Recent monetization of Video Games

[Frosteye]

I was arguing with someone the other day about how the video gaming industry needs to be really careful because they might overreach and face a backlash with their consumer base.

I see more and more predatory practices being employed by some of the big box studios, meant to extract copious amounts of money from their consumers who have already paid for the game. Examples being:

Black Ops 4-

• Pay for $60 Game
• Pay for $50 DLC Pass
• Daily grind to unlock content already paid for in DLC pass. ~2 month window to complete or rewards are gone forever.
• Tier "buy out" system using USD$ to unlock tiers that you didn't have time to unlock

Conclusion: They literally try to charge you twice for the same content you already pay for - unless you no life the video game and play it every single day during the content pass.

PUBG-

• Pay for $30 game
• Pay for $15 DLC pass
• Daily/weekly "mission" grinds to unlock tiers, 2 month time limit. Missions are very ridiculous and tedious to complete.
• Paid option to skip tiers to unlock content

Conclusion: Same as Black Ops 4 except instead of just having to "play the game how you want" on a daily basis to unlock things, they force a very difficult/tedious set of missions on you that forces you to play the game in a non-typical manner. This increased difficulty is probably to give people incentive to pay additional $ to unlock levels.

WOW-

• Implements $60 character boost
• Nerfs leveling to max level significantly

Conclusion: Blizzard is trying to monetize further on expensive character boosts. Leveling was too easy before, but now since it's much harder people are more likely to buy the boost.

Don't even get me started on loot crates in other games...


I could go on and on, such as Mobile Games that intentionally time-gate the living crap out of their game and make it difficult to the point of trying to get people to pay-for-progression via micro transactions.

It seems like Mobile Gamers are more tolerant of pay-to-win than PC/Console gamers, and it's something that Blizzard has only been flirting with - with the WoW token / Char Boost.

They do seem very keen to get into the Mobile Gaming Market with Diablo Immortal though.

I really miss the days where you would just buy a game and it was COMPLETE. You didn't have them trying to get you to pay for "additional content" that wasn't included in the price of the full game. I remember buying Diablo 2 (and the expansion a year later), and after buying each box that was all the money I had to spend.

I just feel like the greedy capitilization of video games is a real plague on our community and we end up getting less quality content due to it.

Thoughts everyone?

[dope_danny]

Its done because fucking rubes pay for it. It all started with Todd and horse armour and was met with 'its not a slippery slope you hater trolls, you wont see games cut up for profit' when so often dlc is only pushed because a games revenue often just covers marketing or production at best. If people stopped buying it then it would go away but i'll always remember the GW2 dev mentioning during its first months that the gem store earned its keep from less than 20 people each spending over $1000 per month every month. Since gaming broke into the mainstream demand for quality is gone. People want virtual mcdonalds to graze on like they did tv a generation before. Its 'watercooler videogaming' where its about playing something to talk about with 'the boys at the office' and that kind of person has no concept of morals coming into play when they drop ten bucks on a png file already on the disc or something.

[Poppincaps]

You do realize that Blizzard just reduced the amount of time it takes to level right?

[Nize]

You do realize that Blizzard just reduced the amount of time it takes to level right?

Blizzard conditioning. They'll nerf heavily by 50%, then buff by 10%, and people will remember the 10% more as it's recent. Overall, it's still a 40% nerf.

[Tech614]

Big corporations want to make money.

Big corporations will try to make more money until is loses them good will and try to backtrack before they attempt again.

This is not exclusive to video games and is a situation of obvious is obvious. When you have to answer to share holders the entire way you make video games changes. Some companies are just more aggressive then others.

[Onikaroshi]

Blizzard conditioning. They'll nerf heavily by 50%, then buff by 10%, and people will remember the 10% more as it's recent. Overall, it's still a 40% nerf.

Actually no, the experience to level 1-110 is less then it was prior to 7.3.5

[kaelleria]

AAA games cost more and more to make these days. This has led to a ton of market consolidation behind major publishers.

Publishers want to be paid so we see monetization.

With that being said, I believe the AAA games industry is in for a change because of very high profile failures in the last two years. Expect less customer unfriendly monetization , but still expect it.

[Powerogue]

Players complain about the WoW leveling whether it's too fast or too slow, they can't win on that front. It's not a greed thing to have a massively old game that's built up an excessive amount of leveling content.

