They are anti-consumer, but for smaller devs in particular, they can mean the difference between between canceling and releasing a game, between bankruptcy and the studio's continued existence.
Do you see developers making games exclusively for one console manufacturer the same way? Are you willing to deprive the gaming community as a whole from these titles? Games like Shadow of the Colossus or Alan Wake 2 would not have happened without exclusivity.
Games like Shadow of the Colossus or Alan Wake 2 would not have happened without exclusivity.
Bullshit. If the publishers for those games had made them for more platforms, they would have sold more copies. Exclusivity deals are made between console makers and publishers in order to sell more consoles and are an anticompetitive practice that should be illegal.
No, both of these titles are "halo games" (not in the Bungie series, but in the way that they are showcase titles) that sold poorly compared to their development costs - and their publishers likely knew that these would sell very poorly, but chose to publish them regardless, because they bring prestige to their platforms. They sold poorly, because they are niche games, not due to their platform exclusivity.
It's kind of like a car manufacturer making an exclusive sports car that only a few hundred people will buy, but that is meant to elevate the entire brand, bring in customers for other products and wow journalists so that they think of the brand more highly. Most of Sony's publishing strategy hinges on strong exclusive titles - since their hardware is virtually identical to Microsoft's - and they started this by going down the "high art" game route all the way back with the PS1 (with extremely niche games like "The Book of Watermarks") before creating more mainstream blockbuster exclusives like the Uncharted series.
I get your frustration with this, I have felt it myself with exclusives that I wanted to play, but couldn't justify the expense of buying a console for, but there are solid reasons from the perspective of developers and publishers for doing it and outlawing this practice would result in a far less vibrant and interesting gaming landscape. Another comparison is how rich aristocrats used to pay artists like Leonardo DaVinci to create art for them. This was also an exclusivity deal of sorts, since most of the public didn't see these artworks until centuries later (the platform exclusivity was being born to the right kind of family), but without these wealthy, selfish patrons of the arts, mankind would have been deprived of amazing creations.
Lol comparing console makers to renaissance art patrons is rich. They are hardware makers and that’s all. They don’t give a shit about great art. They are just trying to have some unique selling points for their locked down platforms so that gaming PCs don’t completely dominate the market. Fuck Sony. Fuck Microsoft. And fuck publishers who sign exclusivity deals. Monopolistic and anticompetitive behaviour doesn’t deserve praise or encouragement.
Which still may not have recouped development costs. Shadow was on PS2, no other console got close to their sales. Costs to convert it to other platforms may have been more than profit from sales on Xbox and GameCube.
Engagement is merely the ability to, or the degree to which you are able to, maintain interaction with something (a system, a game, a fidget toy, whatever) over time. It has absolutely nothing to do with entertainment, although you can use entertainment as a means of achieving or increasing engagement. However, entertainment is hard. People are entertained by different things to different degrees, and respond to their entertainment in different ways. Engagement on the other hand is a fairly simple behavioural matter and that’s a whole field of science (which is mostly bollocks, to be fair, but its lessons can be very effective when applied at scale).
Source: I used to be a behavioural engineer, specifically a gamification specialist. Engagement was the oil I was employed to extract, and entertainment the excuse my field used to pretend what we were (and still are) doing isn’t just social manipulation at scale.
Yes yes yes, I’m very on board with this. I think we all know what we’re doing is wrong and manipulative on some level, but the general consciousness hasn’t caught up to recognising the tort.
It may be just be association, but I’m not a huge fan of the term “entertainment” either. It strikes the same hollow note for me as “content.”
Yes it’s an apt description for a part of an experience, but it comes so laden with its own associations and preconceptions, that it doesn’t feel useful in most contexts in which it’s deployed.
That said I have no objections to how you’ve used it in your comment.
I don't think that :/ I think his statements and the games he chooses to back sort of prove that ultimately profit is what he is interested in. I don't blame him for that. But don't make him out to be what he isn't. He is a CEO first, being a fan of games falls lower on the list.
Then who is at fault? Security? For doing their job? They wouldn’t be on stage if he hadn’t broken the rules. It wasn’t over-use of force, from the looks of things, just unfortunate placement.
Saying the resulting damages aren’t his fault is like forgiving the person who caused a pile-up for driving reckless.
Yes, the trophy was security’s fault because it was from excessive force. He was already restrained! I’m not saying the guy wasn’t in the wrong for climbing on stage, but people climb on stages all the time without security breaking the centerpiece of the event while apprehending them.
