A retro game store opened in my town a few years ago. They've been so successful they opened a second location in a town an hour away this past month. Local news asked the owner (a young guy who opened the store when he was still in high school) why he thought there was a market for retro games. He said he wasn't sure, but he suspected that with older games, you didn't feel like you were getting nickled and dimed constantly.
That could be part of it, but I suspect another major factor is that guys like me who grew up playing these games have become adults and gotten jobs and now have disposable income to burn building a collection of stuff they love.
Arcade games were still made to take money out of the consumer. Making a level unfairly hard was a design decision made because of greed. It's an increase in profits fueled by making the experience worse. The bar is so low it's a tripping hazard in hell but people with rose tinted glasses are still a market that can and will be manipulated for profits.
I honestly think this is the reason that indie games have become popular; indie games are more often passion projects than money grabs, and consumers recognize that. That's why we love them.
Indie games have become a shitshow over the past few years after Steam decided any game that had a working build could be released on their platform as 'early access'. Now the market is flooded with cheap garbage with creators dumping some garbage game out to key into an ongoing fad. Then they abandon the game as soon as they get their bag.
@@FauxRaidenator in the past few years? They've been around for ages now too, I remember the early-access survival game craze in 2014 and despite how many of them were utter failures, it still produced genuinely amazing games with the likes of The Forest, Subnautica and Raft. Look out for the developers history and reputation and wait for some time to see where they take their concept, then you won't be dissappointed. The biggest marketing for these indie devs are gaming channels on YT, browsing thru their stuff until you find something for you doesn't cost you.
I think Stardew valley is one of the best games ever made . Released early 2016 and the lone developer is still developing content . For a 10 dollar game .
Not only have these practices ruined games, but they are leaking into other things as well. Professional software that used to be a one time purchase is now a monthly fee with micro transactions. Cars are locking things like heated seats and horsepower behind a paywall. Streaming services make you pay to use the service, pay again to remove ads, pay again to watch specific shows. Airlines deliver a framework for transportation and nickel and dime you for bags, seat choice, priority boarding, wi-fi, food and sometimes even drinks. Everything that was once a one time purchase is now a monthly fee, and they'll punish you for taking a break from the purchase by not allowing you to sign back up for a set period of time.
Some of the examples are a bit far fetched. Streaming services are not meant to be free, ads will always be there with or without the option to remove, premium shows will always be behind pay wall. Airliners you described are budget airlines with big discount tickets, if you fly with proper national airlines none of the micro-transactions happen. The thing for professional softwares is basically 'xxx as a service' which is the new 21st century meta, I'm not sure if it even originated from gaming but WoW was the first example I remember.
I find myself playing and wanting to play significantly fewer games than I used to. It's hard enough to find an offline single player game, much less one without predatory practices.
This was me for years. But very recently I started looking at older games I never played, never finished, or never owned the consoles for when I was younger. I’m about 40 hours into my first serious Dark Souls playthrough now, and I picked up a couple of PS1 Final Fantasy games to play next. I’m planning to pick up a PS2 and/or PS3 at some point because of all the cool games on those systems I never played.
Its not that hard, its easy if you know where to look and who to buy from. The majority of games I own are singleplayer or have multiplayer as a secondary option to play with friends.
You forgot to mention/blame all the streamers/influencers who basically get paid for luring vulnerable viewers into this abusive monetisation/gambling systems by streaming them.
@@ghagzor I remember the guys who acted like they bought items for CS:GO when they actually used a fake shop where their chances were incredibly high and people thought they could do that to, only to spent more money in the actual shop. It was there before but having people who get paid as actors doing this is far worse.
Consumers are also to blame, I've never paid for any of the examples mentioned here, then again I've been playing since the 90s, when most games were of an acceptable quality and can easily discern today's mediocre quality games from the small quantity of acceptable games we get each year. However IMO since gaming began to appeal more to the masses, most consumers have lower standards for what they consider fun and are satisfied with a lesser quality product which allows for these kind of abuses to be perpetuated over time.
@@qu1253 Which is one reason I almost never buy a 'new' game. See things like _Shadow of War_ where they built the game around a single player campaign... then made the last stage of the game an absurdly long grind... unless you paid them more money for the already full price game. Money that only went towards that individual play through; start over, and you had to pay again. Point is, the game doesn't really start making demands of the player's wallet until well after the player has had time to get invested in the game.
I listened to Todd on Lex Freidmans podcast and it was hilarious how he didn't want to acknowledge they wanted to have a monopoly on DLC and not have free mods
The sad things is nowaday if that exact DLC comes out, it'll be considered "one of the ok ones" Mainly because of its price (~$2). For comparison, most MMO cosmetics can run you up to 30-50 bucks. Fighting Games like Dead or Alive's DLCs cost total are in the thousands of dollars The standards for acceptable post-launch DLCs have gotten so low it's subterranean
I used to build the website for the University of Texas' business school. They had a PhD program, and part of my job was maintaining the section of the site that they posted their doctoral theses on. There was a few years where every single PhD thesis was about how you could increase profits with microtransactions. Every thesis covered the psychological manipulation in depth, taking no care to hide the immorality of it all. They seemed to revel in it. One paper was entirely about how you could drive a certain type of person (they even used the term "whale") to bankruptcy using these methods and how fantastic that was for your business. I've never been so disgusted at work in my life.
@@amushyforyou6083 this is exactly how capitalism works. Businesses chase profits, and they're succeeding with this because THERE ARE people shell out money for this crud. These are business decisions made purely out of profit motive and not a love for the product. And as much as we hate it this is the favored outcome under capitalism.
@@alexs5394 That is actually a good point. What use is there to not buying the stupid monetisation, when it's those 5% that spend multiple monthly wages on it.
Gardenscapes has this feature that runs Monday to Wednesday where you can earn a chest full of boosters as you beat a certain amount of levels in a row. I got so good at the game that I knew I could easily play for hours every day of that period. But because it was only a three day period every week, I felt like I HAD to keep playing in that time frame. I would sit there wishing I was crocheting or reading or doing any of my other kajillion hobbies, but felt like I *had* to be playing, cuz it was only a limited time. By the time I finally deleted the game, I got to the point where I was actually relieved to lose a level and have the chest reset, cuz it meant I had a viable excuse to stop playing.
"Morality is a poor man's quality" is a statement that hits hard when looking at the current climate in the video game industry. Why hire a team of skilled writies, programmers, and artists when you can hire a team of marketers and psychologists that abuse manipulative and questionable practices?
Games were just gamers trying to make a fun game for other gamers. Then when the businessmen noticed the money made after the imagine of gamers just being nerds, they wanted a piece of it.
You can rephrase it "Why hire a team of skilled writies, programmers, and artists when @you actually can do it yourself with your small team - like Disco Elysium (for story) Factorio (for programming) or Cuphead (for art)"
@@MyHydralisk I'm sorry: You _can't_ do it yourself with a small team. Just because an automobile and a go-kart can both get you from one place to another doesn't mean that they're the same thing.
@Bric Aaron I mean, the go kart can get you there just slower... now the real comparison should be between a go kart and a car with missing parts because that is more accurate to what a AAA dev studio is like these days.. and of course the parts are missing because the owner of the car is selling parts of the car off as he goes along and replacing parts with pieces that don't even belong to the car, hell the wheels might even just be wheels of cheese at this point.
One tiny correction, when talking about the advent of DLC, you cannot neglect to mention Mass Effect infamously starting the "Day One DLC" trend. Previously, people were willing to pay for DLC because it took months to make it after the game came out, but Mass Effect introduced the concept that you could cut off a part of the game and serve it as an additional slice to players rather than include it in the base game.
Mass Effect 2 you mean? The first Mass effect only had two DLCs and both were released over a year after the main game. Also I know Dragon Age: Origins had day one DLC a full year before Mass Effect 2, it even had an NPC in-game who advertised it to you lol. I think it's likely that EA did start that trend, though I haven't researched it, but Mass Effect wasn't the first game to do it.
I sort of buy their excuses for this tho. "we would of had to fire the artists a month before release when they finished their work, instead we had them making cosmetic packs"
@@yewtewbstew547 Possibly, yes. My apologies, I didn't research it in detail, but I have a very vivid recollection of it happening. Either way, it was just another stepping stone into the nightmare we live in today.
Theoretically it makes sense, there’s always time in between a game getting finished and the day when it hits shelves, but I 100% believe that day one DLC is usually just sectioned off for more money so the initial release sales figures look better
I never played ME3 with Javik because it's absolutely ridiculous that such an important character would only be available if you drop extra money at release
Looking back at this chain of events is like watching a movie that goes over a dystopian future where businesses are doing absolutely vile things that make you say "Thank god that would never happen." But then I realised the reality of the situation.
It's a sad state of affairs indeed; adding to the box that companies sell "player advantage" in preorders to unlock in-game items early which usually get power creeped or become worthless.
@@1crazypj cheat codes used to be cool before companies started selling them for $$$ A lot of old cheat codes were used by developers to test their games, because back in the 90s the cartridges had to be near perfect... If a game shipped with a bug that was it; it always had a bug unless the company reprinted the cartridges and that was both a rare occurrence and expensive.
One thing I would add about Maplestory's Gachapon: It wasn't JUST the gambling, it was also that the BEST items in the game could be found there. Some of the most rare scrolls and absolutely ridiculously strong weapons (with often super random requirments stats, making them EVEN stronger) were all found in the Gachapon. Unlike something like Overwatch, where the lootboxes were purely cosmetic.
@@fuzzybanana0123 Yeah hated that too. I tried to give OW2 a chance but as soon as I saw that they were locking new heroes behind the battle pass, I was out... If I was ever really in, that is.
@@spritemon98 Have you ever played overwatch ? You would get a box every hour of gameplay, they had a great drop rate, and they would give you money to buy skins, even during events. I played something like 300 hours on the first game and i had at least 2 legendary skins for every character. You litteraly didn't have to pay for them, unlike many other games
@@fuzzybanana0123you literally don’t have to buy the battle pass tho to unlock the heroes? The battle pass has “free” items you get without paying for it which includes the new characters
It's interesting to hear the parallels with gambling and gambling addiction. Especially around 15:10 talking about the proprietary currency. There was a saying when I used to play cards... "The man who invented gambling was smart. The man who invented chips was a genius." When the money doesn't look like money, people will quite literally throw it away
exactly or how they have the packs that “cost little” and you think oh it’s only $5 same thing with gambling people think oh i only have to put in 20 and i can win big, just think about all of those “oh it’s just $5” combined then it’s not just $5
Step 1: introduce an anti consumer system in a game. Step 2: get backlash Step 3: continue to do it anyway Step 4: wait for a new generation of gamers to join the market. They’ve never known games without this system so they accept it, and even defend it. “That’s just how it is”. This cycle happens every time. Most of the things people were outraged about are now considered the norm in games. All companies have to do is wait it out.
@@pauliusrimkus7241 For me it's "Why I only buy indie games that don't do this shit." If a AAA game is good enough I feel like I really need to play it I will just wait until it drops a version with all the DLC included at less than half the original price. If we keep buying things the way they want, they will keep doing it. The one piece of power here is the ability to just...not buy the game.
whats funny is this same tactic is used in all areas of life by corporations and politicians and the ruling elite powers that be. There are countless things normalized and just accepted as "that's just how it is" by the youth that prior generations would have never stood for and actively resisted. It is insidious and we have failed our children and our youth by letting legitimate predators mind control our gullible children. We like to blame them, but no one was there to protect them from this. You can't expect them to know better and be able to protect themselves. Everyone just wants to blame the victim.
Yeah am basically done with triple A, the fact that I also have a toaster pc and indies let me still enjoy em with the toastertron is also a sight of how much needless push for hardware there is.
In this christimas, my family give me some steam credits, i was looking for dwarf fortress, i will bought it early or late, but not know how long will take, already are playing another single player game, also, money wise not worth to put down that amount in new game. But with steam credits, i just bought and already play few hours, about 5 and was amazing, is one of those games i can play now and have a lot of fun, or wait for days, months or years to play, but still equals fun. I notice that gaming are getting really wrong much early in live, but I totally stop buying AAA few time ago, with cyberpunk 2077 actually, the game is there, no MTX, but abuses of other bad behaviour, lie to consumer... At least i never will pay for something that i can't check if it is what it told us it is... Borderlands 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 was both huge hits on my face, due to poor game quality over maketing... In that time i already not buy AAA games a long time, due to MTX on online shit and forcing us to play online where is not even a good choice to do so... I pass all possible games avoiding pay for unfair moneytization, mmo, free games cosmetics, pay to win and soo on, i drop mmo mostly due to this type of situation, even where it looks like not is it, as Albion, they force us to die and lost progress or be stock, with the need to join a guild and everyone is keepet at same low evel due to sheep and wolf theory, at a point they even need to open free players in, you can't make a game wolf-sheep drived and be a major success for long term.
The only reason indie games don't utilize predatory monetization tactics is that they don't have a successful precedent to follow, if that makes any sense. When we see an indie game pull this stunt off successfully, other will copy it, and eventually the majority of games will echo the sentiment. Who doesn't like money after all?
This video makes me sad, but also helps explain why I'm so stuck on continuing to just play the games from growing up, rather than continuing into newer games. ~1987 through 2000 was the true golden era imo
You said it! Just last week, I finally completed my decades-long dream of having a water cooled PC. What’s the first game I played on this beast? F-Zero, on an SNES emulator! Games used to be made by gamers, for gamers. Those were better days.
Maybe I’m just a fanboy but the Metroid games are still very much worth playing, they don’t release games often but when they do there always high quality
When thinking about how games have changed, I feel bad for kids growing up in this environment. Being an older gamer, we at least had a chance to know 'we don't have to participate', and still just game/grind while griping around how things used to be. Children today have no such chance, and may not even realize there is an alternative to the instant gratification to spending real money on endless micro-transactions. **Great video Josh, I would show it to my child if I had one, before letting them get into gaming.**
Besides a few exceptions I stopped playing AAA games in recent years and mostly spend my time playing indies, someone who will put passion and dedication behind a great idea will always win in my book
I'm completely with you. It's not an indigame but I've bought rdr2 now. Feel free to laugh at me because it's so late, but originally I'm not really interested in westerns. I think I'll look at all the old games again. "Soldiers-heros of WW2" is very old but also very nice.
@@TheCrepusculum I prefer to play games after their life cycle has ended. The games are cheaper, and cosmetics or anything like that don't matter anymore. I just recently played RDR2. I don't want to be a part of their system.
@@cxngo8124 I am not alone? I always felt I'm the only one waiting... originally because of complete packages with dlcs - they don't have that kind of error because they DON´T quite fit together (bought separately). thx
@@TheCrepusculum Nah. I originally did it like this because I didn't have much money in highschool and a gold edition with everything would come out anyway soon but the habit stuck and I always feel like I am winning. No frustration, no broken games. More content.
The interesting thing about the FOMO mechanic is that it encourages retention of players you already have, but discourages new players from joining because they think they have missed too much.
Yup, experienced many such moments. Te introduction of seasons in games (think fortnite) kind of remedies that, since you can join at the beginning and everyone's new to the mechanics, but it's annoying for existing players. You learn something just for it to be invalidated in 4 months.
@@Slay1337pl The problem with seasons, is that if you missed something from the last season, you can never get it back, there was a Predator Skin on previous seasons battlepass, i could never get that skin if a join after .
Final Fantasy Brave Exvius abuses this mechanic WEEKLY. Every week they have new, this week only, op asf characters that you will need for months after. Bur you only have a week to get them at a .035% chance to get one.
A game I played for a long time, ragnarok online, is dying because of this, at least the international server. It went gacha so hard that you literally need to spent hundreds to thousands of dollar to somewhat catch up to the remaining playerbase, but the game is 20 years old, has charming old school looks to some but to lots it just looks old, feels old, and its grind heavy as fuck, has been 20 years ago, its way worse now with relevant items costing billions and newbies lucky if they make 1-3m/h, which already requires you to farm some stuff before you reach these numbers. But instead of making the game more newbie-friendly, they go all in on the power creep and milk the remaining addicts that have spent too much to quit for as much as they can. Back in 2004 to idk 2008 maybe 2010 it was p2p, abonnement, then it went f2p, cashshop took over and thats it. Its sad and its exactly the shit we warned about 15 years+ ago when we said this shit will fuck over gaming as a whole. But sheeps gonna be sheeps, using brain hurts.
@@daben7145 funnily enough, i feel like WoW resolved this, I played it first time after the big leveling change. The grindfest always put me off. Now it seems like the game is geared towards new players. The bad thing about it is thst old addon content looks and plays horrible in comparison.
It's interesting how the gaming industry went from, "do what you love, build games that you love" and as a result, money comes, into "build games you hate, because greed and money rules."
Look at it this way. Would you rather be selling $1000 handbags to rich folks at a nice shop or selling 10$ handbags from the trunk of your car? This is the choice facing the game industry.
@@Jimraynor45 No it's not. The industry made plenty of money before. Look at how successful World of Warcraft was at it's peak, BEFORE they added microtransactions and made it pay2win with wow token. Look at how successful Baldur's Gate 3, The Witcher series, Elden Ring, or Monster Hunter World were. Look at how the industry is making record profits EVERY YEAR but still lays of massive amounts of people on the regular just to be able to make that much more. Stop making excuses for greedy scumbags and idiot consumers.
I cannot even possibly express the immense thankfulness I feel towards the independent development scene in the larger landscape of gaming. The massive boom of indie game devs releasing absolute banger titles while completely disregarding pandoras box is the thing that will keep gaming alive.
Issue is of course marketing :) Hope Dunkey will do his job great. Also most Indies a lot of reading needed... god I need practice it somehow so it wouldn't be exhausting.
And yet some indie games are also starting to use stuff like battle passes, such as the Pokemon clone "TemTem". I really hope games like that don't become the norm for indie games.
A notion I'm really hoping to be able to carry forward as well. Graduated from my 3D education recently, and my eye has been set on smaller scale indie work right away. Both to get away from the corporate nature of big games, but also just because the environment of a smaller studio allows everyone a voice in vision of a game. And it's a really nice environment to work in as well.
Shoutout to all those amazing dev teams who still just make good games that you buy and get everything, not only that, they continue to feed free DLC, sometimes asking a small and fair amount for significant DLC expansions. The Long Dark comes to mind.
In Geometry Dash, full game sales make nothing compared to ad money from mobile Lite and DLCs. Plus, Russian kids actively pirate full game, and their amount is so big they sometimes cause game servers to work slow despite not paying the game. If RobTop releases those mobile versions on PC, he either loses most money, or he will have to make up some unfair ad schemes, which will be eventually negated by the same Russians who will just hack the games and delete ads
Really prefer the play station games recently. Console games are so much less of a toxicity money lure. You pay, you get. It's fair. Unlike how all these FOMO model based game that push u into gambling and paying a massive amount of money just to get anything.
Terraria is a fantastic game, and if you have not played it, I feel bad for you. Noita is a fantastic game, and if you have not played it, I feel bad for you. Factorio is a fantastic game, and if you have not played it, I feel bad for you. Enter the Gungeon, you get the idea. Stardew Valley. Ultrakill. Trackmania (Not the 2020 version, fuck that) Undermine. Dwarf fucking Fortress.
I really like when games sell their soundtrack as the only DLC. You could easily just listen to the music on UA-cam, but it's a neat way of supporting the team behind the game. I've done this with a few games and even though i don't use the Steam music player, i still appreciate that it's totally optional and doesn't affect the game one bit.
Yup. One of the most acceptable forms of DLC. You pay for a product, you recieve product, and no strings are attached. And the devs have already done the work to create this product so for them, it's a zero sum gain. (Best part about music sold on steam is being able to yank out the mp3 files, load em onto a usb, then listen to stuff while driving as well.)
For me I like re colors. Leave the items unique and easy to tell what they are and allow re colors imo. I think the direction of game pass and so on will help the gaming market personally
This is the best explanation I've heard. I have never been more depressed about the state of gaming. If only indie devs had the budget to advertise like AAA studios.
The majority of people will never find a good game if it is not advertised. If only a few people happen to find the good game, then the studio doesn't make enough money to support further development. Advertising is actually where most new developers are most likely to fail, and having low sales on your 1st game can quickly bankrupt a studio.
Indie games are clunky, like Hero Siege interface. Grim Dawn and Dusk, Project Warlock are epic though. Too bad people talk about failed games instead of rising good ones.
The problem is video games went from being mainly an art/hobby to becoming a business. The question is no longer “is this game fun for players?” But “how to get as much money as possible from these people?”
It's so sad that when a big game is announced my thoughts have gone from 'how fun it'll be to play 'to 'how much of a monetary drain will that game try to be'.
For me it's usually "I hope the game will be finished on release" or "I hope there won't be massive bugs or garbage performance". Kinda nervous about the new Fire Emblem game, hope it runs fine.
