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Predatory tactics in gaming are worse than you think
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Subscriptions are honest. Like actual sales - where you get a thing you didn't have, in exchange for money. Paying money, to be allowed to use part of the game you already have, is not a sale. SF6 fucking *launched* with $120 in DLC. Like yeah, you bought the game, at full price... but fuck you, pay us again. Breaking up the fuckening into individual characters, trickled out over years, is psychological manipulation to disguise that abuse. > And I’m not getting gouged, I know what the price tag is. ... the fact you can pay hundreds of dollars and still not have all of a 1v1 fighting game is not made problematic through *mystery.* No shit you can see the price tag. That price is obscene. Past abuses being worse is no kind of excuse. I swear to god, Capcom *could* charge the price of a whole game for each new character bundle, and there'd still be people up my ass about how it must be fine because it was the same in the 90s. You know how I know? *Because they do.* Annual character passes are $30! Does that get you everything that comes out, that year? Does it, fuck. > I know you know we’re talking about what FighterZ was able to become Of course you do, because it's what that paragraph was about. How am I the one "playing dumb?" You're still insisting there's no way a game could be updated - aside from the other two ways you don't like! - so that's the same as the game being *banned.* Because saying it's *banned* sounds really bad, and serious, and is totally the same thing as saying Capcom doesn't need real negotiable currency in order to change the *color* of a character's *pants.* But hey, this is only the shallow end of a business model that's turning the games industry into a frustration-based casino. Why worry?DLC is honest. I get a thing in exchange for money. I know what the price tag is, and I'm happy to pay what I think is a fair price. And I only pay once to keep the thing I paid for, unlike a subscription. Let me just cut straight past all your deflecting. Do you think that the final version of DBFZ, with all of its DLC, sold at its price, should be able to exist in this form?
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Charging for anything inside a game is like applying a dollar value to soccer goals. It's a category error, exploited for profit. I am fundamentally opposed to this system of manipulating people into wanting arbitrary nonsense and then charging actual money for it. Your glib endorsement of that manipulation does not make it rational. And this is the shallow end. Characters, you can almost sorta kinda argue, as sloppy expansions. Skins? Fuck off. A bottomless pit of manufactured discontent. Plainly sufficient to wring billions out of people for a game that's "free." Or for a game that's forty fucking dollars and will gladly take another hundred dollars every single year. And characters in a 1v1 fighter are drastically different from MOBA bullshit, where having the wrong options can ruin an hour of four other people's lives. People are rightly incensed by efforts to charge $80 to own one video game. This is an entire market of games where you can pay $1000 and *still not have the whole thing.* Something's fucky.>This is an entire market of games where you can pay $1000 and still not have the whole thing. Those aren't the games we're talking about. We're talking about DBFZ, an example of fixed DLC being sold at a reasonable price, which you want to dishonestly conflate with more predatory models in order to say that nothing should be sold ever.
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> Mobile games to me are basically just one giant scam that forces you to pay or have a horrible time in comparison. So they're the modern arcade games?They are so much worse. I worked with a guy who was pretty damn cheap. I would sometimes pay for his coffe or lunch sometimes, but he would never even drop a cent for me. I didn't really care much, cheap guy, maybe poor, i had no idea. I talked to another guy about video games, and the cheapskate chimed in, saying: i would never play video games, it's a waste if time and money. I didn't think much of it, it made so much sense. Another time the same co worker said something like: "the most he ever spend on a game was 60 dollars for a counterstrike skin". Cheapskate chimed in again, (he was also a bit of a one upper) hah, that's nothing, i spend 900 bucks on clash of clans last month. We both were absolutely flabbergasted, and he started to panic a bit abd said: "you think that's crazy? My girlfriend spends way more on candy crush a month." It's been a while, but i think we calculated that the spend a combined 2000 to 3000 bucks on mobile games a month, for years.
