[DustFalcon85]

The Video Game publishers (EA, Activision, Ubisoft and anyone else) are appearing to be more greedier by implementing Microtransactions and Loot Crates in their games. I don't want Gearbox implementing them in Duke Nukem 5 *if* they make it in the future. I think the video gaming industry is getting worse because of this. Here's what a loot box looks like.



What's your take on Microtranactions and Loot Boxes?

[xMobilemux]

The only so called "loot boxes" I've ever bought are where they are actually acceptable and that's in Free to Play games, even then I only bought them when they were cheap as dirt and those 2 games were Fallout Shelter and Gwent.

Never have I bought a full price game with microtransactions and loot boxes and I never will.

As for Gearbox implementing them, I anticipate Gearbox forcing them into Borderlands 3 so you have to pay for those skeleton keys for that golden chest, then Randy will spin that "you deliver a 7 and it's a 5" bullshit again in some hilariously bad attempt to get out of it.

[cosmonautcowboy]

Unfortunately, it doesn't matter how many of us hate them, and never buy them. As long as there are enough "whales" that put hundreds/thousands of dollars into them, publishers will keep demanding that they're included.

[Maisth]

In overwatch its not a big deal since they give you cosmetical items, on other games like Battlefront 2 EA its a complete mess, you gotta open boxes to progress through the game and thats something that i DON'T want when im playing a MP Game

[JankJason]

Loot boxes have been around since MMO's had lock boxes. Also TF2 has had them for some time now.

[Micky C]

Yeah but TF2 is FTP. I'm sure publishers love them since people don't notice or care when they spend small amounts every now and then. Of course, if I buy a full-priced game I expect to not to have to bother with something like that.

I didn't really mind them in Deus Ex Mankind Divided since I didn't pay any attention to them and played the game normally. However the concern is that publishers simply want us to get comfortable with the idea of having them in games, and use that as a stepping stone to making them a more integrated gameplay component.

As others have said, if it's a purely cosmetic thing then that's not a big deal to me as it doesn't directly influence the enjoyment of the game. I'd happily pay for Siri on my iPhone to sound like the computer from Star Trek TNG, which is apparently entirely possible if they wanted to do that.

[Sledgehammer]

The push seems quite logical to me, especially when nowadays American AAA companies (and Western-wannabe ones like Capcom) need to get their insane investment into marketing campaign back. Difficult to do that when you're selling marketing campaign itself and not quality game so you have to rely on pre-orders and one week window only to get maximum sales, not to mention that a lot of people tend to drop AAA games shorty as well and never revisit them (which isn't surprising since they were buying into marketing campaign and not the game itself to begin with).

Microtransactions are one of the best way to make money nowdays. And unlike season passes with DLCs, making microtransactions is dirt cheap plus there is quite strong demographics for it which consist from people who have real issues, a demographics I'm not sure if interested in overpriced AAA games since the biggest bait for whales are F2P games (or rather not F2P games themselves but insane playerbase which those games attract, whales need average people in front of whom they can show how big their dick is). Capcom tried to make SFV look like a F2P game with $60 price tag on launch (now its $40 or so) and failed horribly, to the point that they decided to go with aggressive DLC policy in their another even bigger failure which is MvC:I. Already mentioned Deus Ex Mankind Divided also flopped so bad that it pretty much killed DX franchise and I'm pretty sure there were other games where microtransactions didn't really help their success at all. Meanwhile F2P games like LoL or majority of mobile F2P games are doing incredibly fine.

Either way, look forward for it to become a norm, because

[BestViking]

Sledgehammer, on 03 November 2017 - 02:36 AM, said:

The push seems quite logical to me, especially when nowadays American AAA companies (and Western-wannabe ones like Capcom) need to get their insane investment into marketing campaign back.

This is the core of the problem. The more cinematic the game has to be, the bigger the budget. Since there are now motion captured actors, celebrity voice actors and extremely detailed environments and props that take an enormous amount of work to make, not to mention the planning and synchronization of the whole dev team, who all need to eat too. Then they scrap ideas that took a lot of time and work to make... it's self-explanatory.

Not to mention the fact that unless the dev team writes their own engine from scratch, they have to pay fees to use Unreal or Cryengine, to name the more popular ones.

