But I also wonder sometimes: Who is spending money on all of these awful games? There's so much good stuff on Steam, GOG, the Switch eStore, etc. Wonderful games made by people who care, for a fair price, without exploitative monetisation, that I don't feel even remotely tempted to play whatever Ubisoft is currently peddling.
Some examples I've played in recent years are Celeste, Into the Breach, Hades, Slay the Spire, Ori and the Blind Forest, etc. These span every genre, and that's not even mentioning the PC back catalog which spans decades. What does it take for those games to win against the lootbox microtransaction garbage?
I notice the examples you're giving are all lower budget indie games, it's also worth pointing out that there's a /tonne/ of big budget games that also eschew this kind of nonsense. See: FromSoftware, basically anything that was a Sony published PS4 exclusive (Horizon Zero Dawn, Spiderman, Days Gone, Uncharted, etc etc), Monster Hunter, Resident Evil, basically everything Nintendo puts out, many many more (honestly I could probably recommend like 50+ AAA quality titles released in the past ~5 years if I sat here thinking for a while, without predatory microtransactions (maybe a few would sell some silly cosmetic items but that's about it)).
Really if you ignore the 'axis of evil' publishers (Activision, EA, Ubisoft) /most/ AAA games are fine.
Also in any single player Ubisoft game I've played (so mostly Far Cry and Assassins creed + Ghost Recon Wildlands (which is great btw)) the microtransactions can be completely ignored, none of their games are balanced around people spending money like mobile games are, nor is any meaningful content locked behind a pay wall unless it's in the form of a proper expansion/stand alone spinoff.
There seems to be a commonly held opinion on HN threads like this that the gaming industry has failed beyond repair, and all AAA games are dark pattern riddled slot machines. But it's really not true outside of a handful of large bad actor publishers. Just open up Steam and read user reviews, it's pretty obvious when a game is a poor cash grab.
I echo the sentiment of another comment here, saying that the market for "good" games never went away (really it's grown). It's just that there's now also another market, serving different customers with casual games with gameplay related microtransactions - which you can completely ignore as a consumer.
>Who is spending money on all of these awful games?
Have you ever played games like Rise of Kingdoms [1], or a lot of similar game of gathering resources, upgrading, attack etc. During one of cross server event you would see the whole server burning Millions ( USD ) worth of items within hours in just one battle. I still remember there was a whale working in investment bank ( or so he says ) that got $50k worth of whatever in-game resources wiped because he was busy in a meeting. He paid another $50K within a week to built back his troops.
These people easily spend $200K to million+ over their entire time in the game. And some will even help you to pay for resources in game as part of being the Guild.
And 80%+ of mobile game IAP revenues comes from just top 2-4% of players. So it isn't as another comment suggest lots of $20 to $50 dollars around from casual players.
Why do they do that? I dont know, I guess they want to be the king inside a virtual world. These freemium games means a lot of people gets to enjoy it without paying a cent. This also generate a feedback loop to the psychology of being king, after all what is the point of being King without followers?
It is unfortunate both Apple and Google are sucked into these money as part of their services revenue. Although I see this as an opportunity for a third mobile operating system. ( Hello Xbox Mobile? )
There's a lot of peer pressure among kids to play certain games. I bought a Nintendo Switch for my kids, and they certainly love the games, but a lot of their friends play games like Clash Royale together. Games like this are full of in-app purchases to be a better player. So obviously, they ask if they can play these kinds of games. For the moment, they're still satisfied playing on their Switch, but once they get their own phones I guess I won't be able to control what they do any longer.
A lot of people like to play competitively with friends and strangers. The major free to play games with microtransaction models I think of are League of Legends, Hearthstone, and Dota 2 which feed off the competitive multiplayer aspects that single player games lack entirely. It often takes a bigger budget company to be able to support the servers and development hours needed to support big multiplayer games.
I think the problem is these sorts of games are still relatively niche compared to most releases by the big shops, which appeal more to people with a passing interest in games as an occasional pastime versus a hobby. For example I knew someone who played a good bit of FIFA, but didn't really have any interest in other games, in the same way someone else might not be interested in Criterion collection movies but might put on a marvel movie.
There are a few games that are popular in both camps like Tetris, but they're by and large the minority, though they also can be extremely successful as a result. Making a game approachable but deep is very tricky. Celeste for example isn't terribly approachable, which is appropriate given it's story and gameplay, which is likely to turn off most players who might try it casually.
Probably largely just name recognition/fame of some sort.
I have limited time, and have tried a few less famous games based on recommendation, and some I absolutely hated. However, I know if I buy say, Assassins Creed, I'm going to enjoy it.
So part of the problem your suggesting I guess is people like me. I don't buy the IAP/addons/microtransactions, but I do buy the games. So if I have time to sit and play a video game - do I scour the internet for recommendations, read reviews, watch trailers...or just buy a name brand I know I've enjoyed in the past? For me obviously, the latter.
It's not so complicated though -- for big budget games, the budget has gone up while the box price has been eaten by inflation. People still pay $60 for a game in the midst of 9 figure dev budgets. $60 isn't enough money to make many types of games, leaving publishers with three choices: charge everyone more, charge a bunch of people a little more (dlc, some loot boxes, ads), or charge a handful of people a ton of money (loot box mechanics searching for whales).
