How could you learn anything about what people think of microtransactions from the success of a game that doesn’t have them? If a beloved franchise added a sequel with microtransactions in it and that sequel tanked, then maybe you’d have a case. From the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 the most you could conclude is “people will still buy a game that doesn’t have microtransactions,” which is not particularly revelatory.
A bunch of AAA games that heavily feature microtransactions are smash hits and made millions of dollars. Sure, people complain about it, but they also purchase tons of them (may not be the same people, mind you). I’m pretty sure we can conclude that not all people hate microtransactions. Hell, publishers will look at Baldur’s Gate 3 and probably go “man, this game is good but if they put some paid cosmetics in there they could have made even more money.”
All 100% correct unfortunately. These companies put in micro transactions because they make a boatload of money off of them. End of story. Til that changes, they will continue to shoehorn them into games to sustain the unsustainable infinite growth/profit model. Until pissing us off costs them more than they gain from it, it ain’t gonna change.
Then fuck it. All the people who want microtransactions, or don’t care about the quality of the medium enough to stop engaging with shitty practices, can have them. There are plenty of developers making games that care enough about the things they make that I’ll be happy to buy from. We’ve reached a point where the big studios will spend three years and a quarter of a billion dollars putting out 7/10 games that look great in trailers and don’t function on PC that exist alongside solo devs who make the games that look at home on PS1 and offer a better experience than anything Blizzard has made in the last decade. Even if my wallet’s vote doesn’t matter to the big guys, it doesn’t have to as long as it’s enough to support people whose passion isn’t exploited to make a just barely par product.
Don’t get hyped, don’t preorder, don’t buy games until they’re fixed. You can’t change the industry but you don’t have to support it.
I don’t mind supporting countries that actually need it but even if the IDF was completely ethical, and they’re not, they still wouldn’t need a single bullet of aid.
"I want to make a movie so painfully obvious in its satire that everyone who understands it lives in perpetual psychological torment inflicted on them by all the people who don’t.”
Wellcome to the post-internet era, where u can no longer tell if that obviously idiotic argument was written by a bot, a troll, your average right-winger or a twitter justice warrior.
Poe’s law was a concern even before its inception by known bigot and casual science fiction writer Edgar Allen Poe. Satire is a corpse animated in allegory to any cause the reader sees fit.
It’s not the dev’s fault, they make what they’re told to make. But the President of media enshittifier MAXHBODISCOVERYDUOPOLY has stated that is what they will continue to force feed us in lieu of content we purchase to then enjoy full stop.
Yeah, and he had the gall to say that after Suicide Squad flopped. Guy legitimately looked at suicide squad and Hogwarts Legacy, and decided that more games like suicide squad should be their focus.
Video games aren’t a duopoly. There’s lots of great indie games coming out. I just started playing The Talos Principle 2, which came out this year. Helldivers is from what I hear a smashing success, and Hades 2 is coming out soon!
Apparently not enough of one if he is saying shit like this out loud. I would assume the GTA6 Online efforts will attempt to make their “+” more attractive.
Large scale long range highly clandestine professional military operation -> Headline: Guy With Children’s Toy (and tons of military grade explosive) Just Defeated Russia!
I mean, the game is really on the nose with its parodic elements, how could they possibly not see that? Just talk to the supply officer ladies in the back part of the ship.
They are full of gems like “the bot society is wholly built on war. If they ever won they wouldnt know what to do“ (paraphrased), or the ministry of truth which ensures all citizens are properly indoctrinated informed, or the ministry of economy which makes sure resources flow to the “most deserving”.
Because actual fascists are hearing shit they agree with. Yes, it’s over the top, but they’re also too stupid to understand satire. If they had the critical thinking skills to realize they were being made fun of, they wouldn’t be fascist in the first place. A fun little catch 22.
Because everyone here is just reacting to the terrible Forbes headline because that’s all people do. Here’s the actual content that you can pick apart, instead of picking apart the headline that some Forbes editor wrote.
he thinks GTA is one of the best values on the market. Here’s what he said:
“In terms of our pricing for any entertainment property, basically the algorithm is the value of the expected entertainment usage, which is to say the per hour value times the number of expected hours plus the terminal value that’s perceived by the customer in ownership, if the title is owned rather than rented or subscribed to.”
So he was just saying that gta is good value for money given their metrics
He can still go fuck himself. I was promised single player DLC in GTA 5 and instead they put their entire focus on GTA online which I’m sure will continue with 6. I’ll probably pirate it because, as much as I hate to admit it I’m still a fan, but I’m not giving them another cent.
I agree with the general sentiment of boo for not making dlc. but if your proposition is “i’m going to pirate your next game” then you’re probably just pushing them further into a direction you don’t want them to go.
If you think that companies look at social media more than their own sales metrics, then Ive probably already sold you a bridge and have a loyalty program for you to sign up for, to get 15% off your next purchase
I can deflect the doxxing slightly by saying it’s more than one. The first rhymes with Wicrosoft and the other is too small and would definitely doxx me. However I have friends all over the industry, and can confirm identical reactions from places with names similar to Acti… mizion, Sledge…wammer Ztudios, 434… endustries, Pioware… Grames?
That really only could be considered even remotely plausible if everyone played online, but most people quickly discovered it was a trash money grab. Otherwise it’s no better value than any other story driven single player game.
gta games are typically pretty competitive with everyone else in terms of value for money on the base game. it’s been a while since there has been a new GTA game, and the other game they have produced - red dead redemption - was incredible value for money given the content and length.
we can complain about a lot, I’ll be the first to say their online is a money sucking low effort playground. But the quality of their single-player experiences is at worst “very very competitive”.
