The real message being sent is that you can release a $40 always-online PVE game with MTXs and rootkit anti cheat and gamers will tolerate all of it if they think it’s fun…
Appreciate you not jumping down my throat. You’re right, it is a low bar, and HD2 does clear it pretty easily. But you and I both know that publishers won’t hear the part about the game being fun (or they won’t care). My point isn’t that HD2 is bad, just that publishers will see its success and completely misinterpret why it’s successful. They’ll see a live service game doing well and think that people want more live service games, not fun games.
I haven’t really got into HD2, too online for my tastes, but I can see its appeal. I think there is a broader phenomenon of a divorce between where big studios are heading and where “traditional” players want to be.
They’ll see a live service game doing well and think that people want more live service games, not fun games.
I can say, when you’re out there with your squad and it feels like space Vietnam, that’s why its selling. That portion of the atmosphere, gameplay, and intensity is on point
I suspect the difficulty the publishers face is that fun is difficult to quantify. The read on this might end up being “All things being equal, DRM/MTX/etc aren’t statistically impediments to financial success if the game is going to sell well anyway. If we percieve them to improve our bottom line, let’s include them”.
I wouldn’t mind live service games as much if these companies were forced to give up tools to allow the community to continue hosting.
Corporations have made it loud and clear over and over: they will torch every scrap of gaming culture if it meant an extra 20 bucks. They are NOT to be trusted with the preservation of this history.
While Helldivers 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3 might look like sudden jackpot successes
This article is funny. It’s like the feel-good inverse of a rage-bait article. It’s stating what we all want to be true and cherry-picking two games that only sort of provide evidence towards it, and only if you squint really hard.
Both games are sequels backed by huge publishers with tons of cash.
BG3 is a Dungeons and Dragons franchise title; a franchise which recently received a massively successful film, a huge boost in popularity during a pandemic, and a boost in cultural relevance in Strange Things.
Helldivers 2 fits the claim a bit better, but it is still a sequel to a well received, well selling title. The extraction shooter genre is also exceedingly popular right now, and the fact that it has Games as a Service bullshit built in says that publishers weren’t as hands-off as the article implies.
So the more realistic take-away from this is that good games with huge budgets for development AND marketing in reasonably popular genres can make a ton of money.
Which isn’t saying much. And it certainly doesn’t look like a sudden jackpot.
Very true. Though I would click that bait so hard!
I still prefer this type of article to lots of others in the bait family. Obviously they want people sharing this article and saying “See! That thing I believe is proven!”
Worth mentioning that Helldivers is hugely and openly influenced by Starship troopers, which although not as big as something like D&D, is still pretty well known in pop-culture to this day, at least in the sci-fi circles.
I can’t speak to Helldivers, but pinning Baldur’s Gate 3’s success on the recent growing popularity of the D&D franchise is beyond reductive. There’s no huge publisher for Baldur’s Gate 3; Larian’s a licensee and an independent studio to boot, and Hasbro’s not running massive marketing campaigns for them any more than Disney is for the typical licensed Star Wars game. There’s also the game’s pay-once sales model, which is something else you get when you’re not beholden to publishers or public shareholders.
BG3 was the culmination of decades of iteration by Larian and was the studio’s first attempt with a AAA budget. The game has more in common with Divinity: Original Sin 2 than it does Baldur’s Gate 2, as the Baldur’s Gate die-hards would be happy to tell you.
Calling CRPGs a popular genre is also going to get some laughs. Sure, we might be able to look on this point now in a few years as when CRPGs went mainstream (or maybe not, as the insane amount of choice built into the game set the bar so high that it’s possible no one’s going to bother with that kind of risky content-making). But by the time Larian started development on BG3, the genre had just risen from the dead after some successful Kickstarter campaigns and was still very niche.
They should manage the organization and stay the fuck away from the product.
Only really mature product owners that understand what they are doing and LOVE the product they are making should be allowed near your product… and they will work with devs to make something wonderful.
Satisfactory, Valheim, manor lords, enshrouded… just a few examples of product that is loved. And it shows.
For one of my friends even though he was on my steam friend's list, and I could see him as a friend on the HD friend list, I had to accept a friend request from him in HD's pending invites section for the game to consider him a friend, and that allowed him to join our friends only games.
It's likely you have the same issue, whatever the reason
The friends thing is weird. I have a pending invite to a friend and I’m already appearing in his list as a friend ans he can’t accept the invite. So we have to set it to public, join, set it to friends only to avoid randos.
Weird, I was able to accept mine, even though he was already my friend, it just made us friends on his side as well. It must be broken in more than one way
Well yeah it is. It’s also heavy on the mtx, non-pushy as they stay (for now). Compared to something like DRG I really don’t feel the appeal, apart from maybe having overplayed DRG at this point.
It's not bad. You only have to use the "premium" currency to unlock the extra unlock tracks, but you also get that currency in-game and farming it isnt too crazy.
