ISTM you should be equally pissed at Psyonix, if not more.
ETA ditto Gearbox.
I am. They went from one of my favorites to fuck them. I won’t spend another cent on rocket league, although I won’t stop playing it so long as I can continue to play it somewhere other than the epic store.
I’m not keen on Epic being the exclusive platform for B3 because I can’t buy things off the Epic Store any more… I’ve been playing Fortnite for the past year and bought two accounts and a half-dozen upgrade packs, one as recently as February, and now they’re telling me my card’s no good and I should use PayPal instead. My card’s fine with everybody else, so, nope.
…I know this is an old post, but I think the best response to this is something that games critic Jim Sterling has been repeating over and over again:
Jim uses Activision Blizzard to illustrate that point. They posted “record-setting revenue" in 2018.
They made more money than they have ever made ever. $7.5 billion in sales and $1.8 billion in profit. Bobby Kotick got a 15 million dollar bonus. But they didn’t reach some arbitrary profit percentage so they didn’t reach their “full potential.”
So they laid off 800 staff.
The thing is: this is unsustainable. If they have already made “all the money in the world” and all the money is “not enough”, then where do they go from here? The normalization of “microtransactions” and “games as a live service” have shown that the “bean-counters” think they have “struck gold at the end of the rainbow.” But the reality is very very different.
Compare this to what happened with No Mans Sky. At launch it was a disaster. But two years later (IMHO) the game is a triumph.
I bought No Man’s Sky a few months ago. It won’t run on my current computer and I haven’t played it yet, but I will upgrade before the end of the year, and I’ll be able to play it in all its glory 
But its a game that from the description is profitable, doesn’t have microtransactions, isn’t a “live service”, doesn’t charge a fan pass or offer paid DLC. Instead they have just been working solidly on the game making it better and better and more and its still selling as well as most other AAA games at launch. Every update is free to everyone who has purchased the game: and every update takes the game to a whole new level.
One of these business models is sustainable. The other is setting itself up for disaster. Of course companies should try and increase their profit. But if you pursue profit with an unsustainable business model then eventually the whole thing is going to turn to custard. Look at how Games as a Service has evolved.
Their value increased in part because of GaaS. But if GaaS stagnates, if it doesn’t grow as anticipated by “the industry”, then there is simply no way for the games companies to meet increased profit forecasts.
TLDR: you’ve missed the point.
You know, I wonder how well NMS would have done if it had launched “complete” rather than spending two years working its Cinderella-story comeback.
Part of its post-launch appeal has been in experiencing a game that launched as one of the most spectacular dumpster fires in modern gaming history. The dev’s twitter account went dark for, what, almost a year? And then all of a sudden - bam! - they start churning out update after update. Craziness.
I think if it had launched as it is now, it would have done very well.
GaaS will stagnate and be a massive waste of money for all but one or maybe two companies because it cannot not be.
We’ve done this shit before, FFS - with MMOs, which were the Ur game-as-a-service. MMOs, very much like today’s crop of GaaS, expected and demanded constant, daily, quasi-exclusive play from its users. That was the whole business model - the games themselves were shit for the most part, but you had bars to fill up and ladders to climb and bear asses to collect ; and if you didn’t collect them bear asses you’d irretrievably fall behind the players who did while you were faffing about having fun playing other games or boiking your girlfriend, you absolute loser. And because a couple of MMOs became hugely succesful and made more money than regular games since they essentially sold you the game 4 times a year (each months’ suscription being 1/3rd of a regular game’s cost, more or less) there were suddenly MMOs launched every month, each more sprawling and time sinking than the next.
Well guess what : most MMOs died out in a year or two (while also costing more to maintain, patch and generally manage than regular games in that timespan). Because players simply did not have the time to fill the new bars by dedicating all of their free time twice. It wasn’t a quirk or a disappointment or an unexpected result, it’s common fucking sense. Resources are finite. And yet I don’t know how many companies tried to be the next WoW. Most often by straight up copying WoW, which didn’t and couldn’t work because WoW is better at being WoW than any non-WoW product is going to be by fucking definition ; nevermind the added sunk cost mindfuckery going on when one considers abandoning an MMO character they’ve dutifully raised the bars of and played for months on end. Or they did something different from WoW, at which point WoW just copied it while still also being WoW and benefiting from those sunk costs and that was that.
