Horse Armour Did Nothing Wrong

[GamerCat_]

The gamer's aversion to business models structured around DLCs, subscriptions, microtransactions, has obviously done far more harm to the industry than good.

The gamer's aversion to business models structured around DLCs, subscriptions, microtransactions is, in fact, the only sane emotional response to that type of cancer.
Any and all attempts to nickel and dime the player should be resisted by 1. not giving a cent to such compromised products and also pirating where applicable and 2. shaming any such disgusting troglodyte devs/publishers and the humongous cuck consumers who enable them. No exceptions.

I don't know if I've ever wanted a game that was seriously monetised. Because they're all retarded westshit I wouldn't play for free. And for the asian gachas I can just follow people on twitter who draw the characters #Finance.

1.Prince of Persia(2008) AND Asura's Wrath both sold their fucking ENDING separately.

Prince of Persia as far as I can tell was a completed game, and its epilogue doesn't really expand the vision of the game, just drags it out a little bit further. You aren't getting an incomplete experience without it. You believe this game is aesthetically justified or you don't. The nature of the work isn't transformed by its DLC. Clearly nobody believed in or cared about this story because the game ended there, maybe with a related DS game or something like that. 2008 was a weird time for gaming. Seriously lost for purpose.

And as for Asura's Wrath, I can't find a straight story on why they did that. Still, there's no hard science of value in play here so ultimately this is your own judgements. Why did these games get DLCs in this way? I don't know, but am kind of curious. I DON'T believe that these are cases of purely cynical profitmaxxing. Or if they were, they weren't very good ones and didn't set lasting precedents (because they aren't optimally cynical moves).

2.Persona 3 has:
-The original version
-The FES version
-The PSP version
-The remake
All of which have different stuff not shared between them, buy the same fucking game over and over again if you want to hear the entire story!

People like Persona 3 so they keep fucking with it and working at it to make it more available and nicer as they go. This does ultimately function as a kind of creeping development where the thing gets more elaborate over time, and you have to repurchase to catch up. But again, there is no science of value. The game was considered complete in its original form. They aren't taking from you in these cases. They are doing more work. If you're a superfan you can buy them all. If you're a regular game you already had a 95% similar experience so you're probably fine. If you're such a fan that a 5% difference actually excites you, is a new complete buy-in even asking that much? Even then, nobody's forcing you.

What is the logic behind your frustration. "the entire story!". The game ended with its original version. Again, I don't think you have any sound notion of aesthetic justification and are instead just arguing from a neurotic completionist's perspective on value.

3.Mass Effect 3, piece of garbage, had the prothean guy as fucking DLC when he should be a major character.

This was the worst DLC got, maybe this specific game, in general EA around this era. But the key point I keep making to people is that they were not running an optimised profit-machine. EA were actually struggling on most of their games. They were failing to learn that high production value single player epics with a start, middle, and end were not really viable investments in the same vein as serial-release captive audience service-titles like FIFA and MADDEN. EA were not greedy people trying to invade your ideal working system and set up tolls to pump you for cash as you passed. They were old retarded incompetent jew fucks running an evolving operation that bewildered them. The DLC squadmate in ME3 was not calculated cynical profitmaxxing. It was a bunch of retarded old guys and women giving demands to bioware via powerpoint presentation.

"We looked at the numbers, Mass Effect is lagging behind FIFA. You aren't releasing a game a year and struggle to sustain after initial sales. FIFA sells players. Mass Effect needs to sell players."

"uhmm.... it's a science fiction action game..."

"Jesus fucking christ okay, sell soldiers or something. If you can't buy soldiers in mass effect 3 you're all fired."

That's why Javik is DLC.

These people were so fucking old and out of touch the differences between FIFA and Dead Space were genuinely lost on them. Granted, stuff like Call of Duty existing probably made the issue murky. I can imagine a bunch of autistic spastic gamedev guys failing to immediately impress upon the bosses that Call of Duty is just FIFA with guns when asked. Though, granted, Bobby Kotick understood this better than gamers. He said that these games reasonably should become subscriptions, but also didn't force that because he understood that gamers are superstitious peasants who would interpret a new deal as some kind of ripoff regardless of the sense behind it. They'll buy what is effectively a season update as a new disc and title at full price every year. Fuck the inefficiency, that's making money so keep it up.

Call of Duty was also effectively a seasonal game that came on a new disc every year, with the campaigns being an increasingly retarded vestigial element MW2 onwards. But if they tried to sell it that way, mobs would pogrom Kotick no question. I remember reading people on /v/ freaking the fuck out about these statements and not getting why, they seemed so self-evidently correct. Call of Duty being a subscription rather than a contrived new production cycle every time would make sense. But no, the gamer masses thought they were being RIPPED OFF. So now we have campaigns nobody plays eating absurd budgets and since nobody cares they got entirely captured by SJW freaks (ties into my other posts today, what happens when you disregard a human element and ditch the quality source) just to serve as a vehicle base for the same multiplayer game warehouse workers have been playing since 2010.