Honestly, idgaf about the monetizatiob of a game unless it's actually p2w. Ppl cry about the Crown store in ESO but I couldn't care less as I'm not gonna buy an outift. Ppl cry about battlepasses but for as long as they don't give op weapons idgaf as I'm not unterested in dumbass skins and backgrounds. You wanna waste your money? Well you do you. A fool and his money, eh?
@@jokuihmehyyppa agreed but it seems to be more and more p2w or you have to pay to unlock levels if i bought the game i bought it i should be able to go to any zone and play any character now skins and shit idc about because you can decide it looks cool or that you want to support the game i don't but it's a choice i make
It would be really cool having a second video showing how those things are starting to leak outside games, like cars locking some features behind some monthly fee
I actually used to be in a game development program at a university, and I dropped out because I thought it was so miserable. It wasn't cause the workload was so bad, but because even when I did get projects successfully completed I never enjoyed making them, or got any satisfaction out of the finished product, just relief that I didn't have to work on it anymore. Thank you for making this, because I could never really explain why until I saw this video - basically all they teach you in the classes is rapid iterative prototyping and shit from that pandora's box, or at least similar mechanics designed to induce a (monetizable) dopamine rush. It's never about what the developers actually want to make, it's all about what the shareholders or investors think will be most profitable.
I ditched a game development subject at uni, but in my case it was because the guy teaching it did a lousy job of organising it. Also, it was just one subject as part of a computer science degree, so there were plenty of other subjects to take up instead. Still got the textbook, though.
Scams are lucrative. Sadly lawmakers dont understand how deceptive game-ified shops are and ignore it. Honestly dont even see the attraction to those scams since I can get a good dopamine berry from 10k other things in life. But I suppose I'm not the target. Kids are and normally they "gotta have it right now".
Yes, exactly. Investors is also the main reason for these tactics to exist as well. If you can make a product that is good and will sell 300 million copies. But you can make a product quickly for cheaper and it will only sell 30 copies... By the law of investors.. you must sell the 30 copies quicker.
Great video, didn't know this channel before but I'm glad that it contains a rather balanced and explanatory approach to the topic, not overloading it with internet memes or senseless raging. I acutally have the impression to have learned something about the origins of monetarization in video games
The people in the major development teams (343, Bunjie, Activision, Capcom, etc) do put their hearts and souls in them as well. The issue their having is the balance of doing what they want but fulfilling their agreements with the corporate overlord to insure the product is worth something. The dev group can only so much when it comes to sales, they can only affect the product. The corporate master (Microsoft for example) maimyk sets the terms and deadlines for the development. Plus they can even outright change the deadlines willingly to get earlier to cash grabs or save money when the time is needed. That's why a lot of new games feel unfinished most of the time, they usually need somewhere like an extra year or such before their actual release. Instead of blaming the company for not allowing the devs to finish their work we are putting the blame on the devs without realizing this issue. Why you may ask? Cause the company makes sure the marketing teams put the devs label on the adds cause "they made it!" so if the game bombs or complaints occurs the company can cheat the devs out of their contractual bonus pay or just get rid of them for free without repercussions and copyright all their work
@@theamericankaiser4549 I also have to make the argument that back in the day it was more gamers making games for gamers. Nowadays, many gaming studios are full of people who not only hate making games but hate games in general. Why they still do it is beyond me. Also, people get hired not based on skill or talent anymore. That being said, I rarely see anyone blaming devs. usually it's the companies altogether that get vitriol
Indie games are the future of gaming, in my opinion. Ofcourse, the quadbillion dollar studios will never die, but it will be the Indie developers that push the medium forward and make better and more interesting games
28:38 “and when a marketing executive pictures you playing a game, you aren’t pictured smiling and laughing with friends ur pictured opening ur wallet and reaching for ur credit card” basically sums up the state of modern triple A games
@@Reahreic How do you think we should do that ? its simply not possible only way you could stop people from supporting this would be by laws and that would be pretty insane to do. Only thing i would agree with making laws against is that every game with real life money stuff thats locked behind a randoom system of for example opening boxes has to be rated R18. Fifa is still Rated 0 or 3 depending on countrys and i think this is insane.
@@PokeBurnPlease The Netherlands outlawed this kind of predatory business practice, and I think every country should. Then again, the U.S. is the only country where pharmaceutical drug ads are allowed. If it's not abundantly clear now that we should abandon our old ways of thinking and look for something more personally fulfilling, like actually bettering ourselves... Well it all comes down to money. Looks like we are doomed. :) Hilariously doomed!
@@sheogorathprinceofmadness2223 Difference is the netherlands forbid it in general but i dont think there is any problem with it. If you are an adult you can decide yourselfe if you wanna pay for loot boxes but the games should not be allowed to be sold to minors like its currently with Fifa for example. You should be required to be 18 to buy such games.
I worked with a games psychologist in 2014 when I worked for a very famous mobile game and he was utterly evil and psychopathic. I felt gross working with him when he was telling me how he was trying to trick kids into using their parent's credit card to buy expensive things in the game, and we're talking £50 here. Oh and I discovered a bug that meant sometimes players wouldn't receive their items so I asked for time to fix it from the project owners and they said it didn't matter as the players would likely just try again and double spend. I left the games industry after that.
Thank you for commenting on this topic. It tears my mind assunder, witnessing this slow decent into madness via overmonetization becoming the new standard. Modern AAA companies have been slowly chopping off good qualities that make games enjoyable, for _SURPLUS_ profit, on top of their already well off profit margines they would have made from simply making a good product. If I had to sum their behavior up briefly, I'd say they are noticeably diluting game experiences to appeal to larger demographics, so there are fewer _AMAZING_ games, and far more "meh, it's alright" experiences. Ironically, the AAA companies; the ones with the most money and resources, tend to be the laziest, rejecting innovation and creativity. This leaves creativity to the indie devs, who are often working a full time job, only making games in their free time. There are certainly a few disagreements I personally have with specific directions that Nintendo has taken, but one thing I praise Nintendo for, is that they are always reinvesting their profits back into their games, experimenting with innovated new ideas, which is more than I can say for many other big names like Activision, Blizzard, EA, Ubisoft, to name a few. Any time someone comments on this, they're always met with the ignorant response "Well, if you don't like it, then don't buy it!". The problem with that mentality, are the reprocussions we're witnessing today. By not demanding a certain level of standards as consumers, it invites all businesses to get lazier, overall, as they realize they can charge more while putting in less effort, knowing their consumers will not fight back. Please note, I am not anti-capitalism. I sincerely believe companies and individuals have a right to earn a "fair" profit for the products they create. What we are witnessing in modern gaming, far exceeds "fair" profit margines. Large businesses are actively performing psychological studies to determine the best way to manipulate their consumers, similar to what casinos have been doing for decades. The F2P model, for example, is advertised as this positive inclusive decision, yet it's entirely profit driven, at the considerable expense of the quality of the game. F2P appeals to the largest demographic, because what excuse do you have to not play the game if it's free, right? This model also reduces backlash towards poor design choices, as how can one complain when the game is free? The most noteable consequence of F2P, is the quite apparent increase in people ruining the gaming experience for others, via smurfing, unapproved modding, cheating, etc. These types of players suffer no consequence for their actions, as they can simply create a new account and continue hindering the intended experience for signifigant portions of the gaming community. You can observe this daily, in games like: Valorant Overwatch 2 Rocket League (after it was made F2P) This system pits the community against eachother, rather than directing that frustration towards the companies promoting this business model as the new standard, inevitably shortening the longevity and vitality of games. People eventually quit playing, because of the stresses F2P incurs quickly outweigh the entertaiment provided by the game.
Weirdly the "Recurrent monetization" has really changed the way I play games. I play way more indie and AA games now. Like most of my "Most Anticipated" game of any new year has become a lot of smaller seemingly more heartfelt projects. My favorite game this year was Roadwarden. A text based RPG. It's kind of sad, but at the same time there are still so many great games coming out every year even if it's not a title I would've expected at the beginning of the year.
I played Ara Fell this year and it felt like a spiritual successor to games like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound. It was clearly a labor of love for the team at Stegosoft Games. It had a bunch of self aware jokes but they knew exactly what the game should be for a classic 16b rpg.
Same here. I play for relaxation and immersion; games with a "buy once, you're good" model are my happy place. Predatory monetization, otoh, makes games completely unpalatable to me. As such, I do hope that smaller games can carve out a consistent niche for fair pricing. Looking at my purchases this year, there is scant outside of indies and AA I found worth my money.
oh good recommendation, i'l keep an eye on that game. I mostly play indie games too now, I don't touch most triple A games except for elden ring and nintendo.
i feel like even indie games are getting worse. the ones that get all the spotlight are gimmicky meme games with no actual substance like stray and then all the actual interesting stuff either gets left in the dust or doesn't do well enough for the studio to grow. this isn't even saying anything about all the survivalcraft genre clones trying to chase market trends instead of the devs making something worthwhile they're passionate about
sinking gut feeling is exactly how I feel about OW2 I didn't even realize until the other day that I haven't played it in weeks. Game just makes me sad everytime I open it now.
If it's online and has multilayer, SKIP IT. If certain publishers put it out, again, SKIP IT. It's not difficult to wait for use reviews. Anything beyond that is your fault
Wow. I never got the big picture of how abusive these systems really are. It's devious. It makes me think we need some sort of "fair game" certificate for games you can actually buy and play in full. 🤔
This would actually be a totally cool idea. As some collab of indie publishers etc., if I see that cert, I know it's full game and no microtransactions. I would be totally tempted to buy games with this on them. As long as it would be done fairly and given to any game that fills the requirements - ie. that this cert itself wouldn't become a cash cow - it'd be both in the interest of the customer and the studios making "fair" games. Should be relatively easy to implement too with binding contracts in the style of no microtransactions now or ever under this title or a certain penalty sum contractually agreed would need to be paid etc., so it couldn't be abused by getting the cert and then turning the game into something totally different in the next update.
Honestly, this is the exact use case for when governments need to step in. I struggle to imagine the market place correcting this issue. We would need unilateral power from a major government to level the playing field.
@@tseikkisnelkytkaks9013 There's no way companies will sign contracts to earn certifications, they'd just make up their own instead. A certification plan could work, but it would have to start with a group vetting games on their own initiative and handing them "fair" or "unfair" certificates depending on the game. But because of the nature of the industry, those would have to be revisited regularly when companies inevitably try to abuse it.
A good friend of mine worked for a big publisher (no name dropping as they´re all doing it anyway) and at one point, they sat in a room with a bunch of psychologists and designers, "theorizing" about how they could redesign certain game mechanics, *specially* for people with compulsive spending habits, like ppl with ADHD for example. He left the room being so disgusted that he gave up the job and started working with an indie dev team instead. lol It´s disgusting to see that they not only ignore, but *willingly abuse* people with mental health issues (like gambling addiction) to make more money.
Companies are essentially massive entities with the singular goal of "make more money, no matter what". Can you really blame them? It's naive to think they'll ever change on their own volition
@@WeAreChecking Yes. Nobody said anything about them changeing on their own. Why would they? Just hold them accountable for the damages they´re directly and indirectly causing and they will have to change or get bankrupt.
@@Mightydoggo While I agree with this, I have one problem with it. How do WE hold them accountable? Once some accountability for video game developers comes into the law scene, I would expect some rulings would happen that could snowball into laws being made. I don't want the government involved more than they have to or we will see some anti gamer laws. Hillary Clinton should be noted here as she was pushing to ban GTA back when San Andreas was the latest one out. Or we could just not buy the games that have these predatory practices. My vote for a game anyone should try out is A Hat In Time. Yes they did have 2 expansion packs, but the packs there are have a lot of content, almost as if it was a whole other game. Almost like HL2:E2.
@@WeAreChecking yes we can and should blame them. they often value short term profits now over long term value and ruin franchises over plain greed when they can still be making millions/billions and keep beloved franchises successful for years and years instead of just.. well be greedy and ruin the reputation of everyone over some quick bucks. is it really so much to ask for people to give a shit about the product they make and not JUST about the money?
I went "game amish" years ago for the sake of my kids. We simply don't consider games with transactions, or even requiring external identity validation. What I didn't expect was that, by eliminating time wasted on games that are a drag, it made games much more fun. At this point when I see some some of these mainstream games it's just repulsive to see all the shit people go through without even getting to play. Thank you genuinely for the effort put into this high-quality video.
Indeed. My one friend almost had a break down because of Soulcalibur IV. He loved Darth Vader, but was ticked you could only play him on the Playstation and he only had an Xbox and didn't want to play as Yoda, lol. (23:33)
This the easiest and only solution to monetization madness. Simply buy stuff that it is worth its cost and stay away from all the crap that isn't. (or is simply a platform to sell you digital stuff that is essentially worthless) What I cannot truly understand is why a large portion of the population doesn't care and gladly spends all their money and time on these products. Not only do they spend way more than necessary, they also lack the wisdom to see what it does to gaming as a whole. I think it is ok to blame the industry, but the gamers themselves that vote with their wallets are keeping these practices around.
@@pinobluevogel6458 It's the same reason so many people joylessly play slot machines for hours and hours: addiction. Some people are just particularly prone to this kind of addition.
And this is why I find myself turning to indie games more often these days. That and I find more interesting relatable stories being told in that space.
We need more people calling out all of the anti consumer and stingy things game companies do now. I hope everyone remembers Totalbiscuit who passed away in 2018, he was one of the first to call out these anti consumer methods used by these companies and fought for anyone who just wanted to play good games. I don’t think things will change anytime soon but I do hope more people will speak out. RIP to a great man
I what we need is for people to stop paying for these transactions. If you just don’t pay for it the company is forced to stop doing it. However a lot of people still buy these things
Just don't buy new releases. Try and convince friends to do so too. Spend 3 or so years playing older games or pursuing other hobbies. As soon as this stops being such a cash cow they will be forced to up quality.
I find it so interesting that game developers are secondary to making games these days and the business model is the primary concern. Clearly the gaming industry is changed forever, glad I was there for the glory days.
@@heroicgoo915 American neonazis pose online either as Jews or non-Jews concerned about antisemitism. They then make false antisemitism claims. Their hope being that people become disillusioned with the very concept of antisemitism in response to seeing unfair accusations. Widespread disillusionment or apathy with the concept of antisemitism would create a more favourable climate for neonazis to thrive in. Why do they bother with this clearly futile endeavour? American neonazis are almost exclusively low IQ men with a poor to non-existent social life and are neither in employment, education or training. Spending their time trying to troll on social media is a sort of bottom of the tank existence they've sunk down to. The above account is one of these little guys.
After many years of enjoying online games, the modern monetization made me go back to single player games instead and now I have much more fun playing games than ever before. So thank you Farmville and Diablo Immortal.
Completely understandable. What's stupid is the amount of single player games now that require internet access. I don't need a F'ing cloud to save my games, the damn computer has a hard drive!
Absolutely, for like 95% of games I think the fun is over, sometimes an honest game like Elden RIng peaks around the corner but that gets very rare now. I just picked up this old Tower Defense Game "Bloons" with the balloons and monkeys up for free on epic. I naively thought, ok thats a nostalgic throwback, lets play some. Within the first few minutes, I encountered an in-game instant upgrade for real money and my smile plummeted and I hit altf4 and uninstalled that shit... nothing is save.
Lol - I sort of feel that way when my job gives me anti-fraud training. Sometimes I'm thinking "Yeah - I could make that work without getting caught..."
Thanks for saying execs instead of devs. Too many people blame the devs for these mechanics in big games, but the devs hate them just as much as we do. The EXECS love it and force it into every aspect of a game…
They all share their insights in gamedev conferences lol Dunno if you watched it but there was a really disgusting talk about whales and how to exploit em in your game in some gamedev conference.
I have played elder scrolls online for two years, and the chapter about daily-habit-forming in this video is spot on. I thought the base game was very good and did not suffer from being bad or lacking when you did not buy cosmetic extras. In the end, after two years of feeling that daily urge to have to play to complete daily quests, daily crafting orders, daily dungeons and weekly sales, I decided to go cold turkey and just abruptly uninstalled it. It felt like getting rid of an addiction.
I did the same thing with World of Warcraft. I was a guild leader of one of the biggest guilds on a classic server, most recently. I went on a trip for a couple weeks, and never went back to the game. I still have an urge every now and then though. It really is like an addiction, from what I hear... Something like smoking cigarettes for years and stopping, every once in a while you still get an urge. I've never had any other addictions than gaming, personally.
Thats because you DID get rid of an addiction. Gaming addiction is just as real and addictive as smoking, it produces nerochemicals that you grow dependant on just like any drug, the only difference is its getting your body to produce them based on sensory stumli instead of chemical.
For me personally I like dailys. They give me an easy goal to start the ball rolling. Don’t get me wrong they are typically bad but some games use it as a opportunity to catch up the casual player and working class which I respect. Much like rested xp.
This video is a perfect example of why it's so important to support small independent game developers. In a lot of ways Indie developers today resemble what gaming studios looked like in the 90s and 2000s. The success of these studios is critical to preventing short-sighted tactics like this from completely taking over.
For now. Until the indie devs start to see dollar signs too. And start using these same tactics. Some won't of course. Some will believe in the artistic vision and simply want to deliver a good game, the kind of game they want to play. Others will follow the money, because there is a lot of it to be made unfortunately.
@@koloth5139 you completely misunderstand how this market works. Luckily, indie devs can't afford to be greedy like this at all because people can easily just ignore their shitty product. Triple A companies have the resources and influence to shove these tactics down the general public's throats
SSX 3 was my favorite of the series. I loved the way you could play on one continuous mountain. And it had Kick Doubt, which for some reason is my favorite name for a course. I sucked at the freestyle courses, I was always into the racing more, but I loved that name.
This is why indie games have been on the rise and I hope they g get bigger and I hope these big companies see how much people love them and change a bit
The problem, in a way, is the gamer state of mind. Gamers will do everything they can to max out their abilities. It's called min-maxing. When game developers run a business like a gamer, they do everything to min-max their profits, including using exploits.
The most important thing is who is the CEO of the company. If the CEO is passionate for gaming and just wants to make good games these predatory practises wont be included in the final product. Take a look at Miyazaki (Elden Ring) or Cory (God of War) or that FF14 lead dev. We need to reward good CEO's and project leads.
A new red flag to add will be a massive and sudden influencer support for a game, the strong deny of p2w mechanics, changing names or using lovely terms to describe loot boxes. I have being slowly moving to the indie scene because every new AAA game is following this trend. Great video, perfectly on target and I think voices the frustration many gamers have.
I love to imagine in meetings at video game companies that some producer is talking with the board and pitching his idea to put microtransactions or a battle pass or some other thing into the game to make them tons of money and everyone in that room absolutely loves it. Then he goes to a meeting with the actual game developers and he introduces his idea and he gets silence and looks of absolute disgust.
Monetising a game can keep a game alive. You don’t have to participate in it if you dont love the game in the first place. If you do, and if you have cash to spare, you can pass the love to the game. I loved ESO and i splurged some cash to thank them for giving so much memories
Being multiplayer-averse seems to have mostly shielded me from the abusive mechanics problem, aside from crap on my phone I keep trying and getting sick of.
When I was younger, multiplayer was the only way I would play a game. I now realize it was because I needed the approval/recognition of others playing the game. It is really nice to be out of that phase and enjoy games for myself, on my terms, and not care that no one will ever see any of my in-game "accomplishments"
I’ve been playing video games since I was 3 years old, I am now 31. It’s truly a shame to see gaming transform throughout the years to what it is now due to these systems and tactics… I want to remind everyone of one thing that renders these systems obsolete, and that is choice. That is something you hold and can’t be taken from you.
i agree and i would add that Collective power we have is a gaming community i mean we changed ea"s shity star wars game. It is my hope that we can protect gaming by putting pressure on these big companies
Yes and no. It's hard not to pay when they use everything to make you pay, including psychologie. Some players will not pay but there will always be some who get trapped.
@@florent3723 so don’t buy or support or even talk about (positively at least) any game that uses these predatory monetisation tactics, and encourage your friends and peers to do the same.
This is one of the most important videos I've ever seen on UA-cam. Aggressive monetization is why I've given up on EA, Activistion, Ubisoft, Epic, and so on. Brilliant video!
That's I believe what happened to Anthem. It was advertised as a Destiny killer and EA execs probably thought it would be because their game would have all of those abusive practices while Destiny didn't. Well, development of the game was trumped by development of the abusive practices. Their biggest mistake was that they introduced too many of those practices right away.
You need to research on a company called Tencent, and how the companies you mentioned are all connected. Look again at what is the real organisation behind Tencent pulling the puppet strings.
