Comment by jl6
3 years ago
Did you know there is a market for pre-war steel? This is steel manufactured before 1945 that is uncontaminated by radionuclides:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
There will soon be a market for pre-microtransactions games.
Also: I used to hate on the casino industry for using the term “gaming” to euphemistically refer to gambling, but now they’re not so different so I’ll let them have that one.
>There will soon be a market for pre-microtransactions games
I'd argue there already is -- what's currently called "indies". IMO the greater threat is the "compulsion loop". Plenty of excellent games, both historical and modern, are content to challenge the player without much in the way of enticement. But in this late year, we're having to contend with things like Vampire Survivors [0], which, while being microtransaction-free, is fun, straightforward, and takes inspiration from video lottery terminals. Yes, really! Its creator, Luca Galante [1]:
>“Slot games are very simple,” he tells The Verge. “All the player has to do is press one button, and the game designers have to find a way to push the player to press that button. [The player] is actually spending money every time they press it, and because of that, there’s a huge attention to detail on the sounds, the animations, and the sequences, because you have so few elements to work with. Basically, [the designers] try to maximize the importance and impact those elements have on the player. I just absorbed that knowledge basically just by being in the industry. And so when making a game, I have automatically applied it to what [I’ve been] doing.”
>That’s all reflected in Vampire Survivors. Starting a game immediately drops you into the action, and the only controls to think about are moving your character and picking upgrades. You don’t even need to press a button to use your weapons. The charming retro graphics feel like they’re ripped straight from a long-forgotten Super Nintendo Castlevania game, and you’ll hear a delightful chime every time you pick up one of the countless experience gems. Opening treasure chests seems to intentionally create the feeling that you’re pulling a slot machine; pixelated weapons stream by on ribbons of color as coins fly everywhere, all backed by a catchy jingle. (If you get lucky and find a chest with five items, there are actually fireworks.)
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1794680/Vampire_Survivors...
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/19/22941145/vampire-survivor...
Every game has a compulsion loop. In chess its a full game of chess. In Street Fighter II it is one full fight with up to 3 rounds. Its a very dystopian sounding but very central component to almost all games.
>Every game has a compulsion loop
Of course, but in non-Skinner-box-speak, we call that the "gameplay". Refactoring an old concept like "gameplay" to wield the tools of war usually associated with gambling -- that's the crux of the matter. That's what I and the root-level commenter fear.
Vampire Survivors itself isn't the problem -- it costs $3, and doesn't require any more (non-temporal) investment, neither microtransactions nor additional quarters. But it's a harbinger of things to come. Remember horse armour, and how harmless it was?
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This is just arcade design. Vampire Survivors might have a more bombastic way of presenting random drops, but otherwise it's not meaningfully different from something like Robotron or Gauntlet.
Well, why do we want to go back there? The demise of the arcade, brought on by computers and consoles growing inexpensive and powerful, allowed videogaming to become an art form (eg Braid, FEZ, To The Moon, etc, are artistic experiences if a film ever was, cannot be replicated on other forms of media, and cannot easily be monetized into an arcade machine). Returning to an age where electronic entertainment needs you to feed it money every once in a while, regardless of how much or why, seems like a step backward.
More concisely, why excuse shittiness with historical precedent?
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Thank you for explaining my recent videogame behaviour. I think the last AAAs I played through was Ghost of Tsushima and the Demon Souls remake. I feel less inclined to play AAAs and I find myself gravitating to Gris, Sable, Untitled Goose Game and Trek to Yomi to name a few.
Honestly, I think there already is a market for that. I know personally, when I buy mobile games, I completely avoid the F2P space. The last mobile game I played was The Oregon Trail (on Apple Arcade), and I gotta say, it was incredibly refreshing playing a game on the phone that was just a game. No annoying timers or things like that to convince me to buy "gems" or whatever currency. (I'm not sure if that game is completely clear from that, but I didn't notice it at all if it was there)
Even in F2P games, there's a huge chunk of gamers that take pride in "I've never bought anything in this game". I think culturally "whales" are frowned upon, even though they (sadly) make up the vast majority of F2P games profits.
When guy's like this CEO talk about monetization btw, IMO a lot of these methods are really shady, because the vast majority of profits come from a very small minority that are unable to exercise self control around these "compulsion loops." On the surface, "if you don't want to pay for it you don't have to" seems friendly enough, but when you realize that essentially all the profits are coming from people that have (arguably) an addiction, it feels a bit gross. Not that all monetization is bad. I don't have a problem with like, selling hats or outfits or things that don't affect gameplay, but when your gameplay is designed to open peoples wallets... it's a bit of a grey area IMO.
The dichotomy between cosmetics and gameplay-impacting microtransactions is irrelevant. They both produce the addiction you describe.
