Once we differed on what cash shop items we thought was game breaking, now we differ on what we regard as casino gameplay. I don't know what we will have issue with in five years time but one thing you can be sure of, is that gaming companies will introduce yet another highly questionable, gameplay altering form of revenue.
Once we differed on what cash shop items we thought was game breaking, now we differ on what we regard as casino gameplay. I don't know what we will have issue with in five years time but one thing you can be sure of, is that gaming companies will introduce yet another highly questionable, gameplay altering form of revenue.
Hopefully by then publishers will have given up on putting loot box gambling mechanics into games, not just multiplayer ones, but single player ones too, the recent spate of games that have gambling mechanics in is disquieting.
Do you people really believe developers have ever had the best interest of gamers at heart when they made games? these scum only make games to push their agendas and put their little satanic signs in to condition you, they hate you and see you as nothing but a useless eater.
I've always said that f2p games are a curse on the genre.
We all love our demons and scapegoats.
The funny thing is what was originally killing the genre wasn't f2p, it was a forced subscription model.
Yeah apparently people have forgotten how many of the current F2P titles died once as a full-box price + monthly sub fee and they were given a second chance by F2P model.
Constantine, The Console Poster
"One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves." - Carl Jung
I've always said that f2p games are a curse on the genre.
We all love our demons and scapegoats.
The funny thing is what was originally killing the genre wasn't f2p, it was a forced subscription model.
Well nothing is "killing" the genre and if there is, if there was something "originally" doing it, it was over saturation of titles and not an equal number of new people paying enough to play them. This was caused by World of Warcraft (not slighting for it's success). Once the amount of money possible was seen, not to be duplicated by most in the end, many companies over the next 5-7 years copied it. Well, that takes money and after release an expected revenue is needed to cover the production. Once it became clear this was not going to be "the next WoW" in terms of revenue there became a problem: How to get enough income post-release to not shut down worst case, and generate enough income to actually expand the title, which is expected of an MMO, best case.
The west in the end copied the East, who was already used to a large volume of releases with a unequal growth in new customers (revenue). Free to play. It was survival for many titles initially and now has grown to include gambling style microtransactions and now a predatory programming.
Vote with your wallet and respect others people's vote. Unless a company is outright lying about what they are doing, and people want to pay for their services, that's their business and they shouldn't be shamed or called out for it. I think fast food is one of the banes of our society but I don't shame people who eat there.
I've always said that f2p games are a curse on the genre.
We all love our demons and scapegoats.
The funny thing is what was originally killing the genre wasn't f2p, it was a forced subscription model.
Yeah apparently people have forgotten how many of the current F2P titles died once as a full-box price + monthly sub fee and they were given a second chance by F2P model.
Echoing what the poster above me hit on- market saturation was a huge factor in those titles "dying" and going F2P.
MMORPGs began as a fairly small niche genre, and aside from the flash in the pan, have never really taken a larger slice of the overall cake.
F2P transitions were a bandaid fix to the underlying saturation issue. It allowed devs to cater to an untenably small population by giving that population a reason to spend extraordinary amounts of money. They could float on the profits scalped from that population.
I think many of the genre's original developers and fans would've been absolutely okay with a sort of natural selection playing out among the titles as box + sub. Instead, we have a plethora zombified titles whose original gameplay tenets have been ripped out, aborted, or warped towards a new payment model that encourages impulse buying in the extreme.
I've always said that f2p games are a curse on the genre.
Or a bless . Said about curse , nowadays you have to pay for the boxes , pay for the DLC , pay for subs then pay for the microtransactions to get better gameplay experience . Basically you will get cursed , pay or not . lol
everyone: Given that in the past 37 years of gaming I have played only one F2P game (well technically it could be 2). It begs the question, why are you playing F2P games, can you not find options?
Why not? I don't know about you. I like free fun.
Sure, there are other options too but they are not mutually exclusive, right? In fact, is there anything wrong with just playing games that I like, f2p or not?
I havent because the games I am attracted to for reasons not related to F2P happen to also not be F2P if that make sense.
