Jim sterling on OWL - General

[video=youtube;RqAsKBE6VN8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqAsKBE6VN8[/video] He pretty much hits the nail on the head tbh

Love going to the overwatch reddit and see them try to defend this.

[QUOTE=redBadger;53041022]Love going to the overwatch reddit and see them try to defend this.[/QUOTE] [url]https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/7pfyhr/jim_sterlings_thoughts_on_owl_skins_tokens_and/[/url] Downvoted a lot and with pretty much every second comment defending it and the highest voted comment is about that he didn't need to watch the video because of the thumbnail.

While I agree entirely with Jim on the OWL (and I'm the kind of person who [I]doesn't[/I] see a problem with lootboxes as long as they're cosmetic skins-only), I have to disagree that OW has any kind of skin-based economy. For a game to have an "economy" the skins would need to be tradable between players either within or off the game (through other websites). The skins can't be traded between players, they can't be sold between players. There's no "economy" surrounding the game, there's only a storefront from developer to customer, and that's it. One point he also didn't touch on was how the "it's just cosmetics" argument doesn't 100% work with the OWL skins, since every other skin in the game can be unlocked through gameplay - these can't. You [I]need[/I] to buy them. I also want to add that I'm getting pretty tired of the pushback against the idea that games are expensive to develop and maintain. They really are, it's not a myth. First of all, back in the day when a game was released that was that. No updates, no expansion packs. If there was any online it was usually peer-to-peer, or hosted by the console manufacturer (as opposed to dedicated on the developers front, à lá PS2/XBOX). This meant games had a lifecycle that couldn't be refreshed - they released, they lived, they died out. The devs moved on to other projects. "Keeping it alive" wasn't really a thing. However, nowadays games are often released with the intention of keeping them alive for a long time through updates, and added content - even single-player games, i.e. through an expanded story-line. This means a game needs to have developers on it at all times, even post-launch, to create new content - even while the company moves on to the next game. With dedicated servers, you need to have those available worldwide for the unforeseeable future - hosting isn't cheap, and some countries will be a pain-in-the-ass about how your game is connected to them (see: China with PUBG). [URL="https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/2ve5m4/how_much_does_it_actually_cost_a_company_to_run/cogwjck/"]This guy on Reddit [/URL]paints a pretty good picture of how much servers could cost a company. Not only that, but the technology is always expanding, as are the teams making the games. Bigger and more impressive work is being done all the time. All of this while games have increasingly lowered in price compared to the 90's and early 2000's despite inflation. Theoretically the gain or loss would be minimal though, due to a growing playerbase, but the more players you have the more servers you need - so the costs become higher anyway. If you take GTA 5/Rockstar as an example, even a AAA-game like that, at the top of my head from just salaries, licensing fees and server costs we're up at some $30 million a year, just to keep the game up and running. I guess my point is that these things DO cost money, and it's INSANE amounts of money, and the company needs to gain revenue somehow after the game is released especially when the intention is to keep it alive for the unforeseeable future, so it kind of bugs me that people dismiss this as being just a "AAA tycoon myth" and that the devs are just pocketing the money. This is why MMORPG's have membership fees. It's why games nowadays have DLC (DLC pretty much just being the digital versions of Expansion Packs, which served the same purpose - prolonging a games lifespan through content patches). :trumpet:

There are a lot of people on the Overwatch subreddit who agree with this video, and a similar amount of people who say they basically don't care. Why antagonize the people who are the ones who like this stuff if the entire point of the argument is to defeat greed and save these people from addictive spending?

Eh, I think his argument is a little weak and in this one he seems to be talking a lot around it before getting to the single point he makes. Personally I don't care at all about OWL, the skins are as he mentions just recolored ones with teamtags. Most colors are already in the game as the cheap color skins. They also won't pollute the existing boxes and they will pretty much just be those skins for the foreseeable future for those tokens. It is only bad for people that need to have 100% of the content in a game, I doubt even OWL fans will spend a lot on other teams beside their own they root for. Teams getting half the money isn't bad either, not a lot of companies do 50/50 split, especially when the teams didn't even do much for the skins. I don't play OW a lot, haven't since winter event was live, so I wouldn't call myself an Overwatch Zealot. Even for my taste Jim goes a bit too cynical here. Edit: Also can we note that this type of Esport specific skins/microtransactions is not new? Dota2 and CS:GO has that as well, not with its own tokens but they have special team skins/items. I feel the same about those, nice to support a team if you like them, but those team branded skins really don't interest me at all as somebody who has no interest in the OWL.

