The thing is that this guy is not the head of a public company where shareholders demand massive and continually growing profits. So he acts in the interests of the consumer, the customer, the gamer. But if this was a public company, shareholders would buy shares and then demand he do something to grow that share price, so they can sell the shares later for profit.
When that happens we see that CEOs do everything they can to maximize profits, like promising release dates in earnings calls.
The difference between private and public companies is the single biggest threat to us all because as soon as the company acts in the exclusive interest of profit, everything else gets fucked. And most do.
That means employees, customers, everyone. Only the 1% benefit from the gutting of everyone else.
Those top level folks are sometimes “incentived” by bottom line targets and other end targets. So sure, you do get greedy people inside private companies.
I don’t think shareholders driving for infinite profit is easily disregarded.
It’s clear from context that he was discussing publicly-traded companies because, like you said, there basically are no public companies in the US. Your post is unnecessary and pedantic.
Technically public still means you act in the interests of the owners, aka shareholders (at least in germany anything else is illegal), it’s just that naturally that will always be profit for the majority.
I agree — some gamers do not understand that the gaming industry is grown up now, or at least old enough to play in the big boy money league. And the big boys are not in the business to make games; they are in gaming to make business. Inherently different decision-making process.
Also, before someone buys something, someone has to sell out. So why do we always have a problem with the buyers, aka investors, whose intentions are clear but not the sellers?
Indeed, the game devs aren’t “In it for the art” anymore, they aren’t John Romero and John Carmack making Doom “Because it’s cool” or Wolfenstein 3D “because I liked that Castle Wolfenstein game on the ZX Spectrum or whatever”
It’s Cigar Munching old men who don’t know what a Mario is, and don’t care, they just know that the chart goes up when they release a product with a trending name, regardless of content.
I mean, the Doom guys were also doing it for the money, at least as a big motovator. But it was less profit-drivem, way more small and less corporate, with way less money on the line.
The difference between private and public companies is the single biggest threat to us all
Nah. One does not build a company to provide a service but to earn money. “Well-being of the company” only matters if you are sure you can sell it for more if you grow it more
There are a hundred different reasons to start a company other than to make profit. Don’t be fooled by the lies of market capitalism. Some people want to create a legacy that generates income for themselves and their employees, maybe even their children. Not everyone is looking to sell to the highest bidder. With that said, the bigger the company, especially if they plan to go, or already are, publicly traded, or are owned by private equity firms whose sole focus is profit and value of the entity the more likely the assumption is true.
Maybe turn the AAA stock into a meme stock, have gamers buy that shit up and give reduced game prices to stock holders to incentivise gamers to buy them. Et voila, No demand for profit that costs quality in the gaming experience.
To be honest, I mainly bought the game to make a statement & show my support for what type of treatment & product I want as a customer. Nowadays everything just seems to want to milk me, games are quite often literally designed around it so that it becomes a core part of the games themselves. And I’m so damn over all of this bullshit.
A lot of us just want to have some fun after work and it is not fun when you feel served up like a buttered hot meal. I don’t want to feel like my games are consuming me.
I can see how Game Pass popularity could be bad for a number of studios, as he says in the article. But, I’ve never understood how Game Pass’s existence was anti-consumer.
We always get these baffling quotes like “Microsoft insists on renting you your games, and you will like it.” or “I’m not going to be forced to pay $17 a month just to play my games”. GP never gained popularity off Microsoft forcing people into it, people voluntarily signed up, even when MS continues to make their games available for direct purchase.
The previous quote from Ubisoft even seemed more like an investor excuse than a threat to gamers.
These days we are expected to be subscribed to tons of shit, including stuff that simply doesn’t justify subscriptions. We know it’s not a benefit to us, but to the companies that dish them out.
I think the worst one I’ve seen recently was a note taking app on Android. Developer made a glorified PDF reader you could write on and wanted $10 to use the fucking app annually. I hope that dev ends up homeless and broken.
Jesus fucking Christ, why not charge a subscription for notepad.exe while you’re at it.
