Why don't we bring in this type of system in for everything.
Hey... Kind of hard making money in the grocery business. I know... how about we sell you RNG grocery boxes and you just hope for the best. Maybe if you're really lucky, there might be a piece of meat in there for you.
You know.... There's no cash prize... it ain't gambling.
What a good way to teach our children how to earn things.
And yes a very significant number of the people playing these games are children and the gaming industry is just shoving this shit down their throats.
This kind of win epic loot crap entices children more than any other age group. Keep this garbage out of games where kids play.
You can do a lot more than vote with your wallet. If you feel strongly, contact your local member of government and let them know how you feel about it.
This shit is like the wild west right now, They all going for a piece of the action. Even the Multibillion dollar conglomerates are in... you know the poor ones that buy up everything.
Industries incapable of regulating themselves is nothing new. Someone always ends up having to step in and clean it up.
I don't like lootboxes, but isn't this argument dangerously close to the "video games teaches our children violence" argument?
Are we going to ban trading cards now too? Cereals that have a chance to contain a rare prize in the box?
When I was a child back in the 60s (before personal computers) there were these gumball "machines" in the grocery store lobby which we passed by every week.
Put in a nickel, get a piece of gum, which was overpriced, but not a bad deal.
Then they put in machines for a dime or quarter that showed a variety of toys you could "win". Some looked very cool and were worth more than what you paid, but most of the displayed items were junk.
Guess what the machine dispensed most of the time? Junk of course, in fact I'm not sure I ever won the highly valued prizes and my parents being much wiser quickly stopped providing money for them. I would sneak off at times and still try, never successful so I soon learned not to play.
Many other examples of RNG or gambling with the odds stacked against me including carnival hawkers and the games of "skill" to church sponsored bingo and even 2 dollar blackjack at their annual festivals.
I even recall the local market had "punch" boards, pay a dime, maybe win a dollar back.
Point of all this is children have been exposed to RNG and gambling long before the 1st video game was ever created so as another said in Bill's thread, "Save the children" is not an argument that should ever be used.
Parent's should however be watching their children and controlling what they buy. My friend just told me his 5 yr old grandson is always bringing over his cell phone with his latest game and its asking for more money to unlock new content, buy more lives, or yes, take a chance to win something. My friend just tells him no.
It's really just that simple, say no if you don't want to buy them.
But as Bill said, there really is no reason to endlessly complain about loot boxes, they are here to stay, especially if you cannot provide alternate and equally surefire ways to generate revenue.
Saying build a better game or provide more regular content simply isn't good enough, there is little evidence to support either approach is either practical or even possible. (outside of a handful of titles which are outliers due to their mechanics or unique IPs.)
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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Actually it says 94% came from EU and NA (47% from each, not 47% for both). So there's the rest of that billion you missed right there.
What you did was try to say how the eastern market was the majority userbase and that their model was not built on subscriptions, where the revenue must then be from shop sales. My counterpoint is the fact that the scale of the market in one region is largely an inconsequential metric if you compare it to the global marketplace for the product and it's major sources of revenue.
No actually my point was made clearly and you confirmed it with a 7 year old link. When did Blizzard's sparkle pony hit the servers? early 2010. Their cash shop was a way to bolster their lie. I never for a second thought Blizzard had 12.5 million subscribers. They didn't say that many playing the game. They said subscribers. I don't believe it.
Then you don't have much of a point. The links that proves the vast sum of revenue and profit for the company comes from box sales and subscription rather than cash shop proves your argument that sparkle ponies are important, how?
It's not adding up at the moment and you're not really connecting the dots in this leap in logic for us either. We can see that the market revenue breakdown favors the sectors that rely on the subscription model, we can see the reported income from these sectors and the income reported from subscriptions in the annual financial statements.
The reasonable conclusion to draw from the evidence provided so far is the fact that the subscription model is providing the considerable bulk of the game's revenue, as evidenced itself by the annual financial statements and the market breakdown. Subscription drops down and cash shop takes it's place? We don't see any notable increase in revenue. Sparkle ponies hit the market and you say they supposedly launched a broader cash shop in the likes of Korea? Yet the annual income didn't grow. Instead, we saw a retained pattern and market breakdown from the prior year continue.
You mean like this?
Blizzard’s operating income increased for 2010 as compared to 2009, primarily due to:
� Release of
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm
in the fourth quarter of 2010 and
StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty
in the
third quarter of 2010;
� Increase in sales of value-added services related to
World of Warcraft
; and
� The China region business being back online for full year of 2010 and the successful launch of
World of
Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King
in China in August 2010
Again, you're not really offering any kind of coherent argument.
