Having played a lot of Rocket League and Fornite with my kids, I’m wondering if it would work having a season pass style mechanic in LE. It’s possible this already exists in other dungeon crawler ARPG’s that I’m not aware of (I’ve not gotten heavily into the other titles in this genre), but I haven’t noticed it before.
I know from personal experience that the season pass in Fortnite and RL do cause me to play more than if it wasn’t there. I like how it adds extra layer of content to work towards on top of new features and ladder reset that accompany a new season. Not to mention it also generates an additional stream of revenue for the studio to pay bills and keep game development going/growing. Also from personal experience I feel like it offers better bang-for-your-buck vs purchasing directly from the store. In Fornite and RL specifically, a cosmetic may cost 5-10$ (or more) and for that same amount of money you can get a season pass and get a large bundle of unlockable cosmetics and other goodies.
PoE & D4 have them (the 2 big arpgs). One is f2p, the other has a box price. Personally I can gety head around them in f2p games, but in games with a box price (especially when they come from massive companies with huge cash flows like Blizz), they can come across as greedy cash grabs.
That’ll be the concern that you’ve spent X so you have to play more otherwise you’ve “wasted” your money (ie, they’re using psychological techniques to cynically manipulate you to spend more time in the game so that you spend more money in the game.
I don’t know what people have against seasons passes. As long as it only gives you cosmetics and no in-game advantage, like in D4 or PoE, I have absolutely nothing against it, even though I have no intention of buying one, like I didn’t for those 2 games.
To me, being against a season pass that only gives you cosmetics feels like being against the MTX shop as well.
I can understand your point of view, but I disagree with you. Cosmetics aren’t a necessary part of the game. Those older games you talk about simply don’t have cosmetics. At all. And you don’t need to buy cosmetics to play LE.
So if you don’t like cosmetics, or the shop, you can basically just ignore it and play the “vanilla” game.
If, however, you want to support the devs and keep funding the game over time, you can buy cosmetics. You don’t even need to use them. I know I’ve bought a lot more cosmetics than I usually use in a single season in PoE. Some even came from supporter packs and I haven’t used them once.
All in all, as long as there isn’t P2W, I feel like cosmetic MTX are either a way to support the game or can be just easily ignored.
This isn’t to say your point isn’t valid. I think it’s like MP towns. Even though I tend to play solo and avoid social interaction, I can just ignore other players. But some people have social anxieties and it’s an issue for them. Both points are valid.
It always feels to me like a kind of general internet culture thing that’s always been around against anything costing money ever.
But really, IMO, people who don’t like season passes and other microtransaction models should be grateful that they exist. It costs more to develop and maintain games than it ever has in history, especially in a perpetual live service game like this, and box prices haven’t even kept up with simple inflation. That deficit has to be made up somewhere. The on-going cost of servers and future free content development has to come from somewhere. Season passes, MTX, etc, are it. The fact that whales have a system where they can blow a bajillion dollars on pretty hats or whatever is, in effect, a subsidy for the otherwise untenably low box prices of many games. It’s what allows free to play games to exist at all. It allows LE (and others) to offer itself as a one time purchase that you can play for years with free content updates along the way.
Even if you’re not on board with that reasoning, I don’t get why anyone would have a negative reaction to a game selling pretty hats. It doesn’t affect you.
Season passes are interesting in that it really depends on many factors.
like for me, PoE season pass is really bad, and hurts them as a company in my eyes. For example, the long standing tradition was, MTX was expensive, but supported the devs. You could buy anything that was not a challenge reward which you cant buy at all. Anything that came from the gacha lootboxes goes into the core shop in the next rotation, so if you dont want to deal with fomo, gambling, etc you just buy it later at face value even if that value is more expensive, it fixes the piece of mind.
But PoE battlepass has skins you never get again, they are unobtainable after the season is over. This prays on peoples desires through limited runs. And especially the latest ones have been armor sets that if you dont complete the pass, you just have random stuff like “well I got the boots and gloves, but can never get the armor or the hat cause life happened”
it also has a hefty iirc 30 dollarish price tag?
Where as something like the FN battle pass instead of giving you 8 matching mtx that feel really bad if you dont complete it, it gives you dozens and dozens of mtx type items for half the price iirc. And so even if you dont complete it, you often still get well more then what you paid(obviously it still prays a bit on fomo)
Battle passes are still in that greyzone where the devs have not figured out exactly how to make them as aggressive as possible, but some are getting close like PoEs
If LE was to have one, I wouldnt be opposed, but id really hope it offers lots of little neat pieces rather then being a “complete it or its worthless” situation
Well, you are entitled to your opinion, but if LE implemented a PoE like season pass, I would have absolutely no issue with it. I wouldn’t buy it, but it wouldn’t affect me in any way.