Now imagine you're some oldfuck who has just lived on corporate boards for a long time, it's 2010, your company makes video games, and the numbers are going down for some reason on a few of your big titles. I probably sound fucking insane to you guys now explaining the above. Imagine you work on Mass Effect and you have to explain that what you're doing simply isn't the same kind of project and will never be as viable as what your boss considers the big ideals you should be chasing. Obviously, you don't say that because you don't want to get fired. So you just kind of sheepishly nod and go along with his retarded ideas on how to maddenise mass effect and hope he doesn't fuck the game too badly.

AND EVEN BEYOND THAT, what ultimately doomed Mass Effect 3 was its pointless, stupid writing and absurd setup, facilitated by how stupid Mass Effect 2 was, which succeeded despite being dumb because this was such an absurdly retarded cultural moment. It was carrying expectations it couldn't make good on. Stuff like Javik, multiplayer mode impacting single player outcomes, that was just salt in the wound.

4.Evolve came out with over 60$ worth of DLC on day ONE.

Oh no... Evolve.

5.Destiny 2 one day decided that their game was *too big* so they started deleting previous expansions and zones from the game, permanently, even if you payed hundreds of dollars for all of that.

Yeah I believe there is exactly one guy on Earth who actually cares about that. Ross. Gamers love Ross because he legitimises a lot of peasant neurosis. "WHAT IF I WANT TO WALK THROUGH THE EMPTY WORLD OF A FAILED 25 YEAR OLD MMO?" The only person on Earth who can ask that question in good faith is Ross. Because he actually does it. He is a very weird, very autistic man with very peculiar interests. Organising the world around the will of extreme autists would be very cool, but I can't call a person vile if they aren't willing to take a serious economic hit to do so for one particular case just because he asks.

The vast bulk of Destiny fans are people playing it as a subscription, they take it all in as an ongoing wave, and don't particularly care about or get attached to any given part anyway. Which particular deleted part of Destiny 2 did you want to see any why? You have no answer, I'm figuring, because the principle gets you. The idea you can't play them all. That value can be taken out of your preferred deal of 60 dollars for the whole thing, with price to only decay from release. That's not viable. The industry can't be the playstation 2 forever. If you want games to get bigger, more elaborate, more involved ongoing dev cycles, the deal has to change.

I don't give a shit about corporate profits, fuck the videogame industry.

Without them who will make the video games?

 

[Sergio]

I don't give a shit about corporate profits, fuck the videogame industry.

It would be justified if these profits went to the ACTUAL DEVS, but no, they just make useless execs rich.

And most devs have completely given up on videogames since all of them get fired the second development is finished. Too many fucking times we've all read some news about ''RECORD PROFITS!'' followed by half of the studio being disbanded.
Nobody of any talent is gonna bother joining this shitfest. So the only people left are the rejects and those who have more passion than wisdom.

They get fired if they're no longer needed. For example, because the company doesn't have a new project for them. Because the previous one was shit and sold like shit. So what's going to pay their salary? At least that's how smaller indie dev studios operate. Make a good game>get sales>pay salary>make enough to have a job for another game>repeat until you fail. Back in the day there were a lot of investors who could ease the financial burden on dev teams, but nowadays funding is very hard to get, both because the investors are wary, and because the competition is very high.

Meanwhile big studios are just meat grinders focused on making money who give zero fucks about their employees anyway (below high management level at least). If you choose to work in such studio and expect anything else, it's your mistake.

 

[processdaemon]

Microtransactions for cosmetics and other in-game items aren't inherently awful, a good game made by talented devs that offers new outfits or premium skins to keep itself afloat is perfectly fine to me and isn't that different to a band making more money from merch than music sales (which can often to be the case for smaller musicians). I have bought premium editions and day 1 bundles for indie and AA games which only offer a few cosmetic or minor boost items for exactly this reason.

That said, I don't think the issue most people have is that individual games have been 'ruined' by microtransactions so asking people to list games that have been damaged by them isn't really getting at the point. The kinds of games that are terrible and have microtransactions are largely made by people who would have likely made terrible games anyway, the issue is that these sorts of games are such good money makers that it encourages investors and the companies that own multiple smaller studios to pour money into games that lend themselves to that sort of monetization and makes funding single player games that have a more deep, narrow focus (which I'd imagine most of the people on a forum like this are going to prefer) more of a risk in comparison. You can monetize these games in the way you're describing to an extent, with item packs, new classes/ quests and expansions (see Owlcat's DLC model), but they can't compete in terms of profit over time with games that are made with enabling that kind of business model in mind without sacrificing some of the things that make them good (stories and character arcs with solid beginnings, middles and ends, well defined build progression, consistent itemisation, etc).

So overall I'd say that the issue isn't 'microtransactions bad', it's 'microtransactions are so good at making money that they appeal more to investors than the kinds of games I want to see'.

 

[Odoryuk]

Actually, horse armor poisoned our water supply, burned our crops and delivered a plague unto our houses

 

[GamerCat_]

Actually good games (or rather, they either WERE good before being monetized to hell and back or WOULD be if not for greedy publishers): FIFA series (NBA2K too). Gran Turismo 7. Overwatch 2. Europa Universalis 4. Fucking Plants vs Zombies!

People who defend this slop is the reason why it's so widespread. Shameful.

