That’s why the top management should never be listened to. The CFO saying that means literally nothing because they will turn around and put MTX in single player games if they feel like they can get away with it. Their word is worthless because their goal is money.
I haven’t played in a while but a ton of my friends are into it, including people who normally wouldn’t be into gaming or Pokemon. I don’t totally get it but they’re doing something right
I haven’t played in the last year or so but the game did age very well. I played it like everyone else when it first came out and the novelty quickly wore off and the game had very little depth. I revisited it many years later on a whim and was surprised with how much content had been added. I ended up playing regularly for a few years after that with my wife. The game is definitely dependent on where you live and now that I’m in a more rural area I don’t play very much but even in a medium population city it’s was very enjoyable. I joined a local discord and we attended many community days and it was a great deal of fun and very social. Fond memories, and I hope to revisit the game again
I had fun with Go when it launched, but haven’t played in years. What I love about it though is how many"non- traditional" gamers play it. I’ve had more than one 50+ coworker I’ve known tell me they play it often, and do no other gaming besides it. Two of my sisters also play, and they don’t play any other games. I think that’s awesome.
I tried it way back when it launched, and before that, the whatever previous non-pokemon game they made. I didn’t stick to it, and today I wouldn’t touch a location tracking game with a long pole, but there was more fun in it than just collecting fake creatures or whatever. Going out for a walk and making my way to places marked on the game map was cool. I found some interesting landmarks that I had no idea about before.
Once you get to a certain point the only way to get new pokemon is to grind eggs and they set the drop rates for some so low it takes dozens and dozens of eggs to get them. Then you have the regional pokemon that are normally impossible to get without travel that will become available for special events if you shell out for 10+ bucks. Its manipulative
I think I have all the ones from eggs which are possible, I’d need to check though. Regional Pokémon haven’t been limited for a while, you can get them in 7km eggs which you get from others.
Year 1 I went hard on pokemon go, I committed to the original 150 (I don’t recognize anything past red and blue) that were available and in my region then peaced out. There wasn’t anything there past my nostalgia.
what really bugs me are fighting games with dlc characters. i know fighting games arent as profitable, but twenty years ago you could unlock every character by actually playing the game. locking content behind paywalls are a slap to poor gamers. that’s on top of a $60 price tag
This has been disproven and was called out at the time of the increase. Games cost less to develop now than ever. Microtransactions and recurrent subscription transaction1s like battlepasses mean a shit game gets to live longer than it would deserve. People have careers in the field and languages common to the industry - this isn’t a “new and groundbreaking” industry - its one of the largest on the planet.
Studios are absolutely not passing any of that $10 to lower level staff. It was to see if the market would bear it, and no other reason - and corporate defenders came out of the woodwork to pretend BILLION dollar corporations need more money. If videogames were too expensive to make, they’d not be spending so much, now would they?
It’s interesting actually. There are both games with insane budgets that cost more that than triple A games in years past and incredible tooling and assets available for very modest amounts of money + incredibly powerful computers very little. It’s possible for some games to be made for less than ever before AND some to be made for more.
Has the distribution gone up though? If the quantity of games being sold has increased the companies are making just as much even though games are “cheaper.”
Imo. That’s the big argument in this debate that doesn’t get discussed. The reach has increased so prices could come down as more units are sold and the company would get the same amount of money.
20 years ago, they sold every Street Fighter three times with more characters in each new iteration. Microtransactions suck, but simple DLC is a less shitty than what used to be normal.
They did milk the fuck out of that, I’ll grant you.
But at the same time you couldn’t take them online and end up playing somebody who’d got the latest one and have to fight new characters you’d have no access to.
Fighting games started in coin operated arcade cabinets that were intentionally designed to be such a pain in the ass to beat that people would dump heaps of money into them just to keep playing. Same deal with games that were released in the days that youd rent them for a week. The difficulty was set so high that it was very unlikely that you could beat the game in that week so you would end up renting them another week or two.
The gaming industry has been filled with greedy fuck policies from the beginning and the only thing that has changed is how they are greedy fucks.
