this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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Business model. Legislating the fucking business model.
Jesus fuck, what is it about this industry that makes people flip out about any sort of consumer protection? You know this is fucked up. You know "just don't buy it!" will never help. What other possible solution do you imagine, besides telling companies to just sell a product, without any exorbitant double-dipping?
I don't see the issue to be honest. It's three days... How is it substantially different from somebody waiting 3 months for the price to go down even more? What are you protecting against?
I think it's fine too, for the general case of video games. If someone wants to pay some premium, several times a game's price to get access a couple days or a week early, I mean, I sure as hell am not going to pay it, but if some people do and are willing to bear a larger portion of the development costs, fine. It's not like I would have noticed or cared if a game's release date was a week later. Besides, I'm going to wait for reviews to come out anyway.
I'll also add that I'm not gonna get "premium" editions with some plastic doodads or artbooks or whatever, but there are clearly people who are willing to do that. If a game publisher wants to make the offer and someone else is willing to accept, I mean, okay, whatever makes them happy.
That being said, WoW is an MMO, and that does introduce different dynamics. I don't play it, so I don't know the specifics there. Like, a guild cannot play together if all of its members aren't together at the same time, and maybe that puts pressure on all the members to buy early. It also sounds like there are some self-imposed challenges to try to be the first person to do various things, and I guess that there could be a pay-to-win element in that sense. Frankly, I don't find doing that sort of thing to be much fun, but I suppose for people who do, maybe it'd be an issue. Maybe there's something specific to WoW that makes it matter more than a typical video game there.
I think that in general, a lot of video game players would be a lot happier if they obsessed less about getting things exactly on release dates. I mean, the patientgamers crowd waits for at least a year before they look at a game. I wouldn't go quite that far myself, but they still have fun playing games.
WoW has historically worked on a daily limit to progression model for the endgame, so the 3 day early access is potentially a 3 day permanent boost for the people who buy it. I would imagine competitive raiders going for world first and "clearing hard difficulty versions of raids while they're current content" achievements and their related rewards will be essentially mandated to buy it.
As for gamers obsessing over things at launch, I wish it were different, but I think of it like movies or TV shows. If you go and watch a movie a year after it came out, nobody is gonna be talking about it anymore. And for some people, that social buzz around a new piece of media is half the fun. Playing a game and talking about it with your friends, the sense of discovery finding things out before you can just look it up on some wiki site, etc.
'How is an order of magnitude substantially different?' is not a question I know how to answer without vulgarity.
Yes, but presumably the order of magnitude (waiting substantially longer) would be worse but you're arguing the opposite... Why is waiting longer for a price cut better?
Ohhh, that's a completely different angle than I thought you were going for.
It's still ridiculous, though.
Price drops exist to encourage new people to pay. People who would not otherwise buy the thing, buy the thing. But - anyone who pays an exorbitant amount up-front, for a game with a monthly subscription, three days early, was fucking obviously going to buy the thing, full-price, day-of. This is just gouging. This is seeing how little they can offer, in exchange for completely arbitrary quantities of money.
If they offered a sliding scale where the price doubles for every extra day of early access - some addict with more money than sense may well drop tens thousand dollars, for an extra week. Which is obviously fucking nonsense. Please tell me you understand price and value are different concepts, and they can align, or they can not. Ten thousand dollars for one week of a game that costs ten dollars a month is complete absurdity, rivaled only by games charging more than the price of the entire full-price game for some stupid item inside that game.
That exploitation of irrational decision-making doesn't begin at ten thousand dollars. Smaller-scale abuses of it are not better... just lesser.
We need to also legislate in game transactions so you can't get scammed in RuneScape anymore
Runescape's real-money transactions should absolutely be illegal.
The fact they had to limit people to spending thousands of dollars per week - for fucking Runescape - is a giant flashing red light. In no universe is any public MMO worth ten thousand dollars per year. But that's the kind of spending all games with real-money charges actively pursue.
If we allow this to continue there will be nothing else.
