As much as I like to agree with Jim here (and he's right on a fair few points) at the end of the day, there's these two sad pieces of truth :
a) The 'Customers' that he likes to fight for are fickle beasts, and
b) These companies that have mountains of data that he's likely not privy to that would contradict his prediction that live services would fail to work.
I mean, is it not a coincidence that the companies pushing for this also have a [I]massive[/I] mobile publishing presence as well? These are companies that are making hand over fist day in, day out through mobiles, gather copious amounts of data through mobile devices about players and actively learning new ways to squeeze them for all they're worth like the little money udders that they are. Is it any surprise that they'd not see success in trying to normalize this behavior to a populace familiar with the system already, on another platform?
It's highly unlikely they won't fail because Jim puts far, [I]far[/I] too much faith in the playerbase he defends to not cave into it, because he thinks that a reaction along the likes of the uproar for Battlefront II (which was unprecedented in and of itself) will keep happening as more publishers continue to pull this shit. The truth of the matter is it won't. Games, like everything else, are also a big part of social FOMO so if friends are getting it to play regardless of the controversy (or they don't care enough about it), you will too. The reason the Battlefront II uproar was specifically successful was the sheer avarice of EA to lock the most loved heroes behind the paywall system and expecting people to pay up for it even after forking over 60 bucks (if not more). I'm pretty sure that on a base level that the whole "Grind for 40 hours just to get Vader" was what really got people more upset and the lootbox debacle was just icing on the shitcake of a buggy game.
The only thing that I can see hammering this shit into the ground is an economical choice that comes with the worst case scenario : another global recession. With a model like this, simply cutting back on spending money for these inessential live services will hammer the shit out of them because there is no safety net in place : No single player game sales, no mobile game sales, no sales in 'emerging markets', nothing. That's what is going to be the thing that fucks them over royally.
[QUOTE=snookypookums;53161486]As much as I like to agree with Jim here (and he's right on a fair few points) at the end of the day, there's these two sad pieces of truth :
a) The 'Customers' that he likes to fight for are fickle beasts, and
b) These companies that have mountains of data that he's likely not privy to that would contradict his prediction that live services would fail to work.
I mean, is it not a coincidence that the companies pushing for this also have a [I]massive[/I] mobile publishing presence as well? These are companies that are making hand over fist day in, day out through mobiles, gather copious amounts of data through mobile devices about players and actively learning new ways to squeeze them for all they're worth like the little money udders that they are. Is it any surprise that they'd not see success in trying to normalize this behavior to a populace familiar with the system already, on another platform?
It's highly unlikely they won't fail because Jim puts far, [I]far[/I] too much faith in the playerbase he defends to not cave into it, because he thinks that a reaction along the likes of the uproar for Battlefront II (which was unprecedented in and of itself) will keep happening as more publishers continue to pull this shit. The truth of the matter is it won't. Games, like everything else, are also a big part of social FOMO so if friends are getting it to play regardless of the controversy (or they don't care enough about it), you will too. The reason the Battlefront II uproar was specifically successful was the sheer avarice of EA to lock the most loved heroes behind the paywall system and expecting people to pay up for it even after forking over 60 bucks (if not more). I'm pretty sure that on a base level that the whole "Grind for 40 hours just to get Vader" was what really got people more upset and the lootbox debacle was just icing on the shitcake of a buggy game.
The only thing that I can see hammering this shit into the ground is an economical choice that comes with the worst case scenario : another global recession. With a model like this, simply cutting back on spending money for these inessential live services will hammer the shit out of them because there is no safety net in place : No single player game sales, no mobile game sales, no sales in 'emerging markets', nothing. That's what is going to be the thing that fucks them over royally.[/QUOTE]
I posted this in a video where someone made basically the same point and I'm just gonna verbatum quote it because if I responded to this post I'd be saying exactly the same thing as last time so yeah:
[QUOTE=Rossy167;53126410]So I'm not trying to no true scottsman here so stay with me:
Us lot on Facepunch aren't the reason this is happening. I mean Jim has long since won, none of his fans, or TB's fans, or people who basically submerge themselves in gaming are contributing to this bullshit in a really meaningful way. Haven't you noticed we all unanimously hate it? The enthusiasts aren't the people that are buying this shit.