I dont look for non-F2P games, its jut that the games I like happen to also not be F2P. So maybe I am playing games that people who are frustrated with their current library could be interested in? maybe?
that is what I was driving at, that I actually like my games...win for me
So you only played Wow, Eve, or Final Fantasy for the past 10 years? Since that is the only subscription mmorpg left.
I thought you were interested in games without a cash shop though?
Cash shops are not all the same however, some are really intrusive and do far more than just sell cosmetic items, some indulge in far more egregious sales tactics that are truly reprehensible.
Oh absolutely.
The underlying assumption however seemed to be !all sub games good, all non-sub games bad". (Shades of George Orwell!)
In reality - as you say - there are different types of cash shop. Some with (essentially) exactly the same as those in e.g. WoW or FFXIV. Some - as you say - with egregious sales tactics. And multiple shades inbetween.
Do you people really believe developers have ever had the best interest of gamers at heart when they made games? these scum only make games to push their agendas and put their little satanic signs in to condition you, they hate you and see you as nothing but a useless eater.
Why would we need devs to have our best interests in heart? We don't have their best interests in heart.
It is a pure commercial transaction. They provide something fun to entertain us. We give them money. No more and no less.
Do you people really believe developers have ever had the best interest of gamers at heart when they made games? these scum only make games to push their agendas and put their little satanic signs in to condition you, they hate you and see you as nothing but a useless eater.
Why would we need devs to have our best interests in heart? We don't have their best interests in heart.
It is a pure commercial transaction. They provide something fun to entertain us. We give them money. No more and no less.
Games - like any other product - are made to make money. Absolutely - no question.
There are - however - different types of transaction that we engage in.
"Basic" goods widely available we tend to buy from whoever is selling them the cheapest. Although we factor in "ease of shopping" - we don't truck across town to save a penny. Retailers know all about this and there is much written about it.
Another type of transaction however involves "repeat business". The simple concept being: amount of money spent over an extended period of time is greater than the first purchase. What makes us come back to one seller over another, what drives "customer satisfaction" - suffice to say even more has been written about this.
By their very nature cash shops are in - or want to be in - the repeat business model. So whilst developers don't have the "best interests" of gamers at heart they don't want to piss them off either.
EA/Activision will now be setting you up in game to fail, or spend. Long gone are the competitive days. They have a new patent that will put you with people with very strong purchased items so that you fail and want to purchase it yourself. Their hope is you join, get raped. Buy a weapon to compete, do awesome against another person that was in the same situation as you previously, then group you yet again with someone who has stronger purchased in game items. Thus making you want to make another purchase.
I hope you are all happy! Lots of us warned you! Good luck in your "competitive" games going forward. Like F2P, you guys will support it and it will spread to other devs.
I hope this leads to some really high end and excellent single player games.
Gross generalization, massive assumption, and vague points. Were you trying to be taken seriously? Because this sounds a lot more like a tantrum than an actual discussion point.
If you don't like Free to play games, if you don't like cash shops, if you don't like subscription fees etc. the answer is really very simple. Do not play them. Yeah, seriously it is literally, honestly, completely THAT simple.
Post like the OP's seem to take the stance that this is personal, let me provide a spoiler alert, it's not. It is business, P.T. Barnum (allegedly) said it best, there is a sucker born every minute. Don't be a sucker.
I love these EA whine posts. If you have not figured out by now what EA is up to, then you deserve what you get.
If you want a new idea, go read an old book.
In order to be insulted, I must first value your opinion.
By their very nature cash shops are in - or want to be in - the repeat business model. So whilst developers don't have the "best interests" of gamers at heart they don't want to piss them off either.
No one says they are going to actively piss players off. In fact, they probably only care about the whales.
But the point is .. they don't need to have anyone's, except their, best interests in mind to make a good fun game for us. And why would I even care why they are making games, as long as said games are fun (for me)?
Of course everything on the left is showing growth. It was a new game and there was high interest. As the game got older it was only natural that people would lose interest and move on . It has nothing to do with the ftp model it's simply a decline in interest and competition from other games. Blizzard eventually had to open their options.
