This is because we feel we paid for something that expects nothing in return.
When you pay for a game that includes add ons and microtransactions, all of a sudden we‘re back to being a marketing target, and we implicitly know we‘re pushed to spend money.
More than that. When you buy a game with microtransactions in it, you’re volunteering to be a marketing target and paying for the privilege. Publishers aren’t trying to get everyone to buy mtx, only the people who bought the game. You’re giving them money and saying, “yes, I want to be targeted, please.”
I started playing warframe recently. Yes it’s free to play, yes there’s monetization, but I feel it’s one of those games you really don’t need to buy anything for. you can pretty much obtain everything via grinding. I can see how that wouldn’t appeal to a lot of people today but I used to play everquest and anarchy online etc so I know about the grind and I don’t mind it.
The thing about Warframe is it tempts you but doesn’t force you to buy. You can sell your time to people who paid actual money, and then buy things you want for that money. The only issue with Warframe is the fomo - them locking warframes behind relics that are “deprecated”. Sometimes they unearth them again, but it’s an artificial attempt at “I need to buy this or it is gone”.
Also the process of getting parts is 100% gambling on low odds. You can get lucky immediately or have to “reroll” by running the same relic over and over and over again. It sucks if you want a very specific thing and often leads to people just buying it outright.
There is very little FOMO in warframe. The unsealing you speak of is a rotation due to the game having over a thousand of things to unlock so farming specific weapon part when you need 5 parts would be very difficult. It’s there to limit the pool. If you want something specific? That’s what trade is for.
Relic system is quite fair but you do need to somewhat understand the full system to see it.
The one thing that WF does fairly annoyingly are weapon slots. You have to buy them off the market with platinum so either you buy it at 75% discount or trade prime parts to get it. A single gold part will be worth more than the 2 weapon slot but it’s the one example that makes you “spend money”.
I’m playing since closed beta and have thousands of hours, got my wife and son into it. I must’ve spent maybe £300 in total (maybe more) to show my support, but I could’ve easily just done trading and bought all the cosmetics I wanted that way too.
WF makes you spend money on things you want to, not need to. No bullshit paid for battle pass or battle pass paid for skips etc.
Sealing / unsealing is 100% FOMO and I have seen people go “Ivara Prime is out now I need to play Warframe”. You can easily setup a system where you choose a rotation to go for when choosing a mission. It wouldn’t even split the playerbase since it only affects the rewards at the end. But they don’t, they do this song and dance about removing and bringing back specific weapons and warframes.
They already split it in 4 ways with lith neo meso and axi.
I see your point, but missing out and the fear of it? I’m not sure. But maybe it’s because I’ve played for longer than some of these players have been alive for… There’s just so much that the whole “OMG I need this specific thing!!!” Doesn’t add up as there’s just so much good stuff in there and power creep has been insane prioritising new things or ever green items.
There are various warframes that work completely different when they are prime. And yeah, you spending so much time with the game makes it that the things that it does bad seem normal to you.
The community is very open about warframe.market existing though. Like an auction house for player trading across all servers. So if your relics drop bad items. Sell them on the market until you can eventually buy the one you want.
Other games do thinks like soulbound/account bound stuff. Not everything in WF is tradable, but most things are
I love the game, but I’d like to point out that baldur’s gate 3 does have a single microtransaction, it gives you a custom dice skin, a tie in item from divinity original sin and a bunch of low level potions. It costs 12CAD.
I will point out that this is mainly just a way to get the free preorder bonus though, and has no real gameplay effects. The dlc also contains a digital artbook, digital soundtrack and some character sheets. I feel like that is quite a bit more than the normal micro transactions, though I still somewhat see your point
Thing is, I’ve seen funbucks stuffed into various single player games over the years. The first was probably Mass Effect 3, but some of the Assassin’s Creed games have it too.
