Reply 2

by Avateur , Monday, March 04, 2013, 17:11 (4285 days ago) @ Kermit

It's impossible to talk about only entertainment and fun. Games have to be funded somehow. My opinion is that nasty impacts tend to convert consumers into non-consumers, and well-made products can find a market.

Agreed on all counts. I just found it interesting that he avoided talking about anything but the money.

Huh? Maybe the justification of seeking profit was the subject of this post, and that had something to do with it being the focus of his thought process.

Well, now you sound like you don't believe him. Do you believe him or not? You know, I used to think of Cliffy B as an obnoxious kid who might be how you characterize him. A number of things, including the New Yorker profile a few years back, changed my mind. But my perception of him started to change when he openly stated, the year the first Gears came out, that Bioshock was the best game of the year. The fact that he would say that impressed me. It's not the comment of guy just out for self-enrichment or self-aggrandizement.

Okay, so you do believe him, sort of, but maybe not since he didn't explicitly take up the issues you mention.

Haha, sorry. I do believe him. It came out weird. What I was saying is that, just like how you said the subject of the post is about the justification of seeking profit, his little bullet point list of why he got into the industry is so out of place. He had absolutely no intention of discussing fun, love of the creation, genre, nothing. Just business, just money. And that's completely perfectly fine! So why throw the rest in there? It was almost as if he was trying to say something like, "C'mon, I'm your homie etc" and get you trust him. It's like he lacked confidence in his own thoughts on the matter and had to throw it in. I felt it detracted and missed out on a good opportunity for him to discuss how to make the business work with a fun and great model for consumers and actual gameplay.

If I wanted an emblem, and didn't have the time or desire to play 90 hours, I'd buy it. Would you rather they monetize something less mundane? Monetizing brings revenue, which helps to fund more games. This is what Cliffy B was saying: people gotta eat. I hope they get to do more than that. I wouldn't be bothered if Jason Jones and Cliffy each had an swimming pool full of gold coins to swim in because money is an exchange of value, and the fun I got out of Gears and Halo was worth way more than what I've spent on either franchise. Money also helps people focus on what they're good at. Cliffy and Jason can spend their energy on creating something great, and the money they have saves them from spending that energy fixing their cars or whatever.

But you already bought the emblem when you bought the game! Why pay twice? It's an emblem. It could have been available from the start, but apparently it was a better idea to make them a pain to unlock to try and get you to spend money on them (hypothetically).

The argument of "people gotta eat" is pretty much a joke. If you think microtransactions are enough to help them eat or pay the bills, you're mistaken. Maybe not if we're talking apps and cell phone games, but if we're talking AAA game makers, c'mon. It's a cash grab, nothing more. When EA says that every one of their games going forward will require microtransactions, that is not a decision made by a collective group of developers who think they need it to help pay their bills. They're being told by their publisher to do it or tough cookies, primarily so that EA can benefit and get more money from it, not the devs themselves. Now, I'm not implying that the devs come out with nothing or that there is no benefit for them, but it's pretty clear who wants this, what it's for, and why it happened, and it wasn't the devs. EA Sports, It's In The Game! Not anymore. You need to purchase the other portions or grind away, sucker.

We tend to balk at the cost of everything, and we expect to be able to buy used games, we're offended when even cosmetic items are monetized, and if an industry leader dares to speak bluntly about the hard calculus involved in creating games these days, we suspect he's Scrooge McDuck.

I'm not trying to simplify your viewpoint. I know that you and I care mainly about fun, but a bit more realism about how that fun got to us and how it can continue to get to us might be in order here. We're entitled to nothing. Neither are developers. They risk alienating us if they make games that aren't fun. That's part of the calculus, too.

I think I have the realism down fine, and I think I'm pretty open to understanding and even agreeing with a lot of the justifications behind these business decisions. But when a company goes out and declares that all games going forward will be required to do it, it's pretty clear that it's only a matter of time before these games will be affected negatively, watered down, and made worse for it. That isn't to say that really great games won't still be made and released under EA, but the potential for them to be worse than they would have been otherwise is there. Game designers may begin actually releasing games with portions that are purposely broken or terrible to try and get you to pay to bypass them. Hell, it looks like plenty do that right now with microtransactions. I just see a really bad and negative trend coming and, as a consumer, I don't plan on supporting EA's plans.