Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to play a fighting game against a player using a DLC character you don’t own
Good. The alternative is inseparable from providing everyone the whole roster, but pretending each character is worth twelve fucking dollars, so a generic fighting game is somehow worth five times what any sane person would pay up-front for one game.
The counterproposal is just selling the god-damned game, with all the fffucking characters. Or adding free shit as incentive to attract new customers and retain existing players. Or selling an honest-to-god sequel or expansion, instead of charging expansion kinds of money for the bare minimum of content.
live games have running costs in general.
Then they should charge a subscription or die off.
People make rational spending decisions about subscriptions. They’re not popular. People don’t like that sort of thing, when you treat them honestly and fairly, instead of tricking them.
I have negative patience for the idea that a company spending money justifies whatever horseshit monetization scheme they propose. As if, because they’ve already blown half a billion dollars, and intend to keep burning more, that makes it okay to charge eight actual dollars for an imaginary hat. Fuck that noise. If your company has ongoing costs - announce ongoing fees. Don’t play stupid games about tricking a fraction of players into spending their whole paycheck.
you’re only paying an access license fee
Fuck that and fuck anyone who told you that. You own things that you buy. That’s what the money was for. The first sale doctrine knocked this shit down, an entire century ago, and it’s only through corruption and nuh-uh-ing that software has retained any form of special consideration. If I bought Peter Jackson’s King Kong on HD-DVD and King King The Game Of The Movie for Xbox 360, I own both equally. Whatever text is written inside to pretend otherwise is meaningless. I own that text, too.
If you believe any mumbo-jumbo saying otherwise then you should demand its immediate repeal. You should be morally opposed to its continued existence. Defend your basic right to own products.
there is no requirement to have immediate access to all content in a game
THEN WHAT DOES IT FUCKING MEAN TO BUY THE GODDAMN GAME?
Even subscription MMOs pull this shit! Games that have obviously covered their ongoing costs, for twenty years straight, are double-dipping out of naked greed. Nobody’s objections matter. The abuse is worth more than whatever dent could be made by people rightly saying, fuck this abuse.
standalone, offline gaming has its own market
Those games have this too.
Were you not listening?
This shit is in FLAGSHIP FRANCHISE, SEVENTY-DOLLAR, SINGLE-PLAYER GAMES. It costs almost nothing to add. The backlash barely matters, because some fucks will lurch out to defend it. The marketing value of ‘we won’t rob you!’ is dwindling, and again, can become a lie after you bought it.
Counting on media literacy to stop direct manipulation for profit is a failure to acknowledge how any marketing has ever worked. Have you seen reality lately? Educating the rubes never fucking works, because the people manipulating them for direct monetary gain are better at tricking them than you could ever be at convincing them they have been tricked.
Yeeeeah, you may just be angry on principle about things that don’t merit black-and-white, this-is-an-abomination rage.
No, I won’t wait three extra years and pay 200 bucks for a fighting game to see if I like it and then only play ten percent of the roster. I find it very convenient to get a base game roster so the dev team doesn’t have to bet the farm that the game will be successful without knowing what will happen and I don’t have to pay three times as much or get a third of the game. Hell, that particular example has improved significantly, it used to be if I wanted to play Cammy on SF2 I had to pay full price to repurchase every other character in the game all over again. Screw that. You can get a character for five bucks these days. Gimme the characters one by one forever.
And I absolutely prefer MTX over subscriptions. All day any day. More convenient, typically cheaper and exactly as problematic as every other games-as-service model, no more, no less.
You can all caps and swear all you want, but digital distribution is giving you what it’s giving you. You don’t own your Steam games, that’s just how it works.
This model has fundamental downsides that need to be addressed and probably need legislative intervention to do so, but the outcome is not going to be “you can only buy things in a static format and devs are forbidden from selling you expansions”. Even if it made sense to regulate things to that extent, it’s inconvenient, expensive and impractical. You may feel strongly about this in all caps, but… yeah, you are in a tiny majority.
By all means go find games that give you that experience. GOG is right there for you. I like it, I use it, go give them money.
But I am not advocating for a blanket ban on all DLC, microtransactions, server-dependent games or free to play games. Those are good things. I like them. They have full-on upsides. They just need to be regulated to the point where consumers are protected and media isn’t an entirely fungible thing built on planned obsolescence. Those are two very different bars.