Fuck me but this is all painfully evident to me, and it was at the time too. Yet people who get paid real money, lots of it, for a living, didn’t grok that much.
And sure, there were a handful of outliers - Dark Age of Camelot did realm-vs-realm combat better than WoW for a long while, City of Heroes was a brand new thing because superheroes hadn’t been done in a long long while (this was before the MCU), EVE Online did space and spreadsheets better than anyone else, and a few other games eeked a temporary life out of a massively recognizable existing IP -* Star Wars Galaxies (then again with Star Wars TOR), Star Trek Online, Conan*… but the overwhelming majority of the MMOs produced in that 00s “fool’s gold rush” were absolute failures, both creatively and financially, to the point that you can’t even name the majority of them today let alone their stand-out features. Hey, do you remember there was a Matrix MMO at some point ? And a Shadowrun one ? No, you fucking didn’t until 2 seconds ago, don’t lie to me. And plenty of companies were shuttered in this nonsense, greed-based, mindlessly-follow-the-leader rush-to-the-shiny-thing mentality. It didn’t work then, it won’t work now. You want to make all of the money, create a new original niche for yourself and let *Fornite *be Fornite. Take risks and be rewarded for them (some of the time).
There’s your strategy, AAA gaming companies. Now where are my big bucks ?
The problem is that is DID work for companies. WoW copied Everquest’s formula, refined it (or dumbed it down depending on your POV) and, while Everquest was “big”, WoW exploded and dwarfed it. Fortnite did the same with PUBG; refining the formula and making PUBG’s impressive population look quaint by comparison.
So people figure, “If they did it, why can’t I be the next big thing?” In fact, why make something new when you’re likely to be the next Everquest or PUBG and get someone else copying you, learning from your mistakes and taking all the money?
(Oh, and while I evidently hold your attention, AAA companies, also let Fortnite/Epic have its 100-hour work weeks and mandatory overtime only not paid as such. Because they’re shit, and every industry needs an example of absolute shit, if only to know what not to do.
You’re multi-billion dollar enterprises, literally making more money than Hollywood at this point, you can afford to pay more man-hours if you need them ; and you can afford more employees if you need more man-hours you greedy fucking prickballs).
And the obvious answer is : “because you’re not”. Not statistically-speaking, and not creatively-speaking either because you can’t just copy/paste and expect people to find you better than what you copy/pasted. So the real choice isn’t between being the next *Fortnite *or being the next PUBG. It’s between trying to be the next *PUBG *(and maybe capitalizing on that cred later) or declaring bankruptcy and failing your dearest of the dear : shareholders. Because you’re not going to be the next Fortnite. There’s already a Fortnite. People who want to play *Fortnite *are already playing Fortnite. Every single evening.
I don’t disagree with you, really. Just saying that, for a select few, copying not only works but works really well.
I’m not saying derivative cannot or doesn’t work - it works everywhere to some extent. But one has to keep in mind market realities and the specifics of the industry they set out to be derivative in.
It’s fine to shovel out a new superhero movie every year, or even twice a year - they’re short bursts of entertainment costing consumers little money, and once you’ve seen one you’re probably not going to rewatch it too much because they’re… not great movies, really. But the next one will be fun, so there’s no market saturation for superhero movies yet (even though it already feels like they’re every movie being put out). Even the real turds (cough Thor anything-not-Ragnarok cough) still make enough money to justify their existence, if only as quick bank stopgaps to shore up the next real good one.
Same goes for music. People are not going to listen to one CD for a month, or a year, on single rotation. So derivatives and bands that sound almost but not quite like that one other band are still OK. I mean they’re shit and a little shameful to listen to but fine, they fill up dead air. And same goes for some video games. Once you’re done playing Skyrim, you’re pretty much done with it ; so there’s space for The Witcher a couple years later.
