3 ms·

Path of Exile does have (cosmetic) loot boxes though. They didn't always, but they do now. Not a problem for me because I just don't buy them, but just not buy

by lawl 7y ago

Path of Exile does have (cosmetic) loot boxes though. They didn't always, but they do now. Not a problem for me because I just don't buy them, but just not buying them isn't really a solution for people with a gambling problem. Games like Factorio do show indeed that it's possible to just sell an excellent game for $20-30 and be profitable. Now, I don't have a source for this, but I heard valve for example stopped making single player-pay upfront games because the a one time profit of $200 million simply isn't worth it compared to, let's just call them 'modern monetization' techniques.

vorpalhex 7y ago
Path of Exile doesn't have just cosmetic loot boxes, you can actually buy game upgrades! You can unlock inventory tabs and get better sorting. And that's what I mean. Those features are a few dollars, you almost always know exactly what you're getting, and they're generally only useful after you've put a few hours into the game. For a free to play game, that's a totally valid use in my book. > but just not buying them isn't really a solution for people with a gambling problem Someone having a pre-existing gambling problem isn't the fault of the developers, nor is that what the researcher in the original article is claiming. The researcher claims that allowing kids to engage in buying loot boxes fosters a gambling addiction later in life.
- lawl 7y ago
  Yeah I'm aware of how their monetization works and I think it's great as they at least never force you to buy them and everything eventually becomes available for a flat price in the shop at some point. > Someone having a pre-existing gambling problem isn't the fault of the developers, nor is that what the researcher in the original article is claiming. The researcher claims that allowing kids to engage in buying loot boxes fosters a gambling addiction later in life. Kids can also buy lootboxes in PoE. Ok sure, technically kids shouldn't be playing PoE, but that's just not reality.
fredley 7y ago
$20 on Factorio is probably the best money I've ever spent on a game, having played over 1,000 hours. In other words, they've managed to make something endlessly addictive without any gambling element at all...
- Bartweiss 7y ago
  Although from an industry perspective, that's bad news because you're paying $0.50/hour for entertainment. And without room for a new campaign or a graphics upgrade, whoever wants to sell you your next 1,000 hour game still has to compete with Factorio. Minecraft, Terraria, Factorio, and maybe Satisfactory have all done well, but each one contends with all the rest. Don't get me wrong, I love Factorio and I think it's a way more valuable achievement than any of the loot box games under debate. I also think it's a viable development model: Factorio was in the top 100 for 2018 Steam revenue, with a 20 person studio. It's just interesting that unlike other media, videogames have this order-of-magnitude variation in how much they compete with one another. (This ties into a much longer narrative about the decline of single-player campaigns. The beauty of e.g. Dragon Age is that you can make an engrossing game and build, not undermine, the market for your next one. But as the difficulty of development shifts towards hard-to-reuse things like character models, there's an increasingly strong incentive to emulate CoD and R6 and wring as much longevity as possible out of each iteration.)
ThrowawayR2 7y ago
> Games like Factorio do show indeed that it's possible to just sell an excellent game for $20-30 and be profitable. Sure, but that means nothing since games of the quality of Factorio come along once in a blue moon. It's nice that selling filet mignon is profitable, but selling a decent burger has to be profitable too to have a viable industry. That has proven to be difficult in the games industry under the current circumstances. (And if any here disagree, ask yourself, "is the software or service I'm building for my employer comparable to a Factorio or whether it's just another average product/SaaS and whether or not my employer "deserves" to be profitable to sign my paycheck".)
- Bartweiss 7y ago
  It's not just that: Factorio makes it harder to games like Factorio to be profitable. The way we consume videogames is essentially unique among media, because the time investment is so varied. Making a superhero movie helps saturate the market for superhero movies, but almost no one directly decides "instead of going to the rest of the MCU, I'll just rewatch Iron Man fifteen times". But with videogames, it's unremarkable to someone who loves two games give one 50 hours of playtime and the other 1,000. If you're going to enter the market, competing with that 1,000 hour title is a much tougher challenge. Factorio is like an an endless filet mignon; since it's not sold on graphics or story, that $20 purchase will endure to challenge all of its successors. (Satisfactory might catch on, but if it does the niche will be one step more exhausted.) Minecraft is a $30 game that's still eating play hours among people who've owned it for years; continuing monetization has depended not on a sequel but on ports (Pocket Edition), peripheral merch, and new generations of players; that's very obviously not a model most games can use. Dwarf Fortress is a niche of its own, near-permanently filled by just two donation-funded developers. (Dominions is less famous, but similar: a two-man team has kept people playing their output for twenty years.) Even AAA products like Civilization struggle; lots of people avoid buying Civ games at release because they compare unfavorably to the patched-and-expanded predecessor. Nor is it a coincidence that all of those games are immersive strategy or construction titles. On one hand, they're generally modest in terms of graphics and campaign, so there's no obvious need to switch to newer titles. And on the other, they're modest in graphics and server load, so a small team can make a popular title relatively cheaply. The end result is that you can make a solid profit on this sort of cheap, no-loot, no-subscribtion game - if you're one of an inherently small number of winners in a constrained design space. I don't think there's anything wrong with this. It's a triumph that $20, thousand-hour games exist, and the people making them actually do seem to make solid money. But it's worth remembering just how niche an arrangement this is. It's possible for media to exist that is at once desired and unprofitable to create; the Factorio equivalent for an FPS or CCG might well be such a product.
boarnoah 7y ago
Curious which category you'd classify Valve's monetization techniques. The big ones Counter Strike and Dota are entirely cosmetics after all.