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Charging for anything inside a game is like applying a dollar value to soccer goals. It's a category error, exploited for profit. I am fundamentally opposed to this system of manipulating people into wanting arbitrary nonsense and then charging actual money for it. Your glib endorsement of that manipulation does not make it rational. And this is the shallow end. Characters, you can almost sorta kinda argue, as sloppy expansions. Skins? Fuck off. A bottomless pit of manufactured discontent. Plainly sufficient to wring billions out of people for a game that's "free." Or for a game that's forty fucking dollars and will gladly take another hundred dollars every single year. And characters in a 1v1 fighter are drastically different from MOBA bullshit, where having the wrong options can ruin an hour of four other people's lives. People are rightly incensed by efforts to charge $80 to own one video game. This is an entire market of games where you can pay $1000 and *still not have the whole thing.* Something's fucky.Skins are fine. They are entirely optional. Something existing doesn't mean you must own it. That's the part where we're not going to agree. Well, the maximalist holier-than-thou stance in general. But otherwise, you see things existing as an affront to you personally. This skin was made by someone and put in the game, and so I'm entitled to it, so it either shouldn't exist or it should be mine. That just doesn't track. I don't feel any more entitled to some random bikini costume than I do to some random statue bundled with a collector's edition. It's faff some people may want, but I'm not being attacked because somebody is buying and selling collector's edition of Cyberpunk for 200 bucks, just like way I'm not attacked by someone buying some in-game costume. Also, you *do* know pro football players get bonuses per goal, right? That comparison means different things depending on whether you know that and both are confusing.
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Where was this article when candy crush became big? This article is literally 10+ years way too late. Mobile games to me are basically just one giant scam that forces you to pay or have a horrible time in comparison.> Mobile games to me are basically just one giant scam that forces you to pay or have a horrible time in comparison. There are so many ports of PC games that are far better than the "exclusively mobile" category of games.
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I want to shed light on a tactic that involves collecting data as you play, feeding this data into complex algorithms and models that then alter the rules of your game under the hood to optimize spending opportunities.
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Skins are fine. They are entirely optional. Something existing doesn't mean you must own it. That's the part where we're not going to agree. Well, the maximalist holier-than-thou stance in general. But otherwise, you see things existing as an affront to you personally. This skin was made by someone and put in the game, and so I'm entitled to it, so it either shouldn't exist or it should be mine. That just doesn't track. I don't feel any more entitled to some random bikini costume than I do to some random statue bundled with a collector's edition. It's faff some people may want, but I'm not being attacked because somebody is buying and selling collector's edition of Cyberpunk for 200 bucks, just like way I'm not attacked by someone buying some in-game costume. Also, you *do* know pro football players get bonuses per goal, right? That comparison means different things depending on whether you know that and both are confusing.Woe betide the poor bikini artist! Nevermind their efforts were directed that way so the publisher could rake in hundreds of dollars, per year, for what's obviously the least impactful element of the game. Costumes would normally be an unremarkable detail - some callbacks, some easter eggs, whatever - but now they cost more than the rest of the fucking game. Do you imagine they took more effort than the rest of the fucking game? Like the horny bonus costumes are worth more than all the effort spent on balance, and netcode, and designing the actual characters. I'll assume not, and underline: that's the total disconnect between price and value. That's the predatory exploitation, laid bare. Those skins are the entire reason the game exists. *That's what makes all the money.* Street Fighter has been reduced to bait on that hook. And it still costs forty fucking dollars. > Also, you do know pro football players get bonuses per goal, right? This subject has the most aggressively off-topic replies. 'There's different forms of value. Some are artificial. You can't just buy more soccer goals.' 'Uh--! But--!' *No.*
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>This is an entire market of games where you can pay $1000 and still not have the whole thing. Those aren't the games we're talking about. We're talking about DBFZ, an example of fixed DLC being sold at a reasonable price, which you want to dishonestly conflate with more predatory models in order to say that nothing should be sold ever."We" includes the guy saying "skins are fine," in reply to the same comment. Quick search, and... yeah FighterZ specifically still has a $60 base price, a $95 version with some annual pass, and a $110 version with additional content not covered by the pass... and several eyebrow-raising "stamps." There's three hundred of those. They seem to be static character images? They cost several dollars each. So do the voice packs. Music's $15 per pack. Assuming - *assuming* - the character bundles are cheaper, and include everybody, there's also $80 of them. So you can definitely spend at least $200 and still be tickled for a deluge of whateverthefuck stamps are for. Two of those character unlocks were day-one. Not quite the obvious scam of on-disc DLC, but still pretty fuckin' blatant. 'Hey thanks for buying our game, and extra-buying the exclusive preorder bullshit... saaay, you didn't want the powered-up versions of these popular characters, did you? Well don't be a freeloader, pay up.' If I buy the game, right now, all of those characters are in the game... but I don't get them. I can get my ass kicked by them. But I can't select them. Not until I pony up at least double the price of the actual game. And then apparently I'll be subject to the same predatory bullshit for some JPEGs in chat. (If all characters are unlockable through gameplay, but you can 'pay to skip the grind,' that *is* predatory bullshit.) This game is one of the less skeezy examples, and they still manage to turn an unremarkable amount of content into an obscene total price. It's on sale on Steam, and it still costs $130. 'But you can pay less up-front!' is the problem.
