Jimquisition: Breaking the Bones of Business

Coreless

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Mr_Terrific said:
I would have like if Jim would have addressed the inevitable talks of "entitled" gamers that will pop up when we gamers start bitching about Dead Space 3.

Also, free 2 play on mobile is anything but. Damn near every game has about an hour of decent gameplay before the difficulty is ramped up beyond comprehension. Ramped up so far, you burn through resources to make it through to the next round and are rewarded fucking nothing for your trouble. So during every load screen the devs are begging you to go download this shit for f2p gold or whatever the currency and that gets you by for a while, then you're screwed. Now they're offering you an extra 10% for their bullshit digital currency just has the difficulty gets cranked up to delete the shit and say you won levels.

I'd much rather pay up front for a game and have a shot at completion instead of being dangled a carrot every minute. And hell, even when you pay up front, they still make the game unplayable at a certain point. It's far worse than the bullshit that when on in arcades where games where designed to suck money out your pockets. At least you had fun fumbling around as quickly as possible to stuff another quarter in the machine before the ridiculous timer expires. Now, you have all damn day hit a button linked to your credit card and pay obscene prices for digital currency.

So basically, screw f2p and mobile gaming...
I feel the same way, hate f2P and mobile gaming because its all a big money grab, at least with $60 dollar games I can get what I pay for and not be required to continue paying unless I want to.
 

Jimothy Sterling

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connall said:
Jim, your desk is awesome. Where did you get the terminator and darksiders mask?
The Terminator is a NECA figure my wife got me for Christmas, the mask was from the collector's edition of the game.

And if anyone's further curious, there's a plush chestburster behind them and a Perfect Cell Figuarts in front.
 

Elyxard

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I refuse to buy almost any 60$ games nowadays because absolutely none of them are actually "60$" anymore. They all come with more and more unsavory and undeserved "strings attached".

EA has been the absolute worst offender for sure. Every product I've bought from them has made me sick to my stomach and I just won't take it anymore. If you're going to force micro-transactions in the midst of a story-based game, you might as well just crap on a plate and serve it to me.
 

wolfyrik

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Thank fuck someone finally said this! I'm sick of harping on about it. I'm sick of all the rabid facking fanbois constantly defending and supporting with cash, every evil, cynical bastard attempt to screw gamers further.

My irritation began with pay to unlock skins for Portal 2. Skins used to be part of the games you already paid for. This escalated over time into rage when I saw the horseshit that was made of Diablo 3 and it's always online DRM.

Jim, it might be early to compare you to a Thomas Paine of the games industry, but stuff it. Jim Paine, thank god for you

(well not god exactly, I am an atheist).
 

omgeveryone9

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Mouse_Crouse said:
Loved the ending, too perfect. Brought ti all together nicely.

omgeveryone9 said:
At 3:13, Jim talks about Mann Co spearheading the idea on forcing us to buy things already in the disk or something similar to that. What is he talking about? I have not yet heard about this, and while I do love TF2, I recognize that there are flaws in the game.
Namco maybe? Not sure.
You're right. it is Namco, it just was that Mann co and Namco sound kind of the same. That happens to me quite a lot when it comes to names.
 

GLo Jones

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Feb 13, 2010
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Haha, I was very pleased to see your shout out to ETS2... But then noticed you were driving a DAF.

I'm sorry, Jim, but that's some seriously bad taste right there.
 

Jimothy Sterling

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To answer the question about what I said at the 3:13 mark --

I was talking about Namco Bandai, a company very much at the vanguard of bullshit DLC. It charged for gold and XP in Tales, it sold you only half a game with Katamari Xbox 360, and it was very much one of the earlier adopters of on-disc DLC with SoulCalibur. Namco's kind of fallen into the background these days now that EA and the like have run with the ball, but that ball was kicked very hard by Namco a few years ago.
 

