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Cliff Bleszinski: Vote With Your Dollars
silentbrad writes "Cliff Bleszinski, formerly of Epic Games, posted a blog entry titled 'Nickels, dimes, and quarters' yesterday, advocating that gamers dissatisfied with the current trend toward DLC and microtransactions should vote with their wallets. Quoting: 'The video game industry is just that. An industry. Which means that it exists in a capitalistic world. You know, a free market. A place where you're welcome to spend your money on whatever you please or to refrain from spending that money. ... Adjusted for inflation, your average video game is actually cheaper than it ever has been. Never mind the ratio of the hours of joy you get from a game per dollar compared to film. To produce a high quality game it takes tens of millions of dollars, and when you add in marketing that can get up to 100+ million. ... I've seen a lot of comments online about microtransactions. They're a dirty word lately, it seems. Gamers are upset that publishers/developers are "nickel and diming them." They're raging at "big and evil corporations who are clueless and trying to steal their money." I'm going to come right out and say it. I'm tired of EA being seen as "the bad guy." I think it's bulls*** that EA has the 'scumbag EA' memes on Reddit and that Good Guy Valve can Do No Wrong. ... If you don't like EA, don't buy their games. If you don't like their microtransactions, don't spend money on them. It's that simple. ... The market as I have previously stated is in such a sense of turmoil that the old business model is either evolving, growing, or dying. No one really knows. "Free to play" aka "Free to spend 4 grand on it" is here to stay, like it or not. ... People like to act like we should go back to "the good ol' days" before microtransactions but they forget that arcades were the original change munchers. Those games were designed to make you lose so that you had to keep spending money on them. Ask any of the old Midway vets about their design techniques. The second to last boss in Mortal Kombat 2 was harder than the last boss, because when you see the last boss that's sometimes enough for a gamer. ... If you don't like the games, or the sales techniques, don't spend your money on them. You vote with your dollars.'"
I've been boycotting all the games with DRM and DLC for over a decade and it hasn't done shit.
Also it's really too bad that there was nothing between the DLC Hell of the early 2010s and the Change-Muncher Hell of the 1980s...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If you don't like their microtransactions, don't spend money on them. It's that simple.
Sometimes I don't mind microtransactions, but they have power to ruin otherwise perfectly good game, and that's my major problem with them.
On the other hand, for an enormous amount of gamers, older titles that are available for very little money continue to provide enormous rewards, negating the need to spend lots of money on the latest titles, even if those latest titles "are cheaper" than new games have ever been.
Yes, the whizbang graphics of the latest multi-million-dollar title are cool and all, but if I can get the same gameplay pleasure out of something a few years old, the latest title needs to drastically reduce its price in order to attract my purchase.
Sure, we can vote with our dollars, and we do. At the same time, we can freely complain about EA adding micro transactions, or any/all forms of DRM.
If you have noticed, if enough customers complain about something, sometimes, things change. So asking us to just vote with our dollars is asking us to reduce our potential power. So if you don't like EA's microtransactions, or any form of always on DRM, then boycott them, AND complain about it verbosely everywhere you want to.
per se, but when a company releases DLC WITH the game, users feel that it should have been part of the game to start, not an additional charge.
If the same company released the same DLC 6 weeks after release, no one would raise an eyebrow.
Gamers have just as much right to whine about a company's pricing policy as the industry insiders have a right to whine about their customers' dislike of their policy. So the industry's getting sick of the complaining? Presumably, they're worried that if there's too much publicity of the issue, customers actually will start voting with their dollars.
He's right, it's a business. A business that ignores its customers doesn't usually last too long.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
We already do you pompus twit. We rail against companies like EA for many reasons, and the games they produce is only part of it. We also rail against them because they are a HORRIBLE COMPANY TO WORK FOR. I've been approached twice for a job with EA in the last year, and twice I've politely declined despite the numbers looking good. Why? Because they suck.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
... gaming addicts (you should know if you are one or not) are the least mentally and/or emotionally disciplined people. So talk all you like about "vote with your dollars... quarters... dimes... nickels... pennies..." and they may even agree with you (providing they paid attention long enough and actually understood any of what you said) but the moment something they want appears, it won't matter.
But this is essentially true of ALL humans. Any time people want something enough, they will mentally and emotionally justify it in the most ridiculous ways denying and defying all reason, morality or logic to their deaths. We all have that flaw to varying degrees. (Except for me... I'm perfect... j/k)
Marketers know how to exploit this human weakness. And without proper law restricting what marketers can do, we will not see an end to it. And it's not like suck measures are without precedent. Look to tobacco, drugs and alcohol advertisements. For that matter, when was the last time you saw an ad on TV for firearms? Wonder why that is?
On the other hand, ever watch some of those late-night, off-branded TV networks? The ridiculous ads and pitches there? Most of them are disgustingly targetted at the stupid, the old or both. "Hey! I've got sonic hearing!!" I'm not saying there is a hell, but if there was one, the people who peddle that stuff certainly need to relocate there. But back to my point.
Gamers -- especially gamer addicts -- will not stand up for what they believe in over getting that next achievement unlocked.
I remember buying many new and re-release full price games for £1.99 in the 80's.
Console games seemed ridiculously expensive my comparison.
I'll readily admit to spending money on microtransactions that I thought were worthwhile. Turbine's games, for instance, at least have some value in some of the transactions. The issue is that EA is so bad at veiling their attempt to suck their customers dry.
Take, for instance, today's reports from The Verge on EA's Real Racing 3. In this game, you pay Real Money to repair damage to your car, and you pay More Real Money to make those repairs take less time.
What they essentially did was say, "Here's a game that totally looks awesome, but we made it suck so that you can pay us money to unsuck it." And worse yet, they did this in a game that already has ample opportunities for purchasing value-added content (e.g., new cars, new tracks, new music, special paintjobs, etc.).
I guess when they sued Zynga over that whole Sims ripoff, they started looking at what Zynga was doing and thought it was a wonderful idea, so then they just ripped off Zynga's entire business model and turned it to eleven.
I don't buy EA games for completely different reasons regarding design and other issues I've encountered. I do play some of their Free to play. I love the free to play model because now friends can play together with little investment in the game. Most free to play games are not play-to-win. The stuff people spend tons of money is really quite pointless, but if they are supporting the game then that's fine by me. It's about like buying plastic spinners for your rims. To each his own.
I don't really care about micro transactions. If the game itself was worth $60 and you bought it, you have it. Years ago once you bought a game, you expected to play it awhile and then be done with it. Now we have DLC's that extend the enjoyment, and if the money isn't worth it to you, then don't buy it.