[QUOTE=Mitsuma;53041137]It is only bad for people that need to have 100% of the content in a game[/QUOTE] The skins don't count towards game completion, you don't need them to 100% the game.

[QUOTE=KIDzilla;53041153]The skins don't count towards game completion, you don't need them to 100% the game.[/QUOTE] as someone who has fell for that kind of mindset a lot, it honestly does feel that way. it's not something I'm proud of, and hope I'm past, but it's how it hooks you there's no official 100% in overwatch, but collecting things is a way of looking at it, especially with the lootbox system it's nice to know you have more options of customization

Well I didn't mean 100% game completion, I mean people who feel the need to own every skin etc. I agree with Jim that "just cosmetics" is not a valid excuse but even in terms of cosmetics they are optional on top of being optional in a sense, so personally they are just not interesting.

I just see them as team donations with a simple incentive.

So they're not in Lootboxes and there's no rarity levels? You just buy the skin you want? I don't really mind it, certainly a better way of doing it! He also then goes on to mock people who think poor people should only wear the shittiest clothes, so paying for aesthetics is fine?

What they should have done was just allow us to support the teams through a spray. When you have multiple different team skins, its just one massive eyesore.

Having to pay for a team's official colours? Unheard of!

Charging 100$ to get one team's shitty palette swap jerseys is such a hilarious ripoff. That's 2.5x the cost of the game.

[QUOTE=Mort Stroodle;53041589]Charging 100$ to get one team's shitty palette swap jerseys is such a hilarious ripoff. That's 2.5x the cost of the game.[/QUOTE] People probably spend more on merch for traditional sports teams. Most players also play maybe 3-4 heroes regular, so you sit at maybe 20-30$ one person would spend.

if it's not lootboxes, it's premium currency no no, you aren't paying 5$ for a just one skin, you are paying 5$ for [b]100 cool points[/b]. that gets you one skin

The metagame is honestly fairly stagnant as well, with the most common composition being as follows. Winston, D.Va, Mercy, Zenyatta, tracer, and another dps. This can vary slightly but it's most likely going to be this or a variant of this.

it's hard to take this guy seriously, furthermore his points. if he dropped the edge perhaps he would be able to convince more people. but it's probably more important to feed his audience with "sarcastic" rant videos

[QUOTE=Vodkavia;53042847]This might be a good argument if Blizzard was actually taking good care of the game and giving us content proportional to the amount of monetization they slap into the game. -blizzard blizzard blizzard-[/QUOTE] My long-winded argument was aimed towards people with that attitude towards the game industry as a whole. I wasn't defending Blizzard.

[QUOTE=Vodkavia;53043158]Thing is coyoteze, it's not just blizzard. Look at EA, Look at Valve, look at Jagex and bungie etc etc etc. This whole "games as a service" has turned into a fast track for shitty business practices because of how easy it can be used to exploit consumers, piss off a majority of the player base and still make loads of cash.[/QUOTE] It [I]can [/I]be a fast track for shitty business practices, but it's in almost every case a necessary evil if you want games to actually be sustained in the long run. You can't release a game and hope to keep it alive for a long time without some kind of revenue stream to keep servers up, employees paid, and content delivered while at the same time hope to move on to other projects and pay for those developments as well. You just can't. It's economically impossible. It doesn't matter if you're a small indie dev or a big AAA-studio, the expenses scale with your companies size and ambitions.

[QUOTE=Vodkavia;53043225]Thing is, in all my examples that’s not what’s happening. Revenue streams are flowing strong, the servers are up; but the games are just husks. No one but the publisher/shareholders are getting their way. I’m not going to pretend I have the perfect one size fits all solution, but at this rate the games in “games as a service” is going to wither to as close to nothing as they can fine tune it to be.[/QUOTE] Revenue =/= Net Profit. You seem to very grossly underestimate the [I]expenses[/I]. A team of 350 people with an avg. salary of $2,500 would alone cost a company $10+ million dollars. I'm not even factoring in running costs, R&D costs, licensing, employers fees & benefits, internal office expenses (rent, supplies, maintenance, equipment), marketing, publishing (ie. physical copies) - there's hundreds of VERY large expenses that are being overlooked in favor of painting a anarrative that every game developer is some scheming evil that just pockets every cent. The world doesn't work like that.