When you watch interviews with some of the early doom developers, the level designers could make a level a week. Now levels in Doom Eternal are years long collaborations between a team of people. Content costs have exploded.
There's an identical trend with ios apps btw: an email app in the late 1990s like Eudora cost $100 to $150 with paid updates. Now people expect email apps to cost under $10 with lifetime updates while doing 10x as much.
Every game has their fair share of whales. People with so much money that it doesn't matter to them how much they spend on lootboxes.
One example I can give is Post Malone in Apex Legends, I think people estimated that he spent $1,600, he buys every heirloom skin as soon as it comes out.
There are a lot of streamers out there who will spend at least $100 a month on skins just to keep their content fresh. Or they buy battle pass levels second it comes out so they can show them off. It's a huge revenue stream for AAA studios.
I think it is largely "casual" gamers and or gamers who can't afford the upfront $50 or $20 for a game and are lured in by the "Free" game and then of course addiction kicks in and they spend $100 or more on it. Sad state of affairs, and something that has only gotten worse with app stores. I don't know if it is causal but they certainly haven't helped stop it.
Excellent article, and the thing is that if you spend any time talking to gamers or on gaming platforms, there’s a near consensus on this attitude against in-game purchases that contribute nothing to gameplay. Even though people still make these purchases, I’d say most of them are conscious of the fact that the current trend is detrimental to gamers.
As a side note, the only people pushing for NTFs in games are crypto enthusiasts or profit-seeking actors who do not care about game experience at all. Even gamers who are also into crypto do not advocate for NTF in games. The whole thing is a shit show IMO.
I think the NFT thing should be illegal. It adds nothing beyond a false promise that you're buying an "investment" instead of an in game item. IMO it's disgusting to see game companies targeting kids with a scam like that.
As for the rest of the article, he could be talking about me. I've basically given up on PC gaming. I used to love gaming and now it feels like a second job. It feels like I'm being forced to "accomplish" a bunch of in game goals because the developer thinks "engaging" me like that is going to lead to a microtransaction.
I thought I'm probably just getting older and grumpier, but I bought an Oculus Quest before Christmas and it's been a blast. Games like The Room had me feeling like a kid who just got their first PC game. I think a lot of it has to do with VR being a new platform and there's less focus on developers squeezing every penny out of you and more incentive for them to build small, fun games that help discover what makes sense in VR.
The craziest part is that I've spent several hundred dollars on VR games in a few months which is more than I've spent on PC games in the last 5 years combined. I know it's popular to trash Meta/Facebook, but I think they did a really good job of pricing VR games. It's <$30 on the high end and they have frequent sales, but the sales aren't such deep discounts that I feel bad for buying something at full price.
I also think microtransactions can make sense. GGG did a good job with Path of Exile. I've played that game on and off and every time I pick it back up I play for a bit and if my stash starts getting disorganized with items that have a convenience stash tab as a microtransaction I'll buy that stash tab. It's always after I've spent a weekend playing and it's only $20, so I don't feel like I've gotten ripped off or forced into buying something. I've probably spent twice as much on that game as any other in recent memory.
I'd separate that into two categories: consensus that "withholding content, breaking games up, or locking devices to stores to artificially create redundant sales" and "abusive monetization design where the game is mostly a flimsy pretext for their real product, a gambling addiction simulator" are reviled industry practices.
People like their stores and skins, they just don't want to have to gamble to get them or be tricked into pay-to-play.
I tried a popular mobile game for the first time recently and almost immediately uninstalled it. As a new player I was overwhelmed with freebies, but every action funneled me back to the store or demanded some kind of worthless interaction. I was horrified at the thought that I might ever allow myself to get used to it and just how many people already had.
I think the idea of nfts is cool, imagine star citizen where everyone could model ships and sell them as nft and set a counter of how many they sell (are available) the market should then set the value between work put in to design the ship, sell it and how many are available.
So juat like right now, you could buy a ship for 5 dollar, cheaply designed and thousands are available (or endless) or get a unique nice and good looking ship for ome thousand (or more?) because you need to pay the work of one guy for several days and its only one time available.
What get right now: bullshit, scams and everything controlled by the company selling the game.
I think the real issue is that we've just left a brief period where the best way to succeed in the market was to make good games.
Anyone who grew up playing arcade games knows that, for the vast majority of cases, the pre-console arcade world was about finding the best way to keep you feeding quarters to a machine. Difficult, almost beating the boss, but ultimately simple games ruled the day. Some are classics now but many were very meh.
The early home console years, when reviews were still hard to come by and rentals weren't a thing yet, were flooded with tons of pure trash games. Everyone knows how awful any licensed game was, but it didn't matter because all they had to do was to get you (or more often parents/grandparents) to buy the game. By the time you got home and realized the game was garbage it was already too late. I remember owning far more horrible games as a kid than good ones.
The late 1990s and early 2000s were a great time for gaming because it was much easier to determine if a game was quality or not before buying, and for a brief window of time the only really great way to make money was to just make a compelling game that got good reviews.
We've since seen gaming become a major industry, where heavy marketing can play just as big a factor as initial reviews. With the massive growth of online gaming and digital downloads it's much easier to make a game that is really about a million microtransaction (remember when people used to think that would save the internet?)
The truth is games have always been structured in a way to optimizer revenue, it's just that we remember a period when the best way to make money in a game was to actually make a game good.
