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[PA Comic] Wednesday, February 6, 2013 - Location Awareness
Geth
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Posts
</darkhelmet>
Also these analysis of sayings comics are always the best. Still say "you don't need to get on a wagon, or off a wagon, you don't need to do anything with a wagon that makes you uncomfortable" in my day to day.
Stop peeing in strangers' mouths.
I'm not too worried about it. I'm sure it'll eventually result in other games offering everything up front as a feature and balance will be achieved.
- author not found
Not until they tell me to.
Just being in the age range doesn't make you the class of people he's talking about. He's talking about people in the age range who are primarily familiar with games on their cell phones and tablets.
For those people, it might seem like a standard part of gaming. But paying $60 for a game and having this big stationary thing requiring its own space in the house to play that game would be something strange and alien, and even the idea of $15 DLC with a few hours of entirely new stuff would be a lofty concept.
You can sell to one side, sell to the other, or split the difference (F2P MMOs for example, trade the up front cost for more microtransactions). From the articles I've read, though, Dead Space 3 is trying to literally have its cake and eat it to: All the up front costs (and probably all the big ticket DLC down the road), all the microtransactions. At the same time. Cryptic used to try that - charging box price, monthly fee, AND a cash store on their MMOs. Not only did it do nothing to make people like them, it nearly killed them.
Another variation by John Hodgman: "Don't poop on my head and tell me it's raining brown solid water."
Things that make the current, existing game I have paid money for more playable? No.
Now you buy access to those things...
...and even though you're paying more money, gameplay is being taken away.
If someone can pay $5 to skip the extra-difficult bonus dungeon and get the blade of awesomeness... fine, whatever.
But I think it's more common to just yank the bonus dungeon and leave paying $5 as the only way of getting that sword.
When it comes to micro-transactions, I think they have a powerful potential to be abused, so I sincerely hope you are right.
I have nothing to say (thankfully) on the subject of peeing in/on people except as it pertains to changing the diapers of my infant relatives.
In the same way that old arcade games were designed to be brutally difficult to keep you pumping in quarters, games designed for micro transactions are designed to be either: A. tedious, or B. too difficult, in order to drive the player to balance the gameplay with their dollars. If you don't change your game to facilitate shelling out for "perks" then you aren't gaining any extra revenue. If you do change your game, then you aren't making a good, balanced, fun $60, full retail experience.
I never want to wish failure upon any hardworking dev team, but what they've done here is gross. I just hope that the market sets them straight.
In the same way that old arcade games were designed to be brutally difficult to keep you pumping in quarters, games designed for micro transactions are designed to be either: A. tedious, or B. too difficult, in order to drive the player to balance the gameplay with their dollars. If you don't change your game to facilitate shelling out for "perks" then you aren't gaining any extra revenue. If you do change your game, then you aren't making a good, balanced, fun $60, full retail experience.
I never want to wish failure upon any hardworking dev team, but what they've done here is gross. I just hope that the market sets them straight.
But yeah, I thought the whole "EA = We want all of your money NOW" has been known for years. This shouldn't be a surprise.
Haters wanna hate,
Lovers wanna love,
I don't even want none of the above.
I can see how Gabe would get it twisted.
Acceptable: A full product which, rather than having very infrequent, large, expensive expansions, has lots of micro-expansions for lower price points.
Acceptable: A free to play product which monetizes optional content which somehow manages to not reduce the overall value of the product. (I swear, League of Legends is one of the only games I've seen do this.)
Unacceptable: A game which has no real gameplay, just long grinds which can be bypassed with cash. (Most of the shittier stuff on phones.)
Unacceptable: A good game to begin with, which then, in order to monetize it with cash shops, introduces artificial grinds or speed bumps into it's game design to force shop interaction. (Quite a lot of games nowadays.)
My biggest beef with the last one is this: I'm willing to pay for my games. I have no problem putting money down on my games, and to be honest, I don't care if I pay in lump sum at the outset, or in increments over time. However, when there's a cash shop involved, sometimes I don't see the clear way to "optimally" play the game, i.e. to play it as if there weren't a cash shop. I wonder if any extra grinds have been put in to drive me to the cash shop, or if any inconveniences were built in, thereby making the game worse, to drive me to the cash shop. That always frustrates me.
Hopefully game developers will realize how fucking retarded they are and get back to making real, bullshit free games.
*high five* I am a "regular" too.
I guess that means that I spend too much fucking time reading and commenting on PA shit and not enough time getting other things done...like work.
Please elucidate the problem of, say, the League of Legends model, in which the only purely for-pay content is aesthetic and the game is otherwise fundamentally free and can easily be played as such.
Regardless, the market trends seem to point towards microtransactions becoming an entirely new beast, which makes me want a shower.
But now with all this pee-rain-solid brown water talk, I'm not sure if standing under hot running liquid is going to suit me any better.
"Readers who prefer tension and romance, Maledictions: The Offering, delivers... As serious YA fiction, I’ll give it five stars out of five. As a novel? Four and a half." - Liz Ellor
My new novel: Maledictions: The Offering. Now in Paperback!
How much or how many is a "load?"
Load = 0.125 Metric fucktons.
Personally, I want a T-shirt with an "Anger Level" meter that increases as I drink coffee.
what the hell people
pleasepaypreacher.net
I can see that demographic paying for microtransactions, as they are clearly in some kind of Brewster's Millions type situation.