A matter of trust: The problem with microtransactions, EA and AAA gaming

I trust BioWare to not pull Bungie. In case they do, at first sign of stealth nerfs or hiding content behind additional paywalls to entice us to pay for something we already paid for I’m switching to ‘fuck EA’ mode. Making all the cool cosmetics mtx only would result in that also.

So far Anthem looks way more interesting than Destiny 2 and I really think it won’t have nearly as shitty monetization.

Games make millions. Sometimes even billions of dollars. The games are not becoming more expensive to make. If anything there's a glut of skilled workers in the field. What isn't ever going down is the greed of large companies. EA is at the forefront, but others, like Bethesda with their recent moves to make everything as cheap as possible and charge 20$ for a freaking ingame skin is a sign of where the things are headed. Anthem will have microtransactions and ingame shop. It will start with costumes but if successful will expand to every aspect of the game. There is no doubt to that.

I pay, you deliver first, then deliver additional. Then we can talk about forther amortisation of your game. In other words - it's not F2P, so MTX shouldn't be there in the first place. GaaS I hear you say? Well, unless I don't know what I'm supposed to expect down the line I'm not gonna pay on top of sale price. And then again - my activities in early access spending is something I keep pretty limited.

Bioware only ever sold its DLC when I really enjoyed their ME3 MP. In no other game have I ever bought any mtx or further DLC.

All is fine then...

Ha. Of course some companies have.

I find Mark and Mike have been pretty consistent doing what they say (over many years) so if they say something is the case very plainly, I'll take it from them. The same trust would not follow if a statement was made by A.N.Other EA apparatchik, to be fair.

You wanna know what happened to that? Wall Street is what happened to that. It's not isolated to games, either. Why do you think Microsoft switched Office to a subscription model? Photoshop? Same.

The revenue curve for a software release is very spikey. Starts off with a big spike, then tails off. Wall Street hates that shit. They want to see growing revenue, quarter over quarter. I mean, from the investor's viewpoint, it makes sense, particularly when there is risk associated with each product, and they come out few and far between.

You want to avoid recurring revenue and monetization, benign or otherwise? Support non-public indie game developers. Once they go public, though, they are subject to pressure from Wall Street.

I put up with benign monetization because I know I have no choice in the matter, if I want a AAA game from a public company. I don't like it, but at least with the benign ones, I can just not spend the extra $.

Please don't.

Like a lot more...teams are bigger, more expensive, infrastructure and associative overhead is more...yet game prices have hardly risen in the past decade.

And I'll take the opposing view on greed.  Consumers are the greedy ones.  They expect more, better, faster without consideration for who's going to pay for it.  Kind of disconnect there imo.  In customer service you can offer price, quality, or efficiency.  Consumers can expect to get one of those...two if they're lucky.  They'll never get all three.

I do agree that the effort/expense doesn't have anything to do with predatory practices...less expensive doesn't negate...

Actually, adjusted for inflation, game making is getting cheaper. Full stop. Plus if expense were the issue you'd see alternate monetization on games that genuinely effing NEEDED it, and not in games that would sell oodles regardless of quality, just on name recognition alone. COD or Star Wars anyone?

If a company doesn't have a quality product that people want to buy, by the laws of the free market IT DOESN'T DESERVE TO EXIST. For all they espouse its virtues and laws, there is not a single bloody company on our planet that actually wants to follow the free market. (Not the least because said system inevitably leads to predatory monopolies without government regulation.)

That makes no sense. Adjusting for inflation doesn't make things cheaper or more expensive, it just normalizes the unit value of whatever you are using to measure cost with, against some baseline. What makes things cheaper is removing costs, like only using 3 environment artists instead of 12, or improving efficiency, like automating texture scaling instead of having 3 artists do it by hand. What increases costs are things like complexity and scale.

While there probably are some efficiencies and labor cost reductions for AAA creation over the last 10 years, I gotta believe those are overwhelmed by the increase in complexity and scale. Map sizes are bigger. Number and size (poly count) of models are bigger. Textures are bigger. Number of animated characters in a scene are bigger. Bigger, bigger, bigger is the trend for AAA. And all the things that are bigger tend to be things that aren't easily automated -- like faces -- which means more manual labor, not less.

Even if the cost of making games is going up, the sheer glut of profit being made on physical and digital sales ALONE dwarf any supposed development sink, let alone supplementary monetization like MTXs and other DLCs. The problem isn't that games don't earn enough; the problem is that it's not going back into the games: It's going into the pockets of the CEOs, Shareholders/Investors, and offshore tax havens. Just like every OTHER effing industry in this country. Any one of these "Triple AAA" companies could fund the entire industry for a YEAR without so much as a dip into their own finances.

Now we're seeing the crash that heralds the bursting of this monetization bubble. Unsustainable growth is self explanatory.

Edit: And noone-NOONE- asked games to go all in on graphical fidelity, complex game systems, or marketing. We could have had a situation where graphics slowly but steadily climbed to meet actual customer demand and budget accordingly BUT NO. EVERYTHING now HAS to be photorealistic or it's the worst crap ever (gaming journalism that panders to this kind of graphical orgy contribute as well). Not mentioning of course the simple stylistic games that are far FAR AND AWAY better quality and more profitable like Minecraft or Stardew Valley.