I do believe an overwhelming majority don’t care at all. There can be things for sale, or not, most people don’t mind because it doesn’t make any kind of difference to them.
The problem is, the tiny minority bothered by that is: 1. very vocal, and includes a lot of influential streamers. 2. “hardcore” competitive players, who are the most likely to drop a lot of money on a game.
So, even if in terms of numbers they would be neglectible, they cannot possibly be ignored by developpers.
I don’t think anyone “hates” PvP in the way you seem to believe. We just don’t give a crap.
Cash shop or no cash shop, high-end competition is only for “24-hours-a-day” people anyway, us common mortals wouldn’t be able to participate even if we wanted to (we don’t).
Last Epoch is actually the best example of that, with VisionGL tournaments being some kind of private playgrounds for 3-4 rich kids.
They don’t have any interest in integrating the community, only fair that most of the community doesn’t have any interest in what they are doing.
Let them have their fun, let me have mine. Again, cash shop or not is utterly irrelevant.
Good joke.
The thing is, I don’t like cosmetics… I find it more fun to see my appearance change along with the gear I find…
But when I spend time on a game I feel like giving a bit of money as a thank you.
I buy stash tabs in PoE, not because I really want more stash tabs, but because there is nothing else in the shop that I like.
Right now I am spending a lot of time on Lost Ark, and I have the same issue, there is absolutely nothing in the store I remotely feel like buying… So I still haven’t given them thank-you money. Figure Amazon can survive without my £10!
I would love to know what causes you to think that?
I’ve been playing games online since the dawn of the internet (yes I am ancient). At first, games were “buy it once” and people were fine with it. Then games arrived that were monthly subscription, some were fine with it but most grumbled about it but still paid when the amounts were “reasonable”. Then P2W arrived in supposedly “F2P” games but in a small sense of what was needed to “win” at end game, people then were so happy to not have to pay a monthly sub or initial fee that they put up with the small amounts to play at end game if they stuck with a game long enough to reach end game.
Then finally this new model of P2W arrived, where the game was free but P2W items would a) get you to end game in a fraction of the time playing “free” would get you, and b) keep you at end game and without them you would not be able to really play that level. Also, the amounts charged in these types of games were pretty large when compared to what it would have cost at say £8.99 per month. Now, even though PoE has stash tabs etc, it’s not quite in this model of P2W just yet. This still afaik primarily dominates the FPS genre, but make no mistake, a lot of gaming companies want it to creep over to ARPG’s.
Now on the last type which you could call true modern P2W, I have yet to see an “overwhelming majority not caring”. Any time I read reviews on new games coming out (I follow most genres, not just ARPG’s) and they contain these types of cash shops, all I read are overwhelming complaints about “gouging”, Rip off’s, etc etc. Take games made by EA for example and their cash shops, they’re hardly popular. Sure tons of people play the games, but that’s due to weak wills and shallow minds, because all they seem to do is complain about the amounts they are paying. The game companies are clever, there’s nothing in their ToS that say you HAVE to pay for these items, and sure you COULD play for free if you want to take 50x longer to do things and “die” far more often than a P2W player, and I’m not even touching the PvP advantages etc.
So, I don’t get your perspective. I think the overwhelming majority do care, but it’s only certain genres of games where the players have enough discipline to not buy into those games. There’s a subtle difference between not caring, and not having the self will to refrain from participating. In Arpg’s a lot of players tend to play on PC, and PC players seem to be more able to say “no” than console players. In sports & fps games, the majority seem to be console now, and from my experience console players seem to lack the same will to say “no”, which companies predate on.
Because the people who comment on forums/reddit/discord/etc and chat in-game are generally a very small minority. If you take LE, there’s probably somewhere around a thousand “regular” players spiking up to 4-7k when there’s a big patch/whatever, but there’s probably only around 100-200 regular posters on the forum, which is a minority by any measure.
That said, it’s impossible to know what the rest of that majority thinks about anything specific (other than that they generally enjoy playing LE) so “most people” assume that the majority agrees with them. One can construct whatever logically sound arguements one wishes, but without going & asking them, it’s entirely possible that one is wrong & said majority is primarily made up of a bunch of mouth-breathing window-lickers that would be fine being treated like **** as long as they get their shiny baubles and bread & circuses.
Simply the fact that these games have huge amounts of players. If cash shops were as much of a deterrent as you would think reading forums, the concerned games would be empty.
They are thriving.
I grant you that maybe it is just that they do care, but don’t have the “discipline to stop playing”. That sounds very possible.