Much like, if they decided that they want to make a, let’s say, dragon portal effect and sell it for 500$, I would be ok with that as well. I wouldn’t buy it, I would probably laugh at someone that spent all that money for it, but otherwise it wouldn’t affect me negatively (or positively either) in any way whatsoever.
Honestly, as long as they don’t annoy me with constant shop notifications like D4 does, or with constant shop broadcasts like PoE does, I don’t really care about that. I’ll buy cosmetics (mostly skill MTX and pets) to support the devs, but I’d probably also do that if all they asked was for me to give them money with nothing in return.
I’m against things that feel like cynical manipulative cashgrabs. If I want an MTX I prefer to be able to buy it directly (like PoE’s skill MTX).
That too.
Yes, but they also make more due to there being a significantly larger market & the price has increased (from ~£35 in the late 80s to ~£50ish now which is a 143% increase compared to an inflationary increase of ~200%). So it’s not quite just a “grrr, you ungrateful younguns, you should be glad we manipulate you into opening your/your parent’s wallet to pay ourselves!”. While I can’t (easily) find the size of the gaming market in 1995 (maybe ~140m in the early 90s?), the gaming market in the UK was worth ~£4.6 billion last year a growth of somewhere on the order of 32x. And consoles were historically always sold at a loss (except the Switch apparently) & they used games to make up the difference.
Neither does cheating/using hacked characters to hit wave 10 trillion on the leaderboard.
That actually doesn’t affect me at all, since I don’t do leaderboard races anymore. But if you’re competing for first, then it does. It removes your ability to compete in the game.
If you were to say that cheating/hacking to hit wave 10 trillion offline, then yeah, that really doesn’t matter at all. Or cheating to have 4LP perfect gear. That really doesn’t affect me at all.
Personally I’d be incredibly disappointed to pay a reasonable retail price for a game only to find it packed with microtransactions and FOMO bullshit to the same extent as a typical game of the same/higher quality I can get for free.
If LE goes that way I will be rooting for it to fail, for the sake of a future where games can just be games and not milking machines optimised in every way to drain our time and money down to the last drop
The standard box price for a game has been ~$60 since at least the 2000s (D2 sold at $60 on its release), which would be $109 today. Meanwhile, according to Wikipedia, the average cost of developing a AAA game went from $1-4m in 2000 to over $200m currently. Accounting for inflation ($4m 2000 → $7.3m 2023), that’s a 27x increase in average cost in the most generous version of this math. They could shoot standard box price directly to $109, which would make the entire gaming community collectively shit itself, and it still wouldn’t make up for that gap. It’s extremely unlikely that increased sales numbers are enough to make up for it either. You can compare D4 and D2 as an example - D2 has sold ~5m copies in its entire life, D4 has only doubled that up to ~10m. And this is all not including the more recently added costs of live service games that deliver regular content updates and fixes at no direct cost to the player, potentially for years after the original purchase was made.
Does this apply to every game everywhere ever? No, of course not. Does not being universally applicable mean it isn’t a big factor/driver for industry trends? Also no.
I’m not receptive to the idea that making pretty hats and putting a price tag on them counts as manipulation, and that also goes for anything that is allegedly manipulative “because FOMO!”, so I hereby deflect this caricature.
There is a large and ever growing gap between revenue that comes from box sales and the cost of developing games. There can’t not be. And when that gap has to be filled, it can’t be filled by increases to box price like it is with any other commodity. The internet lost its mind at a mere $10 increase above “accepted standard” for D4 and $10 doesn’t even count as money. Not making up for that gap is not an option either. If you rule out MTX models, everything that’s left is worse.
The point here is that no matter how much anyone may not like the model of MTX and season passes and whatever else, it enables all of us in a lot cases - especially with a game like LE - to pay less for our games than we would otherwise. Whales that spend thousands of dollars on pretty hats and other special perks subsidize everyone who only ever buys the box.
Well I also don’t care about leaderboards so nyah.
This is always a touchy topic, regardless of the game, so I appreciate everyone who’s gave a thoughtful and respectful response.
TLDR: any type of season pass that has a pay for track needs to have a free track as well, so nobody is left out. Season passes should not allow for any in-game advantage, i.e. pay-to-win (YUK!). No system is perfect but if done correctly it can support the team long-term and provide extra enjoyment and value to the community.
