I was playing Cyberpunk for a couple days last week as it was on sale on PSN but lost interest as soon as I got the final mission (I played it at launch but inevitably returned it due to the state it was in).
the past couple days I’ve been busting through all of my unfinished Warhammer 40k pile instead and have been feeling pretty good about that.
The only sports game worth buying is nba 2k. The graphics are way better. The franchise mode is a million times better. There is less glitches. Stop buying madden. Tell the NFL you dont want EA anymore
Let’s say you score a 20$ ticket to a 3.5 hour game. That comes to $5.7 per hour of entertainment. Meanwhile, this game at $70 means you only need to put in 12.5 hours of playtime to get the equivalent, and after you can continue to play as much as you want unlike the in-person ticketed experience.
You do realize that’s the case for every form of IP, right?
“Man, I want to read the new Brandon Sanderson book, and eat food this month. But the publisher is asking $4,000 for a copy!! What theft!! I’m going to have to subsist on chewing dirt for the next few months!”
Or, sane response:
“Well, that price is ludicrous. I guess I’ll read other books” (and in this case, play other football games)
The argument that people „vote with their wallet“ is not new. But the fundamental problem is that you can’t make them. They have jobs, kids and might not be the most intelligent people. So if the kids ask for this game, they might get overwhelmed by life and make bad decisions. Welcome to being human.
The issue is that corporations are not subject to „life“ so they are able to shape the market as they pleased unless stopped. It has happened countless times. Mergers being stopped because it gave them too much power, predatory business practices leading to lawsuits because they keep competition away.
It’s all about power balance. They can employ psychologists to study our behavior, we can’t and the government can’t and is too slow.
So yes, the „game difficulty“ for large corporations needs to be upped significantly.
You voting with your wallet does not mean that your vote wins every time. Madden might still exist even if you don't buy it. But at least you can direct the money you would have spent on it elsewhere, to someone who needs it more.
I know and I didn’t say otherwise. But this only focuses on you and does not solve the underlying issue. I‘m not saying buy the game. I‘m saying the corporations have too much power.
You take that power away by voting with your wallet though. EA just had its ass handed to them via BattleBit, delivering the game that fans actually wanted, not to mention Baldur's Gate 3 outdoing the last number of efforts from EA's own BioWare. Voting with your wallet isn't an overnight process, and often enough, it brings corporations down.
I‘m not disagreeing that not buying stuff is good. I am saying that we are not bringing corporations down and we are not discouraging them from finding new ways to fuck with us.
Madden 22 raked in 4.4 billion usd. Apparently, typical AAA games take about 60 mil usd to make. That is a 6.666% margin.
Now make something and sell it on ebay, amazon or anywhere for that margin and people will cancel you in a heartbeat. In the country I live in, if you sell something for more than twice the original price, you can get sued.
But nobody has all the stuff required to make a competitor to madden. So you control the market. Pretty easy to grasp in my opinion. And games also are getting more and more convoluted with trash paid dlc, crypto, nfts. You can look at minecraft bedrock for example. Nobody is telling bill gates to stop because people have no choice but to miss out on the game, have their kid not participate in school buddies chit chat and so on. It’s an impossible situation to solve on a „vote with your wallet“ basis.
Apparently, typical AAA games take about 60 mil usd to make.
I don't know where you got that figure, but it sounds very outdated. I expect each iteration of Madden to cost several times that to produce. Video games are also a very scalable product to sell, so your margin comparison to a product sold on Amazon is not apt. Avengers and Forspoken had negative profit margins, for instance, because the economics of selling those things is very different than a product on Amazon.
And games also are getting more and more convoluted with trash paid dlc, crypto, nfts.
The business model has always affected the game design at every step in the medium's history. We used to have quarter-guzzling arcade games as the primary way games were made. Crypto and NFTs aren't taking; it was a bubble that burst just like tulip bulbs and beanie babies. Other business models have come and gone in games before, like subscription MMOs and "project $10" online passes.
Nobody is telling bill gates to stop because people have no choice but to miss out on the game, have their kid not participate in school buddies chit chat and so on.