As someone who put a couple thousand hours into MapleStory over the years, I can attest to the gachapon being a huge influence. Another thing about MS that wasn't mentioned was the cosmetic cash shop with most products in it lasting only 90 days. This was back when it first came out. Now the cash shop does sell permanent cosmetics, as well as cosmetic loot boxes, exp/money boosts, battle pets, crafting Scrolls to enhance crafting success rates, and a lot of other power items.
While not MS, I definitely paid for a few rental weapons in combat arms. Thankfully Nexon or whoever runs CA reloaded these days allows everyone to access everything and it's just some stupid funny mayhem
My spending habits went from Yugioh and Pokemon Cards to Maplestory cards for 90 day cosmetics and 2x xp buffs (these stacked with 2x weekends so you were incentivized to buy them)
@@slumcore3921 I played combat arms and then modern warfare 2 (original) came out and my friends got me into that. The thing i remember about combat arms rental was i tended to earn enough in game to rent an upgraded weapon before the first one ran out. This of course creates habits of playing and i may not have played long enough for that to stop working, but i did avoid spending money on it.
@@FosukeLordOfError yeah I was specifically referring to the weapons you couldn't just grind out and get via in-game currency rentals, there was a point (I think they were mostly removed) where there were like operators with specific weapon loadouts that were exclusive to them, I remember a minigun and a secret agent woman with a dmr I think, tho for grinding rental weapons the LAW was always a good time 👍
@@andrewkarasek3219 those plus magic cards were the definition of physical lootbox. never really bought yugioh but got counterfeits of it from somewhere so dunno if they came in packs like others with 1 guaranteed rarity within the edition its part of.
As someone with a degree in programming and a masters in design, I see this video and my prospects in the modern game industry and I feel like a biochemist whose career was not in creating helpful drugs they aspired to but in finding more addictive ones.
Good analogy. Even Bayer did one good thing though, aspirin. But also, heroine. Oops. I don't think the corporate gamer snakes have ever done one good thing though. :P
@@Vomgnar. they brought enjoyment before, but now they showed their true face, sadly the popularity of gaming has people not giving a shit where they put their money, and alas gaming as a whole is pretty much over, has been since the early 2010 where you start seeing the problem get brought up to the surface more, time to find another hobby if you enjoy video games, unless you're a shill with no shame that feeds dogshit companies money for bad games, majority it seems.
I've been developing games for 15 years and i'm lookingat the industry now wondering if i've made the right choice in career, i'm doing a data science degree now so can shift to machine learning or data management which is becoming more and mor elikely each year. I looked through Steam games this year and there wasn't a single game i wanted to play i can smell monetization a mile off and i guess i'm one of the few that these techniques don't have the same effect on. I don't mind a loot box or two with some cosmetics for a game that has been made well but start adding in battle passes, currency or energy and the game can go in the trash where it belongs.
@@Eddygeek18 Data science is pretty dope but you gotta admit you're basically responsible for ending humanity as we know it like with AI Art so maybe videogames microtransactions aren't...that bad?
How enlightening and depressing having all of this condensed into one space after watching it happen over the last 25 years of my gaming career. Thanks Josh!
good for us that we grew up with actually good games on super nintendo/ps1/ps2 and the likes as a 94s kid, i can say i had a really awesome childhood, its a privilege
Thanks for this! As someone who’s been playing video games since the Atari but haven’t kept up with the gaming community closely, it was confusing to me why EA games and most games in general took a steep nosedive in story and playability. This makes so much sense, but is so sad. I’m wondering if this is why we don’t see games comparable to Bioshock or the Batman Arkham series anymore.🤷🏼♂️
The fact that microtransactions in Genshin Impact, Diablo Immortal, and FIFA beat out Elden Ring's sales is soul crushing. The pinnacle of Fromsoft development released after they defined a genre can't beat digital heroine.
Genshin Impact is good though. I can 36 star the abyss easy with a completely free to play account. Top tier soundtrack and VAs. Think of resource management as part of the game.
It's not exactly surprising. Elden Ring has thus far sold 18 million copies, which is pretty respectable for a niche game (comparable to Monster Hunter for example). Genshin Impact on the other hand has 60 million monthly players. There's no figures for Ultimate Team as such, since EA combine the revenue across the three franchises it's present in, but those franchises are some of it's biggest games (FIFA for example has 111 million sales across the series). So I'd expect the revenue for microtransactions in those games to be higher than Elden Ring's sales, for much the same reason I'd expect McDonald's to make more on sales of diet cola alone than my local burger joint's entire annual revenue - one's a global franchise with 70 million daily customers; the other is a small takeaway that can barely handle 70 orders per day.
Dont forget that going to an arcade was a fun social experience in itself. Meeting new people and challenging them face to face at Street Fighter Alpha, or teaming up with a stranger to beat Time Crisis together, then becoming friends. You dont get that with online gaming (at least not in the same way anyways). And renting games was a reasonable thing. You paid a small amount and you got the entire game, not parts of a game. Sometimes you had to rent it multiple times, but it always felt worth it.
I agree. I remember playing against/teaming up with random players in “Run n’ Gun 2,” Crusin World, and NBA Hangtime in the arcade. Or, sometimes, bringing my PS2 in the common room of the dorm, leaving my multi tap with 3 controllers, playing Balder’s Gate, and waiting to see who would come up to play with me. No frills. No “achievements.” Just fun gameplay with friends.
also, in arcades you were paying to play for longer, which is very different to paying to skip a timer, progress faster or to unlock a character otherwise locked behind dozens of hours of meaningless slog. the former case has you buying more time because it is fun to play, the latter cases hold as a prerequisite that you are willing to pay to spend less time because the game quite intentionally has become unbearably boring.
I see it as an abusive relationship. I don't see a difference when people are manipulated into a hard-to-leave mental drain. Break it off because it's only more painful the longer you give in.
i play Dungeon Fighter Online a lot, but have no money to spend on it (nor wouldn't even if i did), and actually enjoy the core gameplay loop. apparently this is more and more of a minority opinion the more endgame you get, and have apparently become something of a minor meme in DFO's community because i do endgame just barely making DPS cutlines from event handouts instead of... well, paying to win. i don't give a fat flying fuck about keeping up with the Joneses, so the Joneses get offended that a poor guy is polluting their scenery.
Unfortunately breaking off an abusive relationship is hard. I know my dad is evil, I know he's a horrible person, and I know he's hurting my mother, but I need money and he has it
@@MadassSoerensen And the reason why this isn't easy is that, at the end of the day, gaming for many people isn't just a means of entertainment. Gaming is art, it's a form of expression, it's a part of many people's personalities and life experiencies. Saying that getting rid of something that formed you as a person is "easy" is an absurd lack of consideration. It's things like this that make us increasingly convinced that taking any form of art and expression and turning it into a profit-oriented machine, held hostage by large corporations in exchange for "more complex experiences" was too expensive of a price to be paid
The thing is there are great games that don't do this being made. Maybe not as regularly as I'd like, but they're there. So it's more like breaking off an abusive relationship with a 5 whilst at the same time you've a bunch of 10's DMing you nudes lol. That _should_ make it easier.
@@frankgrimes7388 no, games were never bug free. Complete, yes I miss the days of complete games released once with no updates, but games were never bug free unless its simple shit like arcade classics.
@@amanormaybeadragonthere’s hundreds of games from back in the day that I’ve played through that don’t have noticeable bugs. They tested the crap out of games back then knowing that they were going on a cart etc and couldn’t be patched once released. Was great!
I still have an old gaming magazine from the time when the horse armor dlc pack for Oblivion was released. The magazine were heavily bashing it at the time when the price of it was only like 2,4€ or something like that. Now back then that seemed ridicilous and nobody would yet see 10-20€ epic skins being the norm. Its insane how crazy its become
Imagine going back in time and telling someone the new call of duty would be $70 selling $10 skins. Soon it will be $100 mark my words this dystopian reality is only the beginning.
When Modern Warfare 2 has been released, Activision started to sell map packs. 5 Maps, 15 Euro/Dollars. I was like "What?? 3€ for a SINGLE MAP? And two of them were just remade maps from older CoDs!" And boooooy, everyone bought that. I underestimated the lack of reflection among players. I always do. Around these years (2009), devs also stopped releasing editors. This could have also been a part of this video: not releasing editors to be the single source of new content which will cost money of course. Also remember when Bethesda was starting to monetize player generated content on Steam (then moved over to their own launcher for that)? Such companies try to make modders greedy and give them a framework to sell mods - just to get a part of that money and saying "this wasn't made by us, we are not responsible if the mod you paid for doesn't work and not even the modder needs to ensure the mod works."
Back in the day you had 1 skin and that's it. Now you have a choice that you can or don't have to purchase. I don't see a problem. Go into a restaurant and order a meal you don't get to add whatever you want for free do you? Be thankful price of entry is same or less in a lot of cases. Games used to be $60 back when $100 was a lot of money. Now it's the same but that $100 is now $178.
@@nuclearpugg yeah and those people you told bought the game at the same price and will be like wait you get skins??? We just have this or that. And you don't get to choose.
@@thermalrain_yt9725 Games used to be full games when they had been released. Now every game is being developed with season passes in mind. Or in other words: cut content from your game and sell that for extra money. Plus, this content isn't even in your game yet. So you either pay 60$ for a cut game or 100$ for the real full game. If you are "lucky" you also get MTX to pay even more money. Please don't get fooled by the whiney industry that wants to make us believe they are poor. They just need more money to pay investors, CTOs, CEOs millions of dollars. Look at the numbers in the video, they earn more money than ever before. If EA isn't capable of making good games, the available money or the price tag of a AAA game is 100% not the problem.
The biggest horror which I feel is the final message that should have been on the end of this video is that there is no light at the end of the tunnel. There is currently no reason that this will reduce or stop. This is it now. Things are not going to improve.
Why would anybody want them to improve? Just go play games made by companies or solo devs who want to make good games, who cares about companies like Blizzard or EA anymore? I haven't touched the western side of "AAA games" in almost a decade now (or rather I've barely touched it), and there was not a single year in which I didn't have enough great games to play in my free time. I do not understand any of this doom and gloom people keep bringing up...
The good news is that some legal authorities like the EU are starting to recognize that loot boxes are gambling and taking action accordingly. That's a start, but it needs to go much farther. I'm hoping game companies see how Epic just got hammered over Fortnite and start reconsidering their direction, but I'm not holding my breath.
@@mohandasjung I think not paying for mtx is the right thing to do to try to not encourage these practices, however the majority of people won't even think about whether it's an immoral business model, so it will continue to be very profitable. I don't think that consumers can solve this problem.
@@Jallenbah You as a consumer can solve this problem immediately (for yourself) by not engaging with the system and playing games that do not feature microtransactions.
Back in 2009 I worked as a steward on a gaming conference and there was a debate between the creators of Farmville and a representative of Epic Games about the future of videogames. Basically it was "is the future microtransactions or pure artisctic triple-A development?". I distinctively remember the look of dejection on the Epic Games rep's face as the room erupted in applause as the opposing argument won the room over with the profit projections. It was heartbreaking. I stopped buying mainstream releases just a couple of years later before the s*** really hit the fan. I feel like I really dodged a bullet.
@@IskenderCaglarM41B441 The license was a thing even when you had a physical copy. That's not new, but go live in a cabin off the grid and be your best self. I mean UA-cam is as poisonous as twitter and phones and computers are part of the problem.
I complain about it a lot, but this makes me even more grateful for one of my favorite games, No Mans Sky. It’s been going strong for 7 years, had multiple BIG updates, and still has many more coming, and they have NEVER charged extra for any of it. 😳
@@AAA-b3y Bedrock's microtransactions don't actually paywall anything other than emotes. You can still play the entire game and with any maps, skins, or addons you can find online and have the exact same experience as someone who bought content on the marketplace.
I was born in the 80s. Gaming and I kind of grew up together. I watched these things happen firsthand, from start to finish. I remember the dismay I felt at seeing Maple Story, the rise of energy/stamina systems, forced socialization (through locking progression or advantages behind it), and microtransactions. Not to mention...ugh...ads in games. This sums up so well all the feelings I've talked about so many times over the years, seeing all this happen.
Ads in games can be done in a way it doesn’t bug me, all the businesses in Crazy Taxi like KFC, Tower Records, Fila etc.. just feels like a part of the world, but it has to be done with some sensibility. A sports arena having sponsor banners mirrors it’s real world counterpart which I’m fine with. But I don’t want Elden Ring brought to you by Red Lobster
Remember gamers...."You will own nothing and be happy." And if you apply that to today's gaming, it will get worse as time progresses by 2030 and beyond. Good video, Josh.
Bad thing is I very rarely get excited for new games anymore, and haven't been for like the past 5 years. Good thing is my backlog with amazing games is larger than what I'll be able to finish during my lifetime! And if I for some reason would get locked out of my 1300 games steam account, I rest easy knowing most games are safely preserved on the high seas.
@@TheDisturbed0ne1 Fax. I thought I would always play the latest releases once I got off my potato PC. Now that I got a decent PC, there's little to no worthwhile AAA releases. I constantly find myself playing the older games I missed or those hidden indie gems.
I have largely been ignoring video games for many years now. For a while, this was strange to me, because in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, I was such a big gamer. But something just felt wrong, and I drifted away more and more. It was like the soul and art was slipping away, replaced with flashiness and hyper-commercialization. I never could quite put my finger on it, then this video here put so many puzzle pieces together.
There's a ton of soul and art in the indie game scene. As with everything else, a handful of huge companies are trying to squeeze every drop out of their customers, rather than trying to make great things that will make money while making people happy. Small developers and passion projects are often the antithesis to this. For every Farmville out there, there's a Stardew Valley - a better game on the same basic theme made by a smaller (solo, actually) team, that you purchase one time and then play and play and play for the love of it.
At the end, when you were listing all the culprits, I believe you should've concluded that we, the players, are to blame for allowing this to happen and to still, so many years later, continue to strongly signal game companies that they are right for making the box grow more and more and more over time. Thanks for the great video!
Smart consumers who understand what's going on and simply say 'no' and honest game reviews & media which point out this stuff have to be part of the answer to reducing the number of car crash monetisation games out there. So thanks Josh for an informative and interesting video!
Major games now release without any battlepass, no shops, no mts. Get out the good professional reviews, amd then a couple weeks later BAM, all the shitty tactis in youc face
I think we'll see smarter consumers, though possibly over the scale of a generation gap as the new kids grow up with these systems and don't have 40 years of personal experience with older systems to compare against. In particular, we'll likely see the in game currency idea getting more streamlined, as people get more used to having to do that mental math and the "trick" no longer works as well. We'll likely also start seeing more backlash against the most egregious examples of currency bundles "not quite" matching purchases. My predictions over the mid-long term: - Things like skins and other cosmetics I imagine are here to stay. They're fun, they don't harm the game (usually) and they don't _really_ need to be tied into the other tricks in order to sell reasonably well. - As noted, I suspect currency bundles will become more streamlined. Instead of having a 90 token bundle and a 100 token item, they'll have maybe a 150 token bundle with the 100 token item and a small (probably consumable) item for 25 or 50 tokens, along with the 200 token item existing (so players could choose between buying one token bundle and getting the 100 token item + some throwaways or buy two bundles and get both items). Not because companies don't like the "annoy you until you buy more", but because there's so many of these systems that players are just going to get used to retaining a small amount of currency in all of their games so that annoyance drive just won't be there anymore. - I don't see in-game currencies as a whole going away though. They have a major legitimate use that isn't related to tricking players: they significantly simplify game stores across regions. The store can have just a handful of per-region items (the token bundles), while everything else can be completely region- and currency-agnostic. The company has less work to do to keep up to date with local currency fluctuations. Players (and streamers and whoever else) have a common frame of reference no matter where they happen to be in the world, etc. - I suspect gacha and other gambling systems will eventually get regulated to the point of non-existence. Governments (particularly the US government) have been hesitant to poke their heads into this arena so far, but all it will take is one major story about some 12 year old who sold his parent's home for a digital pony or whatever nonsense to cause sufficient public outcry for politicians to take note (and probably make a complete mess of whatever legislation they introduce, because of course they will). Not sure where this will leave The Box as many of the other evils within rely in some way or other on a gambling system. But not all of them. - Battle passes probably won't go away, but they'll likely morph into mini-expansions - ie: dropping the "work to unlock the thing you just paid for" part of the deal. The initial purchase will likely still be time-limited to keep that FOMO rolling, but I suspect the completion time limits will eventually get phased out. I'm sure there's more but this is long enough already. Keep in mind all the things I suggest are not going to happen on the 1-2 year time frame. More like the 10-20 year time frame. (Which is well long enough for some new and completely unexpected form of trickery to arrive that makes all of that irrelevant. Can only wait and see I suppose.)
The book 'evil by design' is a must read for any participant in gaming or social media. It talks about cow clicker which was built only to illustrate evil game design tricks, but then took Facebook by storm
That feeling when your meta critic of evil game design turns into a saturated genre unabashedly using the same (or worse) strategies than the ones you were parodying. Gaming is a joke
What went wrong is when people started calling it "gaming" and themselves "gamers". "Gaming" was a euphemism for gambling, and "gamers" for gamblers, particularly those who kept coming back, and that was for a reason. Playing video games is a vice, like smoking or alcohol. It's a mostly harmless one. But make it your identity, elevate "gamer" above "drinker" or "smoker", and you paint *"CHUMP"* on your back.
@@MegaZeta The crazy pills... This reads like moon landing conspiracy. You know that board games are also games and you could be a board gamer (or gamer for short), therefore board games have tons of monetization tricks, anti-consumer behaviors and deliberately frustrating game design to encourage the gamers to buy more for their board game? Oh wait... No... You saw a correlation (the word gamer) and created an entire fiction to tie that correlation to causation, while no such link exists. This is simply a few companies trying micro transactions and other companies seeing how successful it is and copying it... And now we have today...
I blame EA. They may not have been the first to monetize, but they have always been the most agressive in my experience. I still remember the first time I found a single-use code in one of their physical games and realized "this game is never going to be sold used because of this code." They're the literal worst and I try desperately never to give them any of my money.
I’ve been complaining to my friends about this over each new monetization tactic I see for 6 years. I was against battle passes from the get go because I realized how it was giving me FOMO. For years people I’ve talked to, have often used mental gymnastics to justify these abusive manipulative tactics. Especially if it’s one of their favorite franchises/games.
@@darinherrick9224 I don't know if you're just an annoying contrarian type or someone who just wants to argue, but I don't think you watched the video at all. Please explain to me how me not liking or liking game has to do with a game using psychological techniques to create addictive behavior. There are so many games I like that have been tainted with intentional paywalls or grinds just to make people pay.
This video is absolutely incredible. You explain everything so well to the point where it was making me angry to see how blatantly predatory gaming has become.
Aye, sometimes when i play random games, i can notice the behavior and how the game's shops trist to adjust to fit me, and my quests or whatever, its as if the game knows that i need theese things to progress, so it offers me some part of the items for a sum of cash, insane..
I love the BIAS here. Of course Josh doesn't want to say one word about the GAMERs WHO KEEP BUYING THAT SHIT. Yeah it's the companies fault of course. It's not the fault of the STUPID BRAIN D PEOPLE who keep buying year after year this shit. Nah nah it's all the companies fault ... it's not my fault... me the below average IQ internet loser who has no job, no gf, no family and keeps living on welfare and watches stupid streamers, sending them my welfare money too, while also paying for loot boxes in games and battle passes and cosmetics..... nah it's the company's fault not my fault. ( mocking sarcastically the people who spend money on those things ) ___________________________________________ Yeah right. NO! Its YOUR fault in the first place for spending money on it you room temperature IQ having organism that should not exist. It's your fault for buying that shit. *It's not the companies ruining gaming, its the CONSUMERS WHO ARE RUINING GAMING.*
@@justinhammer3196 It might be 1.50 now, it wasn't then. And I bought it specifically so my horse would stop dying when it decided to join me in battle literally every time.
I mean, it's ARMOR. Protection is implied. Imagine if it had been armor for your player, and then was as useless as the armor for your horse. Everyone would have lost their shit.😂
Videos like yours that spread awareness to this issue are the way to fight it. Knowing the predatory manipulation schemes is the first step. Personally I do what I can by never buying games with any sort of microtransactions, bad DRM like Denuvo, or DLCs that are obviously cut content. I will never take part in fueling those greedy practices or give money to such companies.
Yes awareness is important especially on younger audience needs youtubers and/or influencer to spread the concept that microtransaction is not cool. This kind of monetization strives because people doesn't know or care enough
Another thing I don't like is how unknown the monetization of a game is until you have played it for a while. It's impossible to get any information about it from the marketing information released before launch. The developers almost never talk about how the game is monetized even after release. And for a lot of games you won't even know the true extent of it until you reach the endgame and suddenly hit a mile high paywall! For most aspects of a game, you can just go to the official site and get the information, but they never ever reveal anything about how much money you can spend in the game. I can't even begin to imagine the total price of all DLC in Modern Warfare or any similarly monetized game!
