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Nearly 90% Of Developers Surveyed Say Premium Games Don't Need Microtransactions
(insider-gaming.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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As long as whales keep buying stuff they'll keep putting microtransactions in games. Start making fun of people that buy skins and horse armor and maybe people will stop buying shit that has no value.
Honestly, I'm all for horse armor. Oblivion didn't do anything stupid like requiring an internet connection, and I could easily ignore the horse armor as horrendous value for my dollar. It's way worse when they're prioritizing "engagement" via battle passes or legalized gambling for children via loot boxes.
Tell that to literally every lake ever... When several slopes join together, you can, in fact, drown down slope.
It gave your horse extra health actually, so not purely cosmetic. But I think in a single player game that also has extremely good modding tools, it doesn't really matter. If you want to pay to win your single player game, you do you.
Horse armour was mostly a landmark for showing companies that consumers were willing to pay for micro stuff like that. The potential return vs effort invested was crazy. Todd himself said that they try doing nice DLC that gives you good value for your money, but it's hard to justify business-wise when the horse armour is so cheap to make and sells so well.
It didn't start with horse armor. And even then, while clearly stupid, it wasn't egregious in the way modern mtx is. It was just a poorly priced optional cosmetic DLC. Modern mtx is a whole other beast, where companies use every psychological trick in the book to get people addicted to gambling.
Cachet.
Oh, it had like an inventory functionality? I love Oblivion, but I obviously didn't get the armor and don't remember the details. I suspect it also provided defense for the horse? In that case it's almost approaching Assassin's Creed's "buy xp to skip grind" level of egregiousness, but still just a DLC.
Could you please explain? Now I'm curious.
I didn't find any references to "cache". That's the part I want to understand, what the significance of that part of the joke. Why "cache"?
Ah, as in it provides respect? And sounds like cash? I know, I know, dissecting jokes is a lot of fun.
Horse armor was not cosmetic. It was armor.
Otherwise, spot-on. At least people who paid for horse armor got a whole new file for something that was not already in the damn game. Nowadays you're already looking at the thing, and you're getting gouged for the ability to say you have it.
Horse armor came out in 2006. Micro transactions started in 2002 with Maple Story. Plenty of other games had micro transactions by then. Horse armor was a peak when Microsoft drove too hard and consumers pushed back- it was far from the start.
wait, did microsoft own bethesda back then?
No, but they had a very close relationship. Morrowind was an Xbox exclusive. Oblivion was a timed Xbox exclusive that was supposed to be a 360 launch title that got delayed (the Horse Armor fiasco happened in 2006, while Oblivion didn't release on PS3 until 2007).
100 people see dumb ad.
40 people click on dumb ad.
10 people play game from dumb ad.
5 people stick it out and continue playing.
1 of those 5 spends money.
Games that are p2w exist in a symbiotic relationship with people who are willing to spend copious amounts of money. The people who don't spend money and still exist within these games help fill in the environment. ALL players of these games are the problem.
Mobile games are the most common example of this, though other games fall under similar banners. The truth is any free game with live service needs money to operate. Hell, even that fan-run DBZ MMO has costs associated with it that the community helps fund. This won't go away, it'll just disguise itself as something else.
I do believe, however, that for larger games the bloated cost of development needs to fuck right off. 100mil and 5 years or more? There is a logistical issue there that needs to be addressed. One of many, I'm afraid.
The Team Fortress / CS:GO model of microtransactions was the least offensive and honestly not much different than the pastiche upgrades you could get before DLC, via "Special Edition" game releases and other gimmicks.
Even then, what's obnoxious about modern gaming is the endless injection of ads. Compare Diablo 4 and Baldur's Gate 3, and one of the first things that jump out at you is how much more BG3 is a game and D4 is just a grind that demands more and more of your money. Meanwhile, with the exception of an artbook and soundtrack, what you see with BG3 is what you get. They even tacked on incremental improvements after release that weren't bundled as nickle-and-dime add-ons.
And look who made more money? It was a tie!
I don't think you can strictly shame Microsoft/Blizzard/Activison at this point, because the current C-level staff can get caught in the middle of a serial sexual harassment scandal and still just shrug it off. I don't think you can influence them with your wallet, either, because their model appears to work well-enough (even Diablo Immortal brought in half a billion dollars, and that game sucked shit) relative to BG3 which brought in slightly over $650M.
I think, at some point, you just have to ignore these games at a personal level and satisfy yourself with the knowledge that a dozen or so high quality games get released every year, even if they're swimming in a sea of hundreds of crappy freemium over-promoted titles. Don't worry about the Whales. Just focus on what's good.
agreed. I focus on my personal happiness rather than thinking i can change the industry somehow through my purchases. I just focus on my own pride as a gamer and human being and not paying companies who don't respect me or my time. Then instead of being frustrated by the fact 20 years of 'voting with my wallet' didn't work, i am filled with calm satisfaction at not being taken for yet another ride. and shit, its not like i'm denying myself here... there are so many games.
