Surprised to only see this mentioned a couple of times in here. This and the sequel are probably the two games I would recommend everyone play, gamers and non-gamers alike. They’re just that good and easy to get into from a controls perspective.
The one and only point that I disagree with you on is your take on mtx. They may not affect you, but everything about them is designed to be psychologically exploitative, and the wealthy whale is largely a myth. The vast majority of money from mtx is made from people with addiction issues and other mental health issues or atypical neurology, like people with depression or ADHD.
Microsoft bought up all those studios and didn’t support them, but that’s business as usual for Microsoft, and the money that they’ll make from mtx like this will more than make up for it. I recently watched a former Blizzard dev who was talking about how a single $15 mount for WoW made more money than StarCraft 2 did.
The big issue I see is that most people largely don’t know about anything beyond the big AAA releases, and as we’ve already established, that’s an exploitative wasteland nowadays. There’s plenty of demand for good games and there always will be, but while the indie scene is the best that’s it’s ever been, the majority of indie companies go under after their first game. It’s still hard out there for them, too. There’s just enough of them popping up and putting out truly great games that they can actually compete with the AAA space.
That shit is never going away, and for one simple reason: it’s incredibly profitable. By converting real money into some nebulous fun bucks that doesn’t directly correlate in value, they obfuscate how much money you’re actually spending and make it more likely that you’ll spend more than you intend to. The same reason that casinos have no windows and pump extra oxygen into the air so you feel less tired, all so you don’t realize how long you’ve been in there.
Except that shit is designed by literal psychologists to prey upon people with poor fiscal responsibility, like people with ADHD, depression, addiction issues, and kids.
It’s like blaming people for smoking cigarettes after they got addicted from secondhand smoking.
Except it’s even worse than that. Because these companies hired psychologists to tell them exactly how to tweak the levers in people’s brains to get them to pay.
So you have the stupid people, but also the people whose brains are naturally wired to be played like a fiddle by these companies, and then on top of that, you have the new generation of gamers who have simply never known a world where you didn’t pay for skins.
Reminder that the hours played rule is only a limit for the automated refund system. You can request a refund for a game at any time for any reason. It just has to be manually reviewed and deemed justified by a person.
And that second option already happened with this exact game when people expressed concern over the DRM, which is designed like a rootkit, giving it essentially full control/access to your system while it’s running.
Or, Arrowhead didn’t know that only certain regions of the world can make PSN accounts and Steam isn’t directly involved in the creation of any individual store page unless they have reason to be - like limiting the regions Helldivers 2 is sold in after the fact.
You and I both have no way of knowing whether or not Arrowhead knew that they were selling their game in regions where people wouldn’t be able to play it, but I could totally see it being the case where Sony didn’t tell them and it just never occurred to them that that was a possibility because it’s not an issue where the company is located. The PSN account requirement was in the game and listed on the store page from day one; it was only temporarily made optional due to how overloaded the servers were at launch. Arrowhead themselves said they expected an active userbase of around 10k people.
And if Steam is anything like Etsy, then the most involvement they have with setting up any individual store page is their automated systems like the profanity filter. I run a business on Etsy and they have no direct involvement with any of my store besides providing the hosting platform and systems to create the storefront and listings (as well as backend systems like tracking pageviews and such). The only time that they’d get involved personally would be if something like this happened.
Regardless of where the blame lies, I think Arrowhead are the only ones who will suffer unless Sony relents on the PSN account requirement. The money for refunds isn’t gonna come out of Valve’s pockets, and I can’t imagine Sony forking over the cash now that they’ve taken their cut.
The thing is that it was enforced right at the beginning. There was a period where you couldn’t play without a PSN account, before they made it optional while Sony rolled out more infrastructure to handle the player numbers.
It’s an issue now because it wasn’t stated clearly enough and loudly enough that not having a PSN account was only temporary, and I think Arrowhead screwed up because they didn’t know that PSN accounts aren’t available everywhere and so were selling the game in places that couldn’t play it unknowingly.
Steam is usually pretty good about refunds and has apparently already pulled the game from the store in places where you can’t make a PSN account, so I imagine they’re planning to refund the game. This looks like the kind of thing that could be class-action lawsuit worthy.
Except that people didn’t realize that the account was mandatory until this announcement because they didn’t read the store page nor the message you get the first time you launch the game, and Steam probably doesn’t tell devs why a game was refunded.
