The only way these “play to earn” games can work is as a pyramid scheme. Everybody wants more money out of the pot than they’re putting in, and the company sure as hell isn’t going to run at a loss. Many of them seem to only deal with currency through their own exchange (for fiat currency directly) or through markets backed by coins that are also backed by fiat currency, like bitcoin, for exactly the reasons that you laid out. Can’t make money if everybody is buying your funny money with other funny money that lost 99% of its value 3 months after it appeared.
The only other way somebody could make this work is if the players are the product, but at that point, why wouldn’t you just sell ad space on a website.
I think the first stat in the graph is the most important one and really speaks to the reason for the last one. I said this is another post about this article, but video games have become their own kind of third space. Going out with friends has become so expensive, whether you’re going to a movie or something else, and in a lot of places you can’t go to hang out without having to spend money anyways, so video games have become a replacement way to hang out with friends. And that’s before you start talking about stuff like friends who moved across the country for work or something.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.