mindbleach comments on I miss the era of the internet with random games on every website

I miss the era of the internet with random games on every website (lemmy.world)

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[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

These people have made the exact same comparison, and I will tell you what I told them: buying the same game three times is fundamentally better than being held against the grindstone for potentially thousands of dollars.

And renting time on someone else's machine is never the same thing as being charged five actual dollars to increment a value in a single-player game on your own goddamn hardware.

And if I felt Magic The Gathering booster packs were the same thing as lootboxes then I'd call to ban booster packs too.

And even the infamous horse armor was at least new content, which you bought. Bethesda sent you a file you didn't have, in exchange for money. People were mad about the value proposition versus a full expansion. What actually mattered was that it solved a problem Bethesda created. The entire gacha industry is about installing things without asking, telling you that you can't have them, and convincing you to want them anyway, badly enough to open your wallet and look away.

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[–] MudMan@fedia.io -2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

See, GenZs? This is gonna be you. You're gonna be doing this to justify why your flash games were cool and their gacha crap is crap.

Been happening since books were new technology and it'll keep happening.

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[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

I am explicitly willing to burn down my own childhood, if anyone convinced me it was the same kind of abuse we're seeing now.

But I hold that the abuse we're seeing now is demonstrably worse. And it is a half the industry by revenue. Spare me your narrative posturing and engage with how new things can in fact be fucked in ways that old things were not.

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[–] MudMan@fedia.io 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

Things can be newly fucked in new and imaginative ways, but that doesn't preclude things having been fucked in old and imaginative ways. The fuckery mostly just shifts around. Some configurations are worse than others, but a lot of that judgement does have to do with one's perspective, which in turn has a lot to do with what specific pot of slowly boiling water they were raised in as baby frogs.

So no, I do not concede at all that there is a difference between Magic the Gathering packs and loot boxes. They are quite literally modelled on each other. Fun story, as a broke-ass college student I used to work at a comic store/hobby shop. We did keep a catalogue of collectibles we used to trade piecemeal. I'm not sure at all if this was legal in the first place, but we sure did it. It was a big ole accounting book with handwritten card names and prices because I'm old and so is Magic.

I saw kids jonesing for specific things all the time. I once had someone bang on the locked gate to try to get me to sell them CCGs after closing hours like the gacha zombie apocalypse had started. Another time I had a guy, a full on grown man, buy a HeroClix box, walk halfway down the street and then sprint back into the store to show me the rare he had just packed because it was the last of a set or somesuch. I have never stared more blankly.

And yeah, I was there when browser game MTX were all about energy mechanics and I was the quiet old guy in the back pointing out that they were effectively the same as paying for continues in arcades. And I was self-aware enough to realize that didn't mean energy mechanics were particularly good, just that arcades were... kinda exploitative when you think about it. We just didn't think about it that way.

We did think about all the Street Fighter 2 and Resident Evil re-releases, though. People were pissed even at the time. Capcom was the Ubisoft of the mid-90s like that.

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[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

I do not concede at all that there is a difference between Magic the Gathering packs and loot boxes.

Then why the fuck don't you want both banned? Magic Online shouldn't even be legal. None of the excuses work for a digital game!

I do not respect the comparison as a defense of current horseshit. Charging real money inside video games is a scam. It's a cancer that lets "free" games somehow slurp up billions of dollars a year. It makes psychological manipulation for unlimited sums of money a primary goal of game design. Being good or fun does not matter, so long as people are addicted and unsatisfied.

I was the quiet old guy in the back pointing out that they were effectively the same as paying for continues in arcades.

You were wrong. Arcades are rental - their entire business model was built on cool shit you cannot possibly afford to own, being accessed in very short bursts, for negligible quantities of money. That's obviously not the same thing as your tablet, running a generic 2D Unity project, asking ten fucking dollars unless you'd rather stare at a pointless counter for an entire hour.

Specific things getting worse is not some "back in my day" horseshit. Games and gaming have improved massively - but this bu-si-ness mo-del should have been illegal a decade ago. The shithole it spawned in, a pocket computer where you're not allowed to run your own goddamn software, should never have been tolerated.

This shit is in $70, single-player, flagship-franchise titles. It gets added to shit you already bought. It's naked greed with no upside. Delete it.

