Same with Life is Strange 2. People are not willing to pay more for games, but they also want them to be bigger and better than the ones that came before it.
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Demolishing The Excuses Made For 'AAA' Publishers' Exploitative Greed (The Jimquisition)
- Thread starter Calibro
- Start date
Do you honestly believe that? There is a very vocal group that hates MTX but the vast majority of people are okay with how MTX are handled for the most part.
It's just disheartening to me that something people grew up with and claim to still love falls victim to today's era of (sometimes) arbitrary valuation that often results from a few exceptions altering their entire perspective. "It should've been $15-20, it's pure Capcom greed" is a strong conclusion to make based on the circumstances, at least for that particular game. We don't know what it actually cost to make, there are clear upgrades that some choose to disregard, etc.
But yeah, there are always multiple levels to these things.
Can you give me numbers about the people who oppose MTX vs the people who complain about content?
How much would you pay for claymores/pmn mines?
And I would pay hundreds for FFXI HD Remaster Offline + small scale co op Peer 2 Peer. After that game I wouldn't need games anymore. (wish Socom 2's HDD never introduced me to that game. Still searching for a beastmaster/pet class as cool as FFXI's)
Discussing finance with people who don't have any idea is very difficult (My favorite was the guy who seem to think that operating cash flow was profit). In their minds when they think of investors they imagine guys like Warren Buffet or the guys from wall street. They don't realize that the majority of investors are institutional investors, that manage things like 401k, mutual funds, life insurance/health insurance premiums etc.
All those things relies on constant growth to be able to payout when the holder needs to cash out. Your 401k isn't going to grow if there is literally no constant growth.
But I digress. MTX is a tool, it can be good and it can be bad. It is not a clear moral issue, it depends on how it is use. I prefer the manner in which it was supposedly used in AC:O, since it isn't intrusive. For battlefront not so much.
Guys like Jim whole thing depends entirely on playing on the emotional strings of easily manipulatable people. I am curious how hard he will go on Rockstar since 100+ hours workweek is a clear moral issue, while this isn't clear cut. I suspect, since Rockstar has a lot of fans it wont be as bad.
Give me all SOCOM 1-3 and CA maps with a rebooted visual and lighting, or even SOCOM CONFRONTATION remastered in 4k and 60fps with working servers.
throw in the mines too.
A lot of large games are made large with "bloat", that is to say sidequests and stuff that take up a ton of space in the game. I feel like in many cases a bunch of the extra features/stuff that developers spend excessive time putting in the game winds up never being utilized or seen by most players, which makes it feel like even more of a waste.
I don't think this state of affairs is what anyone wanted when they said the want longer games. A title like DQ7 or Xenogears was 60-70 hours long on storyline alone. That's what people wanted, not a 30 hour game story with another 30 hours on top if you feel like completing all the sidequest hubs.
I don't think this state of affairs is what anyone wanted when they said the want longer games. A title like DQ7 or Xenogears was 60-70 hours long on storyline alone. That's what people wanted, not a 30 hour game story with another 30 hours on top if you feel like completing all the sidequest hubs.
It is possible to disagree with Jim without "defending this bullshit."
Nope but neither of us have them but I bet you that people wouldn't get rid of them unless they are poorly implemented.
I literally gave you the page number and said "salary and bonus". You add one to to the other. That's where the number came from. I'm also well aware they have stock based compensation. I said salary and bonus.
I wasn't making the argument that consumers have this level of influence. I am not sure why you're replying to me in the first place.
They do have benefits.
They mean that the game will get continuously updated for years beyond launch. They mean that the developer will keep changing up the game to keep it fresh and keep people coming back. They mean that the developer will continue to keep it at a playable standard, rather than abandoning it to the forces of anarchy after getting those initial sales.
They also mean that everyone can get expansions/DLCs that would otherwise have been paid for free.
Please tell me about these masses of games that had MTs removed and were "objectively" better.
Imo removing them and removing the continuous update incentive would make games worse.
Fair enough. But disagreeing with what he says in this video amounts to "He's wrong about milti billion dollar companies being greedy"
I dunno, im staying out now. People are fucking mental.
You don't even seem to know what my claims are so I will wear this as a badge of honour.
