What do you mean? It’s already profitable for them. I’m far more concerned with Nintendo’s online subscription than Microsoft’s. Nintendo’s already crossed the line, and Microsoft still stands to make more money by offering games for sale on Steam than to make them only available via a subscription that isn’t doing well with regards to acquiring more customers.
I was being facetious. If your development timeline is 7 years, you have no idea how it’s going to turn out at the end, but they all set out to make a good product, especially when it takes that much time and money to make. Guardians of the Galaxy was supposedly a very good game that bombed horribly, for instance. There’s a lot of risk when your game is that expensive to make, because there are only so many customers out there, and they’re already playing other big expensive games. Even Sony is finding that their marquis titles aren’t bringing in as many customers as they expected anymore, so they can’t keep spending more on games and expect them to be profitable.
True. There would also be even more layoffs in this industry if they threw out years of work and hundreds of millions of dollars at the finish line because they decided not to release a game that didn’t turn out to be as good as they’d hoped.
You can only throw away hundreds of millions of dollars on Avengers and Suicide Squad so many times before they decide to come up with something people are willing to pay for.
I take issue with the requirement being “when it’s no longer supported” for similar reasons. I can foresee an argument where a company advocates for some scenario where they’re going out of business and can’t do it, and some 75-year-old judge who hasn’t played a video game since Tetris lets it slide. Still, this is the shot we have, and we need to take it.
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.