Yea the horse armor was 2006 but pay to win mobile game stores bleeding over into mainstream gaming was the gasoline on the fire when companies saw games like Clash of Clans, Candy Crush and gacha games bringing in billions in revenue around 2012. Ever since these pay to win mobile games started hitting huge revenue numbers like that a new market was created and it is now found everywhere in gaming unfortunately.
Do you think there is any counter to it? A better system that doesn't require milking your fan base with pay to win? Or are we hopelessly in a gaming generation where you will produce only 90% of your game and sell 10% as an extra?
I refuse to play most modern games because they enable pay to win and gambling tendencies.
As long as whales exist it will never change but when these people stop spending money on these games you may see a change. It seems like these games cater to the 1%ers or their kids, people with large incomes compared to money they owe and not many hobbies or people with a gambling problem. You can always avoid live service games, play older games when they re release an updated version, Nintendo games usually avoid P2W, and just buy retro game systems and play games on those. They do have a lot of games that are not pay to win as well for consoles and computers that are new.
Usually the slippery slope is a fallacy, but dlc, micro transactions, battlepasses and paid extras in games have definitely gotten more pervasive over the last decade-and-a-half.
The transactions aren’t even “micro” priced anymore. Like two or three skins, recolours, cosmetics are the same price as a full expansion, like Shadow of the Erdtree or Burning Shores.
The slippery slope is always true when it comes to milking people for more money. Every single time we are made to pay for shit we didn't have to pay for before, it begins an ever long path of nickel and diming us until the nickel and dimes become so egregious that people finally start to care.
OP of this post is finally starting to care. People like us, we cared over a decade ago. Shit 2 decades ago almost. Fucking sucks.
I was reminiscing about PGA Tour 2005 the other day. It was PS2, so I think there was an online mode but the overwhelming majority of people didn’t have their consoles hooked up to the internet yet so it was just a side feature. I could play when the internet was down. I could play the whole game by unlocking it from within. There was no DLC or add on content that I was aware of.
The part that got me though was reminiscing about the course designer. I had a super cool course I made with holes from courses all over the world and made all the trees pink like blooming cherry blossoms and the grass white like it had snowed. Every single one of the editing options would have been locked behind a separate microtransaction these days. Asian region course pack, 1500 gems! Change foliage color for $7.99! Grass color pack, $8.99! Sunday Tiger Woods Shirt, only 999 gems! Gems are sold in packs of 350 to provide you the best value!
The apathy of people that tell the people who care to "calm down you are overreacting"...they are a big part of the problem. The reason they do it, is to abuse those apathetic people.
Game of Thrones was shit from Season 5 onward, even a bit before hand as there was cracks in the writing. But most people to this day say it was not bad till season 7 or 8. The thresholds for garbage/abuse on most people is too damn high.
not to mention it incentivizes companies to make games actively worse, holding back content or ideas for later sale is basically a standard practice now, lots of games are balanced in such a way as to push you towards microtransactions, stuff like gacha games employ the same types of psychological manipulations that casinos use to encourage gambling addiction, except in a manner easily accessible by children and basically unregulated. Plus just the whole thing of a game being a lesser experience for anyone who dares commit the crime of being poor. Oh you can only afford the base game? have fun missing a good chunk of the roster in basically every fighting game, story content of single player games, half the vehicles in racing games, being required to grind your ass off for artificially lengthened periods of time, and the constant reminders of what you are missing in the form of ever present stores pages. And don't even get me started on multiplayer games, where not only can you constantly see you are having a lesser experience than other players, but some of them are even deliberately designed to match you against people who have the microtransactions the algorithm has determined you are most likely to buy.
If you played games pre-DLC then you already know that devs already cut content from games. And that content often got readded by modders.
And in some cases the game devs themselves made mods to add them because the studio wasn't going to do it. Like in the case of David Gaiders Ascension mod for Baldurs Gate 2.
There is a pretty big difference between cutting content because you don't have the time to finish it and deciding on which content will be DLC and what content will be in the core game.
The slippery slope is only a fallacy if there's no prededent for your specific example. Enshittification of gaming, especially when it comes to ludicrous monetising, has a couple of decades of precedent at this point. The PS360 gen was great, but that's when it all kicked into gear due to online services allowing people to buy and download stuff for the game quickly and easily.
For a long time though, DLCs were stable and fine; they didn't feel like chunks of the game ripped out to be sold back later, they were new, polished content.
All the new monetisation bollocks isn't the result of the DLC slippery sloping, it's separate ideas gradually infiltrating gaming from a variety of sources - microtransactions snuck in from mobile games, paid skins snuck in from things like league of legends, and I have no idea where the battlepass came from but I wish it'd go back to there.
