Games

"For some reason." Money. The reason is money.

“A Personalized Profile analyzes your unique head and ear shape for precision sound,” reads the option on the Call of Duty store.

Sounds customized for your specific ear shape??? I've never been less willing to believe something in my life

"For some reason"? Greed. That is the exact reason.

for some reason

It's called price discrimination.

If there are multiple groups of potential purchasers who have different levels of willingness to pay, if you can identify some characteristic of people willing to pay more, then you can create a version of the product that targets that characteristic and thus the group.

Price discrimination ("differential pricing",[1][2] "equity pricing", "preferential pricing",[3] "dual pricing",[4] "tiered pricing",[5] and "surveillance pricing"[6]) is a microeconomic pricing strategy where identical or largely similar goods or services are sold at different prices by the same provider to different buyers based on which market segment they are perceived to be part of.[7][8][2] Price discrimination is distinguished from product differentiation by the difference in production cost for the differently priced products involved in the latter strategy.[2] Price discrimination essentially relies on the variation in customers' willingness to pay[8][2][4] and in the elasticity of their demand. For price discrimination to succeed, a seller must have market power, such as a dominant market share, product uniqueness, sole pricing power, etc.[9]

• "Product versioning"[8][16] or simply "versioning" (or "second-degree" price differentiation) — offering a product line[13] by creating slightly differentiated products for the purpose of price differentiation,[8][16] i.e. a vertical product line.[17] Another name given to versioning is "menu pricing".[14][18]

In this case, you're going to have something like a group of "value customers" who care a lot about how much they need to spend on the game. And then you're going to have "premium customers" who aren't too fussed about what they pay, but want the very fanciest experience.

If you had just one version, sold the game at the "value customer" price, then you'd lose out on what the "premium customer" would pay. If you sold it at the "premium customer" price, then you'd have a bunch of "value customers" for whom the game would no longer be a worthwhile purchase, who wouldn't buy the game, and you'd lose the sales to them. But by selling it at multiple prices, you can optimize for both groups.

EDIT: l'd also add, on the technical rather than economic side, that I've messed around with having a custom HRTF model myself, as Linux (and maybe elsewhere, dunno) games that use OpenAL let you specify a custom HRTF model in the config file. My own impression was that any impact on audio experience was pretty minimal. Might be different if someone had really weirdly-shaped ears or something, dunno.

Imagine still buying and playing Cod games in 2024

Before I read the article I just assumed that the developers put uncompressed audio files into a DLC, in order to both reduce filesize of the game and provide people that car about audio a better experience.

But actually its just an extra charge for spatial audio for some reason. Who will even actually buy this? I wonder if this is a test to see if it is financially valuable to keep in the game engine (spoiler alert, most people do not care about this and wont pay extra for it).

Steam needs an anti-wishlist so I remember not to buy it when it's on sale for $1 ten years from now 😅

Some reason... I think its money.

Imagine paying for the privilege of hearing unemployed dudes and 12 year olds call you racial slurs in higher quality.

One might think that paying extra would simply cover the extra costs of a specific audio license. I'm not claiming anything regarding this, as I don't know, but I do would say that CoD games had spatial audio for many many years already.

Anyways, next up: "thanks for purchasing our game, are you interested in purchasing access to the 3D renderer or the input handler? both are billed separately for your convenience"

Greedy corpos aside, going back to BO1 the audio design was fantastic; everything from the subtle crunch of a boot on gravel to the clack of reloading a gun. Pure ear candy (except for maybe the crazy over-dramatic melee sound). BO 2-5 were good too in terms of sfx but nowhere near 1. I feel like that era had a special attention to detail to audio that modern games don't care to emulate. Maybe they will with 6; either way microtransactions suck and I'll stick to playing the older COD games for this very reason

Balatro is like, $10 and available on my phone tho-…

Oh shit this is hat immersive game pack shit?

Yeah, it's garbage, don't fucking use it. FFXIV did a whole thing back in end Walker and it just ruins audio

Meanwhile my 5.1 setup works with most games out of the box, and universal HRTF works better than IG on the 6 pairs of phones I've tested it on on 2 different fucking Games

Scam software

So sound whoring is a pay to use privilege now?

Greed. That reason is greed.

Fun (probably) fact. Warzone players complained almost constantly about the lack of audio quality. It was an issue that only got worse with each "season". So now that this happens, I can see why.

"Hey players, you complained and we listened! Now pay the fuck up!"