"breaking news: a czech man known only as kovarex has rocketed to the top of the most wealthy men in the world list. Legislation is currently being drafted to regulate the use of the drug ‘factorio’ with several legislators describing as ‘extremely addictive. Like, so addictive. Really guys.’ "
The industry can’t learn this lesson from their customers, because they didn’t get the bad idea from their market. It’s a society-wide trend, a symptom of a whole economy under the control of a narrow coproate elite that knows little to nothing about the industries they control or the products they produce. They contribute nothing to the productive process. They only work to streamline the parasitism that infests our society.
I have experienced this on the production end, as well. I used to work in pest control. For a brief period of my career, I was lucky enough to work for a midsized regional company, grown from a small family business, that was focused on solving actual customer problems. We did tons of one shot work. We did do quarterly and bimonthly service, but there was no particular pressure to subscribe, or to cajole customers who wanted to cancel service (because we’d successfully dealt with the problem) into continuing service.
Then the elderly couple that owned the company sold us to a global megaconglomerate (one of the “Big Three”). Over the course of a year, our focus changed. “Recurring revenue” was now the watchword, which is a tough fit in an inherently seasonal industry. And the reason they do this, in pest control, in game development, in every industry that can potentially produce any kind of surplus wealth, is because the owners (“investors”) neither know nor care about any of the details of the industries they control. All they want is regular and ever-increasing revenues, in exchange for nothing at all. You can’t even say it’s in exchange for access to their savings, because though there is a little actual savings in the system, that’s chump change compared to the ever growing wealthy elite that controls our society and devours our productivity.
Beautifully written and entirely spot on. The question is whether we will do anything about it. We probably have 10-30 years before this elite will entrench themselves forever with some kind of robot police that truly can’t be overthrown. (And it’s not like anyone is rising up now, even though the power is clearly with the workers)
And then this elite will Habsburg-jaw themselves into oblivion and all that remains of humanity are machines built in the name of shareholder profits. What a sad way for things to end.
Or, alternatively, they’ll ruin the earth’s climate in their selfishness and greed and either find a way to leave the planet and abandon the plebs to die, or more likely, die right alongside us as the climate collapses and ecological disaster wipes out the human race.
I see a different future. The tendency of wealth to be drawn upwards as position comes to replace labor as the primary means of gaining wealth ultimately puts a cap on progress. It’s a soft cap, meaning it might happen sooner or happen later, but it will happen sooner or later. Eventually, the imbalance reaches a tipping point, where the slightest jolt to the system sends the entire thing crashing down. Maybe people get pissed enough that general rebellion breaks out. Maybe the population becomes sufficiently stressed and undernourished and, therefore, immunocompromised that a global pandemic goes well beyond COVID into Bubonic Plague territory. Maybe peoples faith in the system becomes so thoroughly damaged that law breaks down generally, forcing those ultra rich to devote so many resources to security the people providing the security become the new elite. Allowing “position” (in Classical Economic parlance, “Land”) to be in itself a source of private revenue sows the seeds of destruction for a progressing society.
Of course, once enough people die and enough capital is destroyed, society starts over again, going once again through an age where labor is in the drivers seat, until population and capital base recovers.
Earning revenue by caring for your customers and the industry takes strategic direction, time, money and effort, and the kind of effort needed is different between industries.
Earning revenue by sucking the living shit out of a company works (at least temporarily) for any industry and a multinational C-suite executive can employ it to any industry to give themselves the guise of success.
It’s like instead of cooking and following a recipe, just take all the ingredients and stick it into a blender and call the smoothie a meal. You’ll get sustenance but you ruined what made food interesting.
Isn’t the whole point of pest control to kill ‘em [the pests] dead? Like, to have recurring business from the same customer one would have to not actually solve their problem. Barring any reintroduction of pests with seasonality as you suggested, or otherwise.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is certainly the latest and most prominent example, but Elden Ring, both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. The Witcher 3. The Last of Us Part 1 and 2. No cash shops, substantive DLC, if there is any.
And what do all those games have in common?
They're solo games.
