eGamer Podcast #26: Cats Eating A Cactus

I think, in my opinion, they were looking at it far too much from a business perspective rather than a gamer’s perspective. Sure, as a business choice it’s great, but for me from our perspective it really is fully crap. I forgot to reply to Adam that the thing about people not having the time has absolutely no grounds either because Dead Space 3 takes five hours to just start in any case (for you to get to the ice planet), and everyone remember Assassin’s Creed III’s six hour tutorial beginning?

If you really care about making a good game first, that’s the kind of thing you can give for free, and there are FAR more ways to make additional money, through DLC and cosmetic purchases, the better way to do microtransactions.

Dean made a good point about maxmising profit in a short time, but that’s again the business side. It doesn’t help us from a gamer’s perspective. Not to mention Dead Space 3′s prices were ridiculous for those things. R50 for reducing the robot time from 10 mins to 5 mins is total extortion. I buy full games for that price, indie and not.

What I really wonder is whether the PS4 will squash this extortion. Because, they said in the conference that you’ll be able to help out your friend in a game who’s struggling by dropping items and such. Perhaps this will only be for PlayStation exclusives, but it certainly puts the microtransaction shit in an even worse light.

Haven’t had a chance to listen to the podcast yet, but microtransactions have plenty of place in games, and are potentially the way to save games going forward.

I’ve had to point out multiple times before while bringing the same point up – the current way developers are going about it is (for the most part) just daft – but unless buying those things is a requirement towards being able to play the game, there’s nothing wrong with it.

In the F2P model, as an example; looking at Blacklight: Retribution and Mechwarrior Online as two active examples, you are not in any way forced to buy anything. There is no ‘golden ammo’ or anything of the sort that can only be bought by spending real money. You are wholly able to play either game without ever spending a single cent on them, kick ass and still have access to just about all the content that matters in any way.

The exceptions are as follows;
* Various cosmetic ‘things’ can only be bought using real money – taunts, camo patterns, ‘hero’ or ‘mech’ presets, some components of which from a visual perspective cannot be gained any other way, but that hold no tangible benefit over their ‘free’ counterparts

* In both games’ case you can buy access to weapons, equipment, stuff like that using real money ahead of being able to access it otherwise (such as by a level prerequisite or generation of the in-game currency gained for just playing)

* You can buy a ‘premium’ mode for your account that amounts to a subscription that boosts your rate of gaining the in-game resources (experience, in-game currency, stuff like that) – to a lesser extent, some of these gains can influence gameplay, such as extra resources gained in Planetside 2

Now, it’s worth noting, touching slightly on what Azhar said in response to you, that it’s possible in Blacklight to get ‘permanent’ copies of stuff you already have (or just stuff you know you don’t want) that you can send as a gift to a friend. It can’t be ‘sold’ in-game for anything, so you either trade it/give it away on a forum, sell it for real money assuming the game’s EULA/ToS doesn’t prohibit it, or give it to a friend.

It’s also worth noting that it really *is* a matter of “if you don’t like it, don’t buy it”. Unless buying it is somehow required, it being an option doesn’t have any influence on your ability to play the game.

Nobody is ‘forced’ to buy stuff for real money on the Diablo 3 auction house -you’re not forced to use the auction house at all, for that matter- yet people rage about the auction house (even the gold-only version) existing at all? These people don’t realise that Diablo1/2 both had auction-houses by way of forums/eBay and the like?

If developers are putting those optional ‘boosts’ into their games, how is it bad? Your Sim is going to die because of your negligence! You can either play the game or give them a R50 injection to make sure they survive! Are you going to rage just because the option is presented to you?

And day-one DLC Is *fine*. No, you do not have any kind of magical ‘right’ to content you believe should have been ‘free’. The game’s development costs money. Every single bit of content ever developed for it costs money to develop/produce. None of that content ‘is’ or ‘should’ be free; its worth is measured by whether or not people are willing to pay for it. You don’t buy a Magic: The Gathering booster pack and expect to get all the other cards available for that generation included by default, do you? Likewise, you don’t go purchase at great expense a ‘complete’ edition from a store offering such a service and expect that any new cards added to that edition (that were planned long before the edition launched) should be handed to you for free, do you?

No. You pay for what you want. Don’t like that you spent R550 on your game and you’re expected of you pay another R50 per character’s DLC and mission pack? Then buy your game later than launch day. After all, you can wait for the game’s announcement to come into being, wait for the launch date’s announcement to arrive, wait for the delay announcement to arrive and wait for the game itself to finally arrive – nobody’s forcing you to go out and buy it on day 1 for the full price. Nobody at all. Nobody’s forcing you to buy the 0-day DLC on that day, either.

What we have with the big-name publishers at the moment is producers and executives that see that the F2P model works and works well. The thing is that they’re not accustomed to this concept of launching a game without a pricetag – they’re not used to the idea of launching a game that doesn’t have physical media, collector’s editions, stuff like that. They can’t wrap around their heads the idea of making their money from people actually playing their games rather than people going out and buying them.

So they’re getting their feet wet in a haphazard, often idiotic manner.
They’ll get it eventually, they just don’t get it _right now_.

And people trying to bemoan things that are really non-issues instead of showing, with their money, that developers are doing things to hurt them, doesn’t help anyone, especially not consumers.

*edit* Also, for the sake of all that is good, learn to use punctuation and paragraphs.

Don’t worry, I was replying to Pea rather’n you. I only referenced your reply for the remark about PS4 and ‘dropping items for friends’, which is already in a sense possible in existing F2P model games (and others). It’s just not spreading to games as quickly as one would expect it to do.

Then again, if you think about it, for any game with a random drop chance for an item that could improve your ability to perform, such as Dead Souls, would having a friend come into your game to drop an overpowered item for you to use not kind of defeat the challenge the game presents to begin with?

It’s a pretty fine balancing act making sure that a game is still enjoyable if a friend elects to ‘help you out’, at the end of the day.