No, I won’t wait three extra years and pay 200 bucks for a fighting game to see if I like it and then only play ten percent of the roster.
Who asked?
“you can only buy things in a static format and devs are forbidden from selling you expansions”
At no point have you understood this argument.
I came out the gate with a favorable comparison for horse armor.
And somehow the least tolerable part of this strawman is ‘you’re just angry, you only feel strongly, juuust because you disagreeee.’ It pains me to leave this abuse-promoting fluff unanswered, but you’re not listening anyway.
I mean, your last statement included, and I quote:
THEN WHAT DOES IT FUCKING MEAN TO BUY THE GODDAMN GAME?
and
This shit is in FLAGSHIP FRANCHISE, SEVENTY-DOLLAR, SINGLE-PLAYER GAMES. It costs almost nothing to add. The backlash barely matters, because some fucks will lurch out to defend it.
I do understand the argument and you do sound pretty angry, man.
For the record,
The alternative is inseparable from providing everyone the whole roster, but pretending each character is worth twelve fucking dollars, so a generic fighting game is somehow worth five times what any sane person would pay up-front for one game.
You asked.
Made me double check the post name, that’s how weird that response was.
Look, we’re not going to agree, feel free to move on, but don’t chalk up people pointing out that your screed is uncompromising and emotional to high school fallacies. Have some intellectual honesty about it, at least.
No shit I’m mad at you. But ‘you’re just angry’ is an insulting dismissal. Like I don’t have reasons. Like there’s not a whole-ass argument, behind all these highlighted barbs. Tone policing is trolling and I reject it utterly.
Making shit up about a delayed game that costs $200 is also trolling. What you were asked was buying games like how buying games worked for the prior forty years.
Have some intellectual honesty about it, at least.
Oh fuck off.
You quoted an all-caps counterargument you have no response to. This shit is in full-priced games. It’s creeping into, if not literally everything, then enough shit that ‘just don’t buy it’ plainly doesn’t work. This systemic problem is novel, intolerable, and getting worse. And you would pretend that nuh-uh, because I experienced emotion while rubbing your nose in it.
Alright, I’m not restarting the whole thing over, but no, it’s not how buying games worked. We’ve gone over this. Expansions, re-releases and add-ons aren’t new.
I’m not calling you out for being angry because you’re angry. I’m calling you out for being angry because you’re making sweeping, absolute statements that are reductive, dogmatic and missing nuance and you’re using anger to hide your disproportionate claims behind an appearance of outrage.
And then you acted like pointing that out was fallacious, which I’m not particularly inclined to let go.
For the record, I agree with you that voting with your wallet is nonsense and not a good way to regulate bad practices. You need actual regulation for that.
Also for the record, I didn’t “make up” anything. If the question is whether you pay for everything up front or piecemeal then the cost of the base package is going up. That is not up for debate, either. There is no such thing as “full price”. Games aren’t exempt from inflation just because people have gotten used to them being sixty bucks for forty years.
Granted, some of that is the fault of game publishers squirming away from price bumps. First by hiding inflation in the lowering costs of media (and eventually going full digital) and then hiding the costs in broken down games where the rest of the cost was distributed through the experience. I’m not against that in principle, but at some point the bandaid needs to be pulled, because there’s no more media and retail cost to shave and you can’t keep piling up MTX forever. So yes, if you want the equivalent of three seasons of DLC in Street Fighter to be in the box, then the box takes twice as long to make and costs a lot more money.
You can all caps, kick and whine about it all you want, but I’m afraid the number of employees, the time it takes to make things and the concept of multiplying them together are not going to budge. I’m not trolling, I’m arguing that I’d rather decide if I want to pay the full 200 bucks after paying the first 60 for the first half of the game as opposed to taking a gamble on the full amount. That is not just not dismissable as a fallacy, it’s pretty obvious.
You’re not listening. Those are fine. Those are what I am aggressively endorsing. Those are how things should work.
If the question is whether you pay for everything up front or piecemeal then the cost of the base package is going up. That is not up for debate, either. There is no such thing as “full price”.
Do you even listen to yourself? Forty years of a stable upper bound and it somehow doesn’t count. Undebatable! Come on. $200 games obviously do not exist, unless you get a big dumb statue with it.
