What the hell is happening with the video-game market?

[George Costanza]

I normally dont buy season passes, but i am fine with day 1 dlc. (especially if it is multiple stuff and on an expansion level) at a moderate level of money spent.

[Jester Joe]

You might be in the wrong thread.

I disagree, because you not buying COD is fine, but how many shooters are super similar to COD now?

I'm not in the wrong thread when you take one post out of context in regards to everything. My point was merely that I'm not going to waste time complaining about LoL, and you seemed to want to escalate that for some reason.

And that has nothing to do with my statement.

[ro9ue]

Yes, and the way you turn modding into a career is by putting your shit into a portfolio, and using it to apply for game development positions, or do mosd on comission from other players, the exact way it works for artists turning theirs into a career, they either work commissions or they put their hobby work into a portfolio and use it to apply for artist positions.

Who are you to decide that's how you turn modding into a career? If Bethesda or any other game developer decides to make a marketplace for playerbase-made goods you can be damn well certain people will be making a living off that if they can.

All that you need for a career is a market willing to pay for what you make. It's just up to the game developers on whether or not they want to allow this to happen.

[GennGreymane]

I'm not in the wrong thread when you take one post out of context in regards to everything. My point was merely that I'm not going to waste time complaining about LoL, and you seemed to want to escalate that for some reason.

And that has nothing to do with my statement.

But why didnt you want to waste time complain about LOL?

[Schattenlied]

Who are you to decide that's how you turn modding into a career? If Bethesda or any other game developer decides to make a marketplace for playerbase-made goods you can be damn well certain people will be making a living off that if they can.

All that you need for a career is a market willing to pay for what you make. It's just up to the game developers on whether or not they want to allow this to happen.

And when people have been offering and getting mods for free for 20 years, that "market willing to pay" is basically not going to exist, and backlash to the system will be extremely harsh, as we have already seen.

There are already ways to make money off modding, ways that don't involve the company taking in money for the modder's hard work when the company did nothing aside from provide them with tools, tools that have already been paid for, by both the modder and the players getting the mods.

[George Costanza]

I do homever agree on some points my main reasons for not buying games like EA wars BF 2 is aside from being EA and them being the root/cause of evil squared, Their business model is stupid, the lootbox stuff where you get upgrades is far too p2w for me, it should just be skins or vanity items, like overwatchs loot boxes are (primarily skins and tatoos or whatever.

Shadow of wars Singleplayer Fuckface McGreedypants (yes the microtrans) is just beyond fucking retarded that i am Sooooo glad the only games i have bought this year have basically been Starcraft Remaster Wolfenstein 2 digital deluxe (for 48 gbp its quite acceptable given it could easily been worse) and probably payday 2-.... Fuck i spend too much on videogames even though that amount is about 150 $ this year.

Yikes.

Fucking shit

[Jester Joe]

But why didnt you want to waste time complain about LOL?

Irrelevant, because that has nothing to do with the thread at this point. I was only responding about it because of the context at the time (which was the other poster being fine with LoL while hating Overwatch, which I find odd as an opinion).

Just because you wanted to escalate that into misunderstanding that for some reason you wanted to drag on for multiple pages without just accepting "Hey, Joe might be a bit thick/stubborn/impulsive at times, but he is saying flat out that isn't what was meant, and the sentence could easily mean exactly what he's clarifying it as, maybe I should just give him the benefit of the doubt!" doesn't mean I should have to keep answering the same questions over and over.

[GennGreymane]

Irrelevant, because that has nothing to do with the thread at this point. I was only responding about it because of the context at the time (which was the other poster being fine with LoL while hating Overwatch, which I find odd as an opinion).

Just because you wanted to escalate that into misunderstanding that for some reason you wanted to drag on for multiple pages without just accepting "Hey, Joe might be a bit thick/stubborn/impulsive at times, but he is saying flat out that isn't what was meant, and the sentence could easily mean exactly what he's clarifying it as, maybe I should just give him the benefit of the doubt!" doesn't mean I should have to keep answering the same questions over and over.

I didn't misunderstand.

[Jester Joe]

I didn't misunderstand.

You did. I told you in a follow up post exactly what I mean, and I agree trend wise it still affects others, but that isn't what I'm debating.

Or the alternative, you didn't misunderstand, but felt like twisting it anyway for the sake of baiting an answer to try to see what you can get. Either way, I'm done now. Already made it quite clear I don't disagree with the trends part, but you're just being silly by trying to say I can't claim LoL as a game doesn't affect me, not as a trend.

