Who Killed Videogames? 401
jjp9999 writes "Video game developer and novelist Tim Rogers exposes the underbelly of free-to-play games that use real-world currency. They're not trying to entertain you — they're trying to get you hooked. Every minute you play is being analyzed by men in suits reeling you into a cycle of addiction so they can keep you coming for more, and hopefully opening your wallet to buy premium points here and there. To do this, they intentionally give you an hour's worth of gameplay dragged out over the course of a week to keep it on your mind, dropping coins here and there for you to pick up, and playing on your own sense of work and profit to keep you coming back."
same as with everything else (Score:2, Interesting)
capitalism
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Its not capitalism its greed.
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Re:Capitalism == Greed (Score:3)
The core of Capitalism is the making of profit above all else. It has no morals, no restraints, and no humanity. The reason companies try to avoid major industrial accidents like Bhopal has nothing to do with not causing harm or death, it has to do with avoiding profit loss. If something improves profits it must be done, to not do it would be to fail those who own the capital. The reason for maximizing profits, is and can only be Greed.
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The core of economics is people doing valuable for things for other people -- "creating value", to use a PHB word. I've had a bit of exposure to the business world, and discovered that there are basically two kinds of businessmen: People who want to get your money by giving you something valuable (i.e, worth the money), and people who just want to make money whatever way they can, preferably with the minimal effort (i.e., generally giving you no
Re:same as with everything else (Score:5, Informative)
People play less these days (lack of time - damn, we get older!), and those who play the most (teenagers) usually pirate, so they want it free.
The only problem with that theory is that it does not match the evidence. The games industry keeps making more and more money every year [wikia.com]. A lot of that increase is due to games costing way more than they used to, but it shows that there are still a lot of people paying for games.
Re:same as with everything else (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of that increase is due to games costing way more than they used to
Wait, what? No they don't. Games have always costed the same amount. In fact, we now have lots of games that are actually cheaper than what most new games were before, thanks to indie games and internet distribution. And yes, even back then there were a few games that cost above the average, for example I remember Sierra's Pro Pilot flight simulator costing more than the average game.
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Um, you're right. It can't be entirely attributed to inflation because games are CHEAPER now when you account for inflation.
Re:same as with everything else (Score:5, Insightful)
If you look at console games, you'll note that the price point is now roughly between 60 and 70 dollars, whereas it was 50 a generation or two ago.
No, you won't note that. You'll note that the price point is now roughly between 50 and 60 dollars, assuming you're talking US dollars. You'll also note that $50 was the standard price for console games for much longer than "a generation or two" - more like over 20 years. Heck, I remember Super Nintendo games up to $75 at retail and N64 games sometimes debuted at even higher prices! Playstation prices bucked the trend (and in fact set a new trend) by being cheaper because pressing CDs cost publishers next to nothing (just as DVD and even Blu-ray duplication is extremely cheap compared to cartridges). In short, adjusting for inflation, retail console game prices have gone down over the years. This is thanks, again, to the disc formats replacing cartridges and the economies of scale. Even with significantly higher game development costs, more games sold means profits can be realized at lower retail prices. I think the reason people think that game prices are higher today is that the average age of gamers has risen steadily over the years which means that more people playing games today bought them with their own money. I was buying games with my own money before the Genesis and Super Nintendo hit the scene, so I've had to know game prices for over 20 years.
Re:same as with everything else (Score:4, Insightful)
" I was buying games with my own money before the Genesis and Super Nintendo hit the scene, so I've had to know game prices for over 20 years."
While the game prices haven't changed much the size of the market has changed offsetting the need to increase prices because of market expansion. I really hate how people say "games are cheaper because of inflation" but then fail to mention stagnant wages and the erosion of buying power from said inflation.
It's too simplistic an explanation that doesn't take into account multitude of variables.
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Many of those games were roughly equivalent to indie games these days, in terms of the amount of manpower required to produce them.
So ... what has the march of time brought us?
Firstly, inflation. The price of a loaf of bread in 1980 was £0.33, in 1990 £0.50 ; now it's more like £1, so prices have roughly doubled for the essentials of living.
An A-list title in the mid 80s would have been something like Elite [wikipedia.org] ; I remember paying £15 for it (on cassette tape). The package was a robust c
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Since when is making money off a product greed?
