The video game industry cannot quit microtransactions. In fact, two of the largest video game companies in the United States — Electronic Arts and Take-Two I...
Yeah, not the same thing. I’m not saying microtransactions can’t be stopped. I’m saying it won’t happen through US-based legislation.
And this iPhone monopoly suit is apples-and-oranges to a microtransaction litigation. They’re being charged with being in breach of an 1890s law that has held strong, but that has nothing to do with microtransactions. In fact, no relevant law exists except some flimsy gambling statutes that simply do not work. Most importantly, there is no legislative piece to it. Apple broke a big law and has been doing so with virtually no consequences for decades. Nobody’s passing new laws against Apple. They’re just finally facing the justice that they should’ve faced a long time gone.
People have shown – and this is true of many industries other than video games – that they weight an up-front payment more-highly than later payments. Cell companies wouldn’t sell you a cell phone linked to a plan where they make the cost of the phone back over time with a higher cell service payment if that weren’t true for them as well. Same thing for, say, modems and ISPs.
If people want to have a game where one pays up front, they can get them; there are a bunch of games that don’t have microtransactions. I’ve only played one game that I can think of that I recall having in-game microtransactions – Fallout 76 – and never purchased anything there, because what they sold were cosmetic things that I had no interest in. What I wanted was more gameplay, and they weren’t in the business of selling that. It’s just that a lot of people do buy games that have microtransactions. Oh, and while I don’t typically play free-to-play commercial games, I did try DoTA 2 for a bit, and IIRC there’s some sort of cosmetics-selling thing there.
Is use of microtransactions intrinsically a negative? Well, it means that the company has an incentive to make a game that people want to keep playing, which isn’t true of a game where they make a one-off purchase, and I suppose that that’s a win over a game with an up-front purchase.
It also reduces a publisher’s risk – you aren’t making one giant investment and hoping it sells well. You can scale up and scale down as you see how the game does. Plus, more room to see what players actually want, based on what they get and what they don’t. And the lower the risk, the more-willing someone is to put the money in to develop something. That’s desirable.
That being said, my own preferred model is where one purchases a game with an up-front purchase, then the vendor sells large expansion packs/DLC. That way, if a game does well, one can get more similar content, and it gives the company an incentive to produce more content that I want. And I think that in general, content sold in larger blocks is both more-interesting to me and more-cost-effective than anything obtained via small purchases.
But, hey, I’m not gonna complain if someone else likes games like that.
And I can’t rule out the possibility that a game vendor might make microtransactions that I would like and make me want to play games that do have them. One irritation I had with the Fallout series was the limited selection of radio songs. I liked what was there, but wanted more of the same. There were some third-party people that made mods, but Bethesda never sold new licensed song packs and stations. Same sort of thing for the Grand Theft Auto series, which also does radio stations, or Stellaris, which doesn’t have radio but does have a lot of ambient music, and which one plays a lot of; the music can kind of get old. That’s legitimately something that I’d have paid for, and any purchase would probably qualify as a microtransaction, since it wouldn’t be a very large piece of content. But as far as I can tell, game publishers just don’t try identifying, licensing, and selling supplementary music packs.
I’ve bought some hats in TF2. Not because I wanted to have an edge or something, but because I liked that game. Many MTX games are just not good games to begin with. Especially mobile ones, and they have more success with children due to that. And to secure their habits at that stage of forming their mentality we probably need to judge what’s MTX, is it gambling, should we allow it etc. Because many devs do abuse that shit, and peers at school bully kids who can’t equip themselves like a normal person would. That’s not what we should support.
Excellent comment. I’ve been playing more free to play games simply for the reason you mentioned, it’s clear those games will have developers working on them for a long time. Games like PUBG or Fortnite (hate it or love it), and more recently, The Finals (absolutely love that game) are clearly going to have dev resources available for a very long time.
That said, I never spent a dime on GTA online, even though I played that for quite a bit. It didn’t appeal to me as much for some reason. I think seeing devs adding cool things makes me want to buy a little something for all the enjoyment I’m getting - especially when it cost me nothing to start. With Rockstar (or Activision) I feel a lot of negative feelings about giving them money when it’s clear they’re trying to cut costs and maximize profits at every turn by holding features back or removing them and keeping them locked behind a paywall. The other games I mentioned let you play 100% of the game and money is more for actual bonus content that’s mostly irrelevant. It’s weirdly ironic, actually
in short, the market is formed by the money spent and what kind of product people buy. Simply don’t buy the stuff you don’t want, and spend actual money on things you want. People need to learn that their own preference does not reflect the actual statistic distribution on what others find “worthy” of their money.