It's not like they are shutting you out of what you already payed for. That's what I'd really worry about, is when you put alot of money into something, but it isn't really yours. A lot of people got hosed when the Company of Heroes free2play went under. Think of all the gaming networks that have went under. Lots of games only supported multiplayer through those networks. Only in some cases did people figure out unstable hacks to get the multiplayer working again without those networks. Do you think these places like EA/Origin and Steam will be around forever? I only buy games on Steam that really cheap(i.e. old or on a big sale). I buy them knowing they won't be there forever, yet I enjoy the convenience of an easy reliable installation. I have to say that is one thing that is nice, is no surprises/junk systray junk you used to get with standalone installers. IMO Steam has a pretty unintrusive design, which I find respectable. When you right-click Exit it stops the downloads, etc. They don't even use their user's as torrent distribution network, which I bet a lot of other companies in their shoes would do.
Like the vote that you make when the candidate is swearing up and down hand over fist that they're the person that's gonna make things right, and their opponents are the ones with ludicrous ideas and the failing records.
Like the vote that you regret when the candidate changes direction and no longer toes the party line but becomes a well-paid backbencher.
Like the vote that you can no longer take back because what's done is done, and your only recourse is to go to the courts or whatever dispute resolution has been set up specifically to deal with the nonsense in the most bureaucratically obtuse method possible.
Yes, microtransactions fit the vote perfectly. Unfortunately, not voting is not the way to get your voice heard. It's only as effective as abstaining, which just removes one potential vote from the pool.
If you don't like EA, don't buy their games.
I won't. Thank you for the advice. And, yes, EA is evil. It's companies like EA that don't care at all about their products and only care about their profits that give capitalism a bad name. Perhaps that's the biggest problem with large companies: that they tend to lose sight of their original purpose which is rarely just to make money.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
DLC and so on exist because they make money.
If someone comes along and makes *more* money with a different business model people will flock to that.
It's not just 'don't buy it' it's 'buy something else in the same industry that is a better value'. If you want to sell me a DLC for 20 bucks (think Dragonborn expansion to Skyrim) that's a good value. It's basically an expansion pack without the box. But then you have to actually say how many copies you sold, so that everyone else knows this is a good idea.
If you make some horse armour for 5 dollars and sell a 1000 copies of it, the market has already spoken. If you make an expansion pack for 20 bucks and sell 5 million of them, the market has spoken too. But without some sales figures (and those two numbers were entirely made up), there's no easy way to know what does and what doesn't work.
If you look at Saints Row the Third on PC, on Steam. There are 3 options for the game (ignoring the strategy guide). The base game (40 dollars), the game with all DLC (50 dollars) or the all the DLC individually for 82. I'm going to go out on a limb and say they aren't selling a lot of the 'all the dlc' individually. All that DLC for 10 bucks that's not a bad deal. All that DLC for 80 is terrible. But well, I'm pretty sure it's only really rich or stupid people buying for 80 dollars what they can get for 50.
I don't make micropayments. I appreciate games which make it clear when a player has purchased an item. "You were killed by custom sniper rifle." I think to myself, they paid 30 cents to be superior.
I do sometimes pay per-month fees, if the game itself is good. I think this is justified for MMO games, due to server and bandwidth requirements.
For games such as the sims, I buy the expansions but would not pay for continuous on-line DRM.
It feels so good to play this way, it makes the pay-to-excel games actually more fun. The challenge becomes to counter-snipe the guy with the 30 cent rifle, unless you get a chance to blow up a 50 cent air ship.
Why does it cost 10s of millions to make a game? I've seen indie games like minecraft or terarria or a bunch of kickstarter games like FTL be very successful and actually fun to play rather than the latest COD15 or madden 2531 clones or remakes that have high production values. I don't think games that are budgeted like Hollywood movies are the only ones i would consider games.
What i don't like is after you charge 50$ you then charge extra for things like new content. Especially zero day released DLCs. Basically what you did was rip out things that should of been in the game and then charged people extra for it on release. Back in the good old days, missing or new content was just given with new patches and there was no charge for them.
I don't buy EA's games already. There are two problems. They continue to make crappy games, and the industry tends to follow the big leaders examples. It isn't like EA is making bucketloads of money with that strategy, they lost, what, a few hundred million last year? Something like that. Obviously, people are already not buying their games. But they aren't listening. Instead, they make Real Racing 3 and charge $80 for a single ingame car, and they've stated explicitly that they intend to focus even more on F2P, microtransactions, mobile games, and DLC to increase their revenue. Why? Because they've seen how much that strategy can make, without realizing they probably never will because their games are crap (and their prices are as well). Then we have other people who look at them going down that path, think "thats a good idea", and overall we end up with lots more shit games, and whats more, games that could be good. You see, F2P can work, but not in every case, and not when run by incompetent money-grabbing arseholes.
Which brings me to my second point. The publishers own lots of promising IP. For example, EA owns Bioware. Bioware was an amazing studio. They made one of my favorite games ever, KOTOR, and Baldur's gate, and similar. Now, though, they've ended up being destroyed and ripped apart by EA's focus on making money in the short term (which, as mentioned above, doesn't even work), and instead of producing gems like they have, they produce crap like SWTOR (sure, some people might like it, but it's nothing at heart but a cheap WoW rip-off), or the "ending" to Mass Effect 3. So we end up with games that should have been good, and even in some cases are if you move past the micro-transaction crap (like the aforementioned Real Racing 3 aparently is), but are simply stupid thanks to the publishers greed.
So in short, people already are voting with their wallets. The big studios just aren't listening, because they're run by a bunch of marketers and buzzword-obsessed executives, not by the people who actually care about the games themselves (except, of course, for the privately own Valve, which is why so many people praise them). Plus, of course, you can't get everyone to stop spending money, especially because a lot of gamers genuinely do like playing AAA titles, and if we stopped playing every game with DLC we simply wouldn't be playing AAA titles anymore. We'd just prefer not to be asked to insert our credit card every 5 minutes.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
I already vote with my dollars. Also, someone doing the "Well, we're stuck with it and you're just feeling entitled. Suddenly getting upset about this microtransaciton movement is just a phase. Remember arcades? Remember expansion packs?"
I didn't know Cliffy B trolled on /v/.
Let's break it down:
In a free to play game, I have no issue with microtransactions. I didn't pay for the game, so if I want a level 72 fuzzy strap-on I should have to pay for someone's development time. Like Mechwarrior Online or anything Zynga related. You don't have to pay to play, but you get perks if you throw money their way.
In a game where I spent a little and the primary focus is multiplayer, paying for advantages isn't so bad so long as everyone has the same chance of droprate. Like Valve's Team Fortress 2. You can buy a hat, or buy a nutblaster for scout. Or if you're patient and lucky, wait for the random wheel to drop that nutblaster you wanted.
