mindbleach @ mindbleach @sh.itjust.works

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5,311

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2 yr. ago

No, I won’t wait three extra years and pay 200 bucks for a fighting game to see if I like it and then only play ten percent of the roster.

Who asked?

“you can only buy things in a static format and devs are forbidden from selling you expansions”

At no point have you understood this argument.

I came out the gate with a favorable comparison for horse armor.

And somehow the least tolerable part of this strawman is 'you're just angry, you only feel strongly, juuust because you disagreeee.' It pains me to leave this abuse-promoting fluff unanswered, but you're not listening anyway.

If buying isn't owning then piracy isn't theft.

Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to play a fighting game against a player using a DLC character you don’t own

Good. The alternative is inseparable from providing everyone the whole roster, but pretending each character is worth twelve fucking dollars, so a generic fighting game is somehow worth five times what any sane person would pay up-front for one game.

The counterproposal is just selling the god-damned game, with all the fffucking characters. Or adding free shit as incentive to attract new customers and retain existing players. Or selling an honest-to-god sequel or expansion, instead of charging expansion kinds of money for the bare minimum of content.

live games have running costs in general.

Then they should charge a subscription or die off.

People make rational spending decisions about subscriptions. They're not popular. People don't like that sort of thing, when you treat them honestly and fairly, instead of tricking them.

I have negative patience for the idea that a company spending money justifies whatever horseshit monetization scheme they propose. As if, because they've already blown half a billion dollars, and intend to keep burning more, that makes it okay to charge eight actual dollars for an imaginary hat. Fuck that noise. If your company has ongoing costs - announce ongoing fees. Don't play stupid games about tricking a fraction of players into spending their whole paycheck.

you’re only paying an access license fee

Fuck that and fuck anyone who told you that. You own things that you buy. That's what the money was for. The first sale doctrine knocked this shit down, an entire century ago, and it's only through corruption and nuh-uh-ing that software has retained any form of special consideration. If I bought Peter Jackson's King Kong on HD-DVD and King King The Game Of The Movie for Xbox 360, I own both equally. Whatever text is written inside to pretend otherwise is meaningless. I own that text, too.

If you believe any mumbo-jumbo saying otherwise then you should demand its immediate repeal. You should be morally opposed to its continued existence. Defend your basic right to own products.

there is no requirement to have immediate access to all content in a game

THEN WHAT DOES IT FUCKING MEAN TO BUY THE GODDAMN GAME?

Even subscription MMOs pull this shit! Games that have obviously covered their ongoing costs, for twenty years straight, are double-dipping out of naked greed. Nobody's objections matter. The abuse is worth more than whatever dent could be made by people rightly saying, fuck this abuse.

standalone, offline gaming has its own market

Those games have this too.

Were you not listening?

This shit is in FLAGSHIP FRANCHISE, SEVENTY-DOLLAR, SINGLE-PLAYER GAMES. It costs almost nothing to add. The backlash barely matters, because some fucks will lurch out to defend it. The marketing value of 'we won't rob you!' is dwindling, and again, can become a lie after you bought it.

Counting on media literacy to stop direct manipulation for profit is a failure to acknowledge how any marketing has ever worked. Have you seen reality lately? Educating the rubes never fucking works, because the people manipulating them for direct monetary gain are better at tricking them than you could ever be at convincing them they have been tricked.

Fuck them kids. I am talking about a scam perpetrated against people with credit cards.

Any comparison with alcohol requires some ridiculous metaphor where it costs money to keep the bottle on your shelf. Alcohol is clearly a product you buy, and then own. It's consumable because it's food. If all games were at least that much of a product there would be nothing her to complain about.

My condolences for somehow dropping one thousand dollars one quarter at a time - but you spent that money renting someone else's hardware. Like a subscription to an MMO, the transaction fundamentally makes sense, as a service. That is never the case for microtransactions. They are charging for permission to say you have something that's already in the game you're already playing on the hardware you personally own.

Actual booster packs are just barely excused by the fact cardboard costs money. Permission does not. And yet: the entire industry is being reshaped to funnel people toward systems that are objectively worse than the most borderline-tolerable abuses of decades past. This is bad, actually. And it's not some niche or remainder or side hustle. It's HALF THE INDUSTRY, BY REVENUE.

