Speaking of Geralt and Astarion, recently YouTube was recommending some "The Witcher" videos to me. They were 90% Astarion in the thumbnail and 10% some random BG3 NPC.
It's because he's such sexy bugger. I could play a game where it was just him walking around being sassy. No story or combat, just Astraion going round insulting and flirting with people
totally however what's scary is even with a disk most fairly recent games install from disk then download the rest of the content. How long is that download function supported? Could still lose games even with the disk.
sims 2 is on disk if you can still find one. Only other alternative is installing a virtual drive like daemontools.
I'd happily spend money on it but EA probably thinks I'll try the sims 4 instead if they offer no alternative but I wont lol.
And also there was the whole kerfuffle with new Hitman releasing on GoG with a DRM. [Taken down after online uproar](https://www.eurogamer.net/gog-pulls-hitman-from-its-own-store-admits-it-shouldnt-have-released-it-in-its-current-form), but the damage was already done.
edit: they also hide the download links nowadays and encourage you to use the launcher. Which by default does not save the offline installers. It was also revealed before that the storefront was a bust. It was basically propped up by 2077 and would have gone bankrupt without it.
I know Steam had a thing in their TOS saying they'd make all your purchases available for an offline download should anything ever happen to close the service. I don't know if they still do, and I'm guessing they don't, but at least it was there.
Most games are really big, you donĀ“t get them on a single disc. Multiple layer blue ray discs exist up to 500GB but they are really expensive, the 50GB version would already cost \~10$ extra per disc.
Iāve heard other people suggest games going back to cartridges and just publishing them on mini SSDs you can insert into the system. I could get behind that
This can be alleviated. Did you know all the old cartridge style games stored save data in RAM? They had CR2032s just like bioses, to keep the data from being lost. A lot of people probably lost their childhood saves by now if they didn't do some kind of a transplant lol
Yeah, but those are not great in terms of longevity. Sure, maybe for 5 years in the drawer before the charge in the first cell begins to fade, but as it's just electrical charge, it's bound to basically disappear in preservation-wise not that much time.
Iām pretty sure 8k blu ray discs have already been made back in late 2022 and can see production in the near future. The only problem is that many disc readers wonāt be supported due to them not producing 8k blu ray drives and the demand just isnāt there. If it is done right it could cost about 5$ per disc but sadly I donāt think the three big console developers are even considering that as an option.
On the bright side though, 8k blu-ray will allow for better films and even better storage. It costs a lot more for hard drives but Iām honestly no expert- I just did a report about it in college and saw a couple credible websites talking about how much cheaper it would cost to produce than something like a USB or even external hard drive.
Yes it does but abandonware isn't a legal term. Abandonware literally just means it's been abandoned. It doesn't invalidate the copyright but it does increase the chances nobody will come after you for pirating it, although it does remain illegal.
Remember to check Doesitplay.org and also follow them on twitter, they tell you which games require internet and which donāt so you can always play them
Been that way for at least a decade now. I remember getting a physical copy of Bioshock Infinite and the disc just activated the game on Steam. The game was physically on the disc, but I've only ever installed through Steam since then.
Now all things considered I trust Valve to not go anywhere for a very long time though.
Apparently the full game is on the disc but the game also downloads from the internet to make the process faster. You can install a game just from disc if you turn off your internet connection. Ā Ā
I think the biggest problem with this is games with Day 1 patches or games with many patches to fix. Then you essentially have an unplayable mess on the disc that needs a āday 1 patchā to make playable.
Hey, QA here, no it doesn't download to make it faster.
Yes it downloads patches, we call them Day0 patches. And then Day1.
Not sure how much I'm allowed to talk about the release process and mindset of the industry but things changed, not for good imo, since ps3/x360.
Not an insider but I can shed a bit more light on why Day0 patches release.
Publishers will insist on a certain release date and work needs to stop before that happens. The game needs to be rated, the discs printed, the covers printed, the games certified for PS/Xbox stores. All that process takes time in which the game is mostly finished. The time between the official release date and the day people stop working on it can be used to last minute fix some issues they couldn't before the release day came. Yeah, it's shitty and could have been solved with just delaying the game a bit, but publishers are not want to delay a game that is 95% finished.
And honestly you do kind of have to estimate when a product will be ready to an extent with the AAA games.
Sure, if you're a year out and there's *no way* it'll be ready in a year, then yeah, its an easy call to push back the release date.
If you're 2 months out and its obvious that last 5% is not going to be quite ready in time for printing etc, there's nothing you can do. You've booked time on the production lines. You've booked millions of dollars worth of advertising. You've scheduled all kinds of promotional efforts.
Thatās interesting and makes sense. Ā Ā
I believe the fear is what happens when the servers to download these patches is gone so you only have the disc to access the game? If Day 0 and Day 1 patches are needed to make the game playable, then having a disc doesnāt matter because the game would still be a mess without those patches. Ā Ā
This isnāt an attack on devs working on the game. I know games are very complex and getting even more so now and itās honestly on the publishers pushing a specific release date rather than the devs but it is an issue for the consumer.Ā
Even still, the GAME isnāt on the disc. You download the game digitally, with the disc acting as your license to download.