Shouting “free!” and somehow getting billions of dollars is a sign of exploitation. They weren’t donated. Yes, people make harsher decisions about up-front costs… because rational decision-making requires that up-front honesty. We outlaw many abuses of “predictable irrationality” baked into the human brain. Current laws don’t cover being groomed into buying whateverthefuck by a Skinner box disguised as a puzzle game, because legislators were insufficiently imaginative.
But now we’ve seen that this business model is a problem - we can simply solve it.
Until then, it will continue infecting the entire industry. This started in “free-to-play” mobile trash and is now in full-price, “AAA,” flagship-franchise titles. It’s in subscription MMOs. It’s in single-player games. All excuses have failed and we need to admit the only motive is greed. This is a scam that turns generic decent games into whale-hunting exercises that want $70 up-front and $10 a month and $30 per “season” and $5 for imaginary fucking hat. If they don’t get that from every player - fine. They get it from enough. And everyone else has to suffer the constant spam reminders that they could be having so much optimal fun if they just paid the publisher again. Just one more transaction bro. Then you’ll be happy.
I don’t care if someone else thinks they like being manipulated that way.
Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
Greed of trying to find ‘a sucker’ someone who will empty the wallet for a flash and a trick. So you get allot of games where the chief motivating factor is trying to copy someone else’s grift and land a whale.
Yea, that’s how companies work under capitalism. They are not trying to make the best games, they are trying to extract the most money. And apparently enough people are supporting this behaviour.
There have been some incredible OSS games. Take away IP concerns and they have more access to assets. Take away needing to work to live, and people passionate about gamedev would have no obstacles in creating video games with their time.
Capitalism makes some core assumptions that, right or wrong, generally do not apply in the dev world - assumptions of laziness and selfishness. Smith tried to build a framework around “people will never be altruistic or work because of their pride”. It was intended both to standardize and limit those selfish behaviors (modern capitalists threw out the “limit” part). You can make your own conclusions about capitalism and most of the business world, but I don’t know a developer who would rather sit and watch The Price is Right than be on their computer coding something other people would love.
Indie devs need to eat too. And they don’t mind spare money to feel basic security while making games. The difference is they have more of that idealized capitalistic competition to even being noticed, so they create original games that you can remember, while AAA companies do have enough publicity they are sure some 10 mils of dumb fucks would buy a pooping simulator if it’s sold by them and follows one of the ironed out formulas.
Making money isn’t capitalism. A market economy isn’t capitalism. You can look up the textbook definition, but to me capitalism means organizing absolutely everything around the pursuit of profit for the ownership class. Indie developers by and large aren’t in it for the money; that would make no sense, because they could make better money doing something else.
Yeah. It seems to me while there’s a lot of ways to take “capitalism”, the moment you point out that people are taking paycuts to do gamedev there’s no way capitalism applies to their motivations anymore.
One of the best video games ever made, Tetris, was made in the Soviet Union, and the guy who made it didn’t see any profit from it for most of his life. Passion projects and games as art would still exist too. I don’t think Stardew Valley exists because Concerned Ape thought it would make him rich - it did, but that’s not why the game exists in the first place.
Ideally if money wasn’t a factor you’d see way more passion projects. In fact some of the most popular games in the world either are passion projects or stemmed from them. Counter-strike was a mod. Dota was a mod. PUBG was a originally DayZ: Battle Royale mod. Minecraft was originally just a passion project. Dwarf fortress is a passion project.
Overall you’d just get less games like what Fortnite is now or probably every COD game after MW, because they exist for the sole purpose of making money.
Might be controversial but I wouldn’t mind AAA studios having one live service MTX heavy game that they use to fund their company. Costs seem to be insane right now. But they never seem to use the money to create new experiences, and neither will they stop at putting it in just one game.
The goal of AAA companies isn’t to sell games, it’s not even to sell MTX, it’s to sell the idea that they’re a perpetual profit engine to the stock market.
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Say it with me: only legislation will fix this.
This abuse is the dominant strategy.
If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.
Say it with me: nobody is ever going to legislate this in the US.
Fatalism is worse than useless. Spit hopelessness at someone else.
There’s a difference between fatalism and realism. I’m not saying the problem isn’t solvable. I’m saying it won’t happen that way.
Heard the same shit about Apple for years.
That naysaying didn’t help a damn thing. Demanding the right action finally has.
Yeah, not the same thing. I’m not saying microtransactions can’t be stopped. I’m saying it won’t happen through US-based legislation.