The security guy who pulled him down towards the trophy sure seemed to cause the trophy to get knocked over though. The stagerusher was pretty far away before that.
The guy already stopped by himself and they decided to smash him into the trophy
Counter-Strike skin betting platform CSGOEmpire has claimed responsibility for the stunt. “Some of our men are on the ground in handcuffs,” wrote CSGOEmpire founder Monarch on X after the incident. “But we fucking did it, boys.”
Why do skin betting sites claim responsibility for stupid stunts as if they’re doing terrorist attacks
“I talked to at least five small teams, like 35 [members] and under, during GDC, and they’re like: Cuts, cuts, cuts, funding canceled, talks that were going on for a year, canceled,” said Casey Yano, the co-founder of Slay the Spire studio Mega Crit. “It sounds like it’s shit. We’re definitely very privileged to be able to self-fund. [Otherwise] I’d be very, very, very scared right now.”
If these deals didn’t exist, lots of games simply wouldn’t get made. You can hate on the platforms all you like but the deals are one of the only sources of funding for small & solo developers.
You do realize those are usually exclusive for only a year, right? So EGS pays them out for a year of exclusivity and then the devs are free to launch on steam and others.
The thing is, often if they don’t get that first infusion of cash from a deal with EGS (or another investor) they don’t get to complete or even launch the game at all. So it never would make it to the other markets.
Usually by the time they’ve made it off EGS, I’ve forgotten they exist. There’s been many sequels to games I loved that I forgot existed because of this.
Profit isn’t the issue, it’s having to continually show outsized profit growth rates to keep shareholders happy that’s the problem. Look at private companies like Valve for comparison.
CS2 is infintely worse imo than CS:GO. Yes, the maps got updated but local multiplayer works way worse and the bots are a laughable mess. Took me days to get working properly on debian too.
At first I thought it had to do with lootbox mechanics and scheduling and reward system gaming, but nope, this one was straight up just “he played vidja too much and I’m afraid of him when I take away his games”
One is multiple parallel goals. Makes it hard to stop playing, since there’s always something you just want to finish or do “quickly”.
Say you want to build a house. Chop some trees, make some walls. Oh, need glass for windows. Shovel some sand, make more furnaces, dig a room to put them in - oh, there’s a cave with shiny stuff! Quickly explore a bit. Misstep, fall, zombies, dead. You had not placed a bed yet, so gotta run. Night falls. Dodge spiders and skeletons. Trouble finding new house. There it is! Venture into the cave again to recover your lost equipment. As you come up, a creeper awaitsssss you …
Another mechanism is luck. The world is procedurally generated, and you can craft and create almost anything anywhere. Except for a few things, like spawners. I once was lucky to have two skeleton spawners right next to each other, not far from the surface. In total, I probably spent hours in later worlds to find a similar thing.
The social aspect can also support that you play the game longer or more than you actually would like. Do I lose my “friends” when I stop playing their game?
I don’t think Minecraft does these things in any way maliciously, it’s just a great game. But nevertheless, it has a couple of mechanics which can make it addictive and problematic.
The social aspect can also support that you play the game longer or more than you actually would like.
This is the part of any online game I absolutely hate. The feeling of being even slightly beholden to someone else, like now I have to think about them having a good time too.
Games that forbid direct communication, and allow you to drop in and out of a match without hurting others feel a bit better in this respect imho
Isn’t that more of just part of interacting with people, though?
Like, if you play some kind of real-life game with no regard for anyone else, that’s generally considered poor sportsmanship. That wasn’t invented in online gaming, it’s been a concern as long as people have been coming up with games to play together. We accept that if you sit down and play a game of chess or golf or pool or D&D or paintball, you’re going to try to not cheat or blow the game off or be a jerk about it. Some people are better sports than others, but the general idea is that we accept the wins and losses and the game going in different directions, because otherwise there’s no game.
What’s an aberration is this concept that people you meet with over an electronic connection aren’t real, don’t matter, and are never owed anything.
What’s an aberration is this concept that people you meet with over an electronic connection aren’t real, don’t matter, and are never owed anything.
What you said is all true, but what I’m saying is precisely the opposite of this. I don’t like playing certain games with others because I empathise with others and want them to have a good time.
So I usually avoid games (video and otherwise) that are designed so that my continued enthusiastic participation are required for the enjoyment of others. To me, that doesn’t feel like play; it feels like work.
