I've thought about this a lot. Every way to monetize a game will be interpreted with hostility.
If you sell games for $60 upfront then your marketing will be perceived as a scam in the face of any failures or shortcomings in your game. You're trying to hype people up and sell them something bad.
If you sell attempts, or lives, like an arcade or candy crush, then when players lose a level they think you're extorting them for money.
If you sell time, like a subscription, then players think you are trying to force them to grind to pay money
If you sell in-game items, like weapons or maps, the players think you are intentionally weakening the free items in favor of the power you can buy.
If you sell in-game cosmetics, like skins, which have no impact on gameplay, the players think you are trying to make every look stupid and you have to pay to look cool.
Video games are inherently manipulative in the sense that the game is designed for you to behave in fun ways and do fun things. Once monetization is in the picture it completely poisons the whole dynamic. It doesn't help that the audience skews young.
If you want to make a game just for the passion of it, if you want to have a healthy relationship with gamers, you are literally not allowed to monetize. You have to give it away fully for free.
It doesn't relate to addictive behavior, but there's still continuous uproar about deceptive marketing and lack of support. Developer interviews are picked around and lists of promises are made. Any monetary incentive a developer has will be viewed through a bad faith lens at every turn. That can't win.
There is only uproar about deceptive marketing and lack of support if the marketing is actually deceptive and if there is an actual lack of support.
People have been burned a few too many times by less reputable developers (EA) selling unfinished, deceptive garbage (SimCity 2013) at full price, so a certain amount of uproar and skepticism when it happens again and again is to be expected, I think.
But there are good, reputable companies too who are doing honest business by selling quality games for a reasonable up-front price. I don't generally see people having an issue with that.
See if you can find a lot of people who are unhappy with dropping $60 on Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Super Mario Odyssey, for instance.
Also, in the old days of early Internet era, we used to buy games not based on some marketing (in my parts of the world, US videogame marketing didn't really exist anyway), but based on reviews in videogame magazines. Those were pretty honest, and if they weren't, we'd blame the magazine. It was entirely expected that games have varying quality and plenty of bugs. People didn't have a problem with that.
an upfront price made sense in the old days when a relatively polished product was released at launch, perhaps with a couple patches to fix bugs, and with users running their own multiplayer servers.
for better or for worse, the norm has shifted to longer periods of support and servers hosted by the company. it's hard to commit to supporting a game this way when each user only pays once.
personally I like the approach csgo has taken. you get a full game for free (although it was still a good deal at $20, imo) and you can pay for purely cosmetic items. I think this aligns the incentives well; the devs can only get paid by making game that people care about playing, but there's also an unrestricted stream of new players since it's free. plus if you decide your finally done, you can sell all your skins on the market and get at least some of your money back.
I will fully admit that I have only the faintest idea of how modern multiplayer games work, but I agree from my understanding that the old business model of selling a complete game once seems ill suited to that style of game.
(Although, counterexample: Mojang made a fortune out of selling Minecraft, a complete multiplayer game, where you host your own servers, with no paid DLC or hidden catches, but then later came out with the Realms thing where they had optional paid server infrastructure. That's a thing you can do. Not sure how it panned out.)
That being said, my point was that there are still plenty of companies, such as Nintendo, successfully operating in the traditional way without facing much hostility for daring to sell a complete, polished, mostly bug-free product for money.
Therefore I think it is inaccurate to state that "every way to monetize a game will be interpreted with hostility" like the grandparent did.
to be clear, I'm not saying it's totally not viable to just release a good game and charge for it upfront. there is a small number of studios/publishers who have such good brand recognition (or just consistently ship really good games) that they can actually make money this way. it can still work well for games with little ongoing maintenance cost from established companies making AAA titles or indie devs who don't have the same upfront costs.
all I'm saying is that there are other "game-as-a-service" models that can align incentives well between players and devs for ongoing projects without necessarily being abusive.
GGP is sort of right though. gamers are a notoriously difficult group of customers to please, and they don't really have a way to understand the business or technical constraints faced by the makers of their favorite games. the worst of them will be uncharitable and hostile, no matter what you do.
It's not about winning - people will complain because that's what people do. Users complain about free products as well, sometimes rightfully and sometimes with too much entitlement. It's not about the monetisation model.
Creating something and putting it out there for free or for a one-off payment is the cleanest possible model.
Regarding the next game from a game developer, I remember an indie making the point that the feedback from the general public (not the loud minorities only) will mostly be felt on the sales of the next game of series and, to a lesser extent, the next game from this developer.
Exactly. It is only when upfront sale gets combined with season passes AND microtransactions AND lootbox-systems is when criticism gets to arise. Rightfully.
> Every way to monetize a game will be interpreted with hostility.
I would say that in almost any business there is always small amount of people who intrepret the pricing and/or the business model of the business with hostility. I think it is quite natural - people would rather not pay for things. However the majority of people are not the ones bitching loudly about it, they pay for services happily and are somewhat content & quiet. The small minority bitches about it and that minority is often quite vocal.
That's because ultimately people have no choice but to either agree to the demands of the vendors or forgo a good or service ("voting with your wallet" doesn't work unless goods are trivial or substitutable, and games are neither). Most of them don't say a thing, because this is how things work and people have a life to live.
That doesn't change the fact that some business models are more abusive and deserving criticism than others, though.
This is the dominant tone of discussion in video game communities. I certainly haven't seen that in other places. No one accused Disney of using cliff hangers to scam them.
Given the previous claim was that some number of people will treat the business model and monetization approach with hostility I think it still holds true with Disney. They have been much derided for retelling public domain stories, then claiming ownership/trademarks/copyright (event going so far as pushing for changes to copyright law) to give themselves exclusive rights to market. And a lot of criticism of their whole “Disney Vault” approach to selling old VHS and DVD titles where only certain titles from the back catalogue would be available for sale in a given year, so you better buy them up quickly or miss out for potentially another 7 years.
