Is AAA gaming (mostly) screwed?

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Nope. Most people are stupid whales willing to shell out tons of money for shiny bits of nothing.

I remember when everyone was mad at Bethesda for Horse Armor. Still no lootboxes in Skyrim though.

To be fair most people aren't whales, but whales spend more to make up for it. You and I may spend only $5 on microtransaction for a new game, so to a Dev it wasn't worth it to program. But that one whale will spend $400+, so that makes up for you and I not being them.
They're addicts. Just like most people don't smoke, but smokers smoke enough to keep the tobacco industry open.

1 millions people spending 5$ is 5 million dollars. People blame whales, but i doubt there are enough whales that spend enough money to make them at fault.

To be fair we're talking about addicts. People will compulsive control issues. The kind where you see an article that some kid spent $30,000 in Candy Crush without realizing it.
They're aren't many of them, sure, but we're talking about players who spend more than the entirely of the rest of the player-base, usually combined.

 

[Wakey87]

I remember when Unreal Tournament used to release regular Bonus packs for free. Maps, models, mutators, game modes.

Now we have COD selling reticles for a buck a pop lol

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

I remember when Unreal Tournament used to release regular Bonus packs for free. Maps, models, mutators, game modes.

Now we have COD selling reticles for a buck a pop lol

I heard about that! Like the fuck?! I was gonna say wait until other companies start selling basic setting options, but didn't Metal Gear survive sell additional save files for like $10?
Pretty soon key-rebinding will be a $1 microtransaction for each key change.

 

[Casual Shinji]

For as much as the scum as increased this generation, AAA on a whole has been more enjoyable to me now than it was previous gen.

Question, somewhat related to the diminishing returns of appreciable improvements from one console generation to next discussed in another recent thread, do you feel this way because it?s been genuinely better or relatively better? Last gen, great titles were like finding $5 bills tucked throughout a stack of $1s; today, the great ones are like finding $5 bills tucked throughout a stack of Monopoly money... in a trough-style urinal? at a strip club? and the strippers charge by the article of clothing they remove and the article of choice is random.

I'd describe this gen as 'the good got better, and the bad got worse', but seeing as I'm generally successful in avoiding 'the bad' (EA, Activision, Ubisoft) I've mostly been left with 'the better'. It's also been just sheer luck that none of the games I've been interested in suffered from lootboxes or microtransactions. I've kept to the Sony exclussives and some of Nintendo, and they've remained blissfully free. It seems the bulk of the AAA bullshit is located in the online multiplayer space, which thankfully I don't care much for at all.

 

[Hades]

For as much as the scum as increased this generation, AAA on a whole has been more enjoyable to me now than it was previous gen.

Question, somewhat related to the diminishing returns of appreciable improvements from one console generation to next discussed in another recent thread, do you feel this way because it?s been genuinely better or relatively better? Last gen, great titles were like finding $5 bills tucked throughout a stack of $1s; today, the great ones are like finding $5 bills tucked throughout a stack of Monopoly money... in a trough-style urinal? at a strip club? and the strippers charge by the article of clothing they remove and the article of choice is random.

I'd describe this gen as 'the good got better, and the bad got worse', but seeing as I'm generally successful in avoiding 'the bad' (EA, Activision, Ubisoft) I've mostly been left with 'the better'. It's also been just sheer luck that none of the games I've been interested in suffered from lootboxes or microtransactions. I've kept to the Sony exclussives and some of Nintendo, and they've remained blissfully free. It seems the bulk of the AAA bullshit is located in the online multiplayer space, which thankfully I don't care much for at all.

That's a good way of putting it. The current generation sank deeper than any other thanks to the whole lootbox nonsense but there have also been many highs. The Witcher III is generally seen as one of the best open worlds, Japanese gaming made a full comeback which gave us titles like Nier and Persona 5 and 2017 is probably one of the best gaming years of all time with incredible title after incredible title getting released.

There is more to complain about than ever but the games I played the last few years easily beat out most of the previous generation.

 

[Kwak]

And now tripleaaaaayyyy executives are delaying the rollout of their gambling/extortion schemes until after the reviews are done and people have bought the game. Cunts.
https://youtu.be/HL8HfoCzCB0

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

And now tripleaaaaayyyy executives are delaying the rollout of their gambling/extortion schemes until after the reviews are done and people have bought the game. Cunts.
https://youtu.be/HL8HfoCzCB0

Bethesda had a lootbox plan for Fallout 76. But people found out so they had to give up on it. At least for now. It's in this video that's worth watching for other reasons too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l12jvXf0GLE

 

[Dalisclock]

And now tripleaaaaayyyy executives are delaying the rollout of their gambling/extortion schemes until after the reviews are done and people have bought the game. Cunts.
https://youtu.be/HL8HfoCzCB0

Bethesda had a lootbox plan for Fallout 76. But people found out so they had to give up on it. At least for now. It's in this video that's worth watching for other reasons too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l12jvXf0GLE

Kinda shocked, actually. Considering the PR disaster this game has been so far due to Besthesdas constant bungling, I half expected them to just throw the lootboxes in there and pretend that everything is fine like they've been doing so far. I guess there's at least one person working in their management team who still has some inkling of the optics

 

[CaitSeith]

The result are incredibly unbalanced games, or shit cheaply made games that they've tried to sell us as AAA-experiences.