In contrast, MMOs (and GaaSs) expect to become the end all, be all of a consumer’s vidya game universe, forever ; both in terms of time invested (gotta keep 'em running on that treadmill) and in terms of spendable money (gotta make them buy your lootbox instead of the next guy’s game). That’s a scummy business model, but again, fine, that’s neither here nor there. What is, is that by definition there cannot be a niche for many of these services at the same time, let alone just two dominating ones. One will dominate, every other will hobble on at best. Even if your game is better than *Fortnite *in all respects, it simply won’t uncarve the niche Fortnite has carved itself.
And I know this, because I played Warhammer Online and loved it to bits (I even wound up working *on *WAR as a result !). Warhammer Online was either on par with or better than WoW. At everything. It started out with a gigantic budget by then MMO standards, also built on an existing IP nerds loved, it also had colourful cartoonish visuals, it also had funny dialogue and didn’t take itself super seriously. It had arenas for quick PvP, it had realm-vs-realm and sieges and all that good *DAoC *shit and the cred of having been made by the *DAoC *guys, it had great & varied character classes and mechanics (better than anything WoW ever did IMO), it had a rapid levelling cycle to make you feel like filling up the bars wasn’t a day job but an endless loop of neat rewards, it had zone-wide quests and GM-driven events to bolster the community feeling… I challenge anyone to name anything WoW did strictly better than WAR, except perhaps the sheer scale of WoW’s world after so many expansions. And yet WAR failed. Spectacularly. What’s worse, it was killed off… by a WoW expansion. To this day, WoW is still the only WoW in town (in the West. In Asia Lineage is the only Lineage around I believe, even if WoW tries to make a dent).
The lesson here is that in the end there was only market space enough for one big fantasy MMORPG, at least in the traditional subscription model (LoTRO, Age of Conan, Neverwinter and even *EQ2 *are doing okay-ish as free-to-plays, probably putting food on the table of their makers. But they’re not the giant piles of Donald Duck money EA and Blizzard expect out of Anthem, *Apex, The Division *and so on). How many play-this-game-every-day market spaces do these business geniuses reckon there are ?
I read all of it, but I didn’t miss the point; you did, by eliding the second and third paragraph of my post that you quoted.
Of course the freemium, microtransaction, loot box bullshit might be a losing strategy. I hope it is, because I hate that shit. There’s no disagreement there.
The disagreement I have is with the implication that it’s an immoral strategy, that one can condemn it by pointing out that they’re trying to make more money. Even if you want to offer a critique of capitalism as a whole (and I’m probably down with that critique), video games are a luxury item, and I don’t care about whatever gross strategies folks are using to get people to buy their luxury items, as long as those strategies aren’t in a small subset (preying on children, preying on addictions, leveraging gross stereotypes, etc.)
There’s a decent argument that microtransactions in some cases prey on children or on addictions, and those are good criticisms. But “they’re trying to make more money” isn’t that criticism.
And Blizzard’s downsizing of its workforce is worth examining and criticizing, but not because it’s a shitty commercial strategy, because it’s a shitty labor practice.
Oh, and edit: what I said above about microtransactions not being immoral most of the time goes double for these exclusivity deals, which are not immoral in any sense I can think of, except that capitalism is sometimes suckass.
Leftie, my man, you’re fusing and confusing all sorts of wildly disparate concepts together. And it’s not your fault, really - in truth, people have been trying to confuse moral arguments with financial, materialistic crap for centuries. I mean that literally - it probably began in the 16th century when the bourgeois first tried to make themselves look respectable. Witness, as example, this simple and common phrase : “work ethic”. There’s nothing inherently ethical about working vs. not working - it all depends on the job, doesn’t it ? Besides, coal mining is just prostitution absent sex, and I’m told *that *one’s very very immoral, so what the fuck, eh ? And there’s nothing ethical about earning money by working vs. earning it some other way, certainly not in the minds of those happy right wing capitalists who’ll poo-poo other parties for lacking in work ethic. They’re just moochers expecting handouts, while I’m earning money by the moral virtue of my investments and stocks ! And so on. I’ll spare you the Marxist lecture unless you absolutely force me to.
