- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.world
And have we come full circle to god damn horse armor.
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It’s crazy how far micro-transactions and monetizing games have come since Bethesda charged $2.50 for cosmetic armor to put on your horse. If you’d told someone back then that one day an in-game mount would cost more than the game itself they would have laughed you out of the room.
I’m so sick of this revisionist bs. Plenty of us were outraged then and warned of EXACTLY this. Y’all reaped what you sowed. Now micro transactions and paid early access are the norm. We screamed and yelled to “vote with your wallets”, and by god, you did. “It’s just a few bucks” is the most common one I hear. Well, now EVERYTHING is “just a few bucks”.
You won.
This. That’s why I gave up on arguing with people a long time ago. There is a shimmer of hope in me that this industry still comes crashing down at some point. I would celebrate it. But by the looks of it, it won’t happen anytime soon.
The best I could do is not buying anything on release, early access or riddled with microtransactions, mostly indie games and maybe one AAA title a year, also avoid certain studios. Oh, and also don’t really care at all when these kind of news come up. I cared back then, I voted with my wallet and still do, but the other side won. Shit happens. There is nothing I can do other than get angry, but that’s not worth the hassle.
A crash is impossible at this point, the market is too big and vast, if AAA dies, mobile will live on like nothing happened, and guess where lootboxes and gacha started…
In casinos, that are (were until recently) government regulated?
I’m with you. I buy almost exclusively on-sale games. I try to buy the super-premium editions about a year after release so I can get lots of content for less than the original game costs, and I avoid any p2w or lootbox games altogether.
Do I miss interactions with some friends who only play the latest titles? Absolutely. I have primarily been a single player gamer anyway, so maybe it just doesn’t impact me as terribly.
The market has spoken, and it said some real stupid shit. I’ve given up on gaming as a hobby, and good riddance.
If we trusted the Market to make it good for us, we’d still have children working 16 hour shifts until they get their arms chewed off by machinery and get thrown on the streets to starve.
“Vote with your wallet” is just something business say to try to convince us that regulation isn’t needed, conveniently forgetting to mention that the fattest wallet in the room is the CEO’s.
Also let’s not forget the horse armor was the free patch, Microsoft allowed 1 free cosmetic patch on the x-box, then everything else they required Bethesda to put a price on. It just so happened to be win -win for both Bethesda and Microsoft
No.
Yeah I remember saying that that Bethesda’s horse armor bs would lead to gamers being nickeled and dimed to death and was soundly called a overreacting whinger.
And like you said here we are now and gamers are being outright exploited and you still have people saying it’s all still blown out of proportion like these companies aren’t hiring psychologists to manipulate us to buy this bullshit.
Some people would have laughed you out of the room. A lot of people, myself included, warned that this was the kind of shit we’d spiral into with these microtransactions. It was basically confirmed within a year or two with the absolutely insane amount of money mobile gaming was seeing where the base product was just addictive crap with as many microtransactions shoveled in as possible. These games just completely blew the revenue of actual AAA titles would out of the water. It was basically inevitable and we’re now in a situation where we’ve got a generation of consumers raised on this trash.
It’s a slippery slope. Money talks. They are accountable to their shareholders. So when they saw that people were paying for them, they started to monetise more and more.
Horse Armor? How about a jewel-encrusted horse!?
Am I alone in thinking this is a joke that has gone over everyone’s heads? Isn’t it just a sparkly topping on a pile of currency anyway?
The fact that this meme misattributes horse armor to Skyrim instead of Oblivion is bothering me way more than it should
Kids these days don’t know shit man. Skyrim had been out long enough to concieve a kid and watch him graduate. Oblivion might as well have been a DOS title to them.
It worries me that you think a 15-year-old is able to watch their child graduate.
It worries me that you assume video games reproduce and raise offspring and develop and receive education at a rate that matches their human analogues.
It worries me that everyone is worrying so much.
I feel like everyone else worrying about everything let’s me relax.
Thats… worrisome.
They’re a child prodigy.
I’ll say, look how much money they’re making.
So I put a boot on my disk, which was the style at the time
A while back in some discord server I was in someone posted a meme that had a siltstrider in it and they didn’t even know what it is. Someone said it looked like a half finished HL2 model.
After so many re-releases of Skyrim, I kind of forgot there were TES games before it…
Morrowind is still dope.
Stop 👏 playing 👏 games 👏 that 👏 rip 👏 you 👏 off 👏
Or just stop playing games that exist as shitty GACHA vending machines.