[GennGreymane]

You did. I told you in a follow up post exactly what I mean, and I agree trend wise it still affects others, but that isn't what I'm debating.

Or the alternative, you didn't misunderstand, but felt like twisting it anyway for the sake of baiting an answer to try to see what you can get. Either way, I'm done now. Already made it quite clear I don't disagree with the trends part, but you're just being silly by trying to say I can't claim LoL as a game doesn't affect me, not as a trend.

I know exactly what you meant. You can;t just create outs for yourself and expect me to take them seriously. The game creates the trend.

[Rusken]

Console "gamers" happened.

Except it's shit like Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight that are giving these Indie Devs the opportunity to have their games available to a huge amount of people, and lots of Indie Devs don't have the money to pay testers so they hype the shit out of their game to entice people to pay them for the "privilege" of playing it early. Consoles are only now recently catching up with the greediness that is Indie game development.

As far as paying for early access like Quake; fuck that. I will never play that game or anything that follows that same idea, especially from studios with the resources to have testers.

[GennGreymane]

Except it's shit like Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight that are giving these Indie Devs the opportunity to have their games available to a huge amount of people, and lots of Indie Devs don't have the money to pay testers so they hype the shit out of their game to entice people to pay them for the "privilege" of playing it early. Consoles are only now recently catching up with the greediness that is Indie game development.

As far as paying for early access like Quake; fuck that. I will never play that game or anything that follows that same idea, especially from studios with the resources to have testers.

To add

I mean did they mean console gamers as in the original crowds of gamers? I am pretty sure the Oddessy and Atari were not PCs. Do arcade machines count as consoles? Do they refer to the original radar equipment as a PC?

Is it a meta argument saying all the issues stem from consoles because consoles were the first big jump for games?

[Scrysis]

Greetings champions. This is a small rant that I'll be making, so #1 - don't take things too seriously, 'cause I'm pissed off, #2, feel free to disagree/agree with me, #3 - I'd be grateful if you contribute with the thread with your opinion.

So, okay. Here it goes:

What the actual fuck is happening with our video-game industry? We're slowly melting into some kind of monster, made of money and greedyness. "Welcome to the real world, kiddo" is something that I hear all the time, but really? Are you okay with these kinds of stuff?

Since the last generation, the gaming market has been suffering from a lot of topics, some that I present below:

• Full games are being torn apart to be released in small chunks;
• Expansion Packs became small DLC content that costs just as much;
• Paid skins in free games became gambling microtransactions in PAID GAMES;
• Don't even get me started in Season Passes (Paying for the "promise" of future content, that sometimes takes a long, long time to be released);
• Triple-A games and companies going to Early Access;
• EARLY FUCKING ACCESS;
• Paying to participate in a Beta Game (Quake: Champions is an example of this);
• Lack of creativity in the triple-A department, leading to that "Deja vu"(I've already played this!) feeling in various games;
• Indie gaming suffering from a lot of problems as well (used to be a cool market, but greed is making it slowly degrade as well);
• Kickstarter leading to a lot of failures and bad games;
• Companies being shady as fuck (Warner Bros with the death of its employee;
• Charging for MODS. MODS, for fuck sake.
• Asset Flippers stealing games and assets to flood online stores with shitty games;

And much, much more. I understand that gaming isn't all bad nowadays, but we should not be having to thank developers if they choose to include "free content after launch" or if their PC port of game X runs well, as these kinds of thing should be expected to be there from the start! Again, I understand the old saying "Welcome to the real world, kid", but I disagree. We still have ways to vote against these kinds of bullshit - with our wallets.

Anyway. Thanks for reading, and sorry for the outrage. I hope you agree with me in some topics, and if you disagree, feel free to express your opinion. I'm all ears.

You want to know what happened? INFLATION.

The fact that you are complaining about this means that you don't have a clue. Twenty years ago, Starcraft, when it came out, was $60. Starcraft 2, when it came out, was $60. If that doesn't strike you as FUCKING WEIRD, you need to take a moment to stop and think about it. EVERYTHING has gone up in price. . . . except for games?? What??

Developers still have to eat, sleep, drive to work, need a place to stay, etc. The gaming industry didn't get hit by a tsunami wave of pixie dust that magically makes things cost less. What they did do, is cleverly shift some of the cost that consumers pay to other areas.