And this iPhone monopoly suit is apples-and-oranges to a microtransaction litigation. They’re being charged with being in breach of an 1890s law that has held strong, but that has nothing to do with microtransactions. In fact, no relevant law exists except some flimsy gambling statutes that simply do not work. Most importantly, there is no legislative piece to it. Apple broke a big law and has been doing so with virtually no consequences for decades. Nobody’s passing new laws against Apple. They’re just finally facing the justice that they should’ve faced a long time gone.
Right, these two things aren’t perfectly identical, so there’s no possible connection.
The will to solve problems through government doesn’t exist! Don’t try!
Shoo.
Ah yes, belittle your interlocutor when you can’t respond to them. Thank you for justifying this block
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CNBC is corpo propaganda…
Why can’t they quit layoffs?
Same reason?
Someone posted a video in another comment section a while ago and I found it really informative:
https://youtu.be/-653Z1val8s
And yes, capitalism and greed.
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Cant walk away from easy money.
Can’t? No, they 100% can but they choose not to because greed.
People have shown – and this is true of many industries other than video games – that they weight an up-front payment more-highly than later payments. Cell companies wouldn’t sell you a cell phone linked to a plan where they make the cost of the phone back over time with a higher cell service payment if that weren’t true for them as well. Same thing for, say, modems and ISPs.
If people want to have a game where one pays up front, they can get them; there are a bunch of games that don’t have microtransactions. I’ve only played one game that I can think of that I recall having in-game microtransactions – Fallout 76 – and never purchased anything there, because what they sold were cosmetic things that I had no interest in. What I wanted was more gameplay, and they weren’t in the business of selling that. It’s just that a lot of people do buy games that have microtransactions. Oh, and while I don’t typically play free-to-play commercial games, I did try DoTA 2 for a bit, and IIRC there’s some sort of cosmetics-selling thing there.
Is use of microtransactions intrinsically a negative? Well, it means that the company has an incentive to make a game that people want to keep playing, which isn’t true of a game where they make a one-off purchase, and I suppose that that’s a win over a game with an up-front purchase.
It also reduces a publisher’s risk – you aren’t making one giant investment and hoping it sells well. You can scale up and scale down as you see how the game does. Plus, more room to see what players actually want, based on what they get and what they don’t. And the lower the risk, the more-willing someone is to put the money in to develop something. That’s desirable.
That being said, my own preferred model is where one purchases a game with an up-front purchase, then the vendor sells large expansion packs/DLC. That way, if a game does well, one can get more similar content, and it gives the company an incentive to produce more content that I want. And I think that in general, content sold in larger blocks is both more-interesting to me and more-cost-effective than anything obtained via small purchases.
But, hey, I’m not gonna complain if someone else likes games like that.
And I can’t rule out the possibility that a game vendor might make microtransactions that I would like and make me want to play games that do have them. One irritation I had with the Fallout series was the limited selection of radio songs. I liked what was there, but wanted more of the same. There were some third-party people that made mods, but Bethesda never sold new licensed song packs and stations. Same sort of thing for the Grand Theft Auto series, which also does radio stations, or Stellaris, which doesn’t have radio but does have a lot of ambient music, and which one plays a lot of; the music can kind of get old. That’s legitimately something that I’d have paid for, and any purchase would probably qualify as a microtransaction, since it wouldn’t be a very large piece of content. But as far as I can tell, game publishers just don’t try identifying, licensing, and selling supplementary music packs.
I’ve bought some hats in TF2. Not because I wanted to have an edge or something, but because I liked that game. Many MTX games are just not good games to begin with. Especially mobile ones, and they have more success with children due to that. And to secure their habits at that stage of forming their mentality we probably need to judge what’s MTX, is it gambling, should we allow it etc. Because many devs do abuse that shit, and peers at school bully kids who can’t equip themselves like a normal person would. That’s not what we should support.
Excellent comment. I’ve been playing more free to play games simply for the reason you mentioned, it’s clear those games will have developers working on them for a long time. Games like PUBG or Fortnite (hate it or love it), and more recently, The Finals (absolutely love that game) are clearly going to have dev resources available for a very long time.
That said, I never spent a dime on GTA online, even though I played that for quite a bit. It didn’t appeal to me as much for some reason. I think seeing devs adding cool things makes me want to buy a little something for all the enjoyment I’m getting - especially when it cost me nothing to start. With Rockstar (or Activision) I feel a lot of negative feelings about giving them money when it’s clear they’re trying to cut costs and maximize profits at every turn by holding features back or removing them and keeping them locked behind a paywall. The other games I mentioned let you play 100% of the game and money is more for actual bonus content that’s mostly irrelevant. It’s weirdly ironic, actually
in short, the market is formed by the money spent and what kind of product people buy. Simply don’t buy the stuff you don’t want, and spend actual money on things you want. People need to learn that their own preference does not reflect the actual statistic distribution on what others find “worthy” of their money.