But who are they for? Who buys them? They’ve never really felt like anything that would be useful. It’s usually just some crappy cosmetics, or something you can get through normal play. It’s like they’ve been stuffed in at the request of management, but also like nobody has ever checked up on what they actually put in, or whether anybody bought it…
The type of monetisation that especially confuses me as a guy brought up on pre-internet era gaming is any kind of pay to win. You’re buying a game then paying extra money so you don’t have to then go through the tedious task of actually playing the game.
The same thing has always confused me about CCGs. Why spend hundreds of dollars to be able to play them at all, when you can just get Dominion and know that the game is both fair and varied?
The game industry was assaulted by the MBAs long ago. They have this financial concept of leaving money on the table. That if you aren’t skinning your customers alive for all they have then you are losing money.
Then there was that infamous power point slide that got leaked where, basically, the plan is to use games to bring in audiences then use gambling techniques to hook on whales then cash them for eternity. Thus “live services games” were born.
It feels like uncreative, predatory shit because it is. It’s a finance people idea, not a creative game developer idea.
I think the last few years has left them struggling with the reality that landlords and supermarkets also have that concept, and when it’s a choice between having a roof, food, or entertainment, then they’re way down the list.
Play Nice by Jason Schreier mentions that the “Pay to Win” style of monetization is very popular in Chinese markets.
I’d wager that, since other markets strongly oppose that, public companies focused on profits over player sentiment needed to find a middle ground. (That dichotomy is the main focus of the last half of the book)
We revolted when Battlefront 2 had loot boxes at the center of game progression, so companies hoping to make the most money in both markets need to make the purchasable items either purely cosmetic or only helpful in early game progression (starter packs).
Exactly. You make good MMORPG and money will come in droves too. Same for RPG or fuck it, even poker game on crack. Just make good games, but it’s not as easy as it sounds… No one just clicks “make game bad” and often the Microtransactions are dictated by whatever publishing deal they have.
I mean, MMOs were supposed to be continuously supported and developed during the enrollment period. Earlier iterations of the model had live DMs running encounters, active continuous releases to expand the game world and advance the storyline, and robust customer support to address the bugs and defects. Also, just maintaining the servers necessary to support that much data processing was hella-expensive on its face.
Games as a service don’t need to be a scam.
But eventually, the studios figured out they can do the MMO business model on any game. Justifying a fee for Everquest was a lot more reasonable than justifying it for a glorified Team Fortress knock off. Or a freaking platformer.
I miss EverCrack.
Not the actual mechanics, things have come a long way since then. But the concepts. No end game. Mobs that take 100+ people all day to take down. And that last piece of armor you want, has a 2% drop rate off them. And even when it does drop, there are 10 of your class who wants it, and you have to work out who gets it. Levels took so long nobody worried about getting to cap, and just hung out. The grind and the community were the point. Not the next piece of gear.
Oh and they were what weekly spawn on top of that too that were also open world spawns to boot, so quite often you had competition just laying claim to it.
Our server had some quite… colorful guilds that didn’t play nice and would train attempts, or bum rush it in an attempt to do more damage to steal the claim, among other nastiness. Imagine you spent hours getting 80 people together, prepping, and then getting ganked at the last minute. lol pure chaos.
The GMs were constantly involved sorting out the aftermath. Which was funny in its own right I suppose. Which is probably why they leaned hard into instances in later expansions.
Fun times. Dont think there will be another experience like it was its hayday.
Sounds like my experiences with Ultima Online. Right before they added paladins and necromancers, the shard where I played was quite “raw”. You really got the human experience, with everything: misery, dignity, psycopaths, etc.
And honestly I think that’s what’s missing in “modern” mmos: the human element. Or rather the social one. Which is ironic.
They are now way too friendly towards solo play and systems like ff14s duty finder removed the social aspect by automating group comp with complete randos that you will probably never see again since it was cross server.
In evercrack and even ffxi you were required to shout for groups from a pool of players on your own server so you got to know people. Who was good and who was not so good. You built a reputation.
