Wow, Larian really breaking the 4th wall in this game.
One of those boss fights where you really regret having to fight him because he actually has a good point.
Probably still evil though.
Honestly I don’t regret paying a subscription for WoW. Maybe it’s different now, but when I played it felt fair. You got reliable servers, frequent updates,somewhat reasonable balance changes, and seasonal events. You didn’t get any loot box bullshit, just playing the game regularly generally got you the rewards with minimal effort.
Sure expansions also cost extra, but that was $30 and about 1 every 2 years.
For a game that ate all your free time, it didn’t hit your wallet that hard.
“We need ideas to find a way to monetize our active playerbase!”
“We already are. They pay us money each month. In turn, we continue to make sure the game is fun and has stuff that keeps them interested.”
“Aha! Carry on.”
I used to hate subscription games with a passion, but seeing what followed, in-app purchases, lootboxes and FOMO-driven battlepasses, turns out subscriptions were the lesser evil.
Unfortunately it works the same way as with StarCitizen, you’re aware it’s a ripoff, but if you want to play this particular type of a game, pay up or leave.
With MMORPGs specifically, here are the options:
Free to Play. Enormous cash shop, often pay to win. Usually these games actually require the most money to play on high level, or waste your time by slowing down the grind and having an optional “premium” sub, which effectively makes it a sub MMO.
Buy to Play. Much less predatory, rarely pay to win, but often with huge cash shop. Get ready to see tons of cool cosmetics that are only available through micro transactions, and the base game often receives scrapes from the table. Still, some of these games like TESO effectively force you to pay a sub by introducing a mechanic (like bottomless reagent bag) that make the game without them miserable on high level.
Pay to play. Most obvious predator, nobody needs this much money to develop a game that already charges almost full price for base game and for all new DLCs, but also usually has the most tame cash shop. WoW for instance has a tiniest (comparing to games like TESO) cash shop with 20-ish mounts and pets nobody cares about.
This creates effectively a pick-your-Devil situation with these games. No good monetization, pick whatever feels least predatory for you
I mean, now that the video streaming industry has shown us how the endgame looks like for subscription models, you'd have to be crazy to want that for the videogame industry.
Whatever short-term gains you can get in convenience or price by buying into their penetration stage are not worth contributing to leading the hobby down that road even an iota.
It’s not even about what we want, but what the stakeholders and decision-makers push for in order to rack in more profits.
The gaming industry was at its highest in terms of fun and variability and innovation when the industry was still figuring out best ways to make mad money, no matter how ethical or morally bankrupt - now they know they can use fear of missing out and predatory tactics to lure people into essentially gambling in a free-to-play online game, or pad out a singleplayer one with mechanics that contribute nothing to the gameplay, but manage to fool game journalists (the ones that weren’t already paid) into praising the game for its deep and branching loops, attracting more investor money or something.
A lot of people accuse us gamers of being a whiny crowd that cares too much and doesn’t like to have fun, but I guess yeah, we do care a little too much and that’s why so many of us try to actively influence the industry to go into a better direction when we vote with our wallets or write reviews or discuss games and practices in ways that can be hopefully seen by the industry’s decision-makers.
Not to say there isn’t just as many (if not more) gamers that don’t care enough and still pour money into games and practices that are ultimately making the industry worse, only to make the stakeholders and CEOs wealthier.
He’s wrong. It seems that people are trending towards game subscriptions like game pass. It makes sense, people won’t finish bg3 once let alone multiple times. They don’t need to own the game outright they can play it on their gsmepass subscription for a month then move on to whatever is in next month’s pass.
Failed to reach target isn’t a sign gamepass is failing. They have 30 million subscribers. In only 4 years they’ve gone from 10 to 30 million and seem to still be growing.
Didn’t imply it was failing, hell they’ve announced they’re making profit off of the service, I’m pointing out that your hypothesis that people are trending toward game subscriptions is weak.
Let’s look at it this way, there are 132 million active steam users and game pass is at 30 million with new game pass subscribers are beginning are slowing down and seeming like it’s reaching a plateau.