Yeah, I noticed this with mortal Kombat on snes. Every time I played the single player campaign, I’d win one fairly easily, then I’d lose to the next guy. Then I’d use a continue and beat that guy fairly easily and lose to the next one. Repeat until I run out of continues, with the occasional upset of the pattern (extra win or loss).
but its okay, cause 4 years later we’ll release an expansion and what we are declaring the final patches to finally have the game in a state it should have been when it was fucking released.
The worst thing is that everyone seems to think that it IS where it should have been at release! Which I will admit that it is finally the polished bug-free game that any game should be at release. But anyone like me who was watching every last promo video they did teasing the game pre-release, knows it still isn’t and never will be the game they promised it would be.
Their insistence on releasing on previous gen hardware is surely as much to blame as the rush to get it out for that sweet sweet pandemic money. Still looking back it’s hard to say if it ever was going to live up to what they were teasing it would be.
I’m just happy if a game arrives in good, playable condition, feature and story complete.
and Cyberpunk couldnt even live up to that. Perhaps it was story complete on release? I dont know, I was never able to beat the game until like 2 years after release due to encountering a mind-numbing amount of bugs and catastrophes and thus giving up and walking away from the game for a good long time.
I would have refunded it and never thought about it again if it wasnt a gift.
Yeah with initial disaster at release it’s easy to forget they originally promised multiplayer would be added in later and a robust functioning society where each NPC would have a job and routine they follow
Exactly. I hate that people are completely on CDPR side again, forgetting that they completely deceived their fans with a half baked game. Just because they eventually made it better (and still didn’t deliver on what they said) doesn’t mean they deserve to heralded again. Any trust I had in them is gone.
I am actually ok with micro transactions in multiplayer competitive games for cosmetic skins.
I am not saying that most games that do this aren’t extremely toxic in their design but the idea of players of a popular competitive game continually paying small amounts of money to artists to create new riffs on the same player models and weapons that those players can use to express themselves is potentially a wonderful direct connection between 3D modeling artists and players that continually values those 3D modeling artists far after the initial game development is over (and a game company could potentially have no work for a 3D modeler when just maintaining a multiplayer game with small updates).
The problem is that the type of people who are most likely to spend money on loot boxes are exploited heavily, and then shamed by everyone around them into not revealing how much they spent on video game call of duty mobile skins.
None of this even remotely works when you talk about singleplayer games though, basically nobody dresses to the nines to just go for a walk in the woods where nobody can see them… the direct link between 3D modeling artists and players expressing themselves in view of other players is gone. Players may spend hours dressing their singleplayer character and enjoy that part of the game but it just isn’t the same thing as your multiplayer competitive game character you have spent countless hours playing in multiplayer matches interacting with countless people with. It is the difference between taking a freeing walk in the woods and taking a walk in a city in view of a crowd of other artists.
I guess what I am trying to say is that micro transactions are really only okay when they are “micro” because they are a direct interaction between a player and an artist in the way buying a single song from an album might be.
Of course, my entire point is subsumed by the fact that most of the big companies probably treat the 3D modelers making their skins like trash and are probably going to replace literally all of them with AI as quietly but as quickly as possible in the next couple of months.
If they want to sell skins that are purely cosmetic I don’t have an issue with that. Some people have money to drop on stuff like that and it helps fund the game.
Loot boxes on the other hand can absolutely get fucked. It’s gambling, plain and simple. It has no place in games.
Except Bethesda is also one of the few companies that releases full on expansions to their games. Horse armour was the worst (and thus cheapest) of Oblivions addons, but Shivering Isles was an entire new full area and plotline.
Nuance exists. And ignoring it allows a lot of good to get caught in the crossfire
Real good take, I couldn’t agree more. I also sold a dota2 skin that I got randomly for a couple hundred dollars like 8 years ago and it funded my PC purchases for a couple years so I might be biased 😉
In my comment I attempted to point out that yes the profit from micro transactions never really goes to the artists and developers, but if it did in theory I would actually be really supportive of artist run cosmetic stores for multiplayer competitive games.
I want 3D modeling artists to be valued, and competitive multiplayer games providing a canvas in which artists can continually express themselves and create outfits/skins for players and items in game is an incredible opportunity to reaffirm the value of the labor of 3D modeling artists.
The opportunity is currently totally captured and subverted by shitty corporate control, but in theory it is still there.
For singleplayer games, no horse armor crap is lame, I just want developers working on expansion content.
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