I’ll do it, but it’s exhausting. Maybe it’s an introvert thing, because I’ll come away from those games feeling completely drained.
Note I’m not saying those games are bad, just that i hate them. At least, if my social battery is already used up for the week (which it usually is just from regular life).
In the case of Minecraft the issues you listed are pretty much present in almost anything entertaining, video games or not, including in-person events and social functions.
As with anything moderation is key and people just need to learn not to let it control them. Some people are incapable of that though.
There are definitely certain things that game companies need to avoid doing but multiple goals, a little bit of luck, and online cooperative play is not it.
The World Health Organization recognizes videogame addiction as a disorder, and the American Psychiatric Association says that the question of whether or not videogames can be addictive is “still being debated,” but that "early evidence suggests that videogames are one of the most addicting technologies around
Its clear that games can be addictive and the concept of „whale fishing“ is openly discussed in terms of game design. Obviously, the weakest of us in terms of addiction make the standard because its those who are harmed.
Obviously, cash shops should be banned in games immediately.
They try to make balantro a 18+ game because it resembles a card game. Meanwhile fifa is for 3+ year old and it's just a card oprning game where they fish money from some sad football fans and children. I have no faith in anyone in charge of that
I have to think part of this is just all the ancient representatives we have. They’ve lived long enough to know what gambling looks like, and what good ol’ sports ball looks like, and by golly nobody can tell 'em any different!
I think that there are better responses and more nuanced opinions to be considered, certainly teaching awareness and response to such stimulus is better than playing wack-a-mole with whatever people get addicted to.
The drug war demonstrated this very clearly, it’s basically impossible to ban things people want and this is even harder with internet services or downloaded software - focus on harm reduction and education for best results.
That said we should regulate against psychologically manipulative game mechanics being linked to real or purchased currencies, though education and offering alternatives must come first.
The drug war in the US - same as any other war - imo was profit seeking of the military industrial complex, incarceration industry and power shifting away from the people, nothing else.
It is not the drugs you need to outlaw, it is the living conditions. The reason nobody gets a handle on drugs is because there is homelessness and injustice galore. Countries around the world have very different approaches to this and they mostly work better than the US solution of mass incarceration.
Corporations designing things for user retention instead of fun is hard to see for people without professional background in marketing sometimes. These things are giving you a way of influencing the subconcious, avoiding the concious in the process. This manipulation is why gambling is outlawed for kids, not the money aspect.
Sure but the point it is didn’t help, likewise gambling is illegal in a lot of places and those places tend to have more of a problem with it because addicts can’t get help.
Treating game addiction generally involves people learning to recognize and respond to behavior cycles, just like with other addictions. We should take these things seriously and teach kids how to recognize and escape manipulative cycles, a lesson which would be useful their whole life in every walk of life.
I agree that it is important that addicts need help. But having unrestricted gambling is not that. Its why even in countries that allow gambling, it is highly restricted. Were moving in a circle now. Maybe we need to agree to disagree here.
That is a good point, I guess I might accept there should be carefully considered regulation in certain well defined situations - I already agree money or brought currencies shouldn’t be allowed which will limit real world damage but I don’t really see where it is needed beyond this.
You’re intentionally dumbing down the topic to make your point sound better. You’re simply describing the binary, whether addiction could be present or not. There are so many more obvious factors to consider. Addiction rate of users, personal and social impacts of that addiction, intensity of addictive behaviors, frequency of use in addicts, target demographic, marketing etc.
There’s a reason gambling has a minimum age requirement, and loot boxes are a way around that to make money by letting children gamble.
You do have a valid point there tbh, certain mechanics should be forbidden from being linked to real or purchasable money but I don’t really think they should be forbidden in general.
My argument for this is it’s too wide ranging and will limit positive elements in game design. I think it’s also important for people to be able to practice emotional response and regulation to such stimulus, if we don’t then advertisers and manipulators will walk all over us.
I agree with this, but we give them till the age of 21 to practice and develop those skills. The entire argument is not letting gaming companies introduce gambling to kids before their brains have fully developed.
Addiction is a neuropsychological disorder characterized by a persistent and intense urge to use a drug or engage in a behaviour that produces natural reward, despite substantial harm and other negative consequences.
If you employ psychologists and other specialists to design something for maximum retention, you‘re not making something „entertaining“, you‘re tricking the brain into a loop.