It's PvP and MMOs where you can purchase an advantage, show off your bling, or purchase expansions to get a head start on the competition. That is where the microtransaction infestation occurs.
Yup, this is why the last two Diablo games have been always online, no one is going to spend $25 on a skin macrotransaction when nobody else can even seen it.
I have wondered what percentage of gamers don’t purchase any mtx in those type of games. We get revenue numbers, but I’ve wondered how many gamers avoid that aspect while playing the game.
Oh yes. Well aware of that. Just more wondering how much of the userbase never actually spends money. Curious as to either how much of a majority or minority the active users who don’t buy any mtx is.
I've been an MMO gamer for a VERY long time and I would say the whaling thing is a perfect analogy. I often pre-order expansions to MMOs like WoW and FFXIV but I have never bought cosmetics other than two race changes for FF, which would make me a "dolphin".
I noticed in WoW and FFXIV that if someone has one mount you can only get from the cash shop, they are VERY likely to have bought TONS of other cosmetics from the cash shop. If they don't have any cash shop mounts, they won't have any cosmetics from it either. It seems like most people are either "all in" or nothing, people like me are very rare.
I’m a lot like you as well. I’m one of those players who buys cosmetics from cash shops when I see something I really fall in love with, but I don’t feel the need to buy everything. I look at it as an occasional treat: sure I won’t own it when the game shuts down at some point in the future, but if I spent the money on, say, a takeaway meal or a night out, that lasts a couple hours and then it’s gone. I’m definitely a dolphin, not a whale.
But I wouldn’t spend a vast fortune on trying to get everything if I have to spend real money. In some MMOs I’ve bought cash shop cosmetics from the auction house, though. I think that can distort the impression of how much someone has spent in the cash shop, making it look like they’re “all in”, when in reality, they’ve just been playing for so long that they have more in-game currency than they know what to do with.
I reckon the “dolphins” are more common than you think.
Is there any actual concrete sources? It’s what I believe to be true too, but would be nice to see something concrete. It is fascinating how a small percentage of gamers change the landscape for a huge majority of gamers.
I don't want the lesson to be learned that devs should only make single player games either. Baldur's Gate 3 itself is co-op, for instance, and Elden Ring has substantial online components for multiplayer and otherwise.
No, you’re right, it’s all of them. Ubisoft is one of the worst perpetrators of this shit actually. Far Cry games having an online shop is so unnecessary.
Edit: In fact, they’re so bad they attempted to implement NFTs in Ghost Recon. Like… what?
That didn’t last though.
the nft implementation in breakpoint was so bad that it seemed like it was missing the point on purpose. It was just different serial numbers printed on a helmet and the rarer the helmet the more play time you had to have on your account to actually wear it. So the nfts were barely unique, didn’t look cool and you couldn’t just buy whatever to show it off. Respect to the devs that managed to pull this off when execs asked for nfts.
I’ve never thought about it before, but I wonder if the companies with games containing microtransactions can ask PSN for compensation for lost income due to long outages.
I tried this in the first place I lived at where I paid for my own internet, which was Comcast at the time.
They said (paraphrasing because it was a long time ago) their contract specified they were not responsible for any outages, nor any income lost due to same. I don’t know if that’s true, but I was young and naive and accepted it at face value.
Outages are a thing of the past since I switched to 4G. If you asked me in 2010 if 4G of all things would be better than a wired connection I would never have believed it.
It’s fast enough and never had an outage. Once in the past year I rotated the antenna to point at a different mast because it was being a little slow. I assume cell towers are a higher priority of infrastructure as they serve more people, and as there are multiple I can connect to there is also redundancy.
This was back in 2006 or so. I don’t recall if 4G was around then, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t available as an internet provider. If it was, I wasn’t aware.
I’m pretty happy with my current internet solution, but I’ll keep your suggestion in mind. Thank you!
My first reason for going 4G was general distaste that all the wired providers leave me with. Awful pricing models where they charge less for 4 months then more for 20 and then loads indefinitely kinda thing and I just decided fuck that. I think there is a bit more competition for the 4G side of things too.