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[–] MudMan@fedia.io 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

Negligible amounts of money my ass. I spent as much pocket change as I could get my hands on every day in my local arcade. Back of the envelope, I could have bought a Neo Geo and a copy of the game easily with the coins I dumped into SamSho2 after class (we got kinda competitive on that one). You want to know the worst part? It also led to me paying full price for the crappy home version of SamSho 1 on top. Ditto for Street Fighter 2, although I'm not sure I could have afforded a CPS1 cab.

As for wanting physical gacha banned... well, you're assuming I have a problem with loot boxes, which I don't, particularly. They can be fun. I don't mind them. I don't buy them for real money pretty much ever, but I can dig a gacha game for a bit.

I would age gate both, probably. That seems like a good call. Age ratings exist for a reason. You may be surprised by this, but I also don't have a problem with actual gambling being legal among consenting adults. You're gonna be shocked when you hear how I feel about alcohol and drugs, too.

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[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

Fuck them kids. I am talking about a scam perpetrated against people with credit cards.

Any comparison with alcohol requires some ridiculous metaphor where it costs money to keep the bottle on your shelf. Alcohol is clearly a product you buy, and then own. It's consumable because it's food. If all games were at least that much of a product there would be nothing her to complain about.

My condolences for somehow dropping one thousand dollars one quarter at a time - but you spent that money renting someone else's hardware. Like a subscription to an MMO, the transaction fundamentally makes sense, as a service. That is never the case for microtransactions. They are charging for permission to say you have something that's already in the game you're already playing on the hardware you personally own.

Actual booster packs are just barely excused by the fact cardboard costs money. Permission does not. And yet: the entire industry is being reshaped to funnel people toward systems that are objectively worse than the most borderline-tolerable abuses of decades past. This is bad, actually. And it's not some niche or remainder or side hustle. It's HALF THE INDUSTRY, BY REVENUE.

If we allow this shit to continue there will be nothing else.

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[–] MudMan@fedia.io 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

Nah, the vast majority of this is just wrong, or at least a significant exaggeration.

It's not a scam if properly implemented and communicated, and there is no requirement to have immediate access to all content in a game just because it's stored in the same package as other content you've paid to access, for one. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to play a fighting game against a player using a DLC character you don't own, since the files for the game to show you their character when you fight them are the same as the files that allow you to use it yourself.

You sort of argue against yourself by somehow granting an exception to MMOs, too, because live games have running costs in general. I'm not clear on why a loot box or a cosmetic microtransaction is supposed to be an invalid way to fund those server costs but a subscription fee is not, beyond you being stuck in some olden days assumption of commercial transactions applying only to physical goods. I hate to break it to you, but even for the most self-contained, MTX-free indie you buy on Steam you're only paying an access license fee. I don't necessarily think that's good, but it is what's happening.

And lastly, no, the entire industry won't become a F2P MTX uniform thing. That model may be very popular and genuinely huge, but standalone, offline gaming has its own market, which has in fact grown fduring most of that process in absolute size. I think part of the reason people see it as a takeover is the gaming industry likes to share bombastic, dumbed down claims about being bigger than this or that other media form and people read it like it's a single blob of things, often based on their impression of triple A gaming at some point in the past. The reality of it is that a bunch of that "half the industry by revenue" comes down to audiences that are just not engaging with the formats and distribution channels than the historically smaller hardcore gaming subset do. Which doesn't mean traditional gaming is going away, just that some other variants that may as well be an entirely different media type have grown faster.

If anything there's been a bit of crossover, where a lot of that was happening in mobile, where especially in Western markets the amount of fossilized slop at the top end started sending people and distributors back to paid up-front experiences while a bunch of PC and console gamers are now starting to fossilze into forever games (free or not) that are several years old and not moving on. I have to guess that will come and go in waves as the whole thing stops growing endlessly by double digits and becomes yet another form of legacy media just chugging along for another century.

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[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to play a fighting game against a player using a DLC character you don’t own

Good. The alternative is inseparable from providing everyone the whole roster, but pretending each character is worth twelve fucking dollars, so a generic fighting game is somehow worth five times what any sane person would pay up-front for one game.

The counterproposal is just selling the god-damned game, with all the fffucking characters. Or adding free shit as incentive to attract new customers and retain existing players. Or selling an honest-to-god sequel or expansion, instead of charging expansion kinds of money for the bare minimum of content.

live games have running costs in general.

Then they should charge a subscription or die off.

People make rational spending decisions about subscriptions. They're not popular. People don't like that sort of thing, when you treat them honestly and fairly, instead of tricking them.