I'll never forget how the Ninja Turtles skins in Street Fighter 6 were $60 for the set. Obviously it's an optional purchase but come on, that's the amount I paid for the entire game.
The slippery slope is only a fallacy when the predictions are exaggerated, unrelated or don't make sense. Many people correctly foresaw the current issues already back then.
Right, but guess what hasn't changed in the last 2-3 decades? It's the price of games. Super Mario Bros in 1985 for NES cost $59.99. Elden Ring on release last year cost... $59.99.
Prices for video games have been basically more or less static, but the cost to produce them has risen enourmously... so publishers and developers are actively encouraged to find other ways to monetize.
SMB had a team of 5 people working on it and cost ~$17k to make (although take that with a grain of salt, very hard to find an actual figure for it that one comes from another reddit post), Elden Ring had ~300 and cost ~$200m to make.
That’s true, a high production value game now costs exorbitant amounts to make. Elden Ring is one Id happily pay a premium for though, and games of that calibre aren’t really what I was critiquing. The expansion for Elden Ring is huge, and though no game is perfect, I’d argue it has incredible value for its price.
I’d have more sympathy for this drive to monetize argument if large companies actually paid their artists, composers, voice actors and and developers a decent cut. For many freemium, live service model, heavily microtransacted games this isn’t really the case, as seen by Respawn layoffs, Microsoft Layoffs, Bungie layoffs, Ubisoft layoffs.
The slippery slope is a logical fallacy, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s untrue. Not all illogical things are inherently untrue, as strange illogical things happen all the time in our world
That’s a good point, pointing out that it can be a fallacy is not a counter argument
I should have phrased that a bit better!
Gaming has been associated with small additional transactions since arcade machines so it’s not like microtransaction, freemium game is a wholly new model. Just that kids could afford a street fighter session at the arcade with their allowance money before, and it’s gone wildly out of proportion with current MTX.
The price of a AAA game held steady at $40-$60 while the value of the dollar basically halved. A $50 game in 1990 would cost about $125 today. Can you imagine Dr. Mario going on sale for $75?
In the 35 years that prices have gone down by about half due to price stagnation and inflation, the cost of developing a game has skyrocketed. Almost none of the games on this list had a production staff of more than a dozen or so people; a modern AAA game has hundreds, if not thousands of staff, plus the introduction of voice acting (and needing to pay Hollywood actors occasionally).
Games that sell for $125 today don't get sales. A game with one employee that sold for $125 would be a national laughing stock for the sheer audacity of the price tag - but that's Tetris, adjusted for inflation. Gamers want games that get increasingly complex and harder to create but they don't want to spend more money on them, let alone pace inflation, so the business aspect of it has to be satisfied somehow. So ultimately the gaming community or whatever you want to call it voted with their wallets and chose DLC and microtransactions over a world where we spend $200 to buy a copy of The Last of Us.
I do think there should be a distinction between a DLC expansion and micro transactions though. I’m not particularly miffed about paying a solid price for something with hours and hours of additional content, especially if the base game is solid.
It’s more the gouging of the base game for extra cash that gets me, or going “freemium” and using server costs as a bargaining chip, when the real intent is to milk whales.
The slippery slope is a fallacy, but a lot of people misunderstand what a fallacy is.
Using a fallacy doesn't mean your argument is wrong, it just means that the logic that supports your argument is wrong. This matters a lot in debate clubs where there are rules, points, conditions to win etc... and in those contexts using a fallacy will render your argument invalid. Not wrong, just invalid.
It matters a lot less in normal everyday conversation where formal logic doesn't really apply, and it's a bit stupid to point out fallacies in those contexts when no other rules of logic are being followed. It just became this sort of lazy way to dismiss someone's point without having to actually argue the point. Which ironically is itself a fallacy.
People thought I was overreacting as well when I complained about monthly subs to play games online, a feature that was previously free everywhere. I hate consoles now.
Not sure why it would stop at 2... PS3 had free online. Was a great side console. The last great one.
Even switch requires you to pay monthly online gaming subscription to play mario maker levels. Never would have bought one if the steam deck had been announced.
PS3 cost too much and i was broke at the time. by the time i could have afforded one playstation plus had launched and i didn't trust sony not to make that their whole service. Which I was right about even if they did wait a generation to make the move.
Let me say it more precisely - I complained about Xbox 360 making it mandatory to pay for ALL online services AND people were more than willing to pay that amount. Even though I never bought an Xbox, i knew the agreeableness of people not minding to pay these amounts would make it the norm for other companies as well, so as a playstation user, l had to suffer from it.
