That's even more depressing somehow.

MGSV was actually pretty decent about PP - at times it's aggressive and they do a few annoying things, but default gameplay there's no over the top tone mapping or anything crazy going on filter or motion blur wise. Some person decided to make a video showing off how ****ty the game would look after some tone mapping:



I think that's partly why I put so much time into that game: it's far less of an eyesore than most damn games.



Not surprised, Nintendo's games just <sometimes> suck for other reasons.

I thought about KotOR but I dismissed it because the revelation doesn't really integrate with a story where you've been the bad guy the entire time. I also dismissed strategy games as their not really character driven. Balance of Power I never played. It's on the list too.

Does Balance of Power have a character driven story line?

I've only played through KotOR once. Does the story play significantly different if you're a Phillip K. Dick the entire time?

In response to the controversy, EA has temporarily turned off microtransactions in Battlefront 2. Credits and loot boxes still exist, but they can now only be obtained through gameplay (unless you are one of the stupid, lucky, and hopefully rare people who have already paid to win).

Because this is EA, you should understand what it means: microtransactions will be fully re-enabled, and possibly made far more vicious and manipulative, the very moment their PR department says it's okay. Until then, enjoy this broken miserable grindy game, that will have you begging for loot boxes by the time they're finally put back in.

https://venturebeat.com/2017/11/16/star-wars-battlefront-ii-microtransactions-go-offline-until-ea-can-make-changes/

lmao

I goddamn wish I could have listened to that conversation.

How's the wife, it's a shame, c'est la vie, do what you think is best for EA, it's okay if we have to downgrade our projections to get in front of this.

CEOs are boring dude.

That's not to say Disney didn't tell EA to drop IAPs, just that Disney didn't tell EA to drop them.

S&P 500 CEO isn't gonna give the bull horns to another S&P 500 CEO. The president of DICE, maybe. The call would have been cordial and as indirect as possible to maintain the illusion that Disney has licensed Star Wars at arms length and is not responsible for this gambling thing.

Whatever rendition of this talk we proles can imagine is gonna be much more interesting than what was actually said, and is probably faithful to whatever was actually meant.

True, real life is way more mundane than that. Probably why I'm liking The Wire so much.

In other news, this sparked an investigation in Belgium regarding loot boxes.

Battlefront 2 update: multiplayer is clunky and not very fun, campaign is actually really good but is very short with a bunch of weird time skips--it feels like a sampler platter of setpieces from a longer, better game that we won't get bc they were too busy making lootbox battle royale.

Sounds weirdly how I expected it to be, and still costs too much even at $25

Games are undervalued in general and it'd be impossible to make & sell a game like this at $25 even WITH the predatory microtransactions. If it was a standalone campaign I'd say it was a little shrimpy for a full-price retail game, but as a side thing for a mainly multiplayer title I'd say it's pretty fair.

Oof.

Games are and aren’t undervalued. Pricing is really complicated and the AAA industry isn’t being honest about what they’re doing. The short version is that their marginal cost for revenue is very low so they can use aggressive price discrimination in both directions; it doesn't cost them anything to print/upload an extra copy, so they can offer deep discounts for some players, in addition to standard upselling that lets them get more money out of the players who would be willing to spend more on a game. Current AAA pricing strategies effectively mean everybody pays the highest amount they would be willing to pay. The total revenue is the sum of all of those highests. Even if the average price people pay is lower than the true clearing price (and therefore the game is technically underpriced), the total revenue is much higher. The $60 base price basically doesn't matter, because it's not what the market is paying for games in aggregate. EA might not be good at making games, but if anybody can nail down the profit maximizing strategy, it's them.

The flip side is that EA also wastes a ****load of money. They posted $1.2bn R&D expense over the last FY versus $2.4bn administrative and non-R&D overhead. They are a tremendously wasteful company. The EA tax effectively triples their game budgets, and in turn effectively triples the amount of value they have to extract from you to survive. So it's false that you couldn't make and sell a game like this at $25, because once you cut out the chaff that's exactly what they're doing. But what you said is also technically true, because EA has way more than 3x the operations budget of any more efficiently run company. They can tank these inefficiencies and still get a game like this released, while smaller developers aren't going to have access to enough money no matter how smartly they spend it. (Just pretend I've made some snarky remark about capitalism here.)

