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[PA Comic] Friday, March 1, 2013 - Microtribulations
Geth
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
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Warframe: TheBaconDwarf
I challenge you to think of a strip that is a more obvious parody/exaggeration than this one.
That MLP game sold a buncha ingame money in packs of £80.
Disagree.
The state of microtransactions in cell games is atrocious sometimes.
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Not by much. Someone did the math, and hitting 100% completion in Real Racing 3 (note, this strip is for RR4, ie the next step) requires a total of roughly 500 hours or dollars, not counting money spent repairing cars or speeding up wait times.
I would be pretty peeved if I had to pay for gas and repairs
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
Doesn't Farmville do this? Machines are easy enough to get, but good luck fueling up without money?
While I don't doubt that's true, I'd imagine it's the case if you want to simply load up the game and buy everything from the off. Which no one does.
Like a good neighbor, Fake Farm is there...
In high end sims you pay as much as fifteen dollars a piece for race tracks
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
Just wait until you get the bill in the mail when your claim is denied, and it comes with an EA or Zygna letterhead.
Skill advancement in EVE Online is tied to real time passing, and that game is fairly popular/big/old... and you can't afaik just flat out buy those skills. It just appeals to a different kind of gamer, I guess.
And even with the option present, most players wouldn't buy everything anyhow.
edit: Doesn't it take a bit of realtime to build ships and stuff too?
your = belonging to you
their = belonging to them
there = not here
they're = they are
True, but they were both from easily my favorite stretch of comics they've ever done. Early to mid 2002 had a ridiculous concentration of fantastic comics. You have XBox controller Grizzly, Badger commandos, Claw Shrimp, Hit Points! Mana!, Gabe's Spiderman dream, Wonder Twins, Giant Spider.
I'm actually kinda annoyed I didn't include giant spider in the first place. One of my all-time favorites.
But at any rate, on the topic of what the comic is addressing: I've paid lots of money into freemium / F2P games (whatever you want to call them). I've not seen many examples of what iOS / mobile apps charge for, let alone how much, and I definitely haven't seen any of it first hand. But I'm worried about this concept of being charged for the basic thing you do in the gameplay. Like imagine if they charged you money for every time you wanted to jump in Mega Man or some shit. It's fine to charge for extra shit in video games but there's this realm showing up that's exploitative or complete bullshit.
Tangentially it's why EA's comment about wanting to charge for all games with micro-transactions worries me - it stems from their attitude with Dead Space 3, that people who play mobile apps think that's how all games work so the company is obliged to charge in the same manner. Rather than, y'know, show those people who think that that they're mistaken. It's the clearest "we want those dollars" move and if they're going to follow the mobile realm's example, it means ridiculous shit will show up in the future.
I would argue that it was the real time element in EVE Online that made it my favorite MMO of all time. We had to put in real work and time to get our heavy industry and transportation corp off the ground and profitable. I hope TOHA Heavy Industries still exists out there. I don't have time for the game anymore, but it was amazing.
Had a very annoyed talk with my wife about that.
However I have bought DLC, so an argument could be made there. Yet in my mind I see that as paying for miniature expansions.
Micro-transactions aren't just about instant gratification. I've paid money for extra character slots, or to unlock costume features or power sets (as in spells and abilities) in City of Heroes, that sorta thing.
The only micro-transactions I've purchased have been for MW:O. I purchased camo colors and mech bays, and I'll probably purchase some more completely useless stuff like bobbleheads for my dashboard. I had almost zero desire to buy these things (except for the extra bays), but decided to do it as a reward for the devs for creating a game I love and not charging me anything for it upfront.
True. I was primarily thinking about games like Farmville, iOS games, etc. However the concept is still pretty much the same, you're paying for the ability to play a game more efficiently and remove the artificial restrictions placed on it, specifically to make money. Which is fine, I'm not trying to admonish that business model or anything, no one is forcing anyone to buy extra character or bag slots in a game.
Its just too ephemeral a concept for me to justify the insanely exorbitant prices usually associated with micro-transactions. I can understand paying $5 for a pack of maps or dungeons in a game, but paying $1-$3 for something like virtual Horse Armor, a neat spell, or "get this upgrade right now instead of in 5 hours!" is tantamount to throwing money away.
Oh, I wasn't criticizing at all. I just meant that calling this the most extreme exaggeration in all of Penny Arcade is kinda dumb, considering I can think of probably three counterexamples without even having to move past the Xbox.
your = belonging to you
their = belonging to them
there = not here
they're = they are
But even that isn't 100% true. Like in the case of City of Heroes, plenty of costume pieces and powers came after the fact - like they didn't come with the base game. And sure, in the realm of PC games that's usually expansion content or just patched in content. But that stuff coming in for free has always been a big, big gesture. And I see it as perfectly fair paying a couple bucks for new stuff added to the game. Not to say it's pure at every level - City of Heroes (to keep working with it as an example) had some silly shit behind the pay wall.
I'm very much against the aesthetic shit in single player experiences, like the Horse Armor. But when you plug that sorta thing into multiplayer games, if I have money / points left over, I may pick it up. There's usually other incentives though - CoH had a system where obtaining points themselves would unlock things, not just strictly spending points. And WoW has had purchasable content (pets) available to go fully into charity drives like the last major tsunami to hit Japan.
Correct, which is why I said "a total of." IE to get everything for free is 500 hours, to pay for everything is $500. So basically it's pay a dollar or spend an hour playing, but the sum of hours+dollars will be 500.
Fixed that for you. Many people will and do pay for these things. I just spent $20 to buy 6 extra stash slots in Path of Exile and had $4.00 remaining to buy a pet, so I did. I am playing a free game, so I want to reward the developer by making a good one. Additionally, I want to have more places to put my lootz. I don't even want to count how much money I spent on Kingdom of Loathing items and League of Legends champs/skins over the years. Different strokes for different folks.
3DS Friend Code: 1821-8991-4141
PAD ID: 376,540,262
3DS Friend Code: 1821-8991-4141
PAD ID: 376,540,262
Even relatively new players would pop up and ask if they should buy the $50 packs of game currency.
Thing is, the currency didn't even buy you much of an edge. I spent $5 on a larger energy pool because I felt that the devs deserved some compensation for all the time I spent with the game, but it was fairly easy to advance without investing a dime.
The reason you see more and more of them is it's much easier to convince someone to buy a pony in a game they like than to convince them to buy a game they think they might like. So for smaller games (provided you design around the model well) it's more or less the safest route possible.
I personally don't mind free to play, though I do think all free to play games should at least launch with a 'buy all the game' bundle that gets them all the content that's in at launch. This way you can basically 'buy' the game, it just happens to have a chunk of DLC that you can earn through playing as well.
Also what Hi-Rez is doing with Tribes is great. They aren't putting any more content (or at least very little) so they've just packaged it up as 'now you can buy the whole thing for 20 pounds'. Essentially they've gone from a freemium model that's too rich for a lot of people to selling the game at a bargin price because it's done. I do hope more free to play games do this once development is done/almost done because it's a great way to get more people into a game.
I'm guilty of this, too. "Oh man, I play League of Legends all the time, so $5 on a skin makes perfect sense, that is a value to me." I'm not seriously able to mentally process, "Is this skin going to improve my experience five dollars worth?"
And that's a pretty harmless example. Take it into stuff like Farmville, where someone has been spending two months playing an hour a day, and suddenly spending $5 on something that in NO WAY measurably changes their experience is still placed at a pretty high value.