It’s the “complaining when they end” thing that I’m interested in, for sure. Especially if a government listens, which he’s aiming to make happen here.
I don’t see how the amount of “completeness” can even be measured. Is it really so much worse that you can buy extra fighters for the Street Fighter 6 that you already own rather than buying Super, Turbo, and then Super Turbo at full price every time? Or that you can choose to buy just the stuff you want for Cities: Skylines for half the price instead of paying twice as much to get stuff that don’t care about along with it? Plus, expansions like Phantom Liberty and Shadow of the Erdtree are bigger than most entire video games from the 90s.
If memory serves, Valve got the idea for the loot boxes from Korean free to play games. As far as I know though, they did invent the battle pass with Dota 2.
That’s commonly said but ignores other economic factors such as income, unspent money, and cost-of-living.
Inflation is derived by indexing all of those things. Some things are far more expensive or far cheaper relative to each other, but we approximate the buying power of a dollar by looking at all of it.
Cosmetic DLC feels like it’s for chumps too, but it’s lucrative. The best example is going to be Simon’s Quest, without a doubt. The strategy guide was in an issue of Nintendo Power. I’m sure they were also happy to let social pressures on the playground either sell the strategy guides or the game just by word of mouth as kids discussed how to progress in the game. A Link to the Past is full of this stuff too. The game grinds to a halt at several points until you happen to find a macguffin that the game doesn’t even tell you that you need. Without the strategy guide, you could end up finding those things by spending tons of hours exploring every corner of the map, but by today’s standards, we’d call that padding.
This is selection bias. You remember Metal Gear Solid, but do you remember Iron & Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft? Do you remember Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero? Bubsy 3D? The million-and-one licensed games that were churned out like baseball cards back then?
and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money
If we’re going to say that a full-price game today costs $70, Metal Gear Solid would have cost the equivalent of $95. Not only that, but that was very much the Blockbuster and strategy guide era. Games would often have one of their best levels up front so that you can see what makes the game good, but then level 2 or 3 would hit a huge difficulty spike…just enough to make you have to rent the game multiple times or to cave in and buy it when you couldn’t beat it in a weekend. Or you’d have something like Final Fantasy VII, which I just finished for the first time recently, and let me tell you: games that big were designed to sell strategy guides (or hint hotlines) as a revenue stream. There would be some esoteric riddle, or some obscure corner of the map that you need to happen upon in order to progress the game forward. The business model always, at every step of the medium’s history, affects the game design.
“Value” is going to be a very subjective thing, but for better or worse, the equivalent game today is far more packed full of “stuff” to do, even when you discount the ones that get there just by adding grinding. There are things I miss about the old days too, but try to keep it in perspective.
Of those three, the one I bought was Three Kingdoms, and I was certainly not forced to buy more than the base game. Paradox’s DLC strategy is a-okay by me. Neither company puts a gun to my head to buy their DLC. Pretty sure blood is a DLC to get away with a lower age rating.
There is if they’re interested in competing with Steam. Epic made some very competitive offerings for the supply side of things and then provided very little reason for customers to ever shop there, which it turns out is just as, if not more important.
My expectation was that they were spending money that they mostly already had, but I was very excited to see a company picking up the pieces that the biggest publishers left behind. No one was going to make a new Outcast game before this, for instance. Game publishers used to put out dozens of games of all types per year, and now they might put out 5. They hinged it all on debt that they couldn’t afford though, so they’re ruining the chances of us returning to sustainable normalcy instead of what AAA has been doing for a decade.
The investor has a stake in the company, so they share in the successes and take on the risk of failure, but they provide capital to make this purchase from the parent company in the first place.