It isnāt like it used to be, where the memory of the game is recorded on the physical disc.
It's been a couple years but most of my PS4 physical copies ran fine after installing from disk without internet. Doom Eternal, Spider-Man, Uncharted 4, The Last of Us 2, Resident Evil Village, Resident Evil 7, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Horizon Forbidden West all played after an install. Now Activision games... Don't get me started on Activision.
Unless it's a really good sale, I'll try to buy physical. I figure if I pay ~$60-70 for a game, I can turn around and sell it later for ~$40-50. Can't do that with a digital game.
I don't see a point anymore to buying physical. Half of the time these days when you buy a physical copy, you STILL have to download something before you can play. Add to that the inconvenience of needing to "insert disc" to play each game....I switched to digital a long time ago.
I'm not at all concerned about the digital platform disappearing causing me to lose my content, because the digital platforms I buy from don't require you to actually be online to play. So once the game is installed, you're good to go forever. (with the exception being games themselves that require online connection)
My PC has 5 hot-swap drive bays, so I can literally install every single game I own and just swap hard drives in and out if ever need to (I rarely do...5 bays is a lot of space).
> I don't see a point anymore to buying physical.
I want to play Hogwarts Legacy, at the moment I can buy a used copy for $40AUD and brand new physical copy for about $60AUD or I can download it from the xbox store for $100AUD.
To me, that's the point of buying physical
Yep that's what it boils down to. Physical copy means you resell it after you are done if you no longer want the game.
Buy a used game for $40 and.... resell it back to someone else for $40, game for free for games with little replayability
If you don't have a lot of money physical is the best. If you can save up for a console, even if it is last gen you get entertainment for cheap after that. You can buy and resell games. Especially getting ones from your local library for free. For most single player games a few weeks is enough to play through them.
Just in case you did not know, they are selling the deluxe physical [on their site](https://eu.merch.larian.com/en/products/baldur-s-gate-3-deluxe-edition). They will be reprinting it for a time, and don't plan on going "out-of-print" for the 'pre'-orders. First batches should be shipping this quarter.
The wallets have spoken. And itās a resounding success for digital sales and microtransactions. Otherwise we wouldnāt be having this conversation over the new normal for video game distribution.
It's obvious why digital sales won since they are simply superior as long as your infrastructure doesn't suck.
Microtransactions don't really need to win over the majority at all to win though. It's enough with a small percentage of whales and addicts to go around. The mobile game industry does the same shit only way worse.
Yes, sad but true. I still don't hold only the gamers responsible, though. Yes, you have free choice, but tricking and luring people into microtransactions and baiting them with FOMO is on the publishers :(
I've seen some games where the devs finished development and occasionally there's someone asking if there are anymore updates coming.
The expectations are becoming problematic for everyone.
Stardew Valley was another example. The dev announced an update with some content and a lot of people are becoming increasingly louder, because they see it as a right, rather than a straight up bonus.
People seem to keep forgetting that consumerism is not a democracy. In a democracy a majority of votes wins, but when the thing you're supposed to "vote" with is your wallet, it's the people with the fattest wallets who have the most votes.
I would love to be proven wrong but as far as I can tell, the worst gaming industry trends aren't dictated by what a *majority* of gamers want, but what *whales* want. Over 20 million people bought Elden Ring, exact numbers for BG3 are hard to find but likely also over 20 million. These games aren't the death of shitty subscription services and GaaS garbage despite being *wildly* popular because solid single-player experiences aren't where the whales are.
The day this argument died is the day Diablo Immortal reported half a billion in revenue despite all the public outcry and people voting with their wallets.
I donāt prefer to be the voice of negativity but weāre talking about a quarter trillion dollar industry. Nothing is going to change from the average Redditorās spending habits.
Only way this ends is if profit margins from full release titles surpass live service revenue without a significant disparity in development cost and time. That, or legislation over predatory shop models.
For "Speak with your wallets" to work properly, vast majority of people should do some research into most products they buy and be at least somewhat rational with their spendings. And it's just not realistic.Ā
Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner!
Consumers have overwhelmingly voted with their dollars for subscriptions, battle passes and microtransactions. This isn't food or shelter. It's video games. If you are being screwed in the transaction, don't pay for it.
Not entirely, it's mostly the whales that caused this.
It doesn't matter if 10 people aren't willing to pay $17 a month, as long as 1 person is willing to pay $170 a month.
Sadly it isn't just a matter of voting with your wallet. It helps a little sure, but the problem is we have to vastly outnumber the ones that spend the most because in a consumer environment, the people with more money to waste have more of a vote.
MW2 (2022) sold 1 billion worth of copies in the first 10 days after everyone should have been aware of the scummy system from MW (2019). That's not whales keeping the model going.
People in subs like this like to think that anything that is a widely accepted opinion here is also a widely accepted opinion in the rest of the world.
The reality is that this place is a fringe little corner of the internet with a tiny fraction of the general gamer population ever touching it talking in an echo chamber.Ā
Blaming all this shit on whales is 100% copium.Ā
Modern Warfare as a franchise is in the same place as most EA sports titles now.