[QUOTE=RichyZ;53043253]actually videogames keep selling after release, funnily enough people are constantly buying overwatch and csgo to this day, even though both were released long ago[/QUOTE] Not [I]nearly[/I] to the same volume as during the first year, month or even weeks of release, however. It's hard to find graphs of sales figures since they're kept pretty internal, but after the first few weeks of release, the amount of purchases per day drop drastically. It typically peaks again around a sale, free weekend or whenever new content is released.

If it's true that blizzard takes a 50% cut on the skins then that's kind of a crappy way to support your favorite team and shows they're just in it for the money. Maybe if 75% or even 100% went to the teams I don't think it would be as big of a deal.

[QUOTE=Coyoteze;53043283]Not [I]nearly[/I] to the same volume as during the first year, month or even weeks of release, however. It's hard to find graphs of sales figures since they're kept pretty internal, but after the first few weeks of release, the amount of purchases per day drop drastically. It typically peaks again around a sale, free weekend or whenever new content is released.[/QUOTE] Blizzard didn't add in lootboxes a few years, months, or even weeks after launch though. Lootboxes were in the game since day one. There's no way to justify blizzard putting gambling crates in the game and making the drop rate so low other than "we're already making a preposterously large amount of money and we're going to wring these shits out for everything they're worth". There are plenty of ways they could have chosen to monetize the game long term without fucking their customers. Free to play, selling cosmetics outright instead of the extremely shitty lootbox system, not arbitrarily locking content behind limited time windows (uprising skins being the most egregious example). Overwatch certainly isn't the [I]worst[/I] example of a game fucking over their customers for some sweet sweet $$$, but it's still pretty damn bad.

[QUOTE=Mort Stroodle;53044621] There are plenty of ways they could have chosen to monetize the game long term without fucking their customers. Free to play, selling cosmetics outright instead of the extremely shitty lootbox system, not arbitrarily locking content behind limited time windows (uprising skins being the most egregious example). Overwatch certainly isn't the [I]worst[/I] example of a game fucking over their customers for some sweet sweet $$$, but it's still pretty damn bad.[/QUOTE] And what's even more bad and very sad is the people defending Blizzard with all their might. As they do currently again and again.

[QUOTE=Coyoteze;53041116]While I agree entirely with Jim on the OWL (and I'm the kind of person who [I]doesn't[/I] see a problem with lootboxes as long as they're cosmetic skins-only), I have to disagree that OW has any kind of skin-based economy. For a game to have an "economy" the skins would need to be tradable between players either within or off the game (through other websites). The skins can't be traded between players, they can't be sold between players. There's no "economy" surrounding the game, there's only a storefront from developer to customer, and that's it. One point he also didn't touch on was how the "it's just cosmetics" argument doesn't 100% work with the OWL skins, since every other skin in the game can be unlocked through gameplay - these can't. You [I]need[/I] to buy them. I also want to add that I'm getting pretty tired of the pushback against the idea that games are expensive to develop and maintain. They really are, it's not a myth. First of all, back in the day when a game was released that was that. No updates, no expansion packs. If there was any online it was usually peer-to-peer, or hosted by the console manufacturer (as opposed to dedicated on the developers front, à lá PS2/XBOX). This meant games had a lifecycle that couldn't be refreshed - they released, they lived, they died out. The devs moved on to other projects. "Keeping it alive" wasn't really a thing. However, nowadays games are often released with the intention of keeping them alive for a long time through updates, and added content - even single-player games, i.e. through an expanded story-line. This means a game needs to have developers on it at all times, even post-launch, to create new content - even while the company moves on to the next game. With dedicated servers, you need to have those available worldwide for the unforeseeable future - hosting isn't cheap, and some countries will be a pain-in-the-ass about how your game is connected to them (see: China with PUBG). [URL="https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/2ve5m4/how_much_does_it_actually_cost_a_company_to_run/cogwjck/"]This guy on Reddit [/URL]paints a pretty good picture of how much servers could cost a company. Not only that, but the technology is always expanding, as are the teams making the games. Bigger and more impressive work is being done all the time. All of this while games have increasingly lowered in price compared to the 90's and early 2000's despite inflation. Theoretically the gain or loss would be minimal though, due to a growing playerbase, but the more players you have the more servers you need - so the costs become higher anyway. If you take GTA 5/Rockstar as an example, even a AAA-game like that, at the top of my head from just salaries, licensing fees and server costs we're up at some $30 million a year, just to keep the game up and running. I guess my point is that these things DO cost money, and it's INSANE amounts of money, and the company needs to gain revenue somehow after the game is released especially when the intention is to keep it alive for the unforeseeable future, so it kind of bugs me that people dismiss this as being just a "AAA tycoon myth" and that the devs are just pocketing the money. This is why MMORPG's have membership fees. It's why games nowadays have DLC (DLC pretty much just being the digital versions of Expansion Packs, which served the same purpose - prolonging a games lifespan through content patches). :trumpet:[/QUOTE] Microtransaction shit doesn't need to be part of a game to keep it alive, case in point, almost all older games, and by older I mean pre-2012 or around then. [vid]https://puu.sh/z1Knj/6d0f67d903.webm[/vid] [highlight](User was banned for this post ("Shitpost" - Novangel))[/highlight]