But in that case people don’t need F2P, they need Addicts Anonymous… That’s just sad.
Of course, as Llama said, there is no way to know for sure.
And yes, I also come from a time when you just bought a game and that was it. I think that was much better, but sadly that wouldn’t work anymore nowadays.
True, and usually amplified by the fact that we naturally tend to hang out with people who share our views.
Giving us a distorted vision, because everybody we talk to DO agree with us.
I mean, I think it’s safe to assume that a significant portion of people who aren’t actively complaining on a forum somewhere either don’t care or don’t care enough for it to impact their gameplay. It is known that people are more likely to be vocal about negative reactions than positive ones, after all.
And, I really do think that most of the “effect” any of it has on anybody who is mad about it is entirely manufactured. It’s always about how “Paying players have an advantage over non paying players”, but the advantage is in… what? I can see how it’d allegedly matter in PvP, but it’s not just about PvP because that’s still the argument in games without it (or that have it as an afterthought). IMO, it’s just people who have an unhealthy emotional relationship with games, competing with other people in a competition that only exists in their head, making up principles about fairness and shortcuts that don’t exist anywhere else in life. Like, it’s not a secret that “gamers” (as opposed to people who just play games) are, as a subset of the population, often dysfunctional.
Meanwhile, everybody else is just playing a game they enjoy, or not playing one they don’t enjoy, with no mind whatsoever that players they’ll never encounter spent money to get the Murder Sword they did a grind for. I genuinely think that most people who play games haven’t forgotten that they’re games.
Lol, this might be just a storm in Zizaran’s teacup (to double up on the pun, not my cup of tea).
But it will be interesting to see what happens.
In March, more than 3 months before release, Diablo Immortal had over 30 MILLIONS pre-registered users. Probably passed 50 Millions by the time they released. This is mind-blowing numbers. Of course it is not going to please everybody in such a gigantic population sample.
I am SO going to play it when it comes to PC!
And happily ignore Zizaran’s and other streamers’ suggestions (I always do).
Just posting the vid - lots of other reddit posts, videos and news articles from two bit online mags to Forbes… if any of the math behind the DI end game & p2w requirements are even 10% valid then its interesting that Blizzard has gone this route and would validate it as a money grab.
I personally dont have any opinion on this because I absolutely loathe mobile games and refuse to play them out of principal. Added to this, the pay for benefit/win I have seen examples of mean that for me, even if I were tempted by the mobile game coming to PC, there is zero chance I would ever play it.
I am honestly old school here - I would gladly pay a box price and be done with it… and if the 50 million pre-registered users was a valid number why would the revenue from a once off price not be enough for any company? Even $10 would be a crazy amount of revenue with those numbers…
Its all just greed in my opinion… and preying on people who are like frogs in a slowly boiling pot… before they realise how much of their hard earned cash they have forked over… to buy some exec a new sportscar for every day of the week.
I agree with that 100%.
Particularly disappointing because up to now, Blizzard was mostly using more traditionnal (and in my opinion way better) business models, at least for Diablo and WoW, the two games from them I care about.
Now they are joining in the “micro-transactions” nonsense. What’s next, selling Diablo 4 in “early access” mode?
I also agree about mobile games. I would never play a rpg on mobile, even less an action one.
I feel like the mobile era has lowered gaming standards, and considerably increased the micro-transactions models (which has now spread to PC).
The one bit I disagree with, is that it won’t prevent me from playing it.
I will just enjoy the story, have fun with different classes, and see where it takes me.
If I never reach the ultimate endgame because I would have to pay, who cares? I will just quit faster. I wasn’t planning on playing just that game for an entire lifetime anyway…
To me, cash shop or not doesn’t make any kind of difference.
For one, what game is seeing 50 million actual sold copies? A quick Googling tells me that the #1 selling game in 2021 was COD: Vanguard, and as of last month it had been outsold by Elden Ring - which has sold only 13.4 million copies and is expected to top out at 20 this year. Meanwhile, this Wikipedia page shows only 7 games in all of gaming history to have sold over 50 million copies, dropping off sharply after that.
For two, because the (almost non-existent) change in shelf prices of games over time does not reflect such things as inflation and ever increasing development costs. Here’s a good video discussing this:
(Which, if memory serves, doesn’t even factor in on-going, post-release costs such as new content, patches, servers, maintenance, and customer support which are in ever increasing demand by players.)