I think this is an underappreciated point, consoles and PC stores have been able to maintain some quality, but I doubt most people playing gacha games today know they're gacha, much less what the odds on pulls are. In moderation this is all ok, but getting there as an industry seems tough on mobile. There are more good ports than ever, especially for indies on mobile, which is a good start.
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, but the state of AAA gaming and how it molds to the market is a little disappointing to me.
I agree. At this point AAA games are a genera unto themselves, whether they're a shooter, adventure game, sports game, whatever. They all share the same elements you outlined: seasons, battlepass, in-game currency, microtransactions for the smallest items, and game design that puts the focus of the entire game on those elements. AAA games are made with massive budgets and are designed to be very attractive to play, to the point of addiction, but I simply can't get into them because of the genera elements.
Imagine being a player who wants to collect new skins or looks in a modern game. In almost any modern game that offers microtransactions. Even indie games are starting to sell cosmetics, so they aren't left out of the feast, err, leaving money on the table.
Your choice is usually limited to: 1) spend money, 2) be unable to get all cosmetics, and occasionally 3) spend hundreds to thousands of hours to obtain the skins.
The worst part is that the average player seems to be fine with this, since it's not selling power - as if power's the only thing that matters in a game.
Some of the AAA publishers overextended themselves; I think they inadvertently got into the cathedral-building business and then realized they can't build a $70-per-serving cathedral every three years without abusing their employees or making some kind of quality compromise. It's been a decade since Skyrim was released, for example, and a little less since GTA V, and the microtransaction model seems to be their strategy for filling in the gaps.
There are many great games coming out from smaller studios and still being maintained. Cases : Rimworld, Valheim, Police Simulator, Project Zomboid, Space Engineers, KSP 1, Factorio.
All off the games you mention seem to be FPS games, perhaps that segment and the sport games suffer segment the most from Pay to Keep Playing schemes.
If the video game market is growing, that means the quantity of people playing games is increasing. Perhaps what's really happening is that a new category of players are being captured by the modern video game market, and that 'old school' video games are still alive and well. I mean, there are still great video games being released. Maybe the audience for those hasn't really changed in size as much.
A year or two ago, I watched @shroud (on Twitch) play Squad. I'm not a fan of playing shooter games, but wow it was quite a spectacle to watch! There were tiers leaders on your team to report to and receive orders. Anyone could pin enemy locations on the map. Every squad worked as a team to capture territory. The play development was entirely organic. etc. etc.
If anything, I hope someone carves out the 'old school' market from the belly of the beast and creates a name or brand that that market can rally around. It seems unnecessary to be concerned by the modern video game market. They are catering to an entirely different type of player. It doesn't matter that it's more profitable if they aren't taking away your audience.
> It seems unnecessary to be concerned by the modern video game market.
The problem is that more publishers who hold well beloved IPs are moving in that direction, see for example Bethesda. So I think it's fair to be concerned.
Yeah this was obvious 10 years ago with the rise of mobile gaming. The only difference between mobile gaming and other forms is that the payment infrastructure was so easily accessible and seamless integrated.
But 10+ years ago we had Farmville and then on mobile we had thing slike Candy Crush, Clash of Clans and so on.
These aren't games. They're A/B tested addiction loops optimized to extract as much money from you as possible.
You can see the impact of this on World of Warcraft, which is >17 years old at this point. In its original form it had traditional RPG game loops. Over the years it has become increasingly dominatded by "micro-transactions". These includes services like character transfers, boosts, racce changes and name changes. It also includes a bunch of cosmetics.
Some people are most OK with cosmetics for monetization but this still has a problem. It creates an incentive for the game designers to make paid cosmetics better than in-game cosmetics to encourage you to buy them. You see this in WoW where in-game mounts sometimes look like they're made of 7 triangles while store mounts are rendered in semi-translucent 3D with particle effects, modern textures, large triangle counts and special moves. More importantly though cosmetics matter. The ability to flex through cosmetics is a huge motivator to players. The fact that someone can swipe a credit card and devalue in-game accomplishments really destroys any incentives to work towards in-game goals.
Outside of FPS games there are depressingly few actual games out there (as opposed to addiction pay-to-win treadmills). I like computer adaptations of board games for this reason because at least these games tend to stay true to being "games".
I haven’t played in a while but Clash of Clans is a pretty decent and fun game underneath all of its addictive patterns.
WoW still has some of the best raid encounter design out right now.
I’m not disagreeing about the effect of performance marketing/aggressive growth strategies on the industry but this idea that there are “true” games and then everything else is like playing mindless slot machines doesn’t really make sense to me
Android games for kids are so depressing. I imagine iOS is no better. The games AND game ads are so manipulative, so transactional, unregulated.
It does not take long for me to come to the realization: WOW, these games are all employing addiction triggers, are all manipulative, are all without depth, and the two major app stores are 100% in cahoots with these parasites.
In the dawn of the TV age there was so much handwringing about children's programming, advertising. Where are the regulators? I'm not even concerned about depictions of violence or sex or drugs or hedonism. What concerns me the most is the outright psychological manipulation of dopamine triggers and other manipulations.
And having played a Machine Zone game (thankfully for not a lot of money) I am familiar with the graduated versions of the childrens "programming": illusory emotional investment, bullying, false group dynamics, fake peer pressure, harassment, direct addiction, rapidly changing economics/devaluation, and other tactics to get you to pony up an endless stream of money.
