It’s like buying a tiara for your fetus, before you even buy a crib.
ALSO, MICROTRANSACTIONS = DLC.
You know that would only lead to more games being published as ‘a finished product’ eventhough they really are not. It would make the problem worse, not better.
“early access” is just an expectations management thing that lets companies release buggy shit and hide behind the “its in beta” argument.
Beta testing/piloting/early access is a real, legitimately valuable, strategy that allows devs to get real-world user feedback so they can make their finished product better, but the way its being used by big companies and game studios is a perversion of the initial intent.
You may be wrong though. It might not make it worse. Think of all of the push-back and review bombs that happen when companies release finished products that are buggy af. Cyberpunk is an example of this. They got so much shit, rightfully so, at launch.
Exactly. Like I’ve said in various comments in this thread, I have complex feelings about how the situation could actually be fixed. Basically, it comes down to two options:
A. Valve should start to actually regulate the Early Access program. Add rules about when and how DLC can be added (basically never, in Early Access), how long a product can stay in Early Access (someone mentioned the possibility of a ‘long-term early access’ category being established). Add a separate grade system for people to rank how well the game is doing, in terms of customer’s satisfaction, in terms of progress toward a finished product. I would also suggest that forced monetary transparency might be a good thing to add, as a requirement for Early Access participation. If the storefront page openly displayed the amount of revenue the game has generated, since coming to Early Access, it would help to instantly make some judgments about the whole product. If the game in question is a dinky 2D platformer, but it has raised $800,000 over 8 years, I’m gonna be questioning why it hasn’t just been completed, at this point.
B. Valve could also remove the entire Early Access label, and just let anyone start selling anything, in any state of completion, and simply make their own case for why people should buy it. If the game is basically an Early Access game, but the game’s description doesn’t make that clear, people will refund the game and shit-talk them, all over the internet. If they make a good case, in their own description and trailers and other media, then people may decide “I will fund this thing, based on those merits.” The benefit would be the lack of the “its in beta” label, for people to hide behind. If devs just had to make their own pitch, in their own words, people would be more likely to judge that pitch, with an appropriately critical eye.
This would also incentive devs to actually finish their game instead of getting stuck in early access limbo
Nah, they’d just call it finished and do the same thing.
This is actually one of the rare times that I fully agree with the everyday consumer when it comes to Early Access. I absolutely 100% agree with this statement if you are still an early access there should not be paid DLC, perhaps they should be able to have free DLC the workshop but definitely should not be allowed to have paid dlc/expansions
Tower Unite 😒
I thought we were going to use the Calvin and Hobbes template from now on?
Yeah. It’s a shame we still use this asshole for these meme templates out of habit, but he is definitely not ok.
Y’all keep buyin that shit tho why would they stop
I used to be vehemently against EA games but there are some good ones. Project Zombiod for one. But a big part of the fun of that game is modding it. And the mod scene is expansive and quality, but I understand lots of people not wanting to mod games.
What pisses me off more is “Released” games like RimWorld that are broken as vanilla and require modding to work properly. That shit needs to stay in EA.
Then don’t buy it. Nothing wrong with it.
Because Steven Crowder doesn’t deserve to be a meme
Ya know, Calvin really has more in common with Crowder than you might think.
They obviously both childish. They’re fundamentally selfish beings. They have incredibly vivid imaginations, but they only ever use them to amuse themselves and reinforce their delusion that they’re the most important person. They believe themselves to be rebels against a banal and suffocating system, but in reality they’re just irritating little shits, constantly acting upon every rogue impulse of their raging ego and id, with no regard for how they’re making life hard for the people who have to live near them.
didn’t like crowder show is dick to all the bros at his work tho?
Imo, Calvin at least is an imaginative, creative individual with an imaginary tiger that frequently gives him shit for his flaws. Kids also notably grow through self absorbed phases while Crowder acts a similar way as an adult.
Man I really hate how right you are.
Basically, if he ever stops seeing Hobbes as a talking tiger, that’ll be the day he just turns into someone like Crowder. Hobbes is kind of a dick, too, but he’s Calvin’s conscience. He’s Calvin’s connection to empathy and vulnerability. When he wakes up one day, and just sees a lifeless stuffed toy, he’ll be a true monster.