So the payment model from the golden days simply doesn't work anymore. Once game development conventions are established, it's a can of worms that can't be closed. Unless, of course, we're talking about indie developers.

And this explains the love aspect of my love/hate relationship to indie-games. You avoid the bullshit. It allows developers who are really passionate about games to make exactly the game they want. Of course, you have peer-pressure and political tendencies once you get into the marxist/SJW sphere. But those games tend to not do very well after all, and I'd categorize them together with the asset-flip scam games at Steam. There has been so much outrage against such developers and practices, that people tend to smell the bullshit the moment a kickstarter is announced.

I think Battlefield 4 did it well with the Battlepacks. Those could be earned by progressing normally, or you could buy them. Out of principle, I do not condone DLC, but the Battlefield DLCs had a lot of content, and the quality was to a high standard.

[Forge]

the more money the game industry makes from implementing them into their products, the more they're going to show up.
follow the dollar.

[MusicallyInspired]

If this is how games will go then they should all be free to play. The $60 buy-in means less and less all the time.

And the thing is they're NOT just cosmetic. They are game-changing implementations that split the community down the middle. And they shove it in your face at every opportunity. It's a slippery slope and it's only going to get steeper and greasier (both senses of the word).

[Forge]

it'll be great for indie developers and people trying to get a foothold into the industry, like voidpoint.
Eventually people will get tired of the paywall, or dumping money into game features with little reward. Greed will devolve it into the hustle and hassle that it truly is.

[Sledgehammer]

Take-Two wants 'recurrent consumer spending opportunities' in every future game

Quote

Yesterday, Take-Two Interactive released its FY2018 second quarter results, where we learned that GTA 5 is the best-selling videogame of all time in the US. A coinciding conference call with company chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick also provided some interesting commentary on the direction of the publisher, and its plans to pursue microtransactions into the future.

As reported by Gamasutra, Zelnick outlines Take-Two's desire to enforce microtransactions—"recurrent consumer spending opportunities," as he refers to them—in every game going forward.
"The business, once upon a time, was a big chunky opportunity to engage for tens of hours, or perhaps a hundred hours. That has turned into ongoing engagement," says Zelnick. "Day after day, week after week. You fall in love with these titles, and they become part of your daily life.

"We've said that we aim to have recurrent consumer spending opportunities for every title that we put out at this company. It may not always be an online model, it probably won't always be a virtual currency model, but there will be some ability to engage in an ongoing basis with our titles after release across the board."

Zelnick continues, pointing to a "sea of change" in the business of Take-Two that saw recurrent consumer spending make up 42 percent of its "net bookings" in the last financial quarter.

Zelnick adds: "One of the things we've learned is if we create a robust opportunity, and a robust world, in which people can play delightfully in a bigger and bigger way, that they will keep coming back. They will engage. And there is an opportunity to monetize that engagement. There's a lot of room for growth. This is just the beginning."

[BestViking]

There was a guy who spent some $30 000 on ships for Star Citizen, a game that has been in development for six years and is not going to be released any time soon. More than that, rumors has it that his wife divorced him once she found out what he spent such insane amounts of money on.

Newest article I could find is from 2015: http://www.pcgamer.c...-citizen-ships/

There is some sort of mental disorder behind this kind of behavior, or a fetish(whatever they get out of that!), because we see the same kind of financially masochistic behavior in other avenues as well: http://metro.co.uk/2...ay-pig-6896283/

The funny thing about Star Citizen is that next to the insanely priced ships, it says "in stock". I'm sure they'll blame it on "immersion" instead of trying to explain how digital goods could go out of stock.

Although Star Citizen outwardly appears the most extreme in this regard, also keep in mind how Blizzard has milked WoW for 10 years. You'd think they would have gone free to play by now... Not only that, but they also released expansion packs on top of the subscription.

[MusicallyInspired]

Take Two will never see any of my money ever again.

Has WOW not gone F2P? I thought they had semi-recently. But even if they did, it took them long enough.

[cosmonautcowboy]

MusicallyInspired, on 08 November 2017 - 05:28 PM, said:

Take Two will never see any of my money ever again.

Has WOW not gone F2P? I thought they had semi-recently. But even if they did, it took them long enough.

I'm not sure, but I think they've been free to play until your character reaches a certain level or something like that for several years now.