Shouting “free!” and somehow getting billions of dollars is a sign of exploitation. They weren’t donated. Yes, people make harsher decisions about up-front costs… because rational decision-making requires that up-front honesty. We outlaw many abuses of “predictable irrationality” baked into the human brain. Current laws don’t cover being groomed into buying whateverthefuck by a Skinner box disguised as a puzzle game, because legislators were insufficiently imaginative.
But now we’ve seen that this business model is a problem - we can simply solve it.
Until then, it will continue infecting the entire industry. This started in “free-to-play” mobile trash and is now in full-price, “AAA,” flagship-franchise titles. It’s in subscription MMOs. It’s in single-player games. All excuses have failed and we need to admit the only motive is greed. This is a scam that turns generic decent games into whale-hunting exercises that want $70 up-front and $10 a month and $30 per “season” and $5 for imaginary fucking hat. If they don’t get that from every player - fine. They get it from enough. And everyone else has to suffer the constant spam reminders that they could be having so much optimal fun if they just paid the publisher again. Just one more transaction bro. Then you’ll be happy.
I don’t care if someone else thinks they like being manipulated that way.
Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
Greed. Saved you a click.
Greed of trying to find ‘a sucker’ someone who will empty the wallet for a flash and a trick. So you get allot of games where the chief motivating factor is trying to copy someone else’s grift and land a whale.
Yea, that’s how companies work under capitalism. They are not trying to make the best games, they are trying to extract the most money. And apparently enough people are supporting this behaviour.
So exactly how would non-capitalism work here? I am curious to see what kind of games we would have if there were no incentives.
There have been some incredible OSS games. Take away IP concerns and they have more access to assets. Take away needing to work to live, and people passionate about gamedev would have no obstacles in creating video games with their time.
Capitalism makes some core assumptions that, right or wrong, generally do not apply in the dev world - assumptions of laziness and selfishness. Smith tried to build a framework around “people will never be altruistic or work because of their pride”. It was intended both to standardize and limit those selfish behaviors (modern capitalists threw out the “limit” part). You can make your own conclusions about capitalism and most of the business world, but I don’t know a developer who would rather sit and watch The Price is Right than be on their computer coding something other people would love.
Ever heard of indie games?
Indie devs need to eat too. And they don’t mind spare money to feel basic security while making games. The difference is they have more of that idealized capitalistic competition to even being noticed, so they create original games that you can remember, while AAA companies do have enough publicity they are sure some 10 mils of dumb fucks would buy a pooping simulator if it’s sold by them and follows one of the ironed out formulas.
Capitalism isn’t the part where things cost money, it’s the part where having money makes you money.
… or sometimes any of ten thousand other definitions, because it’s an overused synecdoche for vast swaths of human culture.
Making money isn’t capitalism. A market economy isn’t capitalism. You can look up the textbook definition, but to me capitalism means organizing absolutely everything around the pursuit of profit for the ownership class. Indie developers by and large aren’t in it for the money; that would make no sense, because they could make better money doing something else.
Yeah. It seems to me while there’s a lot of ways to take “capitalism”, the moment you point out that people are taking paycuts to do gamedev there’s no way capitalism applies to their motivations anymore.
You’re describing markets. Capitalism is the part where people who don’t even work at the game company make money off the game company.
One of the best video games ever made, Tetris, was made in the Soviet Union, and the guy who made it didn’t see any profit from it for most of his life. Passion projects and games as art would still exist too. I don’t think Stardew Valley exists because Concerned Ape thought it would make him rich - it did, but that’s not why the game exists in the first place.
he did it because no one would listen to his music /s
I mean, other than that one song the music was pretty unmemorable.
Ideally if money wasn’t a factor you’d see way more passion projects. In fact some of the most popular games in the world either are passion projects or stemmed from them. Counter-strike was a mod. Dota was a mod. PUBG was a originally DayZ: Battle Royale mod. Minecraft was originally just a passion project. Dwarf fortress is a passion project.
Overall you’d just get less games like what Fortnite is now or probably every COD game after MW, because they exist for the sole purpose of making money.
Just like every industry.
I bet it’s money.
Might be controversial but I wouldn’t mind AAA studios having one live service MTX heavy game that they use to fund their company. Costs seem to be insane right now. But they never seem to use the money to create new experiences, and neither will they stop at putting it in just one game.
The line must go up. Forever. Infinitely.
The goal of AAA companies isn’t to sell games, it’s not even to sell MTX, it’s to sell the idea that they’re a perpetual profit engine to the stock market.