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

[–] 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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