- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
I want to shed light on a tactic that involves collecting data as you play, feeding this data into complex algorithms and models that then alter the rules of your game under the hood to optimize spending opportunities.
None of this is ever about the game part of the game. Fuck entirely off with pearl-clutching over content. This is about a business model. I want people to sell the most addictive, transgressive, customizable bullshit you can imagine, so long as it is either a product or a service. Like anything else you buy. Imaginary shit inside a video game is neither.
You can insist, ‘but it’s new!,’ except it’s already in your game. You’re looking at it, on someone else’s character. This is a dividing line where Oblivion’s infamous horse armor is completely above-board. It was a hundred kilobytes of not much, but it was unambiguously an expansion. You, the human being, received a file you did not have before. Not just permission to say your guy had what anyone else could already wear.
This business model reduces the game part of the game to bait on this hook. Whatever people want, or can be made to want, is dangled at ten bucks a pop, fifty items at a time. Eough rubes get gouged for hundreds or thousands of dollars, such that the total revenue exceeds what the studio would get, even if they sold everybody the full-price game three separate times.
I care about those victims. You delight in their exploitation.
Nothing short of banning the abuse would work. We’re talking about game designers. Manipulating people into enjoying certain behaviors is literally their job. People finally recognized lootboxes are bad - so they sold gave away the boxes and sold keys. Or sold gems. Or insisted it’s just cosmetics. Or-- none of it’s fucking different! It’s all the same shit! You’re all being dragged against the grindstone, using the same tricks that make games fun in the first place. The whole product is an excuse to keep grinding away at you until you decide to open your wallet and look away.
If you want to say that certain types of business models, like paying for RNG where you don’t know what you’re buying, are predatory, I would be with you on that.
But your extreme hardline stance of “nothing should cost money ever” is not a reasonable place to draw the line. At least some of what you’re railing against should be perfectly fine.
Nothing inside a video game. That part is not optional. I’ve dealt with too many cranks who see me arguing - JUST SELL GAMES - and then go ‘you want it for free!’ No, folks, you want it for free. You want to play endlessly-updated games, ‘subsidized by teenage hormones.’ You imagine that you would never be taken for ungodly sums of money.
Even if you’re right, you’re counting on other people being taken for all the money you’re not paying, and more. That’s what it means, when this abuse makes more money.
Predatory abuse is inseparable from this business model. Maximum revenue comes from addiction and frustration. You can be made to want whatever bullshit they’re allowed to push. That’s how games work. They mechanically convince you to value arbitrary nonsense.
edit: oh shit, I thought I hit submit on this five hours ago.
I do want updated games, yes. My favorite games wouldn’t be my favorite games if 1.0 was all we ever got.
Some games have predatory models, and I do oppose that. But only when it actually is predatory. I take issue with how you’re trying to say nothing should ever be sold, even when what’s being sold is perfectly fair.
I take issue with how you’re still lying about what I said. ‘Things being sold’ is my entire drive. Did you miss it, in all caps? The problem is this farce of charging real money for permission to use what’s already in a game you already paid for.
Games were updated before this nonsense was possible. This business model is only like fifteen years old. Unreal Tournament '99 had updates and new content for years, because people kept buying the game.
I’m not missing, I’m saying that your hardline stance against things being sold isn’t reasonable.
You’re repeatedly misrepresenting my stance after several clear and specific corrections.
You said “Nothing inside a video game should cost real money”. Those are your words. If you want to claim that your stance is actually something else, why did you say those words?
And you keep pretending I said “nothing should ever be sold.” Or “nothing should cost money ever.”
Do you need a diagram?
I don’t “delight in their exploitation”, I am one of the people who buy this stuff.
I am not a victim just because you decide I am. I have some say in this.
So hell yeah, bait me, daddy. To this day, Dragon Ball FighterZ is probably the best gaming experience I’ve ever had. I was there at ground floor, bought every character, watched every tournament, got competitive. I ended up with three copies of the game, all 100%-ed and with hundreds of hours of play.
And the only thing that bums me out is that they had to bail out of it early, presumably to go make Marvel Tokon.
I will be on ground floor for Tokon, and I will be funding that mouse engine with a bunch of piecemeal cash, I’m sure.
And I need you to listen to me when I tell you that it’s going to be on purpose, that I’m not a victim, that I hope that treadmill lasts for a good long while and that the game is good enough to support it.
So please spare me the benevolent outrage. I don’t need your protection from my own taste. I would very much appreciate an offline-playable version of the game I can buy with all the DLC down the line, like I did for Marvel vs Capcom 3 or Street Fighter IV, and thanks to the weirdly wholesome interaction between developers and the FGC I may actually get that at some point to support tournament play. But otherwise? Nobody is complaining. You can go save somebody else.
And hey, I say this being a big fan of single player games, and a big supporter of physical media and game preservation. But you come here to tell me that some of my favourite games —and I’m talking game-changing experiences I cherish deeply— should have been illegal and I just don’t know better? Yeah, not gonna fly, Hillary.
