Unpopular Opinion
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What about people that pre order games? Or people that buy each version of Madden or Fifa? Or people that buy games regardless of rootkits like Denuvo? Are you going to call them all evil for supporting companies with dubious practices? For daring to buy games they like? You don’t get to tell people what they should do with their money or time to be “moral”. In fact, I could just as well argue that to spend any money whatsoever on computer games is evil while there are people starving out there.
I have no problem with any of that. You're putting words in my mouth. I actually think pre-ordering has a really good place in the activist buyer toolkit. Pre-order from companies who haven't burned you. Stop pre-ordering if they do burn you. It's a means of incentivizing good behavior. Make companies acutely aware that they have reputations that are either constantly at risk or needing to be mended, and there are always economic consequences for how they maintain those reputations.
Like someone pointed out, the problem with the mobile-style business model is that the developers are forced to put roadblocks in front of your progress through the game and/or invalidate that progress. That's where I draw the line. When the basic gameplay loop is based around the default setting of "it takes forever to do everything," and you can buy your way out of that, as long as you keep pumping money into the game...well, that's not okay.
There can't be any kind of good or acceptable way to run that model. It's outrageously harmful. And those "let's milk the players for a little more, every day" practices have become normalized to the point that they are showing up in games that supposedly aren't mobile-style pay-for-everything games. Like, look at some racing games, these days. They used to just have all the cars unlocked when you started the game, or maybe you'd unlock them as you progressed through the campaign mode.
But now, there are plenty of racing games where LOTS of the cars are just locked behind microtransaction paywalls. I don't think I'm out of line for suggesting that we should try and stop this shit, before it gets worse. Remember: at least one game company exec has proposed a future where we have to buy in-game ammunition with real money. Not in mobile-style games. Not in free-to-download games. In real, full-price games.
My issue isn’t really with your argument, though I personally find pre-ordering to be as bad as this pay to win crap. (But I don’t feel passionately enough about that point to debate it - I concede that an activist buyer could leverage that)
However, I do have issue with you calling people who spend money on micro transactions evil. Or immoral. I find that sentiment to be ridiculous and trivialising actual evil behaviour.
I know about the story where some idiot executive suggested paying a dollar to reload or something stupid like that. If you called the companies evil, or the executives… you know what… I might support that allegation. But the players? The customers?
I think I get why you are saying this - you believe the players enable/allow the companies to do this, thereby supporting their evil ways. I just don’t agree that buying a product (especially an entertainment product) from such a company is necessarily (and to use your word: literally) evil.
Say I agree that these players are evil. Should I now stop being friends with people once I learn they play Genshin? Should I shun them? Tell my sister I can no longer visit them because she allows her kids to play Genshin and Fortnite?
What about people paying subscriptions to streaming services that produce crap content? Or people that followed reality tv to the extent that it allowed the Kardashians to exist?
So apologies for this long reply, I guess my only real point is that while I agree with you that the behaviour of these (mobile game) companies is deplorable (to me), if people willingly spend their money on it, that is none of my business. I can vote with my wallet by buying games from studios I like.
Just like I dislike gambling and casinos, I would never call people that frequent those establishments immoral or evil.
I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding, here. I didn't ever intend to call the customers I disagreed with evil. Maybe I technically said that, at some point. Maybe without intending it, at all.
That's not what I'm intending to say. I am intending to vehemently state that mobile-style game monetization models are evil. Furthermore, they represent an existential threat to the entire gaming hobby.
There are possible futures where this shit snowballs into another gaming industry crash, like the one back in '83. And this one would be even more preventable. We're drowning in excellent technology, which has the potential to bring gaming to more people than ever. But that tech is being misused and abused, and so are the players.
So that argument I can support. However, while I do share your dismay with things as things stand, I am somewhat more optimistic. For instance, it is my belief that recent successes from BG3 and Eldenring for instance has shown companies that a significant market still exists for … let’s call it … traditional games where the model is simply you pay money for a complete game that is great.