Sportsball games in general I consider boring. But as far as playing them goes, you can go back to any iteration you consider ideal. Icycalm wrote a piece about soccer games, about how his favourite one mechanics-wise was less famous, more interesting as a game, not necessarily a realisation of the premise of soccer.

For better or worse I do think it's true that to a certain kind of person, the premise of and appeal of soccer involves money. Obviously there's the gambling aspect in buying random players. But also a sense of luxury and ownership that comes from investing in a team. And I think that's actually what makes FIFA compelling to play online, and something I'm not necessarily opposed to in principle. People think it's cool to be the suitguy building a team to win. Of course games that are just about managing soccer/football teams exist, and maybe they would be better served by those instead. Ideally with some Ridge Racer style aestheticsmaxxed presentation emphasising slick luxury to compensate for the lack of gambling. Really sell the idea that you're a cool guy getting immersed in a higher and nicer world and succeeding. I think the utilitarian presentation of the football manager games, and western sim projects in general is a giant missed opportunity. Companies like Koei have understood for a long time that simulation is more about being immersed in a romantic idea of what something is than accurately simulating market forces.



For Gran Tourismo, I don't know what specifically is going on there, let me look. Okay, it's what I thought. This game is to cars, what World of Shooting/World of Guns are to Guns. I really like World of Shooting. I like the slow grind because it's a game about appreciating things. I'm not rushing to the credits. I want to spend a long time with each gun. It's why I'm here. I get that not everyone is me, some people buy a car game to jump right into the machine on the box. I can't call any approach right or wrong. Again, we have no market justice calculation to fall back on here. This industry isn't rational. But I like this approach of in-game value, slow accrual and appreciation. My favourite realistic car game was the first Forza Motorsport. I loved it as a collecting game. It's about buying cars and having them. Slowly going from not much to a lot. This is a different experience to just opening a game and having a spread of machines you can control.



Yeah the more I look into this the more awesome it looks. This game wasn't made for you. It was made for me. I simply can't trust non-Japanese people to appraise these things. Look at all the third worlders and people who can't write in plain English freaking out in the comment section here. If I hear Japanese people are super pissed off about a game's approach and policies, there's probably something to it.

Now let's see. Overwatch 2. Good one. EU4, ah, right, paradoxshit. Well my understanding of Paradox is that they're trying to kind of bridge the gap between unshakeable hard tactics wargaming grognard models of gigantic modules for gigantic unflinching prices, and the more loose, sales and small pieces approach of newer PC gamer oriented "strategy" works.

My understanding here, what makes this come together, is that these games are made over a long time. That the games tend to be fundamentally complete at launch, with free updates improving functionality, and new modules and parts and features coming out later as optional expansions which they made later, and are willing to give you for compensation for their work. Now if I'm wrong somehow, they make the whole game by launch, then sit on their asses occasionally hitting a release button, you can explain that to me. Or you can explain your market and morality calculations which say what they're all actually worth. But I don't see myself being swayed on this one. I really just don't like these games on a fundamental level. I really liked the first 'Imperialism'. That's my map game.

Plants vs Zombies 2, that's less a case of a game being corrupted by a new monetisation element and more like a fundamentally different class of game. Developers, IP, and talent being swept into what is basically a phone-game scam industry rather than the complete game experiences we used to get, that's a real complaint you can make. But it's not horse armour.

The only real way to beat that particular problem is to embrace gacha more widely, let it be used as a kind of auxilliary money-maker for the greater industry, try to facilitate as much free expression and nice stuff as possible within it to keep people sane, and not let it reach into and corrupt the complete single player experience market. Japan successfully did this. Nintendo makes a psychotic amount of money from selling fire-emblem waifus to phone users. They did not feed the mainline Fire Emblem series to a phone market with distorted incentives. The distorted industry is kept subordinate. A clear recognition of what does and doesn't make money, and what should purely do that and what should really try to be its own more self justified thing, a failure to draw these lines is doing lasting damage to the western industry. Old jews not sure if Mass Effect should be FIFA, if Plants vs Zombies should be Bejeweled, putting elaborate high production value movie-experiences in what is basically a vapid arena shooter for warehouse workers (call of duty).

I believe we can work out right places for all of these elements. Trying to make principled dismissals of classes of monetisation and practices out of hand is just not productive or sharp at all. Keep looking at Japan. They do everything right compared to us.

 

[Fedora Master]

Bethesda did nothing wrong in the same sense the corpse ships that arrived in Genoese ports in 1356 did "nothing wrong".

 

[HumanTotemPole]

Disagree with the OP. Very odd to look back on, with credit to Infinitron, the vulgar corporatisation of games since the mid 00s and conclude that the solution is more of the same.

AAA devs and publishers had success in garnering exponential industry growth without it being reflected in the overall quality of the product, other than in certain aspects of audiovisual presentation; more specifically those that balloon development costs.

Shareholders breathing down their necks as growth must continue, despite ever decreasing amounts of disposable income to hoover up. I don't envy their situation but I don't pity them either. Made the rod for their own backs.

Bethesda did nothing wrong in the same sense the corpse ships that arrived in Genoese ports in 1356 did "nothing wrong".

About 10 years out FM but the point stands.

