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As a lifelong video game player who has little interest in online games, online multiplayer, or mobile games I’ve found myself increasingly frustrated with the

As a lifelong video game player who has little interest in online games, online multiplayer, or mobile games I’ve found myself increasingly frustrated with the state of gaming for all the reasons this article discusses. I remember when DLC (purchased in a brick-and-mortar store, installed via disk) was becoming more mainstream. Anecdotally, people hated it! Comments about not getting a full game or having to pay twice to get the full experience were common sentiments. How times have changed! Now that microtransaction laden grind-fest is the norm for AAA games (even single player ones) I just don’t play much any more which is a real shame. It frustrates me that when games like Spider-Man or Ghosts of Tsushima that buck the trend are notable for bucking the trend and for actually being enjoyable (over being an as-a-service cash cow). That should be the default! These games are fun! Why make fun games or even art when making something grinding and addictive with mtx makes you so much extra money? I hate it. The insidious practices are anti-consumer, anti-human. It’s unethical imo but there’s clearly too much money to be made.

deleted 5y ago
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genocidicbunny 5y ago
> It’s unethical imo but there’s clearly too much money to be made. This is not wrong, in some cases, but I would like to offer a bit of contrary view to that. It's a bit of a wall-o-text. A modern AAA game is hugely expensive to make. Large games can easily cost over $100M to make, and even more than that for large open-world style games that are so very popular now. Lets just say for the sake of easy math that it cost $120M to develop the latest and greatest AwesomeGame title. Just to break even on that, you would need to sell 2 million copies at $60/copy. Now, mind you, you're not getting the full $60 -- probably closer to $45-50. At that point, you're looking at closer to 2.5-3 million copies to break even and make a little profit. But you can't just make a little profit -- you need to either make enough profit to justify the investment from outside investors, or enough to fund development on your next title; Likely both. So now the number of $60 copies you need to sell is closer to 4 or so million. Great, that seems doable (large AAA titles sell tens of millions of copies nowadays, what's 4 million compared to that.) But unless your AwesomeGame is highly anticipated, and people all rush out to buy it release week, you're not likely to sell all those copies at $60/copy. The number of copies you need to sell creeps ever higher. But wait, you have online features, and there's bugs and maybe some patches you gotta put out after release. After all, with a large AAA game, some things probably slipped through the cracks. So now you also have an ongoing maintenance cost for this game that you need to sell enough copies to cover -- and you need to keep selling at least that many copies unless you want to start losing money on op-ex. So now you're probably looking at needing to sell at least 10 million copies over the lifetime of the game to fulfill all these requirements. As you get closer to releasing AwesomeGame..it turns out its NotAwesomeGame. It's okay, it plays well, but just doesn't have that necessary amount of fun that will get you the good reviews and sales. So now you're delayed and need to rework some stuff. Now your AwesomeGame cost $140M to make, not much more, but it does mean you probably need to sell another 1 million copies over the lifetime of the game. Okay, so we're looking at needing lifetime sales of about 11 million copies..which is tough, but with how much money you've spent on the game, and how pretty you made it look, and how much fun it is to play, should be doable. Except...last year you tried making PreviousGame and burned a whole lot of money on that project that ended up failing. Somehow you need to cover those too. So great, now you need probably another couple million in sales to cover that previous shortfall. This all gets even more complicated if you are talking about a MMO instead of a largely single-person, or server-based multiplayer game (think CoD.) In that space, free-to-play is the default, and you absolutely must resort to mtx to make any sort of profit. I realize this is not the type of game your complaint is about, but its also the feature-set that more and more games are moving to with having persistent online components. MMOs or any sort of persistent online experience have a fairly significant op-ex All this is to say that it is not at all unexpected to me that mtx have become so entrenched in the games industry. Often for larger titles, the promise of mtx is the only way to secure financing because you need to be able to demonstrate that a given title will bring in revenue for long after it is published. They provide a financial safety net in the form of recurring revenue. Mtx or DLC is also a way for the studio to hedge their bets on development. They can design new content but wait to spend any significant development time/cost on it until the base game proves to be profitable enough to do so. If the base game fails, you save all that money that you might have spent on making the DLC and maybe put it towards the next (hopefully more successful) project. It also allows the company to spread the development costs over several years instead of taking an immediately large hit before the game starts earning revenue. But the good non-mtx non-DLC experiences you want still exist! In fact, there's more of those than ever because the barrier to entry towards making a game are actually lower than ever. What is high is the cost of making an expansive, pretty, polished game on the scale of a AAA title. At the same time though, making something that is still good looking, polished enough, and fun, is more possible than ever. Just that these are not the things your average video game consumer is clamoring for these days. Most people who play games want them to look and sound pretty, to be well polished, to maybe have some recognizable faces or voices, to have a large story. And AAA games are made for largely that audience. So yes, there is a lot of money to be made, but there's also a lot of money spent, and a lot of money that can be lost. Your best bet if you disagree with this is just to not play those sorts of games. Look for smaller indie games instead. (Full disclosure: I work on multiple MMOs and thus my salary pretty directly comes from mtx.)
- magnetowasright 5y ago
  I love text walls lol, you’ve come to the right place. I don’t think what you’ve written is contrary (I know that’s why things are the way they are) except that we disagree on whether it’s really justifiable or acceptable. I do avoid games with mtx and I do support smaller devs etc., it’d just be nice if fun quality games were profitable enough again. Or if capitalism stopped seeing as it’s the source of this problem. That’s probably a bigger discussion, though.