This is a direct threat. Don’t make me, or else.
But that is not to say that capitalism and morality are inherently divorced (or, coming the other way, entwined). It’s not implicitly moral for a company to seek out profit at every conceivable turn. It’s not implicitly immoral either. But then again, “morality” is a difficult butterfly to pin down. As the social science major hilaaaarious joke goes, the dictionnary oughta go “Morals : see ethics. Ethics : see morals”. As for myself, I don’t see “making shareholders richer” as a particularly moral aspect of capitalist enterprises. Morally speaking, a given enterprise either benefits society at large or it doesn’t. That’s the one moral standard that can apply.
If you make knives that are good and cheap and you make a million of them and you sell them, good. You should get rewarded. People who believed in you and enabled you to build your knife empire (that sounds a bit more nefarious than it should, doesn’t it ?) should also gain something. And the bespoke artisan who made knives just as good, but not as many and not as famous and so on, well, tough for him. He’ll simply have to rebrand, and maybe learn to gild in gold. Sell upmarket. Target hipsters. There’s a way for that guy.
On the other hand, if you make shit knives but they’re the only knives anybody can buy because you’ve fucked every other knife maker out of the market ; then how are you a moral entity in any way, shape or form ? And if you make shit knives and you know the next guy over actually makes better knives than you but you manage to succesfully sink his business anyway, somehow, then no matter what means you used to do so you are an actively immoral actor. You suck. You make society worse by existing. Fuck you, and everyone looks like you. I hope you die. I hope your shareholders die. I hope the people who study you or aspire to become you die, too. I know you won’t, because I have a history degree and I’ve been spoiled extensively - I *know *you win the whole time. Still. There’s always hope, innit ?
I for one never forgot that the Matrix Online existed. Or sucked.
(But Shadowrun had an MMO? How did I miss that?)
Errr, minor edit to #91 : that would be “giant piles of Scrooge McDuck money”, not “Donald Duck money”.
Look, I’m French, I’m trying to culturally translate here. I’m faillible. I forget shit. Like whose the one we dubbed Picsou over here, and I even had to look it up because I’m not 13 any more. And that name is funny and political because it phonetically means “steals pennies”, which makes it a lot more culturally biting than your original “Scrooge” name wot implies a mere personal character flaw as opposed to a more general slam on the very nature of the character and all of his ilk and a moral criticism of you know what, just, fuck y’all, you knew whom I meant ! Jesus !
Yup. I’m… not even sure it ever came out, not actually, at any point ? I honestly don’t know. It might have gone tits up before it even released. The screenshots make it look like a beta for the Harebrained games. But I know I was very hyped for that game anyway. Because it was Shadowrun and ye gods, I’m not an easily duped stooge on an endless quest for NERPs, chummer. Not me. I’m savvy. Almost SINless, you could say.
I never played it, but I think it was missing the MM part of MMO.
Came out mid-2015, stopped working late 2018.
Ah, “turn-based tactical video game”. So the only part of MMORPG it satisfied was the “O”. Uh, and the “G”.
It was an MMORPG the way that Starcraft on Battle.net was an MMORPG.
Now I feel less confused, thanks for the clarification.
…I didn’t miss the point because your second and third paragraph do not materially affect anything I said. No I don’t think games companies are charities. Yes I agree that businesses should try to make money. No I’m not talking about “capitalism” as a whole. I’m specifically talking about the gaming industry.
We aren’t agreeing. Freemium, microtransactions, even loot boxes aren’t inherently a “loosing strategy.” That’s not my point.
Again you are missing the point.
Lets forget about the consumer for a minute. Lets talk about the workforce. Lets directly compare two comparable industries: Hollywood and the gaming industry.
