this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024

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Oblivion Horse Armour dev looks back on hated DLC – “We had no idea what we were doing” (www.videogamer.com)

submitted 14 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 162 points 14 hours ago (5 children)

“[Horse Armor] must have been [sold] in the millions, it had to be millions,” Nesmith said. “I don’t know the actual number, I probably did at one point, I just no longer remember that. And that was kind of a head shaker for us: you’re all making fun of it and yet you buy it.”

And that right there is the reason why the industry is absolutely saturated with this shit now. If people had just chilled the fuck out when this shit was first introduced, made sure it was an absolute flop from a sales perspective (not only for this one, but for others that were released back then, too), we might be in a better place now.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

If people had just chilled the fuck out... we might be in a better place now.

Gamers aren't a bloc, and each person has their own individual game tastes, opinions, and willingness to spend money on trivial junk.

Most gamers are tween Fortnight players or ones who play exclusively mobile games full of ads. They are not people like us. This was inevitable, and nothing would have or will ever change it. Most people just want a pleasant distraction from the horrors of life and don't have any particular principles when it comes to how they spend their money on games.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

There will always be some fucking rich kid that will buy every skin no matter how many other people criticize the practice.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

The sad part is that most of the whales aren't actually that rich...

[–] [email protected] 23 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

I'd argue that part of the problem is, gamer culture has approached everything in the industry from a vein of negativity. "Don't buy this", "Pirate this", "XPublisher is damn evil". Certainly many of those accusations and rejections are valid, but there is now far, far more attention on what sucks than what's good. A developer puts out an awesome singleplayer game they spent 7 years making, and we'll give them $60 but...not much more than that. We'll probably even complain if, due to high budgets, it comes out at $70. Meanwhile, the rest of the world that's curious about entertainment doesn't care much about 30 "Don't" rules and just buys whatever seems interesting when they're bored - because they got their paycheck and want something.

It's reasonable a developer is always finding new ways they can pay their staff. I'd even say many singleplayer games we love were NOT the money-makers we wish they were. Granted, quite often now those $60 are going into paying into shareholders and executive bonuses, and I think that's another valid thing to be negative towards, but once again: If this was an important point to gamers, we could champion studios that grant paid time off and lower their CEO bonuses.

And I'll even go one further: If a common thread is "Studios ask too much of our money for the full game"...we could even turn our attention to minimum wage laws. We certainly should be.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 12 hours ago

I think the takeaway here is that these things are not important to gamers. a few of us complain about it online, but clearly we are outnumbered in the market.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

BG3 received a lot of possitivity for releasing a massive game for half the price of starfield. But it seems apparent that negative reactions are stronger than possitive ones for most of us.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

bg3? baldurs gate 3? that was 70 bucks and not on game pass on release so it was way more expensive than starfield

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

Dude where I live BG3 is $40 and starfield 75 ($100 with the 'expansion')(steam). At least on pc. What's your situation?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

BG3 has been 70 dollars since release, unless i missed a sale. meanwhile starfield was on game pass on release which is like 20 bucks a month, so if you play starfield for 1 month then cancel you had essentially paid just 20 dollars for it. im on xbox though, not steam, so that may be why ours are so different

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

Damn that's quite the difference, those where the standard prices on pc, not sale. $70 is a lot.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 13 hours ago

We must live in the world we create.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

The only reason i have it was because it came with the goty edition. I wonder how many that accounts for

[–] [email protected] 73 points 14 hours ago

I was working in the industry at the time and people absolutely talked about the implications of microtransactions and how it would result in more expensive games and being nickel and dimed.

Like, I distinctly remember conversations with actual human beings from exactly the horse armor DLC and maybe we didn't think it was going to result in, say the online shooter battle pass formula exactly, but we without ambiguity understood that meaningful in game items, and things like levels / experience would be monetized.

The biggest shocks to me were how patches would be used to reduce the game testing cycles, enabling companies to print incomplete or broken versions of games, requiring day one patches.

It's a disgusting practice now, and it was then too.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Their mistake was not making it available for only 2 weeks for $40 like Blizzard.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 hours ago

I encourage everyone to never spend money on blizzard products. They dont even offer quality anymore like they used to.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Bethesda had no idea how much backlash the DLC would create

Yeah sure.

Either they're just straight up lying, or they're completely incompetent over at Bethesda.

Sadly, both don't seem very unlikely realities for what that studio turned in to.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

no idea how much backlash

That's not to say they didn't expect backlash, they fully expected some, they simply didn't do a field study to see how bad it was going to be. Actually pretty common in the industry. Thow shit against the wall, see how bad the outcome is, discount that against profit. :)

[–] [email protected] 15 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

plus

“One of the things about Horse Armour that you have to remember is Bethesda, I believe, was the very first company to do downloadable content expansions,” Nesmith told us. “Nobody had done that before for the platforms. We literally pioneered that. And so Bethesda didn’t know what the hell it was doing at the time. We didn’t know!”

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago

I feel like it would've taken little effort to do a survey, or just even common sense to know what to expect.

They added that paid DLC barely 2 weeks after the game launched, it doesn't require much thought how this probably wouldn't be received positively.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

Bullshit, Bruce Nesmith. You're just a dishonest coward trying to absolve yourself of blame.

Edit: the paid horse armor was extremely controversial among gamers at the time, and plenty of people prophetically warned about what the consequences were going to be. Bethesda damn well knew or should have known exactly what Pandora's box they were opening.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Should they have known before the backlash started?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

Yes! They announced the plan before they actually did it; they had plenty of time to realize how pissed off it made everybody.