You want us to subsidize all of the microtransactions and equivalent online bullshit to turn on your money machine. Strip all that horseshit away, give us good single player ONLY and you’ll be doing just fine.
“CROSSING GUARD, WEARING SOLID GOLD HEAD-TO-TOE ARMOR, SAYS CROSSING GUARDS AGENT BEING PAID ENOUGH TO DO THEIR CRITICAL WORK!”
That was before they started diarrhea shitting themselves since the founders left. GTA Trilogy, GTA+, and removing cars people paid for in Online is just a taste of things to come.
Yeah, they left and the change was IMMEDIATE. Holy moly the shit show that was RDO. If you were playing that game back then, you could see the crumbling of the company happening in real time, it was wild. RDO being left to rot is my Roman empire, and I wonder if the founders feel regret at all with how their creation was treated by the company they left. Or if they just dry their tears with hundos these days?
Heck, I don’t even feel like RDR2 lived up to it’s full potential before they left, what with post-game being the most buggy and unfinished-feeling part of the whole game. It felt like it was just waiting for DLC content to be added, since it was a huge patch of map with hardly anything going on. Sigh, who knows.
It’s Rockstar Games, they love microtransactions and Sharkcards and will more than likely implement more greed tactics into their next big game (GTA 6). I’m still pissed off over the bilking they did with the bunker series in GTA 5. They’re a ruthless, greedy company. And don’t forget those times they went after those fanboys/talented game designers who were revamping their old games like GTA 4. Those kids were super talented and Rockstar busted their asses like the mobsters they are. Fuck Rockstar and their next GTA greed fest.
This only works if you spin this with a product leadership strategy:
Shovelware games that don’t offer a solid chunk of hours or any kind of replayability should be priced lower, and proper games should be priced normally.
The thing is, this is not at all how pricing works if you’re building a business model. Prices are always heavily influenced by what the consumer is willing to pay, or in this case what they’ve been used to for years. For as long as I can remember “full price” has always been $50 or $60.
Special editions with marginal bonus content, $10 price increases on the base game and shitty DLC (horse armor comes to mind) are all examples of corporate shit tests, designed to see how far they can take it.
History has proven though, that changing consumer expectations is among the more difficult things to do in a market where alternatives are rampant. Though the whole franchise loyalty thing kinda ruins that, but I’ll be damned if I have to pay $200 for a game. That will promt me to just play something else instead.
No. This is absolutely wrong. If a game is short but does something unique and engaging it’s worth more than the next open world game that wastes your time. The amount of time a game takes to complete has next to nothing to do with the value a consumer gets from the game.
A “proper game” isn’t one that takes 60+ hours to complete. A proper game is one that takes an idea and does something interesting with it, or at least tries to create the most enjoyable experience for a player as possible.
I don’t want to trudge through an open world collecting bullshit they put in just to make me spend more time. I want an interesting experience that maximizes my enjoyment per hour. If it’s low enjoyment per hour there’s a million other things I could be doing instead.
Which is exactly why my first sentence explicitly states “product leadership”.
I agree, we don’t need any more games that prolong a shitty experience just to use collective playtime as a metric of success.
The correct metric could be play time AND experience rating: If I manage to put 300 hours into a game, none of it feels repetitive and I’m still having fun I’d be willing to spend more than if I get a couple hours of amazing gameplay and a giant “collect all these flags” middle finger for 100% completion.
Ultimately we need publishers to stop their short-term value strategies and start investing in long-term value from reputation, popular IPs and games that will be remembered.
The interest in or aptitude of is irrelevant for the position of CEO. The CEO's skill lies in increasing shareholder value, period, end of discussion. I don't get why people still buy into the idea that CEOs give a good god damn about consumer's opinions of quality - they never have.
Because it's deeply dysfunctional how much of our society is driven by this shortsighted approach. A lot people are not surprised by it at this point, but just explaining and accepting that shareholder value is the only thing that matters to them doesn't really fix the issues. And there's a lot more issues caused by this than just how fun some games are.
We are beyond asking how it works or why, we should be asking what should be done about it.
While I’m not entirely inclined to disagree, I doubt his idea of how much an hour of gaming should cost your average player aligns very well with mine.
What he is doing sounds reasonable on the surface but it's a rhetorical trick.
This is about getting players in forever live services to keep paying forever even if the game is not adding anything more to make it worth it. There is a hint of merit of paying for a game that you enjoy a lot but don't forget how today games are endlessly padded out with grind and daily missions to keep players coming back out of habit, delaying access to what they really want to get, rather than because they are enjoying it. Nevermind that these tactics are also what gets people impatient and buying Shark Cards, for instance. It's why the freemium model became so commonly used. He wants to profit in the mean time too.
forbes.com
Aktywne