The worst I’ve personally seen was a subscription for an Android launcher. No actual cloud services attached and no way to pay outright. They wanted for a subscription for an app that launches other apps.
Just wanted to mention that just like with any other F2P games, there are gacha titles that are fun without paying anything. Not as many as the predatory kind but still.
This too! So many genuinely good games at genuinely good prices. This is true even on Switch, where Nintendo is known to put AAA efforts into genres otherwise filled entirely with indie games (not to mention the Nintendo tax)
Ironically I had to buy a subscription to Nvidia to play BG3 on Mac with my friends because they silently delayed the Mac release on release day for 3 months.
I tried running it on Linux, game posting toolkit, and windows via parallels (another subscription, yay), and I could not fix the invisible textures.
They’ve since launched the game fully but it was upsetting they reneged on their release without so much as a word multiple times.
Weil if that isn’t the consequences of your choices.
Seriously I’m sorry for you individually that you were delayed that way - it reminds me of my fellow Linux gamers complaining about incompatibility though - while running Nvidia cards.
Macs are amazing pieces of hardware - and the price one pays is that one has to accept that some devs don’t want to climb the wall into that walled garden.
Weil if that isn’t the consequences of your choices.
So it’s my fault that a studio with a good history, knowledge of the platform and has worked directly with Apple on their last game, with a working public beta running on my machine, decided to delay release without any announcement?
Larian are generally great, BG3 is awesome, the release comms were shit.
Last time I checked working with and for apple platforms is a pain. A release delay after a public test as you described is a strong pointer in that direction - or do you claim that was done out of spite?
Every (your currency) spent on apple supports this holier than you attitude.
Unfortunately it works the same way as with StarCitizen, you’re aware it’s a ripoff, but if you want to play this particular type of a game, pay up or leave.
With MMORPGs specifically, here are the options:
Free to Play. Enormous cash shop, often pay to win. Usually these games actually require the most money to play on high level, or waste your time by slowing down the grind and having an optional “premium” sub, which effectively makes it a sub MMO.
Buy to Play. Much less predatory, rarely pay to win, but often with huge cash shop. Get ready to see tons of cool cosmetics that are only available through micro transactions, and the base game often receives scrapes from the table. Still, some of these games like TESO effectively force you to pay a sub by introducing a mechanic (like bottomless reagent bag) that make the game without them miserable on high level.
Pay to play. Most obvious predator, nobody needs this much money to develop a game that already charges almost full price for base game and for all new DLCs, but also usually has the most tame cash shop. WoW for instance has a tiniest (comparing to games like TESO) cash shop with 20-ish mounts and pets nobody cares about.
This creates effectively a pick-your-Devil situation with these games. No good monetization, pick whatever feels least predatory for you
Honestly I don’t regret paying a subscription for WoW. Maybe it’s different now, but when I played it felt fair. You got reliable servers, frequent updates,somewhat reasonable balance changes, and seasonal events. You didn’t get any loot box bullshit, just playing the game regularly generally got you the rewards with minimal effort.
Sure expansions also cost extra, but that was $30 and about 1 every 2 years.
For a game that ate all your free time, it didn’t hit your wallet that hard.
“We need ideas to find a way to monetize our active playerbase!”
“We already are. They pay us money each month. In turn, we continue to make sure the game is fun and has stuff that keeps them interested.”
“Aha! Carry on.”
I used to hate subscription games with a passion, but seeing what followed, in-app purchases, lootboxes and FOMO-driven battlepasses, turns out subscriptions were the lesser evil.
That’s a big part of it. Right now, Microsoft tries to put a number of big titles in their subscription service, a bunch of filler titles they can buy from publishers for cheap, and maybe a few that sold more popularly than they expected.
If subscription gaming becomes the majority, Microsoft and other streaming providers get to pick the contenders and not much else gets seen. Games like Lethal Company won’t have a sudden boom in popularity because it wasn’t on Microsoft’s radar.
I mean, now that the video streaming industry has shown us how the endgame looks like for subscription models, you’d have to be crazy to want that for the videogame industry.