Obviously the app stores won't police this to even a small degree, too much 30% sweet commission involved.
I'm going to have to setup a retro emulator for my kid so they can play games that aren't riddled with ads and are designed around manipulation.
On iOS there is Apple Arcade, which has pretty reasonable curated games. My kids only allowed to get games from Apple Arcade for this reasons (except Minecraft and Roblox). Subscription is included anyway with family Apple One umbrella subscription.
Roblox is evil of course with it's micro transactions, but simple rule of never buying robux kinda fixes that.
It's a bit rich, given there are 14 paid DLCs for the latest Civ game, and they all have pretty negative reviews for being too expensive while adding little to the gameplay.
Ironically, I'd rather play a game where the DLC didn't add much to gameplay. If I purchase a game, I want to be able to enjoy the full experience of that game without being forced to purchase DLC. If they release DLC that is little more than different skins or supplemental music, I don't feel I've lost out on anything by not purchasing it. On the contrary, if they release a DLC that substantively changes the game and, even worse, makes it incompatible with the original version for saved games or multiplayer, then I'm more or less obligated to purchase it if I want to keep enjoying the game to its full potential.
Yep, the DLC model can be quite obnoxious. Paradox has gone hard on DLCs and cosmetic DLCs are all fine and dandy, but some of the features locked into other DLCs (No espionage in Hearts of Iron 4 without a DLC, no amphibious tanks without a different DLC) are, IMO, core gameplay components that shouldn't require payment.
But I was happy to pay for a DLC that gave Commonwealth countries unique focuses.
Also, at least in civ5, if you want to play online as a DLC-only civ, you can't unless everyone else bought the same civ.
Can you imagine if you could only join fork knife games with your Spiderman skin if and only if every other player already in the game also owned it?
Can you imagine paying $5 for you favorite LoL character then the game rejecting you because you got matched with a player who is only using the free ones?
Dawn of War 2 didn't have this issue. You could choose to not buy chaos but still play against chaos players online.
I've been mulling over some ideas for a word game, so I recently installed the top 10 grossing word games in the Google Play Store to see what they're like.
They're all just garbage, and they all follow the same dark patterns: Incessant ads and prompts to buy in-game items, interspersed with short bits of gameplay here and there.
Gameplay and original game design have taken a backseat to increasingly hostile monetization schemes, lazy/safe/rehashed game loops and marketing/shareholder driven development for at least a decade now. The amount of AAA titles built on hype and released broken at launch, with promises of future patches, is too long to list. With some notable exceptions, most of the innovation and interesting game design is done by indie developers and smaller studios.
If I understood Zuckerberg correctly during his Lex Fridman interview, he's trying to build an entire alternate reality based on this concept of monetizing in game items. He said something along the lines of, "People want to dress nice and look good in person, so why not in a VR meeting?" and then proceeded to talk about charging people for clothes and haircuts in the Metaverse. I have to wonder what sort of scenarios this might lead to, with all of Facebook's corporate partnerships. Are people going to end up having to pay Facebook in order to keep up with dress codes at company meetings? Will hair grow so anyone who doesn't pay Facebook for a haircut shows up looking like a bum? Will clothes become stained and ragged over time?
Lex even proposed an alternative of a closet that you only pay for once, but updates with a basic style over time. The suggestion was mostly dismissed by Zuckerberg.
Way too late to be talking about video games, this stuff is about to hit many other aspects of human interaction.
The broken at launch thing feels like a response to the increasing cost and resourcing of AAA titles. Big games these days cost a gazillion dollars to make. I imagine at some point in development they end up just being money pits and the developer wants/needs to recoup some cost to continue working on them.
Maybe this is a result of it being hard to estimate and budget new releases, rather than being explicitly consumer hostile (though it may well be as you say).
Does anyone have a ballpark for how much a AAA game would retail at to hit similar mean-profitability as a similar game monetized through smaller purchases? It would be nice to know if this number is more like $70 or $250 in terms of "can this be solved"
[edit] I suppose it would actually have to be X copies at $Y to be fully specified.
Slighly OT: There is great arc in the recent anime ODDTAXI following the inner monologue of a character that gets sucked into being a whale on a micro-transaction-monetized Zoo game. Highly recommended series that brings up several contemporary issues in a poignant and entertaining way.
Yeah, yeah, so this is the reason Civ 6 use sh*t dlc to cheat money?
Don't forget Civ 6's dlc still hold one of the only 7 games that is "overwhelmingly negative".
-- From a (still) angry luxury civ6 pre-order player
that's how south korea managed to become something in the gaming industry, by using shady monetization schemes
they are after NFTs nowadays, the sooner that shit gets banned, the better the western developers will live, not having to kill their brands and reputation to compete with shitty KR and SEA brands in general
I agree with the general idea in the article that games should be about fun and great gameplay at its core.
What I don't agree with is this simplistic narrative by gamers on how how very evil and greedy game producers are. Because gamers themselves play a significant role in that.
As an example, mobile game developers largely switched to in-game purchases not because they want to, instead because it's the only model that works to even get back their investment. Even asking as little as 3-5$ for a high quality game means most people skip it, even though they would love the game and could easily afford it. Apple Arcade is a counter act against this very perverse market dynamic.