And? The bubble won't burst until people stop giving them money, regardless if the games are good or not. There is still lot of room for the industry to sink even lower...

 

[Kerg3927]

I've found myself playing mostly indie games in the past year or so, and that personal trend will likely continue.

They are typically less saturated with politically correct crap. I think they know they are niche and so they don't let themselves get trapped into trying to please everyone. They stick to their artistic vision.

Also, probably due to limited resources, they usually don't have ridiculously vast open worlds of tedium, which it seems every AAA franchise has moved toward just because they can and are expected to.

And yes, it seems like fewer of them have microtransactions and shenanigans, probably because they don't want to risk pissing off their niche audience and shooting themselves in the foot. They don't have a haughty "if you don't like it don't buy it" attitude.

 

[Sleepy Sol]

Screwed in terms of a lot of 'AAA' games trending toward microtransaction-heavy in-game storefronts and mobile game-like progression? Yeah, sure.

Definitely not screwed in terms of those games actually doing well, even with the very real possibility of shit crashing and burning somewhere down the line. As it is now, until people actually really start caring about this stuff and put their money where their mouth is, it's just going to keep being a thing. And for the companies that do this, all signs are still pointing to that kind of approach being continuously and even exponentially more profitable.

Which is a huge factor in me not desiring to touch a so-called 'AAA' game in years. I'll just take my fighting games and RPGs or whatever. For that matter, I remember when just having a (often discounted) new version of a fighting game after a year or so was a big deal and frowned upon. How far things have fallen. Yeesh.

 

[BrawlMan]

I'll just take my fighting games and RPGs or whatever. For that matter, I remember when just having a (often discounted) new version of a fighting game after a year or so was a big deal and frowned upon. How far things have fallen. Yeesh.

Other than random jackoffs on the web, who the fuck frowned upon that? Nobody around me did, neither did strangers I met that were in to fighting games. They told me, if you can an updated version of a game at a cheaper price, then go for it.

 

[Sleepy Sol]

Other than random jackoffs on the web, who the fuck frowned upon that? Nobody around me did, neither did strangers I met that were in to fighting games. They told me, if you can an updated version of a game at a cheaper price, then go for it.

Mostly in reference to Arc System Works games where people coined the idea of the "ArcSys cycle" to refer to the fact that they would quickly release 'new' versions of their fighting games in arcades within a year of the last version being released on console, thereby potentially dating one's purchase considerably quickly if you cared about the competitive scene (issues between playerbases and areas that only had access to an older or more specific version, I guess is how I would put it) or just wanted the absolute newest version. Generally, that's no longer an issue with their games since they get localized and released relatively quickly, and we've kind of traded that for continuous questionable DLC practices which is still tame in comparison to a lot of the shit going on with AAA titles.

People really didn't like even having to pay $20-40 for what they viewed as a "minimally" updated version of the game a lot of the time in my experience. Though ArcSys got a lot of shit for it back in the day, one of the worst examples I remember is the period between the original release of Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and UMvC3 when people realized they were getting the game they should have gotten on the vanilla release.

It's probably true that it's mostly a "random internet jackoffs" problem, though. I just happen to spend a lot of time on the internet, so that exposes me to a lot of negative perspectives on this stuff. Ain't gonna stop me from playing my favorite genre, though.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I dunno I never found it that hard to sidestep the AAA crap. There's always something good out there.

 

[BrawlMan]

Other than random jackoffs on the web, who the fuck frowned upon that? Nobody around me did, neither did strangers I met that were in to fighting games. They told me, if you can an updated version of a game at a cheaper price, then go for it.

Mostly in reference to Arc System Works games where people coined the idea of the "ArcSys cycle" to refer to the fact that they would quickly release 'new' versions of their fighting games in arcades within a year of the last version being released on console, thereby potentially dating one's purchase considerably quickly if you cared about the competitive scene (issues between playerbases and areas that only had access to an older or more specific version, I guess is how I would put it) or just wanted the absolute newest version. Generally, that's no longer an issue with their games since they get localized and released relatively quickly, and we've kind of traded that for continuous questionable DLC practices which is still tame in comparison to a lot of the shit going on with AAA titles.

People really didn't like even having to pay $20-40 for what they viewed as a "minimally" updated version of the game a lot of the time in my experience. Though ArcSys got a lot of shit for it back in the day, one of the worst examples I remember is the period between the original release of Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and UMvC3 when people realized they were getting the game they should have gotten on the vanilla release.

It's probably true that it's mostly a "random internet jackoffs" problem, though. I just happen to spend a lot of time on the internet, so that exposes me to a lot of negative perspectives on this stuff. Ain't gonna stop me from playing my favorite genre, though.

I remember the MVC3 debacle. That one made a bit more sense, but people started appreciating it more once Capcom lost the license. And once MvC:I turned out to be not that great, they definitely became more loving of UMvC3.