 

[Ritz]

The only real way to beat that particular problem is to embrace gacha more widely, let it be used as a kind of auxilliary money-maker for the greater industry, try to facilitate as much free expression and nice stuff as possible within it to keep people sane, and not let it reach into and corrupt the complete single player experience market. Japan successfully did this.

This is also basically the reason a number of the major visual novel, galge, eroge, bishoujo game (whatever) companies are still around and able to hire voice actors, artists, composers etc for their "traditional" games. The company CyGames was founded with the goal of using the profits earned from gacha anime games where men and women get emotionally attached to characters to fund more traditional video games and original anime. This is not a raw deal at all, but it would probably not work in the states because getting emotionally attached to things is "gay".

 

[Necrensha]

In this thread I would like to challenge you all to name good games RUINED by MICROTRANSACTIONS, GREED, DLC, etc

Prince of Persia as far as I can tell was a completed game

No, it wasn't.

And as for Asura's Wrath, I can't find a straight story on why they did that. Still, there's no hard science of value in play here so ultimately this is your own judgements. Why did these games get DLCs in this way? I don't know, but am kind of curious. I DON'T believe that these are cases of purely cynical profitmaxxing.

Selling the ending separately doesn't count as profitmaxxing? Why? Because you say so? Fuck off.

The DLC squadmate in ME3 was not calculated cynical profitmaxxing.

Yes it was.

Oh no... Evolve.

Oh no? You asked for examples of ruined games, but apparently this one doesn't count because... you don't care about it huh.

Yeah I believe there is exactly one guy on Earth who actually cares about that. Ross. Gamers love Ross because he legitimises a lot of peasant neurosis. "WHAT IF I WANT TO WALK THROUGH THE EMPTY WORLD OF A FAILED 25 YEAR OLD MMO?" The only person on Earth who can ask that question in good faith is Ross. Because he actually does it. He is a very weird, very autistic man with very peculiar interests.

Blablabla, you have ZERO arguments and instead start rambling about Ross as if it has anything to do with the topic.

The vast bulk of Destiny fans are people playing it as a subscription, they take it all in as an ongoing wave, and don't particularly care about or get attached to any given part anyway. Which particular deleted part of Destiny 2 did you want to see any why? You have no answer, I'm figuring, because the principle gets you. The idea you can't play them all. That value can be taken out of your preferred deal of 60 dollars for the whole thing, with price to only decay from release. That's not viable. The industry can't be the playstation 2 forever. If you want games to get bigger, more elaborate, more involved ongoing dev cycles, the deal has to change.

So you ARE a profitmaxxing boot-licking corpo-lover who desires every game should be cut into 6000 pieces which can be arbitrarily removed from your account at any point. And you're arguing all of this for FREE? Bro, you're losing potential profits right now!

Without them who will make the video games?

Really, you rant about profitmaxxing so much but then turn around and pretend like you need a corporation to make videogames? Ever heard of indie games or one-man projects?
What a waste of time is trying to dig through your AI-generated posts.

 

[Strange Fellow]

The gamer's aversion to business models structured around DLCs, subscriptions, microtransactions, has obviously done far more harm to the industry than good. Trends which are killing beloved studios, brands, and games can be traced back to this. Multiplayer games people enjoy with a stable game-state can't stay alive on the initial buy-in followed by tolerated micro-trickle of income so they create sequel games that don't make sense and aren't justified as games because they need another initial purchase buy in to stay alive. Blood Bowl 2 and Killing Floor 2 could have stayed alive indefinitely if they found a way to monetise their stable playerbases. I loved Blood Bowl 2. I would have paid real money for elaborate customisation bullshit. Let me put horse armour on my skaven. Their next game kind of did do that, but offset by the fact beyond meta-mechanics blood bowl didn't need a sequel, so to make their project seem more justified they fucked with the rules, the visuals, it's a mess of arbitrary re-arrangement. Split the playerbase and killed high production value PC blood bowl.

It's funny that you mention Blood Bowl, because that was the series that came to mind when I saw this thread. To see it used as an argument in favour of microtransactions is very strange.

Blood Bowl 3 is a perfect example of the kind of garbage that results from the nickel-and-dime business model. The game came out two years ago and is still not close to feature complete, and why? Because they're doing Season Passes to keep people engaged. They're releasing a new official team once every three months, alongside other features that should have been in the game from day one.

You can't convince me that they couldn't have shat out the remaining teams and star players by now. The reason they haven't is presumably to keep people engaged, which is the same reason the game is full of microtransactions - which naturally were in the game from day one, when the game was even shittier and more barebones than it is today, and didn't even have basic things like league support.

They didn't even have league support! Because they thought that they'd make more money from addicted gamers grinding the infinite ladder all day long with their blinged-up teams to complete the Season Pass as if Blood Bowl were Fortnite. That's where they thought the money was, so that's where they spent the effort.

And what have they gained from these brilliant tactics? The playerbase of Cyanide's Blood Bowl has been decimated. Blood Bowl 3 is a failure.