I agree in the broad strokes, about them trying to peddle the "we're actually poor" stuff while simultaneously trying to host extravagant tournaments, but I am kinda confused on one point. He says that them giving every player 100 free fun bux isn't just giving players a bone to be nice, it's to get people "invested" in the "economy" of the recolors that cannot be traded or sold. So like... Invested how? He clearly doesn't mean financially invested, there's no profit to be made by players here. So does he mean psychologically invested? How does that work? Do people just go "Oh now that I have one boring reskin that 99% of people aren't going to notice or acknowledge when they're busy blasting my face off, I guess I gotta... buy the rest?" That's the shittiest hook I've ever heard of, who is gonna give a shit about that? Like nobody says "Oh I didn't want any of these boring reskins, but now that I can get one for free I better spend hundreds on owning all of them!" I think that maybe in this one instance it probably was just being nice a bit because the morons who would drop all that cash would do it anyway, free tokens or not, and nobody else gives a damn.

[QUOTE=SGTNAPALM;53053178] So does he mean psychologically invested? How does that work? Do people just go "Oh now that I have one boring reskin that 99% of people aren't going to notice or acknowledge when they're busy blasting my face off, I guess I gotta... buy the rest?" That's the shittiest hook I've ever heard of, who is gonna give a shit about that?[/QUOTE] That's exactly what he means, and it absolutely works. It's the same psychology as that behind free samples and demos: once people get a taste of what they could have, they get hooked and want more - especially if they were already on the fence about it before. That's the idea behind it.

[QUOTE=Gmod4ever;53053185]That's exactly what he means, and it absolutely works. It's the same psychology as that behind free samples and demos: once people get a taste of what they could have, they get hooked and want more - especially if they were already on the fence about it before. That's the idea behind it.[/QUOTE] You get a free appetizer from a restaurant, you get a tasty treat and might feel compelled to order more delicious meals. That's fine. You get a free sample of, like, maybe a razor blade or something, you might have a really good shave and want to buy their products in the future. That's also fine. You come up to me and say "Hey, here's a free used catheter bag! Be sure to buy more used catheter bags from me in the future!" I'll probably not give a shit. You're telling me that people are being given free used catheter bags and they come back hungry for more? That actually works? Because that's exactly what's happening here. Maybe there's a contingent of mentally unsound individuals who enjoy collecting used catheter bags for whom this promotion does nothing for because they're already gonna drop all their money on used catheter bags, but why would this work on a normal person? "I used to hate used catheter bags, but now that Blizzard gave me one for free I can't get enough!"

[QUOTE=SGTNAPALM;53053196] You come up to me and say "Hey, here's a free used catheter bag! Be sure to buy more used catheter bags from me in the future!" I'll probably not give a shit. You're telling me that people are being given free used catheter bags and they come back hungry for more? That actually works? Because that's exactly what's happening here.[/QUOTE] The problem isn't with the psychology of giving people the ability to sample the skins. The problem is with you analogizing the skins with used catheter bags. When you figure out how utterly inappropriate of an analogy that is, maybe you'll figure out how the psychology behind the move works.