[Warning: Is 3 comments long]
[Tldr: I’m too experienced and jaded to be the industry’s target ez-prey dolla-dolla demographic, but trying to be hopeful]
[1 of 3]
It was first expansions that you could buy. Like add-ons to the game that added content. You’d buy them in a store and have to install them separately over/in the original game.
Then they were served over the internet and would just install themselves.
Then there were patches and stuff.
Then… Those started to sort of blur together. Different companies would give them to you for free, others would charge you for it. Most pc titles only charged you for the big additions, and PlayStation stuff was also largely free services. But Microsoft on xbox was like lolno u gota pay. And everybody followed suit.
And now you pay for the game, the expansion, skins, save slots, storage space for items, quality of life fixes, new audio, etc.
And now it is the sole purpose of the “game” studios, the worst thing to happen:
“Games As A Service”
You pay for everything and the game is designed around selling stuff. It’s not fun, it’s bad quality, it’s expensive, and it’s just the way things are now for everything except small foreign indie studios.
Specifically those things together. Small AND Foreign AND indie. I was looking at what games I actually liked playing in the past ten or so years, and almost every single one was a small studio, in Scandinavia or croatia or Asia, and was an independent studio. I was SHOCKED.
I get that games in the 80s and 90s (I’m only 33 but I know my history, I started gaming in the late 90s) used to cost 60-70$ and have gone DOWN in price despite massive and constant inflation. But instead of accounting for the real need for now cash to still develop games with the same scale, features, depth, and quality by just increasing the price, they’ve chosen to itemize the price behind the lie of a free trial of an intentionally limited and frustrating “game” full of mechanisms to coerce you to constantly spend money.
I’ve worked in construction, and this is the same unethical behavior a lot of contractors do. They start out with a low price, and “find” problems that you’re basically forced to do change orders on. It’s super predatory and deeply unethical, and the same thing that the game industry is ALL moving towards.
I really wish studios would just come out and say “this is how much the game costs us to build if you want lv 1 quality, this for lv 2, and this for lv 3. This is how much we forecast it will cost you players for each level.” And just try to gague interest and make the best possible game possible within some forecasts, with maybe ranges of price with the final price being different at the end. I know that’s probably too much to ask, but GaaS is soooo, so frustrating.
I love gaming. I played, in their eras, a lot of the greatest games of all time. And NONE of them felt like you were ripped off. Not even for the mediocre titles. And it feels like the scopes of games now are just taking a decent minigame from some masterpiece game of the past, adding in some extra features, polishing it up a bit, selling it at full price, then selling extra bits piecemeal to try to make even more money. Like, bro, that was a MINIgame in ff8! You didn’t even have to play it, it was just there if you needed a break from the rest of the game!
[Warning: Is 3 comments long]
[Tldr: I’m too experienced and jaded to be the industry’s target ez-prey dolla-dolla demographic, but trying to be hopeful]
[1 of 3]
It was first expansions that you could buy. Like add-ons to the game that added content. You’d buy them in a store and have to install them separately over/in the original game.
Then they were served over the internet and would just install themselves.
Then there were patches and stuff.
Then… Those started to sort of blur together. Different companies would give them to you for free, others would charge you for it. Most pc titles only charged you for the big additions, and PlayStation stuff was also largely free services. But Microsoft on xbox was like lolno u gota pay. And everybody followed suit.
And now you pay for the game, the expansion, skins, save slots, storage space for items, quality of life fixes, new audio, etc.
And now it is the sole purpose of the “game” studios, the worst thing to happen:
“Games As A Service”
You pay for everything and the game is designed around selling stuff. It’s not fun, it’s bad quality, it’s expensive, and it’s just the way things are now for everything except small foreign indie studios.
Specifically those things together. Small AND Foreign AND indie. I was looking at what games I actually liked playing in the past ten or so years, and almost every single one was a small studio, in Scandinavia or croatia or Asia, and was an independent studio. I was SHOCKED.
I get that games in the 80s and 90s (I’m only 33 but I know my history, I started gaming in the late 90s) used to cost 60-70$ and have gone DOWN in price despite massive and constant inflation. But instead of accounting for the real need for now cash to still develop games with the same scale, features, depth, and quality by just increasing the price, they’ve chosen to itemize the price behind the lie of a free trial of an intentionally limited and frustrating “game” full of mechanisms to coerce you to constantly spend money.
I’ve worked in construction, and this is the same unethical behavior a lot of contractors do. They start out with a low price, and “find” problems that you’re basically forced to do change orders on. It’s super predatory and deeply unethical, and the same thing that the game industry is ALL moving towards.
I really wish studios would just come out and say “this is how much the game costs us to build if you want lv 1 quality, this for lv 2, and this for lv 3. This is how much we forecast it will cost you players for each level.” And just try to gague interest and make the best possible game possible within some forecasts, with maybe ranges of price with the final price being different at the end. I know that’s probably too much to ask, but GaaS is soooo, so frustrating.
I love gaming. I played, in their eras, a lot of the greatest games of all time. And NONE of them felt like you were ripped off. Not even for the mediocre titles. And it feels like the scopes of games now are just taking a decent minigame from some masterpiece game of the past, adding in some extra features, polishing it up a bit, selling it at full price, then selling extra bits piecemeal to try to make even more money. Like, bro, that was a MINIgame in ff8! You didn’t even have to play it, it was just there if you needed a break from the rest of the game!
[Continued in next reply]