Yeah, people blame the developers, blame the publishers, but I think the sad truth is, gamers themselves shoulder much of the blame. Somehow the public came to believe that everything should be free. Maybe it was the internet? Maybe it was sites/apps like Facebook?
Regardless, when a great piece of software that happens to have a price tag fails to sell, whose fault is that?
Don't blame developers/publishers for going instead to the only model that pays the bills these days.
Why blame anyone? Gamers get the content they want in the way they prefer to pay for it, developers and publishers get paid.
The market has pretty clearly spoken and decided that people prefer cosmetic micro transactions with free to play games. Just because it doesn’t match the Hacker News gaming utopia template doesn’t mean anyone is doing anything wrong.
This is especially true for multiplayer games where a lot of children don’t have money to buy the game but their presence on the platform adds value to the people who do have money to spend on it.
I also think “Why blame anyone?”, but not because there’s no problem. Just because it doesn’t make sense to blame individuals for market movements.
Markets are powered by billions of instances of “what someone wants” but that doesn’t mean the resulting market movements are always a good indicator of what everyone wants as an environment. Sometimes aggregate human activity results in a crappy experience for most participants. “The market has spoken” is a glib, ideological phrase that can be used to dismiss any discussion about ways we could steer and improve markets to make them do a better job at facilitating human happiness and flourishing.
Same thing for airlines. I hate the argument "consumers decided they wanted smaller seats, no free food or drinks, etc by buying the cheapest tickets." People just tried to get the best deal possible in the market, they aren't analyzing which airline has the best seats and amenities and making their decision from there.
> The market has pretty clearly spoken and decided that people prefer cosmetic micro transactions with free to play games.
All that the market discovered is that there is a huge number of "whales" that can be exploited. The "fun" will begin once the whales have squandered their money and will either leave entirely or, and that's the scenario I fear, some (or someone's relatives) will raise a sob story in front of their local newspaper or politician... ending in a repeat of the early 2000s with videogames being blamed as a whole for the excesses of a few, and religious and other moral fundamentalists getting ahead.
> This is especially true for multiplayer games where a lot of children don't have money to buy the game but their presence on the platform adds value
Playing a competitive FPS game casually with all age groups is lot of more fun and attractive to most gamers a la Apex/Warzone/Fortnite/Valorant/CSGO.
By charging up front you remove an enormous player base and create a worse matchmaking experience for all players. Long gone are the days of buy a Call of Duty game for Christmas.
That's not true though. No game lives off the general public buying a few cosmetics. It lives off a few addicted people buying thousands of dollars worth, while the vast majority pay nothing. It's a terrible business model that will hopefully be outlawed in the coming decade.
I had assumed those "few addicted people buying thousands of dollars worth" were instead just people with a lot of disposable income.
You could be right though, and it is addiction. That would in fact be uncool.
My only data-point though is a friend of mine who has spent hundreds of dollars (or more?) on Star Citizen ships and he is the disposable-income kind of gamer.
This video by Jim Sterling is a good overview of how knowingly sinister microtransactions truly are, with a couple narrated testimonies of people who fell for them despite not being able to afford them.
There are combinations of both, for sure. But there was an interview some time ago on Eurogamer about a super spender (thousands of pounds) on Candy Crush who was awarded some airplane tickets to attend a Candy Crush convention, but she couldn't afford tickets to get to the airport...
> The market has pretty clearly spoken and decided that people prefer cosmetic micro transactions with free to play games.
I wonder how many people on HN complaining about this model actually even consider themselves gamers.
I'm a gamer. I spend 30-40 hours/week on PC games. I think the "Free-to-play with paid cosmetics" (Apex Legends, Rocket League, Splitgate, tons of other games that follow this model) is perfectly fine.
I think part of the problem is that it's hard to have a conversation about this model because someone will always make references to games that are pay-to-win (Most mobile games) or gate content behind a paywall (Not sure which games do this today), which are an entirely different beast and not a part of the conversation.
EDIT: Just remembered League of Legends. It gates content (characters to play) behind progression, or you can pay money to unlock them immediately. But paid characters aren't necessarily more powerful, and they're constantly making adjustments to characters to try to keep them balanced. Any experienced player will tell you that paying money for a character perceived as being overpowered is foolish as it's guaranteed they'll eventually get nerfed.
IMO, it’s the platforms that turn down novel ideas in preference for money making products, resulting in less visibility for the underdog. Apple’s App Store routinely promotes paid for apps over free ones. Steam does the same. Google search is obviously the worst offender.
This is like saying we should blame the smoker, the junkie, or the gambling addict. The latter is an especially accurate comparison because these companies turn their games into gambling machines.
Sure, personal responsibility is important. In the end the only person who can free an addict from the quagmire of addiction is them. But that doesn't stop us from regulating the fuck out of tobacco companies, heroin dealers or casinos to reduce the harm they do to their victims.
The elephant in the room is that we as an industry hold the power to alter people's psychology on a greater scale than any drug. But people stay silent because it delivers the paychecks and the shareholder returns...
Artificial scarcity is bad, actually. Things that don't cost money to duplicate should be free, we need UBI and maybe a general shift to patronage-based models, luckily this is starting to happen.
There are also plenty of games that implement a cometic lootboxes that don't impact gameplay model that are totally fine.
While my original comment is not my best work by any stretch (sorry), I implore you to reconsider the idea that all motivation is monetary (it's absolutely not) and that patronage must happen on a "platform" that will become corrupt in some way. I think discounting the possibility of novel systems that tackle these problems out of hand is not a good way to start.
Fair enough, it's not a great comment. I don't really know how society should be run, and I shouldn't have offhandedly emphasized a couple things that I think might lead us to a solution.
That being said I'll stand by artificial scarcity being bad thing and clarify that while I don't have some master plan on how to create a functioning society where we don't have to impose artificial scarcity on the digital world; I absolutely think that is something we should be dedicating a lot of effort to. I reject the premise that we need to deny some people things that can be copied essentially for free.
> That being said I'll stand by artificial scarcity being bad thing and clarify that while I don't have some master plan on how to create a functioning society where we don't have to impose artificial scarcity on the digital world; I absolutely think that is something we should be dedicating a lot of effort to. I reject the premise that we need to deny some people things that can be copied essentially for free.
Again this just sounds like an emotional argument -- you seem convinced on a purely intuitive level that artificial scarcity is bad without actually explaining rationally how the harm it does outweighs the benefits.
There is a _very simple_ argument (which I'm not claiming is _true_ in all cases, but it is at least compelling, so anyone claiming the contrary needs to address it) in favor of artificial scarcity: taking away a major monetization strategy (often the only viable one) massively reduces the incentive to create high-quality products and we all end up poorer for those cultural outputs not existing.
> taking away a major monetization strategy (often the only viable one) massively reduces the incentive to create high-quality products and we all end up poorer for those cultural outputs not existing.
Ahahaha, to be quite honest I don't find that argument compelling at all. Profit motives seem to be making software much much worse, not better, compared to what I know is possible. I'm often finding myself reverse engineering/hacking things just to make them usable. From where I'm standing the current system is not doing a very good job. I can often make notable usability improvements in the systems I interact with and IP laws, the main driver of digital artificial scarcity generally prevent me from sharing them. I feel like I'm constantly fighting hostile software that's just trying to extract value from me in some way rather than actually solving my problems.
Regardless, when a great piece of software that happens to have a price tag fails to sell, whose fault is that?
Don't blame developers/publishers for going instead to the only model that pays the bills these days.