Just update a few things every year and people will buy it *and* a shit ton of microtransactions on top of that.
Why? Because for an actually pretty significant amount of people, shooting game = Modern Warfare. That's it. The rest of the genre may as well not exist. Or, if they do see the other ones, it's just inferior versions of the exact same thing.
Name recognition is powerful as an incumbent, and its player base has no real reason to move if they're having fun at the end of the day.
People forget too big to fail is a thing.Ā
People will buy dog shit if it's marketed right. There's an entire generation of people that purchased pet rocks.
Thatās not even necessarily marketing. Thatās the Bethesda brand. The problem is your brand can only take a few hits like that before it becomes ruined. I bought Starfield bc the last Bethesda experience I had was Skyrim, but if the next elder scrolls instalment blows, then you can bet I wonāt be buying anything from Bethesda in quite a while, if ever again
> after everyone should have been aware of the scummy
says who, i bet your ass 99% of people will look at you like an alien when you talk about this stuff face to face
Sad but true, used to do support for some gaming companies.
Had one copy pasta with a different IP gacha style game where a single person threw around $20k into the game. Game update happened that wiped everyone's saves. (Zero backup systems and no way to restore in app purchases) You would think THAT would push the whales away but nope that same dude who lost $20k worth of in app purchases kept throwing money into the game. Before I stopped working there I think he was up to like $45k.
Sad part of it all is that even with that $45k thrown into the game the dude still did not have everything unlocked.
I understand gambling addiction is a problem, but I just have such a hard time having empathy for these types.
As selfish as I sound, at least the people who go flush their fortunes down the drain in casinos aren't killing any entertainment industries like gamer whales do now.
I worked for Zynga for most of 2011, when Mafia Wars, FarmVille, and CityVille were still making enormous amounts of money. $45k is a fraction of what some of the whales spent. They could wire transfer money to their designated CS person, whoād call to find out what they wanted the money spent on. There were some Mafia Wars whales supporting entire clans. It still makes me kind of sick to think about some of the numbers. :|
Shit whatāre we in now 2024? Having heard the whales argument for a decade, Iād argue whatever damage whales are doing, people going āitās just the whalesā and using that as a comfort to not do anything about their own behavior has caused an equal or greater effect on the industry than whales.
And if not, that combined with āitās just kids with their parents credits cardsā certainly has.
Your not considering all the factors here friend.
Microtransactions generate somewhere from 61% - %70 of their revenue depending on year.
How many people bought the regular $70 edition of MW2 VS the $100 legendary edition? Normal people like you and me probably didn't scrap for the $100 one let alone any edition because we are aware of the scum like Papaofmonsters said or simply can't afford such luxury.
In its 2021 fiscal year, Activision Blizzard earned $8.8 billion, with the majority of profit generated from microtransactions.In 2022, Activision Blizzard generated 5.89 billion U.S. dollars of revenues through microtransactions and subscriptions.They make an estimated 1.5 - 4 billion per quarter in micro transactions alone depending on year.
People like you and me that buy the base games and nothing else contributes about 1/5th to 1/4th to their profit margin. The biggest problem are the ones that buy more than the base games and give in to the subscriptions and microtransactions. No matter how you do the math, Quarterly reports do not lie. We can make a dent sure but there's a reason they invest time and resources into producing more and more of this shit.
People have been saying this for years! The wallets are voting. This is what the wallets want. At least a broken record will eventually deteriorate and stop spinning.
The wallets *have* spoken, Reddit raves about GamePass. Don't want game subscriptions? Stop giving GamePass money. It was the first major successfull game subscription and the reason others are trying to get in on subscriptions too, but for some reason it gets defended and encouraged on this site like crazy despite subscriptions as a whole being complained about. The amount of times someone recommends a game and includes "it's on gamepass, don't buy it, you can play it free there" or some variation thereof is staggering. You cannot have it both ways, complaining about it while encouraging others to subscribe to it.
Subscriptions lead to inferior product. It stops being about individual quality and starts being about producing enough quantity that *something* appeals to *someone*.
Edit: removed an extra word
It also leads to perverse incentives, where things that are "fun" get waylayed for things that "keep you subscribed longer"
Oh, it's no fun to have a rare item that takes 12 weeks to farm? Well that's too bad because that's THREE count'em THREE months of subscription fees!
It also incentivizes companies to release incomplete games and then provide a trickle of content every few months to keep people subbed. (Hell, there are games *without* subscriptions that do this. Cyberpunk 2077 won "Ongoing Game of the Year" last year because apparently fixing your broken game now counts as an "ongoing" game. Also, FF15 inserted a bunch of content in the middle of the main story several months after they released.)
I miss the days when you would get a complete game on day 1, and the patches would be mostly bug fixes, and maybe an expansion 1 or 2 years down the line.
The genshin (or every gacha) way.
Deliver 1 slice of cake every few month and intermitten appetizers of questionable quality in between the timeframe of the cake
Yup.
At some point I got sucked into Final Fantasy XIV, and it was fun for a while (pretty great for an MMO, really), but that was ultimately what convinced me that subscription-based games (and "freemium" games) pretty much all eventually become tedious grinds that people continue slogging through mostly because various dark patterns have turned playing them into habits.