When I worked at a web host, we had people like that. Being support sucked. Like, yes, it sucks that your e-commerce site that uses horrifically outdated software is offline but, we don’t offer quad nines, especially not on a $35/year shared hosting plan. And, honestly Drew, your site gets single-digit visits per month and sells erotica based upon the premise of Edgar Allen Poe being transported to 1990s Brooklyn and working as an apartment building super. At best, you’re breaking even on that hosting bill.
As bad as the customers I deal with are I am so glad we only work with real companies. The smallest are a few hundred staff. At least 99% of the time they can be professional. The exception so far have been pretty funny though, shame I don’t go on calls with them anymore tbh.
It is basically just a web form these days (just google “xfinity outage” or whatever).
They cut you off after a certain number of outages per quarter. And they decide how much money you get per outage. So if your next door neighbor has never reported an outage and you report every single one, they’ll get more for that one report.
Live service garbage has costed the industry billions in losses and costed tens of thousands of devs their jobs. Fad chasing in general.
Everyone wants to make the fortnite killer or overwatch killer. They set billions of dollars on fire and get nothing for it. And it’s the devs who pay the price. Not the c-suite dipshits who threw all that money in the fire pit.
I mean they also created a ton of jobs and it‘s not like devs working on single player games don‘t face layoffs and bonuses fraud. Besides Overwatch 2 killed Overwatch already.
Way to make a truly bad faith argument or perhaps you are lost or something. To clarify: Are you implying it‘s any different for AAA SP games? Because that’s the discussion here.
Yes, imo live service games are very bad for the people who buy them and the people making it.
They are only there to make cash. And they make this cash through terrible predatory monetization - loot boxes, microtransactions, season passes. These companies actually want to run casinos that target the most vulnerable and children. You can argue that people wouldn’t want to work on this if they had a choice.
There’s almost always very little artistic value.
At least with sp AAA, you can gain a cult following if you have an interesting gameplay, or story. what are you doing with a live service one? Nothing, just offering the same thing that someone else has already created in another flavour, just to chase a trend. What this means is that they’re more likely to fail and not for the fault of the devs for sure.
They’re also bad for preservation of games. All live service games die, you can’t play them once support ends. You paid 60 dollars to rent a game? (Though I suppose that’s true with sp always online games as well and it’s not directly a bad thing for the dev)
Though… you maybe sort of right, the Industry is so bad right now that it doesn’t even matter whether you are working on sp or live service, you are in some sort of hell regardless…
I‘m just going to say that the distinctions between the two you‘re laying out here seem irrelevant to the discussion to me. I am not arguing about a season pass or preservation of games. Again, that is not what this discussion is about. This is about the developing side of games where these things don‘t mean anything. To give an example of what I mean: World of Warcraft employed and paid more people over a longer period of time than most AAA games.
I don’t know of the statistics, so yes, I can’t say for sure sp employs more people than live service. But in my opinion live service games are more risky and harmful to the industry as a hole.
But my original comment was about how it doesn’t matter if they created jobs or not because they are trying to replace everyone with AI. Coders, designers, artists… So it doesn’t matter sp or live service. They want to not employ anyone and run casinos
From what I know Sweet Baby Inc. is involved. Which is a studio that focuses a lot on DEI when it comes to narratives/story in games.
They already did not have the greatest track record, some good games, but a lot of mediocre and even bad games. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the game scores are related to DEI, but the fact it keeps happening to games they’re involved with says at least something.
The good games they’ve worked on have included some of the most praised games in recent years. If you want to ask why this keeps happening, you have to have massive blinders on to ignore the likes of God of War: Ragnarok and Alan Wake II, both firmly in recent memory, and also realize that basically no writer on earth could save something like Suicide Squad from its criticisms.
Like I said, some good games. Which by the way still received criticism from people about certain DEI related involvements, whether you agree or disagree with that is different thing, but the criticism was there too.
Anything not about straight white men will have people complaining about DEI bullshit. It’s never a reason a game has failed. They fail because they’re bad games. They might also include DEI stuff, but it’s not the cause.
Edit: correction, those games listed are about straight white men. Anything that includes a character that is not a straight white man will have those people complaining. They’re the most fragile people in the world.
