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Electronic Arts, THQ Look To Microtransactions
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Forbes:
"Electronic Arts, one of the world's largest games publishers, on Monday partnered with microtransactions platform Live Gamer to bolster its online game efforts. ... THQ also announced a partnership with Live Gamer last week to facilitate microtransactions of its online PC and mobile games in North America. ... Worldwide sales of virtual items are expected to reach $7 billion by 2015, according to online games research firm DFC Intelligence. Fast-growing social games companies like Zynga, the maker of FarmVille, are leading the charge. The company is estimated to be pulling in around $600 million in revenue annually, largely from the sale of virtual goods. Americans are also growing comfortable with the microtransactions model. Game companies point to the music industry, where consumers buy 99-cent digital tracks instead of full albums on CDs."
Note that in this case the games itself would be free like in asian markets and I doubt that the normal games are going anywhere. This is most likely to expand their market. There are a lot of people, especially teens, who rather pay for individual items than go to a store and pay full $60 for a game.
It also makes piracy really hard, especially when the games are played online and the info about items and addons you own are on the server. It's practically impossible to pirate that. With the 90% piracy rate on PC games it's not surprising that publishers are looking for new ways, even if that's sad. PC gamers really need to think about their future and not try to get everything for free, because it just leads to publishers making games where it's not possible - shitty online games with microtransactions for the housewifes.
for "Nickel-and-Diming"
So when you think about a microtransaction, you think it's a small amount of money. There are two ways for a studio to profit from this: Either they get a wider group of people paying for a game for less money, or they charge so many micropayments to their core users that it winds up netting out the same as if people just bought the game in the first place. In the former, more people get to enjoy the game for free, but if the game doesn't get REALLY widespread acceptance, then they default to the latter, adding more and more micropayments to people that don't realize how much they are spending until they have dropped $100 or more on the game.
Should the latter happen, then the whole idea of micropayments will start to look shady and people will avoid any game that employs the tactic. In other words: It's a slippery slope for all but the most popular games.
Most games are much more like movies or books than a series of separate and distinct songs.
Who would ever think of buying a book by the chapter?
Just release a sequel if you want to milk it a bit.
Especially for story driven games, I would much prefer to just buy the whole thing than to get stuck at a virtual toll-booth every time I was about to make it to the next level.
Yup. They killed a thriving industry, now they're looking to squeeze blood from the stone they made out of that vibrant, resilient hobby. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze.
It's gruff, but that's the way I see it. The faster these arrogant publishers go out of business, the quicker we can start over. When they've gone, nothing of value will have been lost.
This all started with floppy disks and baggies. We don't need Hollywood-style production values to play and enjoy, and we can't abide the cost of corresponding Hollywood-style accounting and mismanagement that goes with it. I don't see the value of adding all that production cost to what amounts to the same crappy FPS, or a makeover on "The Sims."
Let it die already, fast, the sooner we can all go back to enjoying weird little games in baggies, and maybe find something interesting to play as a result.
--
Toro
Microtransactions have spawned an entire group of gamers who find nearly as much fun from paying the game for free and going to insane lengths to get something for nothing than they do from just playing the game.
Other people might pay $10 or $20, then realize what they've done and quit the game in disgust, especially as game executives get more greedy and obvious with their requests for money.
Either way there's a limited pool of people who are paying and that pool is shrinking fast. I personally wouldn't invest in a microtransaction funded game as there's better opportunities that exist for long term growth.
Since their introduction, microtransactions have been subverted from their original purpose of funding content development after the game's release, and used instead to lock out content already on the disc until the user pays (e.g. Resident Evil 5's multiplayer, Street Fighter IV's costumes). This was little different from practice in the past, where content would be withheld for a future expansion pack, but is it all that different?
To use a car analogy, withholding content for an expansion pack and nickel-and-diming with microtransactions seems to me like the difference between buying a car with the ABS option separate for extra cost, and integrating ABS into the car, but requiring the customer to pay to unlock it. Are they really any different? My gut tells me the second scenario is somehow worse, but I can't quantify exactly how it differs from the first scenario.
It's working so well for the airlines; gaming companies want in on the action.
http://www.mordororbust.com/233-lotro-store-beta-screenshots/
This is for the change for Lord of the Rings Online Monthly Subscription/Lifetime membership model to a hybrid form in which you can play for free but have to buy content, similar to what they did with Dungeon & Dragons Online.
Now, having played the game a lot, I can tell give you a rough impression of the prices involved and what they mean.
Take dye. 125 points. An outfit consists of 6 items. If you color them all, that is 750 points. IF 100 points are 1 dollar (widely assumed but not yet confirmed) then that is a fairly hefty sum just to color your outfit. And the dyes can also be created in game. If you are willing to pay 750 points, then surely you would be willing to donate say 1 dollar to my paypal account for the dyes?
Crafting scrolls are even more laughable they give a 15% increase to your critical change when crafting for 30 seconds. Not a long time at all. 40 points. I crank them out by the truckload.