If you wanna lump in everything you’d pay, into the future - this shit costs more.
That’s how it makes more money.
Either you’re paying at least as much, for a lot less - or someone else is getting fucked ten times harder. I care about that victim. I care about you. Your own personal history includes blowing a thousand dollars to not own a game. That kind of obscene overspending is the plainly-stated goal of this business model. They want to do that to as many people as possible. Key figures give public talks about “whale hunting.” That is what nearly everything is becoming. You’ll pay more to pay more so you can pay more, and apparently, some people convince themselves that’s a gift.
You can all caps, kick and whine about it all you want
Fuck this directed abuse. I’ve been sick of your shit, so I yell about the subject. In return, you keep sneering about me, personally. Like I’m just putting on a big mad huffy display, because there’s no way your behavior is infuriating for reasons explicitly stated. It is in fact fallacious to dismiss arguments and conclusions out-of-hand based on tone.
You assert ‘it’s not that big a deal!’ like being haaalf the goddamn industry is peanuts. Like there’s no possible way anyone could really be opposed to paying $60 and immediately getting poked in the eye for another $5, $10, $15, just to un-block part of the game they already fucking bought.
And characters in a fighting game are the least egregious example. You can squint and pretend that’s an expansion. Can we at least agree that hats shouldn’t count? While you’re writing that legislation to unfuck the worst of this rampant abuse, without just saying “ban this business model,” do you wanna try defending the grindstone of induced demand for cosmetics? Sell me on the economic sanity of one item costing a third as much as an entire AAA game. Diagram how much work had to go into that Peter Griffin skin, compared to the entirety of Baldur’s Gate 3.
I’m afraid the number of employees, the time it takes to make things
Budgets follow revenue. Never the other way around.
Budgets are high because revenue is high. If companies didn’t expect five bajillion dollars from players, they wouldn’t spend two bajillion pursuing them. It does not require two bajillion dollars, bare minimum, to make… a game.
Expected revenue is only so high because this bullshit expertly manipulates irrational spending. Lootboxes made it so painfully blatant that even children noticed. Alternatives only disguise the parts that people recognize. They’re still dragged across fishhooks to spend more than they would as a rational purchasing decision. You don’t like subscriptions, right? Nobody really does. But a lot of those people spent more than a subscription would cost, and still tell themselves the game is free.
The things you are endorsing are part of “the business model”, as you call it. Tools to expand the revenue of the game without moving the base price because people have gotten so used to it.
Ask yourself how there can be a “stable upper bound” to a product for four decades when inflation in that period has literally tripled the average price of products. Especially when the budget of a game has skyrocketed not by a factor of three, but of a hundred in that time.
I’ve told you how. Selling more units will only go so far. The install base of a home console peaked with the PS2. Chipping away at distribution costs is a finished process. The amount brick and mortar retailers used to keep is gone. The cost of shipping is gone. The huge cost of cartridges got turned into cheap optical media and then trivial bandwidth for digital distribution. There’s no more cost to shave on that front.
But because those processes kept “a stable upper bound” (not true, by the way, cart costs meant cartridge games went as high as 100 bucks, but let’s roll with it). People got used to a sticker price, the industry kept finding ways to cover increasing costs while keeping the sticker price the same. Eventually that meant selling the extra cost post-release.
And yeah, that has downsides. What used to be a game experience meant to drive up-front sales is now a storefront. That’s a different way to design things. It’s not inherently bad, you can make good games in that model, but left to its own devices it can get very rote and intrusive. And yes, abusive if not handled correctly. It definitely needs oversight and control.
The problem is, you can’t just wave a magic wand and make the economics make sense. That stuff is covering for that “stable upper bound”. Costs don’t follow revenue, costs follow costs and are driven by competition and the state of the art and capped by revenue. A programmer makes the money they make, not because there’s game revenue flowing, but because that’s what the market for all software will pay. People will, and often do, take a bit of a hit to work in an industry they like and are passionate about, but it’s neither sustainable nor fair to pay people peanuts when Google is across the street paying six figures. A concept artist or a 3D modeller charges the same to GTA or to a Marvel movie. As it should be. Many would argue they don’t charge enough to either.