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DLC is honest. I get a thing in exchange for money. I know what the price tag is, and I'm happy to pay what I think is a fair price. And I only pay once to keep the thing I paid for, unlike a subscription. Let me just cut straight past all your deflecting. Do you think that the final version of DBFZ, with all of its DLC, sold at its price, should be able to exist in this form?I'm not participating in your all-or-nothing hypothetical. We just discussed how this exact game could have emerged without this exact business model. And the version of the game with all the damn characters is the version where you had to keep paying to get all the damn characters. If you mean, from today onward, should the game be priced piecemeal on Steam, then no. But it doesn't magically revert to its launch state. I want them to sell the whole game... like regular. This is not a sprawling MMO. There's not terabytes of content. It's a 1v1 fighter with like thirty characters. If Arc honestly thinks the damn thing should be $130 when everything's 70% off, let them stick that single price on it, and good fucking luck.
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I do want updated games, yes. My favorite games wouldn't be my favorite games if 1.0 was all we ever got. Some games have predatory models, and I do oppose that. But only when it actually is predatory. I take issue with how you're trying to say nothing should ever be sold, even when what's being sold is perfectly fair.I take issue with how you're still lying about what I said. 'Things being sold' is my entire drive. Did you miss it, in all caps? The problem is this farce of charging real money for permission to use what's already in a game you already paid for. Games were updated before this nonsense was possible. This business model is only like fifteen years old. Unreal Tournament '99 had updates and new content for years, because *people kept buying the game.*
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I want to shed light on a tactic that involves collecting data as you play, feeding this data into complex algorithms and models that then alter the rules of your game under the hood to optimize spending opportunities.
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I take issue with how you're still lying about what I said. 'Things being sold' is my entire drive. Did you miss it, in all caps? The problem is this farce of charging real money for permission to use what's already in a game you already paid for. Games were updated before this nonsense was possible. This business model is only like fifteen years old. Unreal Tournament '99 had updates and new content for years, because *people kept buying the game.*I'm not missing, I'm saying that your hardline stance against things being sold isn't reasonable.
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I'm not participating in your all-or-nothing hypothetical. We just discussed how this exact game could have emerged without this exact business model. And the version of the game with all the damn characters is the version where you had to keep paying to get all the damn characters. If you mean, from today onward, should the game be priced piecemeal on Steam, then no. But it doesn't magically revert to its launch state. I want them to sell the whole game... like regular. This is not a sprawling MMO. There's not terabytes of content. It's a 1v1 fighter with like thirty characters. If Arc honestly thinks the damn thing should be $130 when everything's 70% off, let them stick that single price on it, and good fucking luck.I don't think you understand how much work it takes to design and balance that many characters in a serious competitive fighting game. Serious question, do you play competitive fighters at all, do you know anything about how they work? In fact, the best way to ensure they're all polished is to start small and expand incrementally over time. This is the right model for a competitive fighter. You're deliberately ignoring the path to get from point A to point B if you think that in your world it would just be the final version right away. I'm saying that in your world, the fighting games I know and love would not be the games that I know and love. Personally, my favorite game of all time is Skullgirls, and they have been very open and transparent about all the expenses involved in developing a much smaller cast. Look up their finances, look up how long it took their small team to get from the eight characters at launch to what they have today. And I'm very happy with every cent I spent on that game, they didn't scam me by offering more of my favorite game. This is a game that has entertained me for a decade. Even if I count all the money I've spent on traveling to tournaments, which is far more than I spent on the game, it's still quite possibly the most efficient form of entertainment I've ever gotten my money's worth from. Can I have the games that I know and love, in the format that allowed them to be the games that I know and love? There is no third option here.