The content itself is far more expensive 500+ points. There are in the original game: Lone-lands, North Downs, Evendim, Forochel, Trollshaws, Misty Mountains, Angmar. 500+ points per area. Say that it is 5 dollars per area. Then you need to spend 35 dollars... how much did the entire game cost again? Oh, its budget now. 10 euro's...
So... buy them in the item shop or a real one, 20 dollar difference. And then you get all orginal classes, full character slots no chat limits etc etc.
Need I go on? It seems pretty clear that the item shop in this case is NOT the cheap option.
To be true micro transactions such items as a dye need to cost about 1 cent. But that isn't profitable. And how many dyes do they need anyway? So Lotro item mall also has scrolls that give a permanent +30 to any stat. OOOPS! Pay to Win anyone?
The old fashioned model of box-game with a monthly subscription is simple, the customer knows what he gets and so does the game company. Micro transactions only work on those who can't do maths and for those who are really going to play your game for free.
I am afraid that for regular games it will be just more of the examples we already seen. Race games were every car has to be bought, RPG's with horse armour for 1/10 of the full game.
Stop nicke and diming us to death. Gamers are not infinitly stupid and once we caught on it will be to late to change anything. We will have stopped buying and you will have gone bankrupt.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
For years now, we've been able to get around the old injustice of having to buy a whole album just for one or two of the songs which weren't crap....
Now, they'll let us buy just the levels in a game we want to play? Great! Level 1 is always such crap, no matter the game, I shouldn't have to pay for it!
Those of us with busy schedules can just purchase the final level, all the pleasure of beating the game without the time investment of all that buildup nonsense.
If there's anything more important than my ego around here, I want it caught and shot immediately.
A huge part of the allure behind home video games in the 70s and 80s was that people could now pay a higher initial cost for the games that they wanted to play and then no longer had to endure microtransactions. It seems that if EA and THQ have their way, we will slowly slide back to the days when we paid for a couple of minutes with a game rather than buying the game itself. After all, it would eliminate the used games market and ensure that developers and publishers get more of our money for less of their product. For a corporate bean-counter, that's a win-win!
This sig has been stolen. Return it to its original user for a reward.
There is a small but vocal minority that would buy the phone book if Steve Jobs offered it to them, but is anyone else still buying music? I don't know anyone who does.
If there are, what percentage of them are curmudgeonly old people too conservative or technophobic to pirate, and what percentage aren't going to die in the next 20 years?
How about lower the price of the game vs $60 + this shit?
Who is this 'god', you speak of?
Well, that's your problem, I am sueing you and you can sue this 'god' person.
how is this tactic taken seriously in a court of law?
The only add-in type DLC (as opposed to downloaded games like Deathspank or Steam games) I ever bought was the Warden's Keep add-on for Dragon Age and I felt ripped off at the end. In fact, I was incredibly irritated with Bad Company 2 for the way it sold competitive advantages to people.
Unfortunately, I'm getting old, and I think my time has passed. I grow more and more weary every year with having to hunt down DRM cracks so I can actually OWN the games I buy, and I'm not keen at all on the notion of paying for digital add-ons I'll never really have possession of. I still hook up my old NES from time to time. What are the odds that even in five years I'll be able to play with most EA's shit?
Alas, the kids are growing up with this as the norm. With Facebook and Twitter, I'm losing the privacy battle to a younger generation. I guess, eventually, I'll lose this battle too. Eventually, I'll lose the entire culture war to them and I'll just be a quaint antique from a bygone era when buying a video game meant actually going to the store and getting a little plastic cartridge full of electronics.
Maybe I'll just retire to the fireside with a nice book and a cup of hot tea. At least I can fire up the kindle when I do it to retain a little bit of an advantage over MY old man though....
...and tired of having to deal with what the average consumer has voted with their wallets about. Micro-transactions in general aren't what the problem is, it's the fact that the average consumer will gladly shell out for all the micro-transacted extras in a game.
I DON'T WANT the extra costumes in a console fighting game for 99c, I DON'T WANT any of the 20 extra levels that each cost 1/5 the full price of the base iphone game. It is currently fine that I don't want those things and can choose not to get them.
What I hate is that I have to deal with them even existing. There's no "opt out" of the extra costumes in SF4 for example. I can't click an option that says "no extra costumes shown to me" if I play it online. So I have to look straight in the face of the people who inherently cause these micro-transactions to be commercially viable. I have to see the leaderboard entries for the levels I haven't bought, all to entice me to buy them. You pay full price $60 for a standard game, and if you're one of the people who don't really like being advertised to, your game advertises all the micro transacted additional content that's available on day one.
I don't mind a dev team continuing to work on a game I enjoy, and later coming out with something they've spent extra resources to produce. I can choose whether or not to get that, like I could always have chosen not to get Brood War and continue to play Starcraft without repercussion back in the day. What I disapprove of is stuff that's available for a price on the first day just because there are people who will buy it.
What needs to stop is the stuff that actually affects what you do if you just want the base game. Extra map DLC that's not free, that now affects your ability to matchmake successfully for example. And that's only a problem because there's ONLY MATCHMAKING and no dedicated servers. I'm looking at you, CODMW2.