For three, a game that’s in development makes zero money. The costs of completing development of the game have to come from somewhere, and unless you’re talking about one-and-done studios, that “somewhere” is often “profits from previously released games”. So, it’s not unreasonable for a studio that wants to continue making games to want to bring in enough extra revenue to cover the costs of doing it in a dry period.
And finally, let’s do an illustrative rephrasing of your question here. When you break it down to its base components, what you’re really asking is: “Why would a business want more to make money when they could make less money?” And if you think about it, that’s kind of a silly question, isn’t it?
Sure… thats ok. Its tricky for me tho. I have conflicting thoughts on the matter… I suppose its because I dont like to be played… I would rather make a decision to pay for the priviledge to play with price that is known and predicatable and not have a game try and underhandedly / by dubious means try and trick me into paying for things when I am hooked…
I think the big take away is no one is actually opposed to cash shops.
People are opposed to outrageous and crazy price gouging, or outrageous gating based on money.
No one wants to get price gouged, which is basically what games that sell power are.
PoE is fairly successful and offers not an ounce of power to players unless we get into the grey area of the economic power stashes provide.
People will often complain about the cost of a suit of armor though, but hey like the video says, games cost money to make. So if you wanna look snazzy you can drop 150$ and look cool as heck.
Riot and league of legends also runs off this model, they just print money selling people skins which also can get pricey for “some pixels”
What games get flamed would be something like maplestory where you are actually stat checked at door of any late game experience unless you swipe up, and that swipe isnt just a “haha one and done” swipe. its a repeated swipe over and over everytime you get a new gear set or reach a new hurdle. This is simply making sure the player is always funneling money into the system at a rate that far exceeds a monthly sub.
But its been a long time of the F2P model being around, we all know you can make a game survive off cosmetic sales alone, so anything else is basically just trying to gouge the player for more money.
How did I know you would respond like this… should have guessed… You are very good at stating the obvious as if everyone doesnt know the point of making money in a business in a capitalist society. Of course I understand the issue making more money over less… Grief dude - could you be more insulting/condescending?
I assumed that anyone who read my comment would understand that… What I am getting at, and what you obviously missed - probably because I was not clear enough - is that I dislike the nefarious methods with which companies approach this need to make the most money to the point where they prey on people by hiding the fact that they are generating revenue by slowly bleeding players dry over time by offering them fictious benefits after having made them addicted to playing a game…
I am of the opinion that everything should be up front and clear… If a company wants to make $100 income per player then they should charge $100 to play… not sneakily try and earn $1 here or there so that the player doesnt realise that they eventually spend $500 on the game…
In general, yes, but this is Blizzard we’re talking about here & they have the massive cashcow of WoW to fund their game development, Blizz have no dry period.
True, but the units shifted has also massively increased over the past ~20 years.
Back in the days you only needed the box price. So everybody who could afford the game had the same core experience (given the specs of the pc were good enough to run the game smoothly).
The first games I remember playing online were all competitive, shooters like Q3 Arena or UT. There it was mandatory to have equal chances. It was all about player skill.
The first time I really faced a disparity between player skill and gear was in Warcraft 3. I really loved doing PvP. And I was very good at it. But I could not afford to put that much time into it so my gear was only average. With a bit luck and skill I could 1vs1 a better geared player. I felt nice to kill people that obviously had epic raid gear when I was only wearing that standard set stuff you get in the first endgame dungeons. But very often I wasn’t able to kill even the biggest PvP noobs because they had the way better gear.
That was kind of frustrating for me, but I also was ok with it in the grand scheme. Those people had earned their gear by spending a lot of time. So why shouldn’t they have an advantage?
When games then became f2p with cosmetics and boosters it first looked like a really cool thing to me. I, as a more casual gamer, could spend some extra cash to boost my leveling speed and/or gear so I could close the gap between me and the 24/7 players. But the thing is that nothing prevents the 24/7 gamers from not also spending money. And what type of people wouldn’t be more motivated to become strong as fast as possible if not the hardcore gamers.
And all of a sudden gaming wasn’t about skill and time investment anymore. It was about the wallet. The real life laws have made it into gaming. When before everybody would have had equal chances in a game - no matter how wealthy he was - now it had changed: The guy with the bigger wallet would be able to just buy to power - like in the real world.
I made use of it to some extend. I’m far away from being a whale, though.
The effect of these kind of business model is that companies profit massively from addiction. They want you to feel forced to buy stuff by gating not only power behind money, but also content, progress, convenience,… They create models to please the whales but also to suck every penny out of the small fishes pockets.