So yeah, no, you’re not looking at this the right way. Which is not to say some of the things you note aren’t bad or haven’t gotten worse. But you’re dumbing this down a lot to fit the black and white terms of your outrage in a way that makes it more satisfying to rant about it online when the problem has a lot more nuance and many more hard constraints than you’re making it out to have.
Your anger doesn’t make this simple, and your anger at me pointing out that you’re using your performative anger to dumb this down doesn’t make it less true.
The business model is charging money for shit already in the game. That’s all we’re talking about. Actual new content you have to pay to own, even if it’s fucking horse armor, is fundamentally better than this growing problem. This problem that is… already… half the fucking industry.
The objectively visible general upper bound can be explained by the skyrocketing sales numbers for products. Doom famously outsold Windows 95. Both sold fewer copies than Centipede for Dreamcast. Inflation hasn’t got shit on how the gaming industry exploded, and did billions of dollars in business, well before this abusive business model existed. Billions is plenty to make a god damned video game.
Increasing costs reflect increasing revenue.
Why the fuck would any business spend more money than they thought the product could make?
The install base of a home console peaked with the PS2.
… and GTA V sold more copies than the number of PS2s that ever existed. Crazy, right? It’s almost like hardware and software are different fucking concepts. Like sixty bucks for a hundred thousand cartridges is less money than sixty bucks for ten million downloads. Weird!
What used to be a game experience meant to drive up-front sales is now a storefront.
An intolerable failure of industry. It’s bad, actually. It’s naked manipulation for unlimited access to your wallet. Holy shit, how do you write ‘games are storefronts now’ and think that’s okay?
There is no reason what-so-ever that games need to cost so much that they demand this abuse. It has never been easier to make a game. But budgets follow revenue, so executives demand more more more, because the last game sold like crazy. Then we get this ramp of diminishing returns for a thousand people crunching eighty-hour weeks to produce hyperrealistic models for a game that makes only one billion dollars - so they’re all fired.
If the whole industry cratered, games would still happen.
You wouldn’t get AAAAA skin pores on aliens in 8K resolution or whateverthefuck. You wouldn’t get seven-year projects with million-word scripts. But you’d still get games, at whatever price point and sales figures worked, because it’s not like the tech got harder to use. It only ballooned to such extremes because it could.
People will, and often do, take a bit of a hit to work in an industry they like and are passionate about
Systemic abuse by an industry that should’ve been unionized by 1980. Publishers could outright say they’re abusing the constant supply of eager young idiots who want to make games and it would not impact the supply of said bright young idiots. It’s unsustainable because it’s abuse, you dense bastard.
My anger with you is not performative. Fuck you for that derailing lie. I am genuinely pissed-off dealing with your repeated horseshit. I did not call out your trolling because I thought calling you a troll was effective rhetoric - I did it because sane conversation was impossible, without highlighting your hypocrisy.
Good. The alternative is inseparable from providing everyone the whole roster, but pretending each character is worth twelve fucking dollars, so a generic fighting game is somehow worth five times what any sane person would pay up-front for one game.
The counterproposal is just selling the god-damned game, with all the fffucking characters. Or adding free shit as incentive to attract new customers and retain existing players. Or selling an honest-to-god sequel or expansion, instead of charging expansion kinds of money for the bare minimum of content.
Then they should charge a subscription or die off.
People make rational spending decisions about subscriptions. They’re not popular. People don’t like that sort of thing, when you treat them honestly and fairly, instead of tricking them.
I have negative patience for the idea that a company spending money justifies whatever horseshit monetization scheme they propose. As if, because they’ve already blown half a billion dollars, and intend to keep burning more, that makes it okay to charge eight actual dollars for an imaginary hat. Fuck that noise. If your company has ongoing costs - announce ongoing fees. Don’t play stupid games about tricking a fraction of players into spending their whole paycheck.
Fuck that and fuck anyone who told you that. You own things that you buy. That’s what the money was for. The first sale doctrine knocked this shit down, an entire century ago, and it’s only through corruption and nuh-uh-ing that software has retained any form of special consideration. If I bought Peter Jackson’s King Kong on HD-DVD and King King The Game Of The Movie for Xbox 360, I own both equally. Whatever text is written inside to pretend otherwise is meaningless. I own that text, too.
If you believe any mumbo-jumbo saying otherwise then you should demand its immediate repeal. You should be morally opposed to its continued existence. Defend your basic right to own products.