Jimothy Sterling

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GLo Jones said:
Haha, I was very pleased to see your shout out to ETS2... But then noticed you were driving a DAF.

I'm sorry, Jim, but that's some seriously bad taste right there.
Knowing nothing about actual trucks, I choose to simply dig my heels in and scream that my choice is superior.
 

The Lugz

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as a consumer is is my prerogative, nay my DUTY to find the best deal possible
i'll tell you how i go about things
search amazon for games ( boxed )
compare prices with steam sales, and figure out if i want dlc or not
sometimes the steam price is far and away the best price, sometimes it is NOT
always check it takes 2 seconds to google

invariably dlc is best bought as a package deal, but not always picking and choosing is sometimes better
as you get what you want and not what a developer decides you should want

for example dlc that breaks resource systems ( ah deus ex, saints row.. you are dumb. )
i don't buy, ever.
why? all it does is deprive you of coming up with a way to generate cash, reputation or a general game currency of some kind efficiently it's not like it's really that hard
and if it is painful to grind, and grinding is a major part of the game? that's called bad game design
avoid it, frankly

however 'cool' items like the ability to summon sharks to eat people ( saints row, again ) is pretty much
an instant buy just because it's fun but i wouldn't spend major cash on it, couple £/$ at most

as is extra game content, levels, chapters, dungeons, Armour sets, loot and collectibles
if all those are available as a bundle it's a great deal if it isn't a significant 'extra' cost
how do i define extra? that's difficult really depends on the game franchise and what the gaming experience is 'worth'
for example i wouldn't pay the cost of another equally fun game for the privilege of getting 4% extra content for a game
I've already experienced and am kinda done with

so £12/$19 is too-much for any dlc pack imo because i can buy a whole 'new to me' experience of decent quality for that

now some things simply aren't equatable a game you really love to death deserves every penny it asks for if it's managed to evoke those feelings because it's done it's job and it's probably wise to support that developer
 

rcs619

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Personally, I hope it all just winds up being growing pains. Every major entertainment industry tends to go through some fairly severe growing pains whenever the medium fundamentally changes. I think most anyone who grew up during the 90's remembers how the music industry handled the emergence of digital downloads (not well) and MP3's (not well at all). I mean, hell, the movie industry tried to take the VHS tape to court because they thought it was going to be the death of their industry.

Now, I do agree wholeheartedly with you though, Jim. The things that the major publishers are getting away with currently are downright reprehensible at times, and I too find myself conflicted about Dead Space the product vs Dead Space the game and experience. My hope is that eventually all this will level out and that the majority of gamers will just stop putting up with it. Corporations are amoral, money-making machines. They do whatever they can legally do to turn a higher profit and the only two things they understand are profit-margins and PR. Airing out their reprehensible tactics, and refusing to buy the products they attach them to are about the only ways to actually fight back. That is one advantage gamers of today have that they didn't years ago, people like Jim Sterling, Totalbiscuit, Angry Joe and others who consistantly point out and cry outrage at these practices. Getting the word out is really the only way to inform people enough to fight back. I mean, think about all those poor bastards who bought Final Fantasy: All the Bravest before the reviews got out.

I'd actually be really curious to compare the number of sales at launch to the number of sales post-reviews. Short of the most uninformed and/or rabid fans, I cannot see how ANYONE could justify buying that ga- electronic mugging device.

Anyway, keep up the good work as always Jim :)
 

luvd1

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As long as there're idiots willing to pay, they will still fleece the consumer for all they're worth. And there are hordes of idiots all willing to defend their stupidity to the death. I remember being called a weak, small dicked, penniless weasel of an excuse of a loser coz I thought it stupid to pay a company to beta test their mmog.
 

Atmos Duality

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The video is pretty close to where I was in 2010 (minus the mobile market since I don't really qualify nor care to participate).

