They paid more for it than they saw back in sales or expected new customers. What they’ve said publicly is that they won’t be using this strategy anymore, because it isn’t working. They claim free game giveaways are working, but I have my doubts as to how valuable those user acquisitions are.
The exclusivity deals appear to have been good for no one involved: Epic, Square Enix, Sony, or customers, so I think we’ve seen the last of them outside of things Epic publishes themselves.
We weren’t per se. Only that a predominantly multiplayer game is a harder sell when the subscription is damn near mandatory, which is why there are so few multiplayer-only games on consoles that cost money up front anymore, and free to play games get an exception to the subscription service on PlayStation and Xbox.
I don’t think it’s singling it out to say that the just-about-required subscription makes it less appealing to purchase, whereas most multiplayer games have the PC version as an option.
Because I’d say the addiction is the issue. The biggest issue with gambling is the addiction. If you’re not addicted, you’re not spending time or money beyond your means. So I’d rather not broaden it to how much money it sucks out of you when the addiction is the issue. It all relies on the same principles that we know to be worth legal regulation when it’s acknowledged as gambling. I don’t know anyone who got addicted to Netflix, but they’ll “binge” shows because we no longer live in the era where we can only watch shows according to a broadcast schedule; plus sometimes, you just want some background noise while you’re doing something else, including a show you’ve seen a million times.
The second game even repurposed large parts of the not-particularly-impressive campaign of the first game. They weren’t going to fool me again by making me buy the same game a third time.
I think keeping you addicted so as to continue to paying a monthly subscription is bad on its own, and I don’t think it needs to be qualified by how much you spend overall if they’re still knowingly capitalizing on that addiction in an unregulated environment. But also, while I don’t know the answer to your question for a fact, I would imagine that they do have ways to spend unlimited money in that game if you’re so inclined.
You could throw most of this same argument back at gachas. They’re just gambling because the world sucks, or something…
No, my understanding is that the reason people get addicted to this stuff is that we evolved to gather finite resources when they’re available, even if it’s rare, so we’re prey to systems like this that can control that rarity. WoW absolutely did this, just without putting a price on each interaction.
The core of lots of games revolve around random chance, and plenty of those exhibit no addictive behavior whatsoever. I’d certainly like to hear a research psychologist’s take on it though.
Without being a gacha game, World of WarCraft is guilty of a lot of the same stuff. You probably know people who flunked out of college due to the addiction, or have heard of parents who neglected their child over that game. It preys on a lot of the same impulses that Diablo and Diablo II seemed to have found by accident, before they were monetized by subscription fees and then microtransactions. And you can see a lot of the same in games like Destiny.