Just keep all the dlc and micro transacted things off the disc, and maybe a blurb of advertisement text saying new stuff is available, a button to see all DLC for example. But keep it separate and invisible if you choose not to partake in it. By all means opt me in to seeing other player's stupid costumes that they paid for, but let me opt out if I wish. Keep my matchmaking from saying "play the DLC playlists!" when I don't want to get those maps. Let me find out on my own that the vanilla matchmaking is dead and choose to go get the DLC. Have a notification that pops up after searching for a game for two minutes that says "matchmaking slow? everyone may be playing DLC", but no hints before then. This way, at least it's a compromise if micro-transactions are here to stay.
I'd also like it if there was an option to buy a game for $65 instead of $60 at the store on/near release day that guarantees all future DLC is included. That'd be awesome, because I think it would actually work because a lot of people would probably cheap out anyway.
By definition, shouldn't only millionaires think 99 cent songs are microtransactions?
Currently hooked on AMP
99 cents for a song on an album isn't the same as video game downloadable content. I can buy and enjoy a single song without owning the rest of the album. But for most downloadable content, you need to have bought the entire 50/60 USD game to even use the content.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
They have a potentially Good Thing going on, don't ruin it.
Five cents is.
Go away, sopssa. We don't like you.
If there's one thing we don't like more than sopssa, it's ad hominem moderation of comments.
I'd also like it if there was an option to buy a game for $65 instead of $60 at the store on/near release day that guarantees all future DLC is included.
Imagine how much a lifetime subscription to all of a game's DLC would cost for a game like Rock Band, with over 1,000 downloadable songs at $2 each.
How's this for an idea?
How about you develop some games worth buying *FIRST*, and *THEN* work out how you are going to sell them to me?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
... "Keep It Simple Stupid".
As an avid gamer, I've pretty much stopped buying modern games now, simply because gaming has become far too complicated for me.
I used to be able to go into a games shop, browse a good selection of titles, buy something, then go home, load it on my machine & play it. I didn't have to download new drivers, then a 500MB patch for the game before I even started to play it, I didn't have to register my security code on a web site, I didn't have to scratch my head reading the back of the game box trying to work out if I could play the game multiplayer on a local LAN.
I thought the Internet was supposed to make all this shit simpler, but it actually just gives games companies the ability to rush this shit out, secure in the knowledge they can just finish it later by publishing a patch everyone can download.
Gaming has become far too complicated for me now, and with the exception of new Fallout or Half-Life games, I'm simply not interested in any other big releases that are coming out in the future.
I keep a Windows XP installation around for gaming, otherwise everything else for me is Linux and that's how I look to get my gaming fun now - existing Linux game ports for things like Quake & Unreal Tournament, free games like Oolite and OpenTTD, running some Windows games favourites in WINE, and finally older games in emulators like DOSBox & UAE. Bunch all that together and there's far more gaming capability there than I will ever have the time to use fully...
Sorry, but I'm really not into hemorrhaging money for, in effect, games that I am renting rather than owning, no matter how "micro" the micro-transactions are and my model for games companies is quite simple:
"I buy your shit & play it, if it's good fun and good value for money, then I'm pretty certain I'll come back and buy more shit later. In the mean time, kindly piss off and leave me to my fun."
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I don't see the real gripe here. Everyone's so pissy about micro-transactions being yet another way for the big bad industry to screw you. Seriously? They're giving you an opportunity to see if you even like something before committing anything to it. Boy, I sure wish other industries would screw me over like that instead of forcing me to drive a 50% devaluation off the lot...
Okay, so they're figuring out that arcades were the way to go and are now wrapping back around to it. So what? What is it now, 12 million subscriptions to WoW or some such nonsense? Apparently the idea of "ownership" as you're defining it doesn't seem to matter to them, and hell - you're probably even one of them.
You know, there was a "gaming" that used a similar model... D&D, anyone? Personally, I think DDO was brilliant when they went back to their roots and converted it so that anyone could enjoy, but just like the "modules" of yesteryear, people could still pay a small amount for additional content.
This is a good trend here, and it's not like the "owned" games will go away, just that it's high-time for a more broad adoption of this model as well.
All-in-all, I think people just like to complain. ;)
Good karma is like social intolerance; apparently everyone has it but me.
THQ published Relic's Company of Heroes. That game kicks serious ass.
But if you're in your mid-fourties now, you'll be in your mid-sixties in twenty years. That's just shy of your sell-by date. I wasn't trying to be mean, but it's well accepted that social change happens to a large degree through older generations passing on.
I'm happy to pay musicians for music, but I can't in good conscience fund terrorist organizations like the RIAA.
Good luck with the colostomy bag, but I don't imagine you could afford me.
Surely most people will still be spending roughly the same amount on games that they always have. If stuff gets too expensive then they will just buy less extras and do something else instead.
I put my books on Amazon, Smashwords, Demonoid, ISOHunt and Pirate Bay. Search for 'Michael Cargill'