I remember putting down $30-40 for games back in the 90’s and can’t believe many games still go for the same today. Especially for large, complex multiplayer games where continued development and continued server costs have to cost a fortune. The economy of scale has helped but something has to give at some point, which is likely why many of these types of games have moved to MTX and season pass models to supplement continued costs.
I think when implemented correctly it can benefit both the community and the team (and annoy the smallest number of people possible). Things like having a free and paid for track (allows everyone to earn additional goodies, even those who can’t afford or don’t want to pay for). Ensuring none of the extras give an in-game advantage (prevents the worst design ever to enter gaming, pay-to-win). Having fairly priced MTX and fairly priced season passes. Not having loot boxes (no RNG based rewards so anyone who does pay knows exactly what they are paying for). I’m probably missing some other characteristics of a good season-pass model, but the point is if done right I think it can support the on-going and (hopefully) growing dev and server costs, plus be a benefit to everyone, free and paid alike.
Just like there are people who are turned off by MTX and season passes, I’d say I’ve become one of the people who are turned off by a lack of MTX and season passes. If I’m going to spend hundreds or thousands of hours playing a single title, especially multiplayer, I like to spice up what I’m seeing with different mounts and outfits. Plus I enjoy seeing other players decked out in their favorite gittups. BUT a poorly designed MTX and season pass model can be worse than none at all…
I do like meta progression systems and battle passes are essentially that. While playing the game regularly you unlock stuff on top of your normal gameplay.
I think if there is something along the lines of a Battle Pass, it defintiely needs a free track and I would even like it so this free track gives a mix of cosmetics and actual ingame rewards. (For examples 10 Glyph of Despair, 2 Rune of Ascendence and at the end maybe even 1 Rune oF Creation). Having a couple of cosmetics in there that are essentially Cycle exclusive will give even non-paying player the opportunity to get some cool cosmetics.
The cosmetics in the Battle Pass however should not the exclusive to the battle pass and be purchaseable on their own. So the battle pass only gives a discount when you want to buy multiple pieces so it only serves as something more dedicated player can use to support EHG when they want multiple cosmetics from it and they know they can fulfill it.
Also it should be purchaseable retroactively and then grant all paid rewards from the paid track.
TLDR:
Battle Pass should have free track with mix of cosmetics and ingame rewards
Paid Track should not grant exclusive rewards, but should provide a healthy discount when you want to have multiple of the cosmetics that are in the paid track
I actually like Battle Passes, even though I never bought one in any game.
I don’t care at all about the rewards, so the free track is more than enough for me, but I see the objectives as added little quests. Especially in a game without an achievements system, it would be great to have.
Diablo 4’s season pass is quite good, for example, because the objectives at each level are very diversified, encouraging you to engage with all the different game systems.
Couldn’t agree more.
Thankfully Larian has given me back a little bit of faith in humanity. Granted, they make CRPGs, not ARPGs. Maybe one day? Come on Swen, you can do it.
Not in the UK it hasn’t as far as I’m aware, I’ve been using Steam since the mid to late 2000s & the price for normal games has been in the £30s for a long time until it went up to £50-£55 some years ago.
Well, that entirely depends on how much more they sell. The good thing about digital sales is that you don’t need to pay for the boxes to shift (you still pay Steam et al a % of the sale but that’s a direct conversion/shift from paying thr bricks and mortar store a % and should be lower, plus no inventory to worry about making enough or too much).
Plus the gaming market is a lot larger than it was in 2000. So yes, the increased volume sold will help a lot.
Apparently D3 sold ~30 million units, though whether that includes the expansion or “ultimate” version isn’t said (though it almost doesn’t matter).
Good for you! Just because you don’t like a thing/statement/viewpoint doesn’t mean it’s not true/reasonable/sincerely held especially when it’s a subjective viewpoint! Unless you’re being sarcastic I expect better than that from you! Where’s the intelectual vigor?
I don’t know abput you, but a)I’d be quite happy to take $10 per unit of D4’s sales (I’ll even pay the tax on it, unlike Blizzard), b)Blizzard has metric fucktons of cash from WoW & cross-subsidising is a thing, c)the cost of living is nit heading in a particularly enjoyable direction & when massive companies pay obscene salaries to upper management while fucking over the people doing the actual hard work (I’m the payroll accountant, I know), are you entirely surprised when said large companies complain about being “poor” and asking for more money that the public gets a bit shirty?