The objections being raised are not to profit in or per se. What is being objected to is
1. Profit *to the exclusion of all other considerations*.
2. *Ever-increasing* profit in proportion to actual producer costs.
Re:same as with everything else (Score:5, Interesting)
You're both wrong.
Capitalism is the idea that whoever builds the means of production gets to have its output. If you own capital, you get to benefit from it. This means that people have an incentive to invest in capital, and build things which will make money for them. This results in a society with more capital to do useful things for it (factories, homes, restaurant espresso machines, satellites, server farms). It also means that people take better care of the capital.
Capitalism harnesses the inevitable human vice of Greed, and (when combined with free-market competition in an efficient market) can make this greed more productive to society at large, but reckless wonton greed is not a value it intrinsically promotes. It's not really a value system; it's merely an ownership system. (Notice also that only markets with low transaction costs and low barriers to entry are really efficient. This is important. Notice what a mess we see when neither is the case: health care, cell phone providers...)
Usually, competition with other greedy capitalists is enough to keep a capitalist in line, and not exploiting and abusing his fellow man too much. When this is no longer the case, it's entirely reasonable to pass moral judgement (or attempt to restrain) these people who are taking their reckless, wonton greed and exploiting their fellow man. Capitalism is not an excuse... but it's not the illness, either.
Re:same as with everything else (Score:4, Informative)
Usually competition in capitalism is bought out or killed off. Capitalism's end game is always in fascism (or as those who dislike nazi links from WW2 to that name call it, "corporatism") where large capital-based industrial monopolies take over the government through buying out those in power.
It happened many times over the course of history.
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Do you prefer more recent history, such as South-Korea and Japan, early industrialization (US late 1890s with its trusts), or even European dark ages when large economic interests bought aristocracy (debt) ending up controlling them, or even the infamous destruction of Knights Templar (which was the first well documented large-scale political attempt to kill a large corporation wielding too much political power).
You can take your pick.
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Why is it suspect? I show that natural flow of capitalism, when uninterrupted by revolutionary level of resistance always leads to the same end. In US, anti-trust legislation of 1920s was absolutely revolutionary in its own right, being the first true attempt to limit power of corporations though non-discriminatory (on personal level) legal means rather then direct application of force (example: pogroms) and extended by legislation that came after great depression.
It's worth noting that repealing parts of s
Re:same as with everything else (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider this bit from TFA:
"An ex-drug-dealer (now a video game industry powerbrain) once told me that he doesn’t understand why people buy heroin. The heroin peddler isn’t even doing heroin. Like him or not, when you hear Cliff Bleszinski talk about Gears of War, he sounds — in a good way — like a weed dealer. He sounds like he endorses what he is selling. When you’re in a room with social games guys, the “I never touch the stuff” attitude is so thick you’ll need a box cutter to breathe properly."
With the traditional, boxed lump-'o-retail game, there was a certain necessary straightforwardness, possibly even honesty about the thing: You make the game and either get my $50 or not. Even if you are merely calculating, you still want to make a fun game, because you need me to buy it. If you are genuinely enthusiastic about games, you also want to make a fun game.
Once you get into the world of DLC and MMORPGs and such, you are in a sort of intermediate position: There is still the upfront purchase; but you have a constant nagging incentive to see what you can get away with in terms of sucking me in for another month's grind, or making some downloaded component semi-obligatory.
Once you get to "freemium", our interests are more or less at odds: I'm a net loss to you as long as I play for free, so you have an incentive to try every dirty trick in the book to 'monetize' me, and create a game that induces payment without ever overtly demanding it.
It's ironic, actually, that the "casual" games would be the ones where this rather ugly dynamic is strongest. The stereotype(not 100% without supporting anecdotes, but rather overplayed) is that the 'serious' gamers are the ones where the hardcore addictions are; but that is the area where the publisher's incentive to create addictive gameplay is weakest: You already have my $60, you want me to enjoy myself so I'll buy the sequel; but you gain nothing from sucking away my life. On the casual side, you start with nothing from me, and you have to scrape it out one microtransaction at a time...
Re:same as with everything else (Score:5, Insightful)
I was hooked on Mafia Wars for a few months, until I realized how much time I was wasting for nothing. So-called "social media" games are anything but. There is no social aspect to them at all -- no in-game conversation, no player messaging support, nothing. Anyone with a headset and an XBox experiences more social interaction while gaming than on Crackbook.