Edit: Grammar, clarity

Yeah I'd pay like a dollar to check it out, that's like my highest.

Why not negative dollars

Hey wait a minute, I think I just thought of a way to get people hooked on gambling.

By the way, if anybody here is working on a game and is attracted to an EA style business model, I have a very specific and wonkish word of warning for you. Economists call this sort of practice converting consumer surplus. If you sell a game at its clearing price of $30 for example (the one profit maximizing price), but a certain customer would have still bought it at up to $100, their surplus is $70. That's the extra value they get out of your game, which you didn't charge them anything for. By definition the people who get the biggest surplus are the people who enjoy your game the most, the people who will promote your products to others for free just because they want to talk about how great their experience is. Your biggest fans. Every dollar of surplus they walk away with goes toward good will. If you really want, you can make a withdrawal against that good will through microtransactions, DLC, season passes, deluxe editions, and whatever else. But make no mistake here, every dollar you extract from your biggest fans is a dollar less love going your way. EA can afford that. You probably can't.

Here, I did a thing. Read this if you didn't understand what I posted above.



This graph is the most basic demand-supply model you'll ever see. It shows a simple linear relationship between price, the quantity producers are willing to make, and the quantity that consumers are willing to buy, within a single market. This is the first economic model you ever learn.

One way to understand this graph is to imagine that each horizontal line (e.g. row of pixels) represents a single person's game consumption. They're sorted by the maximum amount they're willing to spend on games every year, which is indicated by the blue line. The "person" in the bottom horizontal line is willing to spend a lot of money. The "person" in the top horizontal line isn't willing to spend any money at all.

The same reasoning applies to producers.



This graph is the same as the previous graph, but it also illustrates revenue. Revenue is the total amount of money that people spend to buy goods. This is equal to price*min{qty demanded, qty supplied}.

The revenue-maximizing price is always the point where demand equals supply (where the demand and supply lines intersect).



Efficient free markets are said to seek this revenue-maximizing price, which is also called the equilibrium or clearing price.

Economists actually say this is the profit-maximizing price, but that's only because they say a lot of other things about how firms determine their efficient output levels. I'm going to call it the revenue-maximizing price here because it's easier to understand.

The green line marks the actual quantity that this market will produce. The red line marks the actual price that this market will set.



It probably didn't seem like it at first, but this simple graph tells you a lot about a market.

The gray area here is firm revenue. Clearly so: the area of this rectangle is price * quantity sold.

The blue area represents consumer surplus. As I mentioned above, one way to interpret this graph is that each horizontal row of pixels represents a specific person. The people in the bottom half of this graph would be willing to spend more for their games than they're currently being charged. The blue area shows the money they saved by spending only the equilibrium price.

The orange area represents the pocket change of poor people who can't afford any games. Like consumer surplus, this is value "lost" to the industry because they don't offer any products those customers can afford.


In the next post, I'll work on making these graphs more realistic.

In the previous post, I showed a very simple (linear) demand supply model. That model isn't really realistic for games, and I'll explain why in this post.



The first problem is that games aren't like most products. Normally the quantities of a product firms produce at a certain price is constrained by their efficiency and the costs of inputs (the marginal cost of production). In games, however, it doesn't cost much - or, frequently, anything - to make an additional copy of a game to sell. Instead, the governing factor is high up-front fixed costs.

This version of the graph reflects that. Below a certain price, firms can't justify making any AAA games. Above that price, they can produce an unlimited supply.

(Aside: I have big problems with this model in a prescriptive sense. However, it accurately represents how most software and game companies are managed and actually behave.)



The second problem is that games are a luxury good. People don't really need games to survive, so they're not going to put up with very high prices. Demand will fall off quickly as prices increase.

This version of the graph is more accurate, but it's not at all complete. Pricing is complicated. For example, sometimes you can have something called Veblen goods, where demand actually increases as price increases (because it seems more exclusive). If anybody could measure an actual demand curve, I doubt it would look as sane as this one.