Then there's full priced games. And this is what pisses people off. I paid to play a complete game. EA frequently has things completed and ships it with the game. It's not an expansion, it's already completed code and artwork. Contrast with WB's Mortal Kombat 9. Some of the stuff was on-disc fluff like Scorpion's outfit. Other stuff wasn't completed when the game went gold, like Rain.
EA (since Cliffy used them as the example) had a game like Dragon Age where after you come to camp a guy begs you to save his grandma. And you can save his grandma for a nominal fee of $10. On day zero of the game being released.
See, the problem isn't that we're paying for extras. We're being dicked for parts of a complete game that isn't even cosmetic. You can try to bring up arcades and expansion packs, but the truth is I owned consoles so I wouldn't be nickle and dimed at the arcades (for better or worse). And PC games. I'm old enough to remember a time when they shipped a game and it was as bug free as possible. Remember bug testing? Remember when that was a thing and the testers weren't so horribly underpaid and then fired? Remember when games weren't shipped as alpha tests with microtransactions setup that you could only HOPE the devs would fix some day? Remember when patches were to fix this bizarro world of doing 38 things that might make it so you could get out of the map instead of "clicking on cancel and then yes deletes system32"? Remember when quality MATTERED? Remember when an expansion meant that the game was so popular that they went and made MORE game for you?
And since when should I boo-hoo about living in Seattle or Frisco? You can live out in Federal Way or down in Vancouver (BC or WA) you know. We live in a society where internet is relatively cheap and prominent (and tax deductible). Why aren't you guys living in a cheaper place and coding from home? Your HQ doesn't need to be more than an office space really. Look at the guys who are making Universe Sandbox 3. That is both visually stunning AND coded by people from around the globe.
So, how about you quit crying about not affording the next lamborgini and start making games (you know, the supposed reason the industry exists) instead of tiny slot machines with a cover charge in the casino?
P.S. Captcha: unmoved
EA pissed me off one time too many and have been voting with my dollars for years (full disclosure: I did get ME and ME2 as gifts, but EA got the money in any case, so I certainly played them). If I want to call EA scumbags for doing it, then I will call them scumbags and free speech too is part of that same free market. Don't get all butthurt by it.
Voting with our wallets isn't the only thing that will curb this trend. You also have to have the willpower or moral strictness to not pirate it so the companies can't interpret it as demand for their product. And every opportunity you have, explain WHY you are completely disregarding their offering. They probably still won't get it, though...
I'm not saying "you shouldn't pirate" as a blanket statement, by the way, because that would be super hypocritical of me. I'm just saying they're paying attention to what gets pirated in the big picture of "product demand"
Well, not entirely. They're considered 'scumbags' because they have a habit of buying up small studios and either gutting them for the sole purpose of eliminating a competitor or forcing them to wring out their talents and IP's until nothing is left but a shriveled husk. Maxis, Bioware, Pandemic, Origin Systems; I could keep this list going for awhile yet. EA could make an entire game based around micro-transactions, but it would still be a drop in the bucket next to the greater crime of smashing every talented studio they can hit with their money hammer just to keep the little guy down.
"To produce a high quality game it takes tens of millions of dollars, and when you add in marketing that can get up to 100+ million." when Minecraft on PC/Mac/Linux alone has sold 9.5+ million copies and who knows how many on mobile and Xbox. How much has Mojang spent on advertising? This guy living in an old model. Indie development is going strong thanks to open Internet, YouTube (fan videos), and Steam.
When someone tells you to stop complaining about a product, but to simply not buy the thing you're complaining about, what he really means is:
Shut up! I can't make you buy my crap, but your complaining is getting other people not to buy it also! Now I won't make the money I'm entitled to!
The fact that you don't actually have a copy of it does not extend to just games.
Software as as service (SaaS) is not just in games. You don't actually own it, and you get the privilege of purchasing it again and again every year.
In the Enterprise world it has been increasingly common over the last many years. SalesForce, SuccessFactors, Nimble, and other big CRM companies are delivered as SAAS. Many big companies like IBM and Oracle have been moving various systems over.
That's my same argument about the latest round of SaaS Microsoft Office.
Even consumer-facing services like DropBox, Amazon's web services, and Google Office face the same issues.
This is not just EA, and not just SaaS game systems like Steam. It is huge swaths of the software ecosystem that is moving.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Industry would like to revive the change-munching model, but they forget that once the alternative of pay-once-and-own games via consoles and PCs (in the broad sense, not specific to one hardware/OS platform) became accessible, arcades began their long decline.
My favorite game? Mechassault. XBox. I bought three copies. I paid for online gaming. Microsoft promised emulation with the 360, then didn't deliver. It really is just like voting -- when your candidate loses because the game is rigged.
The only voting with my dollars I do now is not spend it in the direction of Microsoft. For that matter, with the PS4 not being compatible with the PS3 (much less the PS2) Sony won't be getting any of my gaming money either.
When a new console design treats my existing game library as if it's irrelevant, I'm going to ignore the new console design. Either incorporate the required hardware, emulate, actually design as backward-compatible, or I'm not buying.
Actually it was more of a sales nightmare. Go look over their SEC filings numbers, and you'll see that their PC division had lost nearly 55% of it's business right up until last year when they decided to scrap it.
Om, nomnomnom...
Been playing MMOs for over a decade now. "This game sucks" "Why do I play this?" "This company is terrible". FFS, if its that bad DON'T PLAY. *head desk*
I'm 41.
Which means I grew up during the golden age of video games, but lacked the financial capability to play them all. Now, I DO have that capability and I find I don't WANT to play them. DRM, DLC, microtransactions, limited installs, buggy releases requiring GB downloads to fix, piss-poor direct ports of console games, etc.
I can find far more reasons NOT to play than I can reasons to purchase it in the first place. Once upon a time the biggest concern was if your hardware was capable of running the game or not. Now it's more " How frustrating is this experience likely to be ? "
It's really simple, with all the limitations and silly bullsh*t built into games these days, I am far ahead of you on your advice.
I don't buy them. At all. All the MUST HAVE games that have come out recently ? Not on my shelf I'm afraid. Not dealing with it anymore.
They're like the movies these days, I don't bother going to the theater anymore because of the rather piss-poor experience that has become.
I love the games, just not going to deal with the silly bullsh*t we are forced to go through to play them anymore.
I've saved a ton of money by not buying a single game since Quake II
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
A boycott is not just you not purchasing something. A boycott is also you going out and damaging the business by getting others to share in the act of not purchasing. This is word of mouth, picket, post, and hell even take out Newspaper ads to support your boycott.
boycott [bkt] vb (tr) to refuse to have dealings with (a person, organization, etc.) or refuse to buy (a product) as a protest or means of coercion to boycott foreign produce
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Doesn't suprise me in the slightest. The DRM they were coming out with was so insanly complicated people couldn't enjoy the games they were buying, I had at least 3 or 4 friends online who got games from them and had to resort to pirated games to get them to even run.
