Any free to play game operates on the same principles that are as “horrible” as EA or Ubisoft, which honestly feels like a dated point of reference when your phrasing was “feels like you have to pay to have a good time”. First, it’s highly subjective. I came away from my time with Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey feeling like I had a bad time because I didn’t buy their XP boosters, but fans of the game said they never bought one and had a great time, perhaps because they had more fun with the game’s side activities than I did, so they got more XP from content that I was more than happy to skip. I haven’t bought sports games in a long time, but if I still did, I wouldn’t touch Ultimate Team with a ten foot pole; not just because of the business model, but because the fantasy to me would be playing with the real teams as they actually exist; and the parts that I would want to engage with don’t ask any more spending of me. And for as much as you associate predatory monetization with those companies, they also put out the likes of Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, and work with partners on Split Fiction and The Rogue Prince of Persia, which use very normal and ethical monetization strategies.
For as much as mobile games often can be a different market, plenty of times they’re not. Thatgamecompany may be known for Journey in our circles, but their big hit is Sky: Children of Light, which started on mobile and came to platforms you and I are more likely to play games on. Uma Musume is blowing up regardless of platform, but it’s a gacha that’s typically found on mobile, and Cygames expanded from their mobile market to putting out console and PC GranBlue games. Mihoyo’s games are in both places and found success using gacha. My point in all of this being these companies, all self-published successes, operate in both spaces, because building a game in either place requires much the same skillset, and they’ve found an audience in both, often with the same exact games.
The last thing I’ll say about this being developer vs. publisher is that if you’re successful enough as the former, you often become the latter, like with Cygames or Epic. These kinds of monetization methods are very feast or famine, so you’ll get survivorship bias of some games getting so big that they’re a publisher now, like Riot, for instance, or they get bought by a bigger fish like Microsoft.
Developers are also incentivized by profit when they’re entitled to keep it rather than a publisher, and this is the case regardless of being AAA or not.
But this game is on Steam, and $80 is a price point companies are flirting with regardless of their ownership of the storefront, like Grand Theft Auto, for instance.
Sorry, I’m not following the A-to-B on your comment in relation to this topic. Sony isn’t charging $80 for games, and even $70 games regardless of consoles aren’t doing so hot. Microsoft hasn’t done console exclusives for a decade.
I think they only expect a subset of their consumers to get the DLC; most people don’t care if they got the full experience. If you’re playing with your friends, they’ve got the option to play with you DLC-less in every case I can think of. In something like a fighting game, they’ve just got a character that you don’t, or in something like Civilization, if they know they’re playing with you, they host the version of the game that doesn’t include the DLC you don’t have. The entry price exists because they know nowhere near everyone will go for their most expensive edition.
Sure, I’ve bought tons of games that are on Game Pass, because I like keeping the game when I’m done, and not having to rush to finish it before the subscription renews.
We were already seeing this at $70: the market is largely unwilling to support games getting any more expensive right now. And even though we had $90 SNES games back in the mid-90s, without adjusting for inflation, I think we can also say quite definitively that the market expanded exponentially as prices got lower, relative to inflation and in absolute terms, in subsequent years. Increasing prices further is pricing out those people. Plus, we’ve got tons of low-cost options that can often be higher quality than the games charging $70+.
I recall them saying that their tech stack in the first game couldn’t handle the influx of players that they got at their peak, and that’s what led them to start with a rewrite.
I don’t like hitstun decay for a few reasons. For one, it’s not easily observable. If you’ve got a combo limit meter (like Skullgirls, Killer Instinct, and the upcoming Invincible Vs), you can see how much the move you just used has gotten you closer to the limits of the combo. It’s not intuitive for a player to track how close they are to the combo dropping with hitstun decay. So because of this, you’re basically just memorizing combos. If you land a hit with a move, or in a situation, that you haven’t practiced, you have no idea how to guarantee that you can finish the combo, which means that if you’re improvising, you’re just quickly routing your combo into a knockdown. As a player, I hate memorization, and as a spectator, I hate watching a game that has just a few bread and butter combos and quick routes to knockdowns when they don’t know what to do. I do like one game with hitstun decay, Guilty Gear XX Accent Core +R, which at least allows you to do “tech traps”, where I’m expecting my opponent to air tech, and if they do, I get a new combo for free, so there’s a mind game there that most games with hitstun decay, in my experience, don’t have.
Hitstun decay is, by and large, the most prevalent form of infinite combo prevention in games with big combos, but it’s the one I dislike most. Guilty Gear Strive, Mortal Kombat, and Tekken all use juggle decay, or gravity decay, where the opponent just falls harder and harder until eventually they hit the floor, and you can’t combo them anymore. This is, of course, much easier for everyone to observe. My favorite method though is just using a meter to limit combos, because it allows for something much closer to freeform jazz. Every combo in Killer Instinct is different, because if you use the same combo every time, the opponent can break it. In Skullgirls, you’re usually unable to do enough damage in a single combo with its limits, so instead you’re looking to tactically drop your combo and sneak in a new one, which is called a reset.
I love Strive and tag fighters, so this should be way up my alley, but I’m concerned about a couple of things. First and foremost, it’s Sony published, which doesn’t give me a lot of confidence that the online is going to work on Proton when it has to go through PSN. Second, there was a moment in the gameplay trailer that showed air teching, and that usually means hitstun decay, which is a mechanic I’m not a fan of. But at least if this one doesn’t work out for me, Invincible Vs will also be showing at Evo.