What you just provided are title launches primarily (box sales). That itself has nothing to do with cash shops. On top of that the things you mention are not any parts of the statements that offers provision of subscription numbers, groupings, or revenue.
By saying that stuff all had launches in 2010 doesn't really mean a whole lot in that regard unless you can step back and tie those statements into where the major sources of revenue are for each of those and what margin they constitutes. Even then that does not refute my point about the income margins for the likes of WoW and the fact that the far and away largest revenue stream supporting the title is in fact is subscriptions while the cash shop remains a minor element in it's contributions.
If you wanted to compare it's revenue to a title where profits are only gained through micro-transactions to compare the success of cash shops, then feel free to compare WoW to HotS.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Their cash shop cannot be a major source simply because WoW does not have an aggressive cash shop because it has a subscription. Hell hath no fury as a subscriber rained on them.....
Seems you didn't read your own link. Their income increased in 2010 What are these value added services related to WOW in 2010? The sparkle Pony made $2 million dollars in 4 hours of release. That is a start wouldnt you think so? Or no?
You're distinctly failing to prove your point with this argument.
For one, you just quoted the entirety of Activision Blizzard's income, where my statement was pointing out WoW's income and breakdown. Their 2010 income being greater than 2009 does not betray their income margin between 2009 and 2010 that I had prior pointed out. Perhaps before accusing me of not reading the statements, pause to read them in full yourself to understand them and what's being referenced.
As you illustrated in your post for me, the jump in revenue for 2010 for the company can easily be attributed to multiple box sales and launches that took place during that year. If we look at WoW however as I was doing and break down it's income, then we're right back to what I have already stated. Your sparkle pony argument does not really stand out well at all between what you've already said for me and what I've already pointed out.
There is no massive hike in profits for WoW that's attributable to the likes of the celestial steed alone and while $2 million or even $20,000,000 in profit is great for that shop, that pales in comparison to the annual $1,440,000,000 reported in earnings. Even if we supposed that 7 million people bought the steed, that wouldn't even break the $200,000,000 million mark. Meaning the majority of profits is still coming from elsewhere when the breakdown hit $1,440,000,000.
Post edited by Deivos on
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Well one thing is for certain the costs involved in putting out an expansion and selling boxes will outstrip putting a virtual pony in a cash shop. Just as Chris Roberts and his virtual ships will attest to the money is a windfall from very little expenditure.
"Saying build a better game or provide more regular content simply isn't good enough, there is little evidence to support either approach is either practical or even possible. (outside of a handful of titles which are outliers due to their mechanics or unique IPs.)"
There's plenty of evidence that quality games make money.
But yeah, lootboxes etc. are reliable, easy and dirty ways to monetize games. It's good for devs because they can be assured to probably make at least some money no matter what kind of crap they churn out. It's bad for us gamers (at least mmorpgs gamers) because we are lost in a sea of crap, with every dev focused on either churning out as much crap as fast as possible or devising new and clever ways to inconvenience us and sell the remedy in the cash shop.
You can't really blame devs for wanting to avoid risk, but damn, it's not a great time to be an mmorpg fan.
So would we rather see the box price raised to say $70 or $80? I mean game prices have remained the same for 20 years or so right?
Let's make it $100 box price and $50 a month subscription, if the game is good and I can happily play it for years then I'm in. I will even pay $100 a year for xpacs.
So would we rather see the box price raised to say $70 or $80? I mean game prices have remained the same for 20 years or so right?
Obviously I would because I find p2w games unplayable. And there would be far less Devs working on World of Boobscraft 2: Waifu Dream, because that game would not sell based on its merits, and more Devs working on creating games I might actually be interested in playing.
Also game prices have somewhat gone up over time, but not in a balanced manner. What was once $20, turned into $40, turned into $60.
However over the course of that change in price, the cost of development did not scale the same way and instead took off more exponentially. Changing the box price even higher isn't necessarily the answer itself though, so much as a re-examination of the industry and why those development prices keep scaling insanely.
Part of the issue as I have experienced it is in part because the cost of the tools developers need to use to deliver AAA content keeps rising, and not necessarily for any discernible reason. Things that require a lot of new R&D do develop are given to costing more as a product to recoup cost of development, but when you talk about product like the Photoshop suite, Corel, 3DS Max, etc that have rev cycles which tend to deliver less standout changes or added value content between one generation to the next, developers are taking major hits to the cost of development due to the constant hike in such middleware that they can't operate without.