Whatever short-term gains you can get in convenience or price by buying into their penetration stage are not worth contributing to leading the hobby down that road even an iota.
It’s not even about what we want, but what the stakeholders and decision-makers push for in order to rack in more profits.
The gaming industry was at its highest in terms of fun and variability and innovation when the industry was still figuring out best ways to make mad money, no matter how ethical or morally bankrupt - now they know they can use fear of missing out and predatory tactics to lure people into essentially gambling in a free-to-play online game, or pad out a singleplayer one with mechanics that contribute nothing to the gameplay, but manage to fool game journalists (the ones that weren’t already paid) into praising the game for its deep and branching loops, attracting more investor money or something.
A lot of people accuse us gamers of being a whiny crowd that cares too much and doesn’t like to have fun, but I guess yeah, we do care a little too much and that’s why so many of us try to actively influence the industry to go into a better direction when we vote with our wallets or write reviews or discuss games and practices in ways that can be hopefully seen by the industry’s decision-makers.
Not to say there isn’t just as many (if not more) gamers that don’t care enough and still pour money into games and practices that are ultimately making the industry worse, only to make the stakeholders and CEOs wealthier.
As much as I agree with his sentiment, this title is bullshit - he never wrote “gamers don’t want subscriptions” but that they shouldn’t want that due to where it might lead.
“Gamers” aren’t some hivemind entity that wants a specific thing. Many people don’t worry whether an idea pushed by the publishers will have a long term negative effect on the industry, they just want to have fun with their hobby.
Look at microtransactions - there’s a lot of negative discussion about them and yet they bring huge amounts of money, who’s to say if the same won’t happen with subscription services? We might not like it but majority doesn’t necessarily care.
Sorry for being pedantic about a title but third-parties changing someone’s words is a bit of a pet peeve of mine.
The idea of the whale is a false narrative created by the companies who run these scams to justify their unethical business practices.
The vast majority of people who make up that demographic are people who really can’t afford to spend money like that, but do because the companies hired psychologists to tell them exactly how to exploit people’s brain chemistry to extract money from them. This mostly includes people who are biologically wired for poor impulse control and an inability to perceive how much money they’re actually spending. People like: gambling addicts, people with adhd or mental health issues, and children.
There are people with more money than sense buying this stuff, but for the most part, it’s gambling addicts and kids emptying their parents’ bank accounts for that dopamine fix.
Just another story they’ve spun to hide how scummy they truly are.
My point is that however you feel about microtransactions they are successful and that’s why they’re so common.
With subscription services you and me can think “I want to own it and play whenever” but a lot (not only casual) players see it as “I pay a few $ and get access to a huge library of games I can try out for the next month”.
As I wrote initially, just because more dedicated audience doesn’t like the direction industry is moving in doesn’t mean majority will care enough to stop it.
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The thing is that this guy is not the head of a public company where shareholders demand massive and continually growing profits. So he acts in the interests of the consumer, the customer, the gamer. But if this was a public company, shareholders would buy shares and then demand he do something to grow that share price, so they can sell the shares later for profit.
When that happens we see that CEOs do everything they can to maximize profits, like promising release dates in earnings calls.
The difference between private and public companies is the single biggest threat to us all because as soon as the company acts in the exclusive interest of profit, everything else gets fucked. And most do.
That means employees, customers, everyone. Only the 1% benefit from the gutting of everyone else.
I mean yes, but also no. I work at a private company and profits seem to be the only thing to get anyone with a title to move their ass.
Most Directors or below have their teams, or customers, or the product front of mind. But once you get to VP seats they just… don’t, it seems.
And this is super anecdotal, I know, but… basically my point is private vs public doesn’t necessarily mean anything.
This guy is just a good guy. He knows what matters to people and speaks from his heart, not his wallet.
Those top level folks are sometimes “incentived” by bottom line targets and other end targets. So sure, you do get greedy people inside private companies.
I don’t think shareholders driving for infinite profit is easily disregarded.
