I wish we lived in a universe, where these platforms can exist on their own, without falling into the trap of needing financial support from literal satan, in companies like Fandom
that universe requires people to pay money for content rather than having advertiser funded content that people will just block anyway. which in 2023 isn’t going to happen
If these were all getting financial support from a large company, why did they all switch on more ads, newsletters, anti-adblockers, and subscription prompts at basically the same time? Must’ve been only crumbs, I think they will move on and be better off. A few less click-bait titles in the aggregators are all that is lost I suppose.
The games “news” coverage system is a-changin’ again, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Large companies are driven by one thing and only one thing. Shareholder value. So they and their subsidiaries will implement policies that drive shareholder value at the cost of everything else.
I have (and still do) use EG for most of my news, but that has taken a slide in quality over the years. In general, they’re not receptive to developmental feedback either - though I’m not prepared to leave the blame at the editorial or mod staff door on that one when you’ve got a company like ReedPop coming in with a clear agenda to make more money, and leaving so soon.
My main concern is for DigitalFoundry - genuinely one of the best, most entertaining, and in-depth spin off channels out there.
I got into it a few years back and nearly finished ARR. I found the storyline and cut scenes really engaging, and felt like I was a part of something. But I tried to pick it up and start fresh about a year ago and the bastards oversimplified my class (Summoner), and I swear they even further nerfed the low-mid level difficulty, making me feel most days as though I was playing on creative mode. For those who don’t care, though, the storyline, world and music (holy fuck, Limsa at night and Ul’dah at night are absolutely soul stirring) are really something special.
I will likely try the game again with the upcoming graphical upgrade, but I fear I will always feel too behind on the story and won’t be a part of the entirely new storyline/age that is slated to begin with the next expansion. That graphical upgrade will be huge, though. I play a ton of old games myself, but sometimes FFXIV feels like it’s running modern character models over PS2 environments and grass textures. It deserves to cast off some of that jank and show how beautiful it’s natural world can be.
F*** big gaming and their microtransaction/subscription/pay to win bull****! Indie and retro games are way better than overpriced AAA titles at his point anyway.
Better idea: Get them a ton of classics from the Steam sale, put them on a fresh acct, and then give them hundreds of hours of good shit for like $50. You could get 5 copies of Undertale for the equivalent price of 1 Fortnite skin.
Strictly speaking, I’m not opposed to monetization in f2p games but the pricing is egregious.
When the le seraffim bundle for overwatch 2 dropped they also put their in game currency on sale so you could get enough currency to get the bundle for $50 instead of $70 and people were calling it a great value.
Even at $50, that’s enough for 4 months of humble choice which would net you 32 games and 6-8 of them would be AAA games.
I share my steam linrary with my two kids. Gave them 200+ games. They still play Fortnite and Roblox because that is what their friends play. When I was young the biggest games were single player and you shared stories with your friends. Now you play with them online.
It really is crazy how much the cultural landscape of games has evolved over the past decade or so. I’ll just be here playing classic singleplayer games until I’m old and gray like a boomer lol.
Ha! I guess I already qualify as a boomer. I’m 43 and been a gamer since the commodore days. I play everything that comes my way if time permits, from indies like islanders for a relaxing me time, to mega AAA F2P monsters like Fortnite to have a laugh with my sons.
I only play one online game (Dead By Daylight). Besides that it’s all single player games (mostly JRPGs). This year: Secret of Mana, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Torna The Golden Country, and Tears of the Kingdom. It was a good year. About to start Xenoblade Chronicles 3.
Everyone’s wondering where we went wrong as a society but honestly a year of game pass during a time of my life where I didn’t get new games very often sounds way better than getting like three games for Christmas.
Evil genius marketing, working as it always does. The kids don’t know any better, so they are being exploited and conditioned to think the horrible new normal is just the way things have to be. And most parents are too tired and busy to find better alternatives.
It’s simple, the games that appeal the most to kids require some form of subscription. If those games didn’t, then they wouldn’t want ones with subscriptions.
Putting it like that makes it sound that this is incidental, but the conditioning techniques baked into the design of these games are included for the sake of selling battle passes and virtual items. If they didn’t have subscriptions and virtual currency, they would have been built entirely differently.
That’s because I am not speaking on the corporate point of view here, I am discussing the kids’. Every time I see this subject come up there seems to always be people who think that the move to subscriptions are due to a preference of access model upon the consumer, naively ruining their own capacity to own things, namely kids/young people, thinking it’s just the modern, and thus better, more convenient, way to go.
Even the article’s headline is written in a manner that suggests that kids prefer the subscription model it’s self, not that they are choosing based on the game without thought to the access model.
I see what you mean. Far from me to want to blame the kids for it, but I don’t think we can just overlook how corporations are deliberately funneling them towards these models through marketing and manipulative design. The kids’ perspective is one of just being excited for things they want in these games, but this happens due to habitual conditioning of a neverending threadmill of virtual rewards and Fear of Missing Out. Not to mention semi-organic peer pressure among kids, over who has the fanciest or default cosmetics. Which wasn’t deliberately created by the corporations, but they are definitely benefitting over it, and nobody is dissuading that from happening.
