This stuff is why “it’s optional” and “it’s just cosmetic” are bullshit arguments.
If you can resist the urge, you’re not the intended target. They don’t make record profits from people who can spend somewhat rationally, even though those are the vast majority of users their contribution to profits is a drop in an ocean.
No, the only reason this model works so well is because it’s exploiting the vulnerabilities of a small percent of big spenders.
So, do you consider paying for more rolls part of the fun?
Because the rest, including the hit of endorphin you get for a stroke of luck, could very well exist without it. But of course on EA’s side getting people addicted has no point if they don’t pay virtually unlimited amounts of money for more.
Not this game in particular. I do gamble and love spending a few hundred every year. I’ll regularly drop $10 or$20 on a mobile time killer when I need them.
You do realize this whole thread and post is about gambling addiction yes? You’re essentially doing the “I have a black friend, I can’t be racist!” but for gambling addiction.
Here's a fun suggestion, how about you unlock the desired players by playing the game? Could even put it into an immersive context, you beat brazil and subsequently unlock their players for your team.
What's so fun about buying a chance to get your player? Is it possibly the shiny colors and the happy soundeffects that are specifically designed to make your brain addicted?
Whales subsidize the cost of the game for everyone else. If there weren’t whales, the cost goes up for everyone or the product diminishes. Reality isn’t a magical realm where the company will not use ROI and net profit to determine what to make or how to price things, it’s all interrelated and you don’t get to hold everything else constant when asking for something to change.
you do realize you’re just saying that the predatory business has to be predatory otherwise they couldn’t operate their predatory business, right? It’s like a sheep defending wolves because if they didn’t eat sheep they wouldn’t be able to continue eating sheep.
I’ve spent €45 for a Mario game yesterday. Last I’ve checked that game costs roughly the same for everyone (except understandable variations in regional pricing). Not €45 once for me and $2,000 per week for some guy with an addiction problem.
Yet that game was made, and thousands more that didn’t rely on gacha, lootboxes or whatever.
People with a gambling addiction will find an outlet for it unless they get help controlling it, just like people with any addiction. Addiction is treated on an individual basis, not by banning an activity that the vast majority of the population can partake in with self-control.
We don’t have tons of public numbers to be able to discuss the initial development, licensing, marketing, support and ongoing development, distribution and overhead costs vs initial costs, expansion and MTX income of games at a large scale. But you can be sure the companies that make the games have those numbers, and they’re used for pricing and budgeting of future development. And that’s before we open the can of worms that is discussing how much profit is ethical.
Maybe they could make less money, maybe they could not make certain features, but where does the ethical line fall when it comes to predatory features and marketing? Who needs protection? From who? How do you implement it without infringing the rights of others? Is it ok to let them gamble if there’s a deterministic worst-case scenario? What if there’s a limit on how much they can spend? What if purchases are purely only deterministic, but they’re limited time exclusives that will never return? What about if you can earn them by playing or pay extra to just get them up front or faster? What about if they carve that feature out of the main product and sell it as an additional cost? These are all predatory in some way, but we don’t need to ban them all when a person can make their own value judgments and interact with games in a way that brings them enjoyment. Otherwise, it’s a slippery slope to asking why we even let people “waste” money on entertainment.
And yet plenty drugs and medicine are controlled substances because they’d be so easy to abuse or hurt yourself with. We could just assign the same to ingame gambling, no? Since that’s also on an individual basis, handle it the same all around?
So to buy a lootbox:
Go to a doctor.
Doctor prescribes you a daily dosage of say, 1 lootbox.
Each day you can go to the pharmacy and pick up a pack of 1 lootbox code, you can have at maximum a store of 4 of them at home then pharmacies stop giving you more so you cannot stockpile. (going by the pills a friend of mine gets prescribed here)
No, whales subsidize the cost of a yacht for the CEO. The games could be paid just from the money you pay for them, if the companies weren’t continuously being siphoned off the top by C-suites and shareholders.
Haven’t played fifa but understand that loot boxes are basically gambling. Arguably worse than gambling because with gambling at least you might win something “real”.
Curious though - there was a screenshot in the article where you could preview a loot box before buying - does that not make it more like “buying” the players instead of “gambling” for them?
All packs for sale in the FUT Shop have an eye icon and a button to trigger the preview. Doing that exposes its contents as if the player actually had bought the pack and opened it.
Once the player has seen the revealed cards, they may then buy the pack with either FUT Coins (the free in-game currency) or FUT Points (the premium). If they don’t like what they see, they don’t have to buy the pack. But there will now be a 24-hour wait period before they can preview another pack or buy a different one in its class. If they buy the pack, that timer immediately expires.
Horrible, but also really impressive how they manipulate people. Forced engagement in the weekend leagues, resetting the game periodically…the addicts don’t stand a chance.
The game whose mismanagement still most upsets me.
It had/has the potential to be so incredible, and they screwed it over.
They were one of the first to have VR, then saw low numbers and wrote it off when they were really just too early to the market. Like - if they actually supported a PS5 version and supported PSVR2 with its foveated rendering right now, they’d probably be the bestselling VR game on PSN.