I have negative patience for the idea that a company spending money justifies whatever horseshit monetization scheme they propose. As if, because they've already blown half a billion dollars, and intend to keep burning more, that makes it okay to charge eight actual dollars for an imaginary hat. Fuck that noise. If your company has ongoing costs - announce ongoing fees. Don't play stupid games about tricking a fraction of players into spending their whole paycheck.

you’re only paying an access license fee

Fuck that and fuck anyone who told you that. You own things that you buy. That's what the money was for. The first sale doctrine knocked this shit down, an entire century ago, and it's only through corruption and nuh-uh-ing that software has retained any form of special consideration. If I bought Peter Jackson's King Kong on HD-DVD and King King The Game Of The Movie for Xbox 360, I own both equally. Whatever text is written inside to pretend otherwise is meaningless. I own that text, too.

If you believe any mumbo-jumbo saying otherwise then you should demand its immediate repeal. You should be morally opposed to its continued existence. Defend your basic right to own products.

there is no requirement to have immediate access to all content in a game

THEN WHAT DOES IT FUCKING MEAN TO BUY THE GODDAMN GAME?

Even subscription MMOs pull this shit! Games that have obviously covered their ongoing costs, for twenty years straight, are double-dipping out of naked greed. Nobody's objections matter. The abuse is worth more than whatever dent could be made by people rightly saying, fuck this abuse.

standalone, offline gaming has its own market

Those games have this too.

Were you not listening?

This shit is in FLAGSHIP FRANCHISE, SEVENTY-DOLLAR, SINGLE-PLAYER GAMES. It costs almost nothing to add. The backlash barely matters, because some fucks will lurch out to defend it. The marketing value of 'we won't rob you!' is dwindling, and again, can become a lie after you bought it.

Counting on media literacy to stop direct manipulation for profit is a failure to acknowledge how any marketing has ever worked. Have you seen reality lately? Educating the rubes never fucking works, because the people manipulating them for direct monetary gain are better at tricking them than you could ever be at convincing them they have been tricked.

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[–] MudMan@fedia.io 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeeeeah, you may just be angry on principle about things that don't merit black-and-white, this-is-an-abomination rage.

No, I won't wait three extra years and pay 200 bucks for a fighting game to see if I like it and then only play ten percent of the roster. I find it very convenient to get a base game roster so the dev team doesn't have to bet the farm that the game will be successful without knowing what will happen and I don't have to pay three times as much or get a third of the game. Hell, that particular example has improved significantly, it used to be if I wanted to play Cammy on SF2 I had to pay full price to repurchase every other character in the game all over again. Screw that. You can get a character for five bucks these days. Gimme the characters one by one forever.

And I absolutely prefer MTX over subscriptions. All day any day. More convenient, typically cheaper and exactly as problematic as every other games-as-service model, no more, no less.

You can all caps and swear all you want, but digital distribution is giving you what it's giving you. You don't own your Steam games, that's just how it works.

This model has fundamental downsides that need to be addressed and probably need legislative intervention to do so, but the outcome is not going to be "you can only buy things in a static format and devs are forbidden from selling you expansions". Even if it made sense to regulate things to that extent, it's inconvenient, expensive and impractical. You may feel strongly about this in all caps, but... yeah, you are in a tiny majority.

By all means go find games that give you that experience. GOG is right there for you. I like it, I use it, go give them money.

But I am not advocating for a blanket ban on all DLC, microtransactions, server-dependent games or free to play games. Those are good things. I like them. They have full-on upsides. They just need to be regulated to the point where consumers are protected and media isn't an entirely fungible thing built on planned obsolescence. Those are two very different bars.

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[+] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 point 1 year ago

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[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

No, I won’t wait three extra years and pay 200 bucks for a fighting game to see if I like it and then only play ten percent of the roster.

Who asked?

“you can only buy things in a static format and devs are forbidden from selling you expansions”

At no point have you understood this argument.

I came out the gate with a favorable comparison for horse armor.

And somehow the least tolerable part of this strawman is 'you're just angry, you only feel strongly, juuust because you disagreeee.' It pains me to leave this abuse-promoting fluff unanswered, but you're not listening anyway.

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[–] MudMan@fedia.io 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

I mean, your last statement included, and I quote:

THEN WHAT DOES IT FUCKING MEAN TO BUY THE GODDAMN GAME?

and

This shit is in FLAGSHIP FRANCHISE, SEVENTY-DOLLAR, SINGLE-PLAYER GAMES. It costs almost nothing to add. The backlash barely matters, because some fucks will lurch out to defend it.