Once I stepped back from them, I realized you couldn't even really call them "games". There is no winning or losing, only perpetual grinding for enough points/items to accomplish a mission, after which you eternally move on to the next mission that they've added in the meantime.
There is no skill involved, no choice involved, and no thought involved. Just keep clicking long enough, and you'll get to the "next level."
I'd call them Ponzi schemes, except you were never promised anything of use or value if you choose to spend real money on them.
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Meanwhile, you were passing the time doing something that interested you.
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People didn't demand negative adaptation. People demanded positive adaptation. You're really straining to be insightful if you're trying to claim that people asked to have it worse.
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However, you do still have lots of normal games too. Those aren't gone even though Facebook has casual games for other people. It just means the gaming market has grown, especially with girls
This has nothing to do with piracy. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not like these "social" games would go away if someone invented effective, unobtrusive copy protection tomorrow.
As a former Facebook game addict, I can tell you that the "social" games speak to the completion/builder/collector in many people. What's really the difference between building a model replica ship and building a model farm? Or collecting something as meaningless as beanie babies vs. collecting something as meaningless as digital tokens? Or needing to finish, well, any task, and needing to master all your character's jobs?
The social games offer a very powerful thing: Constant progress. No matter what you do, you will progress, but you will never win. There are lots and lots of people who want constant progress. There's also people who feel compelled to complete things (I was one of them).
The other problem with blaming this on piracy is that you can absolutely pirate these games! Most of where the publisher gets their money is getting you to pay to remove obstacles to your progress, like timers or "X friends must "help" you" stuff where X is more people than you want to annoy. So you can "pirate" by simply making fake accounts or finding a group of people who are die-hard players like you are but who you don't actually know to add as fake friends, effectively "robbing" the publisher of their revenue. So just like traditional games, you can, with some effort, get the stuff for free, but many people will still pay for it for the convenience. Actually, were piracy the issue, MMORPGs are the solution, as it's pretty much impossible to pirate a monthly subscription.
The problem with the social games though, like any drug dealer, is these game publishers have gotten too greedy. They have cut the product too many times so it is no longer any good. I USED to mostly have fun playing, but then the bean counters got too much control over the game development and it became impossible to progress without either annoying the piss out of my friends (or finding a pile of fake friends) or paying cash. And if you're trying to play for "free", you wouldn't be able to get most things unless you're devoting lots of time to the effort (complete task now, 8-hour timer starts. Are you going to be near a computer in 8 hours? Well, if not, you can accelerate the timer for only XX tokens!
Anyway, they've made it not fun. People don't pay for not fun. I suspect Zynga will ultimately go the way of Groupon.
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The funny thing is that it's pretty much direct result of piracy. Do you remember all the posts on Slashdot that told record labels and developers to adapt to changing times? Well quite frankly, they did. The results is this - free games with microtransactions, impossible to pirate. All of you actually demanded it, so don't cry now.
That is so completely unrelated that I can't even be sure you read the summary. Social games are a different sector of the industry than conventional games. In fact, one could probably consider them a completely different industry given that their demographics have nearly no overlap and their business models are completely different. Social games are not designed to be "fun", but addictive. They hire psychologists and shit to determine the most effective ways of getting people hooked on their crappy sort-of
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I don't think so. MMOs and such use the microtransaction approach as well, but even they have more social interaction than so-called "social" games.
Shifting to microtransactions doesn't mean you have to abandon the idea of providing a good game experience.
Re:same as with everything else (Score:5, Informative)
That is purely bullshit.
Piracy has not reduced the profitability of games one bit. There is no evidence that the people who are pirating games would otherwise buy them.
The F2P debacle is simply the direct result of the entitlement mentality of corporations who feel that any money that is in your pocket that is not destined for their pocket is some sort of existential affront to the corporation's very existence. They HATE the idea that anybody might not be giving them money.
Last week we had an admission from an industry group that "lost profits" was not really what was driving their efforts with the MPAA and worldwide lobbying efforts to create local police states, but rather it was their loss of control. I see you're new to Slashdot, so I'll explain: "Profits" means money. "Control" means "The power to influence or direct people's behavior or the course of events".
