It’s an early access game. If you buy it now you are buying promises and the chance to be a beta tester. And that’s okay, if you don’t get emotional if things don’t turn out as expected.
Servers cost money, adding content costs money, if you want something for free, who’s paying these costs? Because if it’s the business, they won’t be in business very long if they just spend money and have nothing coming back in.
I say this as a person in their 30s, age is irrelevant here.
FFVII for PS1 didn’t need a server. There were no mtx or post to social media buttons or pay walled content crap, just a game you paid for and played. It didn’t need to always be online or require a secondary launcher.
Fast-forward and here we are with profitability being the most important aspect of gaming. Sucking every tiny bit of money and attention away from competing games that do the same thing. Character licensing fees and in game ads literally everywhere. Single player experiences requiring online components so that even though you aren’t directly participating in the mtx system the companies you buy from are still mining your usage data and selling it off to third parties. Mtx and ads and all that are just how gaming is now. Younger adult gamers have a pretty big role in his this had turned out. Instead of saying no to these types of games, they were just like ‘meh I like posting $5 for horse armor…’ and that’s all it took.
The key difference being you paid for the game…. This is a free game… totally different scenarios. So yes I will downvote you for completely missing the point of the discussion and ranting on about something totally irrelevant.
How does a company keep paying for servers and content when they don’t charge for the game or anything else….? With proper MTXs….
I didn’t miss the point. You’re talking about free games that live on mtx and ads… That’s the problem. There shouldn’t be games that function that way, and the fact that you’re using that as some gotcha talking point just proves how normalized they are. They’re predatory.
It’s another unrelated market, mobile games can’t charge $80 for a game. People don’t even like paying $10. That style of developing is barely affordable nowadays as well for pc/console anyways, but that’s another argument and not relevant to this one.
You are comparing apples to oranges. And there’s nothing predatory when it’s done correctly, but there’s also some people who just see the devil in everything, lien you apparently.
It’s hard to take seriously because people don’t like their hobbies and interests being scrutinized.
I’m not going to argue about this anymore. It’s one of those things where the hobby I used to enjoy is no longer for me. It’s for you kids to buy your V Bucks and season passes at an ever increasing price. Let the publishers know you love giving them more and more money for beta software wrapped in a new Peter Griffin skin!
I didn’t choose it and neither did you. You had this forced on you and you were like “yes, daddy more” because people don’t have the stones to say no with their wallets. You won’t give up your Diablo IV Season Pass trinket pack with 666 Devil Coins and a new Overwatch “Dablo” skin for Moira. You’re out of your depth.
Listen if you want to piss away money on transient shit you are welcome to go and do it, but the person missing the nuances here is you. The industry moving towards these models is negatively affecting gaming as a whole and it’ll only get worse, even if you’re too blinded by tacky skins to notice the reason why.
My guy, I wasn't even trying to make a defense of micro transactions, I was pointing out the really weird comparison of a PS1 game from 1997 with no baked in online features, and a modern game with baked in online features.
Matchmaking is also peer to peer as far as anyone knows but I can’t find any info on how messages are handled. It’s entirely possible those also work on their peer to peer system but even if not a server that serves short text snippets with coordinates to all these players could be run on 20 year old hardware so not even costly enough to register.
Oh, yea, they have a verification server for shadowbans but it isn’t strictly necessary for matchmaking, if that verification process were removed you can still play. The seemless coop mod for example does that.
Saying you were 13/14 when horse armor came out doesn’t help your case arguing against their comment. It just means you were prime gaming age when dlc, map packs, and smaller content were replacing larger expansions. The acceptance of those (which based on your demographic you probably did accept) made it easier to transition to more and more egregious micro transactions.
There used to be (maybe still are) complete games released on mobile. They usually cost $6.99 and didn’t need more. If they want Elden Ring on mobile without tarnishing its reputation, they could sell a complete experience for $10 or $15 since it’s been a decade since those $6.99 prices. That’s what Elden Ring was and it was widely praised. That’s what the rest of their games have done and that has turned out well for them.