I do understand the argument and you do sound pretty angry, man.

For the record,

The alternative is inseparable from providing everyone the whole roster, but pretending each character is worth twelve fucking dollars, so a generic fighting game is somehow worth five times what any sane person would pay up-front for one game.

You asked.

Made me double check the post name, that's how weird that response was.

Look, we're not going to agree, feel free to move on, but don't chalk up people pointing out that your screed is uncompromising and emotional to high school fallacies. Have some intellectual honesty about it, at least.

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[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

No shit I'm mad at you. But 'you're just angry' is an insulting dismissal. Like I don't have reasons. Like there's not a whole-ass argument, behind all these highlighted barbs. Tone policing is trolling and I reject it utterly.

Making shit up about a delayed game that costs $200 is also trolling. What you were asked was buying games like how buying games worked for the prior forty years.

Have some intellectual honesty about it, at least.

Oh fuck off.

You quoted an all-caps counterargument you have no response to. This shit is in full-priced games. It's creeping into, if not literally everything, then enough shit that 'just don't buy it' plainly doesn't work. This systemic problem is novel, intolerable, and getting worse. And you would pretend that nuh-uh, because I experienced emotion while rubbing your nose in it.

It takes a lot to waste my time. Congratulations.

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[–] MudMan@fedia.io 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

Alright, I'm not restarting the whole thing over, but no, it's not how buying games worked. We've gone over this. Expansions, re-releases and add-ons aren't new.

I'm not calling you out for being angry because you're angry. I'm calling you out for being angry because you're making sweeping, absolute statements that are reductive, dogmatic and missing nuance and you're using anger to hide your disproportionate claims behind an appearance of outrage.

And then you acted like pointing that out was fallacious, which I'm not particularly inclined to let go.

For the record, I agree with you that voting with your wallet is nonsense and not a good way to regulate bad practices. You need actual regulation for that.

Also for the record, I didn't "make up" anything. If the question is whether you pay for everything up front or piecemeal then the cost of the base package is going up. That is not up for debate, either. There is no such thing as "full price". Games aren't exempt from inflation just because people have gotten used to them being sixty bucks for forty years.

Granted, some of that is the fault of game publishers squirming away from price bumps. First by hiding inflation in the lowering costs of media (and eventually going full digital) and then hiding the costs in broken down games where the rest of the cost was distributed through the experience. I'm not against that in principle, but at some point the bandaid needs to be pulled, because there's no more media and retail cost to shave and you can't keep piling up MTX forever. So yes, if you want the equivalent of three seasons of DLC in Street Fighter to be in the box, then the box takes twice as long to make and costs a lot more money.

You can all caps, kick and whine about it all you want, but I'm afraid the number of employees, the time it takes to make things and the concept of multiplying them together are not going to budge. I'm not trolling, I'm arguing that I'd rather decide if I want to pay the full 200 bucks after paying the first 60 for the first half of the game as opposed to taking a gamble on the full amount. That is not just not dismissable as a fallacy, it's pretty obvious.

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[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

Expansions, re-releases and add-ons aren’t new.

Or the problem.

You're not listening. Those are fine. Those are what I am aggressively endorsing. Those are how things should work.

If the question is whether you pay for everything up front or piecemeal then the cost of the base package is going up. That is not up for debate, either. There is no such thing as “full price”.

Do you even listen to yourself? Forty years of a stable upper bound and it somehow doesn't count. Undebatable! Come on. $200 games obviously do not exist, unless you get a big dumb statue with it.

If you wanna lump in everything you'd pay, into the future - this shit costs more.

That's how it makes more money.

Either you're paying at least as much, for a lot less - or someone else is getting fucked ten times harder. I care about that victim. I care about you. Your own personal history includes blowing a thousand dollars to not own a game. That kind of obscene overspending is the plainly-stated goal of this business model. They want to do that to as many people as possible. Key figures give public talks about "whale hunting." That is what nearly everything is becoming. You'll pay more to pay more so you can pay more, and apparently, some people convince themselves that's a gift.

You can all caps, kick and whine about it all you want

Fuck this directed abuse. I've been sick of your shit, so I yell about the subject. In return, you keep sneering about me, personally. Like I'm just putting on a big mad huffy display, because there's no way your behavior is infuriating for reasons explicitly stated. It is in fact fallacious to dismiss arguments and conclusions out-of-hand based on tone.