The only "direct result of piracy" is groups of corporations fear that a day may come when human beings will realize that they, corporations, are not people and thus should not control everything in the world. And the terror that notion strikes into their hearts has induced them to set out on one last big all-or-nothing effort to lock down the fucking world through bribery, thuggery and dishonesty.
I guess it never occurred to them to try just making high-quality games and charging fair, reasonable prices for them. The experience of Valve's Steam, that people will gladly pay instead of pirate a game if it's $25 instead of $60 and that many people won't lay out $60 for a game after having been burned by the last time they paid $60 for a buggy console port that ended up with only 5 hours of gameplay and needed several patches just to be playable. just never made an impact on the primitive corporate brainstem.
If you listen carefully, TechLA, you can almost hear the sound of the world changing. People are starting, though slowly (and a little late) to figure out that corporations have not been performing on their side of the social contract. How funny that with all their wealth and alleged technical prowess that the corporations themselves are going to be the last to realize what's happening.
Here, let me leave you with a little something. I saw this in the Salt Lake Tribune today:
In a little over a week, an anti-corporate movement went from complete obscurity, known only to a very few online activists, to a popular, global movement that even a significant number of self-described Republicans are getting behind.
The only corporations that are going to win in this new climate are the ones that get a clue. And it may be time for corporate apologists to take note, too, my very high-UID friend. You might want to pass the message up the line. There might be a gold star in it for you.
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Piracy has not reduced the profitability of games one bit. There is no evidence that the people who are pirating games would otherwise buy them.
You overstate your case. If you don't know even one gamer who would buy a game that they pirate (if piracy weren't an option), you either know very few gamers or have an exceptional circle of acquaintances. I don't hold with the attitude that (insert copyright Nazi group here) espouses that every pirated copy is a lost sale. That's bullshit. But it's equally bullshit to claim that no pirated copies represent a lost sale.
The truth is somewhere in the middle. If we try to argue the opposite extreme as the (in
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There has never been a bit of evidence that game publishers have lost profits due to piracy.
I'm not saying that no pirated game represents a lost sale...
If they lost a sale (that is, if someone would have bought the game if not for being able to pirate it, which you seem to agree does happen with a non-zero frequency), they lost profits. You don't need to lose millions upon millions of dollars to lose profits.
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Not if they gained other sales due to the interest generated by those who pirated the game and who otherwise might not have bought it.
The argument here is whether piracy has cost the corporations profits, not whether one lost sale represents lost profits. Is the aggregate effect of piracy lost profits? There has been no e
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I'm actually quite cautious about buying from Steam these days; too much obnoxious DRM. Even Valve are getting in on the act with Portal 2, which has some new buggy DRM that glitches out randomly on genuine purchasers, requires me to disable my antivirus software to even run the game, and is designed to make the game uncompletable if it thinks you've pirated it. (I think I may have tripped this on my genuine, purchased copy; it's hard to tell.)
Re:same as with everything else (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't that interesting? I reply to one industry astroturfer with a very high UID and like magic someone immediately registers with Slashdot only to post one comment which supports the astroturfer's assertion.
I'll say one thing, TechLA, you're a hard worker. But too obvious. You must be new at this. I know times are hard but there must have been a more ethical job out there, like drug dealer.
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Actually, there was. The person to whom I was originally replying is named TechLA (2482532). The person person to whom I was replying beneath that, his sockpuppet, had registered about 5 minutes after I posted my reply to TechLA. His username is "hakahaka (2485890)"
You do understand that it's a lot
Re:same as with everything else (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you finish the game? You seem to suggest you did not.
So, would you call it "lost profits" if a download prevented someone from being fooled into paying $60 for a game that they never would have if they knew how bad it was? It's perfectly reasonable for someone to expect to try something before they buy it. Now I don't mean you should be able to eat a hamburger before you decide to pay for it, but you should at least be able to get a look at it to see if meat is rancid.
What was the last time you saw someone offer a money-back guarantee on a video game? When you have a business model that is dependent on selling an inferior product but relying on them not realizing it until you have their money, you deserve to lose profits.
I don't really believe purchasing products is supposed to be like buying a lottery ticket. If a corporation loses profits because people get wise to the fact that they are selling empty boxes, then I believe that's a good thing for people, if not for the corporation who was selling empty boxes.