I stopped paying and playing newly released games for that exact reason...either pay and play later at much less cost or raise that skull&bones flag once more! Arrrr!
Even worse is a new, insidious, trend of "patching" in monetization schemes after the game launched. So early reviews using pre-launch copies, after-launch reviews from youtubers, and even word of mouth will not mention the monetization on account of it not existing! So then you go buy the game a few weeks later and.... it gets patched with anti-player nickel and dime bullshit. The published reviews are already out and didn't update for the new monetization schemes nor does the box the game came in mention anything about additional online purchases (nor are there any laws forcing retailers/companies to update the boxes!). So people will see "just a game," buy it, bring it home, and after downloading the mandatory update patch... Realize they've been fucking hoodwinked. That's the level of disdain and contempt these fuckwitted parasites have towards us consumers. That's how little they think of us. Far from creating a better product to generate more sales, they are only "innovating" in more fraudulent and exploitative business models while pushing continuous gaslighting campaign into brainwashing us into accepting this horse shit. Games worth $70 bucks now? This shit isn't worth a single fucking penny how badly they've degraded the quality of "AAA" products! Oh, back to your original point... reviewers don't mention monetization because they are pressured into silence. If they are too negative of a game, they get early-access revoked. Without early-access, they can't publish a review in time for the launch window. Without an early review, they won't get the clicks needed to sustain ad revenue. Or in other words, reviewers have to play nice with the big studios or their careers are ruined. BUt not even that level of control was enough... hence the few games like Crash Team Racing that snuck in MTX after the game already came out....
What a phenomenal video and explanation! As a child of the 80's, I've seen this whole journey and you've summarized it brilliantly. Thanks for filling in all the history and details!
'70s kid here, and I agree entirely. You didn't really see it much at all then, but man does it ever have some parallels in dice-based RPGs over the decades.
Also a child of the 80’s and I’ve seen this journey too. I don’t remember the history of some of this stuff though. I felt my personal happy balance was around the era of Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas Oblivion, Skyrim and similar games from that era. I buy a full game with a full story and ending and that’s fine. But later there are expansions that add more quests, weapons ect and I considered that fair more or less. Admittedly I didn’t like the stupidly nonsensical default ending of Fallout 3 because many of your companions were immune to radiation so forcing you or another human into the chamber was dumb. And I was so happy when Broken Steel fixed it. But to be honest I don’t know if Bethesda deliberately did it it sell more Broken Steel expansions or whether they really did just concede that the ending sucked and fixed it as part of the larger Broken Steel story. But either way the DLC contained a lot of new story so I’m fine with it. I’m of two minds about Fallout New Vegas. It was great but the game felt unfinished without all the woven pieces of story from each DLC. But it had none of the modern crap in it at least.
I love the BIAS here. Of course Josh doesn't want to say one word about the GAMERs WHO KEEP BUYING THAT SHIT. Yeah it's the companies fault of course. It's not the fault of the STUPID BRAIN D PEOPLE who keep buying year after year this shit. Nah nah it's all the companies fault ... it's not my fault... me the below average IQ internet loser who has no job, no gf, no family and keeps living on welfare and watches stupid streamers, sending them my welfare money too, while also paying for loot boxes in games and battle passes and cosmetics..... nah it's the company's fault not my fault. ( mocking sarcastically the people who spend money on those things ) ___________________________________________ Yeah right. NO! Its YOUR fault in the first place for spending money on it you room temperature IQ having organism that should not exist. It's your fault for buying that shit. *It's not the companies ruining gaming, its the CONSUMERS WHO ARE RUINING GAMING.*
We really need the world governments to get together and put rules onto this. Especially US, Europe, AUS and BRICS.. 1. In-game coins can't be sold in packs, players should be able to buy whatever number of coins they desire. 2. Paid XP multipliers and battle passes banned, all players or no players deserve to get these awards for playing. 3. Items that aren't entirely cosmetics (new characters and vehicles) can't be bought. 4. etc
The only thing likely to be banned is gacha on the basis of being gambling. A much more fruitful endeavor would be forming a consumer advocacy network that warns people about dangerous practices and certifies games that don’t use them, and encourage people to only buy certified games.
This is why I believe people aren't as excited for newer games. They're not fun anymore, just addicting. There are very few exceptions, at least in the AAA section. It's mostly why many go for indies or stay with the old games
Thankfully Im 50. I can go back a decade and completely forgotten everything about something and be amazed by just downloading a free mod (or 25463 of them). My lastest skyrim run feels like it was released today and mods remove all the shop functions those pigs put in. Indeed, mods can remove every single attempt at being pigs from nearly every game.
Games are still fun. You're just old and your dopamine receptors have worn out. The reason people play older games is because it reminds them of a simpler time when they were kids, not because the games are actually better. Nostalgia helps release dopamine. This is not to say that I approve of the microtransaction system. I don't.
@@babbisp1 good games are fun, AAA games are not. I still play new Indies and there are absolute gems among them that make me feel like a kid. But every time (with extremely rare exceptions) I see AAA title I wanna throw out. It's not just about monetization, it's about the whole design, they are all the same and extremely boring. Big companies don't make good original games anymore
@@babbisp1 I used to think that as well, but then I went back and played the games that I used to play (as well as older games that I had missed). Still fun.
Thats why you should start playing indie games. The developers of indie games put passion and ideas in their games to make the best experience for the players. They most of the time don´t care about battle passes and stuff like this. They just want the game to be fun.
I did that with MineCraft. Notch is such a let down (but for a while there, it was amazing). I agree your position though, investing in the smaller gamer creators is important (just, their not magically above the same kinds of temptations of that box).
As far as games with an original experience for me, the ones that worked out that way were 4 out of 5 indie games. Sure, some are a bit shallow or ill-conceived, but the real original gems are there. (And I say that as a gamemaker out of Spinnaker and Trillium, if any one remembers those, and with a few current titles of my own.)
This so crazy, I try to talk to my friends and co-workers about how I won't buy "x " game because they have predatory systems in them and they look at me like it's not that big of a deal or I'm getting too old for gaming.
Gamer for roughly 25yrs. This was an important video. A lot of games are simply one-armed-bandits. The gambling psychology behind it is scary. That's why I love Horizon: Zero Dawn so much, which I started to play recently. Buy, enjoy, that's it.
I was a dev for a Casual game distributor/studio. For a few years I wrote games for them. In my last few years there, they hired people to come in and build addiction loops, which then we would put a game on top of. Instead of the opposite. Those people they hired did not come cheap either. Frequently they were paid 4x the salary of a developer. Smarter ones would gets a percentage of the game’s purchases sold.
It's not like games contain nicotine. These businesses exploit your weaknesses, so instead of getting stronger you complain? Vote with your time and money, don't buy and don't play crap, and don't work for such businesses.
I used to work in ad agencies as a developer many years ago. I remember one day the copywriter telling me that all he does is "sell the Devil". That phrase stuck with me forever, and knowing how the corporate machine is literally like The Nothing from Neverending Story consuming everything for pure greed, it all makes sense. Every industry and creative outlet has been consumed by this relentless money-making machine, which is fueled by the marketing teams, who are literally at the forefront of selling the idea of chasing rainbows... P2W for the loss.
It's so funny listening to this and self reflecting... Star Wars The Old Republic was the one that got me. I think over the coarse of 4 years or so I spent around $3200 on Cartel Coins for cosmetics. I had no idea at the time that these were the things that were going on psychologically. This wasn't the place for this subject I think, but I think depression plays as much a part of sales for these things as the competitive nature of things. People with depression buy these cosmetics and performance enhancing competitive microtransactions to try and make themselves feel better, which is funny because they often make you feel worse after the fact because, at least in my case, at the time I didn't really have that disposable income, but I spent anyway because it would make me feel better at least for a short period of time. Anyway, thanks for the video Joshey Boy.
Yea, I agree with you. I kinda see myself there in hindsight. Tho I did know the psychology at play, I still did it for the temp time that I didn’t feel depressed.
Bro, that sucks for you and what you failed to reap from the experience. I, on the other hand, have also spent hundreds of dollars on cartel coins for the sake of buying cosmetics that appealed to me, yet I knew what I was getting into and don't regret it at all. I enjoyed being able to outfit my characters to my pleasing at that time and do not feel that any of that spending went to waste.
@@MysticRonin101 It doesn't suck so much, it was still a learning experience. It's just funny knowing what was going on and how it was actually designed. It's even worae now. Now you have the packs, loot boxes, and there is an extra loot box you get as a "reward" every single time. The packs used to give you a selection of items. Now one of those is guarenteed another lootbox that draws from the entire catalogue, further reducing your chabces of getting what you want so that is when I said no more. The thing I'm upset about is just how greedy BioWare is, or has to be because of EA, and how little you get as well as how much the game has been run into the ground at the same time.
@@Blox117 Them losing their money doesn't matter to me at all, they could go broke and I wouldn't care. The problem arises when their spending decisions influence the gaming market to such a degree that games become trash, because trash is what sells best.
Wayyy too focused on graphics these days. You’re totally right. No good reason to abandon story, character development, etc in favor of layering 10 textures over a trash can.
@@nickthompson1812 What objectively needs to be understood is That Graphics exclusively DOES NOT make a Good Video Game at all. 4 Very Important Qualities That make a Good to Excellent Quality Video Game are Compelling Factor, Captivating Factor, Amazing Imagination and Fantastic Quality, Period Dot Dash. I am 37 years old by the way, Black American male.
I miss the golden days of gaming where you buy a game and it's complete game without microtransactions and it has everything like the bonus behind the scenes, art concepts, even cool installation setup. I still remember the cool installation setup of Red Alert 2
I still remember sitting through the installation of Rollercoaster tycoon 1 and 2, Cod 2 and Return to castle wolfenstein. They were magical. If I remember correctly, On RCT there was music being played during the installation, More specifically, The merry go round theme which made it all the better.
I've always seen these things and acknowledged them (and avoided them when I could), but having it all explained at once like this makes me profoundly sad for a medium that is a huge part of my life.
Browsergames and flashgames never get enough credit for making things a lot worse. The game dev advice section of Kongregate had entire lectures about predatory monetization methods that still shock people today, 15 years ago. Farmville certainly didn't invent any of the limited playtime systems, those were already a staple of "free" games sites, facebook was just a big new site. An important aspect of this is that a lot of people who started game dev as a hobby and only later joined the industry, were raised on those practices, even before said practices were known to the general public.
Yeah, I do actually remember some flash games releasing paid expansions or paid cosmetics. Granted I never saw a gambling element, but now that you mention it, microtransactions have been in gaming for a very long time.
I was thinking Farmville was a bit later to the party. I didn't think Kongregate and sites like it were the biggest culprit, but rather private endeavors, like Evony. I feel like Evony should have been there in the place of Farmville, but I also can't guarantee which proceeded the other, nor ignore how much more Farmville rode on Facebook advertisement over the paid advertisement methods non-Facebook games used.
@@Altemeous Most games that were on flashgame sites like Kongregate and Armor Games, werec developed by small studios or individual people and one more than one of those sites. A lot of the same games were on Facebook too, so there was a lot of overlap. I just remember being curious about game development at the time and the Kongregate dev section was throwing around stuff like "average revenue per daily active user" and that I saw "whale" there quite a few years before it became a widely known term. I also remember that when I first installed Steam, the games on it were still far less predatory than "fake MMO" types of flashgames that existed at the same time. So I'm overall pretty sure that in-browser games turned "bad" a good while before downloadable games did.
Farmville was a little late, but not the company behind it -- as Josh pointed out, it was Zynga, with Mafia and the thousand reskins of it out on just about every social media site, paying into their wallets, and often not giving you cross progress, so your Werewolf Clan over on MySpace could surely fight Clans over on Facebook, but booting it up on facebook? Nope, square 1 because that's a different 'account', so you either looked how you could pay to catch up with your progress on a different site, or just focus one game per media.
This video should be played at hearings of the office of consumer protection, gambling etc. It is accurate and quickly presents the essence of the problem, they can go into details later, the important thing is that they quickly understand what the problem is.
2:53 "Good games make the most money" wasn't the standard mentality in the arcade industry at the time. Their mentality was "regardless of quality, only 1 out of 3 games make money, therefore game developers don't deserve to get raises for completely random successes" (this comes from a GDC talk from an arcade game developer). 12:29 "They were joining their mafia" lol, I love that phrasing!
The Mafia comment wasn't phrasing. There used to be (still is?) a mobile game which was a clan versus clan style of game. You had a base, an army of goons and you joined up in mafias (clans) to go fight other mafias. He's probably referencing that one.
@@eyeofsibyl not Mafia City, the game was called Mafia Wars. It was a Zynga game that predated Farmville (I believe) in the quite early days of Facebook. I feel like there may have been other mafia related Facebook games, actually. There was kind of an explosion of Facebook games at the time. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_Wars
Gaming used to be so magical to me when I was younger, I feel robbed of it due to the greed as of late, it's really sad man.. and I know its partially due to me being older and seeing behind the curtain more, but it still makes me just a little bit sad every time I play a game that only really cares how much money I spend rather than how much fun I'm having..
Another aspect of this whole thing especially when it comes to loot boxes and gachas, is the role of social media in all of this. Because whenever someone wins big, they want to share it with other people, while when someone spends money and gets nothing, well they probably feel bad and won't speak of it. This creates a gap between how the randomness is perceived and the actual average experience, and game companies know that very well. That's a big reason they push social media through in-game rewards among other things.
A retro game store opened in my town a few years ago. They've been so successful they opened a second location in a town an hour away this past month. Local news asked the owner (a young guy who opened the store when he was still in high school) why he thought there was a market for retro games. He said he wasn't sure, but he suspected that with older games, you didn't feel like you were getting nickled and dimed constantly.
That could be part of it, but I suspect another major factor is that guys like me who grew up playing these games have become adults and gotten jobs and now have disposable income to burn building a collection of stuff they love.
Arcade games were still made to take money out of the consumer. Making a level unfairly hard was a design decision made because of greed. It's an increase in profits fueled by making the experience worse. The bar is so low it's a tripping hazard in hell but people with rose tinted glasses are still a market that can and will be manipulated for profits.
@@Gatherway-Duo oh absolutely. I’m one of those guys myself. I have no time for some of these new time wasting mechanics.
@@Gatherway-Duo ah yes one of the nice things about getting older is Nostalgia only ever gets sweeter.
There's plenty of newer games like the mentioned Elden Ring to name a recent example.
I honestly think this is the reason that indie games have become popular; indie games are more often passion projects than money grabs, and consumers recognize that. That's why we love them.
Indie games have become a shitshow over the past few years after Steam decided any game that had a working build could be released on their platform as 'early access'. Now the market is flooded with cheap garbage with creators dumping some garbage game out to key into an ongoing fad. Then they abandon the game as soon as they get their bag.
Agree with both of you
@@FauxRaidenator
in the past few years? They've been around for ages now too, I remember the early-access survival game craze in 2014 and despite how many of them were utter failures, it still produced genuinely amazing games with the likes of The Forest, Subnautica and Raft.
Look out for the developers history and reputation and wait for some time to see where they take their concept, then you won't be dissappointed. The biggest marketing for these indie devs are gaming channels on YT, browsing thru their stuff until you find something for you doesn't cost you.
I think Stardew valley is one of the best games ever made . Released early 2016 and the lone developer is still developing content . For a 10 dollar game .
@@Crybaby-Media factorio is good too. Also an indie game. With several time the team size of Stardew Valley, but still good.
Not only have these practices ruined games, but they are leaking into other things as well. Professional software that used to be a one time purchase is now a monthly fee with micro transactions. Cars are locking things like heated seats and horsepower behind a paywall. Streaming services make you pay to use the service, pay again to remove ads, pay again to watch specific shows. Airlines deliver a framework for transportation and nickel and dime you for bags, seat choice, priority boarding, wi-fi, food and sometimes even drinks. Everything that was once a one time purchase is now a monthly fee, and they'll punish you for taking a break from the purchase by not allowing you to sign back up for a set period of time.
That's capitalism. If they (=companies) can monetize something, they will.
It's the Great Reset - you will own nothing, and you will be happy with your nothing, or else.
"We will kill them all." - Optimus Prime
Some of the examples are a bit far fetched. Streaming services are not meant to be free, ads will always be there with or without the option to remove, premium shows will always be behind pay wall. Airliners you described are budget airlines with big discount tickets, if you fly with proper national airlines none of the micro-transactions happen. The thing for professional softwares is basically 'xxx as a service' which is the new 21st century meta, I'm not sure if it even originated from gaming but WoW was the first example I remember.
@@Horky_Porky No thats crony capitalism and illegal Monopoly called corporatism.
I find myself playing and wanting to play significantly fewer games than I used to. It's hard enough to find an offline single player game, much less one without predatory practices.
This was me for years. But very recently I started looking at older games I never played, never finished, or never owned the consoles for when I was younger.
I’m about 40 hours into my first serious Dark Souls playthrough now, and I picked up a couple of PS1 Final Fantasy games to play next.
I’m planning to pick up a PS2 and/or PS3 at some point because of all the cool games on those systems I never played.
Take a look at the indie scene, plenty of great games and they (mostly) aren't anti-consumer
Its not that hard, its easy if you know where to look and who to buy from. The majority of games I own are singleplayer or have multiplayer as a secondary option to play with friends.
@@blairkowalski1180 Lol that is cool, I would recommend LOTR Return of the King (Playstation 2)
@@blairkowalski1180this is the way
You forgot to mention/blame all the streamers/influencers who basically get paid for luring vulnerable viewers into this abusive monetisation/gambling systems by streaming them.
Started way way before streamers.
@@ghagzor I remember the guys who acted like they bought items for CS:GO when they actually used a fake shop where their chances were incredibly high and people thought they could do that to, only to spent more money in the actual shop. It was there before but having people who get paid as actors doing this is far worse.
You forgot to mention/blame all the mindless consumers who make this slop so profitable in the first place.
Consumers are also to blame, I've never paid for any of the examples mentioned here, then again I've been playing since the 90s, when most games were of an acceptable quality and can easily discern today's mediocre quality games from the small quantity of acceptable games we get each year. However IMO since gaming began to appeal more to the masses, most consumers have lower standards for what they consider fun and are satisfied with a lesser quality product which allows for these kind of abuses to be perpetuated over time.
@@qu1253 Which is one reason I almost never buy a 'new' game. See things like _Shadow of War_ where they built the game around a single player campaign... then made the last stage of the game an absurdly long grind... unless you paid them more money for the already full price game. Money that only went towards that individual play through; start over, and you had to pay again.
Point is, the game doesn't really start making demands of the player's wallet until well after the player has had time to get invested in the game.
I still remember when Horse Armor came out. It was mocked endlessly in /v/. Like "who the fuck would pay money for just a piece of cosmetic armor?"
Thems were those days
Why are you on /v/
I listened to Todd on Lex Freidmans podcast and it was hilarious how he didn't want to acknowledge they wanted to have a monopoly on DLC and not have free mods
@@Vaz_G Because it's the best place to freely talk about video games with random internet strangers?
The sad things is nowaday if that exact DLC comes out, it'll be considered "one of the ok ones" Mainly because of its price (~$2). For comparison, most MMO cosmetics can run you up to 30-50 bucks. Fighting Games like Dead or Alive's DLCs cost total are in the thousands of dollars
The standards for acceptable post-launch DLCs have gotten so low it's subterranean
I used to build the website for the University of Texas' business school. They had a PhD program, and part of my job was maintaining the section of the site that they posted their doctoral theses on. There was a few years where every single PhD thesis was about how you could increase profits with microtransactions. Every thesis covered the psychological manipulation in depth, taking no care to hide the immorality of it all. They seemed to revel in it. One paper was entirely about how you could drive a certain type of person (they even used the term "whale") to bankruptcy using these methods and how fantastic that was for your business. I've never been so disgusted at work in my life.
capitalism at work. "vote with your wallet" doesn't mean anything if a tiny minority of people spend their life savings on stupid crap.
@@alexs5394 voting with your wallet especially means nothing when you have millions less votes than mentally ill addicts.
@@alexs5394 the 4yo kid not know how capitalism works is so cute.
@@amushyforyou6083 this is exactly how capitalism works. Businesses chase profits, and they're succeeding with this because THERE ARE people shell out money for this crud. These are business decisions made purely out of profit motive and not a love for the product. And as much as we hate it this is the favored outcome under capitalism.
@@alexs5394 That is actually a good point. What use is there to not buying the stupid monetisation, when it's those 5% that spend multiple monthly wages on it.
