5 ms·

This happens to video games also. Publishers give review copies with microtransactions not included, the reviewers review it, and then shortly after release the

This happens to video games also. Publishers give review copies with microtransactions not included, the reviewers review it, and then shortly after release they add their free-to-play garbage so they get reviews that don't take the microtransactions into account and then they add it later. The also do it during ESRB submission to get around having to have a label that mentions in-game purchases. I'm surprised ESRB lets them get away with it, actually. Jimquisition on it: https://youtu.be/9LeZ89_u2Gc https://youtu.be/9LeZ89_u2Gc Article on it: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/66889/publishers-delaying-microtransactions-bypass-reviews/index.html https://www.tweaktown.com/news/66889/publishers-delaying-mic...

some_random 5y ago
ESRB is industry controlled iirc, and microtransations/lootboxes are a huge cash flow for the largest games companies
- wiz21c 5y ago
  Et voilà. Conflict of interests all the way...
- plorkyeran 5y ago
  Yeah, it's voluntary self-regulation that was establish to stave off laws being passed in the early 90s during the panic over Mortal Kombat, Doom, etc. Presumably if legislators start looking into microtransactions and rating tricks then the ESRB will start taking them much more seriously.
pulse7 5y ago
What are those microtransactions doing? Crypto mining?
- michaelt 5y ago
  The reviewers get sent an account with everything enabled, and have a great time playing as Darth Vader Or Han Solo Or Whatever. The general public buy the game, and find if you want to play as Darth Vader or Han Solo unlocking them costs $20 each.
  - zshift 5y ago
    Or playing for hundreds of hours per unlock
    - ronsor 5y ago
      Or lootboxes, which guarantee you'll spend about $500 per unlock.
- dharmab 5y ago
  "Microtransaction" means small purchases. Such as buying a randomized pack of in-game unlocks for $1 each. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtransaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtransaction
opdahl 5y ago
One of the latest events like this is Capcoms Resident Evil Village which launched with a DRM that added terrible stuttering to the PC version. They only admitted to this and promised a fix when a cracked version came out that had the DRM removed and it didn’t have any stuttering [1]. [1] https://www.gamesradar.com/resident-evil-village-pc-patch-launched-to-fix-drm-related-stuttering/ https://www.gamesradar.com/resident-evil-village-pc-patch-la...
- smoldesu 5y ago
  The folks at Digital Foundry did a phenomenal job breaking down the specifics, as usual. I strongly suggest checking out their video if you're interested in the stuff: https://youtu.be/UXZGCwAJpbM https://youtu.be/UXZGCwAJpbM
- gentleman11 5y ago
  Capcoms pc ports have always been… I remember my dmc3 that didn’t work at all (maybe a fan patch helped?), and the frame pacing in re4 on pc giving my wife and I migraines… or dmc5 deleting my save file… or re2 remake requiring 2 year old drivers to avoid crashes… I have friends who have issues with the street fighters on pc as well. That’s just off the top of my head.
jbverschoor 5y ago
Sounds like the diesel scandal
dijit 5y ago
I work on an upcoming free to play game, we will have microtransactions on cosmetics and possibly new character archetypes. Microtransactions are not in the early builds of the game because we literally hadn't made the content for it yet, we were focusing on the game mechanics. The store is a lot of work in a game, and the cosmetics themselves are mostly content work which is not hyper critical to have in place (unlike, say, matchmaking or gun mechanics). I'm not saying it hasn't been done nefariously; just that: The game I'm making doesn't have microtransactions yet because we worked on other stuff. But we're not lying about them being there, they have to be there otherwise we'll go bankrupt paying the server costs and failing to recoup R&D costs.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Dayshine 5y ago
  You should be ensuring that all reviewers mention that this is an early access dev build with all paid content unlocked then, right? I don't think people are talking about cosmetic micro-transaction though.
  - fencepost 5y ago
    You should be ensuring that all reviewers mention that this is an early access dev build with all paid content unlocked then, right? Sounds like since all the transactions are for cosmetics that haven't been made the content simply doesn't exist in review copies.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  I'm not saying all microtransactions are bad necessarily. I've also worked on a couple of games that have had them, although we did have them on launch (and added more to it later). But it is kind of a shitty move if you let reviewers review your game and let them believe there won't be microtransactions and then you add them later. Now if your game is a free game to begin with, it's sort of expected you'll add something in there to make money at some point. But most of these big AAA games are $60-100+ to buy the game to begin with, so there's not an easy assumption to make. Also they almost always have it available a few weeks after launch, as if they were just waiting to get past ESRB and reviewers without mentioning those things. Finally, I've worked on console games and handled ESRB submissions for our games. You're not supposed to leave anything out. We got dinged once for not mentioning that the card art on one of our cards had a character smoking a pipe on it, and another card where the anime girl had a slightly exposed nipple (we didn't even notice, it was a port of a game by another developer and the card art is busy enough you kind of have to be looking for it... if we had known, we would have told the developer to edit those out and the game wouldn't have had the 'smoking' and 'nudity' label on our rating). The video you submit is supposed to show everything in the game. And yet these companies aren't doing that so they can keep the in-game purchases label off their game. If you're trying to hide something in your game from certain parties, you're being shitty and you should stop, is the moral of the story. If you're not you're probably fine. For the ESRB rating for the game I worked on, here's the back of the box for proof: https://www.vgchartz.com/games/boxart/full_6178352AmericaBackccc.jpg https://www.vgchartz.com/games/boxart/full_6178352AmericaBac...
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
Phone manufacturers do this as well. Release a phone to reviewers with awesome performance and battery life (by aggressively killing background apps), then a month later, release a build that doesn't do those things so people don't complain about missed notifications, etc. Hell, even Apple nuked the noise cancelling in the Airpods Pro right after launch [1], possibly for battery reasons or to prevent hearing damage lawsuits, but by all accounts they had jaw-dropping noise cancelling when the reviewers were writing their initial reviews. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/17/21069953/apple-airpods-pro-noise-cancellation-problems-firmware-2b588-2c54 https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/17/21069953/apple-airpods-pr...
- sebazzz 5y ago
  I see a market for a site called "The late review".
  - dalmo3 5y ago
    Not sure about consoles, but Steam solves that by ranking recent reviews and those submitted by players with more game time as more relevant.
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
IMO with games it's preplanned fraud for profit, With hardware it's due to pandemic induced chip shortage but I guess it's still a fraud when product states something and delivers another. I was expecting that the silent feature reductions in the automobiles due to chip-shortage would seep into another hardware products sooner or later, In fact I was trying to validate whether there's a need to track 'What has been removed due to chip shortage'[1] and it seems like there's good reason to do it. [1] https://needgap.com/problems/234-what-has-been-removed-due-to-chip-shortage-comparision-semiconductor https://needgap.com/problems/234-what-has-been-removed-due-t... (Disclaimer: I created this platform).