Of course this just means the next must-have game that came out with this DRM was pirated right off the bat, because they already knew the pay-for version wasn't going to work. It's a wonderful example because often the pirate version was missing some key features of the game due to how the DRM was implimented, but they did it anyway because the 'full' version the game didn't want to work at all, so the lack of features from the pirate version was hardly a deterrant.
Free-to-play and pay entrance fee then microtransactions can both work, while a huge buy-in also works. What people are complaining about with EA is that they took (are taking?) a huge buy-in game THEN tacking the microtransactions on top of that. Paying $60 (or so) for a game then having to pay more for in game resources is ludicrus (Incidentally, there is a game I own that does exactly this, and it's not from EA). Paying $20 then being able to buy cosmetic items and side-grades (Team Fortress 2 before it went Free) is much more excusable because the cost to enter is so much lower. World of Warcraft (and other MMOs) don't cost $60 in entrance fees then your monthly, the entrance fee can be as low as $0.
Feel free to vote with your dollars, but when games are full priced new and locking out content already provided, then you can complain out the world.
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
I agree that you can make a good long films, but in practice those are usually sold as "TV series", not as "films", because that suits the viewing public's preferences much better. For example, I think the first season and first half of the 2nd season of Twin Peaks could've been put together into a quite good ~10-hour film. But nobody would try to do that, because a 10-hour film just isn't marketable as a film, at least outside of a niche art circuit.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I don't get it. It sounded like he's saying: Vote with your dollars, but keep your mouth shut about it.
What he was really saying was, "Other people do DLC too, but it's bullshit that everyone picks on us."
I've got news for him. They're the punching bag because they've earned it. The one thing a wealthy person wants beyond cash is esteem. He wants to be a business rockstar that everyone loves, and it ain't gunna happen.
You can make a lot of money and still have people like you. Lots of businesses and individuals do it all the time. It's not just "image control" as he suggests, it's not being a douchebag, 100% of the time, for years on end.
You can't be an asshole and just insist that people like you anyway or keep their mouths shut. That's what bosses enjoy in the workplace, but that's not how it works between businesses and customers. Oh, and he can go fuck himself.
If Cliff doesn't like the memes and complaints, perhaps he should boycott Reddit until they stop? It's a free market after all.
That sounds just about as effective as telling (at best) 2% of the gaming population to STFU, boycott and expect things to magically change.
EA doesn't make games and they aren't a game developer. EA is a corporation that monetizes an interactive, visual art experience. NOW IN 3D! They haven't made games since the 16-bit Sega days. As a corporation, they don't read forums, they don't read reviews. EA listens to stockholders, focus groups and quartely reports. They only hear the sound of a product not meeting quarterly projections. Trolling them on reddit does no good because they don't have a soul and they only believe in franchises that bring in fat stacks of money. Hopefully they don't infect the rest of the industry so some other company doesn't figure out a way to legalize gold farming by making a game where the only incentive to keep playing is to farm loot so you can sell it for real money on an auction house...
It's clear here that old Cliff forgot what it used to be like in the old days, where a couple of guys could make a AAA game in their garage over the summer. We have independent developers creating games that the big boys won't touch, while EA is determined to publish almost nothing but sequels and derivative crap. Yes, it costs EA $100 million to make a game, but that's only after the Hollywood style accounting! And besides, the cost of producing the latest EA shitware IS EA'S PROBLEM NOT MINE!
He ist wants to yell at the gaming community as a whole "shut the fuck up and stop complaining about our shitty DLC policy even though it sucks" but he is simultaneously trying to pretend that this isn't his message.
Fuck EA and their two bit trick ass bullshit games. If I wanted to pay extra for everything that should have come with the initial price I'd go to a fucking fancy steakhouse!
Years ago I was not able to tolerate the copy protection. I wanted to play with a game to see if it was any good, I wanted to play it whatever machine I wanted. I paid for games, just like I paid for all software, but I wanted value.
The micro transaction actually worked for a while in getting me back into gaming. I figure a game is going to cost money, and it doesn't matter to me whether it is all up front. I know that some complain that it ends up costing more, but does it really. How much was spent on Mortal Kombat. If there were micro transaction in the game would it really cost more than four games?
What is clear is that the business model does not work, at least for games where infrastructure is needed behind the scene or where development is very expensive. Not enough people buy stuff. Too many people think games should be free, even though they expect to get paid for their work.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
In case you live under a rock, this is how all business is. Companies merge and acquire smaller competitors. They take the parts that help them and remove the dead weight.
They're just game studios, unless you had a vested interest in one of those studios, don't take it so personal.
For instance X-Wing got expansion packs, half a year later that added a space craft. It was about half the money of the full game and added about a quarter more, plus bug fixes which before the internet were not a given (they are not even a given these days).
But DLC and especially micro-transactions are... well... they are horse amor. That is where the descent into madness went. For 5 bucks or so, your horse in one of the elder scroll games got some different textures... WHOOPIE!
This wasn't a new extension to a game that gave it a bit of extra life. It was something modders had been doing for free.
I tried Micro transactions with a sorta open mind in The Secret World and Guild Wars 2 and... jezus christ stuff is expensive. I can understand now why my mother carried a large back with her all the way to the theme park. Because a 30 cent can of coke is a LOT cheaper then a 3 bucks one. A LOT. Especially when an entire family wants a drink.
And it is the nickle and diming that upsets people to much. Not just buying dyes in GW2 for gold bought with real money BUT that those dyes are NOT account wide (promised by the developers) but per character. Delete a character, bought items GONE! TSW also doesn't allow you to use bought clothes account wide and EVEN charges for each different color so you can't delete a character or switch color themes.
I wouldn't mind of purchases were account wide but if game makers ran a theme park they would charge you for the glass, the syrop, the water, the ice cubes, the straw and the toilet visit afterwards, extra if you want to flush.
The secret to getting people to give you money is NOT to constantly try taking it from their pocket. People are happy to splurge (just ask Apple) but they want value for money and they also want to be able to put their wallet away when they made a purchase. It really goes against a basic human instinct to keep paying in the same store for the same item.
The killer here for the industry is that once people STOP buying, it is very easy for people to keep stopping. I don't buy Bethseda games anymore since the horse armor debacle. I simply download their games AND I get the better deal because of it. You pre-ordered at a specific store after choosing which pre-order bonus you liked best? I got them all. For FREE. No DLC, no micro transactions, no need to install spyware.
Free market includes channels the market does not like. It is not that I don't spend money on gaming. I happily buy the latest video card just for knowing I got it. 1040 euro's my last one was. That COULD have gone to game makers but video card makers don't nickle and dime me to death. So they got my dollars and Bethseda can go hang.