Unfortunately, the success of Grand Theft Auto Online will cause corporate execs to forever ignore all your good points.
GTA's been downhill since it stopped being a top-down sprite game.
Retvrn 2 Tradition
Have you tried Rustler? Top-down medieval GTA. Kind of a fun change.
This looks pretty great. Thanks for the suggestion.
Was it? There's a very recent infographic from Larian, and if you cross reference one or two of those stats against achievement data, it looks like they maybe sold about 10M copies. That's lower than I was expecting, but that's what my math says. Not only did Diablo IV sell more copies at the same price, but there were also more opportunities for them to sell post-launch stuff in Diablo.
Estimates put it around 13 million sales on Steam alone. Say another 5 million from console sales combined to a guesstimate around 18 million.
The estimates I saw were around $650M for each. Maybe that doesn't count post-launch DLC.
It's also raw revenue rather than net profit (I guarantee Blizzard had an advertising budget orders of magnitude larger than Larian) so it's very possible Larian kept more of what it made.
They are in the same ballpark in terms of successful game making, however you slice it. Both could make an argument for why their model of development worked and why this proves doing things their way is the best method for making money.
There are too many people who have way too much money and don't care. Games with aggressive monetization aren't going anywhere but the same is true for games made by passionate devs who care about making a good game. Anyone complaining all games are soulless cash grabs isn't giving smaller indie devs a chance.
Whales are largely a myth created by game companies to create a false class war amongst us rather than holding the truly responsible parties at fault. No different than pitting the middle class against the poor.
Do whales exist? Absolutely. However, the vast majority of mtx money comes from people with addiction problems, mental health issues that make fiscal responsibility difficult, and kids who don't know any better. Many of whom who are spending money that they can't afford to spend but can't help themselves from spending.
These companies quite literally hire psychologists to tell them exactly how to exploit people's own brain chemistry against them to most effectively extract money from their wallets. Epic Games got in trouble because it was believed that they were trying to create a culture in Fornite that shamed kids for having default skins. Everything from daily login bonuses to seasons and battle passes to rotating stores are designed to keep you logging in and playing and therefore paying. They turn logging in into a habit and then hit you with the FOMO and completing your collection needs.
You're not going to fix this by shaming people any more than you can cure drug, alcohol, and gambling addiction by shaming people.
The term "whale" just implies a big spender, it doesn't exlude gambling addicts, dumb children or the fiscally irresponsable.
But when people think "whale," they think of the rich idiots with more money than sense. They don't think of the addict being fleeced like kids by cigarette companies. And we need to change that mentality. Because we're just victim blaming here. You can't shame a heroin addict into a sober person.
Been making fun of them since TF2. It doesn't work when they have no shame and plenty of money to waste.
Star Citizen has a $48,000 package BECAUSE PEOPLE ASKED FOR IT!
They didn't just decide to do that. There are actually people that said "I want to buy everything you have but I don't want to have to add one item at a time..." You can only access that package if you've already spent over 1k I believe.
There were even content creators that didn't want to reveal the identity of their viewers, but said they've played with people that have spent $100k... I don't know how true that is, but I've watched one of them enough to get a feel for their personality and they don't seem like to type to make that up.
I've played Clash of clans with people that spent up to 2k every month, so I say it's very believable.
Yes, blame the victims, that always works well.
Microtransactions exploit the fact that some people have addictive tendencies. You won't "fix" that by making fun of those people.
Except the big money isn't coming from the whales. It's coming from the gamer equivalent of the little old lady at the casino with her bucket of quarters.
So the answer is neither.
Unfortunately, the biggest group of people buying mtx are those with mental health issues/addiction issues and kids who have no concept of fiscal responsibility. And as the saying goes, there's a sucker born every minute.
These companies have literally hired psychologists to tell them how to best exploit the human brain for maximum wallet extraction. They're doing the equivalent of casinos pumping extra oxygen into the room to keep you more awake and not having any windows so you don't realize how long you've been in there (plus the easy booze to loosen the purse strings).
Nothing's gonna change until we can hold these companies responsible for their actions. Ironically, I think review bombing on Steam actually helps since it can make people aware of the exploitative practices these companies are doing and make them avoid these games.
And there are plenty of irresponsible parents. There was a story about 5 years ago I remember of a young kid (like 6 years old) who literally emptied his parents' bank account on mtx in an iPhone game because they didn't know it had mtx in it.
And saying that people with mental health issues need to git gud is like saying that people in wheelchairs need to git gud and use stairs. What we need to do is replace the idiots with people who understand how bad this shit is so we can get something done about it.
Better than blaming addicts for being addicted.
As usual, vote local, vote often applies here, but personally, I'm in 100% agreement that the odds of it happening in our lifetime are slim to none.
Victim blaming. Classy