It was a lot harder for sure, but it felt more meaningful.
Exactly. With my FFXIV subscription, I’m storing actual data that can be accessed any time (houses/rooms/apartments), and they provide quarterly updates and events.
Neither don’t play them or ignore additional methods of monetization built into the game. It’s like they don’t exist.
If there is too much dlc, it makes me feel like the base game is an empty shell. Even if it’s not true, it turns me off from the game. Look at sims 4 and one of those city builder games.
Games as a service can be okay, in some situations. Ones we very rarely see due to (primarily) publisher greed.
If you’re paying for the game itself, at any point, GaaS is stupid and extremely exploitative.
If they choose to go that route however, the game needs to be free to play with separate monetization. They need to mebe things that are completely optional and don’t affect gameplay.
I appreciate the sentiment but the (very shitty) reality is single player games don’t come any where near the profitability of these multiplayer games in the current climate. Like no where even remotely close in terms of effort to profit. You can straight up clone call of duty every year, or add a few maps to fortnite, or add a new operator to siege, and monetize every tiny fraction of the game thru micro transactions and people will keep on playing and keep on paying.
Single player games operate pretty much the opposite. You buy it once. Play thru it. Beat it. And generally never touch it again unless maybe some dlc comes out and you might add a few more hours to it and then never think about it again.
I say this as a giant fan of single narrative games, it’s just a much smarter business move to pump out shitty online multiplayer games.
Fortnite was released in 2017, last year it netted almost $6 billion.
Call of duty has been dog water for like a decade. Its been the best selling game every single year since 2009 unless Rockstar releases a game (and Hogwarts legacy randomly dominating one year).
World of Warcraft came out in 2004. Last year they announced they had over 7 million active subscribers… Over two decades later.
Apex legends came out in 2019, last year it made over $3 billion.
The list goes on and on and on. You just can’t compete with weirdos obsessed with showing off a wizard hat on their character in an online game or busting open a loot box to get a new weapon skin or something.
Reading the article, where did you get “audience rewards” == “maximal extraction of cash from the audience”?
IMO having a very profitable game that will comfortably fund your studio for the next 5-10 years AND that has universal critical acclaim and a devoted fanbase is reward enough. You didn’t lose because you didn’t make the most money out of all your competitors.
Different games have different audiences. Some people want arcade slop and slot machines to play with friends, they were never going to play BG3 or E33 anyway.
Important to the conversation as well is the fact that plenty of live-service games have recently failed spectacularly. Remember Concord? Within the industry, that is a clear signal that very high budget online slop isn’t as risk-free as previously assumed, which makes ambitious narrative-driven single player games an interesting diversification strategy for studios.
It’s not either or. Executives could spend 100M€ on “nearly guaranteed” online slop, or 80M€ on online slop and 20M€ on a good narrative game. And the critical and commercial success of games like BG3 and E33 are definitely moving the needle.
Especially when micro-economically, there are diminish returns when scaling dev teams. It’s kind of obvious but the first million euros does a lot more for a project than the 100th million. That further strengthens the case for a move away for big players from ONLY funding live-service slop.
single player games don’t come any where near the profitability of these multiplayer games
True, but they are still very lucrative. You can make them, release them, generate a healthy surplus, and roll that into making the next game with plenty of cash to spare.
Also, you don’t have half your dev team stuck supporting a legacy release, constantly fixated on juicing engagement and monetization. There’s a lot less overhead involved in a single-iteration.
Fortnite
Call of duty
World of Warcraft
Apex legends
Had truly phenomenal marketing budgets. It’s the same thing with AAA movies. 25-50% of the budget goes to marketing, on a title that eats up hundreds of millions to produce and support.
You didn’t need $100M to make BG3. You didn’t need an extra $25-50M to get people to notice it and pony up. These bigger titles have invested billions in their PR. And that’s paid out well in the end. But it also requires huge lines of credit, lots of mass media connections, and a lot of risk in the face of a flop.