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"We" includes the guy saying "skins are fine," in reply to the same comment. Quick search, and... yeah FighterZ specifically still has a $60 base price, a $95 version with some annual pass, and a $110 version with additional content not covered by the pass... and several eyebrow-raising "stamps." There's three hundred of those. They seem to be static character images? They cost several dollars each. So do the voice packs. Music's $15 per pack. Assuming - *assuming* - the character bundles are cheaper, and include everybody, there's also $80 of them. So you can definitely spend at least $200 and still be tickled for a deluge of whateverthefuck stamps are for. Two of those character unlocks were day-one. Not quite the obvious scam of on-disc DLC, but still pretty fuckin' blatant. 'Hey thanks for buying our game, and extra-buying the exclusive preorder bullshit... saaay, you didn't want the powered-up versions of these popular characters, did you? Well don't be a freeloader, pay up.' If I buy the game, right now, all of those characters are in the game... but I don't get them. I can get my ass kicked by them. But I can't select them. Not until I pony up at least double the price of the actual game. And then apparently I'll be subject to the same predatory bullshit for some JPEGs in chat. (If all characters are unlockable through gameplay, but you can 'pay to skip the grind,' that *is* predatory bullshit.) This game is one of the less skeezy examples, and they still manage to turn an unremarkable amount of content into an obscene total price. It's on sale on Steam, and it still costs $130. 'But you can pay less up-front!' is the problem.>"We" includes the guy saying "skins are fine," in reply to the same comment. Yes, optional skins are fine. I agree with that statement. >If I buy the game, right now, all of those characters are in the game... but I don't get them. I can get my ass kicked by them. But I can't select them. This is a good thing, because it means that you can still remain compatible with any opponent even if you choose to stay on the base game. The alternative was the old model where you HAD to buy every upgrade from Street Fighter IV to Super Street Fighter IV to Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition to Ultra Street Fighter IV, or else you were left behind and could no longer play with the rest of the playerbase that moved on to the latest edition. Would you rather have that be mandatory? Is that the model you want to go back to?
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Woe betide the poor bikini artist! Nevermind their efforts were directed that way so the publisher could rake in hundreds of dollars, per year, for what's obviously the least impactful element of the game. Costumes would normally be an unremarkable detail - some callbacks, some easter eggs, whatever - but now they cost more than the rest of the fucking game. Do you imagine they took more effort than the rest of the fucking game? Like the horny bonus costumes are worth more than all the effort spent on balance, and netcode, and designing the actual characters. I'll assume not, and underline: that's the total disconnect between price and value. That's the predatory exploitation, laid bare. Those skins are the entire reason the game exists. *That's what makes all the money.* Street Fighter has been reduced to bait on that hook. And it still costs forty fucking dollars. > Also, you do know pro football players get bonuses per goal, right? This subject has the most aggressively off-topic replies. 'There's different forms of value. Some are artificial. You can't just buy more soccer goals.' 'Uh--! But--!' *No.*I fundamentally disagree with your stance that any form of premium content is 'predatory'. You know what you're buying, and no one's putting a gun to your head forcing you to buy it. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's predatory. Predatory is when gambling-based business models obfuscate true costs and result in players literally financially ruining themselves. Predatory is when FOMO strategies are aggressively pushed to pressure consumers into buying things they otherwise wouldn't. Predatory is when subscription services keep players locked into an ecosystem, with the threat that they'll lose everything if they stop paying (and it's still extremely weird to me that you called this better). If you want to go after that kind of stuff, I would be with you. But calling *everything* predatory actually just makes it harder to talk about real problems. You are ruining this word.
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"We" includes the guy saying "skins are fine," in reply to the same comment. Quick search, and... yeah FighterZ specifically still has a $60 base price, a $95 version with some annual pass, and a $110 version with additional content not covered by the pass... and several eyebrow-raising "stamps." There's three hundred of those. They seem to be static character images? They cost several dollars each. So do the voice packs. Music's $15 per pack. Assuming - *assuming* - the character bundles are cheaper, and include everybody, there's also $80 of them. So you can definitely spend at least $200 and still be tickled for a deluge of whateverthefuck stamps are for. Two of those character unlocks were day-one. Not quite the obvious scam of on-disc DLC, but still pretty fuckin' blatant. 'Hey thanks for buying our game, and extra-buying the exclusive preorder bullshit... saaay, you didn't want the powered-up versions of these popular characters, did you? Well don't be a freeloader, pay up.' If I buy the game, right now, all of those characters are in the game... but I don't get them. I can get my ass kicked by them. But I can't select them. Not until I pony up at least double the price of the actual game. And then apparently I'll be subject to the same predatory bullshit for some JPEGs in chat. (If all characters are unlockable through gameplay, but you can 'pay to skip the grind,' that *is* predatory bullshit.) This game is one of the less skeezy examples, and they still manage to turn an unremarkable amount of content into an obscene total price. It's on sale on Steam, and it still costs $130. 'But you can pay less up-front!' is the problem.Man, you really should play the game if you're trying to be mad about the additional content. It's really good and it's ten bucks on sale right now. Forty to get all the extra content. Well worth it. The stamps are mostly premium edition filler. There are hundreds in the base game and nobody is particularly mad at the three jpegs they try to sell for two bucks as a way to pretend they added two bucks of value to your premium bundle. The music pack is pretty solid, though. Lots of licensed anime music. Can't argue with blasting out Solid State Scouter when playing with Bardock. Just... remember to disable it if you're going to stream the game, you *will* get dinged for copyright infringement on Youtube. You want to get mad about something? How about selling people music as part of a game and then accusing them of infringement for streaming the game they paid for? How silly is *that*?
