That’s what I don’t get. These are expectations that I’ve had for years. The indie space has kinda proven that creativity will take a game a hell of a lot farther than cash ever will. With few exceptions I simply don’t buy AAA games anymore because honestly I just don’t expect the same level of effort will be put into making them.
More like level 3 bandits appearing out of the woods and smugly threatening to mug me when I have armor made by a dwarven hellsmith and am holding the sword of Dragon Agony.
The bandit looks at me and thinks “Yeah. This guy is going to get it.” as he brings up his rusty shiv.
Another stupid form of this is when they level up with you. The bandits sudddenly have armor made of daedra foreskins wielding flaming dragon bone swords and are level 9 gazillion.
Both ruin the immersion but it’s easier for me to justify bandits being fucked in the head than it is justifying them having turbo rare shit all of a sudden.
I mean we can have large games with detailed graphics and have employees treated well. We just need to accept 10+ year timelines for releases on big games which I’m ok with as long as we get quality results and the team is treated well.
I follow star citizen though so I could be the weird one here lol
That’s a valid point. As long as there’s a publisher and investors we’re more than likely never going to see what I suggested, I kinda forgot star citizen is what it is because it’s funded by us.
It’s always the same crunch time for employees and rushed buggy products to feed the investors from “AAA” corps. Hope we can push for some positive change :/
I can’t understand why crunch time has become so normalised. There’s no other software development project where constantly failing to plan for the needed time requirement would be accepted. Crunch is a sign of bad project management, it isn’t normal.
At some point, people figured out that during a couple of weeks of mad rush right before a deadline, if you’ve got committed, well-rested employees who know they’re going to get a rest afterwards, they tend to be much more productive than they normally are. Some bad managers only paid attention to part of that, and determined that eighty hour weeks are more than twice as productive as forty hour ones, and intentionally started inducing crunch. They somehow didn’t notice that the third week of crunch is only about as productive as a regular week, and after that, it’s way less productive as everyone’s exhausted. Combine this with the fact that people with management knowledge tend to flee from the games industry rather than to it, and you end up with the software engineering industry’s least effective managers running things with easily debunked dogma.
The main differences with Star Citizen are that it’s
Funded in advance
Funded by people who have no say in how the product/company should work
Massively overfunded
This means, CIG has no pressure to ship soon or even at all (if the project fails, they have no liability). They also have nobody telling them what to with the money. They have already made their profit.
I am not knocking CIG for this situation, but if you put it like this, it’s easy to see why for each CIG out there, there are tens of thousands of games on crowdfunding sites that either
Failed to raise funds
Failed to get a decent company/legal structure running with the money they raised
Failed to actually ever deliver anything in an usable state
Are just pure scams
So as a general business model rather than just an insane stroke of luck, I don’t think this is a good option.
A business model that only earns money after release (like the classic publisher-funded development model) is bad for the obvious cash-grabby and buggy reasons, but at least it consistently delivers games. Contrary to the “earn money before you start development” model that is enabled by crowdfunding, which in general does not deliver games.
In my (not very educated) opinion, early access is probably the best middle ground. You start off with little initial funding required, but by the time you turn to the crowd, you already have a working prototype and company structure. That makes it much more likely for the game to eventually be released in a full version. This option obviously comes with its own downsides as well, but many of my favourite games have been small studios or even individuals who use early acces to fund development.
Whales buy it. For every 1,000 fans upset by this decision there is 1 fan who is rich enough that spending $1,000 on the game is nothing. A lot of these aggressive monetization schemes aren’t meant to make money on the average player.
The sad part is, those preyed upon aren't always necessarily well off enough to afford it.
It's one of those situations where either the microtransactions are in fact small, so the low costs add up over time before the victims realize it, or they're set up to pressure people into multiple rapid transactions, and so they either exploit some people's poor impulse control or gambling addictions, or more often than not, both.
It’s not that this monetization isn’t meant to target the average player specifically, it’s made to entice singular one-time purchases in a similar fashion to how places like Walmart work. Yes, they have the data that shows a few whales will make those transactions worth it, at the same time they are counting on catching the occasional non-whale slacking. Trick enough minnows into a net and you have the same mass as a whale.
I know this is a small difference in context, to a business it can mean millions of additional dollars. So remember: They know whales will pay. At the same time they are expecting to catch more than a few smaller fish in the process.
Yes, they have the data that shows a few whales will make those transactions worth it, at the same time they are counting on catching the occasional non-whale slacking. Trick enough minnows into a net and you have the same mass as a whale.
You’re actually thinking much more intelligently than they do. I was in games for almost two decades, left a couple years ago. The vast, vast, vast, vast majority of money made is from whales, it’s not even close. I’ve worked on games where we had to speak to banks in both Canada and the UAE to allow a man to make six figure purchases per week. He and one other whale were over 75% of our revenue.