Gardenscapes has this feature that runs Monday to Wednesday where you can earn a chest full of boosters as you beat a certain amount of levels in a row. I got so good at the game that I knew I could easily play for hours every day of that period. But because it was only a three day period every week, I felt like I HAD to keep playing in that time frame. I would sit there wishing I was crocheting or reading or doing any of my other kajillion hobbies, but felt like I *had* to be playing, cuz it was only a limited time.
By the time I finally deleted the game, I got to the point where I was actually relieved to lose a level and have the chest reset, cuz it meant I had a viable excuse to stop playing.
"Morality is a poor man's quality" is a statement that hits hard when looking at the current climate in the video game industry. Why hire a team of skilled writies, programmers, and artists when you can hire a team of marketers and psychologists that abuse manipulative and questionable practices?
Games were just gamers trying to make a fun game for other gamers.
Then when the businessmen noticed the money made after the imagine of gamers just being nerds, they wanted a piece of it.
You can rephrase it "Why hire a team of skilled writies, programmers, and artists when @you actually can do it yourself with your small team - like Disco Elysium (for story) Factorio (for programming) or Cuphead (for art)"
Don't forget project managers
@@MyHydralisk I'm sorry: You _can't_ do it yourself with a small team. Just because an automobile and a go-kart can both get you from one place to another doesn't mean that they're the same thing.
@Bric Aaron I mean, the go kart can get you there just slower... now the real comparison should be between a go kart and a car with missing parts because that is more accurate to what a AAA dev studio is like these days.. and of course the parts are missing because the owner of the car is selling parts of the car off as he goes along and replacing parts with pieces that don't even belong to the car, hell the wheels might even just be wheels of cheese at this point.
One tiny correction, when talking about the advent of DLC, you cannot neglect to mention Mass Effect infamously starting the "Day One DLC" trend. Previously, people were willing to pay for DLC because it took months to make it after the game came out, but Mass Effect introduced the concept that you could cut off a part of the game and serve it as an additional slice to players rather than include it in the base game.
Mass Effect 2 you mean? The first Mass effect only had two DLCs and both were released over a year after the main game. Also I know Dragon Age: Origins had day one DLC a full year before Mass Effect 2, it even had an NPC in-game who advertised it to you lol.
I think it's likely that EA did start that trend, though I haven't researched it, but Mass Effect wasn't the first game to do it.
I sort of buy their excuses for this tho. "we would of had to fire the artists a month before release when they finished their work, instead we had them making cosmetic packs"
@@yewtewbstew547 Possibly, yes. My apologies, I didn't research it in detail, but I have a very vivid recollection of it happening. Either way, it was just another stepping stone into the nightmare we live in today.
Theoretically it makes sense, there’s always time in between a game getting finished and the day when it hits shelves, but I 100% believe that day one DLC is usually just sectioned off for more money so the initial release sales figures look better
I never played ME3 with Javik because it's absolutely ridiculous that such an important character would only be available if you drop extra money at release
Looking back at this chain of events is like watching a movie that goes over a dystopian future where businesses are doing absolutely vile things that make you say "Thank god that would never happen."
But then I realised the reality of the situation.
This or "Butterfly Effect". From harmless "horse armor" to paying to unlock gameplay is some absurd escalation
It's a sad state of affairs indeed; adding to the box that companies sell "player advantage" in preorders to unlock in-game items early which usually get power creeped or become worthless.
@@lv99gamingwiz I've always thought of it as cheating when you buy up so I've NEVER done it and probably never will
@R Hamlet Yep, but 'expansion packs' stopped doing that by about 2008
@@1crazypj cheat codes used to be cool before companies started selling them for $$$
A lot of old cheat codes were used by developers to test their games, because back in the 90s the cartridges had to be near perfect... If a game shipped with a bug that was it; it always had a bug unless the company reprinted the cartridges and that was both a rare occurrence and expensive.
One thing I would add about Maplestory's Gachapon: It wasn't JUST the gambling, it was also that the BEST items in the game could be found there. Some of the most rare scrolls and absolutely ridiculously strong weapons (with often super random requirments stats, making them EVEN stronger) were all found in the Gachapon. Unlike something like Overwatch, where the lootboxes were purely cosmetic.
You spend real money for those cosmetics. They should be completely free and be earned through *gameplay* and not your wallet
Now in Overwatch 2, to play the new heroes they made, you literally had to unlock them in the battle pass lmao. Biggest F you to players ever.
@@fuzzybanana0123 Yeah hated that too. I tried to give OW2 a chance but as soon as I saw that they were locking new heroes behind the battle pass, I was out...
If I was ever really in, that is.
@@spritemon98 Have you ever played overwatch ? You would get a box every hour of gameplay, they had a great drop rate, and they would give you money to buy skins, even during events. I played something like 300 hours on the first game and i had at least 2 legendary skins for every character. You litteraly didn't have to pay for them, unlike many other games
@@fuzzybanana0123you literally don’t have to buy the battle pass tho to unlock the heroes? The battle pass has “free” items you get without paying for it which includes the new characters
It's interesting to hear the parallels with gambling and gambling addiction. Especially around 15:10 talking about the proprietary currency. There was a saying when I used to play cards... "The man who invented gambling was smart. The man who invented chips was a genius." When the money doesn't look like money, people will quite literally throw it away
Gambling is random reinforcement. Do it with a pigeon and it will hit the bar until it dies of hunger...."Next time!"
exactly or how they have the packs that “cost little” and you think oh it’s only $5 same thing with gambling people think oh i only have to put in 20 and i can win big, just think about all of those “oh it’s just $5” combined then it’s not just $5
Gaming addiction and gambling addiction are psychologically identical, people just try to argue they are different to evade regulation.
Step 1: introduce an anti consumer system in a game.
Step 2: get backlash
Step 3: continue to do it anyway
Step 4: wait for a new generation of gamers to join the market.
They’ve never known games without this system so they accept it, and even defend it. “That’s just how it is”. This cycle happens every time. Most of the things people were outraged about are now considered the norm in games. All companies have to do is wait it out.
i hope that ''thats just how it is'' will become a ''thats just how it is and thats why i dont play videogames"
@@pauliusrimkus7241 For me it's "Why I only buy indie games that don't do this shit." If a AAA game is good enough I feel like I really need to play it I will just wait until it drops a version with all the DLC included at less than half the original price. If we keep buying things the way they want, they will keep doing it. The one piece of power here is the ability to just...not buy the game.
whats funny is this same tactic is used in all areas of life by corporations and politicians and the ruling elite powers that be.
There are countless things normalized and just accepted as "that's just how it is" by the youth that prior generations would have never stood for and actively resisted.
It is insidious and we have failed our children and our youth by letting legitimate predators mind control our gullible children. We like to blame them, but no one was there to protect them from this. You can't expect them to know better and be able to protect themselves. Everyone just wants to blame the victim.
Makes me so angry
Overwatch in a nutshell
This is why I usually stick with indie games. You can find a lot of high quality experiences that are not predatory in nature.
Thankfully there's loads of great indie games out there
Yeah am basically done with triple A, the fact that I also have a toaster pc and indies let me still enjoy em with the toastertron is also a sight of how much needless push for hardware there is.
In this christimas, my family give me some steam credits, i was looking for dwarf fortress, i will bought it early or late, but not know how long will take, already are playing another single player game, also, money wise not worth to put down that amount in new game. But with steam credits, i just bought and already play few hours, about 5 and was amazing, is one of those games i can play now and have a lot of fun, or wait for days, months or years to play, but still equals fun. I notice that gaming are getting really wrong much early in live, but I totally stop buying AAA few time ago, with cyberpunk 2077 actually, the game is there, no MTX, but abuses of other bad behaviour, lie to consumer... At least i never will pay for something that i can't check if it is what it told us it is... Borderlands 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 was both huge hits on my face, due to poor game quality over maketing... In that time i already not buy AAA games a long time, due to MTX on online shit and forcing us to play online where is not even a good choice to do so... I pass all possible games avoiding pay for unfair moneytization, mmo, free games cosmetics, pay to win and soo on, i drop mmo mostly due to this type of situation, even where it looks like not is it, as Albion, they force us to die and lost progress or be stock, with the need to join a guild and everyone is keepet at same low evel due to sheep and wolf theory, at a point they even need to open free players in, you can't make a game wolf-sheep drived and be a major success for long term.
Same here I buy mostly indes now and only buy AAA when they're heavily discounted
The only reason indie games don't utilize predatory monetization tactics is that they don't have a successful precedent to follow, if that makes any sense. When we see an indie game pull this stunt off successfully, other will copy it, and eventually the majority of games will echo the sentiment.
Who doesn't like money after all?
This video makes me sad, but also helps explain why I'm so stuck on continuing to just play the games from growing up, rather than continuing into newer games. ~1987 through 2000 was the true golden era imo
You said it! Just last week, I finally completed my decades-long dream of having a water cooled PC. What’s the first game I played on this beast? F-Zero, on an SNES emulator! Games used to be made by gamers, for gamers. Those were better days.
I think many indie games are still worth playing. If you only play AAA games, then yeah, Aside from the occasional surprise, newer games suck.
Indie games it is today my brother
Maybe I’m just a fanboy but the Metroid games are still very much worth playing, they don’t release games often but when they do there always high quality
ok boomer
When thinking about how games have changed, I feel bad for kids growing up in this environment. Being an older gamer, we at least had a chance to know 'we don't have to participate', and still just game/grind while griping around how things used to be. Children today have no such chance, and may not even realize there is an alternative to the instant gratification to spending real money on endless micro-transactions. **Great video Josh, I would show it to my child if I had one, before letting them get into gaming.**
Buy your kids a Switch.
You should only blame yourself as a parent if you allow that to happen
@@mikeclarke3990 They have MTX heavy games on there...
For me, i don't feel bad fot children and teenagers in this gaming era, i felt bad for their parents wallets😂😂😂
Its also sad that there are kids who get bullied in their school, just because they dont have a skin in Fornite
Besides a few exceptions I stopped playing AAA games in recent years and mostly spend my time playing indies, someone who will put passion and dedication behind a great idea will always win in my book
I'm completely with you. It's not an indigame but I've bought rdr2 now. Feel free to laugh at me because it's so late, but originally I'm not really interested in westerns. I think I'll look at all the old games again. "Soldiers-heros of WW2" is very old but also very nice.
The last AAA game I played was Witcher 3. I still play games every day.
@@TheCrepusculum I prefer to play games after their life cycle has ended. The games are cheaper, and cosmetics or anything like that don't matter anymore. I just recently played RDR2. I don't want to be a part of their system.
@@cxngo8124 I am not alone? I always felt I'm the only one waiting... originally because of complete packages with dlcs - they don't have that kind of error because they DON´T quite fit together (bought separately).
thx
@@TheCrepusculum Nah. I originally did it like this because I didn't have much money in highschool and a gold edition with everything would come out anyway soon but the habit stuck and I always feel like I am winning.
No frustration, no broken games. More content.
The interesting thing about the FOMO mechanic is that it encourages retention of players you already have, but discourages new players from joining because they think they have missed too much.
Yup, experienced many such moments. Te introduction of seasons in games (think fortnite) kind of remedies that, since you can join at the beginning and everyone's new to the mechanics, but it's annoying for existing players. You learn something just for it to be invalidated in 4 months.
@@Slay1337pl The problem with seasons, is that if you missed something from the last season, you can never get it back, there was a Predator Skin on previous seasons battlepass, i could never get that skin if a join after .
Final Fantasy Brave Exvius abuses this mechanic WEEKLY. Every week they have new, this week only, op asf characters that you will need for months after. Bur you only have a week to get them at a .035% chance to get one.
A game I played for a long time, ragnarok online, is dying because of this, at least the international server. It went gacha so hard that you literally need to spent hundreds to thousands of dollar to somewhat catch up to the remaining playerbase, but the game is 20 years old, has charming old school looks to some but to lots it just looks old, feels old, and its grind heavy as fuck, has been 20 years ago, its way worse now with relevant items costing billions and newbies lucky if they make 1-3m/h, which already requires you to farm some stuff before you reach these numbers. But instead of making the game more newbie-friendly, they go all in on the power creep and milk the remaining addicts that have spent too much to quit for as much as they can. Back in 2004 to idk 2008 maybe 2010 it was p2p, abonnement, then it went f2p, cashshop took over and thats it.
Its sad and its exactly the shit we warned about 15 years+ ago when we said this shit will fuck over gaming as a whole. But sheeps gonna be sheeps, using brain hurts.
@@daben7145 funnily enough, i feel like WoW resolved this, I played it first time after the big leveling change. The grindfest always put me off. Now it seems like the game is geared towards new players. The bad thing about it is thst old addon content looks and plays horrible in comparison.
It's interesting how the gaming industry went from, "do what you love, build games that you love" and as a result, money comes, into "build games you hate, because greed and money rules."
Look at it this way. Would you rather be selling $1000 handbags to rich folks at a nice shop or selling 10$ handbags from the trunk of your car? This is the choice facing the game industry.
@@Jimraynor45 No it's not. The industry made plenty of money before. Look at how successful World of Warcraft was at it's peak, BEFORE they added microtransactions and made it pay2win with wow token. Look at how successful Baldur's Gate 3, The Witcher series, Elden Ring, or Monster Hunter World were. Look at how the industry is making record profits EVERY YEAR but still lays of massive amounts of people on the regular just to be able to make that much more. Stop making excuses for greedy scumbags and idiot consumers.
@@Jimraynor45thats not how it is at all
I cannot even possibly express the immense thankfulness I feel towards the independent development scene in the larger landscape of gaming. The massive boom of indie game devs releasing absolute banger titles while completely disregarding pandoras box is the thing that will keep gaming alive.
Issue is of course marketing :) Hope Dunkey will do his job great. Also most Indies a lot of reading needed... god I need practice it somehow so it wouldn't be exhausting.
U have examples?
And yet some indie games are also starting to use stuff like battle passes, such as the Pokemon clone "TemTem". I really hope games like that don't become the norm for indie games.
@@muaywub4882 Hollow Knight, Hades, Disco Elysium etc.
You can find tons of good indie games on Steam
A notion I'm really hoping to be able to carry forward as well. Graduated from my 3D education recently, and my eye has been set on smaller scale indie work right away. Both to get away from the corporate nature of big games, but also just because the environment of a smaller studio allows everyone a voice in vision of a game. And it's a really nice environment to work in as well.
Shoutout to all those amazing dev teams who still just make good games that you buy and get everything, not only that, they continue to feed free DLC, sometimes asking a small and fair amount for significant DLC expansions. The Long Dark comes to mind.
In Geometry Dash, full game sales make nothing compared to ad money from mobile Lite and DLCs. Plus, Russian kids actively pirate full game, and their amount is so big they sometimes cause game servers to work slow despite not paying the game. If RobTop releases those mobile versions on PC, he either loses most money, or he will have to make up some unfair ad schemes, which will be eventually negated by the same Russians who will just hack the games and delete ads
I'm also a TLD fan and I definitely agree with you it's pretty much the opposite of everything mentioned in this video
Stardew Valley : )
Really prefer the play station games recently. Console games are so much less of a toxicity money lure. You pay, you get. It's fair. Unlike how all these FOMO model based game that push u into gambling and paying a massive amount of money just to get anything.
Terraria is a fantastic game, and if you have not played it, I feel bad for you.
Noita is a fantastic game, and if you have not played it, I feel bad for you.
Factorio is a fantastic game, and if you have not played it, I feel bad for you.
Enter the Gungeon, you get the idea.
Stardew Valley.
Ultrakill.
Trackmania (Not the 2020 version, fuck that)
Undermine.
Dwarf fucking Fortress.
I really like when games sell their soundtrack as the only DLC. You could easily just listen to the music on UA-cam, but it's a neat way of supporting the team behind the game. I've done this with a few games and even though i don't use the Steam music player, i still appreciate that it's totally optional and doesn't affect the game one bit.
Yup. One of the most acceptable forms of DLC. You pay for a product, you recieve product, and no strings are attached. And the devs have already done the work to create this product so for them, it's a zero sum gain.
(Best part about music sold on steam is being able to yank out the mp3 files, load em onto a usb, then listen to stuff while driving as well.)
For me I like re colors. Leave the items unique and easy to tell what they are and allow re colors imo.
I think the direction of game pass and so on will help the gaming market personally
Couldn’t agree more 👍
yeah for well made games thats the tip to the developers option. ill buy it for good indi games
Yeah, and then there's stuff like dead cells where it's just, want more game? You can buy more game.
This is the best explanation I've heard.
I have never been more depressed about the state of gaming. If only indie devs had the budget to advertise like AAA studios.
You don't need ads to find out which games are worth it and which are not.
The majority of people will never find a good game if it is not advertised. If only a few people happen to find the good game, then the studio doesn't make enough money to support further development. Advertising is actually where most new developers are most likely to fail, and having low sales on your 1st game can quickly bankrupt a studio.
@@TyLovePieyes, you are 100% correct
Indie games are clunky, like Hero Siege interface. Grim Dawn and Dusk, Project Warlock are epic though. Too bad people talk about failed games instead of rising good ones.
The problem is video games went from being mainly an art/hobby to becoming a business. The question is no longer “is this game fun for players?” But “how to get as much money as possible from these people?”
It's so sad that when a big game is announced my thoughts have gone from 'how fun it'll be to play 'to 'how much of a monetary drain will that game try to be'.
For me it's usually "I hope the game will be finished on release" or "I hope there won't be massive bugs or garbage performance". Kinda nervous about the new Fire Emblem game, hope it runs fine.
Honestly, idgaf about the monetizatiob of a game unless it's actually p2w. Ppl cry about the Crown store in ESO but I couldn't care less as I'm not gonna buy an outift. Ppl cry about battlepasses but for as long as they don't give op weapons idgaf as I'm not unterested in dumbass skins and backgrounds. You wanna waste your money? Well you do you. A fool and his money, eh?
@@jokuihmehyyppa agreed but it seems to be more and more p2w or you have to pay to unlock levels if i bought the game i bought it i should be able to go to any zone and play any character now skins and shit idc about because you can decide it looks cool or that you want to support the game i don't but it's a choice i make
@@scull0234 Don't worry, it's gonna be shit like all of them
"how will they ruin this one"
"how many dlcs will be made"
It would be really cool having a second video showing how those things are starting to leak outside games, like cars locking some features behind some monthly fee
Like the 19$/mo seatwarmer thing from BMW?
and software too.
"we will own nothing and rent everything"
Stupid people ruin everything for the rest of us.
@@MazeeKasurame latest one i heard about: Mercedes now wants $100 per month if you expect to use the full power output of the engine.
@@tippyc2 This is getting from kinda funny to kinda depressing real fast.
I actually used to be in a game development program at a university, and I dropped out because I thought it was so miserable. It wasn't cause the workload was so bad, but because even when I did get projects successfully completed I never enjoyed making them, or got any satisfaction out of the finished product, just relief that I didn't have to work on it anymore. Thank you for making this, because I could never really explain why until I saw this video - basically all they teach you in the classes is rapid iterative prototyping and shit from that pandora's box, or at least similar mechanics designed to induce a (monetizable) dopamine rush. It's never about what the developers actually want to make, it's all about what the shareholders or investors think will be most profitable.
Pandoras box. Yes.
This is why indie games have been on the rise. The people make beautiful games for the love of it instead of for money
I ditched a game development subject at uni, but in my case it was because the guy teaching it did a lousy job of organising it. Also, it was just one subject as part of a computer science degree, so there were plenty of other subjects to take up instead. Still got the textbook, though.
Scams are lucrative. Sadly lawmakers dont understand how deceptive game-ified shops are and ignore it. Honestly dont even see the attraction to those scams since I can get a good dopamine berry from 10k other things in life. But I suppose I'm not the target. Kids are and normally they "gotta have it right now".
Yes, exactly. Investors is also the main reason for these tactics to exist as well. If you can make a product that is good and will sell 300 million copies. But you can make a product quickly for cheaper and it will only sell 30 copies... By the law of investors.. you must sell the 30 copies quicker.
Great video, didn't know this channel before but I'm glad that it contains a rather balanced and explanatory approach to the topic, not overloading it with internet memes or senseless raging. I acutally have the impression to have learned something about the origins of monetarization in video games
I find more and more beautiful, well put together Indie games on steam everyday. Those people actually put their hearts into a game.