There may be servers for the multiplayer, but based on the fact none of the other From Soft games charged for it the cost must be minimal.
No, they aren’t. DLC is an expansion upon the content. The best case scenario for mtx that do not affect gameplay are cosmetic only.
If a game in any way has anything else than cosmetic mtx, the game is worse.
“But you don’t have to buy it!” Is how I often see them defended, the subtext being that, if I don’t buy them it doesn’t affect my experience.
Here is the secret, games with mtx are designed to have problems and they sell you the solution. They are designed WORSE intentionally, so you will spend money to bypass the inconveniences. Often your time.
A perfect example is something like long standing games selling boosts to max level. They’re aware the old content is dead, and they’re aware the only people playing it are the people who don’t want to spend money. Why don’t they fix that?
The answer is they did, they decided that inconvenience was acceptable in their game in order to convince the player to spend money.
MTX is not content, often it’s used to bypass content or save time. DLC is content. DLC often expands upon the experience of the game. MTX worsens the experience of the game just buy existing. Dlc doesn’t change your experience if you don’t purchase or use it. MTX changes the game at a base level no matter if you spend money or not.
I feel like it’s just wrong to call these games ‘free’. They are ‘partially free’ with the incentive to extract as much money from you as possible in order to get the ‘good stuff’ or simply to avoid endless hours of unfun grinding. It’s just inferior in every way compared to games you pay for once and that’s it, because they don’t need to drip feed you ‘fun’.
Exceptions apply to competitive games that need a changing meta and content updates. New content for non-competitve ‘free’ games mostly amounts to new stuff you can buy to surpass new arbitrary walls built in front of you.
IMTX can be fair if these don’t abuse the players time, and offer fun content.
IMTX and not wasting players time are nearly mutually-exclusive. These games are designed with the MTX in mind at every single step of the process, and are made with the soleintent of maximizing MTX sales. Them wasting your time is not a mistake, but an intentional (and meticulously-researched and -designed) feature.
There are exceptions, yes, of course, but they are few and far between.
These sorts of decisions can impact future decisions. It is to early to say that this is a trend, so people shouldn’t get all up in arms over things. But still, using other company histories as a basis, it is concerning about where this could end up.
Never heard of this but incredibly excited! I already spend a lot of time playing random 8-bit games, it’ll be nice to have a set with modern quality of life features.
Supermassive doing layoffs is somewhat surprising. Not owned by a giant megacorp looking for short-term shareholder value increases. Their games are generally via the traditional publisher route, so budgets agreed in advance and continued based on milestones. Plus the founders left last month. Don’t have good answers for their layoffs.
So many businesses operate on debt and investments. "If you're going to gamble, do it with somebody else's money." A lot of opportunities to acquire funding for developing video games have just dried up.
The publishers acquire funding this same way. Sony, 2K, and Bandai Namco have all operated as the publishers for their games, and they're all publicly traded companies. They pay the upfront cost for development that both partners in that deal wish to make a return on, and right now, the publishers or other investors (which may still exist regardless of a publisher deal) are scared of throwing money at lots of game pitches these days.
What I said was that the developer may have other investors in the studio or the project even if they have a publisher. Immortals of Aveum, for instance, was published by EA but largely funded by venture capital.
It's a shame for everyone involved, but at the same time it doesn't feel that surprising. It doesn't feel like their games after Until Dawn reached the same level of success. I remember the Dark Pictures Anthology getting mixed reviews as it went on and I don't really remember much about the Quarry's reception except the hype around it being the next Until Dawn.
And it’s kind of bullshit that there’s no real balancing for singleplayers.
Each enemy takes a pretty big chunk of your health bar, and you can only attack so fast. They can and will attack faster than you, and sometimes even just stunlock you over and over until you just die and have to respawn. I want to enjoy the game, but I feel like I’m actively fighting against the brain grain when I play it.
I play multiplayer so I can’t comment much on that … but remember this game is in early access. Like it just launched its early access last month. It’s not a complete game or even a 1.0 game.
