less so on mobile, but I remember that the ones I've tried to kill time during my commute, I could basically play them for 5 minutes if I didn't want to buy gems or whatever.

This, to me, looks much more like the "shareware" / demo versions of old than "free to play". And I think I'd see them in a better light if they were upfront about it.

To compare this with an "open source with paid features" product I'm familiar with, Elasticsearch, they're much more clear about it. At the time, it didn't even support TLS, no authentication, etc. You were of course on your own if you couldn't figure something out. But you'd know this upfront, and you didn't have to reboot the cluster every 10 minutes or 100 searches.

bootloop• 4 years ago

This is absurd. So you also don't use any software products which are a) free to use or b) habe a free tier?

midasuni2• 4 years ago

Back in the 90s shareware was common, you’d get the first level of Duke Nukem, but to get the rest you had to pay

That’s closer to the “free tier” stuff, and a very different model to modern “freenium” games.

jeegsy2• 4 years ago

I dont think an f2p game and your typical "open-source" software have anywhere near the same business model.

OtomotO2• 4 years ago

Counterquestion: Do they entice gambling?

mmcdermott• 4 years ago

Not the GP, but I have a hard pass rule on F2P as well. My reasons for it are two-fold. The biggest one is that I just don't want to deal with it. I spend my entire day "doing business." Games are a place away from all that and I don't want the F2P shop to intrude on my time away from the rat race. The other reason is that in the vast majority of scenarios, F2P creates incentives on the developer to create games that feature things I don't like (grinding and lootboxes being examples).

AtlasBarfed• 4 years ago

bootloop: have you tried machine zone or other popular FTP "games"?

These "games" are HIGHLY MANIPULATIVE. They use bullying, false cult inclusion, peer pressure, gambling reward ration, false emotional and time investment, and outright slot machine tactics to extract money from players.

They are worse than Las Vegas gambling by a country mile, since at least Las Vegas gambling is open and honest about the fact that the house wins and has established rules.

The social bullying that comes from "fake players" that are paid employees of the company is among the most disturbing aspect of these games. They exists to "shake down" players to upgrade with paid upgrades, to sow conflict, etc.

The rules of these "games", including the value of in-game currencies of dizzying types, is routinely nerfed/devalued at rates similar to the more comical instances of hyperinflation in the real world.

These "games" are at the extreme end of the spectrum for now. What is truly disturbing is that practically every "platform" of gaming drools over the revenue streams they produce. It is a sad dark gravity hole that is sucking the entire industry towards it. It is the depravity of capitalism in action, the almighty dollar destroys any idealism.

Aside from that, the appalling ad and currency extraction tactics used by virtually every "free to play" kids game is perhaps more distrubing, not because of the extreme tactics of the MZ games, but because the target audience is young children with demonstrably biological inability to properly regulate the addiction and investment behaviors involved.

Rather than a 10 second toy ad "hooking" a kid, you have a program that can spend an hour or more "hooking" a kid with tactics that aren't as immediately apparent to regulators in their manipulation.

michaelbrave• 4 years ago

for games I want an immersive experience, any kind of shops, popups, ads, or any other prompt to purchase anything in game disrupts that immersion and is a turn off much the same way ads during a video/movie are. Some accept ads as inevitable but all dislike them for their immersion breaking.

Any kind of store experience inside of an experience is just as annoying as any other kind of popup ad except it usually causes the devs to change the nature of the game to cause people to lean toward using the store, making things grindy like enemies have more hit points or have greater difficulty than they would have otherwise for example in candy crush there are levels that are unbeatable unless you pay for help.

Free software is not the same as a freemium game, they don't make the software more difficult to use, make the responsiveness of it slower and have it riddled with popups in the middle of use, or even fake you out with being unable to complete something until you pay. It would be like photoshop allowing you to design something then not letting you export print or save but only right as you were about to complete it, and this wouldn't happen every time, maybe on like the 5th time you use it, it's that kind of annoyance.

wink4• 4 years ago

I think context matters a lot.

If it's an F2P MMO then it's not a decision on a whim by the studio/publisher - it's been the default for a few years and good luck launching a subscription MMO in the last few years.

If it's an AAA single player title and you have loot boxes then it's just someone being greedy.

If it's a mobile game then it would probably not exist without f2p.

But I get your point, I used to not like this F2P trend but over the years I actually like to not completely stop playing some MMOs because I don't want to pay the sub. With F2P I can login three times per month and play for an hour. This might be different if I was willing to pay 10$ for 3h of play.

slightwinder3• 4 years ago

The dishonesty in the system itself is what makes this unbearable for me.

How is it dishonest? F2P does not automatically mean using dark patterns or openly making it Pay2win. Cosmetics are the prime example of an honest F2P, as they have zero impact on the game and still allow the developers to eat.

Do you consider demos also dishonest?

qwery2• 4 years ago

Cosmetics are the prime example of an honest F2P, as they have zero impact on the game

To have zero impact on the game, they'd have to not be a part of the game. Or have ever existed at all, really.

But if you think they are so meaningless, why do you think people buy them? Also, don't you think convincing someone to buy nothing sounds like something a con artist would do?

allow the developers to eat

How do microtransactions feed developers? Do you just mean because its their job to build the game? (which necessarily includes the various monetisation systems)

nanochad2• 4 years ago

In F2P games you need to spend hundreds of hours to either grind to unlock basic functionality, or even if they don't have grinding, you still need skins or everyone will leave your party because they assume you're a noob. Skins drag down game performance. I've seen literal billion dollar games where it ran perfectly fine until they added waves of skins. Also multiple games where each time someone comes near you with a skin, the game freezes to load the skin (probably a blocking socket call in the middle of the main game client loop, as that's the quality you get in such games). And in most games, emotes and skins allow unintended behavior that gives advantages to their users. This is what happens when you focus all dev work on designing skins and zero thought goes into how they would affect the game.

Now, since you don't want to spend hundreds of hours unlocking the ability to play the game on a level playing field, you will probably want to spend money to unlock these things. This will costs hundreds of dollars, far more than you would pay for an actual real game. Even if you unlock them the free way, there's a high chance your account eventually gets banned. As, once again, the studio has no experience in anything other than skin design, and have no idea how their game actually works and will cave in to every single basic cheating allegation and social crap like "he was in my game therefore he stream sniped me". Again, if you have ever played a game in the last 30 years, you would be well aware that most people in charge do not understand very basics like how you could infer an enemy is near you because you heard him behind the wall, or he triggered something on the map somewhere that tells the other player that trigger was indeed triggered across the map.

zero impact

Obviously false unless you have never played a game before.

mihaaly• 4 years ago

Call it trial version then. ; )

kkjjkgjjgg5• 4 years ago

What for example is dishonest about the "free-to-play" of Rocket League or Fortnite? It literally is free to play.

rovek2• 4 years ago

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.

kkjjkgjjgg5• 4 years ago

Why is it worthless? Aren't for example a lot of chess servers also free to play, and thousands of chess players play there all the time?

danaris• 4 years ago

Many of the most popular esports are free to play. Is the competitive element and matchmaking system of TF2, DOTA2 or LoL worthless?

colinmhayes4• 4 years ago

League of Legends is the most popular competitive game in the world, and is free to play. Calling the competitive aspect and matchmaking worthless in f2p games is incredibly naive.

chrismcb• 4 years ago

I don't follow. Tapped out is free to play, and for years was one of the top money earners. I'm pretty sure the developers were eating quite well. If someone releases their game for free, it is their prerogative. Either they want to give it away for free, it they've figured out another way to monetize it.

tsujp• 4 years ago

I hate lootboxes that paywall actual gameplay content; however the ones the author is complaining about are PURELY COSMETIC. There isn't a faster, more powerful car that is earnable via lootbox exclusively. The only things Rocket League gives you via lootboxes (as the author also knows and states) are the livery, hats etc. None of these make your car faster, make it more nimble, or give you any advantage over another player.

Also, $20 for 2,000 hours of entertainment is a pretty good deal right? Go to see a movie and that's about $20 for 1.5 - 2.5 hours entertainment.

I suppose after your purchase the company running and developing Rocket League who hire real people to work on the game, who host servers to facilitate the multiplayer experience are expected to run until bankruptcy?

The part about targeting lootboxes towards children (cosmetic only or not) is valid though because (cosmetic or not) that, to a child, helps develop gambling addiction or tendencies. However, for adults cosmetic-only lootboxes are fine and a perfectly reasonable strategy to ensure you can support a game in the long term for people who are entitled enough to think a one-time $20 purchase means someone has to host them a server, and employ a development team for at least 2,000 hours of gameplay.

bambax• 4 years ago

once you stop playing a game 100% of the money you spend on it disappears, you can’t recover any of it, not 50%, not 20%, just nothing (...) Can you imagine if other art mediums were this ridiculous?

Well, we're getting there. Streaming services, and all subscription offerings, are systems where you don't own anything, and you lose everything the moment you stop paying.

CaptArmchair• 4 years ago

The difference here is that the value proposition of a streaming service is pretty clear up front. Whereas in a context of f2p games, you're given the impression that you're actually acquiring ownership over the digital assets you're buying.