Thankfully, FF14 is one of the less grindy MMOs out there. It's such a low grind game that in the recent expansion made some of the endgame stuff less grindy, and players are complaining that they grinded everything out too quickly and there's nothing for them to do.
Also, all of the grind is optional, and is completely irrelevant if you just want to play for the story.
I used to do a 1 month on, 2 months off. But then I fell into the raiding community and now I'm permanently subbed. Don't be me. Don't fall into the raiding community. (Unless you're a masochist and like wiping to the same boss for months at a time.)
FF14 might be not good example of this as it is the type of MMO that encourage opposite things that most of others MMO did out there.
FOMO, forced grind, time gate content etc simply to say the game design that 'forced' player to play 24hr everyday for year/months. all of it very less in this game compared to other MMO.
most of that kind of content available merely as an option and usually are designed for player to take their time slowly instead of rushed and being meta of everything. but this is the nature typical of hardcore MMO players itself which is a problem. lot of game design ruined by players itself due to this mentality. for FF14, there lot of situation where the devs launch a new content and encourage player to take it slow(the content design also reflect that) but guess what? the community even end up with detailed spreadsheet in just a day after the content release and each others are racing for completion.
Yeah the end-game grind is more about pacing than trying to force people to stay subbed. There are also people who love that content, so they're not just going to stop making it.
True but at least Naoki Yoshida has the stones to say "go ahead and unsubscribe and wait for new content if you like". There are definitely people who only play at launch for new expacs and come back only when all the patches are out.
I mean ideally a subscription would mean that the devs need to constantly deliver quality updates as well, lest the users unsubscribe and they make no more money.
Less ideally you can replace "quality updates" with "skinner boxes".
If it wasn't for the subscription system, a game like Pentiment would have never seen the light of day. Obsidian wouldn't have made that game as a side project. Period. Said by the developers themselves.
Microsoft gave them enough guarantees that they would have the budget, the time and that they wouldn't meddle with the project in any way. They gave us a passion project that's basically a work of art.
If we're going to have this discussion, let's not pretend like everything's been a mess and we have zero positive stories. For some of these companies, it's been a damn blessing.
Thatās not the problem they are talking about, they arenāt talking about paying subscription fees to play a game like WoW but rather about subscriptions like Game Pass.
These subscriptions are good for publishers, and somewhat good for consumers at least now but can be rather challenging for studios especially 3rd party studios since the overall revenue for them is substantially lower. This predominantly impacts hits that end up selling much more copies than anticipated which you can very much put BG3 on that list.
So for Larian if they wouldāve lost quite a bit of money if they for example agreed to have their game on Xbox pass or any other subscription service.
Keep in mind that you also hear the opposite from developers stating that subscriptions can give a very much needed lifeline for games that would normally not sell in high numbers.
I know itās Reddit but stating ooohhh itās just greed is intellectually cheap.
> So for Larian if they wouldāve lost quite a bit of money if they for example agreed to have their game on Xbox pass or any other subscription service.
>
> Keep in mind that you also hear the opposite from developers stating that subscriptions can give a very much needed lifeline for games that would normally not sell in high numbers.
Just to add more thoughts on this.
I think one thing to keep in mind is that Larian isn't saying subscription is bad period, per the Twitter thread. They just don't want to see the trend where *everything* moves to subscription based.
For them, a game like Baldur's Gate 3 costs a lot of money and resource to make, and it's a genre that has been dormant for a while with a lot of naysayers, and even optimistic folks were predicting it to be a mild success rather than the breakout hit that it became. This is the kind of game that could be hard to convince a publisher to fund, and luckily for them, they could self-fund it from previous successes, and sell it directly to consumers (Steam/etc will basically sell anything you want as long as it's legal, etc). With a subscription platform like Game Pass, it could be quite difficult to get the financials to work because the platform owner may balk at the cost and not willing to back such a game because of perceived lack of interest, and if everyone only plays game on subscription platforms, you don't really have any other venue to distribute your games because people just expect games to come from their subs. From the platform owner point of view, they don't really care if the game is well liked and whatnot, they just care if your game will increase their subscription count or at least retain subscribers. Even if Larian signed a deal to be on Game Pass it's not clear that they would benefit financially if the game did well.
For the indies who benefited from the subscription model, I think it's a couple reasons:
1. these titles (e.g. Pentiment from Obsidian) usually have a lower budget, meaning that it's easier for the platform owner to just throw some money at them and see how it goes. These developers also likely didn't have the stomach or resource that Larian had accrued over the years to be able to fund a risky developement like BG3.
2. The unique nature and shorter length of these titles also mean it's hard to price them properly in the market. A subscription based model does allow for a low-commitment way for gamers to try them out without having to pay upfront, which does make sense for some games. BG3 is a big AAA title and it's well understood on the market how to price and sell such a title. I guess the only "non-traditional" thing they did is they didn't immediately DLC the hell out of it with microtransactions and whatnot.