Thats either because your boss privately wants to hoard wealth, or is trying to set the books up for a clean sell.
Public means you sacrifice everything in the name of profit.
Private means you operate on the ideals of the private owners.
A private owner can have ideals of profit. A public company cannot have idealistic shareholders.
Publicly traded, aka private property, means you operate on the ideals of private owners, sacrificing everything in the name of profit.
Publicly owned means almost the opposite, but almost nothing is publicly owned in the US at this point.
Private property ≠ personal property.
It’s clear from context that he was discussing publicly-traded companies because, like you said, there basically are no public companies in the US. Your post is unnecessary and pedantic.
There should be public companies in the US. Especially utilities.
I dont think you responded to the right comment, Im talking about the difference between types of companies, not property.
I’m also talking about different company structures, and how they relate to the type of property that they are.
Ah, in that case I dont think you understand the convo at all
Technically public still means you act in the interests of the owners, aka shareholders (at least in germany anything else is illegal), it’s just that naturally that will always be profit for the majority.
I agree — some gamers do not understand that the gaming industry is grown up now, or at least old enough to play in the big boy money league. And the big boys are not in the business to make games; they are in gaming to make business. Inherently different decision-making process.
Also, before someone buys something, someone has to sell out. So why do we always have a problem with the buyers, aka investors, whose intentions are clear but not the sellers?
Indeed, the game devs aren’t “In it for the art” anymore, they aren’t John Romero and John Carmack making Doom “Because it’s cool” or Wolfenstein 3D “because I liked that Castle Wolfenstein game on the ZX Spectrum or whatever”
It’s Cigar Munching old men who don’t know what a Mario is, and don’t care, they just know that the chart goes up when they release a product with a trending name, regardless of content.
I mean, the Doom guys were also doing it for the money, at least as a big motovator. But it was less profit-drivem, way more small and less corporate, with way less money on the line.
Nah. One does not build a company to provide a service but to earn money. “Well-being of the company” only matters if you are sure you can sell it for more if you grow it more
There are a hundred different reasons to start a company other than to make profit. Don’t be fooled by the lies of market capitalism. Some people want to create a legacy that generates income for themselves and their employees, maybe even their children. Not everyone is looking to sell to the highest bidder. With that said, the bigger the company, especially if they plan to go, or already are, publicly traded, or are owned by private equity firms whose sole focus is profit and value of the entity the more likely the assumption is true.
There are many different reasons than to pursue continually escalating profits.
Maybe turn the AAA stock into a meme stock, have gamers buy that shit up and give reduced game prices to stock holders to incentivise gamers to buy them. Et voila, No demand for profit that costs quality in the gaming experience.
I mean, this is a very Captain Obvious take. The problem is; it won’t change and it’ll only get worse.
Good to see them calling these shitty AAA publishers and their terrible, anti-consumer ideas out.
To be honest, I mainly bought the game to make a statement & show my support for what type of treatment & product I want as a customer. Nowadays everything just seems to want to milk me, games are quite often literally designed around it so that it becomes a core part of the games themselves. And I’m so damn over all of this bullshit.
Between my partner and I we’ve spent 850 hours playing BG3 since October.
That’s more than basically any other “live service” or subscription based game I’ve ever played, especially for the time period.
Phenomenal game that made the team fabulous amounts of money and won awards while all the consumers left happy.
Definitely raises the bar for AAA
A lot of us just want to have some fun after work and it is not fun when you feel served up like a buttered hot meal. I don’t want to feel like my games are consuming me.
I can see how Game Pass popularity could be bad for a number of studios, as he says in the article. But, I’ve never understood how Game Pass’s existence was anti-consumer.
We always get these baffling quotes like “Microsoft insists on renting you your games, and you will like it.” or “I’m not going to be forced to pay $17 a month just to play my games”. GP never gained popularity off Microsoft forcing people into it, people voluntarily signed up, even when MS continues to make their games available for direct purchase.
The previous quote from Ubisoft even seemed more like an investor excuse than a threat to gamers.
I mean, no shit.