> No one accused Disney of using cliff hangers to scam them.
Well, yes and no. When it comes to movies in general and movie adaptations of books in particular, like recently the Hobbit, number one complaint I heard (and expressed myself at times) is that they're so desperate for money that it's pathetic, stringing a short book for three movies ending in a way that ensures people will have to go to the cinema not just to continue watching, but also to rewatch the old movies upon release of the new one.
From what I can tell, the sentiment for now is that it's pathetic, not abusive.
I've certainly seen this opinion around Disney, especially around how much they're milking Star Wars releases, and the recent run of live-action remakes. It's not a universal thing, but "Enormous media company Disney churns out nostalgia-baiting cash-ins" is definitely a complaint that you even see among fairly reputable reviewers.
The biggest example of this was the "rerelease" of Infinity War to add a couple new scenes, and charging full price for people to rewatch a multi-hour movie for 5-10 mins more content.
I hear you on all points. But I would argue that for your last sentence, mature people at least would be satisfied with an upfront cost and a truthful marketing campaign. I think we can all understand that it costs money to make a game.
Yeah, I don't have any problem paying $60 for a game. I haven't paid that much in a long time though, since the vast majority of games I'm interested in are far less than that even when not on sale.
And if you take inflation into account, we used to pay $60 for NES games, which would be closer to $130 today.
> If you sell games for $60 upfront then your marketing will be perceived as a scam in the face of any failures or shortcomings in your game. You're trying to hype people up and sell them something bad.
Between Steam's refund policy and review system this is basically a solved problem.
Oh no, making millions with a literal scam gets you criticized?
Please just stop bringing this up in this context. They literally sold a single player game as multiplayer, along with a plethora of features which were said to be in the game at launch day which where never implemented. See yourself at [0].
The only reason this keeps being brought up is because Sean Murray has extraordinary talent at tickling the medias gamers-are-evil trope. This has nothing to do with payment methods.
No Man's Sky's developers sold a promise upfront, not a game upfront. You see the same thing with pretty much all pre-orders and early access games, not just the crowd funded stuff. It is completely different to selling a complete game for $60 with the customers able to read reviews before purchasing or get refunds after purchasing.
I feel like you're mixing justified complaints ("this game has addictive gambling elements and you're targetting it at children") with less justified complaints ("this completely optional skin which has no effect on gameplay looks cooler than the default but costs money").
I'm mixing them because they are mixed. Go to any gaming community and look at what they're talking about. Justified and unjustified complaints, with the main focus on monetization and how evil the developers are who are manipulating them to pay.
What I want to figure out is how to monetize a game that removes the assumption of bad faith and detoxifies the community. I came to the conclusion that it has to be free. Every other monetization will lead to the abuse we see developers receiving.
The only method you listed that people automatically are hostile to is selling in game items that unbalance a game in the buyers advantage
> players think you are intentionally weakening the free items in favor of the power you can buy.
Players dont just think this, time after time this has proven true. If the buyable item wasnt better why would anyone buy it?
None of the other monetization methods you lists are objectionable if done right.
If enough people are complaining about the value of your $60 game then maybe it's because you got your price point off and should have instead sold it at a lower price. Not every game is a AAA title.
> If you want to make a game just for the passion of it, if you want to have a healthy relationship with gamers, you are literally not allowed to monetize. You have to give it away fully for free.
You are literally allowed to do it. It does mean more effort to preserve the desired healthy relationships.
I don't think free games actually tend to result in perfectly healthy relationships either; but monetisation just provides a single point of failure for such dynamics.
The Netflix or Apple Music model might work. Fixed price per month for a catalog of games, with revenue shares happening based on play time. This a basically a solved problem for video and audio content, games don’t need to be different.
Video and audio content are not interactive. You never feel active manipulation from static media.
Games in that model will be accused of manipulating players into having as much play time as possible even sacrificing quality. The same addictive mechanics can be used for time instead of money.
That is true, and is also happening in other mediums where the incentives are setup this way. The biggest culprit I’ve seen is recipes. What you want is the ingredients and instructions laid out with minimum fluff. What you get is pages and pages of useless storytelling to improve the metrics of the page so that the page gets ranked better for engagement so that it can sell ads.
If you are honest in your approach to selling games, you will not get overwhelming criticism about ANY of the above game modes.
Full-priced games have tens of millions of sales regularly.
Games that do not hide content behind paywalls can sell cosmetic microtransactions all day long (see: League of Legends or Path of Exile).
Its transparent "money grab for the sake of money grabbing" that gets the rightful criticism. Besides, I have literally never seen any complex indie game being attacked for releasing in the 9.99$-19.99$ space. Never.
If you sell games for $60 upfront then your marketing will be perceived as a scam in the face of any failures or shortcomings in your game. You're trying to hype people up and sell them something bad.
If you sell attempts, or lives, like an arcade or candy crush, then when players lose a level they think you're extorting them for money.
If you sell time, like a subscription, then players think you are trying to force them to grind to pay money
If you sell in-game items, like weapons or maps, the players think you are intentionally weakening the free items in favor of the power you can buy.
If you sell in-game cosmetics, like skins, which have no impact on gameplay, the players think you are trying to make every look stupid and you have to pay to look cool.
Video games are inherently manipulative in the sense that the game is designed for you to behave in fun ways and do fun things. Once monetization is in the picture it completely poisons the whole dynamic. It doesn't help that the audience skews young.
If you want to make a game just for the passion of it, if you want to have a healthy relationship with gamers, you are literally not allowed to monetize. You have to give it away fully for free.