Clearly, that's not the case. You're not buying IP rights of those assets. You only buy a license to consume those assets.

kgwxd2• 4 years ago

When I go to the movies, 100% of the money I spend disappears. It's ridiculous.

Loughla3• 4 years ago

It's the same with concerts and theaters and other live venues as well.

I think you might be on to something with this. "Big Art" is out to make sure I can't own anything. At all.

That's why netflix made sure that you can't go to the store and buy movies anymore.

ddaalluu26• 4 years ago

Obviously the paying to watch a movie concept is outdated. I always wondered who pays for a streaming service when you can't watch the movies or series once your subscription expires.

cheerioty• 4 years ago

I feel like Rocket League is like the smallest offender. What really shocked me when I discovered that like 99% of FIFA streams were about loot pack openings these days, not actually anyone playing/enjoying the game. And when they dare to do so anyway, their live viewer count drops right away. Also in this case it’s pure gambling, as you don’t know what you’ll get with any buy.

Edit: People tried to fight this in court, with basically zero results: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2022-03-09-eas-10m-dutch-...

LargeWu2• 4 years ago

FIFA is one of the worst offenders, because it's not just cosmetic. There's a constant flood of player cards of escalating ability, and you have to either keep grinding for objectives, or drop tons of cash, just to stay competitive. I've quit playing because of it because it just stopped being fun, even as a casual player.

oneoff7867• 4 years ago

How bad can this really be without ceasing to be a realistic feeling game? Like I would imagine you’ve got just a few stats like speed, endurance, ball handling and kicking accuracy.

What does the game look like with base F2P characters vs top tier characters? Are they just laughably faster on the field?

walrus01• 4 years ago

... so don't play those games?

There's still tons of world class story driven games that don't have loot boxes or similar mechanics. I think I paid $19 for a used copy of horizon zero dawn and enjoyed it immensely.

yourdeadneopet• 4 years ago

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 mobile Mario game, but was won over by the quality of game design and the clear level of polish.

Nintendo charged $9.99 for this game. The response was absolute evisceration in the ratings. Mobile game players EXPECTED a F2P experience that would waste their time with energy charge ups, loot boxes, etc. and were upset when Nintendo didn't do that. In response, Nintendo switched to this type of experience for their next release, Fire Emblem, which performed much better.

The Wikipedia article for Super Mario Run explains in detail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Run#Commercial

A select quote - '[Nintendo President] Kimishima said that "we honestly prefer the Super Mario Run model", though in a June 2017 investor question-and-answer session, he said "in the future we will consider not only a single set price, but other methods that incorporate a wider variety of elements that allow as many consumers as possible to play"'

adrianh• 4 years ago

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.

wodenokoto• 4 years ago

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.

wink4• 4 years ago

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 platform. On the other hand I did do the "paid unlock" after trying it out for a few. (Ignore this if they had a demo, I never tried it, wasn't it iphone only?)

watwut• 4 years ago

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 already figured how to not allow kids to pay real money in games. They don't worry about that. You just don't attach card to account or require password.

zo1• 4 years ago

This story makes me sad. What a sorry state we've let the mobile (phone) gaming market become purely because of ads.

mattgreenrocks• 4 years ago

It's not popular to say, but maximizing accessibility (by minimizing up-front cost, in this case) has downsides: mechanics and business models end up needing to be shoehorned into the dominant economic model.

Touch controls and IAP impose serious constraints on the mobile game market still. There are some gems, but it seems like the golden age of gaming is occurring outside of mobile games.

MrBuddyCasino• 4 years ago

To quantify "performed much better":

Super Mario Run: $60 million total by July 2018

Fire Emblem Heroes: $656 million by January 2020

An order of magnitude. Incentives are everything.

mcphage6• 4 years ago

"in the future we will consider not only a single set price, but other methods that incorporate a wider variety of elements that allow as many consumers as possible to play"'

Iirc, they released a 3DS game with DLC, where you could haggle the price down in-game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty%27s_Real_Deal_Baseball

GuB-42• 4 years ago

Nintendo charged $9.99 for this game. The response was absolute evisceration in the ratings. Mobile game players EXPECTED a F2P experience...

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.

parkingrift2• 4 years ago

This is false and proven false by your link. Super Mario Run was freemium from the start. The app was free in the stores from day one. You could download and play the first few levels and then you were (surprisingly) asked to pay $9.99 to unlock the rest of the game.

Users were annoyed by the bait and switch. Nintendo should have charged $9.99 in the store and been done with it. Instead they tried to straddle some line between freemium, paid, and demo.

In addition, Nintendo added always-on DRM so that even those who fully paid for the game were dealing with silly issues that you would only expect in a freemium game.

“While still using the freemium model, Nintendo eschewed requiring players to keep paying to access more levels, instead offering the game as a free demo with the first three levels unlocked and requiring a one-time payment to unlock the rest of the game.[12] Part of the reason for this pricing scheme was to make it transparent to parents who may be purchasing the game for their children so that they would not incur further costs.[42] Fearing piracy of the game, Nintendo added always-on DRM, which requires that players have a persistent Internet connection to play.”

emsixteen• 4 years ago

I'm not sure the author is aware that a paragraph can in fact contain _more_ than one sentence.

First paragraph is a 135 word sentence. Two of the other paragraphs are a single meandering sentence. Questions are the only break in the exception.

Come on.

prohobo• 4 years ago

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 money. That may have always been the case in some sense, but I know that studios used to be very proud of their achievements and had ambitious visions for their IP.

As far as I'm concerned, the gaming "industry" is basically dead. The few exceptions are games like Dank Souls and Path of Exile, which bring something new to their respective genres. I know Dark Souls is technically a sequel, but that's the version of the game that first went mainstream, and is considered the corner-stone of the franchise. The point is, those are the kinds of games that actually matter to me, everything else is content.

Rocket League is one of the "real" games, and yeah the micro-transactions are annoying but it works well for that specific game. I'm not sure how to improve the monetization to make it feel more fair to consumers, and the developers need money, so what's the alternative? Keep cranking out crappy sequels?

royjacobs• 4 years ago

The golden age of gaming ended somewhere in 2005-ish.

This kind of statement definitely requires a source.

They are also less about the art, and more about the money.

There have never been more experimental and indie games released than now.

xeornet• 4 years ago

Not sure a source is required when he's simply providing an opinion, albeit assertively.

EugeneOZ2• 4 years ago

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.

deltaonefour2• 4 years ago

RDR2 was a masterpiece.

I wouldn't call it the best video game in the history of humanity. Certainly the most immersive open world game in the history of humanity with a story and cinematic flair on par with the best films from Hollywood. An achievement by rockstar that has yet to be toppled. No other open world game including their own GTAV even comes close. Not even elden ring beats it.

holoduke• 4 years ago

I don't agree. Mobile gaming went to the roof in terms of annoying monatization models. But you still have good games. The Witcher 3, Mass Effect. Minecraft. All pretty good games with no real shortcomings.

vharuck• 4 years ago

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.

Major studios produce derivative, uninspired, and stale sequels. Much like the movie and television industries. They're in it to make money. So their products will be interesting enough, and often show the desires of the creative employees. But their decisions are strongly driven by profit, and they have to regularly publish something even if their creatives have writer's block or a desire to totally pivot a project.

Real gems are produced by the middle-sized studios that grew from talented developers and great designers. I've only ever learned of them through word of mouth, and even then I only enjoy half the games I try.

Path of Exile

Best example of freemium, IMO. Cosmetics are a big source of income, but the developers still put out new game mechanics every couple of months. Bug and quality-of-life patches are frequent. There is a category of real-money purchases that affect gameplay (storage tabs to help organize items you collect), but I don't mind it. Once bought, they're available to all your characters forever. Not having those tabs only became a problem after many (>100) hours in the game. So I saw it as upgrading from the trial version. I've spent less than $100 on it, but have played for almost a decade.

q-big• 4 years ago

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?

Don't give managers bad ideas.

darkwater• 4 years ago

I think the idea is already there, they just miss the technical capacity for now to implement it.

flohofwoe• 4 years ago

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.

Lazare3• 4 years ago

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.

chronolitus• 4 years ago

I was reminded of this when I ended up on reddit's Unity development subreddit (https://old.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/top/)

The daily amount of creativity, talent and technical ability blows my mind!

AlexandrB3• 4 years ago

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 disappointing.

The indie scene is, indeed, vibrant - but there's a limit to the kinds of games that can come from a small team with a small budget. Meanwhile, extensive monetization is creeping into more and more big franchises and studios. See: the recent Gran Turismo 7 controversy.

nebula8804• 4 years ago

There is value in restricting quantity. The N64 being difficult and expensive to develop/publish for had an alluring charm because of how little it had. In the US, 297 titles spanning from September 29,1996 to April 30, 2002. Each game(even made by lesser known studios) was a deep experience that is memorable years later. Sure, this is not for everyone and even Nintendo can't do this model in 2022 but as I was just digging up my old console the other day, I am reminded at how special having so little was compared to today. In fact the amount of software on platforms today has made me think that I am just wasting my precious time and I have essentially given up on video games. I wonder if others feel the same.