It isn’t even the cost per-say. Its the fact that mounts were implemented in D4 as a practical afterthought. They barely affect gameplay, you can’t take them into dungeons, they don’t have any kind of skill progression or character synergy on their own right. Barely more than a TF2 fancy hat.
I got D4 at base price on release, played the main act, and shelved it months ago. I can’t imagine still playing a game that’s been nothing but bloody runs since that initial release. Nevermind paying $60 for a fucking cosmetics improvement while I grind mobs for incremental stat increases at the level cap.
TF2 fancy hats are relevant to the game. They provide an entire economy and allow for style, when finding ever new or enjoying old ways of hilarious frags.
They are not an after thought, but a solid part of the games progressed development. However they are not providing an advantage in the core play, so everyone can still enjoy the game.
At least Diablo is easier to quit than games that literally condition players into a gambling addiction. But all this is easier said than done.
I mean Diablo is pretty addicting too lol, one of my friends dropped out of school for Diablo. Then again, one of my friends almost dropped out of school for Modern Warfare 2 - not that it wasn’t fun of course (most fun CoD imo).
Yeah, but grinding loot for free doesn’t cause the same amount of harm as compulsively spending on lootboxes.
Also stop pre-ordering games that aren’t complete.
Do you guys not have phones?
Meanwhile, Helldivers 2’s armor is like 2 bucks, and you can find the currency in-game.
Its nice to see a low cost microtransaction, and nice to see that you can get the currency in game but really thats just the same as it was a few years back before it went full 100 dollar for a reskin mode.
You are defending a game by pointing out that its money grabbing methods are less greedy than another company.
Games wont make the billions and billions they make now if they move away from the in game purchases models but they also evidently dont need billions and billions to operate.
Some of the best games on the market were made on small budgets by indie developers and sell well because the are fun and people actually want to play them.
I would argue that on online game kinda needs a stream of revenue that’s doesn’t only come from the first purchase, since that will stagnate.
Maybe we don’t make every game a live service. Remember halo 2, game was fantastic and no micro transactions in sight if you don’t count xbl.
For Democracy!
What happened to the micro part of microtransactions? This is why I only bought one skin in Genshin Impact since they give you extra funny money for your first time to get it, but a second skin will double than the first so I’m never buying one ever again.
Macrotransactions.
I will only pay if I get Robin Williams. This is the hill I will die on.
At least Genshin Impact had a fucking plot, too. I can stomach dropping an extra $30 on a game after the first 100 hours. But D4 just stopped being a story after release. I was having fun exploring the world and plot in Genshin for the better part of two years (thanks, COVID!) I cleared D4 in a month. Cleared it again with another class. Got bored and shelved it.
Genshin is good in some aspects, but it shows how desensitized we are that we accept the egregious gambling and the endless grind that only exists for the sake of retention. Can Genshin players really talk shit about this when in average it takes around $200 to get one single 5* character? Even if you are not paying that yourself, the game is built that way to exploit those who do.
we accept the egregious gambling and the endless grind that only exists for the sake of retention
The world was big enough and rich enough that I could mostly ignore the dungeons and never really feel like grinding. I just kinda wandered around chasing quest-lines and having fun. I didn’t sweat the 5* heroes and never really had a problem with the PvE aspect of the game. Admittedly, I wasn’t doing end-game content or playing anything remotely competitively.
Even if you are not paying that yourself, the game is built that way to exploit those who do.
Sure. Its a game full of psychological landmines. And if you’re in your 30s and you’ve learned how to dance through the bullshit, then its easy. But if you’re playing this game as a twelve year old and constantly getting spammed by the Wallet Inspector to give up another $20, less so.
But… I can’t do anything about that. What really gets me is that the country where this game is produced (China) has better and more comprehensive regulations to limit exploitation of end-users than the countries where the majority of players come from (Japan, Korea, USA). I believe there was even some amount of controversy in how hard the western-oriented interfaces sold in-game purchases, relative to the domestic versions.
You can avoid the grind at first since the game is PvE, but the further you go the more the game demands you to increase the World Level, and the more grind you need to do to get each character playable at that level.
I didn’t max out my World Level because at some point it felt like undoing my work of powering up the characters, but the game definitely pushes you that way. Not only story quests, but doiing Abyss levels for more free currency requires high level characters.
That’s not even mentioning Artifacts which have so many layers of randomized stats that you could be basically grinding forever to get one which has exactly the stats you want.