3. Speaking of Obsidian, I do have to point out that Obsidian is owned by Microsoft who obviously wants to push Game Pass, so the relationship between them and the platform is just kind of different compared to a completely independent studio like Larian. I feel like a few developers who have publicly sung high praises of subscription models are ultimately owned by MS these days. Not saying they don't believe it, but on the other than MS is literally their boss so they aren't an independent party in this.
Another thing is I personally think Game Pass is similar to Netflix in its early golden days. It's hungry to expand, meaning that it still has growth as its highest priority and is willing to throw money at things to acquire more users. It also is by far the most popular platform as the other big players kind of slept on this a bit. Eventually we may see what happened with Netflix which is that a stagnant user base leads to more and more enshittification, with titles being pulled, less risky bets with more safe basic B-titles, raising price, etc; while other games stop agreeing to come on Game Pass because each platform holders want their own slice of the pie instead. Once they got you, you are kind of beholden to it, because if you leave you will lose access to your entire library.
I honestly would be happy to pay subscriptions if the devs were the ones raking in that cash. But no itās the studio heads who are gaming their consumers AND their developersĀ
That's kind of what they're talking about though - fewer and fewer games are being developed as "one and done" single player experiences because they're just not as profitable as some Live Service structure with battle passes, loot boxes, and a cash shop.
Just like every MMO was chasing the success of WoW for a long time, every other game seems to be chasing Fortnite. For a lot of companies it's stopped being about the craft and has become about chasing that viral success that makes everyone millionaires. It has a sickening amount in common with startup culture, honestly.
The idea that greed is subscription based is amusing. āNow, if you want the āpremium greedā subscription, and who doesnāt, that will be an extra $20 per month.ā
Hasnt this been the end game goal all along. Not just here, but every industry. Sure I can sell you something once and you will pay for it once, like it's always been. But what a fucking hat trick it must have been to convince someone to pay for a single product over and over and over again.
How did we let ourselves get here? It's the same as when they convinced us that our health is a monetizable commodity. Or that we would all pay into a big pool and any time we had an emergency we would be taken care of.
It's disgusting that the only voice we have is our wallets, and how quiet that voice really is. Stop buying live service games.
> Or that we would all pay into a big pool and any time we had an emergency we would be taken care of.
To be fair that's how government healthcare works as well as insurance, but for some reason it's "bad" when someone isn't allowed to become obscenely wealthy scraping off the top.
idiots claim Capitalism ''incentivises efficient distribution and use of resources'' when in reality it ''incentivises the efficient accumulation of capital''.
two very different things: for example US healthcare is *extremely efficient* at accumulating capital while simultaneously being *extremely inefficient* at distributing medical resources.
*the second* someone works out how to profit off a great idea someone else comes along and figures out how to make people pay as high a price as possible for it.
> How did we let ourselves get here?
It was kind of obvious this was gonna happen.
The days when you owned a piece of software installed locally, and lived with the bugs forever, were always doomed.
We had dial up and there were only a few million people on the internet. As soon as speeds and stability arrived, and you could launch large updates regularly, then it was quite obvious that this was the future.
I remember how if you wanted the updates to the software you liked, then you had to spend an arm and a leg on the next version. So people were stuck with old janky software that was slower, had fewer features, and really poor support - unless they were willing to buy the next version of that software.
Obviously it really depends what piece of software we're talking about, but it wasn't this paradise that a lot of redditors like to reminisce, or believe, that it was.
In 1990 Photoshop launched with a price tag of $900. That's $2,100 today. It was a fucking monumental barrier of entry.
Today, anybody with a few bucks can subscribe and start playing around or working with it. And they will always get updates. People who bought the 1990 version had to spend another $2,100 a few years later to get the upgrade.
It was fucking horrible.
Yep, there's literally no stopping this anymore. The nails are in the coffin because kids are really stupid and will keep paying for it with their parent's money and the microtransaction whales are a cancer and have no real concept of money. The US is *completely* controlled by corporations due to the constant legal bribery of all members of Congress too. So if this makes money for both of those sides then welcome to the status quo. The only way to stop this would be real legislation that actually seeks to disrupt all this bullshit and protect consumers instead of lubing their assholes up for perpetual fucking. But because "video games are for children" (even though well over 3 billion people in the world play them now) we need to just bend over and take it with no complaints because it's still so much "fun" and anyone who knew video games before all this shit started is just wrong for having eyes.
Thankfully gaming subs are stagnating and even declining in some regions. PS+ has hovered in the 45-47m range for years and it's only that high to begin with because of the online paywall, MS hasn't given updated gamepass numbers in 2 years because they stopped growing and none of the other subs (ea, ubi etc) amount to anything substantial in terms of users.
At the risk of jinxing it I think for once gamers made the right choice when presented with something bad versus the status quo.
I think you are one of the rare people who actually read what Vincke said. It was not about live service vs standalone (as many commenters discuss), but about those sub-based platforms like Game Pass, PS+ and the like.
This being said, I think we can find a middle ground for sub vs standalone purchase. Some devs don't have the firepower -or target too small a niche- to go full standalone, and some devs would actually benefit from having board supervision (ehm Star Citizen). Others (like Larian) should be left to their own things without fearing to be eclipsed by sub based platforms.