some_random 5y ago

ESRB is industry controlled iirc, and microtransations/lootboxes are a huge cash flow for the largest games companies

wiz21c 5y ago
Et voilà. Conflict of interests all the way...
plorkyeran 5y ago
Yeah, it's voluntary self-regulation that was establish to stave off laws being passed in the early 90s during the panic over Mortal Kombat, Doom, etc. Presumably if legislators start looking into microtransactions and rating tricks then the ESRB will start taking them much more seriously.

pulse7 5y ago

What are those microtransactions doing? Crypto mining?

michaelt 5y ago
The reviewers get sent an account with everything enabled, and have a great time playing as Darth Vader Or Han Solo Or Whatever. The general public buy the game, and find if you want to play as Darth Vader or Han Solo unlocking them costs $20 each.
- zshift 5y ago
  Or playing for hundreds of hours per unlock
  - ronsor 5y ago
    Or lootboxes, which guarantee you'll spend about $500 per unlock.
dharmab 5y ago
"Microtransaction" means small purchases. Such as buying a randomized pack of in-game unlocks for $1 each. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtransaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtransaction

opdahl 5y ago

One of the latest events like this is Capcoms Resident Evil Village which launched with a DRM that added terrible stuttering to the PC version. They only admitted to this and promised a fix when a cracked version came out that had the DRM removed and it didn’t have any stuttering [1]. [1] https://www.gamesradar.com/resident-evil-village-pc-patch-launched-to-fix-drm-related-stuttering/ https://www.gamesradar.com/resident-evil-village-pc-patch-la...