I guess the Ouya tried to replicate this but the ease of development hurt the console in my opinion. Too much software mixed with the same 24 hours in a day that everyone has leads to much of it never being experienced.

brailsafe2• 4 years ago

You're right, but only for you. This only works if all you want to do is play arbitrary interesting games, but that's almost never what anyone wants to do. The author liked Rocket League, and paid money for it, then disagreed with its direction. I like WoW. I disagree with a lot of its direction. Would I play anything else? Maybe, but probably not.

Everyone is playing Elden Ring. If I wanted to play it, but disagreed with the same things, I couldn't play other games and get the same experience.

dfxm122• 4 years ago

The author liked Rocket League, and paid money for it, then disagreed with its direction.

If you gets years of enjoyment out of a game you spent $20 on, I think you've come out ahead in all measures. I think that's the most important thing to not lose sight of. Now, I totally get expressing disagreement over the direction of a game, but at the end of the day it's probably unreasonable to expect to enjoy the experience of a particular game (or any single thing, really) forever. Games change, gamers change.

idleproc2• 4 years ago

Partly. I stopped playing multiplayer games years ago because I was missing out on so many good single player ones. But wanting to play an online multiplayer game these days puts you in a very large bubble with very few options. After scanning the top 10 multiplayer games on twitch it seems the majority follow similar principles.

650REDHAIR• 4 years ago

My biggest problem with MP games is that there is little room for casual gamers in these competitive games anymore. It stops being fun when you get dunked on repeatedly and it’s getting harder to find community servers where people are playing for fun and not to win and clip it for twitch/YouTube/tiktok.

somedude8952• 4 years ago

It's a wonderful time to be a gamer. I mainly avoid AAA and have found a lot of joy with things like Outer Wilds, Project Zomboid and Rimworld.

However, seeing my favorite franchises go down the drain when I would have loved to keep immersing myself in those worlds still makes me bitter over the direction the AAA gaming industry is taking. So I get that people complain.

9999000009992• 4 years ago

I agree 100%.

Kena Bridge of Spirits and Tony Hawk 1 + 2 HD are amazing games and have no DLC.

It's a very complicated problem to solve, on some level adults have the freedom to be self-destructive. In another business case, dating apps are known to knowingly allow fake profiles to roam to encourage people to subscribe. And even after that, you have various freemium add-ons.

Between this, and a very scary experience, I haven't used an app in years and I actually meet much higher quality people now.

But adults have a right to spend their money whichever way they choose, if you enjoy spending 200$ or $300 a month on free to play games, and chatting with bots, enjoy yourself.

The bigger issue with much of this stuff is there's no clear cap on how much money you can spend, so the bulk of freemium revenue comes from a tiny percentage of consumers.

Like an addict will steal to finance their addiction, you'll have cases where someone will just steal their mom's credit card to buy Fortnite skins or Tinder boosts.

I think a good compromise would be to restrict games with free to play mechanics to adults, as in if you're not at least 18 you're not allowed to play games with loot boxes. Once you're an adult, gambling is fine.

At the same time, I also respect the countries who have just banned this form of gambling outright. As it appears the Netherlands has.

https://screenrant.com/lootbox-gambling-microtransactions-il...

AlexandrB3• 4 years ago

I think a good compromise would be to restrict games with free to play mechanics to adults, as in if you're not at least 18 you're not allowed to play games with loot boxes. Once you're an adult, gambling is fine.

Yes. As it stands many of these games are simply an end-run around gambling laws. It would be nice if games with these mechanics were clearly labelled (ESRB is showing its conflict of interest here) and rated 18+.

tqi• 4 years ago

The author of this article doesn't want to do the work to change their bubble, they want everyone else to change.

shrimp_emoji• 4 years ago

Outside the AAA bubble, stuff is native for Linux as a bonus. :D

martinmunk• 4 years ago

I payed for Rocket League quite a while back, as it had Linux support. But then they removed it. Ofc. I couldn't get my money back from Steam, and admittedly its not their fault but still.

libraryatnight• 4 years ago

"here is this fun simple game called Rocket League, its about playing something like soccer but with cars, a few years ago I paid around 20 dollars for it, back then you were able to earn all the garments (hats, wheels, et al) for your cars just by playing the game, 30 minutes per day were more than enough to get all the wardrobe"

Not true. It had crates that dropped and you had to buy keys to unlock them for randomized drops. At least now you know what you're buying if you choose to unlock an item.

"a game I spend more than 2000 hours is now a game I hate -and don’t play, of course-."

This seems ridiculous to me. The game is the same, if you love the game, why would you stop playing because of cosmetics? Just don't buy them, use the free ones they give out. Or, rid yourself of the notion you must have every cosmetic, and kick a game you love that is also a live service a few bucks now and again for something you particularly like.

There's so many terrible free to play games out there with dark patterns and predatory tactics, Rocket League is hardly the enemy here.

mrwww• 4 years ago

I played apex legends for free for nearly a year before buying any silly cosmetics. Granted, now that i do i am hooked and have overall paid more than if i had paid 60 for apex to begin with, but i think its a good volontary subscription model. And since there isn't any pay to win aspect, i'm totally fine with this business model.

vmception2• 4 years ago

purchase price of non-indie games have to go up like 3x then (at least), and people have to accept that….

But since gamers are uniquely price sensitive for prices that haven’t changed in 30 years, for an entertainment form that last longer than pretty much all other forms

Then you have micropayments to nickel and dime gamers to reach the same result

Lazare3• 4 years ago

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?

automatic61312• 4 years ago

Apex Legends is a game that I've currently got over 1000 hours in, which has been a consistent 1 to 2 hours most days since launch three years ago.

I've also spent roughly $1000 dollars in it too to get the "cool" skins. But I don't mind this since I've also subsidized many free players to pay $0 and enjoy it with me and there's no gameplay advantage so I don't feel like it's cheating (and it means there aren't any gross practices)

Now, World of Tanks, there's a game full of dark patterns and gross monetization.

nopcode2• 4 years ago

$1 per hour is a good rate.

I compare it to the cost of other forms entertainment (cinema, theme park, gocarting, sports event, …)

ddaalluu26• 4 years ago

God you're so naive. I wonder if that's intentional or genuine

MaurizioPz• 4 years ago

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/

unhammer• 4 years ago

and https://nobsgames.stavros.io/

cudgy• 4 years ago

… a game I spend more than 2000 hours is now a game I hate …

Ouch. Who cares about loot boxes when the opportunity cost of playing a silly game like that is equal to a years worth of their wages.

wink4• 4 years ago

I think that's an overly general view and in my experience you have to decide case by case, but of course you're free to ignore anything you don't like.

Take Guild Wars 2 for example, it used to be Buy To Play with an excessive ingame shop that sells not only cosmetics but also quality of life improvements, but no 'power items'. I love this model, I bought it years ago on a sale and was happy to give them money for expansions and cash shop items because it's a nice game with an MMO scope, I want it to survive.

Star Wars: The Old Republic launched as a subscription game and went F2P but with certain benefits once you had subbed for a month once. Many people were upset about some of the things they locked and you only get the full experience (or the newest expansion) if you subscribe, but over the years I did spend some time in f2p and I think it's fine.

I guess in general I don't have a problem with free games with a big cash shop (unless it's pay to win), but maybe that's because I either play a game for 10h and then not touch it again (so free would be... I don't see the limitations before I stop) or I'm playing it for years (then I pay hundreds in subscription fees or if it was a one-time purchase and I feel bad not giving them money after a while).

_jerryxiao• 4 years ago

You could have played supertuxkart.

chemmail• 4 years ago

Have you tried reselling clothes? Unless its some hypebeast crap, which isn't even made for wearing, goodwill might not even want it.

jerryxiao• 4 years ago

You could have played supertuxkart.

taylorius• 4 years ago

I think the idea of Marvel films asking for extra cash in realtime to watch a "secret" extra scene is something that they just haven't thought of doing yet.

jsnell• 4 years ago

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.

low_tech_love• 4 years ago

For me the problem is not so much the direct consequences of paying, but the subtle hidden differences between a game that offers things to buy and one that doesn’t. The amount of money you will pay for something will never be worth the time you’d spend to unlock it for free. Maybe you can pay $1 dollar for something that would take a couple of hours of play time to unlock. Who has a shitty job that pays $0.50 an hour? So, the whole thing loses meaning completely. Why bother? I don’t know. Free to play games are to me simply another type of infinite scroll.

mouzogu• 4 years ago

Games, like many things lost their soul around 2007 with the release of the iPhone. The world has gone in a different direction, the worser timeline perhaps.

kkjjkgjjgg5• 4 years ago

I play Fortnite which is from the same company as Rocket League (afaik). I think their model is extremely fair. You can play for free, and you can buy outfits that don't give you any advantage in the game.

At first coming with "old gamer mindset" I also thought "who would ever pay for that nonsense". But now I simply see it as supporting a creation I enjoy. I buy the "battle pass" every season (maybe 8$), and every couple of months perhaps a funny skin.

Back in the day, I think a World of Warcraft subscription was 15$ per month, so I still pay far, far less than I would have paid for WoW.