Now this obviously works for single player games but even there we see the encroachment you refer to. For instance there was some controversy on Dragons Dogma 2 for instance. (Fortunately turns out most of those items can be acquired in game but the micro transactions presence still irritates me).
Personally I think a bigger threat to the industry is exemplified by Bethesda. Starfield was a pathetic game in my opinion. Lazy writing. Bad tech. Overpriced junk. And I believe that the advancement in AI is going to make it 10 times worse - bland AI written plots and NPCs… AI generated textures and models.
Maybe I shouldn’t say threat to the industry. More a threat to the part of the industry I care most about, which is single player RPGs.
So I guess my question would now be… why do you believe that the crappy monetisation practices of these mobile gaming pay to win companies would bring the industry as a whole down?
Would people not just move to the next game? And is this not something we already see with the success of say Eldenring/BG3?
Well, let's look at Starfield. I don't hate it nearly as much as you do, but I definitely agree it has flaws. But now imagine that some of these hyper-monetization practices had invaded it, on top of the other problems. Like, if you had to do some horrible grind to get fuel for your ship, unleeeesssssss you wanted to pay for some Bethesda Bux, to make that process go faster.
And now imagine almost every other single player RPG game has similar shit, crammed into it. Say anything you want about Todd Howard, I do think he would fight tooth and nail to prevent such a thing. And so would every other traditional RPG developer. But they don't really own their companies, anymore. They've all had to sell out to bigger entities, to keep putting food on the tables of their employees. And even the ones who remain independent aren't entirely above the pressures of the publishers.
So imagine that they can't hold the flood back anymore, and the mobile-style ultra-monetization shit gets into all the RPG games, even more into every online FPS game, into all the single player FPSes and Boomer Shooters, even somehow into sidescrolling platformers and Metroidvanias. And adventure games. And every other genre you can think of.
If all the major releases become completely overburdened with this shit, people might just decide "welp, I'm out. I'm leaving the hobby."
That could cause a crash. Hopefully, true indie games could pull us out of the spiral, but I'm not sure of that. Especially in a scenario like I'm talking about. If there was a real exodus of millions of players, away from gaming, the industry would have to contract massively. Then all those devs who are currently employed by major studios would found a bunch of little indie studios. Some people would applaud that as an unalloyed benefit, but they would all be competing for a much smaller pool of money, and maybe none of them would be able to remain solvent.
So, again, you get the potential for a devastating crash.
Ok. So if I understand your argument correctly you are saying that the financial success of Genshin et al would prompt other publishers to force the studios they own to implement these monetisation strategies.
And this leads to players like you and me leaving the hobby. (Not that I know what else I would do… but anyways) But who knows… maybe people growing up with this sort of thing is fine with it… which might not then crash the industry but just leaves us with shitty games.
Maybe we are in the minority. Maybe millions won’t leave it and it is just you and me taking up stamp collecting or something.
Other than CDPR… I wouldn’t be very upset if a crash in the industry causes some AAA studios to cease to be. The scenario you sketched with more indie studios rising sounds kinda nice actually.
Nature dislikes a vacuum. If the industry crashes because of overzealous monetisation practices I am sure studios with somewhat more competent executives (like say Larian) would jump on the chance to produce content players want.
Then again… it is not like the rise of reality tv lead to the sudden generation of lots of great tv shows from indie studios. So I guess you have a point.
The TV industry is a great parallel example. Like it or not, TV also needs the large money investors to keep the entire thing afloat. Sure, if the proliferation of ludicrously high streaming service prices continues and causes a contraction in that industry, a lot of actors and writers and production crew could try and get together to make YouTube content, but it would be a similar splitting of everyone into little channels, where none of them actually have enough revenue to really sustain true TV-style production.
I think the "nature abhors a vacuum" principle could work beneficially, in terms of another reset, after a crash. But if we had to restart the console market from scratch, that would be much more difficult now than it was back in the 80s.