And no, it's not because of the rules or the models changing - these changes both come directly from the tabletop version. Tabletop Blood Bowl is still popular, and they play with the new rules and (mostly) with the new models. FUMBBL is still popular (relatively speaking), and has always rightly recognised that it benefits from keeping the rules a jour with the universally akcnowledged authority, ie. Games Workshop. As for the models, word has it that it was mandated from GW that the BB3 models correspond to the official tabletop models, so Cyanide's hands were tied there.

The upshot is that fundamental changes needed to happen to both rules and visuals. The idea that the developers would have been better served essentially rebuilding their game from scratch for free, and recouping those costs from microtransactions, rather than releasing a new game and benefitting from hype and marketing, is ludicrous.

The main reason Blood Bowl 3 is a shitty game is because it's incomplete and geared towards mindless grinding, and it is both these things because of nickel-and-dime garbage.

Funnily enough, I actually agree that microtransactions in principle aren't a bad thing for a game like this. Let retarded whales pour money into the pockets of the developers, and I'll reap the rewards. Great! Except now they're actually withholding necessary parts of the game, for no reason except that retarded business people think, like you, that there's massive untapped potential in their customers' wallets that can be unlocked with one simple trick.

Lastly, just to bring it back around to Todd again, I would be remiss not to point out that online games and single player games are fundamentally different things. Skaven armour for Blood Bowl is a good idea (as long as it doesn't affect me - but it always will, because greedy retards never stop there). Horse armour for Oblivion is not just a greedy or evil idea but a stupid one.

The simple reason we can't point to a game that was ruined by the introduction of horse armour is because it never really caught on. Certainly not in any of the post-Oblivion games I've played. It was a failed experiment. The ramifications of the experiment have probably metastasised in lowest-common-denominator trash like gacha games - I wouldn't know since I don't touch the garbage, I've only been unlucky enough to come into contact with it on a single occasion with Blood Bowl. But for single-player role-playing RPG games and other genres worth paying attention to, it's pretty much irrelevant, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

So, you know, who gives a shit.

 

[GamerCat_]

Disagree with the OP. Very odd to look back on, with credit to Infinitron, the vulgar corporatisation of games since the mid 00s and conclude that the solution is more of the same.

AAA devs and publishers had success in garnering exponential industry growth without it being reflected in the overall quality of the product, other than in certain aspects of audiovisual presentation; more specifically those that balloon development costs.

Shareholders breathing down their necks as growth must continue, despite ever decreasing amounts of disposable income to hoover up. I don't envy their situation but I don't pity them either. Made the rod for their own backs.

Bethesda did nothing wrong in the same sense the corpse ships that arrived in Genoese ports in 1356 did "nothing wrong".

About 10 years out FM but the point stands.

The solution to vulgar corporatisation... is non-vulgar corporatisation.

I don't post this book every time game production comes up because I think the cover is funny. I post it because I think it's important. When you say vulgar corporatisation, you're talking about what happened in America, not Japan. If anything Japan was far more corporatised for far longer with excellent results. Clearly the problem is not "corpos" in general. Read the chapters on the transformation from their early 20th century standards to taking cues from Hjalmar Schacht. Those are the most important parts. The story of the subversion and crash through the 80s is interesting (especially Werner's angle) but what I think is really notable is how many underlying elements and ideas of organisation and economics clearly still survived this transformative period, even if in weakened form. Still infinitely stronger than America, where they entirely dropped these practices.

Growth without quality, shareholders, this all sounds familiar.



No jiggling breasts on the anime girls, no love interest under the age of 25 with usu~u~u~u~u~r~ra.

In this thread I would like to challenge you all to name good games RUINED by MICROTRANSACTIONS, GREED, DLC, etc

Prince of Persia as far as I can tell was a completed game

No, it wasn't.

Well, do you feel like it was complete after the DLC? I fail to see how when ending you take as a complete, whole work, and the other not. They're very similar. No really new plot elements introduced. It's just another step towards the already established sequel premise.

And as for Asura's Wrath, I can't find a straight story on why they did that. Still, there's no hard science of value in play here so ultimately this is your own judgements. Why did these games get DLCs in this way? I don't know, but am kind of curious. I DON'T believe that these are cases of purely cynical profitmaxxing.

Selling the ending separately doesn't count as profitmaxxing? Why? Because you say so? Fuck off.

I haven't given a reason why because I don't know why they did it. There's a lot of speculation flying around. That they wanted it to be a highly produced distinct thing rather than a limited part of the original production. Or it was meant to be in a sequel they learned they wouldn't get to make. They cut it for time and didn't want to leave the game without it. If we don't know we can only speculate. If you immediately gravitate to the most coarse and vulgar possible explanation as a matter of course that suggests to me you have some kind of neurosis with regard to this whole thing.

The DLC squadmate in ME3 was not calculated cynical profitmaxxing.

Yes it was.

If it was it would have become standard practice. This is a recurring gamer logic-trap, that everything you don't like is GREED even when it doesn't make money. If this paid brilliantly EA might do it more often. They didn't, because it was a confused scrambling nonsense move. Because the rising costs of the 360 generation threw EA off and they failed to appreciate new industry and market dynamics and work out some new model that gave them what they wanted, not even getting into what consumers and producers wanted.

Oh no... Evolve.

Oh no? You asked for examples of ruined games, but apparently this one doesn't count because... you don't care about it huh.