Currently as soon as you pick it up your account gets it, so you can drop into trivial missions, find some, collect it, alt F4, do the same mission repeatedly dropping at the super credits every time since the spawns are static on the same map (hence the alt F4) and then once you have 1,000 you can buy one of the unlock tracks. All of the gear and everything in the unlock track is in-game currency from there, so I don't consider it bad at all since you can easily cheese it for free
Although I agree that BG3 was not exactly well polished, it was far from being “blatantly unfinished”. I’d even say it was far more finished than what can be considered finished by contemporary standards
I was a big fan of the game. Always thought it had potential to be great. I had already quit this wipe pretty much as soon as I hit Max traders. Don’t think I’ll be returning back next wipe.
I get that they’re successful, and it’d be fantastic if this became the trend. But Battlefield and Call of Duty sell consistently with much less development effort and a lot lower risk of flopping.
It looks like Call of Duty is typically 3 year development cycles, and one took only 1.5 years. Baldur’s Gate took 6 years.
Businesses think in quarters, seeing a cost centre through man hours is a huge no-no for boasting a healthy valuation. They use a model far more suited towards selling tangible products than something long term.
Just because a signal is sent, it doesn’t mean it’ll be received. We all know that practically any other major brand will still pump and dump e-waste, filled to the brim with mtx
So…I’ve lost count of how many Mission Impossible movies they made. At some point between 2014 and 2016 I think they made one, because for hundreds of youtube videos in a row I was shown an ad that had this irritating song that went “Ready or not, here I come” in a really nasally voice? Apparently advertising a Mission Impossible movie.
I have refused to watch any Mission Impossible movie, or any movie starring Tom Cruise made before or since, and to a degree the spy/action thriller/guy intensely running genre ever since. Because of how much they chose to irritate me about it.
If part of your strategy is to beat me into submission, I’m going to avoid your entire market segment forever.
Meanwhile a lot of my favorite games I never saw actual advertisements for, even if those ads existed. I learned about them from word of mouth, watching streamers/youtubers, or searching for “games like [game I enjoy]”
I categorically rule out a lot of big business practices because the era when “Hey you could make a fun game about flying an X-Wing” is over and the era of “Our business strategy leverages marketable properties in a variety of monetization verticals” is coming to a middle. So I tend to buy from smaller studios or solo developers.
Glorious American Capitalism. Enshittification is just a word for the financialization of everything. Finance Bros run the world, and they know you have another .0265٪ disposable income they can get to make their line go up another quarter.
On a completely different subject which I think is related: My parents want a cabinet and hutch for their dining room. I’m designing and building it. Looking on the internet for ideas, I like how that cornice is done. Can’t do those legs the way I’m going to build the side rails" type thing, I notice a trend: There is basically no documentation on the internet that anyone actually uses dining room hutches to store things they frequently use. Those that aren’t just blank to market the cabinet itself are crammed with random knickknacks or worse the White Woman’s Instagram tableau. A scroll sawn cursive word, some brand new ceramic containers with words printed on them in that thin tall font, especially a teapot with TEA written on it in which tea will NEVER be made, a statue of a pig, an old sifter, a fake plant…
I hate the idea of such a large, complicated and expensive piece of furniture used as a trophy case or a diorama of basic bitchery. In the words of George Carlin, “spending money you don’t have on things you don’t need.”
Fucken Rae Dunn, dog. I knew a girl who had two kids straight out of high school and blew her entire income on trendy housewares for the apartment she could barely afford. When I broke contact she was buying halloween variants of serving dishes she had already never used. Last I heard her parents have those kids now.
I wouldn’t say that past generations wanted to be marketed to, it’s just that before the internet, marketing was the closest a customer could get to being spoken to by a brand.
And at some point in the history of marketing, I think companies used to see it that way too, marketing was a means of communicating with potential customers what your product offered. But as capitalism progressed, and media outlets expanded (print, radio, film, TV, etc.), honesty was optimized out in favor of “bamboozleism”.
It’s now easier than ever for a brand to have a direct, two-way conversation with their customers at any time, but marketers are still stuck in that 20th century mindset of “we just say whatever we want, and you just accept it”. The internet is in the process of popping that bubble.
Largely agree. I think the bamboozlers were there the whole time - after all, a lot of early radio was for propaganda purposes. But I do think most companies try to do things the right way, and there was a point when marketing was seen as simple outreach.
I work in the industry, and yeah. Before, marketing was based on utility. “Buy this because it can do this and this and that”, basically marketing how effective or what it can actually do for you. Around the 50s (in the US) marketing changed to be based around lifestyle. “Buy this so you can be this”. Now nearly all ads appeal to emotion instead of reason, and it is very effective.
Researching about what a product offers is so much harder than just buying on a whim because the ads and the product are colorful.
You can see this change in old (really old) newspapers. Ad spreads were chock full of text about features. Now 3/4ths of the ads are an image of a happy woman if marketed for gals, or a stoic muscly man if marketed for guys.
I’m at least an average intelligence guy, not a genius, but I’m not some compelete idiot. Big game companies treat me like an absolute dumb ass so I don’t bother with their trash (the games are almost always mediocre anyway full of MTX). Just sell me a full working product at a fair price and then charge me for an expansion down the road if you want. Don’t nickel and dime me or promise me.shit I know you can’t deliver. Just talk to me like a human lol
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Aktywne