Could you "vote with your wallet' vs "Standard Oil Co."?
There is a fixed price of what do you pay for a movie (adjusted for length, 3D), finished.
How come, where is a "free market"?
Guess what, a game or a movie is an exclusive product, you can't just "go to the other publisher" and get the same thing there.
How can it come down to a choice "buy it or you won't get it at all" in a free market?
So "free market" doesn't really apply here.
And oh, maybe money pumped into industry is spent on improving movies? I bet 50 million $ for Tom Hanks's role in "Illuminati" improved movie a lot...
(And while prices went down, yes, number of customers has exploded. Blizzard, in the times when WoW population hit 10 million, mentioned that its total expenses were about 300 million. They made 4 times more on the subscriptions alone.)
I repeat: there is no competition on price.
And when major players on the market go DRM/always on/don't resell route, "voting with your wallet" turns you into a kind of Don Quixote.
This is pretty much how I view all markets. If microtransactions were so distasteful, there'd BE no market for them. For my part, I only buy games that I've heard good things about, and I haven't paid for any DLC in around a year, and I'm primarily a console gamer. There's plenty enough information out there that nobody can really claim to be "suckered" into buying a game that's poor quality, or half-or-more DLC.
Also, Penny Arcade writes with similar sentiments: http://penny-arcade.com/2013/03/01/microtribulations
Do you see what I did there?
... but they forget that arcades were the original change munchers
Eventually yes, but HELL NO, arcades were NOT always like that. Once upon a time, arcade games did NOT become insanely hard at stage 2, then stay impossibly hard, constantly flashing "CONTINUE? 10 .. 9 ... 8" requiring gobs of change. Originally they actually rewarded skill with continued play, at a SLIGHTLY higher difficulty. The reward for skill was being able to play longer on the same quarter.
Gaming went downhill then, landed on a slightly sh*ttier plateau, and stayed there for about a decade and a half. Then the gaming industry decided to throw itself off that plateau into a dark abyss of DLC and rich-vs-poor players.
You must not only refuse to buy the product you are boycotting, but also communicate to public or important people why you are not buying the product.
The next $1,000+ purchase electronics item I make, I want to do this. Hopefully I remember when the time comes around:
- Take out cash for said item
- When paying for item, see if I can get a picture of me handing the cash over to the cashier, with the brand name (which won't be Sony), visible in the picture.
- Write a *handwritten* letter to Sony's CEO, saying "Because of your past antics, this is exactly how much money you lost from me. I hope it was worth it to you. I will continue to update you with real-life examples of how your anti-consumer policies are directly costing you, your company and your employees."
- Possibly make a big self-centered deal about it on social networks and such
Neglected to mention that I would include the picture with the letter, if it wasn't obvious.
Simply put, customers already are voting with their wallets.
How's that working out for you?
There are lots of games out there. That's the free market. Not for any particular title, but for games in general.
You don't have a right to demand that the publisher sell you any particular game on your terms. If you think their terms are unreasonable, and that includes DRM and DLC and whatever else, you have the option to buy a different game from somebody else.
Oh, by the way, games are a luxury item, not a necessity. You don't have to have the latest game from the most popular publisher. If your friends are so shallow that they will shun you for not playing The Latest Thing maybe you should vote with your feet for different friends.
And yes, you can vote with your wallet when it comes to Standard Oil. You can always find a competing gas station somewhere else. They probably will charge pretty much the same price, but I can say from experience that different stations do not always have the same prices for gas.
Sure, we can vote with our dollars, and we do. At the same time, we can freely complain
Exactly. If we didn't complain, they wouldn't know why we stopped buying.
EA, it wasn't micro transactions that caused me to boycott you, it was excessive DRM. (but micro transactions suck too!)
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DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
If you don't like their microtransactions, don't spend money on them. It's that simple.
Some, maybe most, are bitching and paying because they are tools. But some, myself included, don't do microtransctions, and dislike them because they are being abused in the economic efficiency sense.
The free market is not perfectly efficient. Consumers are not perfectly informed, they don't fully amortize long run versus short run, markets aren't perfectly competitive, etc. Microtransactions may be an economic distortion, particularly in the competition and long-run v. short run sense. They shift the cost from the short run gate to the long run captive audience. That has a tendency to distort market price upward from what would otherwise be equilibrium. It also has some benefits, like inexpensive test driving -- but we are already way past, "It's that simple."
It is not that simple for everyone. Some people are playing a deeper game. Some people want our system to become stronger over time, so we can all become more productive in the long run. Those people think about system stocks, flows, forces, and feedback, and do not believe the economy can be reduced to trite platitudes.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
You mean, the Shareware days when you got a free playable-but-limited demo, but had to pay to upgrade to the full version?
What makes it different is that is that you are paying for the piece that, under the Sharewarer model, was a free teaser to evaluate whether you were interested in paying money for the full product, and then paying again if you want the full product.
If you just stop buying something from a company, and say nothing, well then they really don't know why. They may make an incorrect inference as to what your problem was. For example let's say a game comes out with a new DRM that you hate, and also features a new kind of user input that you like. You don't buy it because of the DRM, but you don't speak up. Same with everyone else, they all like the new input, but hate the DRM, but are silent. The game company looks at the abysmal sales and says "Man that new input idea bombed hard, nobody wants that, let's not to that again."
When you don't like a product you very well should make it known why and not buy it.
However I will say he does have some merit in that gamers, PC gamers in particular, seem to be overly whiny and very tribal. What I mean by that is if you are a "good guy" like Valve, you can do no wrong and if you are a "bad guy" like EA you can do no right.
A great example is the unavailability of some EA games on Steam. The reason is that Valve changed their TOS for new games such that if you have DLC, that DLC must be sold through Steam, not your own site. This didn't used to be how it worked, used to be you could sell a game on Steam (and other services) and sell DLC on your own site. EA wasn't ok with that, they wanted the DLC sales. As such there was an impasse and the EA games that have DLC can't be gotten on Steam, though they can be gotten form other DD services like Impulse, Gamefly, Greenman Gaming, and so on.
Now there's not really a bad guy here, both companies have polices they aren't willing to change, and the policies are understandable, though in both cases you can argue against them. Fair enough. However gamers nearly universally decried EA as being greedy assholes that wouldn't let the noble Valve sell their games.
For that matter they got mad at EA for the same shit Valve does: Tying their games to their DD platform. New EA games wish to use Origin, and will make you log in to it. This is true even if you buy them from another DD service. Ok well this is precisely what Valve does with Steamworks. If you buy any Valve title from HL2 on, you have to install and use Steam. Doesn't matter where you get it, retail, other DD service, you are using Steam period. Same deal with 3rd party titles that use Steamworks (like Skyrim).
However when Valve does it, it is A-OK but when EA does it they are OMGWTFEVIL!!!!111.