Here have another article that goes a little more in depth at the current situation with game pass subscribers.
That article is only speculating that the gamepass user growth has slowed or reached a plateau. Even if we say that gamepass has reached its peak thats 30million people subscribing monthly. Platstation plus is at 50million monthly subscribers. BG3 is estimated to have sold 7m copies so they aren’t exactly in a position to say what the market wants.
Subscribing to gamepass is better value than buying the games outright. The up and coming generations are far less opposed to subscriptions and as they get older and have more money I see them just paying $10-15 a month for an endless supply of games. Maybe they buy a few games here and there the ones they know they will play a lot of.
I obviously havent thought much about it and am just kneejerk reacting to the headline. While I do think the apatite for full priced, fully developed, content rich games is there and BG3 proves to developers that its viable. I also think that subscription bundles and games that release with only core content and use microtransactions or subsciptions to fund developement of more content are easier to make, easier to get investors and overall safer to pull off and that is why I believe the market is trending towards games as a service.
As much as I agree with his sentiment, this title is bullshit - he never wrote "gamers don't want subscriptions" but that they shouldn't want that due to where it might lead.
"Gamers" aren't some hivemind entity that wants a specific thing. Many people don't worry whether an idea pushed by the publishers will have a long term negative effect on the industry, they just want to have fun with their hobby.
Look at microtransactions - there's a lot of negative discussion about them and yet they bring huge amounts of money, who's to say if the same won't happen with subscription services? We might not like it but majority doesn't necessarily care.
Sorry for being pedantic about a title but third-parties changing someone's words is a bit of a pet peeve of mine.
My point is that however you feel about microtransactions they are successful and that's why they're so common.
With subscription services you and me can think "I want to own it and play whenever" but a lot (not only casual) players see it as "I pay a few $ and get access to a huge library of games I can try out for the next month".
As I wrote initially, just because more dedicated audience doesn't like the direction industry is moving in doesn't mean majority will care enough to stop it.
The idea of the whale is a false narrative created by the companies who run these scams to justify their unethical business practices.
The vast majority of people who make up that demographic are people who really can’t afford to spend money like that, but do because the companies hired psychologists to tell them exactly how to exploit people’s brain chemistry to extract money from them. This mostly includes people who are biologically wired for poor impulse control and an inability to perceive how much money they’re actually spending. People like: gambling addicts, people with adhd or mental health issues, and children.
There are people with more money than sense buying this stuff, but for the most part, it’s gambling addicts and kids emptying their parents’ bank accounts for that dopamine fix.
Just another story they’ve spun to hide how scummy they truly are.
To be honest, I mainly bought the game to make a statement & show my support for what type of treatment & product I want as a customer. Nowadays everything just seems to want to milk me, games are quite often literally designed around it so that it becomes a core part of the games themselves. And I'm so damn over all of this bullshit.
A lot of us just want to have some fun after work and it is not fun when you feel served up like a buttered hot meal. I don’t want to feel like my games are consuming me.
I can see how Game Pass popularity could be bad for a number of studios, as he says in the article. But, I’ve never understood how Game Pass’s existence was anti-consumer.
We always get these baffling quotes like “Microsoft insists on renting you your games, and you will like it.” or “I’m not going to be forced to pay $17 a month just to play my games”. GP never gained popularity off Microsoft forcing people into it, people voluntarily signed up, even when MS continues to make their games available for direct purchase.
The previous quote from Ubisoft even seemed more like an investor excuse than a threat to gamers.
That’s a big part of it. Right now, Microsoft tries to put a number of big titles in their subscription service, a bunch of filler titles they can buy from publishers for cheap, and maybe a few that sold more popularly than they expected.
If subscription gaming becomes the majority, Microsoft and other streaming providers get to pick the contenders and not much else gets seen. Games like Lethal Company won’t have a sudden boom in popularity because it wasn’t on Microsoft’s radar.
pcgamesn.com
Aktywne