Of course everything on the left is showing growth. It was a new game and there was high interest. As the game got older it was only natural that people would lose interest and move on . It has nothing to do with the ftp model it's simply a decline in interest and competition from other games. Blizzard eventually had to open their options.
Yeah and my point was all of that growth was with a subscription model. Saying forced subscriptions originally killed the genre is bullshit.
"You CAN'T buy ships for RL money." - MaxBacon
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Of course everything on the left is showing growth. It was a new game and there was high interest. As the game got older it was only natural that people would lose interest and move on . It has nothing to do with the ftp model it's simply a decline in interest and competition from other games. Blizzard eventually had to open their options.
Yeah and my point was all of that growth was with a subscription model. Saying forced subscriptions originally killed the genre is bullshit.
I don't think it's bullshit at all. I think that the idea has been around for quite a long time that people simply don't tend to carry more than one, maybe two, subscriptions. So that's the reason. I think that the push back against any sort of subscription is newer, but the subscription model was limiting for the genre, for sure. It was basically like, "Ok, you're subbed to EQ or WoW and then what?" If anything, F2P actually made the genre viable, since it made barrier to entry minimal and got players playing more than one MMORPG.
Of course everything on the left is showing growth. It was a new game and there was high interest. As the game got older it was only natural that people would lose interest and move on . It has nothing to do with the ftp model it's simply a decline in interest and competition from other games. Blizzard eventually had to open their options.
Yeah and my point was all of that growth was with a subscription model. Saying forced subscriptions originally killed the genre is bullshit.
I don't think it's bullshit at all. I think that the idea has been around for quite a long time that people simply don't tend to carry more than one, maybe two, subscriptions. So that's the reason. I think that the push back against any sort of subscription is newer, but the subscription model was limiting for the genre, for sure. It was basically like, "Ok, you're subbed to EQ or WoW and then what?" If anything, F2P actually made the genre viable, since it made barrier to entry minimal and got players playing more than one MMORPG.
The entire birth, growth and development of the MMORPG genre was founded and supported by subscriptions for over a decade before F2P was even a thing.
How can you support the claim that subscriptions killed the genre when they were the entire reason it was even alive?
"You CAN'T buy ships for RL money." - MaxBacon
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Of course everything on the left is showing growth. It was a new game and there was high interest. As the game got older it was only natural that people would lose interest and move on . It has nothing to do with the ftp model it's simply a decline in interest and competition from other games. Blizzard eventually had to open their options.
Yeah and my point was all of that growth was with a subscription model. Saying forced subscriptions originally killed the genre is bullshit.
I don't think it's bullshit at all. I think that the idea has been around for quite a long time that people simply don't tend to carry more than one, maybe two, subscriptions. So that's the reason. I think that the push back against any sort of subscription is newer, but the subscription model was limiting for the genre, for sure. It was basically like, "Ok, you're subbed to EQ or WoW and then what?" If anything, F2P actually made the genre viable, since it made barrier to entry minimal and got players playing more than one MMORPG.
The entire birth, growth and development of the MMORPG genre was founded and supported by subscriptions for over a decade before F2P was even a thing.
How can you support the claim that subscriptions killed the genre when they were the entire reason it was even alive?
Because as effective as it was at funding the few games that were out there, it was also limiting in that there was a limit to how many subscriptions people would be willing to pay, so it was limited. I'm not saying it killed the industry, but subscriptions inherently limited the growth of the genre because it wasn't only a consideration of the $50 box price anymore, it was an ongoing expense. Hey! Maybe that's a good thing though, right? Maybe the mainstreaming has diluted the genre with tire kickers, right?
Comments
these scum only make games to push their agendas and put their little satanic signs in to condition you, they hate you and see you as nothing but a useless eater.
The west in the end copied the East, who was already used to a large volume of releases with a unequal growth in new customers (revenue). Free to play. It was survival for many titles initially and now has grown to include gambling style microtransactions and now a predatory programming.