I don't think that's true. Take something like Clash of Clans. There's a real incentive to pay for an upgrade to help your clan in your next clan war, or you get into an impatient fuck-it mode because your inferno tower is going to take 10 days to upgrade. After a few weeks of play time and some leveling up the game essentially offers the player a choice: either disengage from the game and accept that most of your efforts were a sunk cost (which is extra sad because your base layout if fairly personal and an expression of yourself), or pony up to get the same feelings you got initially for free.
On the other hand, if I buy a hat I like in Team Fortess, like, I might buy more hats in the future but there's no particular incentive for me to do so.
Addiction generally requires a couple things IMO:
- The product/substance needs to provide some sort of short term relief or benefit
- The short term relief or benefit becomes more expensive over time and less satisfying
- The higher the usage, the more invested or dependent the person becomes
If you spend like $1000 upgrading your base in Clash of Clans, then you're certainly invested and likely to spend more in the future. The benefits also start to dwindle -- you have to spend more for the same effect (ie, upgrades get more expensive/time consuming)
On the other hand, if you buy a hat for $5, none of the above applies. Maybe you're a little more invested in the game but that's about it. And well, if you were buying a hat, you're probably already pretty invested.
Elden Ring's massive success shows the market for games without MTX is absolutely active and large.
But if you never publish those games and no other publishers ever do, you deny that market from existing. I have plenty of gamer friends. They move like sheep yearly to the next title because thats where the playerbase marches to. There is no alternative unless they want to wait 10 minutes between rounds and have half full matches or deal with totalitarian private servers. A publisher like EA has no incentive to ever allow a game like that to be greenlit under their brand, and every incentive to forever shirk it out. A smaller time publisher like those behind Elden Ring can come in with a game like this, but the big time publishers know that the best practice is to wring the cow dry for all they can because it comes to pasture yearly.
EA published that Star Wars Jedi game with no microtransactions and sold 10 million copies. Yeah if you think all your customers are idiots or sheep then you'll make bad games that just manipulate people into constantly spending more, but it's clearly not the only path.
There is a market, unfortunately it might be a small one as I've been unable to find good resources to find games without IAP or without "bad" IAP, aka gems, coins, powerup, speedup, etc. The only good IAPs are DLC, Full Unlock, or Remove Ads. If a game has anything but that I will not download the game. No matter how many times they scream "Free to play" we all know that's 100% bullshit (and if you don't then I've got a bridge to sell you). The only exception to this rule is if the only IAP is cosmetic-only (think: Fortnight).
All other F2P games progress to the point that they require you to pay to proceed either by making your progress slow down to near-zero and/or forcing you to grind for hours to move forward even a tiny bit. No, it's not "The game is just harder", they specifically make the game too hard at a certain point to force you into paying. It's a really ingenious system where they will let you get quite far in the game before they turn the screws, when you think "Well I have played X hours, I can spend $Y on this powerup". PvZ2 is a good example of this. EA absolutely ruined the PvZ franchise (they even went back and screwed up PvZ1, adding ads/IAP even if you bought the game previously) with their greed.
F2P/IAP game developers have perverse incentives to milk you for all you're worth and no matter how "pure"/"moral" they think they want to be. The siren call of money will always lead them to ruin games and make them effectively P2W, even if subconsciously. It's simply too easy to do, just bump the boss HP up by a factor of 10, make this part of the level near-impossible without a powerup, etc.
Apple Arcade helps will some of this but the catalogue is limited (though there are some real gems in there, some of which are games that were F2P/P2W initially). I've found Apple's "Games you might like" or "Based on your downloads" to actually be surprisingly good. I just have to filter them out if they have "bad" IAPs.
YES! I registered gamblingisnotgaming.com with a view to put some material on there about the difference between games and gambling, the dangers of addiction, etc, but dread the idea of getting sued because of it, so it's currently not hosting anything.
It's also especially annoying when searching for jobs in games, and these ruddy e-gambling companies keep popping up on searches, because "gaming".
I think Apple Arcade and similar are already doing this. Games on there are free from microtransactions/ads.
...besides the recurring nominal fee that you have to pay to retain "ownership" of a title? I think you misunderstand what "free from microtransactions" means.
That's why there are so many hugely successful remakes/remasters of old games in recent years. I might just be getting old, but the AAA studios don't seem to be capable of making great games anymore, now that business guys are running the show.
> There will soon be a market for pre-microtransactions games.
It's already too late to get into the hobby of collecting retro games/hardware. eBay prices have been shooting upwards for a good few years already.
Thankfully, the classics are well-preserved via emulation (and in some cases, FPGA recreations of older hardware). But there's an ever-increasing number of games that simply aren't able to be preserved due having no access to server-side components, and many others lost from the early days of mobile gaming (e.g. 32-bit iOS games from before F2P took over), with no way to run them on modern hardware and no emulation solutions yet, even if the games themselves have survived somewhere.
But if there's a market for "pre" microtransaction games, then wouldn't there be a market for "non" microtransaction games? And couldn't you just... make those? It's not like microtransactions are literally dispersed in the atmosphere.
Building a RetroPie is a fun project that can end in having hundreds of old games. https://retropie.org.uk/