And you should really, really be grateful that they did it this way. I know that I am. Instead of having to pay over a hundred dollars for a game, instead, someone else somewhere decided that they wanted to shell out $4 dollars so that their character has a set of cool-looking armor. Is the armor, by itself, over-priced? Yeah, it is. But at the same time, relatively speaking, the game itself is heavily discounted. If I want something cosmetic, I'm going to pay the same high cost for it, but I'm supporting the lower cost of the game as a whole.

Early Access allows games to be published that might not otherwise get off the ground. Large QA teams are expensive, and smaller studios might have issues paying for them. Early Access allows development studios extra capital to keep going, and to simultaneously test their game. It's a form of independent funding. Otherwise, game development studios would have to go to investment companies or big publishers to get their games made. And at that point, the people holding the purse strings suddenly have say over how the game is made, and not the studios. I don't know about you, but the fewer development studios in the clutches of EA, the better. It has benefits for the customer as well. In order to entice people into paying for a game that isn't quite finished, developers dangle out carrots such as lower costs (Wow! Even LOWER costs?), or sometimes in-game items. It is, of course, a situation of buyer-beware. Not all game companies or games will make it, but with the savvy player, you can score a deal. Personally, I've gotten two games in early access, and I've not regretted either of the purchases. One was a company I didn't know well, and the other was a company I was familiar with, so I was confident of them getting their game out.

Lack of creativity in Triple AAA games is because those are games from Triple AAA studios and publishers. Triple AAA publishers are a lot like movie executives -- they don't like to take chances. Once a development studio hits on a good idea, the publisher is going to withhold money from the developers unless they make something that they're confident that will make money, and in this case, it's going to be the tried and true. It has always been this way, which is why you're seeing constant re-hashes in the theaters and in gaming. I don't really know what to say at this. Game development can be a bit of a gamble. I sympathize, but I don't see any way around it. When you have game development costing tens of millions of dollars, the people footing the initial bill are going to be cautious.

I could go on some more on the other points, but I've had stuff come up.

tl;dr -- Game development studios aren't necessarily being "greedy"; inflation is involved and the situation regarding each point is more complex than the simple, "Game devs just want all the money" argument you want to make.

[Gadzooks]

tl;dr -- Game development studios aren't necessarily being "greedy"; inflation is involved and the situation regarding each point is more complex than the simple, "Game devs just want all the money" argument you want to make.

Game devs usually aren't the ones who set prices or decide that there will be 4 dlcs of "x" amount of content. That's usually the publisher, or the company management.

I don't know what side to come down on this issue - I understand that games have gotten more complex than imaginable, games like Witcher 3, Fallout 4, GTA5, there's a HUGE amount of work there, year's worth. So yeah, you could make the argument that paid DLCs help fund the cost of making more content, but that flies in the face of how much money these games generate. Fallout 4 made 3/4 of a billion dollars, according to sources. How much did it actually cost to make? I'm betting a fraction of that. So is it an issue of the publisher taking all the profits, (Record industry model), or does a game like Fallout 4 actually cost 3/4 of a billion dollars to make? Where's that money going? Is it being put back into the game, in the form of dlcs? If so, then why charge for them? I've read GTA5 cost $270 million to make, so you could ballpark F4 around that mark. Is it developer greed? Or publisher greed? Hard to say without a look at actual numbers. Granted, you don't spend that much money unless you're pretty sure you'll make it back, and then some. But is it really so expensive that $25 for Far Harbor, or whatever it cost, is necessary? (I enjoyed it and don't mind the cost, for the record) I don't know.
As for loot boxes and stuff, I don't care. As long as it's cosmetic, more power to them. There will always be people with a couple of bucks to drop on skins and such. It's releasing a game incomplete that I think about. Are games getting so massive, they have to release them in segments, because they take so long and cost so much, or is the publisher taking the lion's share of the profit, so they have to sell more to finance dlcs? Or is it just a trend that has taken over the industry, for the bad for players? Or all of the above?

Edited to add - is it like the concert industry, where performers get a percentage of ticket sales, so companies like TicketMaster have tacked on charges like handling fees, that are almost as much as the ticket itself, so they make more money? (Traditionally, the band would get the larger share of ticket sales) Is the publishing deal with Zenimax that Bethesda makes less off the box sale initially, but get a bigger percentage of dlcs sales? I could see that being the case, easily. I don't know, I'm just thinking on screen here.

[ro9ue]

And when people have been offering and getting mods for free for 20 years, that "market willing to pay" is basically not going to exist, and backlash to the system will be extremely harsh, as we have already seen.

There are already ways to make money off modding, ways that don't involve the company taking in money for the modder's hard work when the company did nothing aside from provide them with tools, tools that have already been paid for, by both the modder and the players getting the mods.