On the note of greedy businesses, it's really quite simple. Don't buy them. At all. Especially don't pre-order them. At all; zero exceptions.

Until I can see someone actually playing the full release on Youtube, as far as I'm concerned I know absolutely nothing about the game. There's that much smoke and mirrors going on with trailers and whatnot.

[Tech614]

AAA games cost more and more to make these days.

Only because they choose to. They are the ones choosing to have $500 mil marketing budgets that are completely unnecessary.

Games from the east like Persona 5, Nier Automata, Xenoblade series, BoTW, Witcher, MHW, Metro series etc prove Western studios are just dumb at managing money if their excuse is legitimate.

The only studios from the west that seem to not have their head up their ass right now are either owned by Sony or are independent developers. I will also give a pass to Rockstar as they spend a shit load of money on their games but at least it actually shows. Rockstar open worlds are quite a different beasts from the shit Ubisoft and EA are churning out. Lets take ACO for example, everything about the game is like an inferior version of Witcher 3 and yet they need to have MTs in the game on top of the $60 price tag? Bullshit.

[khazmodan]

This video says so much in less than 2 minutes:



I really think that the video games industry is going through a reset, that will eliminate some of the overly aggressive cash grabbers and get back to a control balance between product people and finance people.

[Dakhath]

Blizzard conditioning. They'll nerf heavily by 50%, then buff by 10%, and people will remember the 10% more as it's recent. Overall, it's still a 40% nerf.

If you have an issue with Blizzard, that's fine, but at least be factual with your complaints. It's never been faster to level than it is in the current build of the game.

[kaelleria]

Only because they choose to. They are the ones choosing to have $500 mil marketing budgets that are completely unnecessary.

Games from the east like Persona 5, Nier Automata, Xenoblade series, BoTW, Witcher, MHW, Metro series etc prove Western studios are just dumb at managing money if their excuse is legitimate.

The only studios from the west that seem to not have their head up their ass right now are either owned by Sony or are independent developers. I will also give a pass to Rockstar as they spend a shit load of money on their games but at least it actually shows. Rockstar open worlds are quite a different beasts from the shit Ubisoft and EA are churning out. Lets take ACO for example, everything about the game is like an inferior version of Witcher 3 and yet they need to have MTs in the game on top of the $60 price tag? Bullshit.

I can assure you no game has a $500m marketing budget.

To put the scale of things in perspective... Nier sold about 3.5m copies. God of War sold over 8. Sure Nier cost way less to make than GoW, but GoW made more money for the publisher and studio. They invest more in the game to get more out of it.

Witcher Cost nearly as much or more than other AAA games so I'm not really sure why you're even bringing that up. Most studios cannot afford to self finance $83m.

[Edge-]

Witcher Cost nearly as much or more than other AAA games so I'm not really sure why you're even bringing that up. Most studios cannot afford to self finance $83m.

To point out that you can have a AAA budget and huge success without shoehorning in all kinds of MTX that are apparently "necessary" to recoup budgets. It helps when you don't have marketing budgets that are equal to or greater than the cost of development.

And are you implying that publishers like Activision, EA, or Ubisoft can't finance a AAA game on their own or something?

[kaelleria]

To point out that you can have a AAA budget and huge success without shoehorning in all kinds of MTX that are apparently "necessary" to recoup budgets. It helps when you don't have marketing budgets that are equal to or greater than the cost of development.

And are you implying that publishers like Activision, EA, or Ubisoft can't finance a AAA game on their own or something?

They totally can... I'm just saying that games like Witcher are an anomaly where they can remain MTX free and self finance.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be glorious if we had no MTX, but realistically a high end title has been $60 for decades. If publishers wanted to maintain a profit they had to throw in something somewhere.

If they do MTX horribly like SW:BF2 then they need to die. If they don't do them like that I'm more ok with things.

My overall thought on MTX in AAA games is if we didn't have MTX we'd probably just be drowning in phone games at this point with very few AAA titles.

[Tock20]

Games have gone up $10 in 20 years. Inflation has outpaced that. If anything, games are cheaper to buy now than they were 20 years ago. And they probably cost greatly more to make. Paid dlc, and to lesser extent cosmetic loot boxes (not getting into an argument on this), help offset the cost of making games. I'd rather have a $60 game with optional dlc (I don't buy if it doesn't interest me), than pay the $80-100 that a game probably needs to sell for to make a profit.

