Paid content in videogames (DLC, season passes, micro transactions, loot boxes, "surprise mechanics")

It feels like we could be reaching a cross-roads... in past hours we've heard of Ubisofts's "pay to play faster (normally?)" fees in Creed Odyssey, Capcom diverting in-game outfits to the "Deluxe Edition" (for a PS1 remake), Bethesda using "Atoms" as an "optional" (real-world cash) in-game customisation system in Fallout 76 and Activision stating that purchasers of the disc version of CoD Black Ops IIII will have to download a 50 Gb day one patch. Publishers have, for some time now, gradually been seeing what they can get away with and I think we're reaching a peak. Will there be any backlash? Could some of these "AAA" titles see lower sales? Or will the mass market just suck it up?

jawafour wrote:It feels like we could be reaching a cross-roads... in past hours we've heard of Ubisofts's "pay to play faster (normally?)" fees in Creed Odyssey, Capcom diverting in-game outfits to the "Deluxe Edition" (for a PS1 remake), Bethesda using "Atoms" as an "optional" (real-world cash) in-game customisation system in Fallout 76 and Activision stating that purchasers of the disc version of CoD Black Ops IIII will have to download a 50 Gb day one patch. Publishers have, for some time now, gradually been seeing what they can get away with and I think we're reaching a peak. Will there be any backlash? Could some of these "AAA" titles see lower sales? Or will the mass market just suck it up?

There'll be some reddit outrage, a couple of meek news stories, some mealy-mouthed statements from various people, but they'll keep pushing because few people can be continually angry about this stuff for long enough for it to matter. I think the Battlefront 2 stuff used up peoples' collective outrage about this for a while. There may be some lower sales but not enough to drastically change anything.

NickSCFC

There's music in Resident Evil 2 Remake, but it doesn't play continuously like the original.

If it does in the Deluxe Edition, then I'll be forced to buy it

I don't buy into any of this nonsense. Lazyness and greed is what it generally boils down to, rarely there might be some good DLC created way after release that might be worth it but too often it's stuff that could have been included in the game if release had been held back by a week or two.

strawberry float 'em. Another reason to be incredibly selective about what we buy.

NickSCFC wrote:There's music in Resident Evil 2 Remake, but it doesn't play continuously like the original.

If it does in the Deluxe Edition, then I'll be forced to buy it

Now this is going too far! The music is one of my main reasons for wanting to play the game!

Have other devs thought to monetize their music? What next - the screens all blurry and the sound is rubbish until you pay for your character to get a hearing-aid and glasses?

Gemini73

So no complete musical score in the standard edition? That is taking the absolute piss. :lol:

One thing we don't seem to get very often anymore is "GOTY Editions", or basically a complete edition released a year or so later that includes all of the DLC and microtransaction stuff as a complete package.

Gemini73 wrote:So no complete musical score in the standard edition? That is taking the absolute piss.

Is this actually true? :slol:

This is just another step forward in carving up the default package even more to make people pay more for games.

Last edited by jawafour on Tue Oct 09, 2018 3:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Tomous wrote:
Gemini73 wrote:So no complete musical score in the standard edition? That is taking the absolute piss.

Is this actually true?

This is just another step forward in carving up the default package even more to make people pay more for games.

I believe so, Tom - in Eurogamer's article on the Deluxe edition, they say "And here's a cool addition: the Extra DLC Pack lets you swap in the original game's soundtrack.". I can't quite beiieve, as a gaming news outlet, the blasé attitude they take... "Additional payable content for something that was in the original game is cool!" :lol:

.

Gemini73

Yes, I think I'm well justified in giving this the finger. :lol:

Short version:

Game publishers make astronomical amounts of money, pay their executives tens of millions and dodge tax at every turn, however little of the money from microtransactions goes to the actual developers, whose studios get shut down at a moment's notice (over 1,000 job losses this year alone), so their necessity to fund big triple A games is a lie. All this profit has driven shareholder demands for bigger and bigger games, trapping publishers in a need to make as much money as humanly possible, hence EA fighting the law to allow Fifa ultimate team stuff etc in Belgium.