Vote with your wallet and respect others people's vote. Unless a company is outright lying about what they are doing, and people want to pay for their services, that's their business and they shouldn't be shamed or called out for it. I think fast food is one of the banes of our society but I don't shame people who eat there.
MMORPGs began as a fairly small niche genre, and aside from the flash in the pan, have never really taken a larger slice of the overall cake.
F2P transitions were a bandaid fix to the underlying saturation issue. It allowed devs to cater to an untenably small population by giving that population a reason to spend extraordinary amounts of money. They could float on the profits scalped from that population.
I think many of the genre's original developers and fans would've been absolutely okay with a sort of natural selection playing out among the titles as box + sub. Instead, we have a plethora zombified titles whose original gameplay tenets have been ripped out, aborted, or warped towards a new payment model that encourages impulse buying in the extreme.
Said about curse , nowadays you have to pay for the boxes , pay for the DLC , pay for subs then pay for the microtransactions to get better gameplay experience .
Basically you will get cursed , pay or not . lol
The underlying assumption however seemed to be !all sub games good, all non-sub games bad". (Shades of George Orwell!)
In reality - as you say - there are different types of cash shop. Some with (essentially) exactly the same as those in e.g. WoW or FFXIV. Some - as you say - with egregious sales tactics. And multiple shades inbetween.
Why would we need devs to have our best interests in heart? We don't have their best interests in heart.
It is a pure commercial transaction. They provide something fun to entertain us. We give them money. No more and no less.
There are - however - different types of transaction that we engage in.
"Basic" goods widely available we tend to buy from whoever is selling them the cheapest. Although we factor in "ease of shopping" - we don't truck across town to save a penny. Retailers know all about this and there is much written about it.
Another type of transaction however involves "repeat business". The simple concept being: amount of money spent over an extended period of time is greater than the first purchase. What makes us come back to one seller over another, what drives "customer satisfaction" - suffice to say even more has been written about this.
By their very nature cash shops are in - or want to be in - the repeat business model. So whilst developers don't have the "best interests" of gamers at heart they don't want to piss them off either.
For example unreliable source says 2% of mobile game population contribute to 50% of the mobile game revenue for game company.
Seems like very few people support F2P games, but it managed to survive just by the very few high spenders.
Cryomatrix
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
If you don't like Free to play games, if you don't like cash shops, if you don't like subscription fees etc. the answer is really very simple. Do not play them. Yeah, seriously it is literally, honestly, completely THAT simple.
Post like the OP's seem to take the stance that this is personal, let me provide a spoiler alert, it's not. It is business, P.T. Barnum (allegedly) said it best, there is a sucker born every minute. Don't be a sucker.
I love these EA whine posts. If you have not figured out by now what EA is up to, then you deserve what you get.
If you want a new idea, go read an old book.
In order to be insulted, I must first value your opinion.
No one says they are going to actively piss players off. In fact, they probably only care about the whales.
But the point is .. they don't need to have anyone's, except their, best interests in mind to make a good fun game for us. And why would I even care why they are making games, as long as said games are fun (for me)?
Everything on the left side of this graph is growth with sub model.
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/"The Future" in that graph never worked out.
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/I don't think it's bullshit at all. I think that the idea has been around for quite a long time that people simply don't tend to carry more than one, maybe two, subscriptions. So that's the reason. I think that the push back against any sort of subscription is newer, but the subscription model was limiting for the genre, for sure. It was basically like, "Ok, you're subbed to EQ or WoW and then what?" If anything, F2P actually made the genre viable, since it made barrier to entry minimal and got players playing more than one MMORPG.
Crazkanuk
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Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
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How can you support the claim that subscriptions killed the genre when they were the entire reason it was even alive?
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/Because as effective as it was at funding the few games that were out there, it was also limiting in that there was a limit to how many subscriptions people would be willing to pay, so it was limited. I'm not saying it killed the industry, but subscriptions inherently limited the growth of the genre because it wasn't only a consideration of the $50 box price anymore, it was an ongoing expense. Hey! Maybe that's a good thing though, right? Maybe the mainstreaming has diluted the genre with tire kickers, right?
Crazkanuk
----------------
Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
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