I don't mean to demean anyone, I'm not trying to say "[I]not a real gamer![/I]" or some shit, what I mean is that most people play games at this point. Like pretty much all male teenagers for example. Every male teenager has a copy of CoD, Fifa and likely the latest Ubisoft sandbox or big licensed game, and they'll dip their toes into the microtransactions. What's happening is that the driving financial force behind video games aren't video game enthusiasts, which is the case for pretty much all other media too.[/QUOTE]
I am glad Jim has a video about this but I think his argument that "regular games are what adults with jobs have time for. Will mean a rude awakening for publishers." has a few issues.
I think snooky has it right - the publishers know who they are targeting. It isn't me or you, certainly not Jim - but there are enough people out there for publishers to push for this.
[QUOTE=Rossy167;53161537]I posted this in a video where someone made basically the same point and I'm just gonna verbatum quote it because if I responded to this post I'd be saying exactly the same thing as last time so yeah:[/QUOTE]
I agree - but there's also the aspect that not all of us agree to boycott the product out of the actual scumminess, but actually as a rationalization of it not being 'worth it' - we all realize, on a fundamental level, that it's not the actual microtransactions themselves that bother us. After all, they're like TF2 hats, you can [I]choose[/I] not to buy that shit or even see the store button. No, what is galling is the charging of a full 60 dollars or more and the deliberate act of reaching into your pocket for more before you've even had the chance to play a game. Since we're talking about games moving onto Live Services or Games as a Service, there's a crucial term that's used as a key metric to gauge customer satisfaction, which is something everyone can apply to every product/service they now use. It's called "Time To First Value". Simply put, the SaaS metric basically tracks the time it takes for a customer using your service to achieve first value, i.e. they now feel happy and justified in spending that money to purchase your product/service and have realized their first benefit from it. The big problem with the approach by a lot of game publishers who are trying to emulate this model is that the act of putting Microtransactions egregiously like this basically sets the TtFV to zero. Adding exclusive pre-order bonuses sends that value to the negatives because the gamer has gotten fuck-all value and is being expected to pay more. Shit like this is actually what makes it so repulsive and why a more applicable rejection for the outrage isn't "These people have fucked with the franchise" but more "these people have frontloaded their cost without me even getting a taste of what the game is like, so until that frontloaded cost is reduced, fuck the game, I will [I]buy it later[/I]".
Buy it later is the key bit here.
The rationalization is that when the game eventually goes on sale and people start buying it, the original launch debacle will be long forgotten because now, the price being 50% of at 30 dollarydoos is now 'worth it'. The company's ownership or involvement hasn't changed, the mechanics built into the game hasn't changed, none of it - the only thing that's happened is that it is now more convenient for [I]us[/I], the consumer to consume the game at a more palatable price. Nobody ever just 'unpersons' a franchise because of a game. It's how the corpse of what Need For Speed is now keeps sputtering to life year after year after year.
Game companies know this and while they aren't getting as much out of you, [B][I]they're still getting money out of you[/I][/B]. For them it's inevitable that if it's a franchise you are interested in, you'll eventually buy it at a price, but how you choose to rationalize the purchase is your problem, not theirs. "I wanted the full set", "It was 30 bucks, which I thought was a fair price for the piece of shit that it is", "If I didn't get it, the newest one they just announced that has shared story elements from this one won't make sense, so [I]I have to play it.[/I]" Jim makes multiple reference to the idea of clones not being successful and the road to marketshare being littered with the corpses of copycats that didn't make the cut. What Jim should realize is that, ironically, a lot of those games that see such success today for their multiplayer elements were actually considered masterpieces for their singleplayer campaigns, most notable Call of Duty. The love of the original campaign was what made the multiplayer aspect an icing on the cake, not the other way around. Sadly, this same thing is actively being killed off because it is not as lucrative to games companies to sell anymore (because buyers are fickle and varied about their tastes) and more importantly, you cannot front-load money into a single player experience (and they did try that to disastrous effect in Dead Space, effectively killing the francise).