*every day (means daily)
everyday = adjective meaning typical/ordinary/average
The people in the major development teams (343, Bunjie, Activision, Capcom, etc) do put their hearts and souls in them as well. The issue their having is the balance of doing what they want but fulfilling their agreements with the corporate overlord to insure the product is worth something. The dev group can only so much when it comes to sales, they can only affect the product. The corporate master (Microsoft for example) maimyk sets the terms and deadlines for the development. Plus they can even outright change the deadlines willingly to get earlier to cash grabs or save money when the time is needed. That's why a lot of new games feel unfinished most of the time, they usually need somewhere like an extra year or such before their actual release. Instead of blaming the company for not allowing the devs to finish their work we are putting the blame on the devs without realizing this issue. Why you may ask? Cause the company makes sure the marketing teams put the devs label on the adds cause "they made it!" so if the game bombs or complaints occurs the company can cheat the devs out of their contractual bonus pay or just get rid of them for free without repercussions and copyright all their work
@@theamericankaiser4549 I also have to make the argument that back in the day it was more gamers making games for gamers. Nowadays, many gaming studios are full of people who not only hate making games but hate games in general. Why they still do it is beyond me. Also, people get hired not based on skill or talent anymore. That being said, I rarely see anyone blaming devs. usually it's the companies altogether that get vitriol
@@jase276 Because the companies the make all the decisions.
Indie games are the future of gaming, in my opinion. Ofcourse, the quadbillion dollar studios will never die, but it will be the Indie developers that push the medium forward and make better and more interesting games
28:38 “and when a marketing executive pictures you playing a game, you aren’t pictured smiling and laughing with friends ur pictured opening ur wallet and reaching for ur credit card” basically sums up the state of modern triple A games
And gamers are to blame. If we as a collective refused to spend billions a year on this crap, we'd see a different culture form.
and... essentially every market in the world now.
we can't do anything about it either. what a great time to be alive, right?
@@Reahreic How do you think we should do that ? its simply not possible only way you could stop people from supporting this would be by laws and that would be pretty insane to do. Only thing i would agree with making laws against is that every game with real life money stuff thats locked behind a randoom system of for example opening boxes has to be rated R18.
Fifa is still Rated 0 or 3 depending on countrys and i think this is insane.
@@PokeBurnPlease The Netherlands outlawed this kind of predatory business practice, and I think every country should. Then again, the U.S. is the only country where pharmaceutical drug ads are allowed. If it's not abundantly clear now that we should abandon our old ways of thinking and look for something more personally fulfilling, like actually bettering ourselves... Well it all comes down to money. Looks like we are doomed. :) Hilariously doomed!
@@sheogorathprinceofmadness2223 Difference is the netherlands forbid it in general but i dont think there is any problem with it. If you are an adult you can decide yourselfe if you wanna pay for loot boxes but the games should not be allowed to be sold to minors like its currently with Fifa for example. You should be required to be 18 to buy such games.
I worked with a games psychologist in 2014 when I worked for a very famous mobile game and he was utterly evil and psychopathic. I felt gross working with him when he was telling me how he was trying to trick kids into using their parent's credit card to buy expensive things in the game, and we're talking £50 here. Oh and I discovered a bug that meant sometimes players wouldn't receive their items so I asked for time to fix it from the project owners and they said it didn't matter as the players would likely just try again and double spend. I left the games industry after that.
I wonder what his Early Life section looks like... 🤔
@@StarboyXL9 Classic Sociopath... That's a psychologist. Terrible mix. Now wonder he ended up in the job he did.
@@StarboyXL9 oy vey
@@anonymouscheese2095 I feel like mobile gaming came into existence with "The Box" already taking up 75% of production.
I have no objective to business practices that explicitly target stupid people.
Thank you for commenting on this topic. It tears my mind assunder, witnessing this slow decent into madness via overmonetization becoming the new standard. Modern AAA companies have been slowly chopping off good qualities that make games enjoyable, for _SURPLUS_ profit, on top of their already well off profit margines they would have made from simply making a good product. If I had to sum their behavior up briefly, I'd say they are noticeably diluting game experiences to appeal to larger demographics, so there are fewer _AMAZING_ games, and far more "meh, it's alright" experiences.
Ironically, the AAA companies; the ones with the most money and resources, tend to be the laziest, rejecting innovation and creativity. This leaves creativity to the indie devs, who are often working a full time job, only making games in their free time. There are certainly a few disagreements I personally have with specific directions that Nintendo has taken, but one thing I praise Nintendo for, is that they are always reinvesting their profits back into their games, experimenting with innovated new ideas, which is more than I can say for many other big names like Activision, Blizzard, EA, Ubisoft, to name a few.
Any time someone comments on this, they're always met with the ignorant response "Well, if you don't like it, then don't buy it!". The problem with that mentality, are the reprocussions we're witnessing today. By not demanding a certain level of standards as consumers, it invites all businesses to get lazier, overall, as they realize they can charge more while putting in less effort, knowing their consumers will not fight back.
Please note, I am not anti-capitalism. I sincerely believe companies and individuals have a right to earn a "fair" profit for the products they create. What we are witnessing in modern gaming, far exceeds "fair" profit margines. Large businesses are actively performing psychological studies to determine the best way to manipulate their consumers, similar to what casinos have been doing for decades.
The F2P model, for example, is advertised as this positive inclusive decision, yet it's entirely profit driven, at the considerable expense of the quality of the game.
F2P appeals to the largest demographic, because what excuse do you have to not play the game if it's free, right? This model also reduces backlash towards poor design choices, as how can one complain when the game is free? The most noteable consequence of F2P, is the quite apparent increase in people ruining the gaming experience for others, via smurfing, unapproved modding, cheating, etc. These types of players suffer no consequence for their actions, as they can simply create a new account and continue hindering the intended experience for signifigant portions of the gaming community. You can observe this daily, in games like:
Valorant
Overwatch 2
Rocket League (after it was made F2P)
This system pits the community against eachother, rather than directing that frustration towards the companies promoting this business model as the new standard, inevitably shortening the longevity and vitality of games. People eventually quit playing, because of the stresses F2P incurs quickly outweigh the entertaiment provided by the game.
Shoutout to my "long, sincere comment way after upload" crew! We holdin' it down for the long-term conversation. Y'all my boys.
That fair price thing isn't anti capitalism. It's anti-monopoly
Weirdly the "Recurrent monetization" has really changed the way I play games. I play way more indie and AA games now. Like most of my "Most Anticipated" game of any new year has become a lot of smaller seemingly more heartfelt projects. My favorite game this year was Roadwarden. A text based RPG. It's kind of sad, but at the same time there are still so many great games coming out every year even if it's not a title I would've expected at the beginning of the year.
I played Ara Fell this year and it felt like a spiritual successor to games like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound. It was clearly a labor of love for the team at Stegosoft Games. It had a bunch of self aware jokes but they knew exactly what the game should be for a classic 16b rpg.
I think a lot of us have moved that way. But i gotta say, i sure do miss AAA graphics.
Same here. I play for relaxation and immersion; games with a "buy once, you're good" model are my happy place. Predatory monetization, otoh, makes games completely unpalatable to me.
As such, I do hope that smaller games can carve out a consistent niche for fair pricing. Looking at my purchases this year, there is scant outside of indies and AA I found worth my money.
oh good recommendation, i'l keep an eye on that game.
I mostly play indie games too now, I don't touch most triple A games except for elden ring and nintendo.
i feel like even indie games are getting worse. the ones that get all the spotlight are gimmicky meme games with no actual substance like stray and then all the actual interesting stuff either gets left in the dust or doesn't do well enough for the studio to grow. this isn't even saying anything about all the survivalcraft genre clones trying to chase market trends instead of the devs making something worthwhile they're passionate about
This video has perfectly explained that sinking gut feeling I have every time I see new game release and wonder how it will disappoint me this time.
sinking gut feeling is exactly how I feel about OW2
I didn't even realize until the other day that I haven't played it in weeks. Game just makes me sad everytime I open it now.
If it's online and has multilayer, SKIP IT. If certain publishers put it out, again, SKIP IT. It's not difficult to wait for use reviews. Anything beyond that is your fault
@@Broockle that game doesn't deserve the 2 in the title
Games like Elden Ring aren't common - especially at FromSoft's quality standard; nonetheless they are all I, or my kids or their friends, will buy.
I was a huge gamer in my teens and haven't bought a new game since 2015
Wow. I never got the big picture of how abusive these systems really are. It's devious. It makes me think we need some sort of "fair game" certificate for games you can actually buy and play in full. 🤔
This would actually be a totally cool idea. As some collab of indie publishers etc., if I see that cert, I know it's full game and no microtransactions. I would be totally tempted to buy games with this on them. As long as it would be done fairly and given to any game that fills the requirements - ie. that this cert itself wouldn't become a cash cow - it'd be both in the interest of the customer and the studios making "fair" games.
Should be relatively easy to implement too with binding contracts in the style of no microtransactions now or ever under this title or a certain penalty sum contractually agreed would need to be paid etc., so it couldn't be abused by getting the cert and then turning the game into something totally different in the next update.
Actually a nice idea.
Honestly, this is the exact use case for when governments need to step in. I struggle to imagine the market place correcting this issue. We would need unilateral power from a major government to level the playing field.
Good idea.
@@tseikkisnelkytkaks9013 There's no way companies will sign contracts to earn certifications, they'd just make up their own instead. A certification plan could work, but it would have to start with a group vetting games on their own initiative and handing them "fair" or "unfair" certificates depending on the game. But because of the nature of the industry, those would have to be revisited regularly when companies inevitably try to abuse it.
This is a great video and sums it up perfectly I only do sim racing now but even racing games are doing it with track packs and cars etc
A good friend of mine worked for a big publisher (no name dropping as they´re all doing it anyway) and at one point, they sat in a room with a bunch of psychologists and designers, "theorizing" about how they could redesign certain game mechanics, *specially* for people with compulsive spending habits, like ppl with ADHD for example. He left the room being so disgusted that he gave up the job and started working with an indie dev team instead. lol
It´s disgusting to see that they not only ignore, but *willingly abuse* people with mental health issues (like gambling addiction) to make more money.
Companies are essentially massive entities with the singular goal of "make more money, no matter what". Can you really blame them? It's naive to think they'll ever change on their own volition
@@WeAreChecking Yes.
Nobody said anything about them changeing on their own. Why would they? Just hold them accountable for the damages they´re directly and indirectly causing and they will have to change or get bankrupt.
@@Mightydoggo While I agree with this, I have one problem with it. How do WE hold them accountable? Once some accountability for video game developers comes into the law scene, I would expect some rulings would happen that could snowball into laws being made. I don't want the government involved more than they have to or we will see some anti gamer laws. Hillary Clinton should be noted here as she was pushing to ban GTA back when San Andreas was the latest one out.
Or we could just not buy the games that have these predatory practices. My vote for a game anyone should try out is A Hat In Time. Yes they did have 2 expansion packs, but the packs there are have a lot of content, almost as if it was a whole other game. Almost like HL2:E2.
@@WeAreChecking yes we can and should blame them. they often value short term profits now over long term value and ruin franchises over plain greed when they can still be making millions/billions and keep beloved franchises successful for years and years instead of just.. well be greedy and ruin the reputation of everyone over some quick bucks. is it really so much to ask for people to give a shit about the product they make and not JUST about the money?
it's actually very disgusting and sad when you realize there's actual psychologists involved... just makes it so much worse
This is your masterpiece. I am a gamer for >40 years now and I can relate to everything in this excellently elaborated video.
I went "game amish" years ago for the sake of my kids. We simply don't consider games with transactions, or even requiring external identity validation. What I didn't expect was that, by eliminating time wasted on games that are a drag, it made games much more fun. At this point when I see some some of these mainstream games it's just repulsive to see all the shit people go through without even getting to play. Thank you genuinely for the effort put into this high-quality video.
gamish haha
Indeed. My one friend almost had a break down because of Soulcalibur IV. He loved Darth Vader, but was ticked you could only play him on the Playstation and he only had an Xbox and didn't want to play as Yoda, lol. (23:33)
This the easiest and only solution to monetization madness. Simply buy stuff that it is worth its cost and stay away from all the crap that isn't. (or is simply a platform to sell you digital stuff that is essentially worthless)
What I cannot truly understand is why a large portion of the population doesn't care and gladly spends all their money and time on these products. Not only do they spend way more than necessary, they also lack the wisdom to see what it does to gaming as a whole. I think it is ok to blame the industry, but the gamers themselves that vote with their wallets are keeping these practices around.
@@pinobluevogel6458 It's the same reason so many people joylessly play slot machines for hours and hours: addiction. Some people are just particularly prone to this kind of addition.
@@terrencebucker And it will only get worse in the future, as more techniques are prone to be found or engineered and added to the box.
And this is why I find myself turning to indie games more often these days.
That and I find more interesting relatable stories being told in that space.
We need more people calling out all of the anti consumer and stingy things game companies do now. I hope everyone remembers Totalbiscuit who passed away in 2018, he was one of the first to call out these anti consumer methods used by these companies and fought for anyone who just wanted to play good games. I don’t think things will change anytime soon but I do hope more people will speak out. RIP to a great man
Ross Scott of AccursedFarms briefly had a campaign to make it illegal, although I forget the details.
Had no idea he had passed away. What a shock.
I what we need is for people to stop paying for these transactions. If you just don’t pay for it the company is forced to stop doing it. However a lot of people still buy these things
Just don't buy new releases. Try and convince friends to do so too. Spend 3 or so years playing older games or pursuing other hobbies.
As soon as this stops being such a cash cow they will be forced to up quality.
I mean… just play the good games then?
There’s literally not enough time to play all the good games that came out THIS year.
I find it so interesting that game developers are secondary to making games these days and the business model is the primary concern. Clearly the gaming industry is changed forever, glad I was there for the glory days.
Even when these live services will be unplugged and gone, the glory days will remain preserved so we can always go back to them.
Hey! Cool it with the ANTI-SEMITIC remark!
It hasn't changed FOREVER... We can fight back and make actual change, We don't deserve their bullshit...This is INSANE... Gaming should be about FUN.
@@MonstersNotUnderTheBed Huh??? Ive gotta bite, just where is this remark?
@@heroicgoo915 American neonazis pose online either as Jews or non-Jews concerned about antisemitism. They then make false antisemitism claims. Their hope being that people become disillusioned with the very concept of antisemitism in response to seeing unfair accusations. Widespread disillusionment or apathy with the concept of antisemitism would create a more favourable climate for neonazis to thrive in.
Why do they bother with this clearly futile endeavour? American neonazis are almost exclusively low IQ men with a poor to non-existent social life and are neither in employment, education or training. Spending their time trying to troll on social media is a sort of bottom of the tank existence they've sunk down to.
The above account is one of these little guys.
After many years of enjoying online games, the modern monetization made me go back to single player games instead and now I have much more fun playing games than ever before. So thank you Farmville and Diablo Immortal.
Completely understandable. What's stupid is the amount of single player games now that require internet access. I don't need a F'ing cloud to save my games, the damn computer has a hard drive!
Try Farm Sim 22 ,no lie.
Made me turn to indie games. Couldn't be happier.
Minecraft? Subnautica? Undertale?
Absolutely, for like 95% of games I think the fun is over, sometimes an honest game like Elden RIng peaks around the corner but that gets very rare now. I just picked up this old Tower Defense Game "Bloons" with the balloons and monkeys up for free on epic. I naively thought, ok thats a nostalgic throwback, lets play some. Within the first few minutes, I encountered an in-game instant upgrade for real money and my smile plummeted and I hit altf4 and uninstalled that shit... nothing is save.
Probably the best video I've ever seen on this concept.
Imagine the game studio execs watching this and furiously taking notes in case there's something they didn't already consider.
And furiously master bating 😂
Lol - I sort of feel that way when my job gives me anti-fraud training. Sometimes I'm thinking "Yeah - I could make that work without getting caught..."
Thanks for saying execs instead of devs. Too many people blame the devs for these mechanics in big games, but the devs hate them just as much as we do. The EXECS love it and force it into every aspect of a game…
Imagine the fiendish scams and immoral schemes they have already cooked up but not yet unleashed...
They all share their insights in gamedev conferences lol Dunno if you watched it but there was a really disgusting talk about whales and how to exploit em in your game in some gamedev conference.
I have played elder scrolls online for two years, and the chapter about daily-habit-forming in this video is spot on. I thought the base game was very good and did not suffer from being bad or lacking when you did not buy cosmetic extras. In the end, after two years of feeling that daily urge to have to play to complete daily quests, daily crafting orders, daily dungeons and weekly sales, I decided to go cold turkey and just abruptly uninstalled it. It felt like getting rid of an addiction.
Congratulations sir. You're better off now and I'm proud of you
I did the same thing with World of Warcraft. I was a guild leader of one of the biggest guilds on a classic server, most recently. I went on a trip for a couple weeks, and never went back to the game. I still have an urge every now and then though. It really is like an addiction, from what I hear... Something like smoking cigarettes for years and stopping, every once in a while you still get an urge. I've never had any other addictions than gaming, personally.
Thats because you DID get rid of an addiction.
Gaming addiction is just as real and addictive as smoking, it produces nerochemicals that you grow dependant on just like any drug, the only difference is its getting your body to produce them based on sensory stumli instead of chemical.
That's how its done bro. BRAVO.
For me personally I like dailys. They give me an easy goal to start the ball rolling. Don’t get me wrong they are typically bad but some games use it as a opportunity to catch up the casual player and working class which I respect. Much like rested xp.
This video is a perfect example of why it's so important to support small independent game developers. In a lot of ways Indie developers today resemble what gaming studios looked like in the 90s and 2000s. The success of these studios is critical to preventing short-sighted tactics like this from completely taking over.
For now. Until the indie devs start to see dollar signs too. And start using these same tactics. Some won't of course. Some will believe in the artistic vision and simply want to deliver a good game, the kind of game they want to play. Others will follow the money, because there is a lot of it to be made unfortunately.
@@koloth5139 you completely misunderstand how this market works. Luckily, indie devs can't afford to be greedy like this at all because people can easily just ignore their shitty product. Triple A companies have the resources and influence to shove these tactics down the general public's throats
@@Solisus💯 im so tired of the people who say “just play indie games” like they are at all comparable to AA or AAA games.
Mobile games and "micro" transactions have already won, they're the biggest share of the pie, we need more governments to ban gambling in general.
@@zerg6001 because some of them are lmao
SSX 3 was my favorite of the series.
I loved the way you could play on one continuous mountain.
And it had Kick Doubt, which for some reason is my favorite name for a course. I sucked at the freestyle courses, I was always into the racing more, but I loved that name.
This is why indie games have been on the rise and I hope they g get bigger and I hope these big companies see how much people love them and change a bit
@Kevin Morris that board of people usually with ties to EA
Nah they eventually become that evil.
The problem, in a way, is the gamer state of mind.
Gamers will do everything they can to max out their abilities. It's called min-maxing.
When game developers run a business like a gamer, they do everything to min-max their profits, including using exploits.
Indie games may be on the rise but the success of them is at an all time low. Blame Steam for that.
The most important thing is who is the CEO of the company. If the CEO is passionate for gaming and just wants to make good games these predatory practises wont be included in the final product. Take a look at Miyazaki (Elden Ring) or Cory (God of War) or that FF14 lead dev. We need to reward good CEO's and project leads.
A new red flag to add will be a massive and sudden influencer support for a game, the strong deny of p2w mechanics, changing names or using lovely terms to describe loot boxes. I have being slowly moving to the indie scene because every new AAA game is following this trend. Great video, perfectly on target and I think voices the frustration many gamers have.
@@SimuLord it wouldn't be the same without him
Lost ark pay 2 win deniers was hilarious
I love to imagine in meetings at video game companies that some producer is talking with the board and pitching his idea to put microtransactions or a battle pass or some other thing into the game to make them tons of money and everyone in that room absolutely loves it. Then he goes to a meeting with the actual game developers and he introduces his idea and he gets silence and looks of absolute disgust.
Maybe not. Maybe it would motivate devs further knowing that they're gonna get fat pay checks.
@Creative Of course. But you don't need nearly as many people to keep it running compared to the actual development cycle
Monetising a game can keep a game alive. You don’t have to participate in it if you dont love the game in the first place. If you do, and if you have cash to spare, you can pass the love to the game. I loved ESO and i splurged some cash to thank them for giving so much memories
Total buscuit was vocal about this a decade ago already. RIP.
I've been catching up on single player games recently and it reminded me how it felt to be excited to play a game.
Being multiplayer-averse seems to have mostly shielded me from the abusive mechanics problem, aside from crap on my phone I keep trying and getting sick of.
When I was younger, multiplayer was the only way I would play a game. I now realize it was because I needed the approval/recognition of others playing the game. It is really nice to be out of that phase and enjoy games for myself, on my terms, and not care that no one will ever see any of my in-game "accomplishments"
The industry unfornately moving into group play. The new Diablo 4 games looks like you can only get good rewards by doing group missions
I’ve been playing video games since I was 3 years old, I am now 31. It’s truly a shame to see gaming transform throughout the years to what it is now due to these systems and tactics… I want to remind everyone of one thing that renders these systems obsolete, and that is choice. That is something you hold and can’t be taken from you.