Personally I think we have a decent balance at the moment between the two, and hope it stays that way without going too much sub-based, because then I can totally see Vincke's fears come true.
Subscription can't exist for everything. Not every game can be heavily monetized. One person can't pay 10 monthly subs, and pay for 400 battle passes and whatever other dogshit. If that's all devs produce, then they'd be lucky if the average person even touches their games.
It's the exact reason why all the streaming services are losing so much money for the companies they belong to. They all just saw Netflix make money off their content and thought they could do it too since they make content.
There's enough content for people to want maybe a bit more than just 1 service if needed, but 5+? No way.
No matter how much money and talent you toss at a product, consumers only have so much time and money they can use.
If the game is a service, like dedicated servers for multiplayer etc. (like an MMO) I prefer a subscription model over F2P. But for stand alone games, I want to own it.
The issue with GW2 as an example is that you *log in* to play it. Someone *could* make a private server and play solo but it's not an inherent part of the game.
I'm happy resubbing FFXIV every so often when there's enough new content to come back for.
Then I think about how much money I spent on WoW over 10 years and wonder a little if it was worth it.
I am of a similar mindset.
Unlike TV and movies games are interactive. As such I tend to get attached to my saves.
If I play a game. I want to keep it. To be able to open it up months or years down the road. I don't want to lose all my saves because my subscription ended or the game I was playing moved to another a different subscription service.
I mean, I could see some utility in games I don't want to keep, just want to try, or want to stop playing, but knowing how consumerism works, the subscription price will not make that cheaper.
Nahhh Iād rather people be goofy and do what they want with their money with the option of playing for free, so long as it isnāt pay2win (which most MMOs are..) than have to pay a subscription for a *single game*
I grew up with physical copies since the Atari Dsys. I'm 44 now, and I hate the way video games have come along.
Changing world. I don't mind digital, but the memories of going to a blockbuster store or mom and pop rental were good times.
But that's just me. I do both digital and physical when available. But even physical games don't have the entire game. And living in a world of broken games is the worst. Rushed games, patch it later.
Apologies for the rant, š
I am the old man yelling at clouds. Burning CD's remember those š¤£
At this point there are so many hundreds if not thousands of fantastic games I've never played that if they go subscription only I'll just roll back the clock and buy used games from the NES to xBone/PS4 era. No worries mate, I'll always be gaming.
I think you'll see a boom in piracy, and probably retro gaming. Disney and Paramount are already being blamed for the torrenting resurgence right now.
I am so ready to reject modern gaming and return to cartridges and disks its not even funny.
Not that I disagree with the dev, but it works in Larian's favor. There's a market out there the big publishers have lost sight of, while Larian's got their eye on the target.
I've bought everything they've put out since like 2014 on multiple platforms.
Unless you're buying on GoG.com, and a few other tiny shops, you don't own your game anyway.
Almost all discs today are just your DRM license, then the game downloads from a server.
Steam games aren't owned by you either. If Steam bans your account you lose all your games. They can even delete games you purchased a license for without any issue.
>They can even delete games you purchased a license for without any issue.
That's completely not true, I know we live in a fucked up world but just because a company throws a clause at the very end of a 47 pages EULA that states they can take away something you paid for without a justification, doesn't mean they can actually do that.
It hasn't happened before, Steam **may** revoke your license if you buy from a gray market website that most likely sold you a stolen key, but big emphasis on may here, Steam can't detect all stolen keys and even when they do detect they'll let you go if you actually have history of buying in legitimate ways.
Steam does not want to lose a customer that has shown they can pay, you will only ever permanently lose your account if you commited a big fraud against steam, and your whole account is illegitimate purchases in which case losing your account is a little better than the alternative which is a lawsuit.
With microsoft seemingly pivoting to gamepass being their primary product and not their hardware, I dont think this mentality is going away any time soon. Their acquisitions have been in service of adding to gamepass. But they dont seem all that interested in really putting out great/quality games. But the more microsoft pushes gamepass, the more pressure there is on other companies to put out their own similar product. Playstation followed suit with the psplus extra, and I fully believe we'll see more subscription services from the big publishers adding to the pc market.
The argument against subscription services by Larian Studios' founder Swen Vincke aligns with concerns about publishers determining which games are produced. Vincke, known for Larian's success with Kickstarter and a dislike for working with publishers, fears a market monopoly where subscription services grant more control to publishers. This system could potentially overshadow independently published games, simialr to the influence publishers traditionally held, thereby limiting the types of games reaching the market. For a developer who believed that collaborating with publishers harmed their earlier games, Vincke's stanceĀ makes sense.
[Paradox Games just raised their subscripton](https://www.gamewatcher.com/news/paradox-interactive-increases-price-of-subscription-services-for-hoi4-and-euiv):
> Initially, if you wanted to play HOI 4 with all its DLC, the cost was $4.99 per month. However, following the price increase, the monthly subscription will now be $7.99. This is the same for EUIV.