You assert 'it's not that big a deal!' like being haaalf the goddamn industry is peanuts. Like there's no possible way anyone could really be opposed to paying $60 and immediately getting poked in the eye for another $5, $10, $15, just to un-block part of the game they already fucking bought.

And characters in a fighting game are the least egregious example. You can squint and pretend that's an expansion. Can we at least agree that hats shouldn't count? While you're writing that legislation to unfuck the worst of this rampant abuse, without just saying "ban this business model," do you wanna try defending the grindstone of induced demand for cosmetics? Sell me on the economic sanity of one item costing a third as much as an entire AAA game. Diagram how much work had to go into that Peter Griffin skin, compared to the entirety of Baldur's Gate 3.

I’m afraid the number of employees, the time it takes to make things

Budgets follow revenue. Never the other way around.

Budgets are high because revenue is high. If companies didn't expect five bajillion dollars from players, they wouldn't spend two bajillion pursuing them. It does not require two bajillion dollars, bare minimum, to make... a game.

Expected revenue is only so high because this bullshit expertly manipulates irrational spending. Lootboxes made it so painfully blatant that even children noticed. Alternatives only disguise the parts that people recognize. They're still dragged across fishhooks to spend more than they would as a rational purchasing decision. You don't like subscriptions, right? Nobody really does. But a lot of those people spent more than a subscription would cost, and still tell themselves the game is free.

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[–] MudMan@fedia.io 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

The things you are endorsing are part of "the business model", as you call it. Tools to expand the revenue of the game without moving the base price because people have gotten so used to it.

Ask yourself how there can be a "stable upper bound" to a product for four decades when inflation in that period has literally tripled the average price of products. Especially when the budget of a game has skyrocketed not by a factor of three, but of a hundred in that time.

I've told you how. Selling more units will only go so far. The install base of a home console peaked with the PS2. Chipping away at distribution costs is a finished process. The amount brick and mortar retailers used to keep is gone. The cost of shipping is gone. The huge cost of cartridges got turned into cheap optical media and then trivial bandwidth for digital distribution. There's no more cost to shave on that front.

But because those processes kept "a stable upper bound" (not true, by the way, cart costs meant cartridge games went as high as 100 bucks, but let's roll with it). People got used to a sticker price, the industry kept finding ways to cover increasing costs while keeping the sticker price the same. Eventually that meant selling the extra cost post-release.

And yeah, that has downsides. What used to be a game experience meant to drive up-front sales is now a storefront. That's a different way to design things. It's not inherently bad, you can make good games in that model, but left to its own devices it can get very rote and intrusive. And yes, abusive if not handled correctly. It definitely needs oversight and control.

The problem is, you can't just wave a magic wand and make the economics make sense. That stuff is covering for that "stable upper bound". Costs don't follow revenue, costs follow costs and are driven by competition and the state of the art and capped by revenue. A programmer makes the money they make, not because there's game revenue flowing, but because that's what the market for all software will pay. People will, and often do, take a bit of a hit to work in an industry they like and are passionate about, but it's neither sustainable nor fair to pay people peanuts when Google is across the street paying six figures. A concept artist or a 3D modeller charges the same to GTA or to a Marvel movie. As it should be. Many would argue they don't charge enough to either.

So yeah, no, you're not looking at this the right way. Which is not to say some of the things you note aren't bad or haven't gotten worse. But you're dumbing this down a lot to fit the black and white terms of your outrage in a way that makes it more satisfying to rant about it online when the problem has a lot more nuance and many more hard constraints than you're making it out to have.

Your anger doesn't make this simple, and your anger at me pointing out that you're using your performative anger to dumb this down doesn't make it less true.

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[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

The business model is charging money for shit already in the game. That's all we're talking about. Actual new content you have to pay to own, even if it's fucking horse armor, is fundamentally better than this growing problem. This problem that is... already... half the fucking industry.

The objectively visible general upper bound can be explained by the skyrocketing sales numbers for products. Doom famously outsold Windows 95. Both sold fewer copies than Centipede for Dreamcast. Inflation hasn't got shit on how the gaming industry exploded, and did billions of dollars in business, well before this abusive business model existed. Billions is plenty to make a god damned video game.

Increasing costs reflect increasing revenue.

Why the fuck would any business spend more money than they thought the product could make?

The install base of a home console peaked with the PS2.