For studios that can’t fling around nine figures to shout “Look At Me!” during the Super Bowl, there’s no reason to follow this model of development.
Minecraft is the most popular best selling game of all time, and the single-player mode is still being updated. Granted, many people play on multiplayer servers, but still.
On the one hand, you’re right that the market for micro transaction laden multiplayer games is much larger than single player games. On the other hand, the market for people who want single player games is still very large. You showed that yourself mentioning Rockstar games and Harry Potter.
So while many publishers want a piece of that larger pie, every publisher trying for it just leads to over saturation and greater odds that a game will fail entirely. So there is still incentive for publishers to release large single player games even if the pie is smaller since there may be less competition making it easier to stand out. And what the article is saying is that, within that pie, one way to stand out is to avoid micro transactions. And since it’s discussing single player games specifically, I don’t see a lot of relevance for bringing up multiplayer games that exist in a different part of the gaming world.
Depends on how old the game is and how big the DLC is IMO. Rimworld, for instance, has quite a few DLCs now, but they are all well worth it if you like the base game. OTOH if a game just has cosmetic DLC or the DLC is coming out super near release that’s a red flag.
I’m of the opinion that Rimworld DLCs don’t actually improve the base game, they simply build an extra layer of isolated complexity ontop of the base game. I like the base game but I didn’t really enjoy the DLCs (at least not the first 2) because they didn’t actually expand the base game. They felt like mods I paid for.
This describes just about all Paradox games made in the past 15 years, sadly. They release with a barebones concept, then slowly drip-feed content for 5-30 bucks a pop, each one usually sitting at “Mostly Negative” because it doesn’t fundamentally add or change anything most of the time, and the times it does- meh. Crusader Kings 2 was my bread and butter for a long time. Played Crusader Kings 3, and it felt like almost every helpful mechanic that existed in CK2 was stripped, and then added on again over the course of years. It was so infuriating, that I just don’t buy their titles anymore.
It really sucks cause their gamea are really good too and nobody else makes anything like that, so we’re stuck dealing with paradox’s crap. Same story with the total war games.
At the very least, you can still pirate it and play cracked multiplayer with friends.
I made the mistake of buying the game year ago, and bought a bunch of DLC at 50% or greater sales, and now the sunken cost fallacy has taken hold on me, and I still want to buy more . . . . (at least I’m broke so I can’t right now hehehaha)
The game files are already downloaded in the steam version at least. One could, hypothetically, unlock those dlcs even on a normal copy. Steam would have no way too detect that either. Supposedly. In Minecraft.
I feel the same about multiplayer games without gated progression and LAN server hosting. (Or local/splitscreen)
These days I can’t even play a multiplayer game with friends somewhere with shitty internet. And because of progression you have to force yourself to only play together, but never with different people or by yourself because then you will get ahead.
Unfortunately, that’s not sufficient to keep that bullshit out of big-budget single-player games. Publishers can force it upon developers - and will. Once a few games get away with it, the cult of executives will figure they’re losing money if they don’t fuck you as hard as possible.
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This is because we feel we paid for something that expects nothing in return.
When you pay for a game that includes add ons and microtransactions, all of a sudden we‘re back to being a marketing target, and we implicitly know we‘re pushed to spend money.
We play games to escape the real world…
More than that. When you buy a game with microtransactions in it, you’re volunteering to be a marketing target and paying for the privilege. Publishers aren’t trying to get everyone to buy mtx, only the people who bought the game. You’re giving them money and saying, “yes, I want to be targeted, please.”
There’s a difference between a game made with passion and a game by EA/Ubisoft.
He’s right
Nice, now release Judas >:(
I started playing warframe recently. Yes it’s free to play, yes there’s monetization, but I feel it’s one of those games you really don’t need to buy anything for. you can pretty much obtain everything via grinding. I can see how that wouldn’t appeal to a lot of people today but I used to play everquest and anarchy online etc so I know about the grind and I don’t mind it.