They are contract writers for hire, and you have been misled, either intentionally or unintentionally, by the YouTubers you follow. Both Sweet Baby and their clients have denied this interpretation of what they do.
Not sure what I’m being misled over? It literally says on Wikipedia as well:
Sweet Baby Inc. is a Canadian narrative development and consultation studio based in Montreal. Founded by former Ubisoft developers, including scriptwriter Kim Belair and product manager David Bédard, the company consults on video game narratives during development to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion within game narratives and studios.
Also, in every game they’ve worked on it’s quite obvious which part they’ve been involved with, based on the above.
But people on this sub really just like to keep shooting the messenger huh 🙄
You know that in the wake of Suicide Squad and Saga from Alan Wake II, they stated quite clearly that what was “obviously” their contributions were totally wrong, with Remedy confirming on their end? It may not be inaccurate to state that sensitivity reading or consulting for authenticity when writing diverse characters are services that they offer, but their contributions to each game are not itemized. It’s like when a bad port happens and people see Iron Galaxy in the credits, they want to see this pattern of Iron Galaxy being responsible rather than <beloved creator of game you like> and then throw out any evidence of Iron Galaxy actually being a really good port studio. I get that you want to form patterns of why something you perceive to be wrong is happening, but the truth is that these companies’ contributions are not itemized, because video games work more like a traditional business than Hollywood, and it’s no one’s policy to break out which work was done by a contractor versus in-house, so you’ll actually never know. Instead, Endymion, or whoever it is you watch that picked up on the week’s trending rage bait topic, cosplays as a journalist and infers a whole lot of what Sweet Baby does that they just didn’t do, whereas an actual journalist would get quotes from sources to confirm that it’s true.
Did you know about this game? Did you buy and play this game? Did you actually like this game?
Are you one of the ~220 people who bought this game and didn’t spread the word to their friends.
It sounds to me like this game sucks. Maybe it was rotten from the start. Maybe they were forced to hire a bunch of mentally ill people with a massive chip on their shoulder to ‘advise’ and change the game to tick some boxes on a list. ( don’t you just love having fun according to a list of prescribed requirements? ) I bet the people working on it like that. Talk about a soul sucking job without passion. We will probably never know the truth.
You’re parroting the line of dumb conspiracy theories known as Gamergate 2 pushed by a bunch of grifters farming engagement on YouTube.
Narrative consultancy companies like SBI don’t force you to hire them, and if you choose to hire them, you don’t have to follow all of their advice.
If you’re interesting in curing yourself of the mindworms the YouTube algorithm has planted in your brain, please check this out: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGmESJM6BFQ
If video games were priced by hours of dev time, I could kind of agree (with the theory, in practice it doesn’t really make sense). But let’s be honest here - that’s not what he means at all.
Not only is it not what he means but this same asshole would probably force devs to add padded objectives just so he could claim it takes more hours to finish. The new GTA will have 1000 missions where you have to walk across the whole map to retrieve some object that needs to be walked back to the other side if this dick gets his way. It’ll be the first game in history where it takes 2 years to 100% it and costs $200 so it’s a steal - only $100 per year of gameplay!
For some reason I can’t see your answer on the post: despite us being both from lemmy.world and me being able to otherwise access your profile and see your posts and comments, the only way I can see it is in my notifications, not as an answer to my post. Anyway.
That’s why the original argument is inherently flawed: for the same price, I’d rather have 20 hours of carefully crafted content than 500 hours of AI generated fetch quests in a basic, procedurally generated open world from the latest version of the Ubisoft game framework. As a customer, I’m not buying playtime, I’m also buying the quality of that playtime.
This is also why we don’t pay for a movie, an album, or even a show or an exhibition by their duration.
They literally included a screenshot of valve asking to not share information about the game with a little quip about how they pressed escape instead of ok. Blantant disrespect to valves wishes even if it’s not a legally binding agreement.
They chose getting clicks over doing right by valve. Shame on them.
20,000 people are playing it at a time. Not exactly a secret. The way they’re testing this game is radical and newsworthy in itself. I’m glad Verge reported on it, and they don’t seem mad they they were banned
forbes.com
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