These days we are expected to be subscribed to tons of shit, including stuff that simply doesn’t justify subscriptions. We know it’s not a benefit to us, but to the companies that dish them out.
I think the worst one I’ve seen recently was a note taking app on Android. Developer made a glorified PDF reader you could write on and wanted $10 to use the fucking app annually. I hope that dev ends up homeless and broken.
Jesus fucking Christ, why not charge a subscription for notepad.exe while you’re at it.
The worst I’ve personally seen was a subscription for an Android launcher. No actual cloud services attached and no way to pay outright. They wanted for a subscription for an app that launches other apps.
Not to mention the sheer amount of amazing indie games coming out lately. Why even check out this gacha and subscription games?
Just wanted to mention that just like with any other F2P games, there are gacha titles that are fun without paying anything. Not as many as the predatory kind but still.
This too! So many genuinely good games at genuinely good prices. This is true even on Switch, where Nintendo is known to put AAA efforts into genres otherwise filled entirely with indie games (not to mention the Nintendo tax)
Ironically I had to buy a subscription to Nvidia to play BG3 on Mac with my friends because they silently delayed the Mac release on release day for 3 months.
I tried running it on Linux, game posting toolkit, and windows via parallels (another subscription, yay), and I could not fix the invisible textures.
They’ve since launched the game fully but it was upsetting they reneged on their release without so much as a word multiple times.
It’s a very good game now that it works for me.
Weil if that isn’t the consequences of your choices.
Seriously I’m sorry for you individually that you were delayed that way - it reminds me of my fellow Linux gamers complaining about incompatibility though - while running Nvidia cards.
Macs are amazing pieces of hardware - and the price one pays is that one has to accept that some devs don’t want to climb the wall into that walled garden.
So it’s my fault that a studio with a good history, knowledge of the platform and has worked directly with Apple on their last game, with a working public beta running on my machine, decided to delay release without any announcement?
Larian are generally great, BG3 is awesome, the release comms were shit.
Yes?
Last time I checked working with and for apple platforms is a pain. A release delay after a public test as you described is a strong pointer in that direction - or do you claim that was done out of spite?
Every (your currency) spent on apple supports this holier than you attitude.
How is this relevant to the article?
He’s right
Only reason I never got into World of Warcraft
Unfortunately it works the same way as with StarCitizen, you’re aware it’s a ripoff, but if you want to play this particular type of a game, pay up or leave.
With MMORPGs specifically, here are the options:
This creates effectively a pick-your-Devil situation with these games. No good monetization, pick whatever feels least predatory for you
Honestly I don’t regret paying a subscription for WoW. Maybe it’s different now, but when I played it felt fair. You got reliable servers, frequent updates,somewhat reasonable balance changes, and seasonal events. You didn’t get any loot box bullshit, just playing the game regularly generally got you the rewards with minimal effort.
Sure expansions also cost extra, but that was $30 and about 1 every 2 years.
For a game that ate all your free time, it didn’t hit your wallet that hard.
Yeah, it kind of just keeps the agreement honest.
“We need ideas to find a way to monetize our active playerbase!”
“We already are. They pay us money each month. In turn, we continue to make sure the game is fun and has stuff that keeps them interested.”
“Aha! Carry on.”
The subscription also helped with spamming. There was plenty in wow, but it was nothing compared to f2p ganes that I’ve tried.
If only they’d carried on with that idea.
I used to hate subscription games with a passion, but seeing what followed, in-app purchases, lootboxes and FOMO-driven battlepasses, turns out subscriptions were the lesser evil.
Was it Raphael or which BG3 boss said this?
The one with the heavy armor.
Ubisoft: Whatever, hold my subscription.
I hope they don’t say gamers need to pay a subscription fee to keep their purchased games.
No one wants mass subscriptions. “Gamers” is a red herring.
That’s a big part of it. Right now, Microsoft tries to put a number of big titles in their subscription service, a bunch of filler titles they can buy from publishers for cheap, and maybe a few that sold more popularly than they expected.
