Faith restored. For now, anyway, until we see what they mean by this in practice. Either way, my intention to pre-order is back on.
Video Game News and Miscellany
- Thread starter figmentPez
- Start date
It's worth banning (or regulating) without making it about "just think of the children." I wish they'd emphasized more that it IS gambling, and adult "choice" against exploitative practices, etc. But I recognize that doesn't get people out like "just think of the children" does. The YouTube guy has the right focuses, but the Hawaii people don't IMO, at least not morally. Politically/pragmatically they may be right on.
figmentPez
Staff member
More like Destiny Poo, am I right you guys? Up top!
Good guy destiny banned me so I would refund the game.
So, Bungie has turned off the xp scaling in Destiny 2, just like they said they would, but then quietly doubled the amount of xp needed. In-game still shows that 80k xp is required for a level after max level, but in-game testing has shown that 160k is actually needed to fill the bar.
GasBandit
Staff member
You know, a certain point comes along where caveat emptor applies, and people who buy a thing from a company widely known to fuck their customers shouldn't be surprised at getting fucked.
Like you said, you dodged a bullet by getting banned, but that wasn't exactly by your design, now, was it?
Destiny 1 was good. But I fell into the trap of believing that Bungie would not be the greedy asshats that Activision requires all their developers to be.[DOUBLEPOST=1511815962,1511815597][/DOUBLEPOST]Also, don't think I'm not looking at my beloved Blizzard and just dreading the day I know is to come. Three of the 5 games that blizzard currently has active have loot boxes in them now. And of those, at least two of them are free. Overwatch really is patient zero of the loot box epidemic, because while they're not the first game to use them (I remember thinking they were bullshit way back in the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer) they're the first big game to make a bajillion dollars out of them.You know, a certain point comes along where caveat emptor applies, and people who buy a thing from a company widely known to fuck their customers shouldn't be surprised at getting fucked.
Like you said, you dodged a bullet by getting banned, but that wasn't exactly by your design, now, was it?
GasBandit
Staff member
Well, I'm not exactly without sin here. I paid for Overwatch after all (though I never bought any lootboxes). But I think that was the one that cured me. I've pretty much sworn off all the big publishers. I've been playing small time/indie/second string games for over a year and have been having a blast.
PS: Destiny 1 was shooting at a hole in the ground until loot fell out
Play Night in the Woods!Well, I'm not exactly without sin here. I paid for Overwatch after all (though I never bought any lootboxes). But I think that was the one that cured me. I've pretty much sworn off all the big publishers. I've been playing small time/indie/second string games for over a year and have been having a blast.
PS: Destiny 1 was shooting at a hole in the ground until loot fell out
That there was a real money option for a tacked on multiplayer (that was better than the game itself) was still bullshit, and a sign of things to come.
GasBandit
Staff member
When you boil a frog, you do it slow.
I mean, sure, they're putting poison in the water supply, but only a little.
They did, but the game is also free to play. And the stuff you get or can unlock doesn't really unbalance the game as far as I know.
Oh yeah, that's true. It's been so long since I fired up TF2 I forgot it's F2P.
I think that's largely been the biggest problems with these microtransactions and loot boxes. It's not just that they're in the game. It's that they're with a full-priced game. Then that full-priced game has season passes, pre-order bonuses, gold editions, etc. There'd be a LOT less complaining if they were free to play. Far as I know, no one complains about TF2 or DOTA2 being guilty of the same microtransaction/loot box stuff and I imagine it's because they're both F2P.[DOUBLEPOST=1511838348,1511838296][/DOUBLEPOST]
Yep. Jim Sterling praised the game itself and openly said he would've listed it in his best games of that year. But couldn't because of all that malarky.
This is why I'm a bit more okay with the crates in say... SMITE than Overwatch.
- Base game is free to play.
- All crates list their contents
- No doubles, you ether get something new from the crate or some double worshipper/favor days if there is nothing new to give you.
- Many skins can just be straight up bought with Gems, which you can get for free every week or through events if you are willing to wait and save up.
It's still a bit random (You might not get the skins you REALLY want unless you buy several crates) but it feels less like extortion than Overwatch does. Fuck, I don't even play Overwatch unless there is an event going on because it feel disadvantageous to do it. Why waste time on classic crates when I can get event crates?
fade
Staff member
I'll be honest... I can see the devs' sides in this argument. No one wants to pay more for video games, but they don't want to pay for new pricing models either. I still don't necessarily buy the player camp's definitions of "whole game" either. Games were about $50 in 1985, unadjusted for inflation. The average price of a AAA title on Steam is still $40-60. I imagine some production costs have decreased, but a lot of them have increased. Music, acting, license fees for third party (programming) libraries, etc are not cheap.
I’m only speaking for myself, but spending $100 on a game with everything included is far better than spending $40 on a game that needs another “optional” $200 in loot boxes, season passes, and day 1 DLC to get all the content. I’d like to think that guaranteed $100 would be a better revenue model than having “whales” spend too much while the rest of your customers get pissed off at the paywalls.