... and GTA V sold more copies than the number of PS2s that ever existed. Crazy, right? It's almost like hardware and software are different fucking concepts. Like sixty bucks for a hundred thousand cartridges is less money than sixty bucks for ten million downloads. Weird!

What used to be a game experience meant to drive up-front sales is now a storefront.

An intolerable failure of industry. It's bad, actually. It's naked manipulation for unlimited access to your wallet. Holy shit, how do you write 'games are storefronts now' and think that's okay?

There is no reason what-so-ever that games need to cost so much that they demand this abuse. It has never been easier to make a game. But budgets follow revenue, so executives demand more more more, because the last game sold like crazy. Then we get this ramp of diminishing returns for a thousand people crunching eighty-hour weeks to produce hyperrealistic models for a game that makes only one billion dollars - so they're all fired.

If the whole industry cratered, games would still happen.

You wouldn't get AAAAA skin pores on aliens in 8K resolution or whateverthefuck. You wouldn't get seven-year projects with million-word scripts. But you'd still get games, at whatever price point and sales figures worked, because it's not like the tech got harder to use. It only ballooned to such extremes because it could.

People will, and often do, take a bit of a hit to work in an industry they like and are passionate about

Systemic abuse by an industry that should've been unionized by 1980. Publishers could outright say they're abusing the constant supply of eager young idiots who want to make games and it would not impact the supply of said bright young idiots. It's unsustainable because it's abuse, you dense bastard.

My anger with you is not performative. Fuck you for that derailing lie. I am genuinely pissed-off dealing with your repeated horseshit. I did not call out your trolling because I thought calling you a troll was effective rhetoric - I did it because sane conversation was impossible, without highlighting your hypocrisy.

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[–] MudMan@fedia.io 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

You are, again, oversimplifying so hard you are entirely wrong at that point.

For one thing, no, Doom didn't outsell Windows 95. That's a bit of a misquote from a thing Gabe Newell said once about MS doing a study on their Win95 penetration and finding it was ranking behind Doom at that point in time. Doom sold a few million units, between 1 and 3, by most counts. Online reference puts Win95 paid installs at 40-50 million. Made me look that up. I am not familiar with the sales numbers of Centipede on Dreamcast but I'm going to assume that's hyperbole, considering I am not familiar with the sales numbers of Centipede on Dreamcast.

But yes, games sell more copies now than they did in the 90s. Which I actively pointed out in my previous post, as part of a full on breakdown of how the perceived "full price" of a game has remained stable and that you're entirely ignoring here. GTA V has sold an insane amount of copies, but it's a massive outlier. Most games don't move 100 million copies, even when given out for free, in the same way most NES games didn't sell the 40 million copies Super Mario Bros sold. Most games move anywhere betwen a hundred thousand and a few million units. Steam, PlayStation and the other storefronts keep between 10 and 30% of that revenue, taxes keep some other chunk and publishers and devs split the rest, depending on how their relationship is arranged.

That needs to pay for anywhere between a handful and several hundred people for anywhere between six months and five years, give or take. The average salary in the US gaming industry is six figures. You do that math.

Would you still get games if that house of card fully collapsed? I mean, yeah, you'd get games in post-nuclear Mad Max wastelands, too. Gaming is inherent to humanity. Would you want a gaming industry that is entirely restricted to whatever sixty bucks per copy gets you for eternity, inflation be damned? I mean, I wouldn't.

Don't get me wrong, I spend a ton of time with small indie games. But I also spend a ton of time with larger games. I don't want any of them to go away. I will play the next Balatroesque, guy-in-a-garage roguelike that catches my attention, but I sure would like to also get to play a large narrative action game, a AAA fighting game or another big RPG an MMO or whatever else. I am extremely not game for the games industry to have to work within the confines of whatever iteration of monetization you don't think is exploitative because you grew up with it. You aren't the arbiter of what is a "scam", and you determining that subscriptions are fine because you liked playing WoW or that arcades were fine because you remember Mortal Kombat fondly or that sixty bucks is the "right" price for a videogame because that's what you paid for San Andreas doesn't mean it's the subset of options that make sense forever.