"RUINED" is the key word here. What is the appeal of Evolve and how was it compromised by the DLC policy? Is this your neurosis about not having 100% of everything for one purchase again? Would this have been a brilliant and much beloved and enduring game if you couldn't buy a new skin for the ass-blaster immediately?

Yeah I believe there is exactly one guy on Earth who actually cares about that. Ross. Gamers love Ross because he legitimises a lot of peasant neurosis. "WHAT IF I WANT TO WALK THROUGH THE EMPTY WORLD OF A FAILED 25 YEAR OLD MMO?" The only person on Earth who can ask that question in good faith is Ross. Because he actually does it. He is a very weird, very autistic man with very peculiar interests.

Blablabla, you have ZERO arguments and instead start rambling about Ross as if it has anything to do with the topic.

I had to scroll back up to remember what this was about. You're talking about 'DESTINY SEASONS'. Can we get some fellow 'dexers to comment on whether or not Necrensha seems like the kind of person who in a trillion years would be curious about playing the 47th level of 200 of Destiny 2? Is he actually being deprived? And I'd also like a public census, is it reasonable to give a shit even if he does?

The vast bulk of Destiny fans are people playing it as a subscription, they take it all in as an ongoing wave, and don't particularly care about or get attached to any given part anyway. Which particular deleted part of Destiny 2 did you want to see any why? You have no answer, I'm figuring, because the principle gets you. The idea you can't play them all. That value can be taken out of your preferred deal of 60 dollars for the whole thing, with price to only decay from release. That's not viable. The industry can't be the playstation 2 forever. If you want games to get bigger, more elaborate, more involved ongoing dev cycles, the deal has to change.

So you ARE a profitmaxxing boot-licking corpo-lover who desires every game should be cut into 6000 pieces which can be arbitrarily removed from your account at any point. And you're arguing all of this for FREE? Bro, you're losing potential profits right now!

"Corpo" is a tranny term by the way. I like it when companies and artists I like make money. I love some corporations (all Japanese) because I think they do wonderful things for arts and culture. I do not love corporations in general, or hate them. I see it as a broad class of organisation that can do a lot of things. I don't necessarily want every game cut up, but some obviously could be treated that way and might be better off all around for it. If Blood Bowl sold teams one at a time and had something like, season pass by in for ranked season access twice a year, maybe we'd have a viable well produced PC game with a strong playerbase.

Now I know the actual story with Blood Bowl is more complicated due to the odd history between GW and Cyanide, I meant to post about that earlier but forgot. Now there's another post about it I'll get back to the issue. While I'm doing that you go dilate or something.

Without them who will make the video games?

Really, you rant about profitmaxxing so much but then turn around and pretend like you need a corporation to make videogames? Ever heard of indie games or one-man projects?
What a waste of time is trying to dig through your AI-generated posts.

You said fuck the "industry", not corporations. And you clearly do need an industry, and corporations to get a lot done. Yes, some of my favourite games were made by lone autists. Several were made by autists empowered by larger organisations and corporations. Johan Nagel made Angola '86 just about alone because he's a hero. But his earlier games he got done with support from Slitherine. Even if their working relationship wasn't perfect, that initial starting infrastructure and framing got him over the line and got his career started, got him building experience and faith in himself. Doekuramori made 'Beyond Citadel' alone aside from the music and store hosting (hey what is Valve, Necrensha?) alone because he's an autist hero.

But Halo:CE, we owe that game's existence to both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Doesn't get much more corpo than that. And yes, Bill arguably rode Bungie into the ground with sequel demands and crushed their spirit. The world is hard and unfair. We should reorganise the economy along Hitlerian lines. Microtransactions did not do this.

 

[Modron]

1.Prince of Persia(2008) AND Asura's Wrath both sold their fucking ENDING separately.

And PoP didn't even bother to port over the dlc ending to pc.

 

[whocares]

So @GamerCat_ is correct

Is this guy your personal pet project or something? Because you keep encouraging his bullshit while everyone else can see he's a colossal retard without a single worthwhile thought. Just because he's drowning his retardation in walls of text that would make chatgpt blush and visual AIDS, doesn't mean he has anything resembling a coherent point.

Just consign him to prosperium and let him go wild where no one can hear him sperg.

 

[GamerCat_]

Blood Bowl 2 and Killing Floor 2 could have stayed alive indefinitely if they found a way to monetise their stable playerbases. I loved Blood Bowl 2. I would have paid real money for elaborate customisation bullshit.

Cyanide made a not blood bowl game got sued by Games Workshop and as part of the settlement they had to make 3 BB games with GW taking the lion's share of the base sales hence all the nickle and diming they did with the dlc to scrape out a meagre profit.

Yes, meant to get back to this issue.