It's a burden that is rather unfair to developers and it affects their bottom line for pricing heavily in a manner they can't control. Sometimes it's a justified cost, and sometimes it isn't. But the developers are often getting screwed by the situation just as much or more because of it, due to the ever rising cost of tech and middleware.
So foremost I'd love a reassessment of the corporate technology sector and their pricing schemes for their products, as that's a major factor in what pricing scheme other companies like dev-studios are forced to set their consumer products at.
EDIT: And I find this shift from the attempted argument just a moment ago to the statements made just above about the lean on subscriptions and box sales as primary revenue source curious and a bit humorous since it runs rather counter to the argument that was just being posed against me. Might we retain consistency?
EDIT2: Y'know Craft, there's other ways for you to express that you have nothing to contribute to a conversation than pressing the LOL button.
Post edited by Deivos on
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
So would we rather see the box price raised to say $70 or $80? I mean game prices have remained the same for 20 years or so right?
Obviously I would because I find p2w games unplayable. And there would be far less Devs working on World of Boobscraft 2: Waifu Dream, because that game would not sell based on its merits, and more Devs working on creating games I might actually be interested in playing.
That was a pretty awesome answer! I agree btw lol World of Boobscraft
lol indeed. Kind of surprised no game has tried to sell breast enlargement coupons in a cash shop yet.
So would we rather see the box price raised to say $70 or $80? I mean game prices have remained the same for 20 years or so right?
Without even blinking an eye... Same for subs.
Be UPFRONT with your costs. Hiding them behind a lottery system so that some people can freeload is just wrong. MMOs are addictive on their own. Throwing other addictive behavior like gambling into it is just evil.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
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EDIT: And I find this shift from the attempted argument just a moment ago to the statements made just above about the lean on subscriptions and box sales as primary revenue source curious and a bit humorous since it runs rather counter to the argument that was just being posed against me. Might we retain consistency?
Do you really think we are daft ? We are players first even when we might argue about how companies make money and see how the realities are that does not mean we have to like it. Just pointing out that companies support an infrastructure does not make us the enemy or does it ?
I would galdly pay $100 and even $30 subscription for no cash shop .
But tell me seriously in the current market do you think any company would dare do that ?
They will come crawling out of woodwork and screaming down the rafters "gree...ee...eed"
EDIT: And I find this shift from the attempted argument just a moment ago to the statements made just above about the lean on subscriptions and box sales as primary revenue source curious and a bit humorous since it runs rather counter to the argument that was just being posed against me. Might we retain consistency?
Do you really think we are daft ? We are players first even when we might argue about how companies make money and see how the realities are that does not mean we have to like it. Just pointing out that companies support an infrastructure does not make us the enemy or does it ?
I would galdly pay $100 and even $30 subscription for no cash shop .
No, what I call daft is when people say one thing and argue for it, and then argue against it the very next page.
If you want to make this a conversation about stating the realities of any given company and it's behaviors, then that moves even further into the real of opinions shared versus facts, and hence why I was giving sources and information above to break down the reality of the company in question and the reality about it's sources of income.
This is exacerbated even more when the argument is about viability of a given format (in this case I was pointing out through example that a subscription model as primary income source could still be profitable), and then getting a counterargument to that apparently claiming it's not, and then the very same person asking for and agreeing with the notion of using subscriptions and box sales as the profit source.
What you would "gladly pay" for is entirely of no consequence on that matter. The problem is the issue of double-talk, considerably different than what you just claimed.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
The issue with holding up LoL or Half Life as examples is the monthly cost for maintaining and providing content for them is nothing compared to an MMO. So what is an MMO to do? More so a Western developer where payroll can eat up as much if not more than a third of your revenue
I'm tired of seeing people passively complain about "payroll" in the Western world like labor is something privileged to every delusional prick with an idea. Especially in the realm of digital media.
There are 2 options with hybrids inbetween;
Get the capital, create your AAA game, with your AAA timeline, and your AAA expectations and responsibilites. Sink or swim.
Get in your personal workspace, with people who believe in what you're doing, create your indy game, with loose timeline, and no expectations or responsibilities. Sink or swim.
All this "labor and insurance is too high for me, I'm going to have to sell my Lambo now" is getting to be a bit much.
Sorry for the off topic rant.