The PSN account was mandatory when you first logged in on day one, but was made optional later that day due to server load while Sony rolled out extra infrastructure. Why would they knowingly sell a game in 20 countries that would just refund it 10 minutes after first launching it?
I don’t disagree there, I was talking about Arrowhead specifically. I’ve now seen people saying that Sony is the one in charge of the Steam store page, and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if Sony had done it knowingly.
Since posting, I’ve learned some extra context that may or may not be true but would be very relevant here. Supposedly, Sony are the ones in charge of the actual store page. Which would mean that it was their decision to have it listed in countries where you can’t make PSN accounts.
Meaning that there are two mistakes here: Sony knowingly listing it, and Arrowhead not making it clear that the optional account linking was temporary. The second of which the CEO of Arrowhead has already taken the blame for on Twitter.
To most of us, this is probably just a summary of events over the past year or so. But, it’s good to know that this sort of news is reaching non-gaming channels.
The biggest portion of people buying this stuff aren’t “gamers” in the way that it’s often used around these circles. It’s the millions of people who buy coins for their Bejeweled clone of choice and have never owned a console in their life. And there’s so many new kids entering gaming all the time who have never known a better world. I remember a Twitch streamer talking about how heartbreaking it was when AC6 came out and gave you the full color wheel plus multiple channels to customize your mech, and their chat was full of kids shocked that you didn’t have to buy skins or color packs. That’s how it used to be. You’d unlock skins by playing the game, not buying them in the store, but that hasn’t been the case in decades now.
And the often touted story of the whale with more money than sense is a myth. Do they exist? Sure. But the vast majority of money coming from mtx from gamers is from people who are psychologically vulnerable to addiction/gambling and people with a poor ability to comprehend finances like kids. These companies have hired psychologists to tell them how to best extract money from your wallet by probing your brain in just the right way. From lootboxes to battle passes and seasonal content to daily quests and washing money through funny money currencies, it’s all been designed to prey upon people with addiction issues, ADHD, training young kids into gambling addicts, etc. It’s the Lotto tickets and pumping extra oxygen into the air of casinos and making sure there’s no natural light in there so you don’t realize how long you’ve been playing slots of the gaming world. Look at WoW, with its daily quests. They train players using Skinner Box techniques to continue logging into the game and paying the monthly subscription long after they’ve stopped enjoying it because it’s become a habit and they are afraid of falling behind.
Voting with your wallet isn’t going to fix it. You’ll never get your average Facebook mom to care enough not to buy Farmville tokens or whatever, and these companies will never stop abusing psychology on their own. Only industry regulation will stop this.
What’s the saying? Something like, “There’s plenty of fools in the game, and there’s a new one born every minute.”
I feel like the casual mobile gaming crowd falls into the same category. Regardless of how old they are, spending money on mtx is normal because they never knew a world where you just bought a game rather than downloading one onto your phone and putting up with both ads and mtx.
It’s like how words like “unalive” have entered common usage - people have gotten so used to obeying what advertisers want on the internet that it’s started dictating daily life, especially for younger people.
The unregulated gambling aspect designed to exploit human psychology to target vulnerable people to spend money that they probably can’t afford to spend is also a huge issue, but that at least would be easy enough to regulate, if politicians cared enough to do something about it.
Don’t forget that they were hired by companies looking to make a profit off of exploiting the psychology of people and that the blame also lies with those who hired them for those jobs.
The same companies who have fought tooth and nail to prevent regulation to protect those exploited by these practices when politicians have actually cared enough to try to do something about it.
You don’t ever have to deal with the bugs if you don’t want to. There’s an entire second war going on with the Automatons, and the devs have clearly left themselves room for at least 2 more factions. I guess the first game had another faction of aliens that isn’t in the game yet.
But I get it if the bugs are enough to put you off getting it, I had to essentially solo part of Elden Ring in co-op for a buddy because the hands in that game trigger his arachnophobia.
Yes, though the devs have stated that replacing it is something that they’re considering as there’s still been issues with cheaters and I think they said 2 out of every 150 players were having gameplay problems directly related to the anticheat. I don’t expect to see kernel level anticheat go away completely, but I hope that they’ll at least replace it with something less nasty like Easy Anti-Cheat.
Except the whale narrative is largely a false narrative created by the game industry to avoid saying that the money comes from kids and gambling addicts.