The thing about Warframe is it tempts you but doesn’t force you to buy. You can sell your time to people who paid actual money, and then buy things you want for that money. The only issue with Warframe is the fomo - them locking warframes behind relics that are “deprecated”. Sometimes they unearth them again, but it’s an artificial attempt at “I need to buy this or it is gone”.
Also the process of getting parts is 100% gambling on low odds. You can get lucky immediately or have to “reroll” by running the same relic over and over and over again. It sucks if you want a very specific thing and often leads to people just buying it outright.
There is very little FOMO in warframe. The unsealing you speak of is a rotation due to the game having over a thousand of things to unlock so farming specific weapon part when you need 5 parts would be very difficult. It’s there to limit the pool. If you want something specific? That’s what trade is for.
Relic system is quite fair but you do need to somewhat understand the full system to see it.
The one thing that WF does fairly annoyingly are weapon slots. You have to buy them off the market with platinum so either you buy it at 75% discount or trade prime parts to get it. A single gold part will be worth more than the 2 weapon slot but it’s the one example that makes you “spend money”.
I’m playing since closed beta and have thousands of hours, got my wife and son into it. I must’ve spent maybe £300 in total (maybe more) to show my support, but I could’ve easily just done trading and bought all the cosmetics I wanted that way too.
WF makes you spend money on things you want to, not need to. No bullshit paid for battle pass or battle pass paid for skips etc.
Sealing / unsealing is 100% FOMO and I have seen people go “Ivara Prime is out now I need to play Warframe”. You can easily setup a system where you choose a rotation to go for when choosing a mission. It wouldn’t even split the playerbase since it only affects the rewards at the end. But they don’t, they do this song and dance about removing and bringing back specific weapons and warframes.
They already split it in 4 ways with lith neo meso and axi.
I see your point, but missing out and the fear of it? I’m not sure. But maybe it’s because I’ve played for longer than some of these players have been alive for… There’s just so much that the whole “OMG I need this specific thing!!!” Doesn’t add up as there’s just so much good stuff in there and power creep has been insane prioritising new things or ever green items.
There are various warframes that work completely different when they are prime. And yeah, you spending so much time with the game makes it that the things that it does bad seem normal to you.
The community is very open about warframe.market existing though. Like an auction house for player trading across all servers. So if your relics drop bad items. Sell them on the market until you can eventually buy the one you want.
Other games do thinks like soulbound/account bound stuff. Not everything in WF is tradable, but most things are
I love the game, but I’d like to point out that baldur’s gate 3 does have a single microtransaction, it gives you a custom dice skin, a tie in item from divinity original sin and a bunch of low level potions. It costs 12CAD.
I will point out that this is mainly just a way to get the free preorder bonus though, and has no real gameplay effects. The dlc also contains a digital artbook, digital soundtrack and some character sheets. I feel like that is quite a bit more than the normal micro transactions, though I still somewhat see your point
Let’s not forget about the two extra bard songs, which was the only reason I got it lol.
Thing is, I’ve seen funbucks stuffed into various single player games over the years. The first was probably Mass Effect 3, but some of the Assassin’s Creed games have it too.
But who are they for? Who buys them? They’ve never really felt like anything that would be useful. It’s usually just some crappy cosmetics, or something you can get through normal play. It’s like they’ve been stuffed in at the request of management, but also like nobody has ever checked up on what they actually put in, or whether anybody bought it…
The type of monetisation that especially confuses me as a guy brought up on pre-internet era gaming is any kind of pay to win. You’re buying a game then paying extra money so you don’t have to then go through the tedious task of actually playing the game.
I’ve had a few games come with a handful of items for some reason, and very quickly learned to never use them.
Pre order now and ruin the game!