Hollywood has a lot of problems. #metoo has shone a giant spotlight on a lot of those problems, from endemic levels of sexual harassment and assault, to systematic racism and sexism that limits opportunities for marginalised peoples.
But Hollywood has one thing that the Games Industry doesn’t: the workers below the line have a very very strong union.
If you work overtime on a union movie you get paid for it. If you work additional hours you get paid for it. If you do something extra dangerous you get paid for it. You can’t do stunts without a stunt coordinator on set, you can’t have children on set beyond a set amount of hours and at certain times unless you get an exception.
In the games industry there is only one section of the industry that has a strong union: and that’s the voice actors. And in 2016 they put forward a list of demands, they couldn’t come to an agreement with the games companies, so they went on strike. A year later they came to an agreement and the strike ended.
This sort of thing doesn’t happen anywhere else in the games industry. You may have heard of crunch. There is no equivalent outside of the games industry. Its a heartless, soul-destroying process that is near-industry standard in the gaming industry. And the practice continues in the gaming industry for one simple reason: because** they can**. Because games companies don’t want to make “more money”: they want to make “all of the money.” There are very little protections for workers and contractors in the gaming industry. And with so much competition for jobs in the industry workers are disposable.
And here’s the thing. It gets fucking worse. Because while Hollywood is still grappling with endemic levels of sexual harassment and assault, to systematic racism and sexism that limits opportunities for marginalised peoples, one could argue that the same thing applies to the gaming industry, except things are an order of magnitude worse. Add a toxic fanbase that run campaigns like goobergate that the industry as a whole did very little to combat and what you get is an environment that is shitty, that is toxic, that needs to fundamentally change.
But again: this is only a piece of the puzzle. Lets look at “games as a live service” again. This is what EA Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen said back in 2017:
I’ve bolded “engagement” because that word is important. The industry is driven by metrics. And “engagement” has become the latest metric that has guided the industry. More engagement, more revenue, bigger profits. Its the thinking that has shifted the industry away from single-player-stand-alone games and towards the “live service” model.
Except engagement is bullshit. The biggest exemplar of this is the revelation that Facebook had vastly inflated engagement figures and that in part was what prompted many media companies to “pivot to video.”
Just read this twitter thread by Aram Zucker-Scharff. Its epic. And it provides the receipts. It shows just how crappy a metric “engagement” can be. The money quote:
“The numbers are all fking fake, the metrics are bullshit, the agencies responsible for enforcing good practices are knowing bullshiters enforcing and profiting off all the fake numbers and none of the models make sense at scale of actual human users”.
So how does all of this tie up?
Many video game companies have pivoted their entire business models based on dubious metrics. That pivot resulted in inflated company valuations and huge profit forecasts. The video game companies hit certain metrics that meant directors and CEO’s were rewarded with multi-million dollar bonuses. They took in billions of revenue and made billions in profit.
They made more money than they had ever made before. But they don’t want to make “more money.” They want to make “all the money.” They didn’t hit some arbitrary profit margin that was formulated on the basis of dubious statistics. They didn’t reach their “full potential.”
So who got “punished” because they didn’t reach their “full potential?” The people that did all the work. The people that spent weeks and months in crunch, often unpaid for all of that extra time. They got laid off despite the parent company making billions of profit because they didn’t hit an unreasonable forecast based on dubious statistics which resulted in company shares loosing value so they had to “fire people” to make it look like they were doing something about it.
And its this: not the implementation of “microtransactions” that I find to be immoral. It doesn’t have to be this way. Hollywood actively demonstrates it doesn’t have to be this way. The labour laws in capitalist New Zealand show that it doesn’t have to be this way.
Again: back to the Jim Sterling quote. “Companies don’t want to make money. They want to make ALL of the money.” That is the criticism.
Its all part of the same problem.
What the fuck weirdness is this, I spell the word correctly, and you quote me as misspelling it?
As for the rest of it, what the fuck does anything you’re saying have to do with exclusivity deals? It appears to me that I missed your point because I thought you were talking about something vaguely on-topic.