If we allow this shit to continue there will be nothing else.

Ahhh, fuck. I didn't know that's where they found Doug Bowser.

But it'll never apply to what you do, because you're special and that's different.

Nuance nuance nuance! Plagiarism machine. Zero cognitive dissonance.

Generated content is great, it lets you go home early and fuck your wife! But let me ask you, novice: would YOU ever play a game with generated content?

This whole industry makes impossible broken demands, isn't it just the tits? We'd never make games under-budget if not for this tech that I myself said was useless shite until just now. There's no way increased productivity will also be crunched to demand 2000 textures in this eighty-hour week.

Obviously that scaling for selection doesn't apply to MY job, because AI will never do what I do, unlike how I think it can handle everyone else's work. Everyone insisting I'm not superior to all these NPCs I work with must not experience nuuuaaance.

It feels like we were denied the stunning possibility of green tigers... until you stop and remember the stunning reality of them being bright fucking orange.

Alan Davies: "And you could fit his accomplishments on the back of a stamp."

Be glad they didn't knock.

Did Nintendo recently buy EA?

This is what I'm talking about: an unwillingness to see anything but finished products. Not developing the content in a big-ass game... just adding stuff to a big-ass game. Like BG3 begins fully-formed as the exact product you've already played.

Like it'd be awful if similar new games took less than six years, three hundred people, and one hundred million dollars.

Oh my god you're still trying to have it both ways.

I do not concede at all that there is a difference between Magic the Gathering packs and loot boxes.

Then why the fuck don't you want both banned? Magic Online shouldn't even be legal. None of the excuses work for a digital game!

I do not respect the comparison as a defense of current horseshit. Charging real money inside video games is a scam. It's a cancer that lets "free" games somehow slurp up billions of dollars a year. It makes psychological manipulation for unlimited sums of money a primary goal of game design. Being good or fun does not matter, so long as people are addicted and unsatisfied.

I was the quiet old guy in the back pointing out that they were effectively the same as paying for continues in arcades.

You were wrong. Arcades are rental - their entire business model was built on cool shit you cannot possibly afford to own, being accessed in very short bursts, for negligible quantities of money. That's obviously not the same thing as your tablet, running a generic 2D Unity project, asking ten fucking dollars unless you'd rather stare at a pointless counter for an entire hour.

Specific things getting worse is not some "back in my day" horseshit. Games and gaming have improved massively - but this bu-si-ness mo-del should have been illegal a decade ago. The shithole it spawned in, a pocket computer where you're not allowed to run your own goddamn software, should never have been tolerated.

This shit is in $70, single-player, flagship-franchise titles. It gets added to shit you already bought. It's naked greed with no upside. Delete it.

I am explicitly willing to burn down my own childhood, if anyone convinced me it was the same kind of abuse we're seeing now.

But I hold that the abuse we're seeing now is demonstrably worse. And it is a half the industry by revenue. Spare me your narrative posturing and engage with how new things can in fact be fucked in ways that old things were not.

These people have made the exact same comparison, and I will tell you what I told them: buying the same game three times is fundamentally better than being held against the grindstone for potentially thousands of dollars.

And renting time on someone else's machine is never the same thing as being charged five actual dollars to increment a value in a single-player game on your own goddamn hardware.

And if I felt Magic The Gathering booster packs were the same thing as lootboxes then I'd call to ban booster packs too.

And even the infamous horse armor was at least new content, which you bought. Bethesda sent you a file you didn't have, in exchange for money. People were mad about the value proposition versus a full expansion. What actually mattered was that it solved a problem Bethesda created. The entire gacha industry is about installing things without asking, telling you that you can't have them, and convincing you to want them anyway, badly enough to open your wallet and look away.

"They can" isn't, but "they can't" is.

Sure dude.

My apologies for remembering the words you wrote.

If you don't like speculation, don't say things like "there’s no reason they couldn’t become qualified." Because that, in itself, is speculation. As surely as calling this situation "crazy" is commentary on whether it makes sense.

My guy, if remarking that it's "crazy" isn't commentary on whether it makes sense, what is it?

Distinction without difference.