But no, instead, they dropped VR entirely for their poorly developed on foot expansion.
If they actually had resources pouring into the game, just think how amazing the world could be paired up with where generative AI will be within around 12 months. Actually intriguing plot lines playing out in local space voiced by the ship AI. That right there could have been a subscription add on.
But no, instead they just keep shuttering it more and more.
A game like elite is one of the few kinds of games I think generative ai would be incredible, for example: a unique ai generated storefront for selling equipment, everything from the layout to the advertisements seen on the station for it could be so immersive if done right
That’s just sad. I invested so much time grinding my way through this game and engineering my 6 ships and getting a fleet carrier only to be ultimately disappointed by the lack of content and lackluster updates.
It saddens me that I now have to look forward to that mess of a tech demo called Star Citizen, but I’ve already burned my money on that too, so I’m only left with a dream.
I may be wrong, but I think they completely discounted console updates (and probably will do so with PC too). Ellie in VR was something to behold though. Hours of fun.
Yeah, it was amazing. I still haven’t bought the expansion since I only play the game in VR and there was so much reason not to buy it for VR. They have fixed some of it, but even if the original game isn’t really ruined at all, it’s just tough to play now knowing the expansion is out there. So it kinda tainted the whole game even if technically nothing changed for me.
I still have no idea why they decided not to do VR for the on-foot stuff. I don’t know if it was just a cost cutting measure, or if there was some problem they couldn’t sort out. If it was for motion sickness reasons, like not being able to support teleport to move or something, they should probably know motion sickness susceptible people already couldn’t really play the rest of the game. There were some parts that worked ok, their VR demo was ok for most people, but alot of the actual game wasn’t. And even with all the motion sickness reduction options on, driving the SRV didn’t go well for any people I know with motion sickness issues. If it was motion controls they couldn’t support, we have plenty of games with face aim, sure it’s not ideal, but it’s still an upgrade from flat games.
The lack of VR support for in Odyssey, on top of numerous issues at launch, soured me on the whole thing. I know VR is a niche that did not take off so it likely did not make sense for them to prioritize it ; but Elite was the quintessential early killer app for VR, so it stings. Shame, I spent hundred of hours in Elite and would have liked to spend more.
I suppose PC VR can be said to have not really taken off, but there are over 50 million VR headset sales in general so far, that’s pretty good. VR in general is taking off just fine. And PC VR is mostly only suffering from the technical barrier of wireless streaming. Which is clearing up bit by bit, but could be solved with a wireless dongle instead of needing the user to properly configure their router. But newer routers are more and more being able to support VR streaming with their default settings.
While PCVR was mostly abandoned by the big gaming companies, there is still a ton of support from community modders. In the flat2VR community they are up to about 60% of all games working in VR now, about 30% with full motion controls too. So having a VR headset is still getting more and more popular, and being able to use it for PCVR is still getting more and more possible and popular, at some point it’ll come back to the focus of the actual gaming studios too. But for now they don’t have to cuz modders will just do it for free for them if they don’t.
It certainly sucked when VR switched to prioritizing stand alone over PCVR, but I think long-term it will get us to PCVR being mainstream sooner than we would have got there without a focus on the easy stuff first.
The early times of this wave of VR (which really started with the commercial launch of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive) were very exciting. Lots of “experiences” back then: sometimes mindblowing, often half-baked, always interesting. After a couple of years people realized there was no money in it and lots of them moved on.
7 years in, I’m pretty much over early access promising prototypes and flat screen games being modded to support VR. I want VR-native games-ass games of the caliber of Half-Life: Alyx, or Moss. I want VR support to be a standard feature of any new cockpit-based driving or flying game, not an afterthought. We are not getting the former, and slowly maybe getting there for the latter.
Elite Dangerous is the perfect illustration of this cycle: Frontier started supporting VR very early. My first VR experience was Elite Dangerous on a loaned Oculus DK1. It was mind-blowing ! It was also very very puke-inducing ! Then proper hardware came with the Rift and Vive, Elite had full VR support, and it was fucking great. And now, well VR support is still there, but it’s no longer first class, and slowly decaying.
Really glad to see this finally hit 1.0; idiosyncratic titles like this are my favourite thing about Early Access. For all the early, often substantiated negativity about the model, it enables developers to work on a lot of cool stuff.
Fuuuuck, Elite Dangerous is so fucking good. Anyone can make a zoo sim or other games. Very very few can make a massive space Sim with good controls, multiplayer, and the sheer scale and intensity of E:D’s FPS ship combat.
Exactly. My ideal game would be a mix of Elite Dangerous, X4 Foundations, and Starfield. ED has the galaxy map, flight model, and combat down. It just needs to be more of a game.
Been playing World of Horror since it entered early access, great to see it finally getting a full release. It is a great time if you're a Junji Ito fan or just a fan of cosmic horror in general.
I absolutely love World of Horror! It just hit 1.0, so if you were looking to try it out nows a great time! Also worth mentioning that it has modding support, so you can go on the discord and extend the games content a ton (not that it’s really short on content to begin with)
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