[Edge-]

They totally can... I'm just saying that games like Witcher are an anomaly where they can remain MTX free and self finance.

Not really, it's a choice. AAA publishers choose to blow huge amounts on marketing, they don't need to.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be glorious if we had no MTX, but realistically a high end title has been $60 for decades. If publishers wanted to maintain a profit they had to throw in something somewhere.

We already had that solution: Expansions and more recently DLC. Expansions have almost always been far cheaper to develop than base games, as a huge chunk of the initial work is already complete. And now with DLC, the scope of these releases can be scaled down even further, allowing them to move more "units" at lower price points. Again, Witcher 3 is a great example of this as they were able to release a few very high quality DLC's that sold well while being affordable and providing plenty of content for folks.

If they do MTX horribly like SW:BF2 then they need to die. If they don't do them like that I'm more ok with things.

I'm less objectionable to purely optional stuff like cosmetics and whatnot (and what I've seen from say, AC:Od hasn't really bugged me but I haven't looked too closely), but the notion that these things are needed is bunk. They aren't. They're a tool to help drive additional revenue, but they're far from the only tool to do so and there are alternatives to ensure that they can earn their development costs back along with a nice profit without them.

Them being publicly traded and beholden to investors only exacerbates these issues as there's more pressure to hit frequently unreasonable sales targets to keep them satisfied.

[kaelleria]

Not really, it's a choice. AAA publishers choose to blow huge amounts on marketing, they don't need to.



We already had that solution: Expansions and more recently DLC. Expansions have almost always been far cheaper to develop than base games, as a huge chunk of the initial work is already complete. And now with DLC, the scope of these releases can be scaled down even further, allowing them to move more "units" at lower price points. Again, Witcher 3 is a great example of this as they were able to release a few very high quality DLC's that sold well while being affordable and providing plenty of content for folks.



I'm less objectionable to purely optional stuff like cosmetics and whatnot (and what I've seen from say, AC:Od hasn't really bugged me but I haven't looked too closely), but the notion that these things are needed is bunk. They aren't. They're a tool to help drive additional revenue, but they're far from the only tool to do so and there are alternatives to ensure that they can earn their development costs back along with a nice profit without them.

Them being publicly traded and beholden to investors only exacerbates these issues as there's more pressure to hit frequently unreasonable sales targets to keep them satisfied.

I'm just talking production budget when I'm talking about how much some games cost. Marketing is a whole separate animal.

Re: publicly traded companies... Well yeah. The money to make a $50-$100m game has to come from somewhere. If you can self publish... great, but most cannot and maintain their budgets.

[Puupi]

You do realize that Blizzard just reduced the amount of time it takes to level right?

After the realization of being wrong all along and the dwindling sub numbers, yeah they are backtracking with the XP changes.

[tangers58]

You do realize that Blizzard just reduced the amount of time it takes to level right?

They did... after severely increasing it twice in the last year. Its much, much higher than it was pre-allied races, they just did a token nerf to silence those critics that have poor memories.

- - - Updated - - -

Actually no, the experience to level 1-110 is less then it was prior to 7.3.5

Quite wrong, its much higher than it was before. Or at least the time it takes is.

[Jastall]

To point out that you can have a AAA budget and huge success without shoehorning in all kinds of MTX that are apparently "necessary" to recoup budgets. It helps when you don't have marketing budgets that are equal to or greater than the cost of development.

And are you implying that publishers like Activision, EA, or Ubisoft can't finance a AAA game on their own or something?

Witcher 3 did spend a ton on marketing if memory serves, nearly half their budget, I remember the lavish cinematics, trailers and all. And CDPR had the backing of their parent company (who publish games via GOG) plus a huge grant from the Polish government, plus the massive advantage of paying workers in an economy where they are far cheaper than Western developers.

I don't want to say they cheated or anything, but that game just isn't a great example. It was a fairly unique situation, and I wouldn't even be surprised if it still had far inferior return on investment than games like, say, Overwatch. Investors don't want to wait for the perfect storm of elements that come together to form and finance games like that.