smoldesu 5y ago
The folks at Digital Foundry did a phenomenal job breaking down the specifics, as usual. I strongly suggest checking out their video if you're interested in the stuff: https://youtu.be/UXZGCwAJpbM https://youtu.be/UXZGCwAJpbM
gentleman11 5y ago
Capcoms pc ports have always been… I remember my dmc3 that didn’t work at all (maybe a fan patch helped?), and the frame pacing in re4 on pc giving my wife and I migraines… or dmc5 deleting my save file… or re2 remake requiring 2 year old drivers to avoid crashes… I have friends who have issues with the street fighters on pc as well. That’s just off the top of my head.

jbverschoor 5y ago

Sounds like the diesel scandal

dijit 5y ago

I work on an upcoming free to play game, we will have microtransactions on cosmetics and possibly new character archetypes. Microtransactions are not in the early builds of the game because we literally hadn't made the content for it yet, we were focusing on the game mechanics. The store is a lot of work in a game, and the cosmetics themselves are mostly content work which is not hyper critical to have in place (unlike, say, matchmaking or gun mechanics). I'm not saying it hasn't been done nefariously; just that: The game I'm making doesn't have microtransactions yet because we worked on other stuff. But we're not lying about them being there, they have to be there otherwise we'll go bankrupt paying the server costs and failing to recoup R&D costs.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Dayshine 5y ago
You should be ensuring that all reviewers mention that this is an early access dev build with all paid content unlocked then, right? I don't think people are talking about cosmetic micro-transaction though.
- fencepost 5y ago
  You should be ensuring that all reviewers mention that this is an early access dev build with all paid content unlocked then, right? Sounds like since all the transactions are for cosmetics that haven't been made the content simply doesn't exist in review copies.
cableshaft 5y ago
I'm not saying all microtransactions are bad necessarily. I've also worked on a couple of games that have had them, although we did have them on launch (and added more to it later). But it is kind of a shitty move if you let reviewers review your game and let them believe there won't be microtransactions and then you add them later. Now if your game is a free game to begin with, it's sort of expected you'll add something in there to make money at some point. But most of these big AAA games are $60-100+ to buy the game to begin with, so there's not an easy assumption to make. Also they almost always have it available a few weeks after launch, as if they were just waiting to get past ESRB and reviewers without mentioning those things. Finally, I've worked on console games and handled ESRB submissions for our games. You're not supposed to leave anything out. We got dinged once for not mentioning that the card art on one of our cards had a character smoking a pipe on it, and another card where the anime girl had a slightly exposed nipple (we didn't even notice, it was a port of a game by another developer and the card art is busy enough you kind of have to be looking for it... if we had known, we would have told the developer to edit those out and the game wouldn't have had the 'smoking' and 'nudity' label on our rating). The video you submit is supposed to show everything in the game. And yet these companies aren't doing that so they can keep the in-game purchases label off their game. If you're trying to hide something in your game from certain parties, you're being shitty and you should stop, is the moral of the story. If you're not you're probably fine. For the ESRB rating for the game I worked on, here's the back of the box for proof: https://www.vgchartz.com/games/boxart/full_6178352AmericaBackccc.jpg https://www.vgchartz.com/games/boxart/full_6178352AmericaBac...

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago

Phone manufacturers do this as well. Release a phone to reviewers with awesome performance and battery life (by aggressively killing background apps), then a month later, release a build that doesn't do those things so people don't complain about missed notifications, etc. Hell, even Apple nuked the noise cancelling in the Airpods Pro right after launch [1], possibly for battery reasons or to prevent hearing damage lawsuits, but by all accounts they had jaw-dropping noise cancelling when the reviewers were writing their initial reviews. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/17/21069953/apple-airpods-pro-noise-cancellation-problems-firmware-2b588-2c54 https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/17/21069953/apple-airpods-pr...

sebazzz 5y ago
I see a market for a site called "The late review".
- dalmo3 5y ago
  Not sure about consoles, but Steam solves that by ranking recent reviews and those submitted by players with more game time as more relevant.

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

IMO with games it's preplanned fraud for profit, With hardware it's due to pandemic induced chip shortage but I guess it's still a fraud when product states something and delivers another. I was expecting that the silent feature reductions in the automobiles due to chip-shortage would seep into another hardware products sooner or later, In fact I was trying to validate whether there's a need to track 'What has been removed due to chip shortage'[1] and it seems like there's good reason to do it. [1] https://needgap.com/problems/234-what-has-been-removed-due-to-chip-shortage-comparision-semiconductor https://needgap.com/problems/234-what-has-been-removed-due-t... (Disclaimer: I created this platform).