I can never shake off the feeling that if Genshin wasn’t gacha, if you could get characters from quests and weapons and artifacts from exploration, it would be a much, much better game, even if it was smaller and shorter. But more and more, this seems to be the kind of game that companies want to make.
China seems to be showing a bit more pulse than many countries as far as reining in lootbox games goes, but it’s still not enough, and it doesn’t seem the benefits of these efforts can be seen worldwide.
I mean, enough would be loading these senior executives and marketing directors into a cannon and firing them into the ocean. But I agree, even the most stringent rules always seem to be attacking the edges of the problem.
I buy the monthly cards in advance and use the gems they give you from that, best value way of getting them
Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t people warned about this before the game even came out?
This should fall under the purview of “fools and their money.”
Such that laws are created to protect people from scammers? Because that is what really should be done. With the rise of this "buying is not owning’ bulshit, it has been a long time coming.
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This year‘s CK3 DLC package is also very close in price to the „base game.“ Naturally, it provides nowhere near as much content and I refuse to believe it requires nearly as much work to make either.
Paradox DLC policy is why I don’t play Paradox games anymore.
If I were to only play 1 game ever, then the DLC system might be ok, it’s basically a subscription system. But since I’d only play a campaign every other year or so, I’m not going to fork out that much money for 1 campaign. And it’s way too annoying to play some game with obvious parts missing + in game ads, so now Paradox gets no more money from me.
Yeah I loved EUIV early on, but have left it alone for a while. Now, whenever I get the urge to play again (and I do), I have a look at everything that popped up in the meantime and it’s just overwhelming. Sure, I could play the snapshot I have but then the game keeps getting patched so you get stunted new mechanics that need the DLCs to function properly. I could revert to a previous patch, but what was the patch in march 2021? Do I still find it in the steam options?
And if you want to bite the bullet and just buy the whole DLC collection it’s around 100 euro for a couple of years. or something like 300 for the whole package? I do appreciate the quality that paradox churns out though.
This is why I’ve been holding off on getting victoria 3.
Can you expand on this in-game ad thing? I love paradox but it’s been loooong time since I played one of theirs.
Here’s an complaint thread (not mine) with a screenshot: https://old.reddit.com/r/hoi4/comments/suurzs/paradox_this_is_unacceptable_in_a_paid_product/
I personally get more annoyed by in game presentation of features and then getting hit with a “you need to pay extra to use this”, that’s basically an ad as well and it’s constantly there in the main gameplay loop. Bye bye immersion. It’s an annoyance every time that you are confronted with it, which in most paradox games is basically all the time. It’s like buying a car and then having to pay extra to unlock the seat heating that is already installed.
I could probably work around it by not auto updating paradox games and installing mods to remove some of the ads, but for 1 campaign every 2 years that’s just not worth the hassle for me. So I simply don’t play paradox games anymore.
Ya I agree. I do not like that either
Kind of like Monster Hunter Rise’s DLC being almost the same price as the game, while having no campaign at all, unlike Iceborne.
I buy base Paradox games just so i can mod the cracked version with all dlc through steam.
Care to elaborate?
English is not my first language. So basically how it works is you buy the base game and then you can download mods on workshop. Then you download the cracked version (preferably with the latest patch.) Then you launch the game through steam and select the modlist you wanna play, then you launch the cracked version and it will have that same modlist. I tried it with CK3, HOI4 and Stellaris but i bet it’s the same with all of their games. Only thing that sucks is you can’t easily download the latest patch for cracked version, but you can stop steam updates while you finish one playthrough or something. Hope this helps if you need better explanation dm me
This works because Clausewitz games store mods in Documents instead of somewhere specific to the install
Thanks! I thought it was something like that
This sort of thing is exactly why I mostly just play retro games.
Indie games ftw!
I did that for a while, but I discovered my local library has a great selection of games. I went from spending a few hundo on games a year to buying two a year - Christmas and birthday, and doing the rest of my gaming exploring their catalogue. It’s been great on my wallet. Hooray libraries.
There are a lot of solid indie titles you can get for $10
Somehow that’s not surprising, which is sad.
And I’m sure several whales have already bought it
If they still play honestly …
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No it doesn’t. Social media sites that have moderators really need to take a stand about clickbait garbage headlines like this. It’s like getting a free t-shirt with a car purchase and claiming that T-shirt costs $40,000. You’re buying coins which already cost that much, the coins with or without the mount cost that much. Currently you can buy those coins and get a free mount. Lots to be upset with Diablo and Blizzard, but this is just garbage.