Gamers created this dynamic. For being cheap. And please don't respond to say that you're not cheap, it's not a personal comment.
Next example. As a Battlefield fan, let's take good old ultra evil EA. Let's restrict this to the monetization part. Upon launch, Battlefield typically costs about 60€ where I live. And it doesn't take very long for this to significantly drop. IF you want to go crazy, you can go for some ultimate version, for about 100€.
59.99€ for some mysterious reason is carved in stone. Games have costs this amount (or less) since forever. Inflation seems to have no grip at all on game prices, nor does the price reflect the explosion in complexity, scope and upkeep (servers, anti-cheat, more bugs due to complexity, etc).
I guess this is some gamers' "value treshold". A game just can't be priced any higher no matter the value on offer.
Let's talk value. If you're a fan of the series, it has almost infinite replay value, as is the point of an online shooter. You can play the game for years, for thousands of hours. People are still playing BF4, which is from 2013.
And still gamers complain that it's expensive. The reality is that at least for this game, it's a steal. Extraordinarily cheap highly engaging entertainment in limitless supply. Thousands of hours compared to about the cost of going out for dinner.
The low price of 59.99, enforced by irrational gamers, likely is subsidized by optional in-game purchases that do not affect gameplay. In other words, people wanting a fancy soldier's coat in the game are basically paying to keep 59.99 steady, seemingly forever. And in this magic gamers world, ongoing costs somehow don't exist. Basically, any method to monetize is evil.
All of this is to say that game producers use the model that works. If you refuse to pay for fair value and sabotage every reasonable method, this is what you get. Gamers need to look in the mirror.
> 59.99€ for some mysterious reason is carved in stone. Games have costs this amount (or less) since forever. Inflation seems to have no grip at all on game prices, nor does the price reflect the explosion in complexity, scope and upkeep (servers, anti-cheat, more bugs due to complexity, etc).
> Let's talk value. If you're a fan of the series, it has almost infinite replay value, as is the point of an online shooter. You can play the game for years, for thousands of hours. People are still playing BF4, which is from 2013.
> Let's talk value. If you're a fan of the series, it has almost infinite replay value, as is the point of an online shooter. You can play the game for years, for thousands of hours. People are still playing BF4, which is from 2013.
> And still gamers complain that it's expensive. The reality is that at least for this game, it's a steal. Extraordinarily cheap highly engaging entertainment in limitless supply. Thousands of hours compared to about the cost of going out for dinner.
But you can't know that at launch time, and with the hit-based dynamic that the publishers have set up, they need a lot of buyers on launch day. Reviewers are completely in the industry's pocket and everyone knows it. So it's a complete lemon market.
59.99€ isn't the price because it's what the good games are worth. It's the price because it's what gamers are willing to risk losing if the game turns out to suck. And that part is very much on the industry's side - pre-orders, day 0 patches, lack of credible criticism and a very limited ability to get refunds are big factors in this dynamic.
It's getting worse and worse in my opinion. There's so many perverse mechanics now, Gacha games being at the forefront of it. Money is always necessary to develop games, but we've gone from a situation were money was a resource to creative genuinely creative works that had merit to a point where the game itself is just a mechanism to create revenue.
In the process the games themselves degrade. Addictive mechanisms are added, stories are dragged out or split into DLCs, money distorts competition between players, games are designed to waste the players time, and so forth.
And the problem is not just the industry or 'capitalism' or whatever, I think culturally we also have lost the ability to talk about entertainment critically. Games that are glorified slot machines should be called out for it, parents should tell their kids not to play them, and people need to start valuing their attention.
cehrlich|4 years ago
But I also wonder sometimes: Who is spending money on all of these awful games? There's so much good stuff on Steam, GOG, the Switch eStore, etc. Wonderful games made by people who care, for a fair price, without exploitative monetisation, that I don't feel even remotely tempted to play whatever Ubisoft is currently peddling.
Some examples I've played in recent years are Celeste, Into the Breach, Hades, Slay the Spire, Ori and the Blind Forest, etc. These span every genre, and that's not even mentioning the PC back catalog which spans decades. What does it take for those games to win against the lootbox microtransaction garbage?
p1necone|4 years ago
Really if you ignore the 'axis of evil' publishers (Activision, EA, Ubisoft) /most/ AAA games are fine.
Also in any single player Ubisoft game I've played (so mostly Far Cry and Assassins creed + Ghost Recon Wildlands (which is great btw)) the microtransactions can be completely ignored, none of their games are balanced around people spending money like mobile games are, nor is any meaningful content locked behind a pay wall unless it's in the form of a proper expansion/stand alone spinoff.
There seems to be a commonly held opinion on HN threads like this that the gaming industry has failed beyond repair, and all AAA games are dark pattern riddled slot machines. But it's really not true outside of a handful of large bad actor publishers. Just open up Steam and read user reviews, it's pretty obvious when a game is a poor cash grab.
I echo the sentiment of another comment here, saying that the market for "good" games never went away (really it's grown). It's just that there's now also another market, serving different customers with casual games with gameplay related microtransactions - which you can completely ignore as a consumer.
ksec|4 years ago
Have you ever played games like Rise of Kingdoms [1], or a lot of similar game of gathering resources, upgrading, attack etc. During one of cross server event you would see the whole server burning Millions ( USD ) worth of items within hours in just one battle. I still remember there was a whale working in investment bank ( or so he says ) that got $50k worth of whatever in-game resources wiped because he was busy in a meeting. He paid another $50K within a week to built back his troops.