Those people with more money than sense do exist and they make up a portion of the mtx money, but the vast majority is from people who probably can’t afford to make purchases like that (but do anyways because their brain can’t say no).
The industry has been honing these skinner box techniques for decades now - it’s what they used to get people to pay a monthly subscription for an mmo they only play when they log in to do their dailies.
It’s not about literally proving that piracy is morally correct - it’s about getting your average person to rethink their gut reaction to the idea of piracy. It’s the same as pointing out how it’s estimated that more than 50% of all games are now lost forever because the companies who made them never bothered to keep the source code. Or how many early BBC recordings only exist because of people who taped them at home and sent copies to them after a public request campaign because the BBC reused the tape reels for newer programming over the years.
The more people who reconsider their first opinion of piracy as a bad thing, the more people who support it and actively participate in that kind of preservation there will be.
Even the first Dark Souls had game ticks tied to the FPS because consoles had been standardized to 30 FPS for decades.
On the PC port, it was locked to 30 FPS, but a super popular mod unlocked the FPS, and at 60 FPS DoT effects ticked twice as fast, and at even higher FPS could kill you before you had time to react.
The idea of the whale is a false narrative created by the companies who run these scams to justify their unethical business practices.
The vast majority of people who make up that demographic are people who really can’t afford to spend money like that, but do because the companies hired psychologists to tell them exactly how to exploit people’s brain chemistry to extract money from them. This mostly includes people who are biologically wired for poor impulse control and an inability to perceive how much money they’re actually spending. People like: gambling addicts, people with adhd or mental health issues, and children.
There are people with more money than sense buying this stuff, but for the most part, it’s gambling addicts and kids emptying their parents’ bank accounts for that dopamine fix.
Just another story they’ve spun to hide how scummy they truly are.
No, they’re mad that any singleplayer content planned for GTA 5 (and RDR2) in the past decade was abandoned for the money printing machine that is GTA Online. There’s issues to be had with premium currencies (more specifically the stuff that usually goes along with them like lootboxes), but that’s not just a GTA thing.
Also, just because other people created content for a game through mods doesn’t mean we should give the company that made the game credit. That’s like praising a Bethesda game based on a total overhaul mod somebody made.
I feel like a nutjob in that I just…don’t really care about GTA VI. The graphics look great, I’m sure the world will be awesome, but…after what Rockstar did to GTA V’s singleplayer and RDR2 as a whole (abandoning both in favor of printing money through Shark Cards), plus the whole “Rockstar Magic” working conditions thing from awhile ago (and I even forgot about the whole GTA V PC issue), I’m just not really excited for this.
Maybe I’m just disillusioned, but I was much more excited when the Armored Core 6 teaser dropped - a series I had never even played before.
For me it’s not about the singleplayer lasting forever, it’s about it being completely abandoned. I agree with the idea of them making a great singleplayer story and using the online to fund their next game, but it used to be that you would see other stories told in those worlds with dlc like the Ballad of Gay Tony or even the wacky fun of RDR’s Undead Nightmare. Today, that kind of stuff is relegated to online mission packs and seasonal events. They didn’t even bother to do simple stuff like put new guns introduced in the multiplayer of GTA V and RDR2 into the singleplayer. If you have no interest in the online component, you have nothing more to do with the game until they release the next one in another decade.
And this isn’t to say that I’m over here being angry about GTA Online. I have my issues with Shark Cards and I had my complaints over how RDR2 Online was handled, but it’s been many years since I cared about that and my Shark Card gripes are about the predatory nature of how mtx are used by the industry at large, not with Rockstar in particular.
I’m mostly just feeling like I missed something. I think it looks like it’s making a big step forward for graphics in games (hair physics has always been incredibly difficult to get right, for example, and the hair in this trailer looks really good) and nails a perfect vibe for a Miami based city, and I’m sure the story will be fantastic. I never finished GTA V’s story, but RDR 1 and 2 are some of my favorite game stories of all time. But I saw the trailer and went “This looks like another Rockstar game, neat” while the trailer was getting 7 million views an hour for at least the first 5 hours after its release. I just don’t understand why this has record-breaking hype surrounding it. Maybe it’s because I didn’t get pulled into GTA V’s story and got turned off of GTA Online almost immediately, but this is falling squarely into “I’ll pick it up eventually I imagine” territory, not day 1 purchase hype.
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