The same thing has always confused me about CCGs. Why spend hundreds of dollars to be able to play them at all, when you can just get Dominion and know that the game is both fair and varied?
The game industry was assaulted by the MBAs long ago. They have this financial concept of leaving money on the table. That if you aren’t skinning your customers alive for all they have then you are losing money.
Then there was that infamous power point slide that got leaked where, basically, the plan is to use games to bring in audiences then use gambling techniques to hook on whales then cash them for eternity. Thus “live services games” were born.
It feels like uncreative, predatory shit because it is. It’s a finance people idea, not a creative game developer idea.
I think the last few years has left them struggling with the reality that landlords and supermarkets also have that concept, and when it’s a choice between having a roof, food, or entertainment, then they’re way down the list.
Play Nice by Jason Schreier mentions that the “Pay to Win” style of monetization is very popular in Chinese markets.
I’d wager that, since other markets strongly oppose that, public companies focused on profits over player sentiment needed to find a middle ground. (That dichotomy is the main focus of the last half of the book)
We revolted when Battlefront 2 had loot boxes at the center of game progression, so companies hoping to make the most money in both markets need to make the purchasable items either purely cosmetic or only helpful in early game progression (starter packs).
Gamers reward good games
Unfortunately, they also reward bad games.
Exactly. You make good MMORPG and money will come in droves too. Same for RPG or fuck it, even poker game on crack. Just make good games, but it’s not as easy as it sounds… No one just clicks “make game bad” and often the Microtransactions are dictated by whatever publishing deal they have.
I don’t buy single player games with other monetization. You want another $30 you add another 30 hours of good content.
Wish granted, but it’s just 30 dlcs each around a full-game price and you gotta wait til they go on sale for $1 once every year at a random time.
So, I’ve got steam wishlist items going into the third grade this year. I can wait.
I wish you were less evil.
CDPR get this, at least. Phantom Liberty, Hearts of Stone, Blood and Wine. All well worth it.
Yup I do not buy single player games that have monitizacion, indiana jones game was so far game of the year for me
Absolutely!
Games as a service is a scam.
I mean, MMOs were supposed to be continuously supported and developed during the enrollment period. Earlier iterations of the model had live DMs running encounters, active continuous releases to expand the game world and advance the storyline, and robust customer support to address the bugs and defects. Also, just maintaining the servers necessary to support that much data processing was hella-expensive on its face.
Games as a service don’t need to be a scam.
But eventually, the studios figured out they can do the MMO business model on any game. Justifying a fee for Everquest was a lot more reasonable than justifying it for a glorified Team Fortress knock off. Or a freaking platformer.
But they are a scam
I miss EverCrack.
Not the actual mechanics, things have come a long way since then. But the concepts. No end game. Mobs that take 100+ people all day to take down. And that last piece of armor you want, has a 2% drop rate off them. And even when it does drop, there are 10 of your class who wants it, and you have to work out who gets it. Levels took so long nobody worried about getting to cap, and just hung out. The grind and the community were the point. Not the next piece of gear.
Every few years I fire up project99 and it’s glorious. I’ve been resisting simply because I want to get real life stuff done.
Oh and they were what weekly spawn on top of that too that were also open world spawns to boot, so quite often you had competition just laying claim to it.
Our server had some quite… colorful guilds that didn’t play nice and would train attempts, or bum rush it in an attempt to do more damage to steal the claim, among other nastiness. Imagine you spent hours getting 80 people together, prepping, and then getting ganked at the last minute. lol pure chaos.
The GMs were constantly involved sorting out the aftermath. Which was funny in its own right I suppose. Which is probably why they leaned hard into instances in later expansions.
Fun times. Dont think there will be another experience like it was its hayday.
Sounds like my experiences with Ultima Online. Right before they added paladins and necromancers, the shard where I played was quite “raw”. You really got the human experience, with everything: misery, dignity, psycopaths, etc.
