Paid content in videogames (DLC, loot boxes, passes, currencies, "surprise mechanics" and - new! - pay more or wait!)

Last edited by jawa_ on Sat May 20, 2023 8:47 am, edited 1 time in total.

Knoyleo wrote:
Knoyleo wrote:

twitter.com/hangsawoman/status/1658808464091521027

https://store.playstation.com/en-gb/pro ... REORDER000

Can't wait to play an imagining of the tale of Gollum where he doesn't say "precious" or make that gollum gulping noise that gave him his name, simply because I didn't preorder it.

Holy gooseberry fool, it's worse than I thought :lol:

Those prices are more than I'd pay for a full game, for some DLC. £52 for an emote pack, £52 for some alternate VO, and £52 for the kind of in game encyclopedia that most in game menus are already bloated with anyway, and is likely just the Silmarillion paraphrased. Outrageous.

I had initially been looking forward to this game, but absolutely swerving from it as fast as possible now.

Those prices look crazy, Knoyleo!

And... hopefully, they are :-). I looked at Steam and it seems that the core game is £42.99 whilst the Precious Edition - including each of those items of DLC - is £51.99. At least, I hope that's the case - I'm not too familiar with Steam!

What the strawberry float is that pricing :lol:

PEGI have come down hard on two major game publishers who fell foul of the law around paid in-game content.

Eurogamer wrote:PEGI's Enforcement Committee has fined Activision Blizzard the rather paltry sum of €5000, for failing to disclose the presence of loot boxes in Diablo Immortal.

It has additionally fined Plaion the same sum for omitting to tell the ratings board its Limited Bounty Hunter Edition of Hunt: Showdown also contained paid random items.

Yes, Activision Blizzard and Plaion (the latter of whom used to be known as Koch Media and are part of the increasingly massive Embracer Group) were fined five grand each. Activision had earned around $100m through in-app purchases in the game as of January 2023.

As a reminder, yes, PEGI is a self-regulatory body that is adhered to on a voluntary basis. I'm sure this has no bearing on the relatively tiny fines handed out for failure to follow the rules.

Herdanos wrote:
Is this our longest running thread, BTW?

This thread is a baby compared to the Gig and Festival thread.

t:the-gig-and-festival-thread---reading-stage-times?f=7

Tomous wrote:What the strawberry float is that pricing

That has to be a misprint surely to strawberry float.

:lol:

Moggy wrote:
Herdanos wrote:
Is this our longest running thread, BTW?

This thread is a baby compared to the Gig and Festival thread.

t:the-gig-and-festival-thread---reading-stage-times?f=7

Damn that's gonna be hard to beat. That was the day the forum opened no?

Imagine running for 15 years and not hitting the page count. The Elton John Scandal in the topic title happened 7 years ago :lol:

twitter.com/jbu3/status/1661689649708912642

I hope nobody has spent a fortune on that DLC, sounds like the best thing about the game is the joke headlines.

Boil it, mash it, stick it in the bin :lol:

10/10 for that one.

So... remember that Blizzard dropped plans for the PvE single player mode in Overwatch 2 because reasons?

Well, now they're gonna have some single-player content; three story missions. And they're gonna charge $15 for this.

They are absolutely going to point at poor sales for these as reason for not making singleplayer content :fp:

Feels like the business strategy for a lot of games now is to release something and generate revenue on after sales, items, lootboxes.. etc. The market is clearly there as people keeping forking out the cash.

But then this becomes more attractive to developers and studios who then want some of that pie.

I think the worst example is 2k and NBA. The fact that people can spend thousands on clothing and such, only for you to be unable to transfer over to the next years edition, and then they can turn the online connection/servers off on pats games pretty quickly meaning it’s essentially worthless spend.

The gaming industry in the UK has agreed some new "guidelines" for in-game spending on Loot Boxes:

1. Make available technological controls
2. Drive awareness of and uptake of technological controls
3. Form an expert panel on age assurance in the games industry
4. Disclose the presence of Loot Boxes prior to purchase
5. Give clear probability disclosures
6. Design and present Loot Boxes in a manner that is easily understandable
7. Support the implementation of the Video Games Research Framework
8. Continue to tackle the unauthorised external sale of items acquired from Loot Boxes
9. Commit to lenient refund policies
10. Advance protections for all players
11. Work with UK Government and other relevant stakeholders to measure the effectiveness of these principles

In short, loot boxes are still gonna be there but with warning logos and probabilities. I'm struggling to think how something you purchase has probabilities but it's not gambling.

Any game with loot boxes needs to be automatically given an 18 rating with a legally required big warning label on the front that it contains real money gambling, similar to how tobacco packaging has to be.

Anything less is unacceptable.

That sounds like a lot of things that were suggested before that involve making a lot of noise/looking like doing something without actually doing anything.

Disclosing probabilities is already a thing elsewhere in the world and is definitely better than not doing so. Better yet would be to class them as gambling, which they are, and make them 18+. The cynical read of point 8 is that it's there to try and prevent classification as gambling.

Earlier this week, Capcom announced a range of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles additional content for Street Fighter 6.

Eurogamer has reported that - to buy it all - the cost will be £80.

Eorogamer wrote:The four Turtle costumes cost 750 Fighter Coins each and they're just avatar costumes for use in the game's single player World Tour mode, not fully playable characters.

If you want just the Turtle bandanas, these are 250 Fighter Coins each.

Stephanie Sterling highlights something that I've mentioned here a few times in past weeks... the rise of "pay more to play early" - or, as I like to call it, "if you don't pay more then we'll make you wait a while".

Despite new innovations such as "pay more or you'll have to wait" for game launches, Haruhiro Tsujimoto, the president of Capcom, has said that game prices "are too low".

Eurogamer wrote:"Personally, I feel that game prices are too low," Tsujimoto said, citing increasing development costs and a need to increase wages.

Source: click

Not only does this suck as "AAA" games are now priced at £70 to £100+ on console digital storefronts, but Tsujimoto saying this from the angle of "a need to increase wages". I'd imagine that he is personally getting a very healthy wage from Capcom and, with the sales success of some of their recent games, I'd hope that there is adequate funding to pay the staff a decent wage as well. If not... well, they should look at how their development and advertising costs are allocated rather than saying that £70+ per game is not enough.

Supporting My Local Mule Sanctuary Since 11/11/2014.

jawa_ wrote:Despite new innovations such as "pay more or you'll have to wait" for game launches, Haruhiro Tsujimoto, the president of Capcom, has said that game prices "are too low".

Eurogamer wrote:"Personally, I feel that game prices are too low," Tsujimoto said, citing increasing development costs and a need to increase wages.

Source: click

Not only does this suck as "AAA" games are now priced at £70 to £100+ on console digital storefronts, but Tsujimoto saying this from the angle of "a need to increase wages". I'd imagine that he is personally getting a very healthy wage from Capcom and, with the sales success of some of their recent games, I'd hope that there is adequate funding to pay the staff a decent wage as well. If not... well, they should look at how their development and advertising costs are allocated rather than saying that £70+ per game is not enough.

I find this view really bizarre. The £70 price tag is already hurting the sell through of games. Once you've produced and marketed a game, I would argue that a volume model would be more successful than a margin one. I think you'd make more money from selling more units, rather than making a bigger profit on each unit sale. Larger unit sales would also lead to increased discourse around a game, which could well further increase sales and ultimately profits. Personally, I am buying less games, due to these greater prices, indeed, I am probably spending less overall.

Inflation wise, games probably should be £80ish. The £40 price point was there in the '90s.

But, there are very few games now where there aren't loads of other costs added on. £20-£30 for a season pass (sometimes more than 1!) and/or extra costs for extra characters/clothes/weapons etc.

So they can strawberry float off.

Paid content in videogames (DLC, loot boxes, passes, currencies, "surprise mechanics" and - new! - pay more or wait!)

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