The kids are not at fault, but I don’t think this is a “just let kids be kids” situation. They are being exploited.
It did. I think you are misunderstanding what I am saying, or adding more to it than there is.
Children do not desire subscriptions as a superior model to owning games. The model of access is not something they are comparing and contrasting. They are simply going for the games they prefer, which get locked behind subscriptions. I never implied that games popular with kids aren’t intentionally put behind subscriptions, I was arguing that the subscription model isn’t actually preferred by kids.
How you worded this makes it seem like “if those games didn’t” refers to requiring subscriptions.
I would suggest editing it to “If those games didn’t appeal to kids” or similar; if what you meant was that kids just plays what appeals to them, and those games “just happens” to be subscription games.
I was talking just today with some coworkers about how having subscriptions instead of owning is what is normal to kids now - not just games, but things like Netflix and Spotify. So this doesn’t surprise me, but does depress me. Technofeudalism is the new normal.
In my teen years I spent a large fraction of my disposable income on music. A Spotify subscription is a vastly better value than buying whatever I could scrounge from a used CD store. Back then it was common for me to read about some semi-obscure recording and just have to wonder what it sounded like, because I had no hope of finding it in a store, and a special order was way out of my budget, especially for something I had no idea if I’d even like. Now I can listen to damn near anything that’s ever been published for less than I spent as a teenager. I find new music by listening to personalized recommendations instead of local radio stations. It’s just better in every way (except probably for the artists, but music has always been a cutthroat business so who knows).
A lot of subscription services suck and are just a way to milk customers, but streaming audio and video are not in that category.
I keep hoping–perhaps naively so–for a major backlash against this. Sometimes consumers have power, and sometimes they don’t. But maybe we’ll all get fed up with this bullshit and start just dropping any and all unnecessary subscriptions from our lives. The big problem is when a brand becomes synonymous with a product (like fucking Adobe and ProTools, for two examples).
Unchecked “free market” capitalism, if I had to guess.
Companies should never have been able to run outside of a very tight yoke. Yeah sure, capitalism. But not unchecked and especially not unchecked-across-borders so they can start escaping shit by moving legal entities around. Oh and speaking of that, maybe “corporations as entities” is another really really big one we fucked up, allowing the people who make the truly shitty decisions to shirk responsibility for them.
TL;DR: the way it was supposed to work is that entities that wanted limited liability were granted corporate charters in exchange for providing some large, tangible public benefit (and very much not just “shareholder value”, BTW). This post-Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. world where corporations are essentially mandated to be sociopathic is an absolute 100% perversion of what incorporation was meant to be for!
In case you are wondering this because it seems children actually prefer subscriptions to owning games, they don’t. Out of what is offered to them, the most desired choices happen to be subscription models of some form. If those games were something you just bought then the desire would be for games that were purchased in full.
This type of games are free to play. So a bunch of kids who are friends can start playing at any time even without money. If some of them like the game, they’ll stay as a group for the social aspect.
I don’t see any wrong in it. Its just different of what I did 30 years ago.
I’m gonna have to disagree. As somebody who was an Overwatch addict, these games are designed to effectively be like drugs. They are not meant for children and shouldn’t be purported as such.
These are casinos playing in simple.
In fact, it’s much less incentivized for a game that is one and done, even multiplayer titles if they are a paid game.
Not teaching kids thr value of money imo is the main one. They dont understand the cost of subs because its not their money they are spending.
I have a half brother whose on the sensible side of buying games. He doesnt get a lot of money, hell he got a 20$ steam card from a friend, and hes saving it for an indie game that doesnt even release till 2025.
I see a lot of covid misinformation going on around this story which is extremely worrying. Just because the human race not currently at risk of imminent extinction from it doesn’t mean it’s not still a serious illness. Some people get long term complications from it. Some people are extra vulnerable to it. Some people are still dying from it.
“Just get the vaccine” is the worst kind of uninformed handwaving response to the concerns and worries of other humans, it’s upsetting it is becoming the norm.
I don’t get wolfire’s point here. Yes steam takes a hefty 30% cut but game developers are free to sell directly if they want to. Unlike apple who have completely locked down the iOS app ecosystem or Google who allow sideloading but scares and warns people against downloading apps from non Play Store sources, steam does nothing to hinder games not sold through it. If there was a competitor who was as good as steam but took a smaller cut, then that competitor would have been the market leader in place of steam.
Exactly, I mean you can even add Non-Steam games to Steam. Yes, you don’t get achievements that way and there’s no support for workshop or big picture or the community plug-in, but you can launch the game from the steam library.
On another note, can Steam, even for a small payment of 2 dollars, add those functions for games not bought in the Steam store, but that could have been bought through Steam? I really want to have TW3 with achievements, but don’t want to buy it again.
Remember, if Valve actually lost this suit, which they almost certainly won’t, it won’t improve the videogame ecosystem. It will possibly make it worse.
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