Enshrouded has no plans for mods from what I’ve heard so far. Which basically killed the game for me. Not going to bother with it because there are some mechanics that would irritate me too much to enjoy the game. Mods would’ve fixed it.
Not just pausing; it's poor value for the customer to not have an offline mode for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is longevity, because their servers won't be there forever.
never know when your internet just decides to go down for an hour. happened to me 2 nights ago and i didnt even notice until i tried looking at the dlc store (i was playing rock band 4)
Steams cut off that, at just the $3 million mark, is $450 million. This is $900,000 per game.
People wonder why other companies wanted to make their own launchers. They leave millions on the table by having steam 'handle' things.
This is also why Valve isn't that inclined to pump out tons of new games.
A game like Palworld, which as of 3 weeks ago, has sold 12 million copies would end up making Valve somewhere in the neighbourhood of $72 million as of the end of January.
There’s nothing stopping game companies from selling through multiple storefronts, or even direct to customer with Steam’s cut removed.
The fact is, players are happy to pay a premium so that the games live in their steam library, are downloaded via Steam’s delivery network, and integrate with steam features.
The fact is, players are happy to pay a premium so that the games live in their steam library
i don’t think you can make a statement like that, that is so untested. If capcom were to start selling games at $70 on steam, and $50 on capcom.com things might be different, we can’t really say.
Exactly. Steam provides a service to these companies (a pipeline to customers) and they don’t want to pay.
They are free to make their own, like epic, ubisoft, origin, etc. have, and I am free to continue to use Steam, which I prefer because it provides a service and it works and I feel is a superior product.
Another thing is the infrastructure that Steam provides to get the games to the users and support them costs money. If Capcom wants to build the infrastructure themselves it will cost them more. they will have to charge $100 (exaggeration) and they will only be serving Capcom games.
If you sell steam keys through your site you can't charge less than the steam price. In order to sell it cheaper on their site, it would have to be a non-steam version and they'd have to serve up the files themselves. If it's a multiplayer game it wouldn't be compatible, they'd need to switch to EOS or something else. realistically speak, developers could probably charge a bit less by providing that their own. it doesn't cost 30% to serve up the files and process some payments.
it doesn’t cost 30% to serve up the files and process some payments.
No, it doesn’t. It also doesn’t take $5 to make a cup of coffee, or $10 to make a plate of pasta, or whatever Netflix charges every month to serve up mundane low quality streaming video.
But unless you’re proposing ending capitalism to fix the problems with valve’s pricing model, there won’t be any change to it any time soon.
The only thing that will get valve to have more competitive pricing for video games publishers is if they have actual competition that can siphon away games from their platform. It’s not valve’s fault that everyone else has made inferior products.
And there’s nothing forcing you to publish on steam. If you don’t think 30% is a fair exchange for handling file distribution and payments, you can handle your own file distribution and payments. Your game isn’t forced to be on Steam.
or whatever Netflix charges every month to serve up mundane low quality streaming video
Netflix isn't the service I'd point the finger at for low quality streaming video. That would be Amazon. They don't even have the problem that Max has where it always starts low and then evens out by the time the recap is done.
In fact, I’m fairly certain you’re allowed to do both: sell your game for 25% less while hosting and processing yourself. You just can’t sell your steam codes for less.
Gaming on the PC around the 90s-2000s was pretty rough. I remember installing a game from a CD, typing the key on the back of the CD, and installation failed because I needed different sound drivers or something. I remember most games on my janky PC would be a gamble if it worked or not, even if it met minimum specs.
I remember still facing that issue in around 2010s even with Steam, and then seeing how slick installing apps were on the iPhone and it just “worked”, and wishing PC games were as simple.
PC gaming is great now. It’s been a long time coming.
Steam offers many services to users and developers more than just being a simple storefront. They didn’t become top dog by virtue of being early, there are plenty of competing launchers that do not offer even a tenth of what steam offers.
I feel like a lot of people, myself included, forget that there’s all kinds of software and such available on steam. Their main thing is games, but they have stuff like Blender (which is free), Vegas Movie Studio or whatever it’s called, and a bunch of others. Don’t they also have movies, or am I wrong on that one?
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