Here is the above graph, with a revenue plot included. As before, the revenue-maximizing price is where the demand and supply lines intersect.

(Aside: Note that the revenue-maximizing price is the minimum price that will permit the studio to make the game. This is a direct consequence of running a software company or a game studio under an assumed zero marginal cost. If you've ever wondered why the game industry is the way it is, this graph goes a long way toward explaining it.)



Same as above. Red line marks off the equilibrium price, green line marks off the equilibrium quantity. Note that because of the particulars of this market, the green line simply shows the number of copies people buy.



Filled in, same as above.

In the next (final) post, I'll explain how DLC and microtransactions work.

As I said in the end of my very first post, when the game industry sells just a single version of a game at a single price, they're leaving a lot of money on the table. Some die-hard fans are willing to spend a lot more money to get the game. Studios would love to charge them that extra money! And some people can't afford games at their full price. Studios would rather they paid more, but you can't get blood from a stone; it doesn't cost game studios anything extra to give them a copy, and getting them to pay something is still better than nothing.

In economics, charging different people different prices is called price discrimination. The game industry uses price discrimination to get that extra money out of their players, a process called capturing consumer surplus.

Here are three ways they do it.



The first way is by providing multiple editions of every game. Most people will buy some kind of deluxe edition, because there are real benefits to doing so, and they can afford it. Some people can't afford the deluxe edition, though, so they have to settle for the standard edition.

There's a bit more going on here. You might have heard of something called Goldilocks pricing. That's a real thing. This graph doesn't try to show the psychological effect of having multiple editions, only the consequence of having a cheaper version that poorer people can afford to buy.

Note that adding this lesser edition actually created new consumer surplus! That's why things like coupons are super duper great most of the time. Here, though, it's... eh:


The second form of price discrimination is charging higher prices to the people who are willing and able to pay.

Just to emphasize this point: the companies are offering some real benefits here. Consumers have the choice to pay higher prices or not. The point is, these extra benefits fall within their acceptable price range, so they're willing to pay them. I'm not criticizing the availability of things like DLC per se. Regardless of any benefit to the player, though, this is exactly how such things work, and why game studios do them.


That brings us to microtransactions and loot boxes.

**** microtransactions. Seriously.

I wonder how much Collector's Editions would fall under the Veblen good category.

Anyway good write-up, it's convincing to me. In my mind what you said was "more pricing options makes the demand curve more continuous, accommodating different levels of demand".

I picked up Europa Universalis IV on sale yesterday, and honestly it's one of the most interesting games I've played in a long time. It's basically Civilization, i.e. grand strategy, but actually has depth and isn't.. bad.

I'm running the French empire like neoliberal globalists, and am fighting wars against the English. My main concern is managing inflation and developing France economically to support my massive military. I basically wasted like six hours today. Also surprisingly not too difficult to pick up.

To be clear: I've actually played quite a bit of Civ, and like it (Civ IV was my favorite) but at this point it's worn itself out for me, and Civ VI looked uninteresting.

This game has turned me into an anti-English bigot. Goddamn **** the English. They can take their invasions and their tea and crumpets and shove them up their ass. Bunch of crooked-tooth no good ****s.

One problem with all of this is that while it potentially maximizes the amount of money you make off of this game right now, it doesn't account for all the people like me that get pissed and just stop buying games from your company. You look at the revenue graph and it keeps going "up and to the right" and you think your company is doing as well as it could. But this is more due to the market expanding as older people keep buying games as they age and younger people getting into gaming, fine. But you are still losing customers like me so the amount of revenue probably isn't growing as much as it could if you would just stop screwing people over. They don't care, as long as this quarter looks better than the same quarter of the previous year.