There are other games that annoy me, as they basically push gambling onto my kids. They will literally have a push notification telling them to try a spin on the lucky wheel.

DaveSapien3• 4 years ago

At great expense to my carrier I have out and out refused to take part in creating these predatory practices. If you could hear the contempt that "some" game devs have for their customers, you might never buy a game ever again. It really is quite shocking...and the contempt exists from top to bottom, its everywhere. That isn't to say there's not a vast number of of honourable people in the industry, not at all. It's only to say that we as a whole are allowing the demons run amok.

I have seen the damage that compulsive behaviour can do to our most vulnerable in society. Lives ruined, homelessness, suicide, familial dissolution, the list goes on. Children, people with mental dysfunctions, suffers of brain injuries, even people with Parkinson's disease (on l-dopa).

All the people in our society that can control themselves the least are the target. And these people are precisely the target, specifically these people, the 0.001% of players that make up the majority of their revenue. Some companies find out who they are and continually and specifically court them with free t-shirts, beta access, 'free' in-game gifts, etc. In some companies its a whole department that do this kind of customer management. Developing personal relationships all to keep them hooked.

Now most companies don't do this, its much more automated and in-game that this Catfishing, if I can use a term like that.

At the fundamental level predatory games are not actually games they are variable ratio reinforcement schedule machines. Think Guinea pigs in a lab being rewarded for pushing a button. An ultra advanced slot machine that continually changes it's odd's depending on what the app thinks you will be vulnerable too. And it attacks. Now, if you aren't a vulnerable person you will see the obvious things like the pop-ups asking you to spend money or a timer mechanism. And you might think how stupid people must be to fall for that, but you wont see the game's dynamic balancing, because you are not the target. If you're not the target you will never progress further up the attack protocol. So it will always just look like an innocent game to most people.

Its insidious and immoral. (I'm mostly talking about mobile games...mostly)

MMS21• 4 years ago

Basically, if you see the trap you aren't the target. Wow I never thought of it that way.

somehnacct37572• 4 years ago

Having worked in the games industry on Facebook and mobile games, I don't think your perspective is representative.

Most f2p games are targeting a % mix of whales, dolphins, flounders, guppies. You might shoot for 0.1% whales, 10% dolphins,40% flounders, 50% guppies.

The whales will have an outsized impact on revenue for their count, and you largely can't plan for them to arrive. They're typically (very) wealthy people for whom spending $10,000 on a game is cheaper than the watch on their arm. Game companies absolutely set up a VIP customer service team for these players, this is the experience they expect everywhere in life. It's the difference between them playing your game for 2 months or 6 with a significant revenue impact.

Dolphins will be upper-middle class big spenders. They might try to collect every premium hat in your game, or regularly spend during special events. Again to them dropping $200/month in a game is not a hardship. In fact it's cheaper than most other hobbies they could do with their affluence like golf or skiing.

Next is the flounders, the goal is just to get them to spend at all. There might be some singular obviously valuable purchase in the game such as a season pass. This is basically game subscription services repackaged for the modern day.

The rest don't pay. You keep guppies around in hopes you can graduate them to flounders at some point down the line. In the meantime, they are cannon fodder for your matchmaking queues.

None of these psychographic groupings aim to exploit easily manipulated people. Rather the pay bands expand to match the disposable income of various economic classes. This is the same thing that has happened in other industries for a very long time. Some people rent skis, some bring their own, others hire personal trainers, and some rent the entire ski club for a private event. Go to a concert and some have nosebleed seats, others are front row, some watch from boxes, others pay to meet & greet the band after the show.

DaveSapien3• 4 years ago

Thank you for confirming what I said.

I know I won't convince you one way or the other. I've seen statements eerily similar to yours before, that I feel that it might be a regurgitation from some article or book somewhere.

Note the use of dehumanising terms, literally calling customers animals and 'cannon fodder'.

This is what this (part of the) industry thinks of the people that play their games, cattle.

mbg721• 4 years ago

Video games and board games have kind of the same dilemma--the medium has matured to the point that further sophistication isn't necessarily an improvement. A good computer game might be an indie game that looks like it could have been made 20 years ago, because the assumption that more tech equals better games doesn't hold anymore. The board-game world is lagging a little behind that; right now the big trend is "legacy games", where you play through a campaign one time and you're done. I think it's a similar idea, though--the art for the sake of art designers in both cases can do their thing, and the big money is in "Sequel II: Let's Do It All Again, Again".

aftergibson2• 4 years ago

I believe the term is called “whales” for those vulnerable to predatory monetisation. The sad part being many are escaping other addictions through video games, and that escape now attempts to profit through similar tactics. It’s really disappointing.

aftergibson2• 4 years ago

I’m in the same boat, I have the self control not to be affected by these tactics, I also don’t want to ban these types of monetisation but I do feel the industry needs a regulatory reality check.

Gambling mechanics (loot boxes) are having a similar psychological effect to regular gambling and “self regulation” means those at risk are unprotected. Is there a way to setup gambling limits on FIFA loot boxes right now? What about children who haven’t the cognitive ability to reason about these things, are they barred like a casino?

Again don’t want to block innovation and alternative monetisation opportunities, but we should do better at protecting the vulnerable.

incomingpain• 4 years ago

Video game industry was slow at this approach and there was significant push back on all these things. Pay to win vs drm vs gamergate stuff. The industry didn't care at all about any of the push back.

It's actually interesting to see how much the gaming industry doesn't give 2 squats about what online chat says. The gaming industry has dealt with online chat since basically forever. I remember counterstrike 1.5 pre-steam in the early 2000s and learning all kinds of new pejoratives. Gaming industry understood that the 12 year old edgy angsty teens are going to say all kinds of idiotic stuff. I am guilty of this indictment for when I was 12.

This is something a ton of other industries have not learnt yet. These other industries are looking at what is being said online and are responding like they need to take those opinions as truth.

Then again that's also why Elon Musk is mocking Netflix: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1503287788652871680

1 million likes and 150,000 retweets because he's not wrong.

saturdaysaint2• 4 years ago

I play Fall Guys and Warzone, both of which offer cosmetic modifications that are unlockable both through gameplay and by purchasing them. IMO, the cosmetics are little more than flair that add a little bit of fun and personal expression to the experience. Along with the "Battle Pass" model, where users are rewarded for regular play during content "Seasons", these mini-economies incentivize people to play regularly (which improves multiplayer games on a lot of levels) and incentivize the developers to continually add content. People that get these cosmetics enjoy having a distinctive profile in a social experience they spend a lot of time in and subsidize gamers that enjoy robust free experiences (e.g. kids/teens who provide a lot of excellent competition). It's all a win-win-win-win in my book.

I'm 41 years old and have fond memories of the old days of packaged buy-once games, but the modern battle pass/cosmetic standard seems like a much more realistic way of having a consistently updated experience with strong engagement year-round.

jimmyjazz143• 4 years ago

yeah I kinda hated the idea of the free to play model at first but since getting more into multiplayer games I think free to play model help keep them healthy and populated so it seems like a win-win to me. I'm glad not every game uses that model though.

wellthisisgreat2• 4 years ago

Yeah the Rambo skin was worth $10 and it added to the experience. I don’t mind paying extra for it.

However Warzone is a prime example of cosmetics affecting the game - remember any of the scandals (DMR-gate of Dec 2020), when the desire to sell weapon blueprints / Battle Pass pushes the designers overpower the new weapons. It’s subtle but very toxic. Or the Roze skin. Even if that one wasn’t intentional they can’t change/remove it now because people paid for it.

saturdaysaint2• 4 years ago

Yeah, there's room to quibble when it comes to Warzone, but it really doesn't add up to much in my view. The most gamebreaking advantages - The Roze skin and the broken Mac-10 blueprint - were basically accidents when it was a fairly young game (< a year old), and almost all of them were freebies included in the basic battle pass (so essentially free for anyone that plays regularly). Statistical anomolies still come around and "break" the game every once in a while, but it's really reached a point where most of the main weapons are well balanced to the point that I often think I would have been best off sticking with some of the first guns I levelled up.

Most blueprints effectively just make levelling up new weapons a more pleasant experience, maybe saving you 1 - 2 hours for $20.

omgmajk2• 4 years ago

I mostly hate what mobile games have become. It feels like there are pretty much zero games that you can play that doesn't have microtransactions or a wait time between stuff. Unless you go into the premium store and then most games require a controller - which I don't want to use.

anon23anon• 4 years ago

I personally don't see the big deal in paying $5-$10 for a video game. Yes I realize for people in the third worlds that's a lot of money but if you're struggling w/ food and water spending money on games for your phone is probably just a bad idea overall.

omgmajk2• 4 years ago

The problem is that most interesting games require a controller. I would gladly pay that amount for good games.

tejohnso• 4 years ago

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?

