thats just an easy excuse for the marketing department to tell you. in reality the amount of games sold at the $10-30 pricepoint has exploded over the last decade. this happened before the microstransaction train took off even.
now sure, a bunch of things involved in game development have become much more expensive in the same time, but at the end of the day the cost of distribution has dropped by a order of magnitude, while the consumer base buying games has grown an order of magnitude. and again all of that is before you consider the goldmine that micro transactions have turned out to be.
Very very short-sighted and ignorant to say that. The job is actually to keep the company alive. I am not about to give you a business 101 essay but there are many ways to do it and some work better for the consumer than others. Bob's way is very nearly the worst for a certain type of consumer and thusly he is dispised by them.
So you keep the company alive by making less money than you could?
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Producing a high quality product makes more money than producing a low quality product. But sometimes you have to release something, because you can't put more money into production.
Loot boxes and being able to buy gold is cheating. This is why I do not respect CEO Kotick because he is responsible for dragging the gaming industry to the dark corners that should have never been ventured into.
Why is this in WoW general? Bobby Kotick has nothing to do with WoW. Or is this one of those conspiracy theory threads by someone that's never actually played a game that Activision has a hand in? Where their logo is plastered all over the game and the microtransactions make WoW look pure and chaste?
Tokens were a response to two other major MMOs doing it. That's the way the market headed. So you can cross that one off Kotick's list of sins. I mean I don't like the guy, but lets at least keep the blame where it belongs.
Blizzard is heading down the road they started down over 20 years ago, blaming Activision is just a cop-out.
Last edited by RoKPaNda; 2018-09-26 at 04:14 PM.
AchaeaKoralin - Are you still out there? | Classic Priest
The market heading off the cliff doesn't mean they should follow into the soulless abyss of preying on children with loot boxes.
It's really not much different from the 1980's and 90's.. E.G Atari's ET fiasco and a lot or most big movie games adaptions were horrible or sequels of games that were often just as much of a money grab as today. Not to mention horrible ports of arcade games..
And it's not as if the software houses were put a gun to their heads when doing businesses with big publishers.. They either were just in it for the money as well or knew that if they wanted to survive long enough to even finish their game they had to fold in line, and that was also already normal in the 80's. The only thing different is that games perhaps had less bugs, but it was also not unheard of that there were patches, and games were usually less complex as well (less complex in game design/mechanics, programming wise they may have been more complex being done in say assembly sometimes and having to fit in minuscule amounts of ram)
Before crowdfunding it were the big cooperations that put the money into the (bigger) projects, taking the risks and therefore calling the shots, again, not unlike the golden age of home computers.
And well, as for crowdfunding, not to sure that is even a viable option in the long run, either it is ruined by money grabbers promising greatness never delivering that will drive consumers away from it or the over promising and failing ones that will.
Last edited by Amorac; 2018-09-26 at 04:59 PM.
~Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.~
~Every damn thing you do in this life, you have to pay for.~
They mostly will for a certain amount of time. Just look at the amount of time it took from the moment every gamer knew that EA was shit to them actually needing to do something about it - what was it, 10 years?
Here's a good video for you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-LE0ycgkBQ
So at this point I am 99% sure you are a usual suspect who got banned on an alt account and understand fully the dynamics of the topic in question but are pretending not to for thread count. For the life of me I don't know why you people do these things. That said perhaps it can serve to educate someone, if not you.
There is a point when producing something of quality yields less dollar return per dollar spent. You can either say to yourself A) "I want to make the best possible thing while still making enough profit to stay in business" or you can say B) "I want maximum return on my investment". The person in scenario A makes the best pizza, hands down. It comes at a price though, since its not nearly as efficient to produce it cost a good bit more. Person B spends a good portion of his initial investment testing just how shitty a pizza he can make with the least amount of effort and still sell at a profit. After all, people want a pizza even if they can't afford the best, or can't tell the difference due to unrefined taste, so there is a market for this sort of thing.
And that is good and well for both those people to be in business. The problem is when due to US laws pizza man B is able to hostile takeover person A and put out his shit pizza using A's boxes. Now at first he keeps the recipie the same and no one bats an eye. But then one day he swaps the pepperonis out for a cheap trash one. The people say, well its still the best and its not a big deal. But then he swaps the sauce out for imported ketchup "sauce" from china that can't legally be called ketchup without a disclaimer. It's cheaper and the people notice, so many stop coming but some are stuck to the rewards card system and he knows it. After all, his research team understands psychology and sunk cost so he is keenly aware of how to trick a sheep. next after another year he swaps out the dough for wet cardboard. Finally the pizza is the same trash he was peddling before but it has the "A" pizza box name and customers psychologically stuck be it for the rewards card, or the advertising that suckered them in, or nastalgia connection they try to recapture from how great their lives happened to be at the same time pizza A was good.
Anyhow, that was a long and grossly exagerated scenario of how people see Bob. He is businessman B, and if it were not for the ability to buy out A no one would honestly give a shit if he was selling trash pizza. But since he did and he changed it to essentially his trash pizza over time throwing out the original recipie people who can't get pizza A anymore are pissed.
You can argue he had nothing to do with that, and may even be right. I sure as hell don't know for certain. The thing is tho people need a person to blame and old Bobby has given them enough amunition to blame him via his words during earnings calls and such.
Wealth inequality.
Remember: Words are not violence.Make your own groups!!!
Cause he's a big businessman and a name people throw around as being bad.
I personally don't know anything about the guy but people like to find someone to point a finger at when something they don't like happens. Same reason people seem to be going after Mike Morhaime all the sudden.