I‘m tired of talking about this stuff today. It’s like going to a different planet and having to explain that there are other planets with life on them, what experience we made on them and still being „corrected“ at every step.
For the video game Marvel’s Avengers, that budget was more than $178 million. Though the film was a hit, remaining the 10th highest-grossing movie ever, this game was far less successful. It never became profitable, losing the developer and publisher tens of millions of dollars in all.
It’s very boring to have people „know“ everything. I‘ll just leave. You believe whatever you like.
You’re missing the point. This is not about the Madden. This is about the Not-Madden.
Voting with your wallet is not “Refusing to buy a media for several months until its publisher relents and cuts its price in half, meanwhile depositing your $60 in a jar for when the day the price falls”. Instead, it is “When you have money for entertainment, you use it for properties OTHER than the one you used to go for”.
So, to further my example; “Me/my kid really wants the new Brandon Sanderson book, but instead of chewing dirt to pay for it, we decided to vote with our wallets! …But, because Sanderson is a crazy eccentric billioinaire with a patience greater than 5 years, he just INCREASED the price in retaliation to $8 million! What are we to do? …Read OTHER books? HERESY!”
Blaming the subject on corporate psychology is a complete cop-out. They do not grab your wrist and force you to click the Buy button. I’ll make some allowances for instances of gambling addiction (and I would not try to apply this pricing logic to the housing market due to collusion and other factors) but otherwise, price acknowledgment is a very human thing people need to get used to considering, even when it comes to beloved IPs.
I can see your train of thought and it makes sense up to the last part.
As someone who has studied sales and marketing actively for nearly two decades, built rather large companies and happens to be very good at pattern recognition, I know that people don’t understand what is being done to them.
Psychology has been used for a long time to study how to make someone act against their best self interest. Putting this on people with addiction problems is both selling them short and underestimating the problem.
Sales people in certain companies (that I have been to) learn how to use body language, speech patterns, behavioral patterns and other things to manipulate people into buying a particular thing at a particular time. Keep in mind that there is a human in control in this situation and unless they have psychopathic tendencies, they will try to work with the customer instead of against them.
But this is also done in marketing. Best example is the facebook/instagram/youtube algorithm, where the goal is to keep you on the site. It is done (very simplified) with showing you everything that will or might interest, aggravate or otherwise trigger you to keep watching. I‘m not saying it is impossible to leave but especially the not so strong characters will comply. Again, this is the majority of people, not the minority.
From there it is only a small step to actually selling you stuff your don’t actually want/need by showing you price increases (urgency), many different products (availability), fitting videos on other sites (cross site tracking).
These are only the ones I have crossed in my career. It shows that the mentally vulnerable (especially kids) get blasted with this stuff and manipulated into thinking certain thoughts and wanting certain things.
So, while your extreme boom example does play out as you say, the overarching problem has a lot less remarkable features and is therefore harder to spot and harder to fight.
Combine that with giant companies that own 60% of popular sports games for example and you absolutely have a problem.
„Vote with your wallet“ only serves these corporations because nobody cares about 3 less sales if you can manipulate everyone to buying more of these.
This is why the only solution that will put an end to this is outlawing what we call „dark patterns“ (google it) and break up large corporations.
While on a side I agree with you, on the other I see everytime people complaining about subscription fatigue and they never, ever would pay a recurring amount for a game.
I figured savvy sports fans would find a good simulation game without the license and just mod in the updated rosters, but that never seemed to happen.
There are no other football games that are even respectable efforts, and despite the rhetoric, Madden is actually a very good football sim that continually gets developed from year to year.
I suppose I implied but didn't explicitly state that my expectation is that someone would develop that competent football game. There's an early access game now, arguably 15 years too late, called Football Simulator that could be that game. If it's well-made, hopefully it serves that audience. But I don't think it's just rhetoric. Madden review scores have been falling in later years, and that's to be expected when they have a monopoly on the NFL license.
Reviews are extremely lazily done and about game modes. The game modes have seen minimal development since the emergence of ultimate team, and people are justifiably unhappy with that.