Sorry I majored in Business Management and Applied Computer Technology. Can't help but bring it up Payroll is always a big factor in business. Bigger than most realize. Not to mention server costs, network costs and hardware costs. Some articles were floating around a couple of years ago about Blizzard and their monthly costs for just WOW alone. It was something like $140,000 a day. Just for the servers. Not counting all the other costs. Obviously they were and are making a ton of money but what does that say for the teams that do not have Blizzard money? It is expensive running an MMO. Far more than many realize.
You're not wrong about labour costs being higher than a lot of people think but this is true for most businesses and not all of them resort to low-brow income generating schemes. Gambling promotion is an insidious thing in video gaming to the point that gamers have had to come to terms with its existence everywhere or just quit gaming. It would still be seen and criticized for the social cancer it is in any other industry... except for casinos, that is.
Something else that people are also wrong about is assuming that doing grunt work for a game developer gets you a good income. So those high payroll costs are only a factor in gaming because it's a labour-intensive enterprise, not because they pay particularly well.
So I don't buy increased production costs as a justification for resorting to this type of money making scheme. Maybe the market is just over-saturated with MMOs and some of them should just die. This also is part of capitalism.
An equivalent to loot boxes in MMOs in another over-saturated, highly competitive field would be adding slots to struggling restaurants... maybe that's an option in Vegas but they'd have some explaining to do anywhere else.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
cheyane said: Do you really think we are daft ?...
I would galdly pay $100 and even $30 subscription for no cash shop .
But tell me seriously in the current market do you think any company would dare do that ?
They will come crawling out of woodwork and screaming down the rafters "gree...ee...eed"
To address this particular commentary, I can answer your question by simply pointing to the post that you were just responding to.
You apparently didn't even read or comprehend what I wrote, given you addressed nothing in regard to my statement regarding where the cost to the developers comes up, let alone some of the prior costs mentioned about continued operation, and the fact that bloating prices of middleware is a major factor crippling the ability for developers to dictate the pricing of their own products.
No, instead you chose to ignore the entirety of my statement to instead pose an excessively absurd and illogical argument. So to answer a different question you asked of if I might think you are daft, you are making it hard for me to believe otherwise at the moment.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
What nonsense are you talking about ? The only game right now making money hand over fist is WoW with subscriptions. Where is the evidence that other games are surviving on subs only when so many have gone F2P or B2P or a combination of both after starting out with subs. Shouldn't that be proof that they cannot survive on subs alone. WoW is an anomaly because of its size. Other games do not have that luxury. Even FFXIV is not doing that great neither is EvE.
None of these games are pure subs either. So where aside from WoW have you proven anything. All you have shown is WoW which has a cash shop is making money.
I hope that everyone who so roundly castigated @BillMurphy in his article last week, appreciate and understand that our staff has a diverse set of opinions and we're not afraid or reluctant to present both sides of the issue.
So much for the tin foil hat supposition that we're paid by developers, wouldn't you say?
I'd be willing to bet (oh the irony!) that if you were to write an article critical of game studios' gender balance in key decision-making positions, the very same gamergaters that always assume you're being paid-off to be nice, will jump all over you with even more gusto.
Try it - you'll see the same screen names do it
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
What nonsense are you talking about ? The only game right now making money hand over fist is WoW with subscriptions. Where is the evidence that other games are surviving on subs only when so many have gone F2P or B2P or a combination of both after starting out with subs. Shouldn't that be proof that they cannot survive on subs alone. WoW is an anomaly because of its size. Other games do not have that luxury. Even FFXIV is not doing that great neither is EvE.
None of these games are pure subs either. So where aside from WoW have you proven anything. All you have shown is WoW which has a cash shop is making money.
For one, list truly solid MMOs that have launched in that period. You'll find a commonality that most these games share is that they aren't worth the price to play or that the box price more than constitutes the experience, meaning they can only make extended income by bilking players in an ancillary manner.
If you want a game to survive on subs, then it needs to be worth the sub cost. To which I can also point out something you failed to mention in that a lot of these games offer a sub or a proxy for subs in the form of premium packages that you buy every so often that provides premium status of some form alongside extra content/resources. Your named examples provided, for example, constitutes one game that had an utterly terrible launch and had to undergo a redevelopment, which completely hobbled it's potential to be a major success to begin with, and another game that while well built is excessively niche in it's design.