THEN WHAT DOES IT FUCKING MEAN TO BUY THE GODDAMN GAME?
Even subscription MMOs pull this shit! Games that have obviously covered their ongoing costs, for twenty years straight, are double-dipping out of naked greed. Nobody’s objections matter. The abuse is worth more than whatever dent could be made by people rightly saying, fuck this abuse.
Those games have this too.
Were you not listening?
This shit is in FLAGSHIP FRANCHISE, SEVENTY-DOLLAR, SINGLE-PLAYER GAMES. It costs almost nothing to add. The backlash barely matters, because some fucks will lurch out to defend it. The marketing value of ‘we won’t rob you!’ is dwindling, and again, can become a lie after you bought it.
Counting on media literacy to stop direct manipulation for profit is a failure to acknowledge how any marketing has ever worked. Have you seen reality lately? Educating the rubes never fucking works, because the people manipulating them for direct monetary gain are better at tricking them than you could ever be at convincing them they have been tricked.
Yeeeeah, you may just be angry on principle about things that don’t merit black-and-white, this-is-an-abomination rage.
No, I won’t wait three extra years and pay 200 bucks for a fighting game to see if I like it and then only play ten percent of the roster. I find it very convenient to get a base game roster so the dev team doesn’t have to bet the farm that the game will be successful without knowing what will happen and I don’t have to pay three times as much or get a third of the game. Hell, that particular example has improved significantly, it used to be if I wanted to play Cammy on SF2 I had to pay full price to repurchase every other character in the game all over again. Screw that. You can get a character for five bucks these days. Gimme the characters one by one forever.
And I absolutely prefer MTX over subscriptions. All day any day. More convenient, typically cheaper and exactly as problematic as every other games-as-service model, no more, no less.
You can all caps and swear all you want, but digital distribution is giving you what it’s giving you. You don’t own your Steam games, that’s just how it works.
This model has fundamental downsides that need to be addressed and probably need legislative intervention to do so, but the outcome is not going to be “you can only buy things in a static format and devs are forbidden from selling you expansions”. Even if it made sense to regulate things to that extent, it’s inconvenient, expensive and impractical. You may feel strongly about this in all caps, but… yeah, you are in a tiny majority.
By all means go find games that give you that experience. GOG is right there for you. I like it, I use it, go give them money.
But I am not advocating for a blanket ban on all DLC, microtransactions, server-dependent games or free to play games. Those are good things. I like them. They have full-on upsides. They just need to be regulated to the point where consumers are protected and media isn’t an entirely fungible thing built on planned obsolescence. Those are two very different bars.
Who asked?
At no point have you understood this argument.
I came out the gate with a favorable comparison for horse armor.
And somehow the least tolerable part of this strawman is ‘you’re just angry, you only feel strongly, juuust because you disagreeee.’ It pains me to leave this abuse-promoting fluff unanswered, but you’re not listening anyway.
I mean, your last statement included, and I quote:
and
I do understand the argument and you do sound pretty angry, man.
For the record,
You asked.
Made me double check the post name, that’s how weird that response was.
Look, we’re not going to agree, feel free to move on, but don’t chalk up people pointing out that your screed is uncompromising and emotional to high school fallacies. Have some intellectual honesty about it, at least.
No shit I’m mad at you. But ‘you’re just angry’ is an insulting dismissal. Like I don’t have reasons. Like there’s not a whole-ass argument, behind all these highlighted barbs. Tone policing is trolling and I reject it utterly.
Making shit up about a delayed game that costs $200 is also trolling. What you were asked was buying games like how buying games worked for the prior forty years.
Oh fuck off.
You quoted an all-caps counterargument you have no response to. This shit is in full-priced games. It’s creeping into, if not literally everything, then enough shit that ‘just don’t buy it’ plainly doesn’t work. This systemic problem is novel, intolerable, and getting worse. And you would pretend that nuh-uh, because I experienced emotion while rubbing your nose in it.
It takes a lot to waste my time. Congratulations.
Alright, I’m not restarting the whole thing over, but no, it’s not how buying games worked. We’ve gone over this. Expansions, re-releases and add-ons aren’t new.
