The Video Game Industry

"Gamers are dumb consumers" probably?

This reminds me of those mobile games that said that if you want to move on to the next level in the game, then you need to pay to get to the next level. They are essentially trying to get as much money out of you as possible, even if it means upsetting lots of players who really wanted to play the games, but they can't because they have to pay so much money for that game.

I thought it was obvious that most top brass saw consumers as nothing more than walking wallets.

Like, there was criticism here on consumers "why are you not willing to give these great game companies 70 bucks" and yeah, I think that self-answers itself.

We just got out Bobby Kotick getting a fat bonus after a layoff.

People are absolutely happy to buy a $70 game that looks good and from a gaming company they trust. Look at Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

And many companies aren't even putting games that are actually functional in the market, anyway.

And that's another issue with the Video Game Industry as of late. Most of the companies have been releasing the games in an unfinished state and I just don't understand why the companies don't just let the developers have more time to work on the games.

It's easy to understand. Companies want to have good quarterly earnings reports to show off to their investors.

If that means rushing a product to market, then rushing a product to market is what they will do.

It doesn't help that the people at the top of these companies are increasingly disconnected from just how hard and time consuming developing a AAA game is. This trickles down to bad management, meaning more delays and other problems.

What there to not understand? It what we are talking about right now, greed.

And gamers are at fault too. Look at how angry some of us get when games get delayed repeatedly. TBF, that's also because we see delays as the proverbial canaries in the coalmine — they're a sign something is terribly wrong with the development.

Ehhh given nintendo and his anti piracy crusade and the response in part because prize?....yeah.

Some issue here, one is that games are getting longer and longer time because they demand more hardwave and demand more content and you have cases of cyberpunk 2077 who very much needed two years(like I have year people love it now but indeed it took two years).

And another...yeah I will blunt, video games have being notorialy complacent about the states of video game for a while and I feel the industry got quite confortable with pushing harder and harder, specially as more greed base model arise like microtransation or just gacha and mobile games

Edited by unknowing on Apr 2nd 2024 at 10:13:46 AM

And it's sad that some video games are willing to include microtransactions, despite how the public feels about that, just to made an extra buck.

What's truly sad is that there are also gamers willing to defend the practice despite it being objectively bad for consumers.

At least with free-to-play games it's understandable. They have to make money somehow.

But a $60~70 game with microtransactions? Fuck that.

All the halfway decent game sites have RSS feeds.

I don't mind cosmetic microtransactions per se; if games want to flog extra skins that don't affect gameplay, it's no skin (ha) off my nose. Of course, the way such things are marketed can be problematic in and of themselves. Lootboxes turn the process into gambling, which can be insanely addictive, and FOMO can prey on people with poor impulse control.

I also draw a line when the transactions affect gameplay, such as being able to buy gear with better stats. There are grey areas: World of Warcraft lets you buy character boosts that skip you to an appropriate level for the current expansion content, but those don't mean you'll be able to do endgame content instantly, so they aren't the worst they could be.

I suppose my standards have lowered a bit over the years, but monetization is something that's unlikely to go away. We can continue to push back on the most predatory types, though.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 3rd 2024 at 8:39:01 AM

A problem with cosmetic micro-transactions is the social aspect, I remember a couple of years ago reading about how kids in school were getting bullied for using the default free skins in Fortnite.

Now whilst I won't say this is entirely epics fault, since they don't explicitly tell kids to go out and bully the other kids who don't/can't buy all the new skins, it is kind of a side-effect of these things existing. Epic promotes the paid skins as being cooler than the free skins in order to sell them, which in turns promotes the idea that the people who use them are cooler than the people who don't.

Although, to be far, this isn't exclusive to Epic or even videogames, this is a problem a lot of children's advertisement has and seems completely unwilling to actually do anything about.

Yes, that's broadly accurate. Epic didn't invent FOMO or peer pressure, but it certainly does take advantage of them.

Before we get too angry at Epic, let us not forget that Valve popularized gambling for cosmetics in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. If anything, it's the ur-villain here.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 3rd 2024 at 9:22:41 AM

I would also argue another problem with them is that they have basically destroyed cosmetics that you unlock by actually playing the game... if they were just in addition that would be one thing, but there has been a general trend to less and less free cosmetics as time has gone on.

....

Also in the modern era there is an issue of all the crossover cosmetics destroying a games theming.... yet another thing we can thank fortnite for, but thats kind of a seprate issue.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of having goofy characters and outfits increasingly replacing the themed characters and outfits due to how frequently they are chosen. That's annoyed me way back with Uncharted 2's online mode, with too many people playing as the skeleton characters.

There's also that the game publisher CEOs are trying to copy the Silicon Valley model of creating a valuable company to sell to venture capital investors. That's their real product and customer base, not the games themselves, nor the gamers. The quality of the games becomes irrelevant, and even the sales figures can be brushed over as long as they're making the "right" sort of game in the eyes of the investors.

On the topic of kids getting bullied for not shelling out money for Fortnite skins:

I recall when Team Fortress 2 went Free-To-To-Play, with Youtube videos and Machinimas dedicated to basically going: ”Look, a F 2 P Player! What a LOSER, what a NOOB, look how he only has the GHASTLY GIBUS HAT!” and just generally acting like they’d ruin the whole game forever.

So, acting superior and mocking others for not shelling out money the way you^note General ”you”. have is hardly a new concept.

Edited by MagmaTeaMerry on Apr 3rd 2024 at 5:12:48 PM

@8307, 8310: Also, gamers often would rather have the unfinished alpha build now than the polished version later, to the point where Steam has a tag for that: "Early Access," which is Steam code for "we do not promise a complete or tested game but we're still selling to you."

It's not new, no; but the sheer ubiquity of micro-transactions, along with how the videogame industry has grown since then, means it's a larger problem than it used to be, and one that companies are trying exploit rather than mitigate.

Oh, don’t get me wrong - I totally agree that the problem has been exacerbated, with greedy execs and investors who see potential customers regardless of age as moneybags to suck dry.

I just meant that picking on people for not paying out the ass for cosmetics isn’t a new phenomenom. People will pounce on any and every reason to see others as ”inferior” and thus have an ”excuse” to treat them like crap.

Love Humans Are Bastards tag there.