What a load of bull. Here:
https://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/company-officers/EA.O
Lawrence Probst, nearly 150 mil
Andrew Wilson ~22 mil
Blake Jorgensen ~12 mil
Patrick Soderlund ~14 mil
The list goes on. All this before insider trading. Poor Chairman only gets paid 300 thousand. That is, before getting 140 million from options.
Reminds me of those poor politicians that work for nearly free. Except for the millions they get from lobbying and other incentives.
But all of this conversation feels like talking to a wall. Some people are perfectly ok with the paradigm we live in where making money is the ultimate goal and all means to attain that goal are legit. Greed doesn't exist, it's all just business heh? I just hope you apply that shit to everything and don't ever complain about any business decision whatsoever, whatever the context.
Going to be Diablo 3 for me. Boy did that game improve a ton. It was still flawed because of the base game design and itemization, but they made it so you can find your own loot instead of depending on the Auction House and they made the game more fun, and this was even before the expansion and the different seasons/ladders they eventually did. What a turn around.
For Diablo 4 I'll think about getting it, but after a few months of other people testing it. Before I got Diablo 3 I was all in for it because people praised Blizzard for supporting their games way after launch for no extra cost, people kept playing them, and other people bought the games continually due to the support. Epic games was like that too. So much goodwill down the drain.
This may not be a popular opinion, but I'll give my 2 cents on game development crunch phases.
I honestly can't think of a single creative field that don't work under pressure and it's pretty common that computer experts have to work under terrible pressure when it comes to code your average software.
Now video games, by being works of art and the result of programmation can't escape this. Artists must work with dead lines, and it's pretty well acknowledged that in coding nothing works from the get-go, almost every single line of code will fail to do what it is intended to do before working. And the more actors you have in game development the more trouble you'll have to respect the deadlines.
I know some musicians who sometimes find inspiration just a few hours before the deadline they've been comissioned for, and that's something pretty common for all kinds of artists.
Now considering the rules of the game business, and when you consider that most large scaled games work with 3-4 year development cycles, you cant realistically expect anymore to have finished games that are not bug ridden at release. Plenty of people make fun of Bethesda games being full of bugs, but it's something you have to expect with these cycles, despite finishing these games with terrible crunch periodes before release. It's wishful thinking to expect the game industry to solve the crunch problem especially with the amount of people involved in these large games.
I can't see the game industry solving these problems without scaling down the scope of their games and reducing the size of the development teams. But let's be honest, that won't happen for the simple reason that the number of square kilometers an open world game has is still a selling point, 30+ hours of content is expected for a $60+ game and a game will always be criticized for being just decent in the graphics department.
And I don't think that giving more time to developers and having larger cycles wouldn't work that well for a company that doesn't work in a bubble like Nintendo does, for the simple reasons that trends are a thing and missing those can result in disappointing sales, especially considering the iterative development with western game development.
That doesn't mean that devs can't be treated better, and it shouldn't be that difficult for devs to earn a bit more than what they currently do, but expecting crunch periods to disappear completely is wishful thinking.
I honestly can't think of a single creative field that don't work under pressure and it's pretty common that computer experts have to work under terrible pressure when it comes to code your average software.
Now video games, by being works of art and the result of programmation can't escape this. Artists must work with dead lines, and it's pretty well acknowledged that in coding nothing works from the get-go, almost every single line of code will fail to do what it is intended to do before working. And the more actors you have in game development the more trouble you'll have to respect the deadlines.
I know some musicians who sometimes find inspiration just a few hours before the deadline they've been comissioned for, and that's something pretty common for all kinds of artists.
Now considering the rules of the game business, and when you consider that most large scaled games work with 3-4 year development cycles, you cant realistically expect anymore to have finished games that are not bug ridden at release. Plenty of people make fun of Bethesda games being full of bugs, but it's something you have to expect with these cycles, despite finishing these games with terrible crunch periodes before release. It's wishful thinking to expect the game industry to solve the crunch problem especially with the amount of people involved in these large games.
I can't see the game industry solving these problems without scaling down the scope of their games and reducing the size of the development teams. But let's be honest, that won't happen for the simple reason that the number of square kilometers an open world game has is still a selling point, 30+ hours of content is expected for a $60+ game and a game will always be criticized for being just decent in the graphics department.