The gamer's aversion to business models structured around DLCs, subscriptions, microtransactions, has obviously done far more harm to the industry than good. Trends which are killing beloved studios, brands, and games can be traced back to this. Multiplayer games people enjoy with a stable game-state can't stay alive on the initial buy-in followed by tolerated micro-trickle of income so they create sequel games that don't make sense and aren't justified as games because they need another initial purchase buy in to stay alive. Blood Bowl 2 and Killing Floor 2 could have stayed alive indefinitely if they found a way to monetise their stable playerbases. I loved Blood Bowl 2. I would have paid real money for elaborate customisation bullshit. Let me put horse armour on my skaven. Their next game kind of did do that, but offset by the fact beyond meta-mechanics blood bowl didn't need a sequel, so to make their project seem more justified they fucked with the rules, the visuals, it's a mess of arbitrary re-arrangement. Split the playerbase and killed high production value PC blood bowl.

It's funny that you mention Blood Bowl, because that was the series that came to mind when I saw this thread. To see it used as an argument in favour of microtransactions is very strange.

Blood Bowl 3 is a perfect example of the kind of garbage that results from the nickel-and-dime business model. The game came out two years ago and is still not close to feature complete, and why? Because they're doing Season Passes to keep people engaged. They're releasing a new official team once every three months, alongside other features that should have been in the game from day one.

You're looking at this wrong. Your perspective is constrained. We had EVERY team at day one. Because WE HAD BLOOD BOWL 2. We didn't have nobles or black orcs because they're a gay forced meme to pretend 3 isn't the completely pointless remake of 2 it is. That is the outrage.

You can't convince me that they couldn't have shat out the remaining teams and star players by now. The reason they haven't is presumably to keep people engaged, which is the same reason the game is full of microtransactions - which naturally were in the game from day one, when the game was even shittier and more barebones than it is today, and didn't even have basic things like league support.

They didn't even have league support! Because they thought that they'd make more money from addicted gamers grinding the infinite ladder all day long with their blinged-up teams to complete the Season Pass as if Blood Bowl were Fortnite. That's where they thought the money was, so that's where they spent the effort.

I think ladder focus is a good idea, lack of leagues is still terrible, but wanting ladder to be the key experience I think is fine. Good for a PC title. Grinding a league mostly alone, unlocking bits to put on my players, that's a good foundation idea. If you ask me everything else went wrong. Lack of teams, fucking with the rules, visuals arguably being significantly worse than 2. Game should have felt sleek and perfect to justify moving from 2 to 3. An undeniable upgrade.

And what have they gained from these brilliant tactics? The playerbase of Cyanide's Blood Bowl has been decimated. Blood Bowl 3 is a failure.

And no, it's not because of the rules or the models changing - these changes both come directly from the tabletop version. Tabletop Blood Bowl is still popular, and they play with the new rules and (mostly) with the new models. FUMBBL is still popular (relatively speaking), and has always rightly recognised that it benefits from keeping the rules a jour with the universally akcnowledged authority, ie. Games Workshop. As for the models, word has it that it was mandated from GW that the BB3 models correspond to the official tabletop models, so Cyanide's hands were tied there.

I don't care about the specific models so much as the game's greater aesthetic direction and graphical realisation. The game feels muddy and indistinct to look at. I remember JimmyFantastic feeling so sickened by the game's visual quality alone that he quit.

The upshot is that fundamental changes needed to happen to both rules and visuals. The idea that the developers would have been better served essentially rebuilding their game from scratch for free, and recouping those costs from microtransactions, rather than releasing a new game and benefitting from hype and marketing, is ludicrous.

I think rebuilding 2 as a freemium game where you start with humans and orks was the way to go. New game could have worked, but they absolutely had to nail a running start. And of course they didn't do that at all. The game would have to look and handle fantastically and immediately have an enthusiastic and plugged in base to have a notable release. Instead it alienated existing blood bowl fans while also being shit on its own. I really don't consider the visual changes fundamental, I just think the game looks bad. I really liked how 2 looked, but I think the general new designs of the models plugged into the aesthetic and graphical quality and feel of 2 would have looked fine. Did GW say "the visuals have to look like muddy bleeding indistinct brown shit, like you're having a stroke while looking at a world of mud"? Because that's what BB3 looks like.

Why is every image so BUSY and BROWN gah fuck it's so ugly.

2 by contrast just felt clean at all times. Soft colour palette. Clean, restrained visuals.

The main reason Blood Bowl 3 is a shitty game is because it's incomplete and geared towards mindless grinding, and it is both these things because of nickel-and-dime garbage.

For me it's primarily how it looked and new rules. The lack of teams wouldn't have hurt too bad since I'd know they're coming. Something to look forward to. If everything else was great I could have gotten used to a new ruleset. But all of it together, I just didn't want to. What never struck me as an issue was paying for hats or new teams on release. If the game looked like something I'd enjoy I'd just play with what they gave us while waiting for Skaven. I hear you can't even MV10 anymore. Where's the fun in that? It's what Gutter Runners are for.

Lost my oldest screenshots apparently, my favourite Skaven kit was the light blue one. That looked super nice.

Funnily enough, I actually agree that microtransactions in principle aren't a bad thing for a game like this. Let retarded whales pour money into the pockets of the developers, and I'll reap the rewards. Great! Except now they're actually withholding necessary parts of the game, for no reason except that retarded business people think, like you, that there's massive untapped potential in their customers' wallets that can be unlocked with one simple trick.

At this point I have to figure their plans have been altered by shit performance. They've done some numbers and decided this is the best for returns, and they've given up on this game having a really healthy life and playerbase.