I’m not calling you out for being angry because you’re angry. I’m calling you out for being angry because you’re making sweeping, absolute statements that are reductive, dogmatic and missing nuance and you’re using anger to hide your disproportionate claims behind an appearance of outrage.
And then you acted like pointing that out was fallacious, which I’m not particularly inclined to let go.
For the record, I agree with you that voting with your wallet is nonsense and not a good way to regulate bad practices. You need actual regulation for that.
Also for the record, I didn’t “make up” anything. If the question is whether you pay for everything up front or piecemeal then the cost of the base package is going up. That is not up for debate, either. There is no such thing as “full price”. Games aren’t exempt from inflation just because people have gotten used to them being sixty bucks for forty years.
Granted, some of that is the fault of game publishers squirming away from price bumps. First by hiding inflation in the lowering costs of media (and eventually going full digital) and then hiding the costs in broken down games where the rest of the cost was distributed through the experience. I’m not against that in principle, but at some point the bandaid needs to be pulled, because there’s no more media and retail cost to shave and you can’t keep piling up MTX forever. So yes, if you want the equivalent of three seasons of DLC in Street Fighter to be in the box, then the box takes twice as long to make and costs a lot more money.
You can all caps, kick and whine about it all you want, but I’m afraid the number of employees, the time it takes to make things and the concept of multiplying them together are not going to budge. I’m not trolling, I’m arguing that I’d rather decide if I want to pay the full 200 bucks after paying the first 60 for the first half of the game as opposed to taking a gamble on the full amount. That is not just not dismissable as a fallacy, it’s pretty obvious.
Or the problem.
You’re not listening. Those are fine. Those are what I am aggressively endorsing. Those are how things should work.
Do you even listen to yourself? Forty years of a stable upper bound and it somehow doesn’t count. Undebatable! Come on. $200 games obviously do not exist, unless you get a big dumb statue with it.
If you wanna lump in everything you’d pay, into the future - this shit costs more.
That’s how it makes more money.
Either you’re paying at least as much, for a lot less - or someone else is getting fucked ten times harder. I care about that victim. I care about you. Your own personal history includes blowing a thousand dollars to not own a game. That kind of obscene overspending is the plainly-stated goal of this business model. They want to do that to as many people as possible. Key figures give public talks about “whale hunting.” That is what nearly everything is becoming. You’ll pay more to pay more so you can pay more, and apparently, some people convince themselves that’s a gift.
Fuck this directed abuse. I’ve been sick of your shit, so I yell about the subject. In return, you keep sneering about me, personally. Like I’m just putting on a big mad huffy display, because there’s no way your behavior is infuriating for reasons explicitly stated. It is in fact fallacious to dismiss arguments and conclusions out-of-hand based on tone.
You assert ‘it’s not that big a deal!’ like being haaalf the goddamn industry is peanuts. Like there’s no possible way anyone could really be opposed to paying $60 and immediately getting poked in the eye for another $5, $10, $15, just to un-block part of the game they already fucking bought.
And characters in a fighting game are the least egregious example. You can squint and pretend that’s an expansion. Can we at least agree that hats shouldn’t count? While you’re writing that legislation to unfuck the worst of this rampant abuse, without just saying “ban this business model,” do you wanna try defending the grindstone of induced demand for cosmetics? Sell me on the economic sanity of one item costing a third as much as an entire AAA game. Diagram how much work had to go into that Peter Griffin skin, compared to the entirety of Baldur’s Gate 3.
Budgets follow revenue. Never the other way around.
Budgets are high because revenue is high. If companies didn’t expect five bajillion dollars from players, they wouldn’t spend two bajillion pursuing them. It does not require two bajillion dollars, bare minimum, to make… a game.
Expected revenue is only so high because this bullshit expertly manipulates irrational spending. Lootboxes made it so painfully blatant that even children noticed. Alternatives only disguise the parts that people recognize. They’re still dragged across fishhooks to spend more than they would as a rational purchasing decision. You don’t like subscriptions, right? Nobody really does. But a lot of those people spent more than a subscription would cost, and still tell themselves the game is free.
The things you are endorsing are part of “the business model”, as you call it. Tools to expand the revenue of the game without moving the base price because people have gotten so used to it.
Ask yourself how there can be a “stable upper bound” to a product for four decades when inflation in that period has literally tripled the average price of products. Especially when the budget of a game has skyrocketed not by a factor of three, but of a hundred in that time.