You've built a mental model of the industry, and that's fine, everybody does. But it's unreasonable for you to want that mental model to be the only valid version of a videogame that everybody gets to play. This whole conversation stems from the observation that younger people are looking nostalgically at what people like you were calling a scam in the early 00s. Me included, incidentally. It's a good exercise to get over ourselves and understand both the business reasons and the appeal that lead to each iteration of this business and art form getting popular. Turns out there was some gold in the Flash game shovelware mines, apparently, and I missed it. If you want to be the old man yelling at clouds about how games should be in a DVD for 60 bucks forever, goddamnit, I can't stop you. But you're wrong about the facts of how the industry works and why the costs are the way they are. That much is not opinion.

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[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

You do that math.

They'd hire fewer people and ship more often. Oh no, apparently. It is impossible to make video games for less than one billion dollars.

Genuinely - how the fuck do you write "between a handful and several hundred people, for anywhere between six months and five years," and still pretend it can't mean a handful in six months? Like namedropping the high numbers means nothing else is real.

And those games would be pretty fuckin' good, actually, with rapid response to consumer desire, and abundant variety, and readily-available iteration on whatever parts you liked.

whatever iteration of monetization you don’t think is exploitative because you grew up with it

If I felt current bullshit was only as bad as what I grew up with, I would call ban what I grew up with.

You glibly insist we can't even own things, as if that's an immutable fact of the universe, and not a dogshit interpretation of buying a disc in a case at a store. But sure, I'm the one pounding the table for the status quo.

You aren’t the arbiter

Cult thinking. Like there's only "I said so," not the central fucking argument we've been having.

Subscriptions are part of rational economic decision-making. Fuck you for ignoring that Econ 101 concept, despite several mentions. People spend more when getting their balls tickled, inside a video game, because humans are predictably irrational, and that can be exploited. That is the only way this shit makes more revenue.

Sixty bucks is what games have cost for goddamn near the entire history of video games, not just my personal childhood, you asshole. Even if you want to bicker - there has always been some general price point, since long before it was possible for a home game to seek rent. At no point could it justify charging one thousand dollars to a single player. I'm sorry you were taken for that blatant abuse. But repeating that abuse is now the thrust of halfthefuckingindustry.

Play inflation-games with those numbers all you like - "microtransactions" will always gouge orders of magnitude more than whatever a whole-ass game costs. That's what they're for. That is the entire reason this is happening. They make more money - by charging more - through manipulation. That process of abuse is the keystone of this entire business model.

We could end it tomorrow and it wouldn't make games smaller, or worse, or more expensive. The biggest as-a-service games today have one map each.

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[–] MudMan@fedia.io 0 points 1 year ago

Nah, "fewer people and ship more often" isn't math.

Do the math.

Because I didn't give you "a billion dollars", Doctor Evil, I gave you ranges with actual numbers. If you have more likely ranges or more likely numbers, by all means, use those.

But do the math.

I didn't "pretend nothing else is real", I told you that games, big and small, are within some constraints. And that small games aren't the only games I want to exist. So some games are going to be five people for six months, some are going to be two hundred people for five years. You don't get to tell people (or the industry) that only one of those models is valid.

And for the record, that sixty bucks is what games have cost for "goddam near the entire history of videogames" is my entire point. Which would be easier to discern if you were less concerned with the name calling and more concerned with the reading.

Because for goddamn near the entire history of videogames sixty bucks have gotten you an increasingly bigger, more expensive game. Meanwhile, during the goddamn near the entire history of videogames a snickers bar went from 40 cents to 1.5 bucks and lost a fifth of the size.

So how do you think that worked? Because that's not "inflation games". It's inflation-inflation. Games weren't shielded from it because they're magically ordained by nature to be sixty bucks, it was a set of market reasons shaving costs and selling more units. But then that dried up and there are only two ways past that: you charge more up front or you charge more after. If, you know, you do the math.

Again, your mental model for the industry is wonky and simplistic. You can call me an asshole all you want, that is still the case. And of course, calling me an asshole doesn't mean anybody is going to listen to you. The market, driven by smarter, better informed people, will continue to look for ways to survive and make money. I would prefer for those ways to be sustainable, fair and ethical. That requires some intervention, consumer and worker protection.

"Waaah, games should be sixty forever and I think MTX are inherently more evil than subscriptions" is... not that.

Oh, and it wasn't abuse to dump a bunch of quarters a day in Samsho for the better part of five years. It was a thing I did with friends in a social setting. Was it the best value? No. Did I end up paying more than I would have buying the game up front? Very likely. Was I abused, scammed or taken for a ride? Not particularly, although I fully understand why a kid today would absolutely not see the point (and why my dad didn't either).

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