And it's not just loot boxes. The various "editions" and DLC piss me off (why can't I just "buy the game?"). Super Mario Maker pissed me off because I had to spend "N" number of hours building a stupid level with 5 basic blocks in order to "unlock" fancier blocks. I have no idea how long I had to "play" in order to "unlock" the rest of the blocks because I got frustrated and quit. I was really looking forward to Mario Maker and I had so many cool ideas but they put most of the building blocks behind time-based unlocks that made no sense. So yes, they got my $60 for that game but do you think I'm going to buy the sequel if it ever comes out? Nope.

Same with always-online DRM (mario on mobile, for example), having to sign up for yet-another-online-service just to play a single-player game, etc. They are charging full-price for these games but then also requiring you to give them permission to harvest your private, personal information in order to play it (name, age, address, telephone number, email address, birthday!!!, when and how often you play it, ip address which gives them your location, etc.). It's absolutely nuts.

Plus, we're paying the same price (well, in absolute dollars), but the games are worth less because we can no longer sell them or give them away when we're done with them. I preordered some call of duty game for my son and it came as a piece of round cardboard in a cd jewel case. The cardboard had a steam code on it. What the hell is the point of that? (and I'm sure everyone here knows, the round cardboard is more fun to play with than the game itself)

I really don't like where the games industry has gone. I think what makes it sting so bad is how great it used to be. I have such great memories of playing wolf3d for the first time. And doom. And JK. And quake. And duke3d. And a hundred other games. You pop them in. You maybe have to update stupid drivers and install a patch or 7. But you didn't have to sign up for a zillion online services and give a cheek swab. You didn't have to put in a credit card number for incidentals. If you kept getting your ass whipped you knew it was because you sucked and not because the other guy payed more. If the other guy had a cooler costume than you you could just ask where he got it, and the answer was never that he paid extra for it.

Brian:



The big publishers are colluding on this business model. They are working to deny your choice and socialize the risks to any one company. They know that some people will stop buying games, they’re accounting for it. They just don’t care.

Edit: tldr “capturing consumer surplus” is a finance euphemism for ripping off customers.

I'd be curious to know how many sales were recovered by DRM from people who would have pirated the game. My hunch is that people who pirate generally don't pay as much in the first place, but if the games industry is anything like the music industry (I know, the record labels are perfect examples everybody's favorite kind of corporation), then the reality is that file sharing did really damage sales. But then then you have things like GOG that are DRM free.

DRM increases piracy.

I stopped knowingly buying games with DRM. I miss out on quite a few games that look interesting. I have enough excess income that I would otherwise blow on games that I probably wouldn't even finish. For example, I bought an entire xbox one bundle with a lot of **** I never even played, just because I wanted to replay Gears of War ultra HD remake or whatever it was. And we only got through level 4 or something before getting stuck/bored and never touching it again. It's been collecting dust on the tv stand for years. A few times we've decided to pick it up and try again but every time we start it up it takes about 4 hours to go through its update/reboot/repeat cycle and for me to recover my ****ing xbox password and type it in using the mother****ing controller that I'm so enraged I give up and go back to reading a book. I liked it before, where you put the cartridge in, select your save game, and off you went.

Anyway, my point was that I don't buy the DRM games, and I don't pirate them either. I just opt out of the system. They're not that important to me anymore. The whole experience is too expensive anymore. And not in dollars, but in everything else.

Sonic Mania looked like an amazing game but when I heard what DRM it was using I decided not to buy it. I probably never will buy it.

DRM is bad enough, but companies are now layering multiple DRMs on top of each other. I think it’s as much about buying from some son-in-law’s DRM startup as it is about protecting their IP.

Huh, I bet that's a good racket to make some cash in.

http://www.pcgamer.com/belgium-says-loot-boxes-are-gambling-wants-them-banned-in-europe/



haha, eat **** EA

I feel like just buying an EA game at $60 should be considered a gamble.

What if every time you bought an EA game, there was a 50/50 chance they actually charged you?

People who regularly buy EA games would buy twice as many?

NEVERMIND

Haha, I guess Bungie released an "expansion" for Destiny 2 that blocked access to old content for people who didn't buy it.

post a link to what you're talking about!

https://www.cinemablend.com/games/1737639/how-destiny-2s-new-dlc-is-locking-out-game-content-for-players-who-didnt-buy-it