by lawl 7y ago

vorpalhex 7y ago

Path of Exile doesn't have just cosmetic loot boxes, you can actually buy game upgrades! You can unlock inventory tabs and get better sorting. And that's what I mean. Those features are a few dollars, you almost always know exactly what you're getting, and they're generally only useful after you've put a few hours into the game. For a free to play game, that's a totally valid use in my book. > but just not buying them isn't really a solution for people with a gambling problem Someone having a pre-existing gambling problem isn't the fault of the developers, nor is that what the researcher in the original article is claiming. The researcher claims that allowing kids to engage in buying loot boxes fosters a gambling addiction later in life.

lawl 7y ago
Yeah I'm aware of how their monetization works and I think it's great as they at least never force you to buy them and everything eventually becomes available for a flat price in the shop at some point. > Someone having a pre-existing gambling problem isn't the fault of the developers, nor is that what the researcher in the original article is claiming. The researcher claims that allowing kids to engage in buying loot boxes fosters a gambling addiction later in life. Kids can also buy lootboxes in PoE. Ok sure, technically kids shouldn't be playing PoE, but that's just not reality.

fredley 7y ago

$20 on Factorio is probably the best money I've ever spent on a game, having played over 1,000 hours. In other words, they've managed to make something endlessly addictive without any gambling element at all...

Bartweiss 7y ago
Although from an industry perspective, that's bad news because you're paying $0.50/hour for entertainment. And without room for a new campaign or a graphics upgrade, whoever wants to sell you your next 1,000 hour game still has to compete with Factorio. Minecraft, Terraria, Factorio, and maybe Satisfactory have all done well, but each one contends with all the rest. Don't get me wrong, I love Factorio and I think it's a way more valuable achievement than any of the loot box games under debate. I also think it's a viable development model: Factorio was in the top 100 for 2018 Steam revenue, with a 20 person studio. It's just interesting that unlike other media, videogames have this order-of-magnitude variation in how much they compete with one another. (This ties into a much longer narrative about the decline of single-player campaigns. The beauty of e.g. Dragon Age is that you can make an engrossing game and build, not undermine, the market for your next one. But as the difficulty of development shifts towards hard-to-reuse things like character models, there's an increasingly strong incentive to emulate CoD and R6 and wring as much longevity as possible out of each iteration.)

ThrowawayR2 7y ago

> Games like Factorio do show indeed that it's possible to just sell an excellent game for $20-30 and be profitable. Sure, but that means nothing since games of the quality of Factorio come along once in a blue moon. It's nice that selling filet mignon is profitable, but selling a decent burger has to be profitable too to have a viable industry. That has proven to be difficult in the games industry under the current circumstances. (And if any here disagree, ask yourself, "is the software or service I'm building for my employer comparable to a Factorio or whether it's just another average product/SaaS and whether or not my employer "deserves" to be profitable to sign my paycheck".)

Bartweiss 7y ago
It's not just that: Factorio makes it harder to games like Factorio to be profitable. The way we consume videogames is essentially unique among media, because the time investment is so varied. Making a superhero movie helps saturate the market for superhero movies, but almost no one directly decides "instead of going to the rest of the MCU, I'll just rewatch Iron Man fifteen times". But with videogames, it's unremarkable to someone who loves two games give one 50 hours of playtime and the other 1,000. If you're going to enter the market, competing with that 1,000 hour title is a much tougher challenge. Factorio is like an an endless filet mignon; since it's not sold on graphics or story, that $20 purchase will endure to challenge all of its successors. (Satisfactory might catch on, but if it does the niche will be one step more exhausted.) Minecraft is a $30 game that's still eating play hours among people who've owned it for years; continuing monetization has depended not on a sequel but on ports (Pocket Edition), peripheral merch, and new generations of players; that's very obviously not a model most games can use. Dwarf Fortress is a niche of its own, near-permanently filled by just two donation-funded developers. (Dominions is less famous, but similar: a two-man team has kept people playing their output for twenty years.) Even AAA products like Civilization struggle; lots of people avoid buying Civ games at release because they compare unfavorably to the patched-and-expanded predecessor. Nor is it a coincidence that all of those games are immersive strategy or construction titles. On one hand, they're generally modest in terms of graphics and campaign, so there's no obvious need to switch to newer titles. And on the other, they're modest in graphics and server load, so a small team can make a popular title relatively cheaply. The end result is that you can make a solid profit on this sort of cheap, no-loot, no-subscribtion game - if you're one of an inherently small number of winners in a constrained design space. I don't think there's anything wrong with this. It's a triumph that $20, thousand-hour games exist, and the people making them actually do seem to make solid money. But it's worth remembering just how niche an arrangement this is. It's possible for media to exist that is at once desired and unprofitable to create; the Factorio equivalent for an FPS or CCG might well be such a product.

boarnoah 7y ago

Curious which category you'd classify Valve's monetization techniques. The big ones Counter Strike and Dota are entirely cosmetics after all.