It’s astonishing how predatory some p2w models are and even more how many people play those games.
But the internet is full of storys that are just ridiculous, like people investing into NFT projects and getting scammed 7 times in a row within 3 years and losing thousands of dollars. But that’s another thing…
That’s a nice opinion to have. It’s also idealist and willfully naïve.
Gamers in general are extraordinarily cheap, and many would just voluntarily not buy the game because they’d be unwilling to spend $100 up front as a matter of “principle”. Others wouldn’t buy games at a higher price point without knowing that they were going to like it - driving the industry to adapt by focusing even more on sequels, remakes, and copycats that would sell more reliable than innovation and experimentation. Still more would be priced out of buying the game entirely because they simply can’t afford to. There’s an entire avalanche of negative effects that would come raining down on the industry, many of which come from straight up childish entitlement at the hands of gamers, with the net result being sales and revenue would plummet.
Do you want to experience a world of gaming where everything becomes COD and Madden and WoW just so companies can sell enough, reliably, to make a profit? Should economically disadvantaged people be prevented from playing AAA games to appease a vocal minority’s uninvestigated ideas about ethics and transparency?
Or is it maybe better for everybody that players have options in how much they choose to spend on a game that they want to play? Some people get to play for years without spending a dime, and their ability to do that is subsidized by streamers and people with high disposable income who feel they get value out of dropping thousands or more on the shop. Some people can try a game for a few hours, find out it’s not for them, and not feel bad about losing the box price or even worse - playing a game they aren’t having fun with just to appease their sense of sunk cost.
Or is that also all so obvious that pointing it out makes me condescending?
I am not receptive to arguments that grant as valid the practice of not keeping track of one’s own finances unless the subject has a mental health issue (like gambling addiction) or is an actual child (in which case I’m only a little receptive, because their parents should be doing it). Absent those scenarios, an adult is perfectly capable of keeping track of and restraining how much money they spend on any given hobby. If they choose not to, that is on them, not the game company. “You get Thing for Price”, right up in your eyeballs in the shop, is not sneaky.
Meanwhile, how much time and enjoyment did this hypothetical player get out of spending that $500? At what point does that $500 divide out on a gameplay hours basis that it’s no longer “bad” to have spent it? Did they spend it on a game that was delivering content to them which was otherwise free, for years, as is the case with the majority of games that make heavy use of MTX? Did they pay nothing to start paying the game, in which case you can subtract $60-90 out of that $500 to make up for the lack of a box price? Did they start playing years after the initial release, after the game has gone through many development and release cycles of content updates and expansions that they’re now getting for free? How does that $500 spent on a game compare to potential spending on other, equally frivolous hobbies? I spent almost 10x that just last year on equipment for one of my other hobbies.
And that’s always the problem with this argument. People just make up and toss out numbers that sound bad to them with no context and no consideration thereof, as though the number just stands on its own as an indictment. But if that’s $500 you spent on POE, that could potentially be less than $50 a year, or $30 per expansion, and that doesn’t sound as unreasonable does it? That’s a game you can play with any dollar figure the average person is going to end up spending on a normal game.
I wasn’t talking just about Blizzard. It was a general statement.
But, WoW doesn’t mean it doesn’t apply to Blizzard too. WoW just isn’t the revenue juggernaut it used to be, and they are a large company that can have any number of games in active or experimental development, sometimes spending years on projects that get dropped entirely or radically change direction. Even though Blizzard has a reputation for paying poorly compared to many of their peers and exploiting their employees, good talent is still expensive. They can’t rely on just WoW to cover the costs of all the development that isn’t currently making money, and may not for years, and that’s why they don’t. And again, that is just one cost that revenue has to cover - Ongoing infrastructure maintenance both for games and for staff, customer support, office space, utility consumption, security, legal teams (especially in the last year), and so on.
(And to be clear I’m not trying to make a statement about Immortal, its MTX, or the ethics thereof here. The game doesn’t interest me, so I haven’t investigated it and don’t really care.)
I look at streamers vids occasionally for build ideas, but that’s the extent of it.
As far as streamers voicing opinions, I don;t pay them any attention whatsoever. How can you possibly pay any attention to the “opinion” of someone whose entire revenue is from sources including the paid promotion of said games. It’s like asking a second hand car dealer if the car he is trying to sell you is a good car or not. Of course he will be honest with you, and no doubt tell you “trust me”. The sad fact of modern society now is that the majority of people are IMHO stupid enough to do just that.