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You know that revenue does not equal profit, right?
The fact that gaming has expanded into consoles does not mean that computer gaming has not also grown. There is a myth of "market share". The point is that the big game companies are
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A direct result of piracy is definitely a stretch. At best piracy is a contributor to more established studios getting into the social/web game market (and social/web games have their own versions of 'piracy': almost all features that one can pay for can eventually be gotten with scripting).
Free-to-play web games have been around since the creation of the internet (and like most other websites they are usually funded by advertisements).
Then as they got tied in with social platforms they got exposure to larg
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F2P is an attempt to sidestep the normal market dynamics. On the PC most F2P games are C-grade clones of popular AAA games that try to compete by not charging anything up front. On the mobile phones the F2P games exist to avoid the price pressure as most mobile gamers have learned that anything can be had for a dollar or free if you wait for a sale, F2P extracts more money from such people.
Me, I prefer paid equivalents since they don't give the dev any incentive to add needless "pay a buck to skip this" gri
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"Poker is also just a game based on pure luck"
Yes. Unless we forget the fact it is not, that is.
"it's completely random which cards come out."
Yes, but it is not completly random what the contenders will bet against their respective odds.
"If hit and play until end of the hand, it's completely random which cards come out"
If you promise me that you will stick to that behaviour you can play poker with me whenever you want.
"You can't win the game with skill"
That's right. Except that's wrong, I mean. The fact
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Once you get into the world of DLC and MMORPGs
Not necessarily. There are a couple MMOs out there that are genuinely fun and if they are built on the principle of addiction, it is very well hidden. Guild Wars is still one of my favorites for that very reason. They already had your money (it had no subscription, you paid once and then could play), so their goal was to make you want more (expansion packs), but I never got the feeling that the game was a "trailer" for the expansion packs. Maybe because they did things so differently from everyone else in t
I haven't read the article, but hear me out here.. (Score:5, Interesting)
This summary quite literally illustrates exactly what is driving away gamers, and which nothing to do with the games but instead the various companies behind it and their various little pay-as-you-go niches (map packs, songs, excessive subscriptions, etc.). It's all about the various companies involved in the development and marketing of a game, who nearly always turn out to be greedy little pigs. Take, for instance, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and their Double XP Promotion [pcgamer.com]. This really pisses off real gamers (the ones who play a lot and get better through time and practice), and especially pisses off those who had to work hard for their last prestige. One mere example, but, regardless, they really need to knock it off.
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I keed. I keed!
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I am not sure I can agree with you.
You talk about MW but you clearly think of something else than Mech Warrior. I can not support that.
Re:I haven't read the article, but hear me out her (Score:4, Interesting)
You don't have to buy their games. Fortunately the games market - at least for PC's and smart phones - is fairly easy to get into. Yeah ok if you want to talk retail distribution then it's harder if you're not doing it online - getting your game into brick and mortar stores around the world is next to impossible unless you sign with a major publisher. But even the major publishers are moving to online distribution, so the independent has no excuse. The market is coming to expect to be able to download games and apps now. And many, many independent games have achieved surprising success.
Therefore there will always be some game genres that don't follow the mainstream trend - if everyone is monetizing, at some point they are not going to be getting new customers because everyone will be busy playing the non-monetized games. Apart from the occasional idiot who never learns, you can only take people for a ride so often. Eventually people are going to get a feel for these cash-sucking parasites, just like people get a feel for telemarketers or infomercials and instantly switch off, and this "industry" will extinguish itself. I think good games are never going to die because human creativity is never going to die.
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I was actually about to comment on how surprising it is that it took this long for the games industry to mutate to this model. Games have always been ripe for psychological manipulation of the customer, but for the most part until recently game developers had focused solely on the "pure" goal of providing a great experience. Eventually this led to publishers milking franchises to maximize profits, but usually those sequels (like the Elder Scrolls and Fallout) were actually quite good. Now we have "achiev
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Now we have "achievements" and "trophies" and other bizarre and meaningless "rewards" mostly unrelated to the actual game experience.