[Player Lin]

MusicallyInspired, on 08 November 2017 - 05:28 PM, said:

Take Two will never see any of my money ever again.Has WOW not gone F2P? I thought they had semi-recently. But even if they did, it took them long enough.

cosmonautcowboy, on 08 November 2017 - 07:14 PM, said:

I'm not sure, but I think they've been free to play until your character reaches a certain level or something like that for several years now.

As an active player of World of Warcraft, no... it's not F2P, just "free play for starter" only(called Starter Edition, every account of WoW/Battle.net will default on this state if not subscribe yet or lapsed subscription), after the character is on level 20 and will not be able to get any XP, you still needed to buy the game, expansions and pay subscription fee to continue playing. Of course Blizzard did gave some methods for leveling fast or instant to the level cap of pre-current expansion for get into the current expansion early if you're newbie or were stopped play WoW long time ago, but that means pay more $$.

Unless you counts those microtransactions for decorations, pets, mounts and leveling potions in WoW as F2P but I don't count, because they just make your character(s) look cool/stupid(?) or get you fast to the level cap but still you have to get your loots by playing game contents.

[Forge]

EA made history.
The most hated post on reddit. Ever.
at the time I'm writing this it has -575,000 points.
the next closest is -24,333

https://www.reddit.c...locked/dppum98/

EA Community Manager Mat Everett's response? People are "arm-chair" developers.

saved for posterity:


funny. this game will still sell millions of copies and make mass $$$ - even with the condescending money grubbing attitude.

[Zaxx]

The problem is that Overwatch popularized this shit and Activision Blizzard made so much money through loot boxes that we're just not gonna get rid of them. Btw. Randy Pitchford already said that Borderlands 3 will have this stuff too so if there's a new Duke game loot boxes will be there, I have no doubt about that.

What I love is that the excuse for using loot boxes and microtransactions in general is always "game development is expensive and hey, we've kept game prices at 60 bucks for the longest time now, aren't we publishers just awesome?" The problem with this excuse: it's simply not true. Overwatch made a ton of money anyway and from the looks of it (it's a multiplayer shooter) the development really did not cost that much when it comes to AAA titles and Blizz could have sold the game for 60 bucks easily anyway... but nope, instead they released it at 40 or 45 bucks and opted to use the psychological cancer of gambling to make a ridiculous amount of money.

Shadow of War? The base game is 60 bucks alright but of course there's a season pass, there is content for the Silver and Gold editions of the game too etc. so the actual price of the full experience is somewhere around 120 bucks... nope, doesn't sound like 60 to me because these days the 60 dollar base title is nothing more than a skeleton game that gets expanded later down the line through DLC even when it comes to single player focused games.

Injustice 2? The base price will be 50 bucks for the PC port WB managed to be 6 months late with compared to the console release. Will that be enough if you want to go online which is a must if you're someone like me who takes fighting games seriously? Nope, you gotta buy the Ultimate Edition for 80 bucks because if you don't then you won't have access to 9 DLC characters and have fun figuring out how to beat them online if you can't play and study them yourself. And btw. the Ultimate Edition is not really that ultimate since you miss out on one character this way too: Darkseid is either a pre-order exclusive or separate DLC for 6 bucks. So if you want to play the full game you have to drop 86 bucks overall and then you have to cope with the loot boxes and the gear system... what a piece of garbage that must be. The best thing: Injustice 2 is a NetherRealm game so yep, loot boxes will be a thing in Mortal Kombat 11 because fuck everyone and their mothers.

Damn, the gaming industry is garbage these days.

[xMobilemux]

I'm honestly surprised that Capcom, yes that Capcom that was known for horrible downloadable and disc locked content practices, forcing Resident Evil into a CoD pandering machine and had less than $130mil in the bank one time is actually being very anti micro transactions.
http://www.pushsquar...r_v_says_capcom
https://www.vg247.co...ess-satisfying/
https://twitter.com/...747952430215169

The whole loot boxes and micro transaction crap is why I'm not really interested in Western gaming anymore(with some exceptions) and mostly focusing on Japanese games, specifically the Yakuza series(which I very highly recommend btw).

Though the fact that Sony's new CEO is looking into Micro transactions shows that even then it won't be entirely safe.

[Zaxx]

xMobilemux, on 14 November 2017 - 03:29 AM, said:

Though the fact that Sony's new CEO is looking into Micro transactions shows that even then it won't be entirely safe.