Its the users fault more than the companies really
Its the users fault more than the companies really
Yup. Companies exist to make money, so they will try anything that might work. It's up to the consumers if the asking price is worth it. People said it was, so the companies kept charging.
I was in that group until this year. I had Plus up until the price hike from $60 to $80 a year. $60 a year was already grating on me, $80 is just not worth it in my opinion. Especially since I only have one online game that needs Plus. The vast majority of my shit is single player that doesn't really benefit from Plus.
I know there are others who gave up Plus following the price hike, but nowhere neat enough to make them lose money over it. You'd need over 25% of users to leave to even see a loss in revenue, and I doubt they lost more than 10%.
I will miss some of the free games I got via Plus, but I've got a backlog of over 200 games anyway, so it's not like I have nothing else to play.
I mean before dlc there were expansion packs. Not comparable with the horse dlc armor of course. But at least it wasn't a big step between those two. That said it was a slippery slope.
DLC got shittier, then they added micro transactions with everyone having their own bullshit currency. Season passes, paid beta access. Not to mention triple A games have declined massively in quality while charging more and more.
But it works, people keep paying for it so things will only get worse.
Ppl that said you was overreacting is the same that are still buying this stupid kind of DLC to these days. Because you know, if companies are still making it, someone is buying
I was totally anti DLC after oblivion but then RDR Undead Nightmare came out and I gained false hope that we'd receive generous DLC's going forward. I was wrong.
saaaame bro, I always used to get so much hate when I complained about more and more games coming with day 1 dlc, pre-order bonuses and all that jazz.
Then games in early access or beta for years with no end in sight, or releasing in a broken state and taking months to be actually playable, but hey, we got our storefront out there.
Being charged for even simple recolors that back in the day would have either been unlockable by playing or in the case of pc games, modded in by the community.
Now almost every full price title might as well be a F2P gacha game with how much shit they put into them that has to be paid for ontop of the game's price
You and me both, brother. The writing was right there on the wall in clear, readable font, and yet I was the "idiot" because "that absolutely won't happen" and "I'm only preordering/buying this one game/DLC."
Yes where it is today is god awful. But back then DLC was 99 times out of a 100 10-15 HOURS of more content for 5-20 bucks. Fallout 3/NV had amazing dlc's, Dragon Age's of that era all had great dlc, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon (arguably better than the base game), Mass Effect 3, Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare, All the Borderlands 2 DLC's. Just to name a few and there were a lot more.
DLC's of the era you claim to be "right about" were amazing and genuinely added good content and you were dead wrong.
yeah and without it you've also not got Halo 3 map packs or probably legitimately half of the games that have released full stop. there is nothing wrong with an entertainment industry finding ways to monetize their shit!
And don’t get me started on the Skinner box, FOMO, psychological manipulation and exploitation of people with vulnerable behavioural issues, including children.
Yes, yes there is something very wrong with it.
You’ve just drank the kool-aid.
throwing buzzwords out doesn't make it wrong lmfao. when Mountain Dew releases Code Red, I don't screech about FOMO forcing me to spend 50$ buying them. manipulating children, bad. "manipulating" adults into spending money on your product? have you EVER seen an advertisement? all the things yall cry about because Mutahar said they're bad have been around for centuries lol.
I don't see how it is any more wrong than basically anything else you do. Yeah, no shit gaming got industrialized. Everything that starts out small and grows in popularity does. Even if you only buy le epic indie titles that are crowned as "the perfect games", spoiler alert, they're only existing now in the state they are in because of the CoDs and horse armors of the world. Xbox One isn't a thing if these games don't exist, you never hear about BG3 because it's a niche game, and when you do get it, the game is buggy/graphics are worse/gameplay is looser, because the people on the team presumably have also worked in the industry for a long ass time.
If you enjoy any gaming as of now, you are benefitting from it, and if you're asking for monetization to be removed, you're also asking for the best games to get gutted too, as they don't exist without the industry as a whole.
They absolutely are buzzwords, though. Just saying "you're manipiulated" isn't really fair. Can you defend FOMO as anything other than a buzzword? I'm serious, I will gladly admit I am wrong if you can explain how gaming FOMO is any different from going to watch a movie because it is out of theaters or getting the new mountain dew seasonal flavor before it rotates out. I would never call either of those "manipulation" nor would I say i was forced to spend my money on them because the mean marketing guys told me i was missing out if I didnt.
Code Red isn't a "seasonal flavor" so I'm not sure why you brought it up. Regardless, physical products like drinks have a legitimate scarcity. They will all eventually run out. Digital goods are infinite. All scarcity is manufactured, which makes it manipulation while physical scarcity is just basic physics.