I don't think that's a fair comparison. It's more like offering to have him use a special limited edition outfit rather than his well known outfit. And I don't see what the big deal is. You can get the standard cost experience, or the higher fee, upsell experience. It's not uncommon, and it's not a major problem. Just pay for what you want. (And learn to want less).

boredumb• 4 years ago

Just imagine in game purchasable cosmetic items as a buy-only NFT.

jdlyga• 4 years ago

The real problem with modern games is they're too focused on making the biggest most important game possible instead of making the game fun. I think development teams and budgets have gotten too large. It's the constraints that really bring out people's creativity.

deltaonefour2• 4 years ago

If you think the industry is shit right now, you haven't been gaming. Literally OP article didn't even mention Elden Ring the greatest Triple A game that's trending right now.

Elden Ring is the opposite of everything OP mentioned and you can't criticize the industry without bringing up the IT game that is literally the opposite of the entire article.

The golden age of the gaming industry is right now. That goes for triple A games AND indie games.

The whole DLC BS is this annoying side thing among triple A studios but it has nothing to do with overall trend of the industry.

alex_sf• 4 years ago

There are definitely dark patterns, dishonestly, manipulation to drive sales in F2P games. That's not a good thing.

However, most of the people criticizing this did not grow up poor. When I was a kid, there were a ton of video games I would have loved to play, but my family couldn't afford it.

Nowadays, everyone can play. The difference between the haves and have-nots are cosmetics. Better than that: in most games, the best cosmetics can often be unlocked purely (and only) by skill. A poor kid may not have as many skins or whatever, but they can still unlock things.

kgwxd2• 4 years ago

I've played a ridiculous amount of Rocket League. "30 minutes per day were more than enough to get all the wardrobe" is just not true. Keys and locked loot boxes were in the game years ago, it was terrible, it was taken out well before it went FTP. Now, every seasons has free stuff, a few of them are random, and random blueprint drops after matches that can be unlocked with credits, but you know exactly what you're buying. There's a "Rocket Pass" which gets you a lot more stuff including exactly enough credits to buy the next season pass with, but nothing in the Rocket Pass is random and it doesn't get you any more chances at random stuff. You can't buy the random stuff anymore, on purpose.

I buy the pass every season, even though I've been wearing the same things for years, because I can afford it, and would like to see the game (more specifically, the servers) live forever.

jimmyjazz143• 4 years ago

Over 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 the free model is great and I don't feel like there is any loss for someone not wanting to spend money on them.

I think those cases are different than the mobile app style which makes no sense to me since many of the games are single player so nobody will see the skins or whatever anyway.

Karawebnetwork• 4 years ago

"Laurey LoL statistics indicate players spend an average of $92 a year on the game."

XCSme2• 4 years ago

The thing about IAPs in games is that most money comes from whales, people spending thousands of dollars for customizations or pay-to-win items, this rises the average by a lot. It would be nice to see the distribution of payments.

hfourm• 4 years ago

I may spend 100-200 a year on Valorant. However, I am getting way more per hour value out of it than say, a 50 - 60$ single player game that I quit after a single play through. Or worse, the 50-60$ AAA titles that popup every few years, get a swarm of players in the first few months, then die off as the ADHD Twitch community moves to something else.

andechs• 4 years ago

The median spend might be zero $ per year.

auto2• 4 years ago

My experience lines up with yours, as a looong time Halo veteran who is a bit bummed with the state of Infinite, I'm happy to not pay a cent, despite spending thousands on Halo over the years. I've also spent a decent amount of the previous year playing Valorant, and I almost feel bad that I've paid nothing for it, but the the problem is that apparently the economists Riot employs have figured the sweet spot for selling in game items is $20+ (with many items in the 30-40 range), which is just too much for a single item for me.

The irony is that if gun skins were all $5-10, I'd probably have already spent over $100 on them. Oh well, time to queue up again and contribute nothing back.

Hasu• 4 years ago

Queueing up IS contributing something back - it's a multiplayer game, so every person playing is helping keep queue times low. It also gives Riot a MAU and DAU which they probably track internally to determine how successful a game is (and thus how much to invest in more content for that game).

vl2• 4 years ago

despite spending thousands on Halo over the years

But how could you have spent thousands? Original Halos don’t have micro transactions.

sheepybloke2• 4 years ago

I completely agree! I feel that way about Hearthstone Battlegrounds cosmetics. I've been playing a lot and thought I might buy a skin pack or two to vary the experience up a bit, but all of the packs were more than $20 a piece! I was totally down for like $5-15, but once you hit $20, it's a like a switch flips in my brain to not worth it...

xeromal3• 4 years ago

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 incredibly cheap amount of fun I've gotten for a whole year when the entire world was closed and I couldn't get out and have fun. I really don't see why people complain so much. Coin-operated arcades were literally a microtransaction model from the 70s and 80s!

I'm paying 25 cents an hour on a game with a lot more labor involved than an old arcade game.

mattbrewsbytes• 4 years ago

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.

wly_cdgr2• 4 years ago

Lol whatever, play other games then

Fire-Dragon-DoL2• 4 years ago

You can play those beautiful single player games that have none of these problems, or play rocketleague for the gameplay instead of trying to play "pimp my car" while playing rocketleague. I think it's good training for life: practice with temptetion with something as cheap as a videogame and stretch your "resistence" now, so that later when your income increases even further, you will avoid spending on way more expensive things. I'm talking by experience, wasted quite some money in league of legends, but I don't play it anymore

I played yesterday night couch coop rocketleague with my friends (my daughter, me, my wife and 2 friends), we have the basic cars and had a great time with that game.

And yes, bought the game for super cheap long time ago

SV_BubbleTime• 4 years ago

You can play those beautiful single player games that have none of these problems

I was never a small studio lover, until all the large studios started really sucking.

Tunic, Subnautica, Hollowknight, Outer Wilds are absolutely must plays. Tunic being the latest which has been the closest I’ll ever get to playing A Link To The Past for the first time again.

Fire-Dragon-DoL2• 4 years ago

Exactly. Well, some indie games are now extremely good, way better than big studios.

  FTL: Faster Than Light
  Ori and the Blind Forest (doesn't count as indie)
  Ori and the Will of the Wisps
  Invisible Inc.
  Hollow Knight
  XCOM
  Dyson Sphere Program
  Kerbal Space Program (to be fair, this is not really for everyone)
  XCOM 2
  Assault Android Cactus (great for coop!)
  Factorio
  Dark Souls 1 and 3 (big studio)
  Frostpunk
  Hellpoint
  Sundered
  Starsector
  EXAPUNKS
  Monster Hunter World: Iceborne (yeah, this is from a big studio)

My list is really long, so I'll stop there, this is already years of gaming

gigaflop8• 4 years ago

The big studios sucking has, for better or worse, reduced the amount of time I spend on games.

They don't survive if they don't do something right. Compare that to the big studios who churn out their yearly releases, and get by because they're still milking a cash cow that dominates the 'gaming' headspace for people who prefer to turn on a console and stay busy.

wly_cdgr2• 4 years ago

Cosmetics are a fine business model. I am more worried about the assholes who think it's fine to play a game for dozens or hundreds of hours without buying any. These are the entitled freeloader scumbags who ruin it for everyone else (by forcing gamedevs to use P2W instead of cosmetics to stay in business), not gamedevs

XCSme2• 4 years ago

I think the given example is really bad, Rocket League does free-to-play in one of the best ways possibles. I never spend any money on their IAPs nor do I care about them, I still feel like I have access to more customization/items than I have the time to use.

A "better" example are games that have the goal of progression (e.g. city builders, like Clash of Clans) and then simply lock that progression behind a paywall, giving you the option to either wait for hours or pay a "small" amount to skip waiting.

mmacvicarprett• 4 years ago

You are missing one big and relevant point, the goal is not to get money for every small change but that now nobody needs to pay $20 to play the game. It is done to grow the game but by drastically increasing its reach. For a competitive multiplayer game that is a very good thing.

conjectures• 4 years ago

Meanwhile (probably elsewhere on HN), someone is hating on web3. Which might enable reselling all this junk.

jokoon• 4 years ago

I think overwatch is the best fps in the world. I love the game mechanics.

Meanwhile, Im realizing blizzard encourage smurfing, meaning have several accounts, to constantly win against lower skilled players in competitive, instead of playing against players of their own skills.

You now see entire teams "deranking" meaning losing on purpose, to lose skill rating, so they can climb all over again. It ruins the game.

Other games add barriers, like sms, or scanning for ip.

Blizzard does make a lot of money that way.

bob1029• 4 years ago

Blizzard is fully aware of this. Their matchmaker is perfectly designed to provoke this behavior with their use of hidden ratings and other rubber-banding mechanics.

Why fix it if its not broken? Buying another copy of overwatch is a drop in the bucket for players who have already invested thousands of hours.

gigaflop8• 4 years ago

best fps in the world

Have you played for very long? I originally got into it several years ago, a little before Moira was announced. After a while, it felt like everything devolved into samey-ness, especially when the maps stagnated.

Not long after the hamster showed up, my whole group of friends had also gotten bored of it.

DynamicStatic• 4 years ago

I would say it is definitely a contender for the best fps. Especially if you play it in a eSports manner with a dedicated team. Not many games that can compete with what ow is doing. Very excited to see what ow2 brings.

Mikeb85• 4 years ago

Meh, if you don't like FTP and loot boxes avoid those games. There's lots of good more traditional titles out there, indie games, MMOs, and yes FTP games. Choice is better than ever.

