TomWiley said:
Hero in a half shell said:
TomWiley said:
Let's play a bit of devil's advocate here.
It's their software, their game, their chance to make you interested in their product. It's a proposition to you as a consumer; "do you want this or not?" Regardless how crappy of a value proposition that is, I don't see why it would be upsetting.
If you see a seemingly worthless DVD in a store, which at that is way overpriced, you just ignore it. You don't engage in some moral outrage or start ranting about anti-consumer practices, you just walk on without buying the thing. You simple don't give a fuck. So what makes games so bloody different?
Because this will affect how the medium is priced and produced in the future. This practice, if unchallenged, will be rolled out into other games until it affects a game (or all the games) that I really want to buy, and I'm stuck with either missing out on an experience I want, or getting an inferior product that chastises me and makes the gameplay more boring and punishing unless I pay them more money.
Microtransactions didn't exist in the 90s. You bought a game and you owned all the content on the disk. This is changing, we've seen it with Mass Effect 3, and Dead Space 3, and now Ryse. It will just get trod out into more and more markets and become more and more intrusive into the game if the developers see themselves getting away with this practice. There will constantly be some way the developers try and get more money from us, whether Microtransactions, subscriptions, On disk DLC, Standard DLC, Expansion packs etc.
We have to make it clear that we will not support the practices that hurt us as consumers, the practices that make us pay more for a worse product, because if we just lay down and take it we'll end up with virtually no rights left.
You are acting as if games are getting more and more expensive. It's the complete opposite. Adjusted for inflation, games today should cost about $100 rather than the typical 59. Now take into consideration the fact that dev costs are higher than ever before and the typical turnaround for production of games takes longer.
With other words, microtransactions, day-one DLC etc. These are more or less our inventions, and if we want to rid the market of these tricks, we have to meet them half-way.
Do you know why DLC and multiplayer is so popular? Used Games. Gamers are less likely to trade in their games when new content are released for the titles. Multiplayer games are seldom turned in at all, which is why great singleplayer franchises are nowadays ruined by tacked on multiplayer.
Game development costs are a really messy area to get into, especially when discussing AAA games. But one thing is for certain: We have seen loads of great quality, high standard games making tonnes of profit this generation (Dark Souls/Demon Souls, Dragon's Dogma, Bioshock Infinite etc.) These are games that have a high quality and quantity to rival any AAA title, and made huge profits because their budgets were sensibly scaled to the achievable level of sales they expected to get (around 2-4 million)
Sterling talked about this in a lot more detail on his video about Dark Souls, but he mentioned that Resident Evil 6 didn't break even when it sold 5 million copies. Because Resident Evil 6 had a development team of
600 people Tomb Raider was in a similar position because it let its costs run away by hiring Hollywood actors.
Remember the fuss about Dead Space 3 requiring to sell 5 million copies to break even or they would close the franchise, and everyone knew it wouldn't hit that number and instead they should just cut the development costs... Everyone but EA apparently.
How can Dark Souls turn a huge profit with 2.3 million sales, Bioshock Infinite was massively profitable at 4 million sales. Hell, The Witcher 2 did it with 1.7 million and Dragon's Dogma did it with 1 million. Why the huge discrepancy in these titles making huge profits despite less sales than the other titles? I'll remind you that they all sold for the same price, that $59 that apparently 'needs' to increase for games to be profitable.
No. gamers don't need to foot the cost of developers, developers need to budget their costs appropriately for the amount of sales they will believably get. There are plenty of profitable games out there that do virtually everything the AAA major titles do, and they are just as complex, just as lengthy, just as pleasing to look at, but don't require 5+ million sales to turn a profit because the developers are sensible about their costs.
It's quite simple really, the burden of making game development lucrative is on us. And until we can rid the industry this used games loophole and retailer costs, we're going to see more and more of this until every game is a microtransaction driven free-to-play mess. This is exactly where the industry is heading and we are already seeing the evidence.
The burden to make game development lucrative is on the game developers. It was on 2k to make Bioshock Infinite profitable, and they succeeded without microtransactions, without DLC, without DRM to counter used games and retailers.
It was on CD Projeckt to make The Witcher 2 profitable, and they succeeded without microtransactions, without DLC, without DRM to counter used games and retailers.
It was on Capcom to make Dragon's Dogma profitable, and they succeeded without microtransactions, without DLC, without DRM to counter used games and retailers.
It was on From Software to make Dark Souls profitable, and they succeeded without microtransactions, without DLC, without DRM to counter used games and retailers.
Why was Capcom able to make Dragon's Dogma successful, but not Resident Evil 6? RE6 sold almost 5 times as many games!
The answer isn't the used game market. It isn't the retailers. It isn't not enough Microtransactions, or DLC, or DRM, it's nothing to do with us, and everything to do with the 600 people involved in Resident Evil 6, compared to just 150 in Dragon's Dogma. It's the costs on the developers end that have bloated ridiculously and must be addressed, not fobbed off on the consumer.