Lastly, just to bring it back around to Todd again, I would be remiss not to point out that online games and single player games are fundamentally different things.

Yes, very important point lost on gamer culture as a whole.

Skaven armour for Blood Bowl is a good idea (as long as it doesn't affect me - but it always will, because greedy retards never stop there).

But they do. There has never been a widely popular multiplayer game in which you could just pay to powerspike yourself. The way the internet talked about it in 2012 you'd think you could buy tactical nukes in call of duty. Nikita pulled some bullshit in Contract Wars, but he lives in Russia and needs money to live and make cool things, so I sympathise. I should look further into that, what exactly you could do with the purchases. I've read the notes from that talk he gave about studying cheater and purchase dynamics over the life of Contract Wars. Should look again.

Horse armour for Oblivion is not just a greedy or evil idea but a stupid one.

The simple reason we can't point to a game that was ruined by the introduction of horse armour is because it never really caught on. Certainly not in any of the post-Oblivion games I've played. It was a failed experiment. The ramifications of the experiment have probably metastasised in lowest-common-denominator trash like gacha games - I wouldn't know since I don't touch the garbage, I've only been unlucky enough to come into contact with it on a single occasion with Blood Bowl. But for single-player role-playing RPG games and other genres worth paying attention to, it's pretty much irrelevant, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

Actually, I think it became semi-common for Japanese games to have this kind of thing. Because the Japanese are smart and tasteful. Buying costumes is in a lot of single player or local multiplayer games. Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid, etc. You can buy parade kit for your horse in MGSV, and a tuxedo for Snake. Awesome.

So, you know, who gives a shit.

One day horse armour will rise from the grave and you will all see I was right.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Games with MTXs or similars have a game-loop logic that seems more akin to forced labour or prison sentence.

 

[HumanTotemPole]

Disagree with the OP. Very odd to look back on, with credit to Infinitron, the vulgar corporatisation of games since the mid 00s and conclude that the solution is more of the same.

AAA devs and publishers had success in garnering exponential industry growth without it being reflected in the overall quality of the product, other than in certain aspects of audiovisual presentation; more specifically those that balloon development costs.

Shareholders breathing down their necks as growth must continue, despite ever decreasing amounts of disposable income to hoover up. I don't envy their situation but I don't pity them either. Made the rod for their own backs.

Bethesda did nothing wrong in the same sense the corpse ships that arrived in Genoese ports in 1356 did "nothing wrong".

About 10 years out FM but the point stands.

The solution to vulgar corporatisation... is non-vulgar corporatisation.

I don't post this book every time game production comes up because I think the cover is funny. I post it because I think it's important. When you say vulgar corporatisation, you're talking about what happened in America, not Japan. If anything Japan was far more corporatised for far longer with excellent results. Clearly the problem is not "corpos" in general. Read the chapters on the transformation from their early 20th century standards to taking cues from Hjalmar Schacht. Those are the most important parts. The story of the subversion and crash through the 80s is interesting (especially Werner's angle) but what I think is really notable is how many underlying elements and ideas of organisation and economics clearly still survived this transformative period, even if in weakened form. Still infinitely stronger than America, where they entirely dropped these practices.

This is fair, corporatisation used nonspecifically is a bit broad brush. With most of us here being Westerners or at least adjacent to Anglo-American cultural hegemony, corporate hasn't been associated with quality for a long time, as I'm sure you know. Has me thinking of rent extraction and financialisation in Silicon Valley rather than 20th century Japanese industry at its peak. No incentive to behave otherwise either, so it'll continue for the foreseeable.

 

[Iucounu]

most devs have completely given up on videogames

Seems to me there are still more than needed. Or maybe it's the good ones that leave, and only the hacks remain?

since all of them get fired the second development is finished.

Ideally devs would find a new project as soon as their current one was finished - just like in any freelance business - but it's true that many eventually get tired of the lack of stable income.

Firings could also explain why games take so much time to make. Maybe some bugs are even inserted on purpose, to make the devs indispensable for a few more months of debugging.

 

[Necrensha]

Seems to me there are still more than needed. Or maybe it's the good ones that leave, and only the hacks remain?

Apparently the videogame industry has more than twice turnover compared to the majority of other industries(15-20% average vs 5-10%), making it one of the highest in the world.
Yeah, there's more devs than ever but most of them are unironically third worlders scamming the shit out of the system with their worthless degrees.

Ideally devs would find a new project as soon as their current one was finished - just like in any freelance business - but it's true that many eventually get tired of the lack of stable income.

Right. The problem is that videogames have become more expensive and complex than movies by several orders of magnitude. Many AAA devs are basically trained assembly line workers, they can barely understand what they're doing.
Like when Beyond Good and Evil 2 was being worked on by Michel Ancel an article came out of some people that used to work on Assassin's Creed now complaining that it was ''impossible'' to keep up with BGE2's director since he insisted that they manually sculpt every single thing in the game instead of buying assets and called him a slave driver and so on.
People really underestimate just how hard it was the forge the classics of the past.

 

[HansDampf]

"It's fine if it's just for cosmetics."


MTX only benefit the publishers, not the gamers.