So I do understand his point. Gamers need to bitch less, and stop being so tribal. Evaluate stuff on its merits, buy or don't, and don't cry all the time. Also, stick to your guns. An informative happening was when Modern Warfare 2 came out. PC gamers were pissed because it had been gimped on the PC. There was a "Boycott MW2" Steam group. Day one of the release? Most of the people in the group were playing MW2. They were willing to whine, but not to put their money where their mouths were.
The gaming industry is changing. Every one of the major players is trying to find a way to change with it and are taking different paths to find out which works and which doesn't work doesn't make them evil or good.. They are just trying to find a way to produce games and be profitable is the goal, they are forcing you to anything (which would be evil). So, what's happening is what you should WANT to happen.
What does vilifying those that have a different viewpoint accomplish?
People can't be trusted to make informed, rational, and moral decisions. How often to posters bitch about how much they hate content they dump tons of time/ money into and pirate content they claim to love? There's a reason so many producers of movies, music, and games add wide-scale appeal elements (look at the CoD-ification of Battlefield 3).
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I've seen a lot of comments online about microtransactions. They're a dirty word lately, it seems. Gamers are upset that publishers/developers are "nickel and diming them." They're raging at "big and evil corporations who are clueless and trying to steal their money." I'm going to come right out and say it. I'm tired of EA being seen as "the bad guy." I think it's bulls*** that EA has the 'scumbag EA' memes on Reddit and that Good Guy Valve can Do No Wrong. ... If you don't like EA, don't buy their games. If you don't like their microtransactions, don't spend money on them. It's that simple.
Cliff says it's okay to not buy DLC from companies you think are trying to screw you over, but I guess you're not allowed talk about it? And also while you're at it, please don't talk about companies you like either. It's just bad form, I suppose.
So since, as a game developer, he isn't happy with the current model: "more talking" and "less spending money", but he isn't advocating "more talking" and also "more spending money." Instead, what he wants is "less talking" and "less spending money."
Because of this, I can only assume that the "more talking" is the part impacting the business in a meaningful way.
Personally I just see in EA a sort of banal, brainless corporate "squeeze it until it bleeds dry" greed.
Steam (ie Valve's greatest product) is a giant sucking parasite perched on the carotid of modern gaming. It is the worst thing to happen to gaming, ever, and consumers are too stupid to see it.
Steam offered a brave new world of content delivery, and it was great. Except for the worm in the apple: the fact that they are NOT just a delivery organ, they are a license-management organ. No resale. No gifting of products (once they've been played). No transfers of licenses in any circumstance.*
Further, the system is stupid: if I'm logged in to Steam because I want to edit a Civ5 scenario (a game I legally own) on one computer, and want to play a quick game of Magicka (another game I legally own) with friends on my laptop, I can't, because Steam doesn't allow simultaneous logins FOR ANY REASON. So essentially, my game library is now locked behind a vault wall, with an asshole running the show who will only "let" me play one title at a time. BRILLIANT!
*Truth in advertising, I'll explain my particular beef with them, and let you decide: I have 2 sons, who until recently were minors. To manage their exposure to the world of multiplayer games, whenever they got games that were Steam-required, we attached them to MY steam-account. Now they're 16, and there's no need for me to manage their access anymore, but Steam offers no provision for me to one-time-transfer) licenses (we don't give a crap about achievements, etc) to their own Steam accounts. So now when one son wants to play 'his' copy of TF2, the other one can't play Xcom.
I even tried to actually talk to someone in Steam, I've offered to do ANYTHING to prove that I'm their father, this is a one-time deal, anything; the response I got was a flat refusal to give me a contact name, and the assertion that "we're a flat organization, we don't have managers". Right, so Gabe Newell's right there, answering tech support calls I bet?
I disliked Steam, but every time I see a title on the shelves that says "Steam Required" I hate them that little bit more.
-Styopa
To produce a high quality game it takes tens of millions of dollars, and when you add in marketing that can get up to 100+ million
All the high quality games (defined as the ones I have the most fun with) that I've played lately have come out of indie studios and didn't cost nearly so much to make.
Only the rehashed crap coming out of the major studios costs that much, because they have to spend so much on marketing and shinys to hoodwink people into buying it.
Bingo. That's exactly what I was going to say. This guy is an idiot if he thinks things would be better (for EA or any other company) if nobody complained and only voted with their dollars. Hearing people bitch and complain about something that you've done to your product is probably the best way to get immediate feedback on that change, especially when other unrelated changes may have been made at the same time, or when a change to product X alienates your customers such that they refuse to buy product Y or product X+1. Do you seriously want to wait until the effects of people "voting with their dollars" propagates through the system before you know you've fucked up? Then, what? You want to have to guess what exactly it was that you did to piss everyone off? Maybe create a survey and send it out into the world, or have your marketing droids canvas shoppers at GameStop to see why they aren't buying? I can't believe this guy actually thinks that's a good idea...
Except we *did* have a vested interest in those studios, in the form of "we liked their games". EA buys companies, guts them, then makes crappy games with the IP (or just buries it completely). Meaning if you liked the games the previous studio made, now you either get nothing, or crap. Why *shouldn't* we be pissed at that? Alright, yes, the guys at the top of the previous company probably got money out of it, and if I were at the top of a company, I'd be tempted too, but it still sucks for everyone else.
Never mind the ratio of the hours of joy you get from a game per dollar compared to film.
as you should, since it's an entirely different thing.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Exactly... Capitalism is the movement to hoard capital investments to gain consideration not normally available in the "free market".
In this case EA uses capital to buy up competing small outfits that don't need DLC so it appears "the free market" has chosen this path. In reality just a handful of very large players are grasping at straws.. But they have so much money "free market players" are steamrolled.
It's not that people think games should be free. It's that people expect to OWN something when they BUY a box with a disk. Bilking portals like steam and origin take this away.. People are only demanding what they've come to expect up through about 2004: dedicated server binaries (if applicable), mod tools (if applicable), and no remote DRM that can get shut off 2-5 years hence or gets in the way of the experience. These things allow customers to retain control over the access of what they purchased. When true, then $50 seems reasonable for a AAA title. If not, then the game's worth about $0.50 or one go at street fighter 2 in 1991.
No one wants to be bilked out of that much money for a rental experience. The fact that there are now microtransactions affecting game play on top of the initial $50 just shows how little value is left in today's games. It's not about selling good products at fair prices anymore, it's about how much they can bilk without the customer noticing.
It's not like game companies that made good products were suffering.. I seem to recall certain high profile people driving around in ferraris at the heights of their careers, so offering real, ownable value for the money does work. I think this new post 2005 model is due to the slow consolidation of smaller studios into top-heavy publishers who need ever growing revenue to stay afloat..