When video games started out, we had points and high scores with three-letter winner boards featuring winners like ???, TIT, and POO. Those were pretty meaningless. Then we moved on to computer games, and they kept the arcade style leader boards, which were even more meaningless, then the "send in a letter to the publisher in care of 'I won!' with a self addressed, stamped envelope to receive your certificate of completion of the game. Congratulations!". And then that went away too, so the end cutscene
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This has been done in MMOs since the very start. Companies have evolved this over time but from the beginning there have been micro-managed quests doled out in bite sized pieces to provide quick periodic positive feedback.
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And I don't really agree about achievements.. I think they're nice addition to games, if well done. For example in TF2 the achievements grant you items which you can then use in gameplay, so they're a bit like quests. It also provides more objectives in games - Defense Grid is awesome tower defense game, but I've finished it long time ago. I am, however, still playing it to finish all the missions to get gold medals out of them, or play with specific style (no upgr
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There's something wrong when you use "working hard" in a sentence about gaming. Gaming is supposed to be fun, it's not supposed to be work.
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Re:I haven't read the article, but hear me out her (Score:4, Insightful)
Take, for instance, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and their Double XP Promotion [pcgamer.com]. This really pisses off real gamers (the ones who play a lot and get better through time and practice), and especially pisses off those who had to work hard for their last prestige.
Sure, but you'll still buy it, mate? [penny-arcade.com]
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It's up to the players to recognize this and just avoid what they don't like. This attitude of "omg they just want money!" is naive and stupid. They've always wanted money, they're no more or less evil than they were 10 years ago. The game companies have never been their pals.
If people don't like it they should vote with their wallets. Support good games with good replay value.
Silly. (Score:4, Insightful)
Video games have been about making money since the beginning. Arcade games used to last approximately 26 seconds a play, and you put in a quarter every game. If you want I guess you could couch it in really loaded terms: "business men in suits crawl out of the gutter and analyze player behavior to get more and more quarters into their greedy hands."
And are there actually businessmen in suits looking over the computer-generated databases on player behavior? If there are, is this a bad thing? This whole article is bullshit with some kind of weird nonsensical anti-establishment bias. Perhaps you'd be better off occupying Wall Street.
Re:Silly. (Score:5, Interesting)
I was watching a old computer chronicles from 88? anyway there was a game designer talking about arcade games
"Its almost like inventing a drug, and finding that balance between letting people play forever and not frustrating them so they keep dropping the quarters in, is the key, just give them a big enough dose that they cant stop"
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Video games have been about making money since the beginning.
Well, so what? You could say something similar about music, film, and literature. Fine - that doesn't mean that the increasingly focus-tested, mass-appeal garbage we're getting in all of these media isn't worse than it used to be.
Find me any 1950's equivalents to Justin Bieber, like Elvis for example, and I will guarantee they will have more artistic merit than the Biebs.
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Video games have been about making money since the beginning. Arcade games used to last approximately 26 seconds a play, and you put in a quarter every game
And as a direct result of this, home video consoles like the Fairchild and Atari were born, as parents figured out it would be cheaper to pay $180 and buy one of those for the kid for Christmas instead of feeding him $10 bills every weekend...
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Not all arcade game producers were like that. Many games such as 'The New Zealand Story', 'Pang', 'Super Wonderboy', 'Strider' or 'R-Type' would last quite a while, especially if you were good. These games were created out of a love for their craft, rather than purely just money.
Sure they made them tricky, and often short. But in any case, often I wish more games these days had more quality over quantity like that, where you get a better run in a shorter time frame.
So you're partially wrong in 2 different w
Ah, the $0.25 micropayment (Score:3)
I shudder to think how much money I actually fed those old machines, a quarter at a time.
Well...yeah. (Score:4, Interesting)
They're not trying to entertain you — they're trying to get you hooked.
From my perspective as a consumer, what's the difference? It's all the same to me as long as I'm satisfied.
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Well the nice thing about terms like 'addictive' or 'psychological manipulation' is that it makes people blameless 'wasting time'. TV went thru this nonsense too.
Real video games haven't changed (Score:2)
I play plenty of video games on consoles and the PC, and have for over 30 years. You know what? I don't see any difference (beyond all of the technological innovations) because there are just as many *real* games out there as there have always been.
So a bunch of middle-aged homemakers are now sucked into Farmville - these are *new* customers who have never played the "traditional" video games that existed before the glut of free-to-play Facebook crap, and will probably never be a part of that market.