But you’re right. The market is currently showing that people would take the latter option.
figmentPez
Staff member
As I said in another thread:
"an SNES Final Fantasy cartridge cost $15 to make just for the physical media. Even with a price of $70, which at the time was outrageous, Final Fantasy 6's manufacture cost 20% of the retail price. Compare that to the pennies it costs to distribute a game via digital distribution, and the fact that you can keep selling that game at $40, at $20, at $5, at $1 and still keep making a profit until you've hit the very end of a long tail that rivals re-releases of the White Album. Selling games on cartridge was risk, too. Publishers are just able to invest more money into human effort now, instead of having to invest 20% into manufacturing costs."
Not only that, but an SNES RPG could never have an expansion pack, or any other sort of post-release content.
If it's really true that development costs necessitate higher game prices, and gamers won't pay for fair pricing models, then maybe we shouldn't have absurdly over-produced games like SWBF2. There are a lot of games that are profitable without loot boxes, and the extra money thrown at SWBF2 still produced a bug-ridden, unbalanced near-disaster.
If loot boxes were really a make or break for profit, then stopping them wouldn't be considered "not a setback", it would be a financial catastrophe.
To paraphrase Jim Sterling, if you want to know what's really going on with development costs, don't look at what companies tell their customers or game sites; look at what they tell their investors.
To paraphrase Jim Sterling, if you want to know what's really going on with development costs, don't look at what companies tell their customers or game sites; look at what they tell their investors.
GasBandit
Staff member
On the other hand, they no longer have to manufacture cartridges, so really their costs are the same whether they "ship" 100 units or 100,000,000, and there are DEFINITELY WAY MORE people buying games now than there were in 1985. Hell, in 1997 the VG industry's revenue was only $5.1 billion, today it's over $90 billion. That's an 18-fold increase with a complete elimination of distribution costs. If the game's good enough, more people will buy it, which incurs no extra logistical cost and is all pure profit.
Oh, I see Pez already went down this path.
Now, hang on. I thought I'd heard that SWBF2 was a great game in and of itself - like, the way it plays, the quality of graphics, etc - but that having so much content locked behind RNG loot boxes ruined it.
Was it a bug-ridden disaster that the loot boxes were *also* a problem with?
Also, didn't we hear this same complaint about Shadow of War - about having to buy shit to get the real ending - when it turns out it's not that complicated to do it just by playing?
Was it a bug-ridden disaster that the loot boxes were *also* a problem with?
Also, didn't we hear this same complaint about Shadow of War - about having to buy shit to get the real ending - when it turns out it's not that complicated to do it just by playing?
It's not the same industry, though. That change in revenue isn't all going to the same companies who are spending on the same number of games at the same amount of cost. First of all, half of it is mobile revenue, and a very significant chunk of the remainder is from Chinese F2P PC games. Then development costs of AAA PC/console titles have gone from $2-$10M in 1997 to $50-$100M before marketing costs today. And that's not accounting for crazy outliers like Destiny and GTA V, which each supposedly cost ~$140M before marketing, and SWTOR, which supposedly cost ~$200M. The Witcher 3 "only" cost $81M because WBIE picked up most of the marketing tab and most of the developers live in Warsaw.
Furthermore, with prices staying nearly the same, you would need to see a sufficient uptick in unit sales to make up for that massive increase in cost. Going digital has helped, but things like technology licensing fees, salaries, and growing team size (and all the equipment capital that comes with that) eats that particular windfall up.
Should game developers be focusing on smaller teams/projects? Probably. Real wages have remained stagnant, at least in the US, so raising sticker prices as a rule really won't work very well, so getting lean and efficient is the answer if you can't drive revenue in some other way.
Does this mean that gamers need to factor in company financial situations when they make purchase decisions? No, of course not, that's just stupid, it is the companies making the development decisions they do that should be taking the risk. But looking at the global gaming revenue and acting like nothing else has changed is silly.
GasBandit
Staff member
I wasn't saying nothing else has changed, I was saying that since manufacturing and distribution costs have decreased to near-zero, the profit curve vs units sold is exponentially higher than it was. Super Mario 3 sold 7 million copies in the US and was the highest selling unbundled NES game ever. Now Eidos considers 5 million copies of Tomb Raider to be a failure. Probably because of the ridiculous budgets you describe.
I agree that the lesson to be taken away here is to be smaller and leaner, because as you say - the justifiable cost of a game is not based on the expense of developing it, but on what the market will bear - and the market clearly will not bear >$60 price points, aside from a few whales.
fade
Staff member
And I still counter that manufacturing costs may have gone down, but production costs have skyrocketed. Every one of those logos at the beginning of your favorite AAA game requires a massively expensive licensing fee that's probably per-unit. Not to mention all the smaller lego brick libraries that don't get fancy above-title billing. The cost of art assets don't even approach the 8 bit sprites from 1985. Separate art teams for characters, landscapes and FX. The foley, the score, the actors. The developer teams and marketing teams are massive (and they're probably getting screwed the most--devs in that industry have zero job security). A AAA game is now a superset of a movie production, and we know how much those cost.