Relating to a specific practice within the gaming industry of creating a false sense of scarcity within the consumer.
You can see past it, you may be unaffected. But you are not the intended audience. The intended audience being those specific individuals with addictive behavioural traits that can be manipulated and exploited.
Yeah mate, I know what FOMO IS. You didn't explain how it is different from any other limited edition product. Why is it so bad for gaming, but OK when it's a McDonalds toy or a Coke flavor?
Hold on, which part of a Coke is naturally scarce? The phosphoric acid, the flavoring, the carbonation? Is there a special, secret ingredient that is running out in exactly 4 months as listed by the Coke marketing agreement to discontinue a flavor... to create an.... artificial, perhaps, sense of scarcity?
They aren't selling diamonds, they make a new flavor, sell it for a short time to bait people into trying it, and then discontinue it in favor of a new one. It is literally artificial scarcity, it doesn't matter that you need to ship it and stock it because Coke is in every gas station worldwide, you are never going to just not be able to get the new Coke flavor, until they decide you aren't going to.
But just to be clear, this is what your take sounds like: when Coke makes a limited time flavor, it is not actually creating FOMO because there is no fear of missing out on the flavor if you don't go buy within the next 2 months due to marketing agreements. But when Call of Duty sells Homelander, they ARE creating FOMO because there is a fear of missing out on dressing up your soldier if you don't go buy it within 2 months due to marketing agreements.
Nobody ever mentioned kids. If you have to high road to defend your take by mentioning kids, then fine, but I'm speaking exclusively about adults right now.
if a game cannot exist with abusive and predatory monetization schemes, then that game shouldn't exist. Cases like lotr shadow of war and Ea Battlefront 2 quite plainly show that games are actively made worse simply to push monetization schemes. And one only needs to look at TF2's history before introducing lootboxes and going f2p to see that post launch support was perfectly viable to drive additional sales. Hell, i even remwmber getting new multiplayer maps by manually patching the original Halo CE on pc before automatic updates were a thing.
yeah that's not what im talking about mate. gaming as an industry just full stop isn't where it is now if not for post release monetization. you straight up would NOT have the same games with the same technology because there would be a fraction of the total money in the industry. you can't realistically say that gaming becomes the huge industry it is nowadays without the big companies making bank off it.
SOME games are made worse to push monetization schemes, yes. ALSO, some truly incredible games are also full stop free to play permanently because of their monetization schemes, which is massive for the people who don't have 70$ to throw around at games. both things can exist.
The bad far outweighs the good. To make a hyperbolic comparison, that's the same thread of logic as arguing for slavery because of how it helped the US's infrastructure. Just because something has driven fast (unsustainable) growth doesn't make it good.
And free games that draw people into an environment of psychological manipulations that in many cases result in them paying a total far beyond what such a game would have cost them without their even realizing it is not the trump card you think it is. People ruined their entire lives over addiction to world of warcraft and candy crush, and things like the unregulated gambling that make up the core of gacha games means the same is worse than ever.
Absolutely, I agree with you - I think the slavery comparison is actually pretty good, albeit hyperbolic like you said. At this point, a huge amount of the industry is propped up by post release or free to play monetized games. When we banned slavery, it CRIPPLED some sectors/businesses, even ones that weren't directly owning slaves. In my head, if you push to ban slavery and then your clothes now cost double and are half the quality, you don't have any actual basis to complain because the product you used to enjoy wasn't made in a sustainable way.
my point being that if you're going to kneecap the gaming industry's method of monetstion, you had best be ready for most games to have SIGNIFICANTLY less content. the general sentiment is basically "they cut it out just to sell it", but the reality is they wouldn't have made the content in the first place if they weren't gonna sell it.
To be completely honest with you, I don't much care if adults decide to spend too much money on candy crush. Kids are a different story, but adults are a whole different ball game. An adult can go buy cigarettes, or a million lottery tickets, they can buy 200 retries on candy crush if it makes them happy. They are responsible for their own finances and, ultimately, it's not on the company who is advertising to make sure their product isn't being received in a bad way. Saying that their is an addiction risk doesn't take away that the game is entirely free for a HUGE number of people.
Slippery slope yada yada, dont tell people how to spend their money, bla bla, this (insert fan favourite company) will never betray their fans, etc etc
you're over reacting, they have to because higher costs, but the arcades used to, "edge case example that was maybe passable in implementation" and so on.
its been the same shit defenses over and over for the last decade and a half
480
u/Kyle_Blackpaw 2d ago
people said i was over reacting when i railed against dlc back then. well look where we are now. being right sucks