The way I see it, in retrospect:
Following the launch of the current console cycle, the AAA Publishers boomed and grew too big, too fast, becoming an oligopoly on the primary gaming market. Demand was so high that they felt they could push the envelope in asking for more, while providing less. Now we're to the point where the hub game (that you pay 60 bucks for) is just a shell of a game with more and more content being charged at a premium.

We let them do this. We let them grow too big. In 2006-07, Horse Armor "DLC" was an outrage. Today, it's a standard business model.

But now the current consoles are outdated and so are the AAA's main business models. The market is retreating to greener fields like Mobile and even Independent systems (the very idea of the Ouya would have been laughed off the market in inception 4 years ago).
The publishers know they have to act, and fast. Desperate to remain relevant and in control of the market they believe they own. They are gobbling up new ideas from said greener fields and are twisting them into money-making engines.

Thankfully, it's not working quite as planned, though this leads into speculation of another Game Market Crash.

Personally, I do not see another game market crash happening.
The crash in the 80s was due to the entire market becoming shovelware-centric; exploitation of IP without a shred of quality gameplay attached to said IP.

Today, we face a different kind of exploitation, one founded on oligopoly, and the solution, as it is to any oligopoly, is competition.
New competition breaking into the market and causing an upheaval. You can see it happening right now, like long-dominating industry giants like World of Warcraft eroding and crumbling before new F2P titans like League of Legends. Independent games flourishing on new mobile markets and kickstarters rather than sequels spawned in shareholder and marketing meetings.

Where it took Nintendo to fill the void in the 80s, we now have talent ready to enter the market from all across the globe. If a crash happens, it will be a metaphorical Phoenix, one of simultaneous death and rebirth, rather than another slow 9 year slog of recovery through someone's monopoly (and you better believe Nintendo had a monopoly following the crash of 83, all the way up to the early 90s).

At worst, I see the actual talent employed in the AAA companies suffering the most, since without publishers they will be unemployed. Given how hard the AAA publishers are still fighting to hammer the market into their image by forcing these crap game-business models on us, and mostly failing, I also see a plethora of opportunity out there for the developers outside of the traditional publisher-structure.

-

I've played Path of Exile lately, and it blows my mind just how much GGG gets it, even moreso than either of the genres' pioneers. Where Diablo 3 was built entirely around the auction house and eliminating any real player input by making a tiny handful of character builds viable, Path of Exile lets the player choose their build without being strong-armed into any sort of gold-twink market (there isn't even an in-game currency to farm, everything is done via barter and item modification orbs. It's brilliant).
Everything fits together nicely, between the tone the combat and the scrounging-esque gameplay.

PoE isn't perfect, and has its share of problems, but at no moment do I feel cheated or abused while playing it, unlike D3.

This bears repeating, but it really blows my mind that a game still firmly in Beta (for free) does better what one the largest and richest gaming corporations in the world shat out with over 5 years of time and money behind it.

Sorry if this sounds too "hipster" for some of you in the peanut gallery, but I believe when you make the game entirely about the business instead of the game, it fails, and rightly should fail at both (game and business).
 

ron1n

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The thing that pisses me off the most about the cash shops and micro transactions isn't so much the fact they exist, rather it's the increasing lack of attention that is applied to the existing base game.

I miss the days of expansion packs where additions were bought self-contained, many months or even a year after the original release. This meant developers could actually spend time fixing all the bugs and imbalances with the base game before looking toward new content.

With the current model, a game's co-op campaign or multi-player might not even work, but that won't stop them from adding new guns and skins that you and your friends can't even use.

So many game's now have become cows being butchered for their meat rather than nurtured over time for their milk.
 

Waaghpowa

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Apr 13, 2010
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Which is precisely why I'm not buying Dead Space 3. That and the lack of a PC demo and the PC version apparently being a straight port.

Also asking 60 dollars for the game with all that micro transaction bullshit is disgusting.
 

Callate

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It's kind of bizarrely fascinating watching the AAA industry try to self-immolate. I'm not saying I like it, but from sufficient distance it has the grandeur of all great, preventable disasters.