Calvin is also only six years old, so he has an excuse.
I don’t buy early access so I didn’t even know :O
I think thor said it best, horse armor made more money than starcraft 2 expansion. Thus was the beginning of shit DLC cash grabs
horse armor made more money than starcraft 2 expansion. Thus was the beginning of shit DLC cash grabs
The most annoying thing about that aspect of the phenomenon is how it’s based completely and entirely on a false premise. When you do some crazy new shit and it takes off like gangbusters, you CAN’T JUST ASSUME THAT IT’S GOING TO BE POPULAR FOREVER.
Sometimes, a new product or service is immediately popular because it’s genuinely a hot seller. The day hotcakes were invented, people probably said they were selling like blowjobs. Then they somehow sold even better than blowjobs, so they became the new idiom. But the thing is, that’s not a guaranteed thing, for every product, and you shouldn’t base the future of your industry on your bullshit assumptions.
The goddamned horse armor sold like crazy because it was a new thing. The potential market for $2.50 worth of micro-content was beyond wide open. Huge numbers of people were ready to go “LOL, I’LL BUY THAT INSTEAD OF A CRUNCHWRAP SUPREME.” That should NOT have been an indicator of further success, in and of itself. But big business motherfuckers don’t want to use actual logic, or even real intuition. They just said to themselves “I really want this to be the new easy way of printing money,” and so they have spent all the following years FORCING that paradigm into existence.
But I think it’s a false paradigm. Nobody talks about the money that’s being left on the table, when such a huge percentage of the industry has been given over to microtransaction-based nonsense. The Battle Royale, MOBA, and Hero Shooter genres are as saturated as they’re going to be. What about people (like myself, for instance) who play absolutely none of those games?
I’ve never played them. I’m never going to play them. I’m not even refraining from playing them because I hate microtransactions. I just dislike them, as genres. They’re not my cup of tea. I play mostly play a mixture of sandbox games, RPGs, single-player action and shooter games, strategy games, and VR games, as well as a few survival/crafting/fighting games, like Terraria/Starbound.
I’m not alone. There are other people like me, who always want more intentional, in-depth content. If anybody doubts the possibility for better games to make money, you only need to look at Baldur’s Gate 3. That game has made shitloads of money. Money that corporate advocates of the “we can just print money with skins and stickers” philosophy can never have access to, unless they also pry open their wallets, and invest in real content.
wonder if steam gets 30% of all that too
Any transaction through steam as far as I understand it.
I can’t understand the hate for Steam/Valve taking 30 percent. Back in the day, when people were forced to rely on traditional brick-and-mortar sales models, developers could consider themselves lucky if they got the 30 percent. When publishers, disc/disk manufacturers, box printers, shippers, and retailers finally got done taking all their cuts, it could amount to more than 70 percent. Easily. The lowly creator of the software was an afterthought, in the payment pecking order.
But noooooo, Valve is eeeevil incarnate, because they take 30 fucking percent. Fuck that. 30 percent is reasonable. And what do they do with that money? Does Gaben flaunt his private jet travel and buy sketchy islands, like a some billionaires? Nah. They pump the money back into weird, tech-focused projects. Modern VR would be ENTIRELY under the control of FACEBOOK AND APPLE, if it wasn’t for Valve spending their money stash on the SteamVR systems.
I know I sound like a fanboy. It’s not even REALLY about any of the stuff I’ve said, so far. The biggest reason why it’s okay for Valve to take 30 percent is to insure that Steam will always exist, and always be thriving, barring a vast and all-encompassing planet-wide economic catastrophe. Nobody has to worry about their Steam library suddenly vanishing. People might be tempted to praise alternative distributors, like Itch.io, because they take only a 10 percent cut. But you only have to look at their website to realize they’re incredibly fragile, by comparison. I don’t know if Itch.io will still be around in ten years, twenty years, certainly not thirty years. Steam WILL be around in fifty years, when I’m an old, old man. I’d be SHOCKED if it wasn’t around a century from now.
That kind of guaranteed future costs money. That is a stone cold fact, whether you like it or not.