Uh huh.
Nope, pulling the chute on this conversation.
That’s somehow worse than the continued lying about banning games when I am talking about a bu-si-ness mo-dellll. Go fuck your strawman alone.
We’re saying the games we like couldn’t exist without the business models you want to ban. How does something like Dragon Ball FighterZ continue to expand if you are forbidding them from selling anything that would make character expansions possible?
If you want to say “nothing should cost money ever”, then the natural outcome of that is that we just don’t get new characters anymore. In effect, you are banning these games by making it impossible for them to exist like this.
Stop lying about what I said. “Nothing inside a video game” does not mean “nothing ever.”
And you know goddamn well that fighting games had incremental re-releases, decades before this abuse was possible.
Or, sell actual expansions. You want characters to cost twenty bucks each? Fine, sell that like a game, not like a fucking hat. If it’s on your hard drive, in your game, you already fucking have it, and charging real money is a scam.
Or, if you want continuing revenue for an online service - make it a service. Sell subscriptions. Oh sorry, do people not like that? Yeah no shit, because it’s up-front about how much it costs, rather than luring people in and gouging them for untold sums.
Or, a game comes out, and plainly exists, and doesn’t become the version that’s squeezed a billion dollars out of ten percent of players over ten years. Oh well! TF2 without this bullshit would still be TF2. People would still be playing 2fort, forever, the same way they’re still doing Ryu vs Ken on Street Fighter 2 Turbo. I do not respect the dishonest conflation of ‘FighterZ doesn’t get to expand forever’ with ‘FighterZ would be banned.’
Zero thought for all the games that genuinely don’t exist, because publishers killed projects to demand live-service flops. Zero thought for all the novel software people could have spent money on, instead of dropping hundreds in one game that barely changes year-to-year. You’re stuck on what exists, as if any change would mean all of it disappears, and you’re magically robbed of that past.
Nah, some thoughts.
But not everything is black and white. And in the spectrum of grey there are plenty of in-game sales that are better than the alternative.
Again, I would much rather buy the characters one by one and have the all-in-one box come out later than have to wait for the big box and pay full price for it.
I am genuinely baffled about why you think that’s worse than “pay me for the game every month or I take it away”. I am even more baffled by how you think that distinction is somehow logical beyond personal preference. Your being adamant about this doesn’t make it make sense.
Charging for anything inside a game is like applying a dollar value to soccer goals. It’s a category error, exploited for profit. I am fundamentally opposed to this system of manipulating people into wanting arbitrary nonsense and then charging actual money for it. Your glib endorsement of that manipulation does not make it rational.
And this is the shallow end. Characters, you can almost sorta kinda argue, as sloppy expansions. Skins? Fuck off. A bottomless pit of manufactured discontent. Plainly sufficient to wring billions out of people for a game that’s “free.” Or for a game that’s forty fucking dollars and will gladly take another hundred dollars every single year. And characters in a 1v1 fighter are drastically different from MOBA bullshit, where having the wrong options can ruin an hour of four other people’s lives.
People are rightly incensed by efforts to charge $80 to own one video game.
This is an entire market of games where you can pay $1000 and still not have the whole thing.
Something’s fucky.
Skins are fine. They are entirely optional. Something existing doesn’t mean you must own it.
That’s the part where we’re not going to agree. Well, the maximalist holier-than-thou stance in general. But otherwise, you see things existing as an affront to you personally. This skin was made by someone and put in the game, and so I’m entitled to it, so it either shouldn’t exist or it should be mine.
That just doesn’t track. I don’t feel any more entitled to some random bikini costume than I do to some random statue bundled with a collector’s edition. It’s faff some people may want, but I’m not being attacked because somebody is buying and selling collector’s edition of Cyberpunk for 200 bucks, just like way I’m not attacked by someone buying some in-game costume.
Also, you do know pro football players get bonuses per goal, right? That comparison means different things depending on whether you know that and both are confusing.
Woe betide the poor bikini artist!
Nevermind their efforts were directed that way so the publisher could rake in hundreds of dollars, per year, for what’s obviously the least impactful element of the game. Costumes would normally be an unremarkable detail - some callbacks, some easter eggs, whatever - but now they cost more than the rest of the fucking game.
Do you imagine they took more effort than the rest of the fucking game? Like the horny bonus costumes are worth more than all the effort spent on balance, and netcode, and designing the actual characters. I’ll assume not, and underline: that’s the total disconnect between price and value. That’s the predatory exploitation, laid bare.
Those skins are the entire reason the game exists. That’s what makes all the money. Street Fighter has been reduced to bait on that hook. And it still costs forty fucking dollars.
This subject has the most aggressively off-topic replies. ‘There’s different forms of value. Some are artificial. You can’t just buy more soccer goals.’ ‘Uh–! But–!’ No.
Those aren’t the games we’re talking about. We’re talking about DBFZ, an example of fixed DLC being sold at a reasonable price, which you want to dishonestly conflate with more predatory models in order to say that nothing should be sold ever.