These people easily spend $200K to million+ over their entire time in the game. And some will even help you to pay for resources in game as part of being the Guild.
And 80%+ of mobile game IAP revenues comes from just top 2-4% of players. So it isn't as another comment suggest lots of $20 to $50 dollars around from casual players.
Why do they do that? I dont know, I guess they want to be the king inside a virtual world. These freemium games means a lot of people gets to enjoy it without paying a cent. This also generate a feedback loop to the psychology of being king, after all what is the point of being King without followers?
It is unfortunate both Apple and Google are sucked into these money as part of their services revenue. Although I see this as an opportunity for a third mobile operating system. ( Hello Xbox Mobile? )
[1] https://rok.lilith.com/en
gman83|4 years ago
iepathos|4 years ago
kipchak|4 years ago
There are a few games that are popular in both camps like Tetris, but they're by and large the minority, though they also can be extremely successful as a result. Making a game approachable but deep is very tricky. Celeste for example isn't terribly approachable, which is appropriate given it's story and gameplay, which is likely to turn off most players who might try it casually.
silisili|4 years ago
I have limited time, and have tried a few less famous games based on recommendation, and some I absolutely hated. However, I know if I buy say, Assassins Creed, I'm going to enjoy it.
So part of the problem your suggesting I guess is people like me. I don't buy the IAP/addons/microtransactions, but I do buy the games. So if I have time to sit and play a video game - do I scour the internet for recommendations, read reviews, watch trailers...or just buy a name brand I know I've enjoyed in the past? For me obviously, the latter.
x0x0|4 years ago
When you watch interviews with some of the early doom developers, the level designers could make a level a week. Now levels in Doom Eternal are years long collaborations between a team of people. Content costs have exploded.
There's an identical trend with ios apps btw: an email app in the late 1990s like Eudora cost $100 to $150 with paid updates. Now people expect email apps to cost under $10 with lifetime updates while doing 10x as much.
volfied|4 years ago
One example I can give is Post Malone in Apex Legends, I think people estimated that he spent $1,600, he buys every heirloom skin as soon as it comes out.
There are a lot of streamers out there who will spend at least $100 a month on skins just to keep their content fresh. Or they buy battle pass levels second it comes out so they can show them off. It's a huge revenue stream for AAA studios.
https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/t0m44q/post_ma...
newsclues|4 years ago
JKCalhoun|4 years ago
There's the problem. A new fickle breed of consumer that do not pay for software.
I know, they fall for the in-game content, but that is optional. A game purchase is money up front.
gameswithgo|4 years ago
sstevenshang|4 years ago
As a side note, the only people pushing for NTFs in games are crypto enthusiasts or profit-seeking actors who do not care about game experience at all. Even gamers who are also into crypto do not advocate for NTF in games. The whole thing is a shit show IMO.
donmcronald|4 years ago
As for the rest of the article, he could be talking about me. I've basically given up on PC gaming. I used to love gaming and now it feels like a second job. It feels like I'm being forced to "accomplish" a bunch of in game goals because the developer thinks "engaging" me like that is going to lead to a microtransaction.
I thought I'm probably just getting older and grumpier, but I bought an Oculus Quest before Christmas and it's been a blast. Games like The Room had me feeling like a kid who just got their first PC game. I think a lot of it has to do with VR being a new platform and there's less focus on developers squeezing every penny out of you and more incentive for them to build small, fun games that help discover what makes sense in VR.
The craziest part is that I've spent several hundred dollars on VR games in a few months which is more than I've spent on PC games in the last 5 years combined. I know it's popular to trash Meta/Facebook, but I think they did a really good job of pricing VR games. It's <$30 on the high end and they have frequent sales, but the sales aren't such deep discounts that I feel bad for buying something at full price.
I also think microtransactions can make sense. GGG did a good job with Path of Exile. I've played that game on and off and every time I pick it back up I play for a bit and if my stash starts getting disorganized with items that have a convenience stash tab as a microtransaction I'll buy that stash tab. It's always after I've spent a weekend playing and it's only $20, so I don't feel like I've gotten ripped off or forced into buying something. I've probably spent twice as much on that game as any other in recent memory.
washadjeffmad|4 years ago
People like their stores and skins, they just don't want to have to gamble to get them or be tricked into pay-to-play.
I tried a popular mobile game for the first time recently and almost immediately uninstalled it. As a new player I was overwhelmed with freebies, but every action funneled me back to the store or demanded some kind of worthless interaction. I was horrified at the thought that I might ever allow myself to get used to it and just how many people already had.
Bombthecat|4 years ago
So juat like right now, you could buy a ship for 5 dollar, cheaply designed and thousands are available (or endless) or get a unique nice and good looking ship for ome thousand (or more?) because you need to pay the work of one guy for several days and its only one time available.
What get right now: bullshit, scams and everything controlled by the company selling the game.
stemlord|4 years ago
time_to_smile|4 years ago
Anyone who grew up playing arcade games knows that, for the vast majority of cases, the pre-console arcade world was about finding the best way to keep you feeding quarters to a machine. Difficult, almost beating the boss, but ultimately simple games ruled the day. Some are classics now but many were very meh.