Just wanna commend you for proving yourself wrong on one of your own facts. Even if it did turn our you were right about him not owning an island.
Thanks.
Transactions = more money for Steam
Disrupt this incentive loop (somehow) and then we can all have nice things.
What do you imagine would replace Steam/Valve? The Magical Post-Capitalist Game Fairy, who distributes games for free, for no reason?
Do you remember who used to distribute games? Walmart. And Best Buy. And CompUSA. And Circuit City. And Target. And GameStop. And Electronic Boutique. Ya know, retailers.
I deliberately peppered that list with names that most people hate AND names that many people associate with good feelings of nostalgia, or mixed feelings at least. But that’s the reality of retail. Capitalism sucks. It literally sucks. It sucks money out of everyone, for itself.
Steam was and is the disruption that you’re talking about. Steam disrupted a broken and destructive brick-and-mortar sales mode. If the catalog of products available on Steam had to be sold in physical stores, only about the top 2-5 percent of the currently available catalog would be physically able to be sold. THAT WAS, AND REMAINS, THE MASSIVE DISRUPTION TO THE OLD SYSTEM.
You’re talking about disrupting the disruption. Maybe you’re talking about some kind of nonsense universe, where everyone distributes open source games for free, maaaaan. Or maybe you think the developers should still get money, but the distribution system should be run as…a charity, I guess? Just, because someone feels like spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a bulletproof, entirely secure, worldwide system of game distribution and sales…for free?
Like I said, that would be some kind of Magical Post-Capitalist Game Fairy. If anyone tells you they are willing to do that shit, I guarantee there is a catch. They’ll be getting something that they want, somehow. If they’re taking a 30 percent cut of the money, I know that’s the catch. If they’re supposedly doing everything for free, out of the goodness of their own charitable hearts, I don’t know what their angle is, but I know it can’t be good.
At least you’re advocating that someone should get paid. Most open-source/free-software zealots don’t bother to do that.
Motherfuckers just stand on the notion that people with the equivalent of (or actually possessing) postgraduate engineering degrees should just…work for free. Like, literally work at Walmart as a nine-to-five gig, then come home to their hovel with five roommates, and slave away, doing engineering work on free software projects that could be sold for tens of millions.
When I support a company like Valve, I’m looking at their past behavior (supporting open industry standards, for things like controllers and VR, plowing money back into developing blue-sky R&D, in both hardware and software) and the fact that they’re an entirely private holding, as opposed to a public company that has to answer to shareholders. Shareholders, of course, would demand that they stop funding anything that won’t specifically generate a maximum return on investment, in a short or medium timeframe.
Because Valve doesn’t have to worry about that crap, they can build a system that is not inherently brittle. I believe them, when they say they have contingency plans, to make sure that we won’t ever have to worry about losing access to software we purchased licenses to use on their systems. And if they ever did become insolvent, there is apparently a contingency-contingency plan, to allow people to download fully non-DRM versions of as much of those libraries as possible.
But to the open-source/free-software zealot, none of that matters. The perfect is always the enemy of the good. Valve = proprietary, so they’re bad, according to you.
Whatever. Narrowmindedness is what it is.
Tell us how you feel about Star Citizen.
Actually gotten good recently.
Ok but actually? I’m an original backer with nothing but the original dinky ship and I’m still waiting for a game worth playing for the money I already spent. Haven’t looked in a year or two.
Is squadron 42 even playable end to end yet?
I’m not the one who said it’s good so can’t comment on that part, but sq42 is supposedly feature complete and in the final polishing phase atm.
So the answer is “no”.
I don’t even play the game man, just reporting the news. No need to be a jerk about it.
Not being a jerk, just clarifying that the game that was promised 11 years ago doesn’t exist, and won’t exist for some time.
Same as always.
Marks have been saying this for literally over a decade.
Tell us how you feel about Star Citizen.
I unironically believe the scammers behind that shit should be imprisoned for life, in that place where they put the surviving Boston Marathon bomber. I guess they would have to expand the place, to house all the people involved with it.
How is it a scam?
Did I mention the fact that you can pay thousands of real-world dollars for a not-real spaceship?