Thank you. Hit the nail on the head. Just because I've "voted with my dollars" doesn't mean I'm going to sit here silently while you continue doing this shit even after I've tried to show you with money.
I'm going to complain and I'll keep doing it and I'll be especially pissed when you do shit like what they did with Mass Effect 3 and pulled a character out of the game, claimed it was DLC that they worked on later (despite there being references to him all throughout the game's code), and then proceeded to tell us that potentially one of the most important characters in the game wasn't really important and you could just play without him. This is called shitting on your fanbase. I was not happy about that and I'm still not. Yeah, I could have done without it, but after I'd invested over 100 bucks in the 3 Mass Effect games, I think they could give me a fucking $5 character for free. That was a pretty dickish thing to do, in my opinion and it's a pretty good example of doing shitty things with DLC.
Oh and apparently the 90s didn't exist? At some point quarter munchers stopped and we just had games and then expansions. No $100 in DLC that looks like they ripped it from the finished product and launched it on day 1 (or in Capcom's case IT WAS ON THE DISC WHEN THEY SHIPPED IT).
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
When I *really* don't like something, I vote with my dollars AND by influencing others not to spend their dollars either.
I'm sure EA would greatly prefer if dissatisfied customers merely voted with their dollars, but kept quiet so as not to build a public awareness and cause others to do the same. Well, that's not how things work, especially in the modern times of widespread internet connectivity and online social networking.
I personally don't play video games much. But I recently tried a few on an iPad. My first experience, Plants vs Zombies, was fun. It seems to have been designed before this in-game purchasing became a big deal. But then I tried another, and another, and yet another... and it quickly became clear they were designed to force you to make in-game purchases. One even had 3 times of in-game resources, plus 2 types of time limits, which you could pay your way around.
Those games just aren't much fun. That's the problem. if you don't pony up real money, they're incredibly boring and repetitive... pretty much being stuck in a purgatory of inadequate resources to play the game. I tried paying on a couple. Guess what... then you've got everything you need and the game quickly becomes not very interesting either. It's a low quality experience either way.
When you make a poor product, word gets out. When an entire industry moves in a direction that's initially profitable, but ultimately results in poor products that people don't enjoy, eventually the marketplace wises up and demand for those products declines or evaporates. That's simply how free markets work.
Critical public commentary is simply part of that free market process. EA may not like it, but that's too bad. Sooner or later, as enough people vote with their dollars, EA will respond with better products, rather than wishing their dissatisfied customers would quietly go away.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
So what you mean is Lord of the Rings VS Game of Thrones.
LotR could have easily been stretched into a short series (ok, with extended cuts its actually longer than GoT season 1) but at the same time the Hobbit didn't work trying to make 3 movies... But the motivation is about funding and investors as much as audience. If LotR didn't make money nobody would Try GoT...
Once you become a high enough executive, you no longer care about the long term, only the short term. Who cares how the company is doing in two years, if you won't be here to face the consequence. They only care about short term growth to appease their share holders.
There are many moves that boost short term profits at the expense of long term growth, this PR piece from EA is their way to tell us to either pay up or shut-up (because the negative PR is hurting them).
Could you "vote with your wallet' vs "Standard Oil Co."?
Standard Oil had a ton of competitors. That's why they were losing money buying up all the competition, who would just turn around and start a new business that Standard Oil then had to buy up.
Big Business had to convince the government to pass laws and regulations to make startup costs prohibitive in order to prevent that in future.
One of the main problems I have with micro-transactions is their use in competitive games. When something is purchased to give one player an advantage that another player does not have without paying that same money, that creates a imbalance that ensures only those who are more wealthy will have the edge. Sure, some of that can be solved by server configurations that disallow certain weapons, but it is less likely that those server configurations will be available. Also, wealthier people can purchase better computers that cause the game to perform better, but at least that imbalance is more subjective where-as a better weapon that somebody else doesn't have access to directly alters the maximum potential of gameplay results. Even if people vote with their dollars, many will choose to pay to gain that unfair competitive edge which may hurt the minority, but the minority still deserves just as fair a chance.
The argument that the customers can force companies to abandon exploitative business practices only holds if there is enough competition in the market and there are not enough victims to make it worthwhile. WoW, Farmville and other games that rely on addiction-based gameplay with either monthly fees or microtransactions have demonstrated that there are people willing to purposely design their game to exploit the vulnerabilities of their players for profit and the industry is holding them up as examples of real success, not expoitation.
To hold the players responsible to make change is similar to holding other victims of abuse and exploitation responsible for the actions of the abusers. Certainly as a whole we need to reject abusive business practices, but the expectation of individual game players should be that the games are designed to provide enjoyment, free from exploitation. Imagine if other forms of entertainment that were designed to make you pay more for them while you experienced them. There is nothing wrong with paying game creators to create more content, but an industry that designs its products to extract profit regardless of the cost to its customers is going to develop a terrible reputation and invite a backlash against it along with regulation. The gaming industry is foolish to not castigate those that try to profit from anything other than making great games that respect their customers.
Complexity Happens
You forgot Bullfrog, the studio that developed Syndicate. They recycled that IP as a worthless FPS that had very little to do with the original game.
Screw everything else. Here's a game designed to be fun, fair, and free. I purchased Bad Company 2 and played it for a couple weeks. Haven't gone back to it, though, because Cube 2 is far more fun.
Wow. What a bitter, incoherent rant.
So, let's take this apart. The ranter, Cliff Bleszinski, is not actually saying "Vote with your dollars" he's saying, "You'll take what we give you and like it." However, the rant comes across as desperate and rage filled because that's actually false bravado, he knows that his customers don't have to take what they give them and like it.
I think a certain amount of games industry executives, people who aren't in the business because they love games as an art form, probably look at other businesses with envy. "Look at those heroin kingpins, their customers will do anything for another hit." "Look at the oil industry, it seems like they can raise prices through the roof and people keep buying." "Look a pharmaceuticals, if people don't pay their prices, well, they die." or "Look at credit cards, those earn money for the banks while the bankers are sleeping!"
However, for whatever reason, the games industry executives are stuck in an industry that lives or dies on customer service. Ask Atari how well they did after 2600 Pac -Man made all the little children cry..
So does this mean no DRM? No DLC? No microtransactions? Why no!
I've been dealing with DRM since games came on 5 1/4 inch floppies. DLC reminds me of paying for a disk of shareware, and then paying some more for the rest of the content. And while it isn't an electronic game, I don't think any Magic addict like myself could be unfamiliar with the concept of microtransactions.
What it means is that you can't push it and expect to make money. However sad it makes the game honchos, they aren't heroin dealers. They can't say "the price is the price, yo" like Badger on Breaking Bad and expect people to pay it.