The early home console years, when reviews were still hard to come by and rentals weren't a thing yet, were flooded with tons of pure trash games. Everyone knows how awful any licensed game was, but it didn't matter because all they had to do was to get you (or more often parents/grandparents) to buy the game. By the time you got home and realized the game was garbage it was already too late. I remember owning far more horrible games as a kid than good ones.
The late 1990s and early 2000s were a great time for gaming because it was much easier to determine if a game was quality or not before buying, and for a brief window of time the only really great way to make money was to just make a compelling game that got good reviews.
We've since seen gaming become a major industry, where heavy marketing can play just as big a factor as initial reviews. With the massive growth of online gaming and digital downloads it's much easier to make a game that is really about a million microtransaction (remember when people used to think that would save the internet?)
The truth is games have always been structured in a way to optimizer revenue, it's just that we remember a period when the best way to make money in a game was to actually make a game good.
ece|4 years ago
fattless|4 years ago
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, but the state of AAA gaming and how it molds to the market is a little disappointing to me.
ranger207|4 years ago
ericd|4 years ago
falcolas|4 years ago
Your choice is usually limited to: 1) spend money, 2) be unable to get all cosmetics, and occasionally 3) spend hundreds to thousands of hours to obtain the skins.
The worst part is that the average player seems to be fine with this, since it's not selling power - as if power's the only thing that matters in a game.
mbg721|4 years ago
prox|4 years ago
All off the games you mention seem to be FPS games, perhaps that segment and the sport games suffer segment the most from Pay to Keep Playing schemes.
eezurr|4 years ago
A year or two ago, I watched @shroud (on Twitch) play Squad. I'm not a fan of playing shooter games, but wow it was quite a spectacle to watch! There were tiers leaders on your team to report to and receive orders. Anyone could pin enemy locations on the map. Every squad worked as a team to capture territory. The play development was entirely organic. etc. etc.
If anything, I hope someone carves out the 'old school' market from the belly of the beast and creates a name or brand that that market can rally around. It seems unnecessary to be concerned by the modern video game market. They are catering to an entirely different type of player. It doesn't matter that it's more profitable if they aren't taking away your audience.
somedude895|4 years ago
The problem is that more publishers who hold well beloved IPs are moving in that direction, see for example Bethesda. So I think it's fair to be concerned.
jmyeet|4 years ago
But 10+ years ago we had Farmville and then on mobile we had thing slike Candy Crush, Clash of Clans and so on.
These aren't games. They're A/B tested addiction loops optimized to extract as much money from you as possible.
You can see the impact of this on World of Warcraft, which is >17 years old at this point. In its original form it had traditional RPG game loops. Over the years it has become increasingly dominatded by "micro-transactions". These includes services like character transfers, boosts, racce changes and name changes. It also includes a bunch of cosmetics.
Some people are most OK with cosmetics for monetization but this still has a problem. It creates an incentive for the game designers to make paid cosmetics better than in-game cosmetics to encourage you to buy them. You see this in WoW where in-game mounts sometimes look like they're made of 7 triangles while store mounts are rendered in semi-translucent 3D with particle effects, modern textures, large triangle counts and special moves. More importantly though cosmetics matter. The ability to flex through cosmetics is a huge motivator to players. The fact that someone can swipe a credit card and devalue in-game accomplishments really destroys any incentives to work towards in-game goals.
Outside of FPS games there are depressingly few actual games out there (as opposed to addiction pay-to-win treadmills). I like computer adaptations of board games for this reason because at least these games tend to stay true to being "games".
zer0-c00l|4 years ago
WoW still has some of the best raid encounter design out right now.
I’m not disagreeing about the effect of performance marketing/aggressive growth strategies on the industry but this idea that there are “true” games and then everything else is like playing mindless slot machines doesn’t really make sense to me
mtnygard|4 years ago
AtlasBarfed|4 years ago
It does not take long for me to come to the realization: WOW, these games are all employing addiction triggers, are all manipulative, are all without depth, and the two major app stores are 100% in cahoots with these parasites.
In the dawn of the TV age there was so much handwringing about children's programming, advertising. Where are the regulators? I'm not even concerned about depictions of violence or sex or drugs or hedonism. What concerns me the most is the outright psychological manipulation of dopamine triggers and other manipulations.
And having played a Machine Zone game (thankfully for not a lot of money) I am familiar with the graduated versions of the childrens "programming": illusory emotional investment, bullying, false group dynamics, fake peer pressure, harassment, direct addiction, rapidly changing economics/devaluation, and other tactics to get you to pony up an endless stream of money.
Obviously the app stores won't police this to even a small degree, too much 30% sweet commission involved.
I'm going to have to setup a retro emulator for my kid so they can play games that aren't riddled with ads and are designed around manipulation.
vl|4 years ago
Roblox is evil of course with it's micro transactions, but simple rule of never buying robux kinda fixes that.
lewispollard|4 years ago
StanislavPetrov|4 years ago
EdwardDiego|4 years ago
But I was happy to pay for a DLC that gave Commonwealth countries unique focuses.
kevingadd|4 years ago
antifa|4 years ago
Can you imagine if you could only join fork knife games with your Spiderman skin if and only if every other player already in the game also owned it?
Can you imagine paying $5 for you favorite LoL character then the game rejecting you because you got matched with a player who is only using the free ones?