If subscription gaming becomes the majority, Microsoft and other streaming providers get to pick the contenders and not much else gets seen. Games like Lethal Company won’t have a sudden boom in popularity because it wasn’t on Microsoft’s radar.
Here’s an idea, I give you money for a game, I download it off the store front, I keep it forever.
“You only have a licen…”
Shut the fuck up, if buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing.
Fucking BASED.
I mean, now that the video streaming industry has shown us how the endgame looks like for subscription models, you’d have to be crazy to want that for the videogame industry.
Whatever short-term gains you can get in convenience or price by buying into their penetration stage are not worth contributing to leading the hobby down that road even an iota.
It’s not even about what we want, but what the stakeholders and decision-makers push for in order to rack in more profits.
The gaming industry was at its highest in terms of fun and variability and innovation when the industry was still figuring out best ways to make mad money, no matter how ethical or morally bankrupt - now they know they can use fear of missing out and predatory tactics to lure people into essentially gambling in a free-to-play online game, or pad out a singleplayer one with mechanics that contribute nothing to the gameplay, but manage to fool game journalists (the ones that weren’t already paid) into praising the game for its deep and branching loops, attracting more investor money or something.
A lot of people accuse us gamers of being a whiny crowd that cares too much and doesn’t like to have fun, but I guess yeah, we do care a little too much and that’s why so many of us try to actively influence the industry to go into a better direction when we vote with our wallets or write reviews or discuss games and practices in ways that can be hopefully seen by the industry’s decision-makers.
Not to say there isn’t just as many (if not more) gamers that don’t care enough and still pour money into games and practices that are ultimately making the industry worse, only to make the stakeholders and CEOs wealthier.
As much as I agree with his sentiment, this title is bullshit - he never wrote “gamers don’t want subscriptions” but that they shouldn’t want that due to where it might lead.
“Gamers” aren’t some hivemind entity that wants a specific thing. Many people don’t worry whether an idea pushed by the publishers will have a long term negative effect on the industry, they just want to have fun with their hobby.
Look at microtransactions - there’s a lot of negative discussion about them and yet they bring huge amounts of money, who’s to say if the same won’t happen with subscription services? We might not like it but majority doesn’t necessarily care.
Sorry for being pedantic about a title but third-parties changing someone’s words is a bit of a pet peeve of mine.
Micros rake in the cash because they exploit the stupidity of “whales” (people with more money than sense).
The idea of the whale is a false narrative created by the companies who run these scams to justify their unethical business practices.
The vast majority of people who make up that demographic are people who really can’t afford to spend money like that, but do because the companies hired psychologists to tell them exactly how to exploit people’s brain chemistry to extract money from them. This mostly includes people who are biologically wired for poor impulse control and an inability to perceive how much money they’re actually spending. People like: gambling addicts, people with adhd or mental health issues, and children.
There are people with more money than sense buying this stuff, but for the most part, it’s gambling addicts and kids emptying their parents’ bank accounts for that dopamine fix.
Just another story they’ve spun to hide how scummy they truly are.
Yes. Yes. Yes. The whale comment pisses me off, it might have been true initially, but these days all the average consumers spend money on this trash.
My point is that however you feel about microtransactions they are successful and that’s why they’re so common.
With subscription services you and me can think “I want to own it and play whenever” but a lot (not only casual) players see it as “I pay a few $ and get access to a huge library of games I can try out for the next month”.
As I wrote initially, just because more dedicated audience doesn’t like the direction industry is moving in doesn’t mean majority will care enough to stop it.
Wait, a CEO said that? What’s the catch?
Larian is privately owned. They don’t have stockholders to appease with short term gains.
Which is weird because they remain shareholders for years, so you’d have thought they want long-term gains.
I think I’ve come to the conclusion that “businessmen” are just idiots.
They do. They just also want short-term and medium-term gains.
They’re gambling addicts
Incorrect. The shareholders are the private owners. They’re just not gambling douchebags trying to make themselves short term gains. :D
He’s a CEO of a relatively small company that is product focused. He has yet to grow and focus margins in any serious way.