Do you need any other fucking definition of a scam?
That’s what’s called a microtransaction. Sure, the prices are insane, but that doesn’t make it a scam.
Micro transactions in games are scams by default.
Not by definition, at least
noun - a fraudulent or deceptive act or operation
If you design a game with psychologists to maximize serotonin hits instead of gameplay and then charge money to keep getting a hit is, by definition, a deceptive act, and ergo – scam.
Is your name ironic?
Holy shit you’re a psychopath.
Wanting people to be punished for horrible things they did? That’s psychopathy, now?
You realize that there are poor souls out there who have spent their life savings on that piece of shit. Now, here comes the best part: the part where YOU tell me that those people don’t deserve sympathy. They chose to get scammed, they’re suckers, they deserve what they got for speculating on fake starships, etc.
Which one of us has empathy? Which one of us is pointing the finger at the actual criminals?
the part where you tell me
I don’t have to tell you shit. You’re a psychopath who’s clearly beyond reason. You can’t be helped.
Care to give me a list of other criminals and villains who you think shouldn’t be punished?
I’m fascinated by this through-the-looking-glass mentality you have, where wanting vicious and destructive criminals to be punished is evidence of psychopathy.
Namaste the fuck away from you.
I just see this as you continuing to defend the actual psychopaths, in the situation. Let me try to make this clearer, for you:
The scammers who sell pretend starships have been happily doing so for YEARS, by now. They know about the stories of people compulsively spending thousands of dollars on their bullshit. They know there are people out there, who have had to break down and tell their spouses “I spent the kids’ college fund on a bunch of in-game starships…BUT HONEY, WE’LL BE ABLE TO FLIP THEM FOR TEN TIMES WHAT I INVESTED! WHY ARE YOU CRYING?”
That shit has happened. To real people. And the asshole scammers absolutely know about it. And they DO NOT CARE, AT ALL. That’s what psychopathy is. They calmly and happily continue to spend those people’s hard-earned dollars. Not on the game. Not investing it back into the game. Oh, no. If they had been using all that fucking money to develop the game, it would have come out years and years ago.
They’re funding their own investments, their own lavish lifestyles, their own egomaniacal satisfaction. They will never feel any guilt about what they’re doing, because they don’t feel guilt. Again: they are actual psychopaths.
The only way to make them feel anything negative about what they’ve done would be to imprison them, in that horrible place in the desert, where they can only see a tiny rectangle of sunlight, and barely have enough space to stretch to their full height. They won’t ever feel bad about the pain they caused other people. They can’t. They would only ever feel sorry for themselves. But I want them to feel that pain.
I don’t see how you can disagree, knowing that most of their victims will NEVER be financially okay again, and the perpetrators of the scam are just freely living the good life. What passes for a concept of justice, inside your head?
Chill dude
Nah.
But but but… Your username!
Yeah, it was a mistake. Or, like, aspirational.
Fair enough
Early Access can be easily abused. That’s why I don’t bother with it at all.
As I mentioned to someone else, that’s a shame. The only alternative to Early Access = developers having to go hat-in-hand, begging for up-front investments from heartless corporations. They increasingly won’t fund anything that isn’t fit to be saddled with a games-as-a-service price-gouging model.
When Early Access is abused, it’s destroying that necessary system for all of us, developers and consumers alike. If you want games that aren’t 100 percent mainstream, money-sucking garbage, you should want Early Access to stick around. That’s why I think it should, ya know, suck less, and NOT be abused.
I wanted to challenge this but I can’t think of a single early access that I have that tried it, I can only think of ARK and they got roasted for it, even more so when people discovered that ATLAS was a reskin of ARK.
ARK has a whole ass sequel and the base game is STILL horribly unoptimized AFAIK. To be fair, I’m on linux, but that’s hardly an excuse when like 95% of other titles work just fine!
Don’t worry, ARK runs like ass anywhere, it’s so intrinsic to the game that the remaster also runs like ass.
I think they’re talking about emperyon galactic survival. They never finished the game, but took it out of EA, and now they just sold a story based DLC when the main game doesn’t even have its story completed yet…