Dawn of War 2 didn't have this issue. You could choose to not buy chaos but still play against chaos players online.
humaniania|4 years ago
stack_framer|4 years ago
They're all just garbage, and they all follow the same dark patterns: Incessant ads and prompts to buy in-game items, interspersed with short bits of gameplay here and there.
imiric|4 years ago
Gameplay and original game design have taken a backseat to increasingly hostile monetization schemes, lazy/safe/rehashed game loops and marketing/shareholder driven development for at least a decade now. The amount of AAA titles built on hype and released broken at launch, with promises of future patches, is too long to list. With some notable exceptions, most of the innovation and interesting game design is done by indie developers and smaller studios.
This video sums it up nicely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q38fjcyP1IQ
34679|4 years ago
Lex even proposed an alternative of a closet that you only pay for once, but updates with a basic style over time. The suggestion was mostly dismissed by Zuckerberg.
Way too late to be talking about video games, this stuff is about to hit many other aspects of human interaction.
joshschreuder|4 years ago
Maybe this is a result of it being hard to estimate and budget new releases, rather than being explicitly consumer hostile (though it may well be as you say).
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
aidenn0|4 years ago
[edit] I suppose it would actually have to be X copies at $Y to be fully specified.
labster|4 years ago
More like one sequel, SMAC, and five remakes.
antifa|4 years ago
3np|4 years ago
jerryzh|4 years ago
Shadonototra|4 years ago
they are after NFTs nowadays, the sooner that shit gets banned, the better the western developers will live, not having to kill their brands and reputation to compete with shitty KR and SEA brands in general
one can dream
fleddr|4 years ago
What I don't agree with is this simplistic narrative by gamers on how how very evil and greedy game producers are. Because gamers themselves play a significant role in that.
As an example, mobile game developers largely switched to in-game purchases not because they want to, instead because it's the only model that works to even get back their investment. Even asking as little as 3-5$ for a high quality game means most people skip it, even though they would love the game and could easily afford it. Apple Arcade is a counter act against this very perverse market dynamic.
Gamers created this dynamic. For being cheap. And please don't respond to say that you're not cheap, it's not a personal comment.
Next example. As a Battlefield fan, let's take good old ultra evil EA. Let's restrict this to the monetization part. Upon launch, Battlefield typically costs about 60€ where I live. And it doesn't take very long for this to significantly drop. IF you want to go crazy, you can go for some ultimate version, for about 100€.
59.99€ for some mysterious reason is carved in stone. Games have costs this amount (or less) since forever. Inflation seems to have no grip at all on game prices, nor does the price reflect the explosion in complexity, scope and upkeep (servers, anti-cheat, more bugs due to complexity, etc).
I guess this is some gamers' "value treshold". A game just can't be priced any higher no matter the value on offer.
Let's talk value. If you're a fan of the series, it has almost infinite replay value, as is the point of an online shooter. You can play the game for years, for thousands of hours. People are still playing BF4, which is from 2013.
And still gamers complain that it's expensive. The reality is that at least for this game, it's a steal. Extraordinarily cheap highly engaging entertainment in limitless supply. Thousands of hours compared to about the cost of going out for dinner.
The low price of 59.99, enforced by irrational gamers, likely is subsidized by optional in-game purchases that do not affect gameplay. In other words, people wanting a fancy soldier's coat in the game are basically paying to keep 59.99 steady, seemingly forever. And in this magic gamers world, ongoing costs somehow don't exist. Basically, any method to monetize is evil.
All of this is to say that game producers use the model that works. If you refuse to pay for fair value and sabotage every reasonable method, this is what you get. Gamers need to look in the mirror.
lmm|4 years ago
> Let's talk value. If you're a fan of the series, it has almost infinite replay value, as is the point of an online shooter. You can play the game for years, for thousands of hours. People are still playing BF4, which is from 2013.
> Let's talk value. If you're a fan of the series, it has almost infinite replay value, as is the point of an online shooter. You can play the game for years, for thousands of hours. People are still playing BF4, which is from 2013.
> And still gamers complain that it's expensive. The reality is that at least for this game, it's a steal. Extraordinarily cheap highly engaging entertainment in limitless supply. Thousands of hours compared to about the cost of going out for dinner.
But you can't know that at launch time, and with the hit-based dynamic that the publishers have set up, they need a lot of buyers on launch day. Reviewers are completely in the industry's pocket and everyone knows it. So it's a complete lemon market.
59.99€ isn't the price because it's what the good games are worth. It's the price because it's what gamers are willing to risk losing if the game turns out to suck. And that part is very much on the industry's side - pre-orders, day 0 patches, lack of credible criticism and a very limited ability to get refunds are big factors in this dynamic.
malka|4 years ago
Actually, this makes me more ok with the situation.
pom66|4 years ago
[deleted]
Barrin92|4 years ago
In the process the games themselves degrade. Addictive mechanisms are added, stories are dragged out or split into DLCs, money distorts competition between players, games are designed to waste the players time, and so forth.
And the problem is not just the industry or 'capitalism' or whatever, I think culturally we also have lost the ability to talk about entertainment critically. Games that are glorified slot machines should be called out for it, parents should tell their kids not to play them, and people need to start valuing their attention.
Chris2048|4 years ago
tasha0663|4 years ago