But this will cut the Steam metrics in half and thus the Steam store algorithm will push the game to the Steam users less. Unless of course they both sell well then you get put in front of a user twice.
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.
This specifically is an easter egg ending in Chrono Trigger, requiring you to have beaten the game once before to access it.
Chrono Trigger allows you to warp to the final boss and try to beat them before you would reach them through the plot, from very early on in the game. A lot of the special endings require you to do that and win at various points in the story, which isn’t possible for most of the game unless you carry over stuff with new game plus.
I believe this ending requires you to start new game plus and then take the warp to fight the final boss as soon as you possibly can.
Don’t quote me on that though, the game has something like 13 endings and I canct keep them all straight.
I’ve just looked it up, and it seems to just come from a Reddit post where they explain how they’ve worked it out, but in their working out they’ve triple-counted the N-shaped faces.
OK now they can go ahead with plan B where they allow you to link your PSN account to get some super cool cosmetic. I wonder what the reaction of the consumers will be then.
I really don't see the problem, provided it is cosmetic. If you don't want to link, you don't get a glittering, whatever in game. If you don't mind sharing your datas, then you get the shiny thing (and everyone knows you don't mind sharing your datas).
So if you mind sharing your data, don't get the shiny. You know it will become like that shiny pony back in wow's wrath expansion. It told you more about the person than anything else.
There are legitimate reasons for the devs and Sony to want your psn account linked. It’s also reasonable to not want to do so. Why not offer a compromise, like any healthy relationship, and allow, not force, account linking, with a little incentive? Where is the downside to either party?
Except now many loyalty cards are now required to get sale prices that were previously available without them. It is a bleak world where folks have to potentially choose between affording groceries and protecting their privacy.
Back in the day i had this absolute savage friend who only had 1/4 Gamecube controllers that had the analog stick grip intact, and i remember it being unbearable to play with
All of the PS1 and PS2 controllers I had growing up lost the rubbery coverings of the analogue sticks because they were apparently exactly what my baby brother craved when he was teething
I’d like to thank all the teenagers who used their mom’s credit cards to buy Fortnite skins so I can enjoy free GTA V, Control, Star Wars Battlefront, and now this game.
EDIT - Close to the add button Is written [Base game] and even after adding it to my library i can still see the 9$ dlc option in the menu. Either way is not too clear so I’ll let the (base game) in the title.
Same experience here. I’ve already owned the base game, but none of the DLC. It let me accept Spacer’s Choice, which is literally just another store entry for the base game, but you can buy the upgrade for 10$ instead of 17$.
Update: I’ve done some research. Apparently this version of the game is like a third-party remaster done by a different company, hence why it’s a different entry in the store
My receipt, screen I selected for the game, and everything I see and can tell says it’s the spacers choice edition, which is the edition that includes the DLC.
I think the giveaway just doesn’t include the $9.99 dlc to upgrade the base game if you already have it to the spacers choice edition. In other words, if you have the base game only, get this giveaway and you’ll have the dlc for free via spacers choice edition.
Longer answer: The access hadn’t been removed yet, as the update that would enable account linking wasn’t pushed yet. As for the Steam side, I’m pretty sure people who already had the game installed should’ve had access still, although updates and general unsureness definitely could be obstacles. With this tweet, however, the update is no longer coming, and were just waiting for Sony/Valve to lift the selling/installing restrictions in those countries.
Steam only removes games from the store, and doesn’t remove games from anyone’s library. Those affected people, if they didn’t refund, will still have HD2 in their library. There is also never install restrictions/blocking.
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