Face
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It's possible to cater to more than one skill level, though. In fact, I just picked up Forza 4 and it's a good example - it has 5 difficulty levels that let beginners have fun and experts experience accurate racing techniquies. I haven't played a decent driving game in a while so I started at "medium". If I get into it, I'll probably bump it up to hard/advanced, but may never go to expert since I just don't have enough time to practice these days. Same with some of the better FPS shooters, etc - you c
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I think the issue there may not be as much a matter of video games in general, but of sequels that should just die and developers who should take a risk once in a while :)
More nostalgia goggles (Score:5, Insightful)
Shareware games->designed to get you hooked on the first few levels so you buy the game
Those little SNES consoles they set up at stores back in the day->designed to get you hooked on the game so you guy it.
hell even a lot of arcade games were intentionally designed to be really easy for the first stage or two so you would get hooked and feel compelled to pump more quarters in. This guy has some serious nostalgia goggles, the model has, and always will be to get gamers to spend money on the game by tempting them with a little taste of what is in store if they do spend money on the game. Free to play has just added another method for achieving the same objective.
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How is this fundamentally ANY different from what video games have been doing since the dawn of time?
It is fundementally different, because of the design objectives. They are designing the game to hook the player in by putting monetary gain as the primary motivation of design, not playability or making the game fun for the players. Monetary gain is the objective of this game.
This creates very different kind of games than those that were originally designed for just the love of making videogames!
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Yeah, it was a great game. Yeah, the guy who wrote it probably loved videogames. But damn, did he like quarters just as much, because there's never been a wallet vacuum like that game.
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You never played Gauntlet back in the arcade days, did you?
I remember being a poor boy going to the video arcade, and watching this guy plunk down like $10 worth of quarters on the machine and start playing. I was so jealous.
ps: "Remember, don't shoot food!"
Re:More nostalgia goggles (Score:5, Funny)
Programmer needs quarters . . . badly.
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+1 one from me 2!
The quote is from Gauntlet (Wizard needs food...badly), obviously there aren't many real old-skool Slashdotters here anymore...sadly :/
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If the game is decent or gives me some enjoyment for a few hours at a time then why is it wrong for them to try to get me to spend money on it? Still cheaper than going to the movies in most places and more fun than watching TV.
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Re:More nostalgia goggles (Score:5, Insightful)
How is this fundamentally ANY different from what video games have been doing since the dawn of time?
Ever played FarmVille? No? Give it a try. Within the first few minutes you will learn that that games works quite different from anything you played in the past. Among other things:
* based on realtime, forcing you to revisit the game to not spoil your crop
* regular calls to spam your friends, for in-game reward
* regular calls to exchange your real world money for in-game currency
* randomized in-game reward whenever you start the game
* essentially free of challenge, all the game requires is clicking on stuff to get rewards
None of those elements have been present in that form in traditional games.
Certain elements of course overlap a bit, Civ has some of those addicting elements, Diablo had them, etc. But the way they are directly exploited and analyzed in free to play games is quite a different thing then what you had in the past.
Arcade games where of course somewhat similar in trying to exploit the player, but they where limited by needing an expensive arcade machine that could only serve one or two players. Online games not only no longer have that limitation, they also allow regular changes to the games to optimize them for maximum revenue.
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* based on realtime, forcing you to revisit the game to not spoil your crop = PAIN IN THE ARSE - If I can't automate that, not interested! ;-)
* regular calls to spam your friends, for in-game reward = HELL NO. I want to keep my friends
* regular calls to exchange your real world money for in-game currency = FUCK OFF, I don't buy virtual crap. If you sell me the game that is a real world item. If you start trying to sell me in game items I walk away
* randomized in-game reward whenever you start the game = WOOOHOOO write a script to start the game daily
* essentially free of challenge, all the game requires is clicking on stuff to get rewards = Same as any video game I've played. Just gotta click the right stuff.
No wonder I've never been interested in farmville.
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But what I can't comprehend is how people are pissed off that we're trying to make the games fun.
People are not pissed of at others making games that are meant to be fun, people are pissed of at developer who make games with the sole goal of maximizing profit. A lot of features that get implemented into free games are there to do the exact opposite of fun, they are there to maximize the player annoyance and willingness to pay to skip or speed up that step in the fast. Essentially these games are exploits of human psychology and they work damn well when you look at the amount of money Zynga is making. J
FUD in light of industry history (Score:2, Informative)
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All hail the great Zynga! They get people to pay more money to build a single virtual structure than a WoW player pays for an entire month of play. Magnificent bastards.