We could discuss this endlessly but suffice it to say that there are techniques for retention that dont make an experience necessarily better but more captivating. Infinite scrolling is a very simple example. i bet some game designers could shine a pretty bright light on this if they stumble across this thread.
I could abstract this to the real world like so: two people can speak exactly the same text but one cares if their audience is getting tired and stops, the other one speaks a little louder and turns on some more lights. I‘m pretty sure you will get a significantly longer retention despite the quality being the exact same.
And this is why methods for retention need to be carefully screened and regulated.
Have to strongly disagree. Having to constantly reload entire pages of content is incredibly annoying. The only reason it makes people want to quit is because it’s annoying.
The fact that you chose that specific example, one that I think is plainly wrong, just goes to show that the discussion is not as simple as you or other people make it out to be, and that any regulation around this will most certainly ensure that future games are shittier.
I dont like you stating things as if they were an objective truth. It is your opinion that infinite scrolling is “good” or whatever you wanted to say. But it is a retention method and not just a QoL feature. There are articles explaining this and some websites have expressly disabled it because it leads to problems for people who are vulnerable.
That’s putting it a bit strongly. But it does induce people to spend money. Personally I don’t spend extra money on games. I can go to Vegas if I want to gamble for money.
It started in “free” mobile trash and is now in $70 single-player games. This shit costs almost nothing to add. The backlash doesn’t outweigh the extra money squeezed out. This is the dominant strategy. It is half the industry’s revenue. What else needs to happen, to tell you everything else is in trouble?
‘Just don’t buy it!’ I’m not, and yet: it keeps getting worse. It’s half the industry by revenue. And growing.
‘You just don’t like it!’ It monetizes human misery… inside entertainment. It makes gaming objectively worse.
‘Don’t legislate content!’ This is about the bus-i-ness mod-el. Sell whatever sex and violence you want. Just sell it.
‘There’s no exploitation here!’ Games make you value arbitrary worthless goals. That’s what makes them games.
One genius argued ‘other studios make several games over the decade these wallet-siphons have been dragged out, so they’d have to cost hundreds of dollars on release!’ Or. And this is just wild speculation about the cutting edge of computer science. Or they could make several games? Over time? And sell them for normal prices, less than a decade apart?
These people act like the just-sell-games model is unproven and hypothetical, in the same breath they insist it’s unaffected by this alternative of tricking people into tolerating endless fees. They’re not arguing. They’re just shuffling cards.
I agree fully. Its disgusting. People literally drinking the cool aid. Can I ask you something weird? I feel like making a counterweight (like political movements, eg the fedipact) would actually help.
Like a movement with a name and a written agenda so we dont have to repeat ourselves all the time. The idea is that we identify games with exploitative mechanics, dont buy them and call out the makers.
Its incredibly easy to put a link in a comment under a post hyping such a game to counter it. The more we push this, the more people will follow. We could then start sending open letters (per email) to game studios where people sign this.
We might he able to change this shit. Would you like to help? I‘d draft up something and we can make posts to gather an initial group of people.
Those are just ideas but it works wonders in other topics so why not try? Feel free to dm me if you want to discuss this.
Just because you only know three games, it doesn’t mean the rest of us do too. Slay The Spire, and Darkest Dungeon, are a couple of really well known and community loved indie games. Both excellent examples of what can be done with limited resources
How does this contradict what they said though? Just because some niche community knows these games, it doesn’t make them platform-selling games. Valve had HL2 with episodes, Portal, TF2, CS, and Dota 2.
These are enormous classics, made by small studio is not the same as unknown game. Sold much more than many triple a games, this is a very dry weak take
What a fascinating conspiracy theory. Interesting that you specify ngo, government agency, and government projects. Also interesting that you call it “woke/gender/diversity”. If you don’t mind me asking, where did you hear of this concept originally?
According to Danish law they are risking 6 months of jail time (or 6 years under “particularly aggravating circumstances” but I don’t think that’s relevant), so not just money. The destroyed trophy, even though they weren’t directly aiming for it, a good lawyer might go after them on grounds of vandalism which is up to 1 year and 6 months under normal circumstances (disclaimer: I havent’t seen the video).
So far I don’t think there’s much precedence on it so it is hard to predict the outcome. Usually you wouldn’t get the highest punishment for a first offence, so if it is jail time I’d be surprised if it’s more than a month. But a jail punishment will haunt your criminal record for 5 years while a fine will stay with you for 2 years, which is actually the the worst part if you have anything but a low-level job in Denmark.
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