Sony depends on quality exclusives, I don't think they'd risk putting their whole business at risk in the hope of getting some extra money.

[MusicallyInspired]

New developments, due to the massive reddit downvote, EA promised that "change is a constant" with Battlefront II and reduced the 60k credit requirements for unlock Vader and Luke down to 15k, even though initially it was 10k before they raised it, so they've got people thanking them for technically raising the requirement by 50%. Also, not only did they reduce the Vader/Luke unlock credit requirement by 75% but they also reduced the awards for achievements by 75%. It used to give you 20k credits and now it only gives you 5k. And game modes like Arcade give you a max of 100 credits for every 3 hours or something like that. Apparently they don't take kindly to single playering your way to unlocking Vader.

And besides all this I think I heard there's a max credit reward cap per day. And people are cheering. They're just throwing around big numbers to placate people into not cancelling their preorders (when they're not hiding the refund button, in certain regions!) and coaxing them into the slot machine.

[Sledgehammer]

xMobilemux, on 14 November 2017 - 03:29 AM, said:

I'm honestly surprised that Capcom, yes that Capcom that was known for horrible downloadable and disc locked content practices, forcing Resident Evil into a CoD pandering machine and had less than $130mil in the bank one time is actually being very anti micro transactions.

They're "anti" because not even microtransactions saved SFV from failure, that's why they made shitton of overpriced costumes with a few exclusive overpriced arenas and overpriced colors for SFV since their "fight money" bullshit didn't really work in a 60$ game which feels like a F2P game (it started in 2016 around summer if not even earlier, when sales for the game dropped significantly and people didn't buy their shitty fight money). They even came back to disc locked DLC and made their DLC policy even more aggressive with MvC:I. This is obviously typical damage control from their side so they could save their face, I think the same bullshit happened when they failed to make any kind of profit from pachinko.

Capcom is a Western wannabe company and the West is still their main demographics. That's even why they declared arcade market dead when were asked if SFV will see arcade release when the truth is, Japan isn't interested in their games anymore outside of maybe MH which was the only non-Westernized (and thus not ruined) franchise, although I expect MH World change that.

MusicallyInspired, on 14 November 2017 - 07:38 AM, said:

EA promised that "change is a constant" with Battlefront II and reduced the 60k credit requirements for unlock Vader and Luke down to 15k

Typical PR scheme. This is exactly why they didn't remove that shitty comment with ton of downvotes in the first place. And in the end, they still made it 15k. I have no pity for the fools who will waste their money on this game.

[Sledgehammer]

So… this became even more amusing:


[source of the tweet]

[BestViking]

Battlefront... well to me that means only one thing: there's an even longer wait for a proper Battlefield. I have zero interest in it. Star Wars in that context? Nope. I loved the Jedi Knight games though. In the context of multiplayer or even MMO? It becomes too much of a clusterf*ck IMO.

In regards to proper Battlefields, we didn't have one since 4, although I had a bit of fun with Hardline. It was a bold move, I give them that, but the context and confines of Battlefield really didn't work well with an obviously GTA-inspired theme, down to the cartoonish, plasticky graphical aesthetics.

But it was simpler and more arcade-like. More barebones and not some overwhelming thing where you had so many situations to adapt to as can become the situation in the "real" Battlefield games("we wuz kaiser" is not counted here, mind you).

I really enjoyed Hotwire, and the TDM was nice too. CQ didn't work too well, but the limited theme at least made sure the vehicles didn't ridiculously overpower the infantry. I'd still play it if it wasn't for the fact that the playerbase now is pretty much nonexistent and more people play BF3 than that one.

O.T aside...

If DICE gets one thing right, it's DLC. The BF4 DLC maps are absolutely beautiful.

[MusicallyInspired]

Similarly, I couldn't care less about Battlefield. But you didn't care for Battlefield 1? (Battlefield 4 on my PC looks like absolute trash, incidentally. I was severely disappointed and regret the $7 I spent on it)

[Forge]

[Forge]

[cybdmn]

Zaxx, on 14 November 2017 - 12:48 AM, said:

Damn, the gaming industry is garbage these days.

This is my thinking since more than ten years now.

[MusicallyInspired]

[xMobilemux]

Yeah CD Projekt RED is one of the only hopes I still have in Western gaming.