Majority of people who play video games are fine with the monetization.
i agree and i would add that Collective power we have is a gaming community i mean we changed ea"s shity star wars game. It is my hope that we can protect gaming by putting pressure on these big companies
Yes and no.
It's hard not to pay when they use everything to make you pay, including psychologie.
Some players will not pay but there will always be some who get trapped.
@@florent3723 so don’t buy or support or even talk about (positively at least) any game that uses these predatory monetisation tactics, and encourage your friends and peers to do the same.
Very poetic and true and very hard to do
This is one of the most important videos I've ever seen on UA-cam. Aggressive monetization is why I've given up on EA, Activistion, Ubisoft, Epic, and so on. Brilliant video!
Same here.
Years ago i realised monetization matters more than releasing a finished game.
Game Pass could actually be a good influence.
That's I believe what happened to Anthem. It was advertised as a Destiny killer and EA execs probably thought it would be because their game would have all of those abusive practices while Destiny didn't. Well, development of the game was trumped by development of the abusive practices. Their biggest mistake was that they introduced too many of those practices right away.
You need to research on a company called Tencent, and how the companies you mentioned are all connected. Look again at what is the real organisation behind Tencent pulling the puppet strings.
Ok cool. There's still thousands more games to play without those companies.
I want every gamer to watch and understand this video before they're allowed to defend their favorite game/gamestudio.
As someone who put a couple thousand hours into MapleStory over the years, I can attest to the gachapon being a huge influence. Another thing about MS that wasn't mentioned was the cosmetic cash shop with most products in it lasting only 90 days. This was back when it first came out. Now the cash shop does sell permanent cosmetics, as well as cosmetic loot boxes, exp/money boosts, battle pets, crafting Scrolls to enhance crafting success rates, and a lot of other power items.
While not MS, I definitely paid for a few rental weapons in combat arms. Thankfully Nexon or whoever runs CA reloaded these days allows everyone to access everything and it's just some stupid funny mayhem
My spending habits went from Yugioh and Pokemon Cards to Maplestory cards for 90 day cosmetics and 2x xp buffs (these stacked with 2x weekends so you were incentivized to buy them)
@@slumcore3921 I played combat arms and then modern warfare 2 (original) came out and my friends got me into that. The thing i remember about combat arms rental was i tended to earn enough in game to rent an upgraded weapon before the first one ran out. This of course creates habits of playing and i may not have played long enough for that to stop working, but i did avoid spending money on it.
@@FosukeLordOfError yeah I was specifically referring to the weapons you couldn't just grind out and get via in-game currency rentals, there was a point (I think they were mostly removed) where there were like operators with specific weapon loadouts that were exclusive to them, I remember a minigun and a secret agent woman with a dmr I think, tho for grinding rental weapons the LAW was always a good time 👍
@@andrewkarasek3219 those plus magic cards were the definition of physical lootbox. never really bought yugioh but got counterfeits of it from somewhere so dunno if they came in packs like others with 1 guaranteed rarity within the edition its part of.
As someone with a degree in programming and a masters in design, I see this video and my prospects in the modern game industry and I feel like a biochemist whose career was not in creating helpful drugs they aspired to but in finding more addictive ones.
Good analogy. Even Bayer did one good thing though, aspirin. But also, heroine. Oops. I don't think the corporate gamer snakes have ever done one good thing though. :P
@@Vomgnar. they brought enjoyment before, but now they showed their true face, sadly the popularity of gaming has people not giving a shit where they put their money, and alas gaming as a whole is pretty much over, has been since the early 2010 where you start seeing the problem get brought up to the surface more, time to find another hobby if you enjoy video games, unless you're a shill with no shame that feeds dogshit companies money for bad games, majority it seems.
I've been developing games for 15 years and i'm lookingat the industry now wondering if i've made the right choice in career, i'm doing a data science degree now so can shift to machine learning or data management which is becoming more and mor elikely each year. I looked through Steam games this year and there wasn't a single game i wanted to play i can smell monetization a mile off and i guess i'm one of the few that these techniques don't have the same effect on. I don't mind a loot box or two with some cosmetics for a game that has been made well but start adding in battle passes, currency or energy and the game can go in the trash where it belongs.
@@Eddygeek18 Data science is pretty dope but you gotta admit you're basically responsible for ending humanity as we know it like with AI Art so maybe videogames microtransactions aren't...that bad?
There's still a market for *good* games. Just do the opposite of what the big guys are doing and people will flock to you. I wish you great success!
How enlightening and depressing having all of this condensed into one space after watching it happen over the last 25 years of my gaming career. Thanks Josh!
good for us that we grew up with actually good games on super nintendo/ps1/ps2 and the likes
as a 94s kid, i can say i had a really awesome childhood, its a privilege
@@Baseraver Yeah, having to buy Street Fighter II 3 times to get the full game was so nice, nothing was predatory before evil Activision made CoD...
Thanks for this! As someone who’s been playing video games since the Atari but haven’t kept up with the gaming community closely, it was confusing to me why EA games and most games in general took a steep nosedive in story and playability. This makes so much sense, but is so sad. I’m wondering if this is why we don’t see games comparable to Bioshock or the Batman Arkham series anymore.🤷🏼♂️
The fact that microtransactions in Genshin Impact, Diablo Immortal, and FIFA beat out Elden Ring's sales is soul crushing. The pinnacle of Fromsoft development released after they defined a genre can't beat digital heroine.
Genshin Impact is good though. I can 36 star the abyss easy with a completely free to play account. Top tier soundtrack and VAs. Think of resource management as part of the game.
@@warmtoiletseat5596 nah genshin impact is just feels like another jrpg. Try hyperdimension neptunia
@@warmtoiletseat5596 genshin is a gacha game aka a litteral slot machine
@mattriones3057 1st thing, reading comprehension needs some work. 2nd thing, where do you think "souls-like" comes from?
It's not exactly surprising. Elden Ring has thus far sold 18 million copies, which is pretty respectable for a niche game (comparable to Monster Hunter for example). Genshin Impact on the other hand has 60 million monthly players. There's no figures for Ultimate Team as such, since EA combine the revenue across the three franchises it's present in, but those franchises are some of it's biggest games (FIFA for example has 111 million sales across the series). So I'd expect the revenue for microtransactions in those games to be higher than Elden Ring's sales, for much the same reason I'd expect McDonald's to make more on sales of diet cola alone than my local burger joint's entire annual revenue - one's a global franchise with 70 million daily customers; the other is a small takeaway that can barely handle 70 orders per day.
Dont forget that going to an arcade was a fun social experience in itself. Meeting new people and challenging them face to face at Street Fighter Alpha, or teaming up with a stranger to beat Time Crisis together, then becoming friends. You dont get that with online gaming (at least not in the same way anyways). And renting games was a reasonable thing. You paid a small amount and you got the entire game, not parts of a game. Sometimes you had to rent it multiple times, but it always felt worth it.
I agree. I remember playing against/teaming up with random players in “Run n’ Gun 2,” Crusin World, and NBA Hangtime in the arcade. Or, sometimes, bringing my PS2 in the common room of the dorm, leaving my multi tap with 3 controllers, playing Balder’s Gate, and waiting to see who would come up to play with me. No frills. No “achievements.” Just fun gameplay with friends.
And now we get banned for saying no-no words to people who don't care if we say them and use them themselves.
As an introvert... ew. Social stuff. I play alone.
also, in arcades you were paying to play for longer, which is very different to paying to skip a timer, progress faster or to unlock a character otherwise locked behind dozens of hours of meaningless slog. the former case has you buying more time because it is fun to play, the latter cases hold as a prerequisite that you are willing to pay to spend less time because the game quite intentionally has become unbearably boring.
😢 god the nostalgia
I see it as an abusive relationship. I don't see a difference when people are manipulated into a hard-to-leave mental drain. Break it off because it's only more painful the longer you give in.
i play Dungeon Fighter Online a lot, but have no money to spend on it (nor wouldn't even if i did), and actually enjoy the core gameplay loop. apparently this is more and more of a minority opinion the more endgame you get, and have apparently become something of a minor meme in DFO's community because i do endgame just barely making DPS cutlines from event handouts instead of... well, paying to win. i don't give a fat flying fuck about keeping up with the Joneses, so the Joneses get offended that a poor guy is polluting their scenery.
Unfortunately breaking off an abusive relationship is hard. I know my dad is evil, I know he's a horrible person, and I know he's hurting my mother, but I need money and he has it
Some people might need help to break away from it, if it was so "easy" to break away from i guess it wouldn't be so profitable
@@MadassSoerensen And the reason why this isn't easy is that, at the end of the day, gaming for many people isn't just a means of entertainment. Gaming is art, it's a form of expression, it's a part of many people's personalities and life experiencies. Saying that getting rid of something that formed you as a person is "easy" is an absurd lack of consideration.
It's things like this that make us increasingly convinced that taking any form of art and expression and turning it into a profit-oriented machine, held hostage by large corporations in exchange for "more complex experiences" was too expensive of a price to be paid
The thing is there are great games that don't do this being made. Maybe not as regularly as I'd like, but they're there. So it's more like breaking off an abusive relationship with a 5 whilst at the same time you've a bunch of 10's DMing you nudes lol. That _should_ make it easier.
I remember when games came complete and bug free once you paid for them. Those were the days 😊
Thats never been a thing
*cyberpunk has entered the chat*
@@frankgrimes7388 no, games were never bug free. Complete, yes
I miss the days of complete games released once with no updates, but games were never bug free unless its simple shit like arcade classics.
@@amanormaybeadragon the bugs were later patched in Expansions and updates atleast
AND PC modders Those people are the GOAT
@@amanormaybeadragonthere’s hundreds of games from back in the day that I’ve played through that don’t have noticeable bugs. They tested the crap out of games back then knowing that they were going on a cart etc and couldn’t be patched once released. Was great!
I still have an old gaming magazine from the time when the horse armor dlc pack for Oblivion was released. The magazine were heavily bashing it at the time when the price of it was only like 2,4€ or something like that. Now back then that seemed ridicilous and nobody would yet see 10-20€ epic skins being the norm. Its insane how crazy its become
Imagine going back in time and telling someone the new call of duty would be $70 selling $10 skins. Soon it will be $100 mark my words this dystopian reality is only the beginning.
When Modern Warfare 2 has been released, Activision started to sell map packs. 5 Maps, 15 Euro/Dollars. I was like "What?? 3€ for a SINGLE MAP? And two of them were just remade maps from older CoDs!" And boooooy, everyone bought that. I underestimated the lack of reflection among players. I always do. Around these years (2009), devs also stopped releasing editors. This could have also been a part of this video: not releasing editors to be the single source of new content which will cost money of course. Also remember when Bethesda was starting to monetize player generated content on Steam (then moved over to their own launcher for that)? Such companies try to make modders greedy and give them a framework to sell mods - just to get a part of that money and saying "this wasn't made by us, we are not responsible if the mod you paid for doesn't work and not even the modder needs to ensure the mod works."
Back in the day you had 1 skin and that's it. Now you have a choice that you can or don't have to purchase. I don't see a problem. Go into a restaurant and order a meal you don't get to add whatever you want for free do you?
Be thankful price of entry is same or less in a lot of cases. Games used to be $60 back when $100 was a lot of money. Now it's the same but that $100 is now $178.
@@nuclearpugg yeah and those people you told bought the game at the same price and will be like wait you get skins??? We just have this or that. And you don't get to choose.
@@thermalrain_yt9725 Games used to be full games when they had been released. Now every game is being developed with season passes in mind. Or in other words: cut content from your game and sell that for extra money. Plus, this content isn't even in your game yet. So you either pay 60$ for a cut game or 100$ for the real full game. If you are "lucky" you also get MTX to pay even more money. Please don't get fooled by the whiney industry that wants to make us believe they are poor. They just need more money to pay investors, CTOs, CEOs millions of dollars. Look at the numbers in the video, they earn more money than ever before. If EA isn't capable of making good games, the available money or the price tag of a AAA game is 100% not the problem.
The biggest horror which I feel is the final message that should have been on the end of this video is that there is no light at the end of the tunnel. There is currently no reason that this will reduce or stop. This is it now. Things are not going to improve.
Just don't give them your money, there are lots of onde stuff you can look up.
Why would anybody want them to improve? Just go play games made by companies or solo devs who want to make good games, who cares about companies like Blizzard or EA anymore? I haven't touched the western side of "AAA games" in almost a decade now (or rather I've barely touched it), and there was not a single year in which I didn't have enough great games to play in my free time. I do not understand any of this doom and gloom people keep bringing up...
The good news is that some legal authorities like the EU are starting to recognize that loot boxes are gambling and taking action accordingly. That's a start, but it needs to go much farther. I'm hoping game companies see how Epic just got hammered over Fortnite and start reconsidering their direction, but I'm not holding my breath.
@@mohandasjung I think not paying for mtx is the right thing to do to try to not encourage these practices, however the majority of people won't even think about whether it's an immoral business model, so it will continue to be very profitable. I don't think that consumers can solve this problem.
@@Jallenbah You as a consumer can solve this problem immediately (for yourself) by not engaging with the system and playing games that do not feature microtransactions.
Back in 2009 I worked as a steward on a gaming conference and there was a debate between the creators of Farmville and a representative of Epic Games about the future of videogames. Basically it was "is the future microtransactions or pure artisctic triple-A development?". I distinctively remember the look of dejection on the Epic Games rep's face as the room erupted in applause as the opposing argument won the room over with the profit projections. It was heartbreaking. I stopped buying mainstream releases just a couple of years later before the s*** really hit the fan. I feel like I really dodged a bullet.
there are some gems out there. elden ring and doom lack game passes and micro transactions.
@@Andrew_Sword Doesn't doom and elden ring has some kind of online drm?
You can still buy games like you can still buy movie tickets. You just have to be more selective when you do.
@@justinhammer3196 No you can't still buy games. You are only allowed to play them. You can't truly "own" games anymore.
@@IskenderCaglarM41B441 The license was a thing even when you had a physical copy. That's not new, but go live in a cabin off the grid and be your best self. I mean UA-cam is as poisonous as twitter and phones and computers are part of the problem.
I complain about it a lot, but this makes me even more grateful for one of my favorite games, No Mans Sky. It’s been going strong for 7 years, had multiple BIG updates, and still has many more coming, and they have NEVER charged extra for any of it. 😳
@@AAA-b3y Bedrock's microtransactions don't actually paywall anything other than emotes. You can still play the entire game and with any maps, skins, or addons you can find online and have the exact same experience as someone who bought content on the marketplace.
I was born in the 80s. Gaming and I kind of grew up together. I watched these things happen firsthand, from start to finish. I remember the dismay I felt at seeing Maple Story, the rise of energy/stamina systems, forced socialization (through locking progression or advantages behind it), and microtransactions. Not to mention...ugh...ads in games. This sums up so well all the feelings I've talked about so many times over the years, seeing all this happen.
I first remember seeing in-game ads in Battlefield 2142 way back in 2006 lol and people were annoyed then, I'm sure they are so much worse now though.
Ads in games can be done in a way it doesn’t bug me, all the businesses in Crazy Taxi like KFC, Tower Records, Fila etc.. just feels like a part of the world, but it has to be done with some sensibility. A sports arena having sponsor banners mirrors it’s real world counterpart which I’m fine with. But I don’t want Elden Ring brought to you by Red Lobster
I'd like to ask what was the issue with Maple Story? I looked it up but what about it frustrated the consumer base in your time?
Ads are used you do don't pay for the game, like all mobile games developers need a return.
What’s wrong with energy/stamina systems?
Remember gamers...."You will own nothing and be happy." And if you apply that to today's gaming, it will get worse as time progresses by 2030 and beyond. Good video, Josh.
At Disney World you own nothing, and that's the happiest place in the world.
well thought video, lets hope it stays available to public and not being removed due to "angry business owners"
Bad thing is I very rarely get excited for new games anymore, and haven't been for like the past 5 years. Good thing is my backlog with amazing games is larger than what I'll be able to finish during my lifetime! And if I for some reason would get locked out of my 1300 games steam account, I rest easy knowing most games are safely preserved on the high seas.
WELL, I OWN GUNS....... AND THAT'LL DO! REMEMBER YUVAL NOAH HARARI AND KLAUS SCHWAB WANT YOU HOOKED ON COMPUTER GAMES SO YOU STAY A GOOD SLAVE!!
@@TheDisturbed0ne1 Fax. I thought I would always play the latest releases once I got off my potato PC. Now that I got a decent PC, there's little to no worthwhile AAA releases. I constantly find myself playing the older games I missed or those hidden indie gems.
I have largely been ignoring video games for many years now. For a while, this was strange to me, because in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, I was such a big gamer. But something just felt wrong, and I drifted away more and more. It was like the soul and art was slipping away, replaced with flashiness and hyper-commercialization. I never could quite put my finger on it, then this video here put so many puzzle pieces together.
There are quite good ones out there, like Inside.
Nintendo still makes great games without micro-transactions.
You should try playing the Dark Souls games.
@@Mzee1084 RE2 remake was tight too, Japan always deliver.
There's a ton of soul and art in the indie game scene. As with everything else, a handful of huge companies are trying to squeeze every drop out of their customers, rather than trying to make great things that will make money while making people happy. Small developers and passion projects are often the antithesis to this. For every Farmville out there, there's a Stardew Valley - a better game on the same basic theme made by a smaller (solo, actually) team, that you purchase one time and then play and play and play for the love of it.
At the end, when you were listing all the culprits, I believe you should've concluded that we, the players, are to blame for allowing this to happen and to still, so many years later, continue to strongly signal game companies that they are right for making the box grow more and more and more over time. Thanks for the great video!
Smart consumers who understand what's going on and simply say 'no' and honest game reviews & media which point out this stuff have to be part of the answer to reducing the number of car crash monetisation games out there. So thanks Josh for an informative and interesting video!
All of this stops, when psychology becomes a professionally teached subject in school.
Major games now release without any battlepass, no shops, no mts. Get out the good professional reviews, amd then a couple weeks later BAM, all the shitty tactis in youc face
Smart consumers is an oxymoron.
I think we'll see smarter consumers, though possibly over the scale of a generation gap as the new kids grow up with these systems and don't have 40 years of personal experience with older systems to compare against.
In particular, we'll likely see the in game currency idea getting more streamlined, as people get more used to having to do that mental math and the "trick" no longer works as well. We'll likely also start seeing more backlash against the most egregious examples of currency bundles "not quite" matching purchases.
My predictions over the mid-long term:
- Things like skins and other cosmetics I imagine are here to stay. They're fun, they don't harm the game (usually) and they don't _really_ need to be tied into the other tricks in order to sell reasonably well.
- As noted, I suspect currency bundles will become more streamlined. Instead of having a 90 token bundle and a 100 token item, they'll have maybe a 150 token bundle with the 100 token item and a small (probably consumable) item for 25 or 50 tokens, along with the 200 token item existing (so players could choose between buying one token bundle and getting the 100 token item + some throwaways or buy two bundles and get both items). Not because companies don't like the "annoy you until you buy more", but because there's so many of these systems that players are just going to get used to retaining a small amount of currency in all of their games so that annoyance drive just won't be there anymore.
- I don't see in-game currencies as a whole going away though. They have a major legitimate use that isn't related to tricking players: they significantly simplify game stores across regions. The store can have just a handful of per-region items (the token bundles), while everything else can be completely region- and currency-agnostic. The company has less work to do to keep up to date with local currency fluctuations. Players (and streamers and whoever else) have a common frame of reference no matter where they happen to be in the world, etc.
- I suspect gacha and other gambling systems will eventually get regulated to the point of non-existence. Governments (particularly the US government) have been hesitant to poke their heads into this arena so far, but all it will take is one major story about some 12 year old who sold his parent's home for a digital pony or whatever nonsense to cause sufficient public outcry for politicians to take note (and probably make a complete mess of whatever legislation they introduce, because of course they will). Not sure where this will leave The Box as many of the other evils within rely in some way or other on a gambling system. But not all of them.
- Battle passes probably won't go away, but they'll likely morph into mini-expansions - ie: dropping the "work to unlock the thing you just paid for" part of the deal. The initial purchase will likely still be time-limited to keep that FOMO rolling, but I suspect the completion time limits will eventually get phased out.
I'm sure there's more but this is long enough already. Keep in mind all the things I suggest are not going to happen on the 1-2 year time frame. More like the 10-20 year time frame. (Which is well long enough for some new and completely unexpected form of trickery to arrive that makes all of that irrelevant. Can only wait and see I suppose.)