“We” includes the guy saying “skins are fine,” in reply to the same comment.
Quick search, and… yeah FighterZ specifically still has a $60 base price, a $95 version with some annual pass, and a $110 version with additional content not covered by the pass… and several eyebrow-raising “stamps.” There’s three hundred of those. They seem to be static character images? They cost several dollars each. So do the voice packs. Music’s $15 per pack. Assuming - assuming - the character bundles are cheaper, and include everybody, there’s also $80 of them.
So you can definitely spend at least $200 and still be tickled for a deluge of whateverthefuck stamps are for.
Two of those character unlocks were day-one. Not quite the obvious scam of on-disc DLC, but still pretty fuckin’ blatant. ‘Hey thanks for buying our game, and extra-buying the exclusive preorder bullshit… saaay, you didn’t want the powered-up versions of these popular characters, did you? Well don’t be a freeloader, pay up.’
If I buy the game, right now, all of those characters are in the game… but I don’t get them. I can get my ass kicked by them. But I can’t select them. Not until I pony up at least double the price of the actual game. And then apparently I’ll be subject to the same predatory bullshit for some JPEGs in chat. (If all characters are unlockable through gameplay, but you can ‘pay to skip the grind,’ that is predatory bullshit.)
This game is one of the less skeezy examples, and they still manage to turn an unremarkable amount of content into an obscene total price. It’s on sale on Steam, and it still costs $130. ‘But you can pay less up-front!’ is the problem.
Of course I know, I know how much it fucking sucked! No one wants to go back to that!
You’d rather spend $60 on Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, then spend $60 on Street Fighter II’: Champion Edition, then spend $60 on Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting, then spend $60 on Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers, then spend $60 on Super Street Fighter II Turbo?
That’s better to you than being able to get the patches for free, with the option of buying characters at a reasonable price, all while still retaining compatibility with opponents on the latest version even if you don’t spend a dime?
How is that better? How?
No, no I don’t like that! I would much rather buy a character once than have to subscribe to them forever! If I buy a character I get to keep them, if I subscribe I don’t. And I’m not getting gouged, I know what the price tag is. If anything, a subscription is gouging because I have to keep paying again and again in order to keep what I should’ve only had to pay for once.
I’m actually baffled that you’re seriously trying to suggest subscriptions as a better alternative. Like… seriously? Really?
FighterZ as we know it would not exist in your world. In your world, it’d just be the 1.0 base game and that’d be it, but I know you know we’re talking about what FighterZ was able to become over the course of its lifespan thanks to DLC.
You’re taking this needlessly aggressive tone accusing us of misconstruing you, but I know you know damn well what we’re saying here while you keep misconstruing us. Don’t accuse me of being dishonest when you’re playing dumb like this.
Subscriptions are honest. Like actual sales - where you get a thing you didn’t have, in exchange for money. Paying money, to be allowed to use part of the game you already have, is not a sale.
SF6 fucking launched with $120 in DLC. Like yeah, you bought the game, at full price… but fuck you, pay us again. Breaking up the fuckening into individual characters, trickled out over years, is psychological manipulation to disguise that abuse.
… the fact you can pay hundreds of dollars and still not have all of a 1v1 fighting game is not made problematic through mystery. No shit you can see the price tag. That price is obscene. Past abuses being worse is no kind of excuse.
I swear to god, Capcom could charge the price of a whole game for each new character bundle, and there’d still be people up my ass about how it must be fine because it was the same in the 90s. You know how I know? Because they do. Annual character passes are $30! Does that get you everything that comes out, that year? Does it, fuck.
Of course you do, because it’s what that paragraph was about. How am I the one “playing dumb?” You’re still insisting there’s no way a game could be updated - aside from the other two ways you don’t like! - so that’s the same as the game being banned. Because saying it’s banned sounds really bad, and serious, and is totally the same thing as saying Capcom doesn’t need real negotiable currency in order to change the color of a character’s pants.
But hey, this is only the shallow end of a business model that’s turning the games industry into a frustration-based casino. Why worry?
DLC is honest. I get a thing in exchange for money. I know what the price tag is, and I’m happy to pay what I think is a fair price. And I only pay once to keep the thing I paid for, unlike a subscription.
Let me just cut straight past all your deflecting. Do you think that the final version of DBFZ, with all of its DLC, sold at its price, should be able to exist in this form?
I’m not participating in your all-or-nothing hypothetical. We just discussed how this exact game could have emerged without this exact business model.
And the version of the game with all the damn characters is the version where you had to keep paying to get all the damn characters.
If you mean, from today onward, should the game be priced piecemeal on Steam, then no. But it doesn’t magically revert to its launch state. I want them to sell the whole game… like regular. This is not a sprawling MMO. There’s not terabytes of content. It’s a 1v1 fighter with like thirty characters. If Arc honestly thinks the damn thing should be $130 when everything’s 70% off, let them stick that single price on it, and good fucking luck.
Hey, if latching on to the jokes helps you ignore the point be my guest, but the point stands with or without your acknowledgement.