ED_Radish• 4 years ago

at least you can resell your barbie and resell the hat but we don’t have that privilege because Valve determined we are not worthy of it

Isn't valve the only company that lets you resell cosmetics?

fattless• 4 years ago

Going to repost something I wrote up earlier on a similar topic, regarding how games are changing their designs to push players to buy things.

“The worst part of this trend to me is how many games sacrifice their identity to fit the mold that is now most profitable, it feels so soulless. This is all from my own experience/memory.

Every game needs live service, seasons, and a battle pass. While I appreciate that it can keep the game fresh and evolving over time, I think a lot of times its harmful. Sometimes a relatively simple game is blown out of proportion over time and id almost rather a stagnant game. Furthermore, gameplay can suffer too. In my opinion R6 siege started really strong, but has gone downhill recently, most obviously in operator design. Real power creep is sometimes an issue as well, somewhat recently I remember there were one or two operators added that felt like almost direct upgrades to base game ones. In its case, both the art style and operator design suffered from being stretched out for so long. Or RDR2, who sells most of the content through their premium currency and whose movement between the single player and online is so drastically different that fights online look like smash bros melee matches with frantic strafing and rolling. Compare this to titanfall 2’s design, which has remained stagnant (because it was killed a long time ago), but incredibly successful maintaining a large player base to this day.

Cod and pubg have sacrificed their art style and aesthetic, MW went from “realistic” tactical characters to jigsaw puppets and neon, out of place outfits. It’s like power creep, but for ridiculousness, skins have to get crazier and crazier because sometimes it keeps people buying them because its funny. It fit in fortnite because it was cartoonish and ridiculous from the beginning, but through MW and CW lifespan you can see the art style gradually decay. These game aren’t really meant to be taken seriously, but it always kinda put me off. Not necessarily making an argument about my taste, but rather how the games stray more and more from their original vision, driven by micro transactions. Battlefield has thrown out their traditional classes for specialists following in r6 and other hero shooters footsteps, part of me always kinda felt like it was to sell skins for each specialist, but I might be wrong here.

This isnt the biggest deal, especially not within the games industry, but frustrating to see innovation slowly be stamped back into the mold. There are many games that hold true to their visions or fill these voids especially in the indie scene but the state of AAA gaming and how it molds to the market is a little disappointing to me.”

japhyr• 4 years ago

My son is eleven, and he has been so frustrated so many times when he's found what he thought was a good game, only to discover that it's a pay-to-win game.

I've learned in this thread that there are games where most or all of the IAPs are cosmetic, and don't give players significant advantages. My son already plays Rocket League. Can anyone recommend other good games where you don't have to buy your way to competitiveness?

nerdponx• 4 years ago

Can anyone recommend other good games where you don't have to buy your way to competitiveness?

Single-player games, and a handful of MMORPGs.

Minecraft and Terraria would both probably be good for an 11-year-old. CS:Go of course if you want an actual competitive game.

And Dota 2, if you're OK with your son becoming an addicted degenerate.

Ygg2• 4 years ago

Single player games. Stuff made by Larian for Coop DnD.

Deep Rock Galactic for Coop mining fun.

scrapcode• 4 years ago

MOBAs League of Legends and DOTA2 are FTP but the acquisition of a wider variety of characters in LoL is excruciatingly slow without paying. The communities also seem extremely toxic in my limited experience.

spicybright• 4 years ago

There's more great games at our finger tips than ever before imo

I agree AAA big budget games suck, but there's soo many good indie titles that can be much more fun than them.

You don't gotta only eat at mc donalds.

failrate• 4 years ago

There are so many new and dufferent games being created at all times, I defy you to even point in a general direction and say "this is what video games are".

Coupled with that is the horrible viewpoint that the money for your game is now "wasted", which assumes that most everything we buy is kept, when in reality, most of what we buy is transient: food, energy, garments.

akira2501• 4 years ago

I think people play games looking for an escape. So a game that attempts to bring the "transient reality" of everyday life as part of it's core mechanic is severely missing the point.

Then again, Roblox has kids literally "working" for each other. So, what do I know?

ajmurmann3• 4 years ago

Roblox and kids might not be the best example, given that that doesn't reflect the reality for kids they'd want to escape.

jerf• 4 years ago

Most people who say this mean "this is what AAA video games are". Rocket League is arguably not AAA but is clearly taking its more recent changes from it.

As you say, many new things are being created, and the solution for the most part is simple: Don't buy AAA. It has almost no appeal to me anymore, and even when I hear about some franchise I like or used to like, I just assume the worst if it's making the leap to AAA, and to be honest, that metric hasn't failed me in a while.

I'm late to the bandwagon and just bought Slay the Spire for $10. No microtransactions, no unlocks, no AAA garbage at all. Just money for fun. That's the solution. Don't play games that are just platforms to deliver psychological manipulation to extract money from you when there are games that will deliver the same basic dopamine hits for defined amounts of money, and for goodness' sake, don't pay money for things that are just platforms to psychologically manipulate you into giving them money. And often, frankly, aren't as good at the dopamine hits anyhow since they have to wrap them around manipulation.

Spinnaker_• 4 years ago

I don't think it's necessarily AAA games. I don't game much anymore, but the last five games I played are: Elden Ring, Red Dead Redemption 2, God of War, Super Mario Odyssey and Breath of The Wild. None of them have the problems mentioned.

It seems like it's really easy to avoid microtransactions, etc.

duckfruit• 4 years ago

I agree. We live in a golden age of gaming. Steam and all the game stores have a practically unlimited catalog (granted there's a lot of shovelware, but still plenty to chew on). Triple A games with budgets that rival and even exceed tentpole Hollywood franchises. New art forms constantly furthering the boundaries of narrative driven entertainment. Hyper realistic graphics pushing the frontiers of CG and even AI research with DLSS and the like. Gaming can be entertainment, a social activity, a creative tool (There's Minecraft of course, but also check out some of the incredible stuff made in Dreams on the Playstation https://youtu.be/AXtNlgjPb80?t=288).

And on top of all that, there's also innovation in the underlying business models. F2P games that are morally dubious and depend on hapless whales that get addicted to your product and subsidize it for the rest of the playerbase? Sure! Single $60 or $70 purchase without DLCs? Contrary to the author's insinuation, there are plenty of games that still follow that model. Expansion packs! Monthly subscriptions! There's just no other kind of media that even comes close -- where else can you spend $50 and potentially get hundreds or even thousands of hours of entertainment?

ilrwbwrkhv2• 4 years ago

The fact that all consoles charge money for "online play" irks me. I mean the internet is there for a reason.

oneoff7867• 4 years ago

Online play typically involves servers to authoritatively host the game. It’s not just “the Internet”.

ilrwbwrkhv2• 4 years ago

Which the games themselves provide.

zzo38computer3• 4 years ago

You should not be required to use the official servers; you might set up your own, which could use LAN if you wanted to do, I should think. However, not all games (and other computer programs) are designed in this way.

PaulHoule2• 4 years ago

My son is a fan of

https://krunker.io/

where the "trading items" aspect adds a lot of fun to the game. I am generally skeptical of "the metaverse" but Krunker shows that item trading can be fun, you just don't need a blockchain to do it.

allo37• 4 years ago

I wonder how much of this is driven simply by the fact that games are often bought by young people.

I remember when I was a kid/teenager I just didn't have much money, so if I wanted a game I either had to save for it or ask my parents. But if a game was free, then no problem, right? Just download and enjoy! And the microtransaction-based content addition is much more allowance-friendly than a monthly subscription or a large (for a kid) upfront cost.

chaostheory• 4 years ago

Millions of children in the world do not have the money to spend $20 (quoted price for a game in the blog) for one game. Loot boxes subsidize games for these children.

oneoff7867• 4 years ago

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?

I would happily have this be an option if it meant that Netflix was free. I wouldn’t spend a dime.

ianbutler2• 4 years ago

Counter points: literally every indie game, Elden Ring, Tiny Tina's Wonderland, God of War, all of Nintendo (they have other issues though) and the literally hundreds of triple A games that aren't live service. I'm quite sure I'm missing a lot, but these are just top of mind.

They've chosen a very narrow definition of video games to be disappointed over.

s_trumpet• 4 years ago

Sadly, this curse is nearly inescapable if you want to play modern online multiplayer or PVP games. MOBAs, MMOs, shooters, racing games, etc. are almost all like this now.

ianbutler2• 4 years ago

I play all of those, I buy cosmetics because I have the cash and realize it’s an optional part of the game. But it’s amazing the quality of game people can play for absolutely free and never spend a dime. My friend for instance has probably gotten at least a couple hundred hours in Apex Legends now without ever spending a cent. On one hand I’m absolutely against micro transactions that give tangible gameplay impact but Im hard pressed to find issues with pure cosmetic purchases other than maybe how sometimes the marketing around them is manipulative and the Skinner box that is the loot box. I think Chivalry II has probably the ideal implementation of this. No loot boxes, just pay cash for the visual you want but it doesn’t effect game play.

deathcalibur• 4 years ago

I’m confused about the hate towards Valve since they have created the steam marketplace where you can sell and buy in-game items, to literally address one of the main points of this article. The problem is that Rocket League isn’t using this system (I guess, I don’t play it).

henriquecm8• 4 years ago

You talk about not being able to resell the cosmetics because valve doesn't allow, but many games on steam allow that, and it's up to the developer to implement the integration with steam market. It probably also gets harder to implement if the game is available in more than one storefront/platform.