Literally not one major outlet is evaluating the actual simulation of the sport, which very clearly has massive investment from year to year and sees serious improvements to complexity and fidelity in each instance, with stagnation only coming when it hits the wall of what console hardware can do.
I've seen football simulator. It might maybe be competitive on physics with decade ago Madden, but even that's generous. If you just want a vehicle for franchise mode it might work for you, but if you want to play football it's just not close. Madden isn't perfect as a football sim either, because the physics of football are insanely complex, but there's nothing out there that's better than "kind of close to a decade ago" technically. You're much more likely to make something tolerable leaning into the discrepancy and making an arcade-y NFL Street knockoff, and that isn't there either.
Value for money is a great thing to evaluate in a review, and the simulation of the sport has seen an increase in bugs in recent years, hence the lower scores.
the simulation of the sport has seen an increase in bugs in recent years,
This is a ridiculous lie. It's not even in the general vicinity of reality.
The absolute best mainstream review of Madden in existence is a many times less competent version of that platformer review where the guy couldn't get through the tutorial. You unconditionally are not qualified to give any opinion in any context if you don't understand the mechanics and strategy of the sport.
Fine. I don't play Madden. But I know with the sources I follow on games news, this is what gets echoed back. Giant Bomb does a quick look for the game, say up front that they don't expect to get through it without encountering bugs, and then they encounter bugs. The kinds of bugs you'd recognize no matter how into football you are.
EDIT: Yup, bugs are mentioned in many reviews for the last several years of Madden. Seems to be the reality.
There will always be bugs. It's the nature of a complex simulation with emergent gameplay.
But anyone telling you that they're increasing doesn't know what they're talking about. They're increasingly small edge cases as the simulation gets very obviously more advanced and complex every iteration. It's not minor and it's not subtle. If you play ten hours a year with a middle school football level of understanding the improvements are impossible to miss.
Any review from someone who doesn't watch football every week all season is the exact same quality of someone who's never played an FPS reviewing a tactical shooter. it has literally zero value in any possible context and it's an embarrassment to your organization to publish it.
I can't speak for every reviewer, but a good number of them do watch football every week. Plenty of games have advanced simulations and don't have texture bugs and T posing. I'm glad you enjoy the games, but the reviews are what they are for a reason. I'm also not sure how you went from, "Anyone saying these games are buggy is lying" to "Of course it will have bugs!"
The reviews are what they are because there are literally zero gaming outlets who respect the existence of sports games or cover them the way they cover anything else.
I play hundreds of games a year and have literally never once seen a player t pose on the field. It's not a thing that's a normal or frequent occurrence, and anyone who tells you it is isn't just incompetent. They're deliberately and maliciously lying to you, and in and of itself it's incontrovertible proof that their entire review is fraud.
If you’re paying for a new version every year, is all that different than paying for a service? At the very least, with the yearly release model, you can simply decide not to pay for a year and keep playing the old one.
Part of me wants to argue that the games industry has a long-standing history of under-compensating workers, which makes being within the top 25% not particularly impressive, but instead I’m just going to admit that you caught me ragging on EA with an easy jab.
They did lay off a shed load of workers earlier this year mere days after announcing record profits though. Still, they’re not quite the miserable black hole that they were in the ‘EA Widows’ era when they were forcing unpaid overtime on a straight up illegal level.
EAs CEO makes $20MM. They have 13k employees. That’s an $1100 raise, give or take, if you take every penny from the CEO. For the vast majority of their employees, that is less than a 1% raise.
So no, it won’t get you both, in any meaningful sense.
Edit: And yes, if you are not productive, you get paid less. That’s the whole point. If you are not 100x productive, you don’t deserve to get 100x the wages of a regular employee too.
If I follow your search terms, the first Google result is this. If the data were to be trusted, then most of the employees are absolutely paid much less than the “top positions”.
If you are taking the CEO’s income literally (without considering their assets), then you are hopeless.
And a guy sitting in their office biting nails all day is somehow much more valuable than the people developing the product. Sure, if you would believe in that.
I’d say that’s its because there’s only really 1 country that’s going to buy it in large numbers but the reality is it’s the standard ea tax. Stop buying it every year or stop complaining.
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