I don't think we need laws to stop a few oil barons from risking it all in the wildy, you're proposing such stupid overregulation lol. these are literally non issues
A few--?!
This is becoming EVERY GAME. Silent Hill has a battle pass! Silent Hill does not have battles! All of that shit is just lootboxes plus excuses. People finally recognize lootboxes are abusive nonsense. But all that's changed is how they're presented, so people can go, well, that was bad, but this is completely different slightly!
And all it takes to stop that from infecting the entire industry, is - stop charging real money, inside video games. A thing that was barely conceivable, fifteen years ago, when the industry was neither small nor broke. This grift takes in billions of dollars per year. Largely from children. And if you care as little about kids as I do - it's also fucking up the entire medium of video games. Again: this is becoming every game. Nothing modern is safe. You can't even reliably stay away, because it gets shoved into games, after people bought them.
If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else. Only legislation will fix this.
Word salad.
?
I dont get your point about "Just don't buy it" not working.
If consumers didnt think it was a fair price, then they wouldn't buy it. People can live without a videogame, it's not like this is a big pharma company raising prices on a life-saving drug.
Profit means ethical, says newborn babe, innocent and fresh.
the business model of...charging too much money? No, I dont have any issue with this. I have a lot of issues with Blizzard, but this ain't on the list. It sounds like a smart way to alleviate expansion launch server burden, giving both a much better experience for some, and an improved launch for the rest.
... it's a subscription service! They already get a shitload of money, every single month. Don't bemoan their server costs. That's what you're already paying for!
I didnt say server costs, I said server burden. Long queue times on launch day, server crashes, very unevenly distributed server load when everyone is in the same area at the start. I remember FF14's latest expansion was so bad, they completely halted sales of it. Forget too expensive, there was no price, you could not buy it if you were late.
You dont have to pay $90, because you dont have to buy this early access. you dont have to buy the regular access. You are not entitled to this game as a human right, the developers didnt have to make this game, and they dont have to let you play it for whatever price you want. They get to decide the price.
Hair-splitting. They have your money already. Services breaking down is not a problem solved by charging more - as you point out, for FF14. Charging more than the price of an entire new game, for three fucking days of opt-in beta testing, is completely absurd.
Any form of taking your money for bullshit is reducing how much you can spend on things that matter. This ultracapitalist zeal for equating price and value only makes a lick of sense if it's rational people making informed decisions - and there's a thousand other ways we identify and forbid irrational uses of money.
Outright confidence scams have seen victims come back with more money, thinking it'll work out this time. Revenue alone absolves nothing.
Yeah, charging more is a very common way to alleviate service congestion, like amusement parks. They have the same sort of early access for more money deals. or very popular dine in restaurants, concerts, anything where capacity is a concern really.
They are not taking anything, they do not have access to your wallet or your bank account. You can choose to give them your money. No one is making you, you have all of your money to spend on things that matter. If this doesnt matter to you? Dont have to spend a cent on it. Make your own MMO and charge less for it.
First paragraph: 'it happens a bunch' never makes direct monetary exploitation better.
Second paragraph: strawman based on stupid word game. Less than hair-splitting. A lie about what I fucking obviously mean, by comparing this abuse to a scam, not theft.
this is no strawman, I quoted you, you're claiming they're taking your money. Because otherwise what point do you even have? Nothing is happening because they dont have your money if you're not giving it to them of your own free will for a service you very much do not need or have any innate entitlement to. It's only a problem for you because you want that service, you think you are entitled to it for a cheaper price.
Please, take up game programming. 3D modeling, rigging, animating, shading, level designing, server coding, writing, music composing, voice acting, localizing, play testing, bug fixing. On the scale of World of Warcraft. You can sell it for whatever price you want after you've paid the hundreds of people you had to get help because you didnt know how to. You have no appreciation for what you think you're entitled to.
A vending machine takes money. Taking doesn't just mean stealing. That's why I didn't say stealing your money. You are fixated on one word to ignore the actual god-damn argument.
Or do you get the impression I choose words for softer impact?