You can't withdraw the money from steam, you can only spend it on other games or the market, but there are some 3rd party sites that you to sell these cosmetics and withdraw the money, but thrusting them is up to you.

dfxm122• 4 years ago

It's good that there's plenty of games the author probably hasn't played yet.

I get pressing back against what seems like to be a growing trend of exploiting whales (although that doesn't seem to be the exact point they're trying to make), but on the other hand there are a few Castlevania games I can play on my 3DS that I missed when they first came out. I'd just as soon play one of those than worry about what's on Steam.

And on the other finger, even if you only care for contemporary games, Elden Ring just came out and has a TON of content before having to buy any DLC/whatever.

rolph2• 4 years ago

chiming in late here, but it looks like a substantial portion of the thread is about monetization of skins, and items.

that seems to be what video games have become.

I remember the days of tombraider and all the skins, and modding kits available. this was grassroots stuff to begin with.

eventually the industry realized that server subscriptions were not enough, and commercialized the elements of the gameplay.

ive never purchased a console, and i think Torchlight [0] is the most recent game i have in the MAME machine.

the last 20 years of gaming is mostly gone in this direction and has little appeal, other than hacking around in a graciously received console from the closet, that was designated as {bookend} .

i think GOG is about as good as it gets now.

[0] https://gog-games.com/search/torchlight

k12sosse• 4 years ago

Escape From Tarkov is a most impressive video game. It's challenging, provides a path to success, and there is no pay2win.

There are varying tiers of support of the developer which only provide you with quality of life improvements, such as a larger backpack (stash) for storing items between sessions ('raids'). All of those gains are achievable in-game with no requirement to purchase anything but the base video game.

It's quite an achievement, and very fun. I can say that as someone who's played video games since monitors had two colours. It's not your average video game, but it's base recipe are already being copied out to new games (The Cycle). The idea of persistence of character is quite refreshing in a die-and-respawn-without-consequence state of the FPS world.

Also I just wanted to point out from the article:

We used to laugh of people buying hats for barbie and now we are bigger fools than them, at least you can resell your barbie and resell the hat but we don’t have that privilege because Valve determined we are not worthy of it, once you stop playing a game 100% of the money you spend on it disappears, you can’t recover any of it, not 50%, not 20%, just nothing, doesn’t matter if you already spend $20 bucks on it or $3000.

That is more or less incorrect to state. Valve may not offer a way to redeem in-game loot back to real dollars, but you can sell in-game loot on the steam marketplace for valvebucks. It's up to the developer to implement. But for example, you can sell your PUBG skins on the marketplace. So while the money is still "gone" from your "real world wallet", it's not locked out of having "value" which restores the value back into the "steam wallet", which can be used in lieu of "real world" money in the future.

I once sold an in-game item for $40 in valvebucks. Not exactly the $1,000 CS:GO knife skins, but hey, it's not nothing.

gxqoz• 4 years ago

I don't play too many games anymore, but as a player I've been able to have more than enough content in the last 15 years of gaming without literally ever encountering a lootbox. This is mainly due to my preference for Nintendo and indie games. But there's enough games out there that you can basically choose your own adventure.

Beltiras• 4 years ago

I don't play the F2P games on PC. Got one of those on my phone which is a good turd-passing helper (come to think of it, aren't all phone games F2P P2W games?).

I only buy quality games that are worth the money spent. Bought Factorio in Early Access, paid money for Rogue Tower the other day. Come to think of it, maybe games have taken a turn for the worse. I'm spending less on games over time at least.

sabujp2• 4 years ago

This is all due to having a device in your pocket constantly connected to the sum of all human knowledge. This device created an attention economy that forces producers/developers to create ever increasing ways of engaging your attention for as long as possible. Mobile game spend was $80 billion in 2020, PC $37 billion, and consoles $45 billion [1]. There are still games out there that don't go the loot box route, but perhaps they aren't as popular (addictive) as the free loot box ones, specifically due to the reason mentioned in the parentheses.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/05/27/mobile...

sabujp2• 4 years ago

I recently got my kids playing Trackmania to help their eye hand coordination. It operates on the freemium model but the free version is adequate enough since there are enough tracks every season and enough previous seasons available to keep them engaged during daily video game time. You can also download user created tracks (or create your own!) and addons that keep things interesting. Hopefully ubisoft doesn't switch this to the loot box model, once you start adding incentives and milestones, that's when things start getting addictive.

tehredplague• 4 years ago

If it's purely cosmetic and gives no advantage (outside them style points) then I don't care. As for whether or not you "own" what you're paying for. These things that merely represent physical objects, but are in fact just pixels. Well you've gotta let that one go. Would you complain about how every time you buy a cheeseburger after you eat it your money was wasted because you no longer own a cheeseburger? I doubt it. Perhaps there's a valuable lesson to be learned here. If you think by spending money you will enhance you're experience, then you paid for the experience not the material possession. kaboom.

danielvaughn• 4 years ago

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.

epgui• 4 years ago

This 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.

decebalus1• 4 years ago

Not sure I agree with such a sweeping opinion about 'what video games have become'. I've been playing video games since the early 90s and quite frankly I've never been happier with my gaming career like I've been in the past 4-5 years. And haven't been paying anything for it (aside from the price of the game). Maybe I'm playing the 'wrong' games? I also don't play any EA games out of principle..

I do agree with the underlying sentiment. But these pay for play schemes are so easy to ignore. I play CS:GO and get a lot of enjoyment out of it without paying for skins or special weapons or whatever.

babyshake• 4 years ago

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?

I don't think it would be this exactly, but I can absolutely see this type of thing happening.

balls187• 4 years ago

Two Words: Elden Ring.

90+ hours into the game. 100% pure joy.

a game I spend more than 2000 hours is now a game I hate -and don’t play, of course-.

2000 hours is quite a lot of time to invest in a game. I imagine the longevity for the game is because the developers were updating the game, which was funded by the very things the author is complaining about.

astrobe_• 4 years ago

FWIW, that's one reason why I turned away from commercial games and play almost only FOSS games.

Yes, they don't have an income so they are at least 10 years behind on tech and generally have less good assets (textures, shaders, sound) (there are exceptions), yes, the player base is more on the 10,000s at best than on the million (an obvious problem for multiplayer games), but on the bright side their decisions are not tainted by profitability or business model considerations.

For instance, to replace Rocket League, OP could try the soccer mode of SuperTuxKart.

honkycat• 4 years ago

While it is true that there are a ton of great games out there, the reality is that if you enjoy multiplayer, community matters A LOT.

There was an excellent game released recently called Chivalry 2. It was an extremely fun "realistic-ish" sword fighting game with huge servers and excellent implementation.

Last time I checked, nobody was playing. This is true for SO MANY interesting multiplayer games.

So I feel what this person is saying. Popular multiplayer games are not to my taste these days ( I miss Quake III ). And there isn't a huge community for a lot of the games I am interested in. So it goes.

Another thing is: A lot of these games are made for young people. So yes they do dumb dances and are cringe-y but you have to just get over that. I very normal and was really into zombies when I was 11, I'm sure I would be doing the Fortnite dances as well. Though I may have been contrarian and into PUBG...

tills13• 4 years ago

Video games, movies, TV, books, etc have never been better yet all people focus on are the bad examples. There have always been bad examples. Get out of the past.

zzo38computer3• 4 years ago

I agree with this; there are these and other problems. However, not all computer games are designed like this.

My opinion is, the game should be made to be standalone. No internet connection should be required for the game to work (unless you wish to join an official tournament that runs using the internet, perhaps). It should be independent of the time, date, etc. It should be independent of other instances of the same game on the computer.

There are other problems too with some games, such as some are too easy. Some have too many cutscenes. Some take up too much disk space and/or RAM. etc.

Fortunately, there are still some good ones. One case of this is some people will write a computer game for older systems (e.g. NES/Famicom) and then you can run in an emulator of your choice (or on the real hardware if you have it); the emulator may include capabilities such as controls remapping, save states, etc. But there are also games written for native code too, that can also be good.

See comment 30827853 (and its replies) for some comments about dark patterns; I will write a comment there, too (later today, probably).

Melatonic• 4 years ago

The thing I found funny about cosmetics is that often the players that are REALLY good (as in very top of the game) end up stripping off all cosmetics and going as bare as possible (or just using one single basic cosmetic). When you get to the point where you already own all the good stuff and have used it for so long theres a novelty in looking vanilla. And of course you could argue a competitive advantage in that people may think you are a much, much worse player than you really are.

0des• 4 years ago

This is also why some models dress and look the way they do. Looking at you, balenciaga.

powerapple• 4 years ago

when you grow old, you start to hate every new change :)

pmontra• 4 years ago

On the other side, I'd pay an extra to buy a fully unlocked Gran Turismo because I don't want to spend time to get driving license again for the nth time, money for the nth time, tracks, cars, etc. It's a total waste of time. Let me drive and that's it. So I didn't buy any of the most recent versions of the franchise. A loss for sellers, I can play with what I already have.

screye• 4 years ago

I don't agree.