If you are going to sell people a $60.00 game, it can't be the equivalent of a $5 shareware disk with DLC being necessary to complete it. That's why some companies played around with selling games as episodes at a slightly lower price... and that model didn't pan out. I think expansion packs make money, I enjoyed Yuri's Revenge but some actual effort was put into that, and Red Alert II was a fine, complete game without it.
DRM that makes the game unplayable... makes the game unplayable. That's not hard to understand, is it? If it makes it unplayable some of the time, it makes the game unplayable some of the time. It diminishes the games quality. Don't do that if you don't want a reputation for selling unplayable junk.
There are two kinds of games. Games built from the ground up around micro-transactions and games that are totally destroyed by shoehorning microtransactions into them. You can't take the latest iteration of Doom (by which I mean any FPS that can be loosely described as lone hero versus hordes of monsters), and make the player have to pay for every gun and demon. It won't work. It will make the game suck.
You might not like it, but if you don't I suggest you look for work in one of those other industries I mentioned, because an industry built around pleasing customers is clearly not for you.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
If anything, this is a classic example of how too invasive DRM turns people onto illegal copying who would otherwise not have thought of it. People buy a game, see it doesn't work and look for a solution, find the solution in a cracked version and the next time they buy a game, they omit the step that doesn't give them anything: Buying the game.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't mind paying to play a game, but I do mind paying to get rid of a grind deliberately introduced to make people pay. That's just rude. It's would be like if restaurants offered you free2eat meals, but you had to pay to get rid of the hostile and abusive waiter.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think Cliff misses the point about why a lot of people hate EA. Its not just that they seem to produce very lack-lustre releases, diddled with DRM and DLC, its that EA throws their money around the industry in order to obtain a significant number of development houses and their IP. Then, once they have that IP, they don't do anything with it!
Loyalty to EA typically comes about because someone is loyal to a fun product which EA later absorbs.... then lost when future release are steaming piles of crap or simply non-existent
Then you have companies like Steam that seem to encourage development and innovation, and don't employ armies of ham-fisted employees that typically answer questions with dumber questions. Is it any wonder that gamers respond well to Steam's approach?
Maybe he confused the games. Goro from the original Mortal Kombat was a motherfucker.
... are too stupid. Let's face it, the reason DLC, microtransactions, etc have arisen is because a sizable chunk of humanity is braindead.
"Boohoo, our industry can't make enough money and that's why we have to fuck you over with paid DLC and microtransactions" said the multi-millionaire playboy game developer.
But you're right. Vote with your wallet. Which is why there is a very long list of companies whose games I'll NEVER purchase. And that list seems to grow every month.
No network content (because no network connection) ; no way for billing to occur ; no problem. I've never paid for an add-on in any game, ever. Is it common?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I would say the biggest problem facing the PC gaming industry isn't DLC or DRM so much as it is lack of content and lack of fun. I think Steam and similar services are a remarkable bridge between the old school copy protection and the new-school pirates. They're not onerous, cost nothing (in and of themselves), and actually have a moderate benefit: games that automatically update and patch, as well as no longer having your rights to a game being tied to a physical computer or disc. DLC -- well, I hate it, but I also don't play the lowest common denominator type games that seem to have the most issues with it. I am ok with never having slightly different looking guns/armors/whatever. What I have noticed is how boring and limited many games are. A lot of games are either tired old sequels, follow the same formula as every other game in their genre, are horribly executed/developed, or suffer from serious balance/AI issues. It's getting to the point where that $50-60 investment in a new game is becoming a very difficult decision for me, because a great sub-$20 game could offer just as much 'fun' value. Of course, a very few of the $60 games offer mega, mega value, the most notable example being Starcraft II, with a single player, vibrant multiplayer scene, user developed arcade games, etc. Skyrim was fun, but after grinding up to level 50, I felt a kind of revulsion at the thought of starting with a level 1 character. Anyways to compound this problem, the industry now engages in shady practices with regards to video game reviews. A bad game will have an 'embargo' meaning all reviewers must sign an agreement: that they won't publish their review until the launch date. There's even more gaming (pun intended) of the system by allowing 'exclusive' reviews to be published if they give the game a high enough score. This wasn't such a big deal circa 1999, but now the craze is pre-sales and, you guessed it, 'free' DLC for pre-orders. This all came to a perfect storm with Aliens: Colonial Marines, where a popular movie franchise spawned huge presale numbers, but the game itself was beyond shoddy (Metacritic score below 50), and hugely benefitted from the review embargo. Even more disturbing are allegations that the review version of the game was essentially vaporware, that was 0% related to the finished product. Thus, I feel the real problem is a corruption of journalistic integrity. If we can get fair, timely, and relatively unbiased reporting about video games, I have no doubt that voting-with-dollars will absolutely work. However, if we continued with this subversion of professional reviewers, it actually continues to make shoddy games at least break even, which we can't have.
...that this is coming from some game designer I couldn't tell apart from Adam on a blog I never read, I must ask the value of this individual's opinion. He's a game designer? That doesn't make him an expert or the end-all-say-all of the topic.
What I really find hilarious if it wasn't so troubling is the fact he is defending EA. EA has done wrong, but you wouldn't know it based on Cliff Bleszinski's words. Maybe he is ignoring the fact that people are complaining loudly and EA is all but ignoring them. Maybe he wants to forget the fact EA "accidentally" banned members for complaining about microtransactions or the DRM scheme. Maybe he thinks EA is in the right with this "always on" DRM method and people that don't have internet at home (like myself) are SOL. Maybe he thinks it is totally in the right that EA puts microtransactions in games that are not at all Free to Play.
Frankly, I think he is an obscure game designer who has a terminal case of USI and is spewing his vitriol on an obscure blog nobody cares about (except for the poster of this article and Slashdot)...
Also: I'd really love to know where he came up with this "Free to spend 4 grand on it" because that sounds like hyperbole. So, how is spending $4,000 in an EA Microtransaction store any different from spending $4,000 on LotRO or STO? Is it ok because it is EA or is this something Mr. Bleszinski made up to justify EA's poor business practices? I say it is the latter...
in and of itself: Microtransactions aren't bad as long as there is some kind of system in place to prevent those who have $4,000 to spend to gain unfair and insurmountable advantages. EA of course doesn't have such a system in place because money is God. In fact: EA encourages such actions.
Frankly, I think Mr. Bleszinski's idea of "Don't like it, don't buy it" only works if people got that hint and quit being such fanboys of EA. Unfortunately, fanboys like Cliff Bleszinski don't want to openly acknowledge they are being raped by companies like EA. Like a rape victim, they think if they continue to support the rapist, then it will get better. Yet it never does. As long as this cycle continues, then no amount of complaining or boycotting will ever work.
Seriously, when marketing costs 10x the price to make something, there is something wrong with that "industry".
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.