When I bought The Walking Dead, Telltale said, "Hey, do you want to get the entire series for one price"? And I said, "sure, I've heard this is really good, and the price is right; why not." When I bought Saint's Row 3, THQ gave me a "Season's Pass"- with all the episodic DLC- for free for buying early. (Yeah, I missed out on being able to call Penthouse Pets to shoot at things for me; big whoop.)

They didn't say, "From square one, you're not going to be getting the full package after you paid the MSRP. And you may not know all that you're not getting until a good six months down the road."

They also didn't do the perverse "...and then a year later we'll put out the GOTY edition with all the extra content sewn in for the same price as the original cost without it, screwing over everyone who showed their loyalty by pre-ordering or buying on release day" thing.

The short-sightedness of ceasing to treat buyers of your games like customers- instead treating them like numbers that can be plugged into a revenue equation- becomes clearer every day.
 

Something Amyss

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Dec 3, 2008
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I think your video is broken, Jim. I don't see anywhere to buy Jimbucks.

Beryl77 said:
I see sometimes people defending EA's decisions by saying that "they're just a company doing business". Fuck that, what a load of bullshit. There are tons of companies who do very well without behaving like they're related to the Antichrist. It's still their own, conscious decision to do those things, nothing else. Them being a company doesn't excuse that in the slightest.

Also, nice ending. Very well done.
To be fair, they ARE just a company doing business. Doing it wrong. And amazingly, people will try and save them like THQ.

People seem to have a problem with the concept of big corporations. We as a group complain about X being in the pocket of gaming companies, but so are we as a whole. We're so convinced by their PR bullshit that we'll defend their right to make a profit above all else.

Except the right to make money is pretty limited as it only goes so far as people are willing to pay.

"But they are paying for it," I hear a lot of people saying. Well, yes and no.

This isn't working for most people. While EA is still moderately healthy, Capcom is taking hits. Nintendo took a big hit with their concept of overvaluing their own products. THQ made some really bad decisions which were compounded by a lack of faith by investors. Squeeeeeenix is floundering a bit in terms of profit projections as well, and adjusting down is rarely good for a company (except in the sense that honesty is still mandated by law, and not breaking the law and/or going to jail is good).

The thing is, this is the natural extension of a business not adapting to the market. Even THQ's problem revolved around this: "This peripheral sold well on the Wii, so we'll assume it's going to sell even better for the other consoles and then make millions of them! No need to think about consumer response, we'll make sure they want it!"

I've heard so much about capitalism and the free market on these boards from people who also lament THQ. Well, THQ is capitalism: it's a company that made a lot of bad decisions and failed. End of. This is what should happen to bad companies that make bad decisions. EA had more gas in the tank, or its recent problems might have killed it, but it's not invincible. I'm sorry most of this is tangential to your point, but I'm glad there are people who don't run their businesses like complete dickheads because the cost of doing business the EA way just might be one of the biggest gaming publishers collapsing under its own corpulent form.
 

LordLundar

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Yeah, this pretty much mirrors what I've been saying fro a while. The systems themselves aren't inherently evil (save for DRM), it's the rampant abuse of the systems that's the real issue.
 

ron1n

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Waaghpowa said:
Also asking 60 dollars for the game with all that micro transaction bullshit is disgusting.
See, the crazy thing is, I don't even care about micro transactions being added in on top of the shelf price.

That stuff is all essentially a choice when it comes down to it.

The face palming begins when the game itself doesn't even work well enough for me to even consider buying any extras because I've long since stopped playing.

Perfect example: Shogun 2 Totalwar.

From day one, the Co-Op Campaign was horribly broken due to a desync bug.

Of course, they never fix it and instead churn out a bunch of unit and faction DLC. Except, the Co-Op campaign is the one thing that would have actually kept me playing the damn game long enough to be interested in DLC.

It benefits no one long term -_-