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.
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
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.
Assume I’m a psychopath C-level executive. Why would I spend huge resources on a success that earns money when I can earn money on fifty screwups instead?
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
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.
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
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 wish this was true, but marketing is explosively effective. I have a top 10 VR app and it only gets sales when I market it despite the glowing reviews. Heck you cannot even sort by review on many sites as then you would not need to market if you title was great.
Marketing is far from dead. Larian themselves used it to great effect with BG3. Does no one remember the announcement trailer released for BG3 well in advance of any gameplay footage? That’s marketing, though and through. And yes, it worked plenty well on me. A D&D game based around Mind Flayers, made by the folks behind Divinity Original Sin? Shut up and take my money. Also, when I noticed the outline of a Nautiloid ship in the background, I may have needed a change of shorts.
The difference with BG3 was that Larian didn’t just pull an Edward Bernays style marketing as a con. They delivered a good product, worked with players to fix any issues and have gone above and beyond supporting the game after release. They have done everything right to build long term customer relationships. Maybe they don’t reach the same level of profits some other companies might, by stuffing microtransactions in every orifice. But, I suspect they are profitable and seem to be better built be continue long term and not have to tear the company up and saddle one of those pieces with insane amounts of debt.
While I can’t promise that I’ll buy their next game, I’ll undoubtedly keep an eye out for it. Larian puts out a quality product and doesn’t fuck their customers. That’s what makes their brand of marketing work.
Meanwhile, FIFA players: “when can I pre-order the next edition of my game, and could I just pay for the cards in advance, or do I have to wait until release?”
Sadly, bamboozling players, dark patterns and nickle-and-diming work, and work VERY well at that - if they didn’t, people would stop doing it a long time ago…
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.
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