On the first point, I didn't say I thought the market was viable, I just said they deserve the right to try.

On the second, I agree with you on the company taking way too much money from the modders.

[Schattenlied]

On the first point, I didn't say I thought the market was viable, I just said they deserve the right to try.

On the second, I agree with you on the company taking way too much money from the modders.

Taking anything is too much, we already paid for the game and the mod tools, everything else is the modder's work and ideas, the company doesn't deserve jack shit of it.

[ro9ue]

Taking anything is too much, we already paid for the game and the mod tools, everything else is the modder's work and ideas, the company doesn't deserve jack shit of it.

I agree somewhat but from a modder's perspective isn't it better for them to have the option to at least make some money from their time?

My ideal scenario would be this:

Company provides modder tools. You can either buy those tools outright for $X and sell your mods for 100% profit. Or you can get the tools for free, but the company will take a 5/10% rake off each sale.

BUT there can still be an option for the modder to just provide their mod for free, with no cost to the player and gain for the developer.

[Schattenlied]

I agree somewhat but from a modder's perspective isn't it better for them to have the option to at least make some money from their time?

My ideal scenario would be this:

Company provides modder tools. You can either buy those tools outright for $X and sell your mods for 100% profit. Or you can get the tools for free, but the company will take a 5/10% rake off each sale.

BUT there can still be an option for the modder to just provide their mod for free, with no cost to the player and gain for the developer.

I mean, the modders already paid for the tools, if they are included in the game purchase, they purchased the tools.


Also, they can already make money off of it by simply accepting donations, opening a patreon, providing a paypal link for people to drop them money, lots of people do that already... If you've ever browsed Nexusmods for TES or FO mods almost every major mod has a donation avenue available. It's like supporting a youtuber or twitch streamer or your favorite artist on patreon, everyone gets the content for free, and some people with disposable income choose to throw money at them for minor extra perks that don't really matter (a lot like any good free to play game model, actually), like video previews, twitch chat emotes, or higher resolution image files, and it covers it for everyone.

[Karon]

Except it's shit like Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight that are giving these Indie Devs the opportunity to have their games available to a huge amount of people, and lots of Indie Devs don't have the money to pay testers so they hype the shit out of their game to entice people to pay them for the "privilege" of playing it early. Consoles are only now recently catching up with the greediness that is Indie game development.

As far as paying for early access like Quake; fuck that. I will never play that game or anything that follows that same idea, especially from studios with the resources to have testers.

Then it's a good thing that I specifically addressed only some of the bullet points, eh? Reading must be hard...

[Kallisto]

We always forget that games were ASSSSSS back then too

Firstly I love watching AVGN and lots of Mike and James lets plays.

But yeah people always seem to forget bad/mediocre stuff of previous generations unless they are notriously bad (ET I am looking at you). Not just games but films and music too. Nostalgia is a kicker here. For every great band or song in the 50s-90s there were at least 30-40 terrible ones. It's no different than today. We have great games and real stinkers. Back then some good games and stinkers.

As for these tiny DLC that cost. These things have actually been around forever. Even before the internet. I know it might seem crazy but hear me out. Magazine cover disks were not only having demos, but patches and what the bulk of the disc was were little addons for games. C&C:RA had multiplayer/skirmish maps on many cover discs. Other games had things as well like game changing effects that devs and publishers would make. Hell on the Playstation you had people putting in saves and small mods that went onto the memory card from official playstation magazines. These were not new, it was just they migrated from the price of the magazine which were never really truely mainstream and even then people didn't see what were on most of the disc before hand because they weren't looking. It's just putting them on the internet for all to see, instead of hidden away cover disk a niche market looked at puts it in everyones face.

Then we have the cost of a base game. SNES/Megadrive(Genesis) era was where $60 became norm. But let's take Street Fighter 2. You could complete it in 30 minutes and it cost on release $69.99 which today is $122.11. Hell Snes games on average were mostly $70 on release and cost a fraction to make compared to today and even the shortest of modern games are longer than pretty much all games from the SNES era except maybe JRPGs of then compared to non RPGs of today.

Hell even the first 3 resident evil games can be played through back to back in a single afternoon. RE1 takes 3 hours, 2 takes 2 hours and 3 takes 2.5 hours. Gamers though have shown that outside to most dedicated no one is going over $60 to buy a game. With the + Inflation putting at the original 60 at something like $110-$115 something somewhere is going to give, so publishers looked elsewhere.