Now the intelligent thing to do to make money here would be, as you said, getting minnows to spend – but that takes too long and the people who run these things want it now.
So rather than selling each armour colour or whatever for 50 cents each, they’ll charge 20 bucks for all of it, pricing out 90% of users*, and barely making money on it, instead of a million people buying it making them a tonne of money. (*this is a personal experience tale, this did happen, these numbers are unaltered.)
I was under the assumption this was the case for the mobile market. I didn’t realize this extended to larger titles. I mean, I guessed everyone is whale hunting, just didn’t realize to what extent. I appreciate the perspective!
To be 100% fair here, that anecdote I used was a mobile game, but the same thing does happen in larger PC/Console game titles, it’s just not 75% of (player) paid revenue.
This is especially so in games that have battlepasses – far fewer people buy those every time thank you’d think, and the ones who do are a small percentage of total players, but make up a lions share of the total revenue earned from said battlepass. Those are also the people (the every pass ones) who buy everything in the shop. 50 dollar cape or whatever, they buy it on release.
Exactly. They also have to know the number of “whales” is rapidly shrinking as more and more money is moved to fewer and fewer hands. Eventually they’ll be left with like 4-5 whales and only a couple live minnows.
Capcom continually hamstringing themselves. With this and Street Fighter 6 having 100 dollar costume sets they can fuck all the way off. I expect RE9 to let you buy ammo for cash.
I mean, the RE4make let you buy weapon upgrades with cash, DMC 5 let you just buy all the currencies in game directly, I don’t even know where to begin with Monster Hunter World’s microtransactions. It’s shitty, but Capcom does this in literally all of their games now, so absolutely you’ll see dumb mtx in RE9 and Monster Hunter Rise.
That’s almost too harsh. The one positive thing you can say on the matter is that Capcom isn’t running around shuttering development of games to lay-off developers in order to manufacture like 3 points of profit. The Western AAA games industry is fucking disgusting in their greed, the Eastern AAA industry is just kinda confusing.
Weird thing is no one went and review bombed DMC 5. It’s still talked up as being one of the best hack and slashes. Re4 was continuously talked up as game of the year. If people are going after DD2 then be fucking consistent towards other games too.
One time my buddy was tripping super hard and he went to play a new game, stared at the TOS for like 5-10 mins then hit “do not accept” and backed out to the home screen.
I have purchased games, have it ask for me to create an account, and promptly never play the game. What’s annoying is a lot of sports games are like this now.
I bought NBA 2k since I hadn’t played a basketball game since NBA Live 2001. It took like 15 minutes to get a account set up. A few days later my account was gone. Haven’t played since.
I used hamachi because no one aside from me in my group of friends knew how to port forward, but it didn’t work on my network and it took me 4 years to figure out it was because at&t has it’s own network on it’s dialup modems by default.
They still do that to this day with their fiber modem/routers! I hate it! And even if you do passthrough to have your own up for only your router, your ping is still never below 23ms because there’s two stop points in the chain, that and at&t’s dns resolution is ass.
Terraria before proper multiplayer support was our prime Hamachi game. We had like 7-8 people from an internet forum playing on and off through our hamachi virtual network.
Sheesh, I didn’t realize it was doing that bad. I recall hearing them implement some really questionable business moves in Payday 2, so this is pretty funny to see.
More like explicitly stating no loot boxes, then several years later announcing loot boxes and editing their own forum post to remove the no loot boxes section of the comment.
Not to mention the conviction of the previous CEO of insider trading.
I don’t get why companies everywhere think that making a promise, then quietly editing it out before breaking the promise is going to work at all for them?
Just that, and then you somehow end up with 3 credits that will forever be stuck there because nothing ever cost anything that can make the 3 go away. So you will never have a round number of credits again.
I had a mouse where one was vertical and the other horizontal, but I seem to think the horizontal scroll was oriented horizontally. Having googled the mouse in the picture, it says one is programmable and suggests it starts with volume.
For navigating a great big thing that benefits from two axis scrolling? Yes. For literally anything else a scroll wheel might be used for, like swapping weapons in games? No. The clickyness of the average scroll wheel is actually pretty useful and can’t really be applied to a trackball.
I’ve got one of these for Photoshop. I’ve got the front wheel set up as normal, but the second wheel is set to change the brush size. It makes working much smoother, as I don’t have to use the keyboard.
This mouse model was made decades ago for the time when would come the chosen one. The scroll master. He’s here to equilibrate the world with his scroll powers. Zoom in, zoom out. Volume up, volume down. Everything is possible, with, THE. DOUBLE. SCROLL. WHEEL.
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