Wouldn’t it just be perfect irony if they run completely out of money before managing to release something/anything? Though with how many people put in money over and over even though progress over the years has been slow to say the least I guess the more likely outcome is nuclear holocaust putting a damper on the release schedule.
I still remember being in college and hearing people in the lab next to me excitedly proclaim that they were able to pay $100 for a rare ship that has X Y Z features including handling, top speed, and fashionable interiors.
They weren’t able to use the ship yet, but oh man was it a great investment for when they’d one day be able to ride them.
So fucking bizarre. But, if you have people out there thinking like my then peers, you’re guaranteed to have a long term stream of income based on loose promises alone.
They lost me like exactly after I put in money and started the insurance idea. I regret heavily putting money directly to the main site instead of kickstarter, at least I might have chance to get a refund or something since the pitch content changed.
Haven’t they made close to a billion dollars when counting the Kickstarter, starter packs sold via the website, and the “microtransactions” for things like ships (which are more macro than micro with the prices often being way over 100€)? I doubt they’ll run out of money any time soon, although hookers and blow definitely aren’t free
Scientology has been running strong from their grift for decades.
They are going to eventually run dry when they’ve burned through every ounce of their reputation. But it’s a long, long path of riches and broken dreams in the meantime. By the time it’s finally done, Chris and the other COs will have retired with their hundreds of millions, and they won’t care.
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.
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.
I remember getting getting sucked into opening packs years ago in Madden Ultimate team. I stopped when I realized I had spent twice over what the game itself cost. I stopped then, and never played ultimate team again. I am not an addictive person, but even the most strong minded individual can get sucked into their vortex. The fact that lawmakers let this industry be self regulated means these companies can keep abusing players.
i did that once with microsoft points i got for my birthday. never did it again when i found out that after X number of games all those great players i have cannot be used unless i buy some fucking dumb shit thing to refill their playing meter? or something dumb like that
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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