deleted 5y ago

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genocidicbunny 5y ago

> It’s unethical imo but there’s clearly too much money to be made. This is not wrong, in some cases, but I would like to offer a bit of contrary view to that. It's a bit of a wall-o-text. A modern AAA game is hugely expensive to make. Large games can easily cost over $100M to make, and even more than that for large open-world style games that are so very popular now. Lets just say for the sake of easy math that it cost $120M to develop the latest and greatest AwesomeGame title. Just to break even on that, you would need to sell 2 million copies at $60/copy. Now, mind you, you're not getting the full $60 -- probably closer to $45-50. At that point, you're looking at closer to 2.5-3 million copies to break even and make a little profit. But you can't just make a little profit -- you need to either make enough profit to justify the investment from outside investors, or enough to fund development on your next title; Likely both. So now the number of $60 copies you need to sell is closer to 4 or so million. Great, that seems doable (large AAA titles sell tens of millions of copies nowadays, what's 4 million compared to that.) But unless your AwesomeGame is highly anticipated, and people all rush out to buy it release week, you're not likely to sell all those copies at $60/copy. The number of copies you need to sell creeps ever higher. But wait, you have online features, and there's bugs and maybe some patches you gotta put out after release. After all, with a large AAA game, some things probably slipped through the cracks. So now you also have an ongoing maintenance cost for this game that you need to sell enough copies to cover -- and you need to keep selling at least that many copies unless you want to start losing money on op-ex. So now you're probably looking at needing to sell at least 10 million copies over the lifetime of the game to fulfill all these requirements. As you get closer to releasing AwesomeGame..it turns out its NotAwesomeGame. It's okay, it plays well, but just doesn't have that necessary amount of fun that will get you the good reviews and sales. So now you're delayed and need to rework some stuff. Now your AwesomeGame cost $140M to make, not much more, but it does mean you probably need to sell another 1 million copies over the lifetime of the game. Okay, so we're looking at needing lifetime sales of about 11 million copies..which is tough, but with how much money you've spent on the game, and how pretty you made it look, and how much fun it is to play, should be doable. Except...last year you tried making PreviousGame and burned a whole lot of money on that project that ended up failing. Somehow you need to cover those too. So great, now you need probably another couple million in sales to cover that previous shortfall. This all gets even more complicated if you are talking about a MMO instead of a largely single-person, or server-based multiplayer game (think CoD.) In that space, free-to-play is the default, and you absolutely must resort to mtx to make any sort of profit. I realize this is not the type of game your complaint is about, but its also the feature-set that more and more games are moving to with having persistent online components. MMOs or any sort of persistent online experience have a fairly significant op-ex All this is to say that it is not at all unexpected to me that mtx have become so entrenched in the games industry. Often for larger titles, the promise of mtx is the only way to secure financing because you need to be able to demonstrate that a given title will bring in revenue for long after it is published. They provide a financial safety net in the form of recurring revenue. Mtx or DLC is also a way for the studio to hedge their bets on development. They can design new content but wait to spend any significant development time/cost on it until the base game proves to be profitable enough to do so. If the base game fails, you save all that money that you might have spent on making the DLC and maybe put it towards the next (hopefully more successful) project. It also allows the company to spread the development costs over several years instead of taking an immediately large hit before the game starts earning revenue. But the good non-mtx non-DLC experiences you want still exist! In fact, there's more of those than ever because the barrier to entry towards making a game are actually lower than ever. What is high is the cost of making an expansive, pretty, polished game on the scale of a AAA title. At the same time though, making something that is still good looking, polished enough, and fun, is more possible than ever. Just that these are not the things your average video game consumer is clamoring for these days. Most people who play games want them to look and sound pretty, to be well polished, to maybe have some recognizable faces or voices, to have a large story. And AAA games are made for largely that audience. So yes, there is a lot of money to be made, but there's also a lot of money spent, and a lot of money that can be lost. Your best bet if you disagree with this is just to not play those sorts of games. Look for smaller indie games instead. (Full disclosure: I work on multiple MMOs and thus my salary pretty directly comes from mtx.)

magnetowasright 5y ago
I love text walls lol, you’ve come to the right place. I don’t think what you’ve written is contrary (I know that’s why things are the way they are) except that we disagree on whether it’s really justifiable or acceptable. I do avoid games with mtx and I do support smaller devs etc., it’d just be nice if fun quality games were profitable enough again. Or if capitalism stopped seeing as it’s the source of this problem. That’s probably a bigger discussion, though.