And I don't think that giving more time to developers and having larger cycles wouldn't work that well for a company that doesn't work in a bubble like Nintendo does, for the simple reasons that trends are a thing and missing those can result in disappointing sales, especially considering the iterative development with western game development.
That doesn't mean that devs can't be treated better, and it shouldn't be that difficult for devs to earn a bit more than what they currently do, but expecting crunch periods to disappear completely is wishful thinking.
But your numbers are wrong and the way you interpret the data is wrong and none of your math added up. Wut?
You add one number to the other. How does that not add up? Citations needed for the rest of your claims, and how it relates to the discussion.
holy cow, you couldn't be less interested could you? look at page 35. same reference you made, same sheet. you're not actually interested in conversation are you?
People have a free choice to leave these 'evil corporations' if they want.
So... bootstraps?
Freedom is exactly the opposite state of being within a capitalist society, for most people.
Hypocrisy much?
I said salary and bonus. Salary was $1.14M, bonus was $2.5M. Add them, that's $3.64M. You said, "none of your math adds up". What exactly are you adding to the conversation other than, "You're dumb because I said so."?
I'd rather they scale down the scope of their games. Usually when they go on a added content spree, or super duper graphics it dosen't add much. I would have been fine sitting in PS2 graphics with cleaner edges, and maybe better textures.
A mobile game I played that had a similar game on the PC was better looking to me, even though it clearly had technically worse graphics. Marvel Future Fight (Android) vs Marvel Heroes (PC). MFF looked awesome, controlled like trash even with a controller, I just wished Marvel Heroes looked like it. R.I.P. Marvel Heroes.
A mobile game I played that had a similar game on the PC was better looking to me, even though it clearly had technically worse graphics. Marvel Future Fight (Android) vs Marvel Heroes (PC). MFF looked awesome, controlled like trash even with a controller, I just wished Marvel Heroes looked like it. R.I.P. Marvel Heroes.
sure, but salary and bonus are obviously a meaningless statistic in this case
outside of trying to intentionally mislead people, or being ignorant, i don't see why you would use it to make a point
The part where his income adds up to $35 MIL and you're downplaying non-salary compensation to bolster your argument. Also, the part where you're using revenue figures when it benefits you and switching to profit after expenses when you want to highlight how several hundred million dollars is just so small and pitiful and how in the world could we ever live without MTX?
You're contradicting yourself, ignoring huge sums of money, and adding figures together in ways that make no sense, except that it helps you pretend that all of this is normal and OK.
"several hundred million"? After you've answered that, what do you think would happen to their profit margins if the MTX revenue was removed?
Nah, employers have, or at least should have, the responsibility to treat their employees well. Not just in terms of compensation either.
Unsurprising you would believe that given you just declared all CEOs to be insider trading and all politicians to be corrupt.
I don't know how else to say this, but this is my last shot: if you build your entire business model (or even shift it) around MTX, then yes, MTX will become essential. Money would be lost. Nobody is arguing this. But Jim's presentation included a number of remarks on how the industry, or at least specific businesses, have created this need for themselves, in part by planning their budget around MTX and in part by unequally distributing value across the company. If your revenue is many multiple billion dollars, but you can only squeeze out a couple hundred mil and that only with MTX, you might think something is afoot. And of course something is afoot, but we're all stuck here arguing about a margin line that is the product of a business plan generated by the executives themselves.
Now we've talked about a ton of other stuff in just the last hour, so this alone isn't the problem. It's just one part. If you can't see that there is more to this than reading a profit summary, I don't know what to say.
Why? Because people don't automatically agree with you? Or how bout when your argument is picked apart and you don't want to respond?
Let's put it this way, eight years ago we'd already be on Overwatch 3.
You should've taken the time you were away to learn how to read. It helps in good faith conversations.
This is what people have to fall back to when they realize they can't argue on substance.
no, but because certain posters have a post history where >50% are on very specific topics
I'm not sure you seem too interested in "good faith conversations"...
What do you mean? Middleware doesn't exist remember? We don't live in a time where there's more mid budget games than ever before in the history of the industry.
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