And honestly I think that’s what’s missing in “modern” mmos: the human element. Or rather the social one. Which is ironic.
They are now way too friendly towards solo play and systems like ff14s duty finder removed the social aspect by automating group comp with complete randos that you will probably never see again since it was cross server.
In evercrack and even ffxi you were required to shout for groups from a pool of players on your own server so you got to know people. Who was good and who was not so good. You built a reputation.
It was a lot harder for sure, but it felt more meaningful.
I think it’s a bit more nuanced - for example MMOs. But for the most part yeah.
Exactly. With my FFXIV subscription, I’m storing actual data that can be accessed any time (houses/rooms/apartments), and they provide quarterly updates and events.
Neither don’t play them or ignore additional methods of monetization built into the game. It’s like they don’t exist.
If there is too much dlc, it makes me feel like the base game is an empty shell. Even if it’s not true, it turns me off from the game. Look at sims 4 and one of those city builder games.
Games as a service can be okay, in some situations. Ones we very rarely see due to (primarily) publisher greed.
If you’re paying for the game itself, at any point, GaaS is stupid and extremely exploitative.
If they choose to go that route however, the game needs to be free to play with separate monetization. They need to mebe things that are completely optional and don’t affect gameplay.
I appreciate the sentiment but the (very shitty) reality is single player games don’t come any where near the profitability of these multiplayer games in the current climate. Like no where even remotely close in terms of effort to profit. You can straight up clone call of duty every year, or add a few maps to fortnite, or add a new operator to siege, and monetize every tiny fraction of the game thru micro transactions and people will keep on playing and keep on paying.
Single player games operate pretty much the opposite. You buy it once. Play thru it. Beat it. And generally never touch it again unless maybe some dlc comes out and you might add a few more hours to it and then never think about it again.
I say this as a giant fan of single narrative games, it’s just a much smarter business move to pump out shitty online multiplayer games.
Fortnite was released in 2017, last year it netted almost $6 billion.
Call of duty has been dog water for like a decade. Its been the best selling game every single year since 2009 unless Rockstar releases a game (and Hogwarts legacy randomly dominating one year).
World of Warcraft came out in 2004. Last year they announced they had over 7 million active subscribers… Over two decades later.
Apex legends came out in 2019, last year it made over $3 billion.
The list goes on and on and on. You just can’t compete with weirdos obsessed with showing off a wizard hat on their character in an online game or busting open a loot box to get a new weapon skin or something.
Reading the article, where did you get “audience rewards” == “maximal extraction of cash from the audience”?
IMO having a very profitable game that will comfortably fund your studio for the next 5-10 years AND that has universal critical acclaim and a devoted fanbase is reward enough. You didn’t lose because you didn’t make the most money out of all your competitors.
Different games have different audiences. Some people want arcade slop and slot machines to play with friends, they were never going to play BG3 or E33 anyway.
Important to the conversation as well is the fact that plenty of live-service games have recently failed spectacularly. Remember Concord? Within the industry, that is a clear signal that very high budget online slop isn’t as risk-free as previously assumed, which makes ambitious narrative-driven single player games an interesting diversification strategy for studios.
It’s not either or. Executives could spend 100M€ on “nearly guaranteed” online slop, or 80M€ on online slop and 20M€ on a good narrative game. And the critical and commercial success of games like BG3 and E33 are definitely moving the needle.
Especially when micro-economically, there are diminish returns when scaling dev teams. It’s kind of obvious but the first million euros does a lot more for a project than the 100th million. That further strengthens the case for a move away for big players from ONLY funding live-service slop.
True, but they are still very lucrative. You can make them, release them, generate a healthy surplus, and roll that into making the next game with plenty of cash to spare.
Also, you don’t have half your dev team stuck supporting a legacy release, constantly fixated on juicing engagement and monetization. There’s a lot less overhead involved in a single-iteration.