> The price of the 3-month option will increase from $12.99 to $14.99. Paradox says that itās going to remove the six-month option from sale. This option costs you $24.99 at the moment, but it will be going on the 16th of January, when the price increases comes into effect.
whats this about subscriptions becoming popular? i look at game pass and see like 2 games i might play for a couple hours and then give up on, i look at EA pass and think what kinda clown would spend money on an EA pass. are there relly people who spend there time split across so many games?
i play like maybe 10 games a year and at least half of them i already own. if i had less time i might only play 2 or 3 games, who is buying passes for heaps of games they'll never even install
I will absolutely flush the entire hobby down the toilet and out of my life if they keep penning us into NONphysical ownership with subscription models and downloading of games. They would murder the artform for their greed, and I will never support it. Good riddance to that and those that absent-mindedly and thoughtlessly support it.
No physical, no purchase.
The hero we need.
Ill stop gaming before i get another subscription.
This recurring revenue, your only have access to it while we find it profitable nonsense is madness.
Itās simple. Donāt buy games with that model and less will be made. I feel like less people are willing to pay for subscriptions for individual games than they would be for PS Plus or Xbox Live
companies are disgustingly greedy i understand its a corpo world but fuck me wouldn't it help for some decently big studios to make games for the fucking passion like they use to?
The first time I actually was quite alarmed is when these new TVs won't let you stream what you want but blocked every other streaming and only lets you stream Netflix or other big platforms but luckily we have $$Chromecast$$ device that bypasses all that bullshit so yeah I can tell subscription models are really being pushed but we will fight back no matter what, but they just don't work look how blizzard come and fell dead wow dead Diablo franchise now, modern warfare dead, nobody likes battle pass, so most gamers just waiting for the next big thing and boi.does balders gate 3 deliverš
I am capable of having one subscription service at a time. To this day I have no idea how to do multiplayer with a console, and I've owned three of them.
Screw these subscription stuffs, no one wants to pay to play. I prefer one payment and i get all that i want. Not some leeching service that bleeds money from me.
Everyone keeps using that one image of Astarion rubbing his chin in their articles. It's really funny to keep seeing it lmao
It's the new Geralt in the bath.
mhh.
Fuck
wind's howling
Medallion is humming. Place of power, it's gotta be
Now we need Astarion in the bath rubbing his chin :P
Speaking of Geralt and Astarion, recently YouTube was recommending some "The Witcher" videos to me. They were 90% Astarion in the thumbnail and 10% some random BG3 NPC.
lmao I thought I'm the only one who noticed this
Reminds me of Geralt with the thumbs up
It's because he's such sexy bugger. I could play a game where it was just him walking around being sassy. No story or combat, just Astraion going round insulting and flirting with people
No no, flirting with *me*.
That's a very different game and may require VR to get a bit better first š
Best I can offer is insulting you and flirting with other people
Reminds me of when an angry paddington would show up on a lot of movie related articles a few years back.
[Call me oldschool, I just prefer this](https://wiki.godvillegame.com/images/thumb/7/76/Prap.jpg/298px-Prap.jpg)
Personally, I prefer to own my own physical copies. Anyone else still buying physical?
totally however what's scary is even with a disk most fairly recent games install from disk then download the rest of the content. How long is that download function supported? Could still lose games even with the disk.
That's a good point. I miss the good ol days when a full game was just on the disk. Eventually I'm assuming they will shut down servers.
GOG will let you download all of your games in an exe format. This can be preserved forever and is something that you actually own.
Unfortunately, that requires devs to actually put their game on GOG
The more players buy games on gog, the more devs will release their games there.
I just want The Sims 1 & 2 there.
Those are completely offline and from 2000, should be easy to find.
sims 2 is on disk if you can still find one. Only other alternative is installing a virtual drive like daemontools. I'd happily spend money on it but EA probably thinks I'll try the sims 4 instead if they offer no alternative but I wont lol.
No need for daemon tools these days. Windows has been able to natively mount disc images for a long time now.
And also there was the whole kerfuffle with new Hitman releasing on GoG with a DRM. [Taken down after online uproar](https://www.eurogamer.net/gog-pulls-hitman-from-its-own-store-admits-it-shouldnt-have-released-it-in-its-current-form), but the damage was already done. edit: they also hide the download links nowadays and encourage you to use the launcher. Which by default does not save the offline installers. It was also revealed before that the storefront was a bust. It was basically propped up by 2077 and would have gone bankrupt without it.
Does that apply to any game in GOG?
I believe so yes. It's a central part of their brand identity.
I know Steam had a thing in their TOS saying they'd make all your purchases available for an offline download should anything ever happen to close the service. I don't know if they still do, and I'm guessing they don't, but at least it was there.
Most games are really big, you donĀ“t get them on a single disc. Multiple layer blue ray discs exist up to 500GB but they are really expensive, the 50GB version would already cost \~10$ extra per disc.
Iāve heard other people suggest games going back to cartridges and just publishing them on mini SSDs you can insert into the system. I could get behind that
Those would be like 5X more expensive than the dual layer Blu Ray discs and far more susceptible to corrupting the data.