This does highlight yet another point however about the market. Something that's already understood to be a problem, the volume of titles without notable innovation or strong variation. Stagnation of the market can contribute to this spiral into loss of profits because even if you build a user experience that on an general level is "good", that does not guarantee profitability if you are competing in a market inundated with similar products. This characteristic has done quite a number on many segments of the market and can be observed trending very harshly in the mobile market at present already approaching a 1% profitability rate.
So where can you find good games worth paying much for in the first place? Answer that and you'll also have my answer about where else you can find a sub model profitable.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
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Put in a nickel, get a piece of gum, which was overpriced, but not a bad deal.
Then they put in machines for a dime or quarter that showed a variety of toys you could "win". Some looked very cool and were worth more than what you paid, but most of the displayed items were junk.
Guess what the machine dispensed most of the time? Junk of course, in fact I'm not sure I ever won the highly valued prizes and my parents being much wiser quickly stopped providing money for them. I would sneak off at times and still try, never successful so I soon learned not to play.
Many other examples of RNG or gambling with the odds stacked against me including carnival hawkers and the games of "skill" to church sponsored bingo and even 2 dollar blackjack at their annual festivals.
I even recall the local market had "punch" boards, pay a dime, maybe win a dollar back.
Point of all this is children have been exposed to RNG and gambling long before the 1st video game was ever created so as another said in Bill's thread, "Save the children" is not an argument that should ever be used.
Parent's should however be watching their children and controlling what they buy. My friend just told me his 5 yr old grandson is always bringing over his cell phone with his latest game and its asking for more money to unlock new content, buy more lives, or yes, take a chance to win something. My friend just tells him no.
It's really just that simple, say no if you don't want to buy them.
But as Bill said, there really is no reason to endlessly complain about loot boxes, they are here to stay, especially if you cannot provide alternate and equally surefire ways to generate revenue.
Saying build a better game or provide more regular content simply isn't good enough, there is little evidence to support either approach is either practical or even possible. (outside of a handful of titles which are outliers due to their mechanics or unique IPs.)
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
What you just provided are title launches primarily (box sales). That itself has nothing to do with cash shops. On top of that the things you mention are not any parts of the statements that offers provision of subscription numbers, groupings, or revenue.
By saying that stuff all had launches in 2010 doesn't really mean a whole lot in that regard unless you can step back and tie those statements into where the major sources of revenue are for each of those and what margin they constitutes. Even then that does not refute my point about the income margins for the likes of WoW and the fact that the far and away largest revenue stream supporting the title is in fact is subscriptions while the cash shop remains a minor element in it's contributions.
If you wanted to compare it's revenue to a title where profits are only gained through micro-transactions to compare the success of cash shops, then feel free to compare WoW to HotS.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
For one, you just quoted the entirety of Activision Blizzard's income, where my statement was pointing out WoW's income and breakdown. Their 2010 income being greater than 2009 does not betray their income margin between 2009 and 2010 that I had prior pointed out. Perhaps before accusing me of not reading the statements, pause to read them in full yourself to understand them and what's being referenced.
As you illustrated in your post for me, the jump in revenue for 2010 for the company can easily be attributed to multiple box sales and launches that took place during that year. If we look at WoW however as I was doing and break down it's income, then we're right back to what I have already stated. Your sparkle pony argument does not really stand out well at all between what you've already said for me and what I've already pointed out.
There is no massive hike in profits for WoW that's attributable to the likes of the celestial steed alone and while $2 million or even $20,000,000 in profit is great for that shop, that pales in comparison to the annual $1,440,000,000 reported in earnings. Even if we supposed that 7 million people bought the steed, that wouldn't even break the $200,000,000 million mark. Meaning the majority of profits is still coming from elsewhere when the breakdown hit $1,440,000,000.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
Cash shop pony ''Money for Nothing"
There's plenty of evidence that quality games make money.
But yeah, lootboxes etc. are reliable, easy and dirty ways to monetize games. It's good for devs because they can be assured to probably make at least some money no matter what kind of crap they churn out. It's bad for us gamers (at least mmorpgs gamers) because we are lost in a sea of crap, with every dev focused on either churning out as much crap as fast as possible or devising new and clever ways to inconvenience us and sell the remedy in the cash shop.
You can't really blame devs for wanting to avoid risk, but damn, it's not a great time to be an mmorpg fan.
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거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
Also game prices have somewhat gone up over time, but not in a balanced manner. What was once $20, turned into $40, turned into $60.
However over the course of that change in price, the cost of development did not scale the same way and instead took off more exponentially. Changing the box price even higher isn't necessarily the answer itself though, so much as a re-examination of the industry and why those development prices keep scaling insanely.