Gemini73

Trelliz wrote:

Short version:

Game publishers make astronomical amounts of money, pay their executives tens of millions and dodge tax at every turn, however little of the money from microtransactions goes to the actual developers, whose studios get shut down at a moment's notice (over 1,000 job losses this year alone), so their necessity to fund big triple A games is a lie. All this profit has driven shareholder demands for bigger and bigger games, trapping publishers in a need to make as much money as humanly possible, hence EA fighting the law to allow Fifa ultimate team stuff etc in Belgium.

Yeah, my decision to quit buying video games gets easier every day. :lol:

Gemini73

$79 billion dollars.

Please buy our season passes, special editions, lootboxes and microtransactions, games are soooo expensive to make!

Gemini73

The audacity of these companies crying poverty is mind blowing.

Gemini73 wrote:The audacity of these companies crying poverty is mind blowing.

It's the people defending them I find even more insane.

Gemini73

Cheeky Devlin wrote:
Gemini73 wrote:The audacity of these companies crying poverty is mind blowing.

It's the people defending them I find even more insane.

Indeed.

Cheeky Devlin wrote:
Gemini73 wrote:The audacity of these companies crying poverty is mind blowing.

It's the people defending them I find even more insane.

I've been totally guilty of both of these when it comes to games, but its a combination of sunk cost fallacy (the more you invest in something the harder it becomes to abandon it) and cognitive dissonance (trying to reconcile the belief that you are smart and intelligent purchaser and you wouldn't get hoodwinked by these companies vs. realising you've been hoodwinked). Systems like lootboxes and Fifa UT draw you in and after a while you've "invested" too much to pull out without having to face that you won't get that time, money or fun back, so people stay in to avoid that.

To avoid being accused of being mentally ill or just pointing out the flaws in others while claiming infallibility, I'd like to open this meeting of lootboxers anonymous by admitting that i've totally been drawn in by these systems - I've paid to win in Star Trek Online, I don't want to look at how much i've spent over the years, its probably a couple of hundred by now. The game has all the tricks of the trade - real-time cooldowns for things to keep you coming back every day to be as 'optimal' as possible, a time-gated intermediary currency which you can convert into the 'premium' currency and all that. If it wasn't almost the only Star Trek game going i'd have binned it long ago, but i've stopped buying into it to get more ships to add to the pile I haven't flown yet.

I dabbled in crates in TF2 and CSGO but found that immediately unsatisfying. I did get Shadow of War, but only after the crates had been patched out, and even then it was for about a tenner.

I think this fits in with the thread - in so far as it's about game income - but I'm amazed at how quickly publishers are dropping prices on new games now. FIFA 19, the latest title in the hugely popular franchise, has been available for less than four weeks and yet it has now been discounted by 30% on the PlayStation Store; from £60 to £42.

Whilst this price cut makes it tempting for potential buyers, what about the folk who have supported the game and paid the far higher price at launch? Just waiting a few weeks could have netted them a substantial saving. A similar thing has occurred with Shadows of the Tomb Raider; digital purchasers paid a minimum of £55 at launch (and disc purchasers around £46) but the disc version is now readily available at £30. Pro Evolutiion Soccer 2019 - the latest game in my beloved franchise! - was released at £50 on the PS Store but was discounted by £10 in a sale just four weeks later.

Publishers seem to be almost "punishing" those people who buy early. I am now holding off from both pre-ordering and buying at launch because it seems obvious that there's a good chance you'll get the game far cheaper just by waiting a few weeks.

jawafour wrote:I'm amazed at how quickly publishers are dropping prices on new games now. FIFA 19, the latest title in the hugely popular franchise, has been available for less than four weeks and yet it has now been discounted by 30% on the PlayStation Store; from £60 to £42.

Whilst this price cut makes it tempting for potential buyers, what about the folk who have supported the game and paid the far higher price at launch? Just waiting a few weeks could have netted them a substantial saving.

Publishers seem to be almost "punishing" those people who buy early.

From the publishers' perspective, strawberry float 'em. The more people drawn into preorder culture and who shell out day 1 (or increasingly day -4 with the Super-Duper Ultra MLG Pro Deluxe Gold Platinum Ultimate Legendary Collectors Early Access Editions) the better, as they make more money from the same audience and the same product, fitting the aforementioned trap of meeting shareholder demands for just that. The sheer contempt the industry has for us through all this is astounding and (as you can probably tell for me, at least) increasingly reciprocal.

Paid content in videogames (DLC, season passes, micro transactions, loot boxes, "surprise mechanics")

Who is online

Affiliates