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>"We" includes the guy saying "skins are fine," in reply to the same comment. Yes, optional skins are fine. I agree with that statement. >If I buy the game, right now, all of those characters are in the game... but I don't get them. I can get my ass kicked by them. But I can't select them. This is a good thing, because it means that you can still remain compatible with any opponent even if you choose to stay on the base game. The alternative was the old model where you HAD to buy every upgrade from Street Fighter IV to Super Street Fighter IV to Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition to Ultra Street Fighter IV, or else you were left behind and could no longer play with the rest of the playerbase that moved on to the latest edition. Would you rather have that be mandatory? Is that the model you want to go back to?Skins are predatory bullshit. Skins are surely the majority of this abuse, by revenue. Skins are the easiest way to charge $1000 and still give someone a fraction of the content in one video game. Skins aren't trivial to create... but you sure can crank 'em out. The model I want to go back to is where buying the game means you get the whole god damn game. Letting people *have* content, but not *use* it, is inseparable from anything you'd acknowledge as predatory. We can try to split those hairs, and we would fail. Nothing short of addressing the *business model* will solve those problem. The only reason this bullshit can even sound defensible is that Capcom used to be even worse. Like if they sent a guy to your house to take a hammer to your cartridge, and now you can pay him five bucks at the door. Is that better? Probably. Is it tolerable? *Nope.* Imagine if this applied to literal versions. 1.1 drops, with bug fixes for save corruption and some balance tweaks, and Steam wants another ten bucks for it. Would you respect if someone scoffed, 'do you want them to make you buy the whole game again?' Plainly not. Incremental changes to the game you already bought... should just go in the game you already fucking bought... because you already fucking bought it.
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I don't think you understand how much work it takes to design and balance that many characters in a serious competitive fighting game. Serious question, do you play competitive fighters at all, do you know anything about how they work? In fact, the best way to ensure they're all polished is to start small and expand incrementally over time. This is the right model for a competitive fighter. You're deliberately ignoring the path to get from point A to point B if you think that in your world it would just be the final version right away. I'm saying that in your world, the fighting games I know and love would not be the games that I know and love. Personally, my favorite game of all time is Skullgirls, and they have been very open and transparent about all the expenses involved in developing a much smaller cast. Look up their finances, look up how long it took their small team to get from the eight characters at launch to what they have today. And I'm very happy with every cent I spent on that game, they didn't scam me by offering more of my favorite game. This is a game that has entertained me for a decade. Even if I count all the money I've spent on traveling to tournaments, which is far more than I spent on the game, it's still quite possibly the most efficient form of entertainment I've ever gotten my money's worth from. Can I have the games that I know and love, in the format that allowed them to be the games that I know and love? There is no third option here.> You’re deliberately ignoring the path to get from point A to point B if you think that in your world it would just be the final version right away. Who are you talking to? We *just discussed* how to incrementally build a game, without this specific business model. I am only against the business model. Do you know how to address that, without slapfighting a strawman? 'Game design is hard' doesn't excuse this creeping systemic abuse. Again: this is the low end, and it still expects $130 for an eight-year-old 1v1 fighter. *70% off.* This business model inflates prices to the absurd extremes, even when it's not an antipattern vortex.
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I'm not missing, I'm saying that your hardline stance against things being sold isn't reasonable.You're repeatedly misrepresenting my stance after several clear and specific corrections.
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> You’re deliberately ignoring the path to get from point A to point B if you think that in your world it would just be the final version right away. Who are you talking to? We *just discussed* how to incrementally build a game, without this specific business model. I am only against the business model. Do you know how to address that, without slapfighting a strawman? 'Game design is hard' doesn't excuse this creeping systemic abuse. Again: this is the low end, and it still expects $130 for an eight-year-old 1v1 fighter. *70% off.* This business model inflates prices to the absurd extremes, even when it's not an antipattern vortex.I'm talking to you. You're living in fantasy land claiming these games could be the exact same thing without the business model that made them possible. They would not. Can I have the games that I know and love, in the format that allowed them to be the games that I know and love? There is no third option here.
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