"A strange game." (Score:2)
"...The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"
The indie game scenes is still out there creating some wonderfully beautiful, challenging, and meaningful games, and making money to boot. The universe remains in balance.
Nothing New (Score:2)
As much as
This reminds me vaguely of Graham Watkins' Virus (Score:2)
Except instead of a computer virus that is trying to optimize users so that they supply a steady input of data, it's businessmen trying to optimize users so that they supply a stead input of cash. In both cases, through trial and error the would-be optimizers eventually discover the secrets to getting users to play over and over and over until they're absolutely drained.
Gosh, when I put it like that it also sounds like the golden age of video games. Pong, Space Invaders, Q*Bert, Pac-Man, etc. were just big
Terrible writing (Score:3)
He wasn't kidding about being 'The Worst Journalist In The World'.
Skinner Box (Score:2)
The Buggles killed them (Score:2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwuy4hHO3YQ [youtube.com]
A fool and his money... (Score:2)
A fool and his/her money are easily parted.
The rest of us get a surprisingly good entertainment return on video games compared to movies/cable/clubs/whatever even with DLC...
Easy differentiator (Score:5, Insightful)
There seems to be a confusion about the games. TFA is talking about the games that have been distilled down to discard all elements of skill or even luck. All that's left is the Skinner conditioning, mechanical grinding and an offer to skip the grind in exchange for real world cash.
People were hooked on SPACE INVADERS (Score:3)
If you expose a product to at least 100 million people you're going to collect some of those who have addictive personalities. If you think it requires modern marketing analysis to create an addictive game, replacing "real" content with material designed to addict then you must have missed out on the late 1970s/early 1980s when kids were glued to arcade games. Space Invaders, Pac-Man et al were drawing children intro scrounging for every last quarter just for one more play. This happened worldwide, with none of the benefit of the cold, computer-aided fine-tuning that we're told is luring people in.
Can they make a video game more addictive? Possibly, but the idea that only specialized work on a title is what makes people addicted to it is not accurate.
For the win by Cory Doctorow (Score:3)
If you ever want to read an interesting book on this subject, For The Win by Cory Doctorow.
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No, they don't have to make money. Profit is not a right.
--
BMO
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They have to make money in order to keep the business going dumbass.
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The logical response to losing your business to copyright infringement does not involve pissing off the people are are buying your products.
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The difference, according TFA, being that these games intentionally provide variable stimulus (the most powerful type of stimulus according to behavioral psychologists) and diminishing returns in order to maximize profits. A regular game which you paid up front is designed to entertain you. Whether or not you actually finish the game depends on the perceived difficulty of the game, the appeal of the game view (world, story, graphics, physics system, etc) presented to you and your own desire and willingness
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"Every time they see you starting to lose interest, they might move the candy a little closer, every time they see you are really interested they move it a little further."
Sounds like /. Every time I log out for a few days, and then log back in, I get mod points; else, not.
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The original Civilisation provided variable stimulus enough to never stop playing it. Just another turn syndrome. And it was pretty successful.
It did not, however, use this marketing scheme.
I played the original Counter-Strike for years almost exclusivly and on a daily basis. And that game never really changed, there were no dangling fruits, no mastermind that carefuly crafted my gaming experience. Just the same game every time, about 20 minutes of rahter simpple action and the final scoreboard.
So I don't t
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Such passion indicates a different market addressed by different games.
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LOL has a serious problem though... You are not allowed to learn how to play. I logged on, played five games, then deleted it thanks to being called all manner of stupid names, and being verbally assaulted for not memorizing all the silly terms ("leash blue!", wtf?) before hand. It seemed fun, but the community verges too much on "hardcore" (read: 13 year old boys) for my tastes. I miss silly online shooters, like UT2k3. TF2 is close, but I got sick of Valve updating the whole 30Gb package every three
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That being said, LOL gets my vote. They make a fun game, that is actually free to play, where you can't ever buy an advantage. Oh... you can buy an awful lot, and they definitely set the pricing in such a way as to maximize profits. However,