Most games have Twitter shrines worshipping the games. Nothing will change. Look out for Ring 2027! 🔥😂
The book 'evil by design' is a must read for any participant in gaming or social media. It talks about cow clicker which was built only to illustrate evil game design tricks, but then took Facebook by storm
That feeling when your meta critic of evil game design turns into a saturated genre unabashedly using the same (or worse) strategies than the ones you were parodying. Gaming is a joke
What went wrong is when people started calling it "gaming" and themselves "gamers". "Gaming" was a euphemism for gambling, and "gamers" for gamblers, particularly those who kept coming back, and that was for a reason. Playing video games is a vice, like smoking or alcohol. It's a mostly harmless one. But make it your identity, elevate "gamer" above "drinker" or "smoker", and you paint *"CHUMP"* on your back.
@@MegaZeta ah yes a label is responsible for capitalism
@@MegaZeta The crazy pills...
This reads like moon landing conspiracy.
You know that board games are also games and you could be a board gamer (or gamer for short), therefore board games have tons of monetization tricks, anti-consumer behaviors and deliberately frustrating game design to encourage the gamers to buy more for their board game?
Oh wait... No...
You saw a correlation (the word gamer) and created an entire fiction to tie that correlation to causation, while no such link exists.
This is simply a few companies trying micro transactions and other companies seeing how successful it is and copying it... And now we have today...
@@monchete9934 Feels like Monopoly all over.
This video might become an evergreen relic in the days of video game monetization discussions
I blame EA. They may not have been the first to monetize, but they have always been the most agressive in my experience. I still remember the first time I found a single-use code in one of their physical games and realized "this game is never going to be sold used because of this code." They're the literal worst and I try desperately never to give them any of my money.
I’ve been complaining to my friends about this over each new monetization tactic I see for 6 years. I was against battle passes from the get go because I realized how it was giving me FOMO. For years people I’ve talked to, have often used mental gymnastics to justify these abusive manipulative tactics. Especially if it’s one of their favorite franchises/games.
all that means is that they liked the game and you didn't. That's ALL it means.
@@darinherrick9224 Somebody didn't watch the video. Players should play games, not vice versa. Not everything is an opinion.
@@digitalnomad9985 “not everything is an opinion”
Ooh, that sounds nice. I’m definitely using that in the future, thanks
@@darinherrick9224 I don't know if you're just an annoying contrarian type or someone who just wants to argue, but I don't think you watched the video at all. Please explain to me how me not liking or liking game has to do with a game using psychological techniques to create addictive behavior. There are so many games I like that have been tainted with intentional paywalls or grinds just to make people pay.
FOMO is a good psychological tactic for marketing IMO, its like the social media marketing tactics spilling over into the other areas of cyber space
This video is absolutely incredible. You explain everything so well to the point where it was making me angry to see how blatantly predatory gaming has become.
don't hate the player, hate the game.
The game companies are gaming you out of money. That is their game.
@@tensevo No, the players buying MTX are just as pivotal to the problem.
Aye, sometimes when i play random games, i can notice the behavior and how the game's shops trist to adjust to fit me, and my quests or whatever, its as if the game knows that i need theese things to progress, so it offers me some part of the items for a sum of cash, insane..
Gaming today is what happens when the main motive is profit and not a hobby or a passion.
I love the BIAS here. Of course Josh doesn't want to say one word about the GAMERs WHO KEEP BUYING THAT SHIT.
Yeah it's the companies fault of course. It's not the fault of the STUPID BRAIN D PEOPLE who keep buying year after year this shit.
Nah nah it's all the companies fault ... it's not my fault... me the below average IQ internet loser who has no job, no gf, no family and keeps living on welfare and watches stupid streamers, sending them my welfare money too, while also paying for loot boxes in games and battle passes and cosmetics..... nah it's the company's fault not my fault.
( mocking sarcastically the people who spend money on those things )
___________________________________________
Yeah right.
NO!
Its YOUR fault in the first place for spending money on it you room temperature IQ having organism that should not exist.
It's your fault for buying that shit.
*It's not the companies ruining gaming, its the CONSUMERS WHO ARE RUINING GAMING.*
You need to include that the horse armor pack appeared to protect your horse and only after it was purchased was it found to not do so.
Really? That's such a scummy move!
@@min24434 afaik it was just called Horse armor and no description whatsoever
It was a 1.50. Stop blaming Bethesda and MS for every evil in gaming.
@@justinhammer3196 It might be 1.50 now, it wasn't then. And I bought it specifically so my horse would stop dying when it decided to join me in battle literally every time.
I mean, it's ARMOR. Protection is implied. Imagine if it had been armor for your player, and then was as useless as the armor for your horse. Everyone would have lost their shit.😂
NAILED IT!!! Best video I've ever seen on this topic, especially the influence & impact of FB games like Farmville.
Videos like yours that spread awareness to this issue are the way to fight it. Knowing the predatory manipulation schemes is the first step. Personally I do what I can by never buying games with any sort of microtransactions, bad DRM like Denuvo, or DLCs that are obviously cut content. I will never take part in fueling those greedy practices or give money to such companies.
Yes awareness is important especially on younger audience needs youtubers and/or influencer to spread the concept that microtransaction is not cool.
This kind of monetization strives because people doesn't know or care enough
Another thing I don't like is how unknown the monetization of a game is until you have played it for a while. It's impossible to get any information about it from the marketing information released before launch. The developers almost never talk about how the game is monetized even after release. And for a lot of games you won't even know the true extent of it until you reach the endgame and suddenly hit a mile high paywall!
For most aspects of a game, you can just go to the official site and get the information, but they never ever reveal anything about how much money you can spend in the game.
I can't even begin to imagine the total price of all DLC in Modern Warfare or any similarly monetized game!
I stopped paying and playing newly released games for that exact reason...either pay and play later at much less cost or raise that skull&bones flag once more! Arrrr!
Sounds like one more reason to NOT pre-order games
Even worse is a new, insidious, trend of "patching" in monetization schemes after the game launched. So early reviews using pre-launch copies, after-launch reviews from youtubers, and even word of mouth will not mention the monetization on account of it not existing!
So then you go buy the game a few weeks later and.... it gets patched with anti-player nickel and dime bullshit. The published reviews are already out and didn't update for the new monetization schemes nor does the box the game came in mention anything about additional online purchases (nor are there any laws forcing retailers/companies to update the boxes!). So people will see "just a game," buy it, bring it home, and after downloading the mandatory update patch...
Realize they've been fucking hoodwinked.
That's the level of disdain and contempt these fuckwitted parasites have towards us consumers. That's how little they think of us. Far from creating a better product to generate more sales, they are only "innovating" in more fraudulent and exploitative business models while pushing continuous gaslighting campaign into brainwashing us into accepting this horse shit.
Games worth $70 bucks now? This shit isn't worth a single fucking penny how badly they've degraded the quality of "AAA" products!
Oh, back to your original point... reviewers don't mention monetization because they are pressured into silence. If they are too negative of a game, they get early-access revoked. Without early-access, they can't publish a review in time for the launch window. Without an early review, they won't get the clicks needed to sustain ad revenue. Or in other words, reviewers have to play nice with the big studios or their careers are ruined.
BUt not even that level of control was enough... hence the few games like Crash Team Racing that snuck in MTX after the game already came out....
@@Hunne2303 Please teach me how to be a pirate on windows 11. I didn't have a computer for so long
@@duncanlutz3698 Is there a UA-camr or review site that only focus on these things? Would be nice to have updated information on this for games.
What a phenomenal video and explanation! As a child of the 80's, I've seen this whole journey and you've summarized it brilliantly. Thanks for filling in all the history and details!
As a fellow child of the 80's, I've seen it as well.
'70s kid here, and I agree entirely. You didn't really see it much at all then, but man does it ever have some parallels in dice-based RPGs over the decades.
*'80s
The apostrophe isn't for pluralization, but to take the place of the omitted millennium and century.
Also a child of the 80’s and I’ve seen this journey too. I don’t remember the history of some of this stuff though. I felt my personal happy balance was around the era of Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas Oblivion, Skyrim and similar games from that era. I buy a full game with a full story and ending and that’s fine. But later there are expansions that add more quests, weapons ect and I considered that fair more or less.
Admittedly I didn’t like the stupidly nonsensical default ending of Fallout 3 because many of your companions were immune to radiation so forcing you or another human into the chamber was dumb. And I was so happy when Broken Steel fixed it. But to be honest I don’t know if Bethesda deliberately did it it sell more Broken Steel expansions or whether they really did just concede that the ending sucked and fixed it as part of the larger Broken Steel story. But either way the DLC contained a lot of new story so I’m fine with it.
I’m of two minds about Fallout New Vegas. It was great but the game felt unfinished without all the woven pieces of story from each DLC. But it had none of the modern crap in it at least.
I love the BIAS here. Of course Josh doesn't want to say one word about the GAMERs WHO KEEP BUYING THAT SHIT.
Yeah it's the companies fault of course. It's not the fault of the STUPID BRAIN D PEOPLE who keep buying year after year this shit.
Nah nah it's all the companies fault ... it's not my fault... me the below average IQ internet loser who has no job, no gf, no family and keeps living on welfare and watches stupid streamers, sending them my welfare money too, while also paying for loot boxes in games and battle passes and cosmetics..... nah it's the company's fault not my fault.
( mocking sarcastically the people who spend money on those things )
___________________________________________
Yeah right.
NO!
Its YOUR fault in the first place for spending money on it you room temperature IQ having organism that should not exist.
It's your fault for buying that shit.
*It's not the companies ruining gaming, its the CONSUMERS WHO ARE RUINING GAMING.*
We really need the world governments to get together and put rules onto this. Especially US, Europe, AUS and BRICS..
1. In-game coins can't be sold in packs, players should be able to buy whatever number of coins they desire.
2. Paid XP multipliers and battle passes banned, all players or no players deserve to get these awards for playing.
3. Items that aren't entirely cosmetics (new characters and vehicles) can't be bought.
4. etc
The only thing likely to be banned is gacha on the basis of being gambling. A much more fruitful endeavor would be forming a consumer advocacy network that warns people about dangerous practices and certifies games that don’t use them, and encourage people to only buy certified games.
This is why I believe people aren't as excited for newer games. They're not fun anymore, just addicting. There are very few exceptions, at least in the AAA section. It's mostly why many go for indies or stay with the old games
Thankfully Im 50. I can go back a decade and completely forgotten everything about something and be amazed by just downloading a free mod (or 25463 of them). My lastest skyrim run feels like it was released today and mods remove all the shop functions those pigs put in. Indeed, mods can remove every single attempt at being pigs from nearly every game.
Totally.
Games are still fun. You're just old and your dopamine receptors have worn out. The reason people play older games is because it reminds them of a simpler time when they were kids, not because the games are actually better. Nostalgia helps release dopamine.
This is not to say that I approve of the microtransaction system. I don't.
@@babbisp1 good games are fun, AAA games are not.
I still play new Indies and there are absolute gems among them that make me feel like a kid. But every time (with extremely rare exceptions) I see AAA title I wanna throw out. It's not just about monetization, it's about the whole design, they are all the same and extremely boring. Big companies don't make good original games anymore
@@babbisp1 I used to think that as well, but then I went back and played the games that I used to play (as well as older games that I had missed). Still fun.
Thats why you should start playing indie games. The developers of indie games put passion and ideas in their games to make the best experience for the players. They most of the time don´t care about battle passes and stuff like this. They just want the game to be fun.
STATIONEERS!😄👍
I did that with MineCraft. Notch is such a let down (but for a while there, it was amazing). I agree your position though, investing in the smaller gamer creators is important (just, their not magically above the same kinds of temptations of that box).
🤣🤣🤣
No bro, I want to play AAA games
As far as games with an original experience for me, the ones that worked out that way were 4 out of 5 indie games. Sure, some are a bit shallow or ill-conceived, but the real original gems are there. (And I say that as a gamemaker out of Spinnaker and Trillium, if any one remembers those, and with a few current titles of my own.)
This so crazy, I try to talk to my friends and co-workers about how I won't buy "x " game because they have predatory systems in them and they look at me like it's not that big of a deal or I'm getting too old for gaming.
Gamer for roughly 25yrs. This was an important video. A lot of games are simply one-armed-bandits. The gambling psychology behind it is scary. That's why I love Horizon: Zero Dawn so much, which I started to play recently. Buy, enjoy, that's it.
I was a dev for a Casual game distributor/studio. For a few years I wrote games for them. In my last few years there, they hired people to come in and build addiction loops, which then we would put a game on top of. Instead of the opposite. Those people they hired did not come cheap either. Frequently they were paid 4x the salary of a developer. Smarter ones would gets a percentage of the game’s purchases sold.
Players only have themselves to blame. They said no to subscription models and this is the hell we got.
It's legalized social engineering.
Such a sad reality we live in...
@@canaldecasta -- People chose this reality. No one is obligating them to play those games. Vote with your time and money.
It's not like games contain nicotine. These businesses exploit your weaknesses, so instead of getting stronger you complain? Vote with your time and money, don't buy and don't play crap, and don't work for such businesses.
I used to work in ad agencies as a developer many years ago. I remember one day the copywriter telling me that all he does is "sell the Devil". That phrase stuck with me forever, and knowing how the corporate machine is literally like The Nothing from Neverending Story consuming everything for pure greed, it all makes sense. Every industry and creative outlet has been consumed by this relentless money-making machine, which is fueled by the marketing teams, who are literally at the forefront of selling the idea of chasing rainbows... P2W for the loss.
You have coined P2W4L for me now.
Capitalism! Woo hoo
*on my comment: unironically reads as Paywall. Paying for a wall between you and enjoyment: P2W4L.
It's so funny listening to this and self reflecting... Star Wars The Old Republic was the one that got me. I think over the coarse of 4 years or so I spent around $3200 on Cartel Coins for cosmetics. I had no idea at the time that these were the things that were going on psychologically. This wasn't the place for this subject I think, but I think depression plays as much a part of sales for these things as the competitive nature of things. People with depression buy these cosmetics and performance enhancing competitive microtransactions to try and make themselves feel better, which is funny because they often make you feel worse after the fact because, at least in my case, at the time I didn't really have that disposable income, but I spent anyway because it would make me feel better at least for a short period of time. Anyway, thanks for the video Joshey Boy.
Yea, I agree with you. I kinda see myself there in hindsight. Tho I did know the psychology at play, I still did it for the temp time that I didn’t feel depressed.
Bro, that sucks for you and what you failed to reap from the experience. I, on the other hand, have also spent hundreds of dollars on cartel coins for the sake of buying cosmetics that appealed to me, yet I knew what I was getting into and don't regret it at all. I enjoyed being able to outfit my characters to my pleasing at that time and do not feel that any of that spending went to waste.
@@MysticRonin101 It doesn't suck so much, it was still a learning experience. It's just funny knowing what was going on and how it was actually designed. It's even worae now. Now you have the packs, loot boxes, and there is an extra loot box you get as a "reward" every single time. The packs used to give you a selection of items. Now one of those is guarenteed another lootbox that draws from the entire catalogue, further reducing your chabces of getting what you want so that is when I said no more. The thing I'm upset about is just how greedy BioWare is, or has to be because of EA, and how little you get as well as how much the game has been run into the ground at the same time.
@@xJAKEx117x a fool and his money..
@@Blox117 Them losing their money doesn't matter to me at all, they could go broke and I wouldn't care. The problem arises when their spending decisions influence the gaming market to such a degree that games become trash, because trash is what sells best.
the obsession with realism and being cinematic is what killed most of gaming to me
Wayyy too focused on graphics these days. You’re totally right. No good reason to abandon story, character development, etc in favor of layering 10 textures over a trash can.
@@nickthompson1812
What objectively needs to be understood
is That Graphics exclusively DOES NOT
make a Good Video Game at all.
4 Very Important Qualities That make
a Good to Excellent Quality Video Game
are Compelling Factor, Captivating Factor,
Amazing Imagination and
Fantastic Quality,
Period Dot Dash.
I am 37 years old
by the way,
Black American male.
@@VoidDweller086You could be a little green alien and you'd be right all the same. 😎🤟
Story and gameplay…if those sucks then your game just suck.
@Imufur oh the Playstation exclusive Syndrome: Realism, Cinematic, must appeal to everyone, over the shoulder cam.
I miss the golden days of gaming where you buy a game and it's complete game without microtransactions and it has everything like the bonus behind the scenes, art concepts, even cool installation setup.
I still remember the cool installation setup of Red Alert 2
Team Cherry one of the real ones
Remember the days when every subsequent release was better than the last?
Stuff like that still happens and that's usually the only games I actually buy.
I always pirate games that has gutted itself to sell as DLC.
I still remember sitting through the installation of Rollercoaster tycoon 1 and 2, Cod 2 and Return to castle wolfenstein. They were magical. If I remember correctly, On RCT there was music being played during the installation, More specifically, The merry go round theme which made it all the better.
Best game installation screen in history, good memories were had with that disc man...
I've always seen these things and acknowledged them (and avoided them when I could), but having it all explained at once like this makes me profoundly sad for a medium that is a huge part of my life.
Browsergames and flashgames never get enough credit for making things a lot worse. The game dev advice section of Kongregate had entire lectures about predatory monetization methods that still shock people today, 15 years ago. Farmville certainly didn't invent any of the limited playtime systems, those were already a staple of "free" games sites, facebook was just a big new site.
An important aspect of this is that a lot of people who started game dev as a hobby and only later joined the industry, were raised on those practices, even before said practices were known to the general public.
Yeah, I do actually remember some flash games releasing paid expansions or paid cosmetics. Granted I never saw a gambling element, but now that you mention it, microtransactions have been in gaming for a very long time.
I was thinking Farmville was a bit later to the party. I didn't think Kongregate and sites like it were the biggest culprit, but rather private endeavors, like Evony. I feel like Evony should have been there in the place of Farmville, but I also can't guarantee which proceeded the other, nor ignore how much more Farmville rode on Facebook advertisement over the paid advertisement methods non-Facebook games used.
@@Altemeous Most games that were on flashgame sites like Kongregate and Armor Games, werec developed by small studios or individual people and one more than one of those sites. A lot of the same games were on Facebook too, so there was a lot of overlap.
I just remember being curious about game development at the time and the Kongregate dev section was throwing around stuff like "average revenue per daily active user" and that I saw "whale" there quite a few years before it became a widely known term.
I also remember that when I first installed Steam, the games on it were still far less predatory than "fake MMO" types of flashgames that existed at the same time. So I'm overall pretty sure that in-browser games turned "bad" a good while before downloadable games did.
Farmville was a little late, but not the company behind it -- as Josh pointed out, it was Zynga, with Mafia and the thousand reskins of it out on just about every social media site, paying into their wallets, and often not giving you cross progress, so your Werewolf Clan over on MySpace could surely fight Clans over on Facebook, but booting it up on facebook? Nope, square 1 because that's a different 'account', so you either looked how you could pay to catch up with your progress on a different site, or just focus one game per media.
you forgot mobile games.
Very well put video. Really summarizes everything well
This video should be played at hearings of the office of consumer protection, gambling etc. It is accurate and quickly presents the essence of the problem, they can go into details later, the important thing is that they quickly understand what the problem is.
2:53 "Good games make the most money" wasn't the standard mentality in the arcade industry at the time. Their mentality was "regardless of quality, only 1 out of 3 games make money, therefore game developers don't deserve to get raises for completely random successes" (this comes from a GDC talk from an arcade game developer).
12:29 "They were joining their mafia" lol, I love that phrasing!
The Mafia comment wasn't phrasing. There used to be (still is?) a mobile game which was a clan versus clan style of game. You had a base, an army of goons and you joined up in mafias (clans) to go fight other mafias. He's probably referencing that one.
@@Dalinos Clash of Clans?
@@DLBBALL No, Clash of Clans is its own separate game. This game was an actual mafia simulator. Different hierarchies, different weapons etc.
@@eyeofsibyl not Mafia City, the game was called Mafia Wars. It was a Zynga game that predated Farmville (I believe) in the quite early days of Facebook. I feel like there may have been other mafia related Facebook games, actually. There was kind of an explosion of Facebook games at the time.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_Wars
Gaming used to be so magical to me when I was younger, I feel robbed of it due to the greed as of late, it's really sad man.. and I know its partially due to me being older and seeing behind the curtain more, but it still makes me just a little bit sad every time I play a game that only really cares how much money I spend rather than how much fun I'm having..
but playing for example elden ring and feeling the magic proves that its not us being older, its the games that just dont try anymore
it is for this reason I enjoy indie games most usually
I actually feel that but ironically on the other hand accepted the new model p2w and even support it with my money YIKES 💀
@@Totemion Elden Ring is a bad example.
Another aspect of this whole thing especially when it comes to loot boxes and gachas, is the role of social media in all of this. Because whenever someone wins big, they want to share it with other people, while when someone spends money and gets nothing, well they probably feel bad and won't speak of it.
This creates a gap between how the randomness is perceived and the actual average experience, and game companies know that very well. That's a big reason they push social media through in-game rewards among other things.