4 ms·
That still gives game makers perverse incentives. They'll profit more if they make their levels too hard and too annoying. No matter how much they claim to do t
by streptomycin 13y ago
That still gives game makers perverse incentives. They'll profit more if they make their levels too hard and too annoying. No matter how much they claim to do the right thing, there's no real way to prove it either way, and the presence of the perverse incentive ensures that most game makers in that situation will do the wrong thing.
So no, that would defeat the point of this. If perverse incentives are not removed, they will pervert things.
- daeken 13y agoI've been heavily playing Counterstrike: Global Offensive lately, and I've found that it has truly honest, unbiased IAP. You can buy skins for weapons that make them look cooler, and high-end skins will also add StatTrak, which let's you see how many kills you managed with a given weapon. That's it. You can get the same items via play, but there's a thriving real-money market around them, with items ranging from cents to hundreds of dollars. IAP isn't the enemy; shitty games that exist solely to make money are the enemy.
- kevingadd 13y agoValve has been the canonical example of 'honest' IAP for a while; sadly they're starting to enter scum territory. Their recent Snow Globe promotion leveraged a lot of evil psychological trickery and misleading information to simultaneously maximize how much money people were spending while minimizing the value they got out of it. It's no surprise that as soon as the promotion was over they expunged all traces of it from their website...
- chii 13y agowhat exactly did snow globe sale/cards do that was so evil? I saw it, and just completely ignored it.
- kevingadd 13y agoTo summarize it: the snow globes were a limited supply promotional item with vaguely-stated mechanics and an unstated expiration date. They encouraged people to do certain things to generate snow globes, and made it possible for some people to stockpile them in advance. Then with about 24 hours notice, they announced that all snow globes were going to be permanently removed from users' inventories, which drove the steam marketplace price of snowglobes up dramatically as people went about trading them to try and complete sets of snowglobes. When they finally got killed some of them were trading for as much as $5 USD each. All this for cards that literally don't do anything: The only use was to collect a set of 12, which would give you a chance at a random item from a list of utterly worthless decorative goodies (the list had a FEW good, valuable items on it, but only a few), mostly from games nobody plays.
- CrazedGeek 13y agoEh? I remember the snow globe page specifically saying that the cards would be removed at the end of the sale right when the sale started. It was why my interest wasn't that high.
- Paradigma11 13y agoBut then the success of a game depends on the developers ability to produce new cosmetic items that people want.
- Sommer717 13y agoValve has solved this by crowd-sourcing cosmetic items through the community. In Team Fortress 2 (which uses the same kind of skin/item system as Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive) 90% of the items have come from the community, who then also get to share in the profits [1]. [1]: http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2014/1/16/5316248/on-average-team-fortress-2-and-dota-2-item-creators-made-15000-last http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2014/1/16/5316248/on-average-...
- mildtrepidation 13y agoIAP isn't the enemy; shitty games that exist solely to make money are the enemy. Exactly right. IAP has absolutely enabled really, really bad behavior, but it's not the cause any more than the existence cars is the cause of automobile accidents. One facilitates but does not imply the other.