I keep saying it, but gamers cannot win this battle until the way it's played is changed. There is no consensus to the behavior because the demographic spread is now so vast that a single whale can make up for the lost business of a small army of discerning purchasers.
Microtransaction even in a full price game isn't something I'd be against. But it comes with the slippery slope, that you have to trust the publishers and developers. Not to deliberately sabotage the main game, in order to incentivize people to use microtransactions. Which has been proven again and again is never not going to happen. Which is why myself and many others turn their nose at the stuff.
And his main point is solid, if the major AAA publishers are all gonna jump on the live service stuff, with a focus on mmo like busywork. Unless they make some really diverse and really interesting "live services", it's just going to join the pile of dead oversaturated MMOs. Then 10 years down the line, they're gonna kill the servers for the new "live service"
[QUOTE=bord2tears;53161617]I am glad Jim has a video about this but I think his argument that "regular games are what adults with jobs have time for. Will mean a rude awakening for publishers." has a few issues.
I think snooky has it right - the publishers know who they are targeting. It isn't me or you, certainly not Jim - but there are enough people out there for publishers to push for this.[/QUOTE]
I think the artistic harm of games that don't end is far worse than it not appealing to busy people. Time consuming hobbies not appealing to busy people is kind of a non issue, if you haven't got time to do shit then you not doing shit isn't shit's fault.
[QUOTE=Rossy167;53163998]I think the artistic harm of games that don't end is far worse than it not appealing to busy people. Time consuming hobbies not appealing to busy people is kind of a non issue, if you haven't got time to do shit then you not doing shit isn't shit's fault.[/QUOTE]
I would actually argue the opposite : Games that don't end actually would be artistically terrible, but surprisingly more stable for artists working in the field. If you look at it in terms of game development, a publisher taking a chance constantly on a new IP that would bomb is pretty catastrophic on the worker side, because most artists work on a contract basis, with the idea being that the game being successful means they'll likely begin production on a sequel or another new IP, in which case you're back in again (Yay!). Game bombs, studio purges inessential staff from dev team keeping only a skeleton crew to ensure functioning (an "Oh shit we fucked up, abandon ship" moment).
On the other hand, with the 'continuing development' approach, you can keep a skeleton crew of tech and art resources on the devteam, either working on the roadmap (season pass shtuff) or bugfixing and polishing (because most AAA titles now are rushed unfinished messes to begin with). That means for artists and tech resources, there's some degree of job stability even post-contract. I mean, look at Microsoft and compare this to an OS lifecycle (which is exactly the kind of set up they're looking to emulate) - they don't cyclically purge/hire staff on development cycles, they purge them on sales/earning cycles.
Another thing is the differing costs of tech vs. art resources. By virtue of skillsets alone, a tech resource commands more money than an art resource, with the delta being different depending on actual skillset. But almost universally, it will be more. By moving to this continuing cycle of development for a game, once the core development of the game engine and gameplay is complete, outside of tools creating/bugfixing/future polishes and fixes, tech resources no longer have much of a purpose. This move allows a lot of the heavy lifting to be done by the more expensive tech resources early on, then jettisoned to leave a skeleton crew of tech and a handful of cheaper art resources to work on keeping the season pass going or moving the tech team to other roles for future IP development.
From a financial point of view, the move to develop less and extend the lifetime of the game 'product' more is a shrewd attempt to kill many birds with one stone : cut down overheads by staffing, extend the lifetime value of any given IP and generate a continuous stream of revenue that's almost pure profit, given that there might not be any development on a new game for years until they hit a preset flag on diminished monthly earnings.
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