Ah but see, that may only be due to GTA V actually having the development time and releasing as a single player game because Online wasn’t near being ready when the game launched. Now that Online is out and that’s where their focus has been, we will most likely see the base single player game quality suffer dramatically. Look at games like Call of Duty. They used to have phenomenal single player experiences, and now you’re lucky if you get something worth playing at all.
So I would point at rdr2. That came out long after gta v online made mountains of money. Large single-player experience. Online existed, didn’t detract.
Cool, so could the makers of the software they use to make these games do the same to them? They should pay them all for the per hour value times the expected hours of development plus the terminal value perceived by expected income from sales! Yes, good business model. Maximize them profits!!!
Yeah, and I bet they’re affordable. What Strauss is proposing is a massive increase in initial purchase price for those that aren’t paying subscriptions. $70 is borderline affordable for a lot of people as is and that will now be a higher entry price. I’m not in that boat, personally, but I can see how it would be detrimental to the gaming industry as a whole.
Then again, there is the flip side where people are now forced to choose the games they can afford that year even more carefully (1-2 vs 6-7 or more as an example) and if a game fails expectations and someone misses out on something else, then maybe it’ll start putting some shitty developers out of business.
They aren’t proposing increasing the price. Did you read the article or my initial comment about how people just read the bad headline and argue against it at all?
Of course I read the article. It specifically says, “… value of the expected entertainment usage, which is to say the per hour value times the number of expected hours plus the terminal value that’s perceived by the customer in ownership, if the title is owned rather than rented or subscribed to…”
I’m beginning to wonder if you read the article. They want to charge off of one value and add it to an initial base value. If you think this idea has nothing to do with increasing profits then I have a bridge in the Sahara to sell you.
Nothing in that is about raising the price, the whole thing is about him showing off what great value the series is by their metrics.
Here’s where you say “of course it is! I’ve imagined that this leads to the next thing which is raised prices”. Cool, go make these comments on the thread about them raising prices, or proposing raising prices. That isn’t what is happening here.
That may be true for many, but I’m willing to bet most of those “hours” they count are for GTA Online. Have they ever mentioned what percentage of players play Online versus all sales? Because that is something many of us have never and will never touch so it isn’t included at all in my value consideration other than a negative for the company to focus on INSTEAD of additional single player content.
If they want to turn GTA into an always online Game as a Service, that is their prerogative, but don’t try and hide it stuffed alongside a single player game they’ll ignore after release, and don’t be surprised when some people stop buying and playing when the only option is online multiplayer.
Most of them still haven’t figured it out as far as I can tell.
Keep in mind, these are the same people who watched the Colbert Report unironically for years. I genuinely believe that there is a certain portion of the population which lacks the cognitive tools to process satire.
It’s Forbes. I’m pretty sure this article’s audience are boomers of the “I’m not a computer person” variety, who are only reading it thanks to the Apple ecosystem and younger family members.
With permission from the family. Not the owner of the voice, who can’t speak for themselves anymore, obviously.
Whilst I think most people feel like this is the one exceptional case where we will be okay with this, I feel like every exec is seeing it, and the community reaction to it, and saying, “So it is possible”.
And we get into why everyone is striking. We’re all okay for normal use cases like this, but execs are like “we’ll pay you for 3 hours of work, then build a model and then do 180 hours of voice from that model. And you’ll say thank you for the opportunity”
I dunno, once you’re dead nothing else really matters anymore, does it? You’re not a person anymore, so why would your opinion matter? If my family can use my legacy to make money for themselves, I would just be happy knowing they’d be a bit better off once I’m gone. And if they choose to protect the right to use my voice/likeness after I’m gone, I’d prefer that they do so because of their own personal beliefs, not because they believe they have to do so for my sake.
I feel like that answer is for you and you alone, and not for actors in general. Personally I don't really see why I would be worried about this after I die (after all, I'm dead ), and if it helps my family a bit then it'd probably just make me rest easier if anything.
Not until Helldivers 2 dies too. I was tricked into thinking it was healing, and then that game exploded.
EDIT: The truth hurts, but that’s still a live service game that’s actively working against the interests of consumers and preservationists. The more money and playtime people give it, the worse this situation gets.
I still don’t think the enemy is “all live service games” exactly. A lot of us have a style of gameplay we enjoy that makes us go “That was fun! I want some more of it.”
Just that Rocksteady made singleplayer games well, and their poor shift just informs us that not all games need to be live service, especially when the gameplay shifts to something no one likes in order to achieve Number Go Up (similar situation with Gotham Knights)
Number can go up without being tied to a server you don’t and can’t control. Those games still get made, from Titan Quest to Borderlands. Nothing about the gameplay loop of Helldivers offends me; the totally unnecessary forced obsolescence does. The thing that makes it a live service game is the thing that makes it incompatible with surviving for more than a few years without an Act of God, like Knockout City. I also hate that people have been trained into differentiating “single player” and “live service”, as though multiplayer must inherently be this way when it doesn’t have to be. A live service game is just an inferior version of a game they could have made that would survive offline, because it’s tied to their servers. Do you think Sony could have mandated a PSN account after the point of sale if it was available DRM-free and allowed you to run your own servers?
There is some hope for these games. For example Shadow of War works perfectly fine now and doesn’t have any of it’s “battle pass” stuff in it anymore. It can happen.
Rarely.
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