I’ve told you how. Selling more units will only go so far. The install base of a home console peaked with the PS2. Chipping away at distribution costs is a finished process. The amount brick and mortar retailers used to keep is gone. The cost of shipping is gone. The huge cost of cartridges got turned into cheap optical media and then trivial bandwidth for digital distribution. There’s no more cost to shave on that front.
But because those processes kept “a stable upper bound” (not true, by the way, cart costs meant cartridge games went as high as 100 bucks, but let’s roll with it). People got used to a sticker price, the industry kept finding ways to cover increasing costs while keeping the sticker price the same. Eventually that meant selling the extra cost post-release.
And yeah, that has downsides. What used to be a game experience meant to drive up-front sales is now a storefront. That’s a different way to design things. It’s not inherently bad, you can make good games in that model, but left to its own devices it can get very rote and intrusive. And yes, abusive if not handled correctly. It definitely needs oversight and control.
The problem is, you can’t just wave a magic wand and make the economics make sense. That stuff is covering for that “stable upper bound”. Costs don’t follow revenue, costs follow costs and are driven by competition and the state of the art and capped by revenue. A programmer makes the money they make, not because there’s game revenue flowing, but because that’s what the market for all software will pay. People will, and often do, take a bit of a hit to work in an industry they like and are passionate about, but it’s neither sustainable nor fair to pay people peanuts when Google is across the street paying six figures. A concept artist or a 3D modeller charges the same to GTA or to a Marvel movie. As it should be. Many would argue they don’t charge enough to either.
So yeah, no, you’re not looking at this the right way. Which is not to say some of the things you note aren’t bad or haven’t gotten worse. But you’re dumbing this down a lot to fit the black and white terms of your outrage in a way that makes it more satisfying to rant about it online when the problem has a lot more nuance and many more hard constraints than you’re making it out to have.
Your anger doesn’t make this simple, and your anger at me pointing out that you’re using your performative anger to dumb this down doesn’t make it less true.
The business model is charging money for shit already in the game. That’s all we’re talking about. Actual new content you have to pay to own, even if it’s fucking horse armor, is fundamentally better than this growing problem. This problem that is… already… half the fucking industry.
The objectively visible general upper bound can be explained by the skyrocketing sales numbers for products. Doom famously outsold Windows 95. Both sold fewer copies than Centipede for Dreamcast. Inflation hasn’t got shit on how the gaming industry exploded, and did billions of dollars in business, well before this abusive business model existed. Billions is plenty to make a god damned video game.
Increasing costs reflect increasing revenue.
Why the fuck would any business spend more money than they thought the product could make?
… and GTA V sold more copies than the number of PS2s that ever existed. Crazy, right? It’s almost like hardware and software are different fucking concepts. Like sixty bucks for a hundred thousand cartridges is less money than sixty bucks for ten million downloads. Weird!
An intolerable failure of industry. It’s bad, actually. It’s naked manipulation for unlimited access to your wallet. Holy shit, how do you write ‘games are storefronts now’ and think that’s okay?
There is no reason what-so-ever that games need to cost so much that they demand this abuse. It has never been easier to make a game. But budgets follow revenue, so executives demand more more more, because the last game sold like crazy. Then we get this ramp of diminishing returns for a thousand people crunching eighty-hour weeks to produce hyperrealistic models for a game that makes only one billion dollars - so they’re all fired.
If the whole industry cratered, games would still happen.
You wouldn’t get AAAAA skin pores on aliens in 8K resolution or whateverthefuck. You wouldn’t get seven-year projects with million-word scripts. But you’d still get games, at whatever price point and sales figures worked, because it’s not like the tech got harder to use. It only ballooned to such extremes because it could.
Systemic abuse by an industry that should’ve been unionized by 1980. Publishers could outright say they’re abusing the constant supply of eager young idiots who want to make games and it would not impact the supply of said bright young idiots. It’s unsustainable because it’s abuse, you dense bastard.
My anger with you is not performative. Fuck you for that derailing lie. I am genuinely pissed-off dealing with your repeated horseshit. I did not call out your trolling because I thought calling you a troll was effective rhetoric - I did it because sane conversation was impossible, without highlighting your hypocrisy.
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