Part of the issue as I have experienced it is in part because the cost of the tools developers need to use to deliver AAA content keeps rising, and not necessarily for any discernible reason. Things that require a lot of new R&D do develop are given to costing more as a product to recoup cost of development, but when you talk about product like the Photoshop suite, Corel, 3DS Max, etc that have rev cycles which tend to deliver less standout changes or added value content between one generation to the next, developers are taking major hits to the cost of development due to the constant hike in such middleware that they can't operate without.
It's a burden that is rather unfair to developers and it affects their bottom line for pricing heavily in a manner they can't control. Sometimes it's a justified cost, and sometimes it isn't. But the developers are often getting screwed by the situation just as much or more because of it, due to the ever rising cost of tech and middleware.
So foremost I'd love a reassessment of the corporate technology sector and their pricing schemes for their products, as that's a major factor in what pricing scheme other companies like dev-studios are forced to set their consumer products at.
EDIT: And I find this shift from the attempted argument just a moment ago to the statements made just above about the lean on subscriptions and box sales as primary revenue source curious and a bit humorous since it runs rather counter to the argument that was just being posed against me. Might we retain consistency?
EDIT2: Y'know Craft, there's other ways for you to express that you have nothing to contribute to a conversation than pressing the LOL button.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Same for subs.
Be UPFRONT with your costs. Hiding them behind a lottery system so that some people can freeload is just wrong. MMOs are addictive on their own. Throwing other addictive behavior like gambling into it is just evil.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
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I would galdly pay $100 and even $30 subscription for no cash shop .
But tell me seriously in the current market do you think any company would dare do that ?
They will come crawling out of woodwork and screaming down the rafters "gree...ee...eed"
If you want to make this a conversation about stating the realities of any given company and it's behaviors, then that moves even further into the real of opinions shared versus facts, and hence why I was giving sources and information above to break down the reality of the company in question and the reality about it's sources of income.
This is exacerbated even more when the argument is about viability of a given format (in this case I was pointing out through example that a subscription model as primary income source could still be profitable), and then getting a counterargument to that apparently claiming it's not, and then the very same person asking for and agreeing with the notion of using subscriptions and box sales as the profit source.
What you would "gladly pay" for is entirely of no consequence on that matter. The problem is the issue of double-talk, considerably different than what you just claimed.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Something else that people are also wrong about is assuming that doing grunt work for a game developer gets you a good income. So those high payroll costs are only a factor in gaming because it's a labour-intensive enterprise, not because they pay particularly well.
So I don't buy increased production costs as a justification for resorting to this type of money making scheme. Maybe the market is just over-saturated with MMOs and some of them should just die. This also is part of capitalism.
An equivalent to loot boxes in MMOs in another over-saturated, highly competitive field would be adding slots to struggling restaurants... maybe that's an option in Vegas but they'd have some explaining to do anywhere else.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
You apparently didn't even read or comprehend what I wrote, given you addressed nothing in regard to my statement regarding where the cost to the developers comes up, let alone some of the prior costs mentioned about continued operation, and the fact that bloating prices of middleware is a major factor crippling the ability for developers to dictate the pricing of their own products.
No, instead you chose to ignore the entirety of my statement to instead pose an excessively absurd and illogical argument. So to answer a different question you asked of if I might think you are daft, you are making it hard for me to believe otherwise at the moment.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
None of these games are pure subs either. So where aside from WoW have you proven anything. All you have shown is WoW which has a cash shop is making money.
Try it - you'll see the same screen names do it
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
If you want a game to survive on subs, then it needs to be worth the sub cost. To which I can also point out something you failed to mention in that a lot of these games offer a sub or a proxy for subs in the form of premium packages that you buy every so often that provides premium status of some form alongside extra content/resources. Your named examples provided, for example, constitutes one game that had an utterly terrible launch and had to undergo a redevelopment, which completely hobbled it's potential to be a major success to begin with, and another game that while well built is excessively niche in it's design.
This does highlight yet another point however about the market. Something that's already understood to be a problem, the volume of titles without notable innovation or strong variation. Stagnation of the market can contribute to this spiral into loss of profits because even if you build a user experience that on an general level is "good", that does not guarantee profitability if you are competing in a market inundated with similar products. This characteristic has done quite a number on many segments of the market and can be observed trending very harshly in the mobile market at present already approaching a 1% profitability rate.
So where can you find good games worth paying much for in the first place? Answer that and you'll also have my answer about where else you can find a sub model profitable.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin