Yeah, gacha games use a stamina system so you get X amount of energy to spend per day, and then usually have some kind of reserve items which regenerate stamina. And if you want more past that then you need to use premium currency to refresh it.
That makes it so that you have people keep coming back to the game each day as a habit so they aren't wasting energy, and getting a bit of money from the whales who don't care about how much they spend.
Otherwise you might have a mode that requires currency to enter, like Hearthstone's arena. Where if you do well you can earn back your currency, but if you do poorly then you go negative.
That seems a little like saying “sure we can serve mashed up vegetable paste instead of proper meals at our restaurant! Look at how well baby food sells!” The target audience of mobile games is quite different from the target audience of console and PC games.
One of the major issues is younger demographics aren't familiar with what they missed out on and how they should be treated, and they're willing to accept some discomfort if they've never dealt with it before. It's like predatory developers are Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused: "That's what I love about these [gamers]... I get older, they stay the same age." There are constantly new gamers entering the market whose perception of "normal" is much different than ours, and developers count on that.
On top of that, a lot of gamers are losers who let the whole world walk all over them. We're also talking about the types who enter parasocial Twitch streamer relationships and let all their money get siphoned away through donations and completely useless subscriptions. Those people don't have self-respect and will fritter away 100% of their time and money no matter how unfair the deal is.
How does that make a difference to you, the consumer, though? Obviously, the game would have to be quality to hold your interest either way, but does there being a physical space hosting the machine the game runs on, a distributor who brings the new games in and takes the old games out, and maybe a repairman to work on the machines make that much of a difference to your gaming experience?
okay, there's the local business argument. Granted, but what's wrong with the same model direct from the publisher directly to your own hardware you have anyway? I just don't understand why it's okay in one setting but not the other.
well, that's what I'm saying. instead of having to buy the game, you just pay for your use of it. no continuing subscription, no $70+ upfront fee, no paid dlc, just logon, insert your (metaphorical) coin, and play a match.
Instead of buying the car, you just pay for your use of it. No maintenance, no car washes, no insurance, use your ride share app, and get to your destination.
I don't think people will accept it, even as a replacement for "F2P" mechanics. The whole reason F2P monetization is the way it is today is obfuscate the cost. Even paying to play a round would be buried under "buy a pack of gems, 20% more free! Each gem is 0.35 and round of gameplay costs 0.5 gems."
Even brick and mortar arcades realized that once they switched to cards instead of coins/tokens, they could use them to hide the credit / $ exchange rate so you don't realize how much you're spending when you're playing. They hide it because customers naturally dislike putting money (that is obviously money) in repeatedly.
Pay-per-run actually isn't uncommon in the crypto game space, but mostly as a justification for having it tied to crypto in the first place. Solution looking for a problem.
It makes a difference because software as a service is a tremendously anti-consumer practice. Also, if a purchase isn't ownership, then piracy isn't theft.
yeah, but the arcade was the same way, there were just more middlemen involved is my point.
...and the online portion of any game has been that way for a while now anyway...how many games actually feature user-hosted server capabilities, let alone lanplay (god, I miss that...)?
took me a couple tries to figure out what you meant, but I think you mean the ability to host your own games locally. No...I think the industry has all but killed that concept as it is, sadly, a few notable exceptions aside (minecraft, etc).
That ability was also killed in Minecraft, practically, when microsoft demanded everyone create a microsoft account and stole their game if they didn't. Technically you still can but ms could take away your right to do so at any time for any reason.
Some Freemium games already do this where you need to pay for unlocks to weekly content that is otherwise baked into monthly subs. Swtor was doing this with flashpoints and ops [dungeons and raids] years ago already.
No, there are generally 3 options for games like this.
The traditional monthly sub which gets you access to everything.
Free to Play, which is bare bones access that probably has most of the main content people want locked away.
And a sort of middle ground which is F2P but with various hoops you can jump through to access the parts of the locked content you want without unlocking all of it. If you only want to pvp you can unlock access to the pvp modes, or remove any limits that might be present which would otherwise mean you can only do a set number of matches a day/week. Same deal with other modes be it dungeons, raids, or the campaign story.
Precisely how these features are paid for varies on the devs in charge. Some games let you use in game currency. Some let you use real money. Some of that in game currency can be bought with real money however so there are options for players. Some will just spend real money, some will grind away in game currency. The fastest route will always be the most expensive, though, and this is before getting into whatever MTX presence there might be.
Fuck no. An arcade charges money because it is a physical retail space that costs money to own and maintain, and they have a limited amount of customers that can come in and play per day due to physical constraints.
A company like EA or Activision does not have those physical constraints on their income stream, and the only real estate they need is for their office and their server farms. No arcade in the world could compete with that, and it shows. Even without lootboxes and other microtransactions, they still blow arcades out of the water.
The whole reason why I never got into World of Warcraft back when it was big was because I couldn't fathom paying a subscription to play a single game. I barely tolerated Xbox Live back when I still played Xbox, and I'm pretty close to cancelling PS Plus once I finish playing the free games in my library that they offer. Now that I have a good PC, there's no reason to do something silly like that.
okay, so you'd rather pay the up front cost of the game, plus deal with the pay-to-win schemes, the lootcrates, etc?
sorry, i'm not trying to antagonize, i'm just trying to drill down on this one which is preferable. Obviously, we'd rather go back to pay for the game and that's the last money you spend on the game.
Fuck no. An arcade charges money because it is a physical retail space that costs money to own and maintain, and they have a limited amount of customers that can come in and play per day due to physical constraints.
Fair, but EA/Activision does pay to maintain the servers, update the game to fix glitches, security flaws, etc, add new content, etc.
I'm not trying to make a rebuttal. I'm genuinely trying to figure out which would be preferable. I know what I prefer, but I'm clearly the odd man out.
okay, so you'd rather pay the up front cost of the game, plus deal with the pay-to-win schemes, the lootcrates, etc?
Where have you been living the past decade? Realistically, game companies will just add "pay per match" on top of the pile of other MTX already existing. You think it's either get A or get B, but we will just get both.
Fair, but EA/Activision does pay to maintain the servers
No one actually asked them to do so. Community servers existed since the dawn of online gaming, and people will gladly make their own servers for the game they love. On top of that, they generally have mods and admins looking at the game and banning cheaters on the fly, way more effective than any other automated anti-cheat.
No. Not even if it was free up front. The first game that tries charging per game, is going to crash and burn and the entire rest of the industry will treat the concept like it was radioactive.
The consumer's tolerance for being nickle-and-dime'd is not that elastic. Particularly in the face of the ridiculous push to charge seventy, eighty or ninety dollars for games these days.
I hate to break it to you, but that already exists, is very common and is making OBSCENE amounts of money.
All those mobile games that have some form of energy that you have to spend to play? Yea, that's exactly that. Go buy some more energy tokens if you want to continue playing!
so you'd rather have seventy dollars for the title, plus lootcrates, plus pay-to-win, plus DLC? Personally, i think paying only for how much you use the service since they want to moved to a games-as-a service model anyway, but to each their own, I guess.
Charge reasonable prices and don't fill the game with bullshit. If not I won't buy it. It's not a necessity, they do not and have never needed to do this predatory nonsense.
Deep Rock Galactic for example, proves that quite well. The game is beloved and survives entirely on the list price and cosmetics.
Personally I'd rather the industry just bring back private server capacity for users like in the heyday of online games.
Charge reasonable prices and don't fill the game with bullshit. If not I won't buy it. It's not a necessity, they do not and have never needed to do this predatory nonsense.
probably gonna have to abandon AAA for a few years then... until these companies crash and hard, they're gonna keep doubling down on this nonsense until casual games are less egregious...
Personally I'd rather the industry just bring back private server capacity for users like in the heyday of online games.
no arguments here. I miss LANplay and private servers, too.
yeah... I've always been more or less behind on the latest games anyway. I mostly play indy stuff or older games these days (trying to work my way through soul reaver atm. never finished that one).
I agree. They should have each game in its own box, with screen and controls ready. Then charge, say, a quarter per play. Let's have a big room in a prominent shopping area have a bunch of these games.
Accents don't usually bother me unless they're unintelligible. At least the person is usually trying. Endymion is a native English speaker who's too lazy to bother with silly things like syntax or logical flow.
Sounds like a terrible idea that would quickly spiral out of control. The first game to do so better crash and burn in spectacular fashion.
As I wrote below, mobiles games are already doing that and it makes them tons of money.
Yeah, gacha games use a stamina system so you get X amount of energy to spend per day, and then usually have some kind of reserve items which regenerate stamina. And if you want more past that then you need to use premium currency to refresh it.
That makes it so that you have people keep coming back to the game each day as a habit so they aren't wasting energy, and getting a bit of money from the whales who don't care about how much they spend.
Otherwise you might have a mode that requires currency to enter, like Hearthstone's arena. Where if you do well you can earn back your currency, but if you do poorly then you go negative.
That seems a little like saying “sure we can serve mashed up vegetable paste instead of proper meals at our restaurant! Look at how well baby food sells!” The target audience of mobile games is quite different from the target audience of console and PC games.
It should, but... remember the horse armour?
One of the major issues is younger demographics aren't familiar with what they missed out on and how they should be treated, and they're willing to accept some discomfort if they've never dealt with it before. It's like predatory developers are Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused: "That's what I love about these [gamers]... I get older, they stay the same age." There are constantly new gamers entering the market whose perception of "normal" is much different than ours, and developers count on that.
On top of that, a lot of gamers are losers who let the whole world walk all over them. We're also talking about the types who enter parasocial Twitch streamer relationships and let all their money get siphoned away through donations and completely useless subscriptions. Those people don't have self-respect and will fritter away 100% of their time and money no matter how unfair the deal is.
I dunno about that...it's a model that worked well for quite a long time in the arcade market.
Arcade is different, because you're paying to access a game someone else bought on hardware they own.
How does that make a difference to you, the consumer, though? Obviously, the game would have to be quality to hold your interest either way, but does there being a physical space hosting the machine the game runs on, a distributor who brings the new games in and takes the old games out, and maybe a repairman to work on the machines make that much of a difference to your gaming experience?
okay, there's the local business argument. Granted, but what's wrong with the same model direct from the publisher directly to your own hardware you have anyway? I just don't understand why it's okay in one setting but not the other.
Is this a real question?
"Why does it cost money per-ride to take a taxi somewhere, but I don't have to pay per-ride for a trip in my own car?"
"Why do I have to pay hourly at an Internet cafe when I don't have to pay hourly on my own PC?"
People are okay with paying per-ride or per-time because they understand it's in exchange for exclusive access to someone else's resource.
well, that's what I'm saying. instead of having to buy the game, you just pay for your use of it. no continuing subscription, no $70+ upfront fee, no paid dlc, just logon, insert your (metaphorical) coin, and play a match.
Instead of buying the car, you just pay for your use of it. No maintenance, no car washes, no insurance, use your ride share app, and get to your destination.
You will own nothing, and you will be happy.
...as far as AAA gaming is concerned, that ship sailed when they got rid of physical media.
at least this way, you don't get bilked at every turn...
I don't think people will accept it, even as a replacement for "F2P" mechanics. The whole reason F2P monetization is the way it is today is obfuscate the cost. Even paying to play a round would be buried under "buy a pack of gems, 20% more free! Each gem is 0.35 and round of gameplay costs 0.5 gems."
Even brick and mortar arcades realized that once they switched to cards instead of coins/tokens, they could use them to hide the credit / $ exchange rate so you don't realize how much you're spending when you're playing. They hide it because customers naturally dislike putting money (that is obviously money) in repeatedly.
Pay-per-run actually isn't uncommon in the crypto game space, but mostly as a justification for having it tied to crypto in the first place. Solution looking for a problem.
fair, I still think it could work, but it's not like i'm an expert on this stuff or anything.
also, I appreciate you breaking it down, I think I did a poor job of selling what I was saying, and people took it the wrong way because of that.
It makes a difference because software as a service is a tremendously anti-consumer practice. Also, if a purchase isn't ownership, then piracy isn't theft.
yeah, but the arcade was the same way, there were just more middlemen involved is my point.
...and the online portion of any game has been that way for a while now anyway...how many games actually feature user-hosted server capabilities, let alone lanplay (god, I miss that...)?
Is this the endgame of removing private server browsers?
took me a couple tries to figure out what you meant, but I think you mean the ability to host your own games locally. No...I think the industry has all but killed that concept as it is, sadly, a few notable exceptions aside (minecraft, etc).
That ability was also killed in Minecraft, practically, when microsoft demanded everyone create a microsoft account and stole their game if they didn't. Technically you still can but ms could take away your right to do so at any time for any reason.
so a return to tradition, back to arcade games?
that's what I was thinking as well, yes. ( I ran out of characters.)
Some Freemium games already do this where you need to pay for unlocks to weekly content that is otherwise baked into monthly subs. Swtor was doing this with flashpoints and ops [dungeons and raids] years ago already.
ah, so a weekly subscription on top of a monthly subscription... yeesh.
No, there are generally 3 options for games like this.
The traditional monthly sub which gets you access to everything.
Free to Play, which is bare bones access that probably has most of the main content people want locked away.
And a sort of middle ground which is F2P but with various hoops you can jump through to access the parts of the locked content you want without unlocking all of it. If you only want to pvp you can unlock access to the pvp modes, or remove any limits that might be present which would otherwise mean you can only do a set number of matches a day/week. Same deal with other modes be it dungeons, raids, or the campaign story.
Precisely how these features are paid for varies on the devs in charge. Some games let you use in game currency. Some let you use real money. Some of that in game currency can be bought with real money however so there are options for players. Some will just spend real money, some will grind away in game currency. The fastest route will always be the most expensive, though, and this is before getting into whatever MTX presence there might be.
More likely charge for skill based matchmaking first. All of the sweats will pay and the regular players will get pub-stomped until they pay.
that could be too.
would you pay a dollar per match if it meant no up-front fee, no pay-to-win, no lootcrates, etc?
Fuck no. An arcade charges money because it is a physical retail space that costs money to own and maintain, and they have a limited amount of customers that can come in and play per day due to physical constraints.
A company like EA or Activision does not have those physical constraints on their income stream, and the only real estate they need is for their office and their server farms. No arcade in the world could compete with that, and it shows. Even without lootboxes and other microtransactions, they still blow arcades out of the water.
The whole reason why I never got into World of Warcraft back when it was big was because I couldn't fathom paying a subscription to play a single game. I barely tolerated Xbox Live back when I still played Xbox, and I'm pretty close to cancelling PS Plus once I finish playing the free games in my library that they offer. Now that I have a good PC, there's no reason to do something silly like that.
okay, so you'd rather pay the up front cost of the game, plus deal with the pay-to-win schemes, the lootcrates, etc?
sorry, i'm not trying to antagonize, i'm just trying to drill down on this one which is preferable. Obviously, we'd rather go back to pay for the game and that's the last money you spend on the game.
Fair, but EA/Activision does pay to maintain the servers, update the game to fix glitches, security flaws, etc, add new content, etc.
Why do you keep offering this false dichotomy as if it were a legitimate rebuttal?
I'm not trying to make a rebuttal. I'm genuinely trying to figure out which would be preferable. I know what I prefer, but I'm clearly the odd man out.
The answer is neither. Both are bad, I reject the idea that there are only two choices.
fair.
Where have you been living the past decade? Realistically, game companies will just add "pay per match" on top of the pile of other MTX already existing. You think it's either get A or get B, but we will just get both.
No one actually asked them to do so. Community servers existed since the dawn of online gaming, and people will gladly make their own servers for the game they love. On top of that, they generally have mods and admins looking at the game and banning cheaters on the fly, way more effective than any other automated anti-cheat.
fair
No. Not even if it was free up front. The first game that tries charging per game, is going to crash and burn and the entire rest of the industry will treat the concept like it was radioactive.
The consumer's tolerance for being nickle-and-dime'd is not that elastic. Particularly in the face of the ridiculous push to charge seventy, eighty or ninety dollars for games these days.
I hate to break it to you, but that already exists, is very common and is making OBSCENE amounts of money.
All those mobile games that have some form of energy that you have to spend to play? Yea, that's exactly that. Go buy some more energy tokens if you want to continue playing!
Mobile slop isn't appealing to the kind of people this is targeted towards. I expect they'll vote with their feet rather than play such things.
so you'd rather have seventy dollars for the title, plus lootcrates, plus pay-to-win, plus DLC? Personally, i think paying only for how much you use the service since they want to moved to a games-as-a service model anyway, but to each their own, I guess.
No I'd rather avoid all of the above.
Charge reasonable prices and don't fill the game with bullshit. If not I won't buy it. It's not a necessity, they do not and have never needed to do this predatory nonsense.
Deep Rock Galactic for example, proves that quite well. The game is beloved and survives entirely on the list price and cosmetics.
Personally I'd rather the industry just bring back private server capacity for users like in the heyday of online games.
probably gonna have to abandon AAA for a few years then... until these companies crash and hard, they're gonna keep doubling down on this nonsense until casual games are less egregious...
no arguments here. I miss LANplay and private servers, too.
Seven years and counting. It's simple really. I have requirements of what I want if they want my money.
yeah... I've always been more or less behind on the latest games anyway. I mostly play indy stuff or older games these days (trying to work my way through soul reaver atm. never finished that one).
People have been doing that for decades. Where have you been?
not sure what you're referring to specifically, could you clarify?
I agree. They should have each game in its own box, with screen and controls ready. Then charge, say, a quarter per play. Let's have a big room in a prominent shopping area have a bunch of these games.
Naw, that's too archaic.
lol. I would love to see arcades make a revival.
that being said, I think an arcade style pricing scheme could work with modern online games.
"please drink a verification can"
I'll start watching Endymion videos to the end when Endymion learns to speak English coherently.
I've heard worse, lol.
actually had a supervisor with an accent so thick that, between that and the machines, i could barely understand her half the time.
Accents don't usually bother me unless they're unintelligible. At least the person is usually trying. Endymion is a native English speaker who's too lazy to bother with silly things like syntax or logical flow.
she was borderline at the best of times.
Wtf do you mean it's not a bad idea
well, for one, it's how the gaming industry worked for decades. remember the coin-ops?