I don't play WoW. I have never played WoW. I am never going to play WoW. I happen to care about people who aren't me. And all the devs you namedrop as if I'm wildly ignorant of underlying complexity would be massively better-off, if the industry that already abused the shit out of them wasn't careening toward bottomless greed. If they could just make a thing, and sell it, without being laden with expectations by coked-out executives who expect everything to be an eternal subscription and an overpriced retail sale and a microtransaction Skinner box.
How things make money... matters. Some ways are a scam. And when scams are allowed to proliferate, they starve everything more sensible, by making a shitload more money. But being, y'know, inherently dishonest, morally intolerable, widely detested, et very cetera, the revenue is completely detached from value, and largely detached from quality. Video games as a medium are becoming a mere base for these parasitic business schemes. That happens to be really fucking bad for everyone involved - but most immediately, for anyone who wants to purchase and enjoy a major entertainment product, without being subjected to psychological manipulation to give give give unbounded quantities of their actual real-world money, before they've even played the game.
they can, there is nothing stopping anyone from doing that. But here's what happens. They've got freedom too. This 3D modeler has spent a tremendous amount of time and focus to be as good as he is. And he gets the final say on what he is worth, and what he will accept to work for. A game studio is looking to hire a new 3D modeler. And they have a long history of successful games, games that they have sold for an up front cost and continuing subscription cost. They have more money to offer him than other studios, and he accepts their offer. They are paying industry leading amounts to secure industry leading talent. And they get the final say what they're willing to sell their game for. And you get final say on what you spend your money on. Everyone involved has their freedom, no one is being forced to do anything against their will. The modeler didnt have to accept the job, the studio didnt have to offer that pay, you dont have to buy their game. A chain of events of freedom of choice has lead to the price that they are charging
Parroting 'nobody was forced' will never be a meaningful response to 'this is a scam.'
Every con involved choice. That's what makes them a con, instead of a mugging.
These scams are killing off every other business model.
I have no idea how you think this is a scam. What's the deception? Is it not actually $90? Do you not get 3 days early access? There's...not a whole lot of elements to get through here, one of those two would have to not be true.
Taking money for value invented out of thin air is a scam. All of this arbitrary exclusivity for absurd sums of money is that same process. This is the shallow end - but it is the same sty.
No theyre taking money for 3 days of early access. You dont think its worth that, but that is what people are paying for, Blizzard is being honest about what they are getting, and how much it costs. Scams are by definition deceptive, and there is nothing of the sort happening here.
It costs them nothing extra and makes them a shitload of money. It further normalizes some people paying entirely too much for a video game, and getting special treatment commensurate with the money they throw at it.
And it's still a subscription fucking MMO, with real-money "microtransactions" for arbitrary in-game bullshit, charging ninety god-damn dollars on top of all that.
Untrue. Servers don't run on pixie dust and dreams. Employees don't pay rent with good vibes and well-wishes. Every second of operation costs money.
And the seconds on Tuesday cost more than the ones on Friday?
This is a stupid word game, to you. I am not playing anymore. Stop talking to me.
Do you know what determines if something costs too much? People not buying it. Thats it. If people buy it? Then its worth that much.
I think youve got a misconception about me telling you you dont have to buy it. Im not prescribing it as a method to stop video game prices from going up if we all work together to not buy it. Im telling you, personally, dont have to buy it, you get to keep your money, and no harm has been done to you. And everyone that does buy it has the same option not to. But Blizzard has been up front, what they get for the money they are spending, and they have the freedom to choose to pay that money, the price is not too much for them.
Scams ruin everything.
This is harming the entire video game industry... by making maximum profit come from addiction and frustration. We are all worse-off, because this makes more money. "Caveat emptor" doesn't fucking work. That's part of what makes this a scam. Outright boycotts don't even work, because these greedy bastards can hook a bunch of severe addicts and siphon thousands from each of them. For hats. Or for a game that is, giant air quotes, "free."
There's a fucking battle pass... in a Silent Hill game. How blatant does this problem have to get, before you stop pretending it's just me, as an individual, having a snit? If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.