Had truly phenomenal marketing budgets. It’s the same thing with AAA movies. 25-50% of the budget goes to marketing, on a title that eats up hundreds of millions to produce and support.
You didn’t need $100M to make BG3. You didn’t need an extra $25-50M to get people to notice it and pony up. These bigger titles have invested billions in their PR. And that’s paid out well in the end. But it also requires huge lines of credit, lots of mass media connections, and a lot of risk in the face of a flop.
For studios that can’t fling around nine figures to shout “Look At Me!” during the Super Bowl, there’s no reason to follow this model of development.
Minecraft is the
most popularbest selling game of all time, and the single-player mode is still being updated. Granted, many people play on multiplayer servers, but still.Sad but true.
On the one hand, you’re right that the market for micro transaction laden multiplayer games is much larger than single player games. On the other hand, the market for people who want single player games is still very large. You showed that yourself mentioning Rockstar games and Harry Potter.
So while many publishers want a piece of that larger pie, every publisher trying for it just leads to over saturation and greater odds that a game will fail entirely. So there is still incentive for publishers to release large single player games even if the pie is smaller since there may be less competition making it easier to stand out. And what the article is saying is that, within that pie, one way to stand out is to avoid micro transactions. And since it’s discussing single player games specifically, I don’t see a lot of relevance for bringing up multiplayer games that exist in a different part of the gaming world.
If I go to the steam page for a singleplayer game and see a bunch of paid DLC content, I usually skip it. Look at Stellaris, for example
Depends on how old the game is and how big the DLC is IMO. Rimworld, for instance, has quite a few DLCs now, but they are all well worth it if you like the base game. OTOH if a game just has cosmetic DLC or the DLC is coming out super near release that’s a red flag.
I’m of the opinion that Rimworld DLCs don’t actually improve the base game, they simply build an extra layer of isolated complexity ontop of the base game. I like the base game but I didn’t really enjoy the DLCs (at least not the first 2) because they didn’t actually expand the base game. They felt like mods I paid for.
Rimworld’s DLCs are kinda assumed purchases for the modding scene, too. I feel like this drives a lot of their sales TBH.
This describes just about all Paradox games made in the past 15 years, sadly. They release with a barebones concept, then slowly drip-feed content for 5-30 bucks a pop, each one usually sitting at “Mostly Negative” because it doesn’t fundamentally add or change anything most of the time, and the times it does- meh. Crusader Kings 2 was my bread and butter for a long time. Played Crusader Kings 3, and it felt like almost every helpful mechanic that existed in CK2 was stripped, and then added on again over the course of years. It was so infuriating, that I just don’t buy their titles anymore.
It really sucks cause their gamea are really good too and nobody else makes anything like that, so we’re stuck dealing with paradox’s crap. Same story with the total war games.
Vampire Survivors is an exception.
$ for hours on VS is insane, even with all the DLC it’s pennies. I feel like I’m stealing from the dev.
No, that is what “made for fun”-monetization looks like
At the very least, you can still pirate it and play cracked multiplayer with friends.
I made the mistake of buying the game year ago, and bought a bunch of DLC at 50% or greater sales, and now the sunken cost fallacy has taken hold on me, and I still want to buy more . . . . (at least I’m broke so I can’t right now hehehaha)
The game files are already downloaded in the steam version at least. One could, hypothetically, unlock those dlcs even on a normal copy. Steam would have no way too detect that either. Supposedly. In Minecraft.
I feel the same about multiplayer games without gated progression and LAN server hosting. (Or local/splitscreen)
These days I can’t even play a multiplayer game with friends somewhere with shitty internet. And because of progression you have to force yourself to only play together, but never with different people or by yourself because then you will get ahead.
Unfortunately, that’s not sufficient to keep that bullshit out of big-budget single-player games. Publishers can force it upon developers - and will. Once a few games get away with it, the cult of executives will figure they’re losing money if they don’t fuck you as hard as possible.