The industry has begun splintering in the same manner as Hollywood. Disney releases popcorn-entertainment and makes money off merchandise. Indie studios are creating quality movies of a tier that we never used to see before. Lastly, have some quirky bigwigs (wes anderson, Edgar Wright) who reliably create highly-stylized memorable if familiar works.

Epic, EA and Ubisoft are the Disney equivalents. Nintendo, CDPR, Naughty Dog, Kojima, From Software are your quirky stylized studios. Then you have indie studios making games like Hades, CupHead and Hollow Knight that provide excellent & complete experiences at the fraction of the investment. You get to pick which one you want.

Microtransactions are mostly restricted to the big studios. Restricting core gameplay aspects via microtransactions or Pay-2-win setups are pretty scummy. But, MMORPGS had those problems in the late 90s. So, it isn't new by any means. In cases where smaller games have microtransactions, they tend to be limited and exclusively cosmetic. The fact that I have played hundreds of hours of Rocket league and Dota without spending a single dollar, is a testament to how secondary the cosmetics are to the core gameplay loop.

I actually wonder if systems built to exploit whales are unethical. In some sense, the poor get to enjoy polished games because the rich are willing to pay an exponentially greater sum to look pretty in game. I don't think that's entirely bad.

Now, I do dislike 'loot boxes' with a passion. They play with our 'monkey brain', forcing us to buy more before our consciousness is able to intervene. Younger kids are even more susceptible and it serves as a gateway into gambling addictions. This part of dota and rocket league is reprehensible.

smordistan• 4 years ago

Nintendo is most certainly Disney, not quirky. The Zelda series might be an exception but the rest of Nintendo's IP is very Disney-eqsue.

blaser-waffle• 4 years ago

Nintendo is definitely Disney or Warner Bros. They've been around forever, have lots of family friendly IP, and occasionally break out the lawyers and smack the hell out of groups that aren't even vaguely infringing on their IP. They say "be afraid of the mouse" but also be afraid of Mario.

Penguinz0 has a whole series on youtube as to why they're a terrible company.

You also left out Activision/Blizzard, which is not yet M$ property, and is arguably a Disney, far more than Epic.

cwkoss• 4 years ago

This is happening to all IP industries and leaking into other ones. You no longer buy a song, movie, ebook, or game and truly own it. You get a non-transferrable license that only last as long as you don't do anything to anger the fickle platform overlords.

You can't lend IP you've purchased to a friend. You can't resell your content to others. Even consumer electronics are becoming increasingly worthless, as they require perpetual internet connection so they can rent seek via subscriptions and ads for a device you already paid for.

The idea of ownership is being destroyed, and consumers' ambivalence to this is extremely disappointing to me.

It should be illegal to have "buy" button when the purchaser doesn't really own anything.

ghostDancer• 4 years ago

The new generations are being taught to not have anything but to have access to it, songs, games, movies, ... . They don't know anything else and the ubiquity of access to everything makes them think it will always be there. I see it with my son and friends. And when I try to explain them they look at me like an old man shouting at the clouds (it's almost literal). When I try to explain my son that is better to buy buy, even if it's more expensive, the physical copy of a game instead of the digital copy he understands it but can't see the problem, I guess till he lose something won't realize.

rchaud2• 4 years ago

I think most people snap out of it though. The turning point is when they go on Netflix/Prime and type in a TV show, and see the autocomplete, only to be shown a screen saying they don't actually have that show.

graynk• 4 years ago

Multiplayer games are a very small subset of video games

"video games" have not "become" anything, they're basically the same, unless you choose to play exclusively AAA blockbusters and online free2play.

einpoklum• 4 years ago

IMHO, purely-online or mostly-online games which are not community-run FOSS are fundamentally suspect :-( I'm not saying they are all problematic, but my basic tendency would be to steer away from those.

Also - old-school games, people... by now, there are over 40 years of games if you count old-time stand-alone consoles (Galaxian anyone?) that's probably more than you could play in a lifetime of gaming. Ok, maybe not, but more than you could play in a lifetime of gaming in your spare time if you are actually holding down a job :-P And the best thing is that those games either don't have a way to scam you, and the ones which do (say online games with vanity item monetization) from 10 years ago probably don't work anyway these days.

phatbyte• 4 years ago

"...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?..."

For the love of whatever-god-or-not-you-believe, don't give them ideas

remmargorp64• 4 years ago

The cosmetics in Rocket League are entirely optional. The game is great and amazing to play even if you completely ignore all of the cosmetics.

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.

neoyagami• 4 years ago

Any kind of phone/freemium monetization tactic (out of cosmetics ofc) must be barred imho. this just give tools to corporations to pry on their consummers.

And the whole lootbox thingy is... to be honest embarassing, look what they did to Gran Turismo :\

peter-m80• 4 years ago

I play a lot of videogames and never opened loot boxes or bought skins.

andreisbc• 4 years ago

Bought myself a Nintendo Switch Oled just to play Hades. Probably the best game i've played in years

m1gu3l• 4 years ago

Drivel. Don’t like it don’t play it. If i have to read one more person complaining about micro-transactions I will puke. Ffs go outside.

wallfacer120• 4 years ago

This kind of "anti-materialist" manic word salad can seem really deep, but there is absolutely nothing there. I never laughed at anyone who bought a Barbie accessory, because I understand that mocking people and calling them brainwashed for having different tastes than you is poisonous behavior that blinds you to your fellow humans. Yeah yeah, you're smarter and more iconoclastic than everyone who bought a Barbie when they were younger, you were probably too busy listening to some band was popular but not too popular and whining about society, you and every other intellectual.

marssaxman• 4 years ago

I hate the exhausting run-on sentence this article has become.

ddaalluu26• 4 years ago

Man if a blog post like this makes the 2nd page I wonder what a proper rant would do. Like I used to write them and always get banned on Steam forums, because criticism = lost revenue and we can't have that. My Steam account was banned so often that the next ban will last 2 years. And I wasn't even offensive or insulting. Meanwhile Valve did get a slight grip or maybe I have changed? Whatever the case it has lead me to not spend money on their platform and in general. If it's a b2p game I pirate like I always have. Because if you want my money you will not silence my opinion and feedback of your game. And you will not restrict resale of the games I bought. Despite court ruling that Steam has to open up and enable resale of licenses, shit all has happened. And they're not the only platform where it's not possible to do so. So good job game industry - you have lost a paying customer for good.

Valve's Steam is extra predatory and anti consumer. A little story. Back in the day I was very active at the game Meridian 59, the 1st MMORPG. But not on the official side, on the reverse engineering side. Later when it got abandoned by 3do a compiled server exe leaked along with resources and configuration. We learned a lot from that, wrote tools, created new art, etc. My point is I knew a lot about the software, so I posted on Valve Steam's Meridian 59 forum with detailed knowledge about something only someone familiar with the software could know, which lead to a ban, because someone was apparently harassing the moderator there and he thought I was him. So I was unjustly banned because the moderator saw ghosts where none were and I appealed to Valve. The response was "be that as it may there's nothing we will do about it". So the case was clearly in my favor but Valve hands all power to the forum moderators. And the rule like dictators. One especially terrible Dictator is SamBC terror moderating 2k affiliated forums. If you write anything negative about a game of theirs and see all the paid white knights jumping in to defend the company sales and you call them out for what they are you will get banned. Accumulate a few bans and you will get an account ban. But to finish the story, I then contacted the moderator outside the game and the ban was lifted, not by Valve but by him. That didn't change the fact though that it counted as 1 ban point towards an account ban, which eventually lead to a 1 year ban on Steam.

I'm 47 years old now and I will not be silenced or told what to write especially if what I write is not offensive.

I once got a ban for disagreeing with the choice of a female protagonist in the "For Honor" game, because it's so far from historical facts that I cringed every time I tried to play the game. When something is so wrong that it upsets me I have to write about it. And the moderators there didn't like that I returned to the thread and continued to write about how historically inaccurate it was and how unrealistic this was. Nope can't have someone voicing their opinion and literally telling them what a shitshow their produced. That's bad for business and must be banned.

I for one am done with buying games and you can thank your overzealous moderators for that, game industry.

zecg• 4 years ago

Around the time they changed monetization I started using the default Octane with the default everything. RL is actually an example of a great game where everything you can buy or unlock is cosmetic and you don't need any of it.

spaceisballer• 4 years ago

I get the sentiment that is being expressed but there are just so many games out there I don’t get the complaint. I play zero games that have loot boxes or pay 2 win functionality. I guess the AAA titles get a lot of press but I’m overwhelmed by how many good games that are out there. I think the complaint may be mostly relegated to online multiplayer games, something that in my age I care very little about. Online Co-op games on the other hand or single player games are my jam.

onikolas7• 4 years ago

There are more games than ever before, including DRM-free, host-your-own-server games. Don't like in-app purchases? Play something else.

I hate what video games have become

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