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Penny Arcade - Comic - Late Capitalism
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Late Capitalism
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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I don't want to see Star Wars video games fail, but I do want to see EA fail. They are toxic to the industry and super anti-consumer.
I fully 100% understand wanting to make money and understand that for the suits at EA, the video game industry is just another way to earn the dollars. But for the creators and developers it isn't just about money. It's about art. And those two things do not go hand in hand. You cannot have corporate mandates without destroying artistic vision in the process. And EA are murderers of artistry.
OMG. The end of times is upon us!
Most gamers and buyers don't really follow gaming "news" or read sites like this. It's OMG I CAN BE LUKE SKYWALKER or OMG ITS COD WITH LIGHT SABERS. Or parents saying "Timmy likes Star Trek so I think this game is a good stocking stuffer"
So they'll make like 2 billion USD instead of 2.5 billion. Oh the horror.
Will I get it? Perhaps. I just tend to play single player games so I'd like to play the (really short) SP campaign here. And my brother will be getting it, so maybe have something to play against him with since we don't hang as much as I'd like. But I definitely won't be paying any micro transactions.
Am I part of the problem? Perhaps. But if my brother gets it then I'll sacrifice some ideals to play with him and make fun of the size of his light saber :-)
For over a decade now I can't wrap my mind around how EA just keeps being EA. They've been just consummately evil the entire time I've been conscious of them. They murdered Origin, Bullfrog and Westwood, the trio of my favorite childhood developers. I'm sure the "EA Spouse" blog is as accurate today as it was then.
They had maybe 2 years where they tried to not be evil. This is when Mirror's Edge came out, along with a few other more creative games. Apparently that was the first year EA lost money, so they just doubled down on being evil.
I don't understand how anybody still buys EA games. How haven't they burned nearly every consumer on the planet at this point?
Ok, consumers are idiots. That's an easy excuse.
How haven't they so thoroughly alienated all the developers that keep lining up to fall into their maw? What fucking developer hasn't gotten the word that EA is going to murder them? How do they keep thinking it'll be different for them?
I don't know what dark arts EA performs to keep this up. I suspect it has something to do with them going anything and everything to ruin companies they can't acquire.
pleasepaypreacher.net
It's really not complicated, like every other corporation on the planet, they can abuse and cheat as much as they want because of how much money they have.
in general, consumers like microtransactions way more than anyone likes to admit. If they didn't this business model would've been an outright failure long ago
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I think the more accurate statement is that "in general, consumers buy microtransactions way more than anyone likes to admit." I think saying they "like" them is a big leap. If freemium games have taught us anything, it's that people can dislike playing a game that they're still totally hooked on. Turns out if you plug into those lower level skinner box instincts, you don't have to care about the higher level critical thought processes.
I fully admit that to the corporations, this is a distinction without a difference.
And the usual industry reaction to making a lot of money but not all of the money is to double the fuck down on stuff like this.
That's... The most fatalistic self-defeating nonsense I've ever seen.
I still agree, nope, it won't work. We're doomed.
Eat Arby's.
For only $.99 you can buy a fatilist doubler or for $2.99 you can eat Arby's.
Maybe it’ll help ensure that this loot box pay to win pachinko parlor crap doesn’t infect Titanfall 3.
At the moment not a single one of my friends intend on buying it anymore, even though they were very impressed by it, so I'm off the hook too
Titanfall 3 is doomed.
Star Wars is a huuuuuge thing, and when you fuck it up this badly, it has a far reaching effect. Titanfall is awesome, but not exactly a beast of an IP even in the videogaming world. EA will choke the life out of Respawn and Titanfall with a belt around the neck and there will only be a relatively quieter backlash.
Shortsighted and greedy as EA are, you'd think even they wouldn't be stupid enough to go full hog on this as much as they've done on Battlefront II, without realising its going to bite them in the ass in some fashion.
People keep doing it because gambling is exciting. It's why MMOs work, if WoW gave you the loot you wanted after an equivalent amount of playtime, it'd have closed up shop years ago. Loot boxes just abstract the monster drops out a step. fundamentally, killing X monsters and looting them is no different from killing X monsters to get a crate that contains what you would have looted from them. This allows them to be simultaneously sold for actual money. I'm not supporting this industry shift. But human beings (and almost everything else) react very positively to random positive reinforcement. Rewarding a behavior every time is way less effective than rewarding it some of the time. In a way it's surprising it took the industry this long to get here.
How much do I need to pay to not eat at Arby's?
This is exactly it. I didn't really get the connection until Shut Up and Sit Down talked about how random cards in packs like in MtG and Pokemon was "gambling for kids." (And adults, of course, but... kids, geez, how low can you get?)
This also relates to my earlier reply to the claim that (paraphrasing) "people must secretly like microtransactions because they keep paying for them." It's like the defense that people really "like" slot machines because they keep feeding money into them. It's a word that plots on a different axis than people's connection to gambling. "Like" ain't got nothing to do with it.
Paying directly for the things they're after would constitute or simply be interpreted as "pay 2 win," which is why you rarely see games do it. You'll see premium packs with a more narrow scope of prizes, before an a la carte buy.
It won't drop off after a while because they generally release new content in the boxes over time too... wasn't going to buy this game before because I imagine it has a million multiplayer achievements that will take forever to complete, so I don't have a horse in this race.
Also Star Trek is better.
A tiny bit of self-worth and preservation.
For $10 a month, I can offer you the chance to not eat Arby's.
You'll receive 1 crate a month, and it will either be empty or contain a Beef n' Cheddar sandwich.
Okay, I'm interested. Do you have any kind of "loot booster" that can decrease my odds of getting the sandwich?
Should you obtain a sandwich in your crate, simply use one of the durable, black plastic fun-bags. Place the sandwich inside, and then leave the fun-bag in the nearest garbage can!
So. Bets on when micro-transactions are coming back. I assume it'll be shortly after The Last Jedi comes out.
E.G sure it won't take 40 hours of grinding to get a single lootbox anymore, but it'll take 30. Sure you can't buy lootboxes, but you can buy currency to buy lootboxes with. Sure, you can't buy the currency anymore, but you can buy this resource booster that allows you to grind for the currency faster.
It's just a rabbit hole of false compromises.