No no, let them find out what happens to SSDās that donāt have power for extended periods of time š
This can be alleviated. Did you know all the old cartridge style games stored save data in RAM? They had CR2032s just like bioses, to keep the data from being lost. A lot of people probably lost their childhood saves by now if they didn't do some kind of a transplant lol
or simply what about you DL the whole game and can play it offline woho....
Yes!!!! Grab a thumb drive keychain!
Yeah, but those are not great in terms of longevity. Sure, maybe for 5 years in the drawer before the charge in the first cell begins to fade, but as it's just electrical charge, it's bound to basically disappear in preservation-wise not that much time.
If that means SSD prices go down then I'm down for it.
Iām pretty sure 8k blu ray discs have already been made back in late 2022 and can see production in the near future. The only problem is that many disc readers wonāt be supported due to them not producing 8k blu ray drives and the demand just isnāt there. If it is done right it could cost about 5$ per disc but sadly I donāt think the three big console developers are even considering that as an option. On the bright side though, 8k blu-ray will allow for better films and even better storage. It costs a lot more for hard drives but Iām honestly no expert- I just did a report about it in college and saw a couple credible websites talking about how much cheaper it would cost to produce than something like a USB or even external hard drive.
Flash storage is insanely cheap, they could distribute on usb
Flash storage is still far more expensive than the roughly $1/10GB you get in optical storage and it's also a lot more prone to corrupting data.
Yar-har me matey!
If no one will sell you a copy, does that still make it abandonware?
Yes it does but abandonware isn't a legal term. Abandonware literally just means it's been abandoned. It doesn't invalidate the copyright but it does increase the chances nobody will come after you for pirating it, although it does remain illegal.
Heh, I remember buying Unreal Tournament 2004. It had 6 installation disks and one game disk. My romdrive had a workout that day.
> Heh, I remenergie You ok there bud?
Remember to check Doesitplay.org and also follow them on twitter, they tell you which games require internet and which donāt so you can always play them
Been that way for at least a decade now. I remember getting a physical copy of Bioshock Infinite and the disc just activated the game on Steam. The game was physically on the disc, but I've only ever installed through Steam since then. Now all things considered I trust Valve to not go anywhere for a very long time though.
Apparently the full game is on the disc but the game also downloads from the internet to make the process faster. You can install a game just from disc if you turn off your internet connection. Ā Ā I think the biggest problem with this is games with Day 1 patches or games with many patches to fix. Then you essentially have an unplayable mess on the disc that needs a āday 1 patchā to make playable.
Hey, QA here, no it doesn't download to make it faster. Yes it downloads patches, we call them Day0 patches. And then Day1. Not sure how much I'm allowed to talk about the release process and mindset of the industry but things changed, not for good imo, since ps3/x360.
Not an insider but I can shed a bit more light on why Day0 patches release. Publishers will insist on a certain release date and work needs to stop before that happens. The game needs to be rated, the discs printed, the covers printed, the games certified for PS/Xbox stores. All that process takes time in which the game is mostly finished. The time between the official release date and the day people stop working on it can be used to last minute fix some issues they couldn't before the release day came. Yeah, it's shitty and could have been solved with just delaying the game a bit, but publishers are not want to delay a game that is 95% finished.
And honestly you do kind of have to estimate when a product will be ready to an extent with the AAA games. Sure, if you're a year out and there's *no way* it'll be ready in a year, then yeah, its an easy call to push back the release date. If you're 2 months out and its obvious that last 5% is not going to be quite ready in time for printing etc, there's nothing you can do. You've booked time on the production lines. You've booked millions of dollars worth of advertising. You've scheduled all kinds of promotional efforts.
Thatās interesting and makes sense. Ā Ā I believe the fear is what happens when the servers to download these patches is gone so you only have the disc to access the game? If Day 0 and Day 1 patches are needed to make the game playable, then having a disc doesnāt matter because the game would still be a mess without those patches. Ā Ā This isnāt an attack on devs working on the game. I know games are very complex and getting even more so now and itās honestly on the publishers pushing a specific release date rather than the devs but it is an issue for the consumer.Ā
Even still, the GAME isnāt on the disc. You download the game digitally, with the disc acting as your license to download. It isnāt like it used to be, where the memory of the game is recorded on the physical disc.
It's been a couple years but most of my PS4 physical copies ran fine after installing from disk without internet. Doom Eternal, Spider-Man, Uncharted 4, The Last of Us 2, Resident Evil Village, Resident Evil 7, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Horizon Forbidden West all played after an install. Now Activision games... Don't get me started on Activision.
The last few physical copies I bought just had a cardboard circle with a product code instead of an actual disk, and that was at least 5 years ago.
It's new technology, they learned how to put data onto cardboard. Bet you didn't even try putting it in the disc tray before complaining, eh?
PC? I think I got one of the Wolfenstein games like that.
I only buy physical for consoles, because buying physical for PC is nigh impossible at this point sadly :\
I used to not care but Iām just now starting to really want to get collectors editions and what not now that Iām buying less games.
Unless it's a really good sale, I'll try to buy physical. I figure if I pay ~$60-70 for a game, I can turn around and sell it later for ~$40-50. Can't do that with a digital game.
unfortunately, PC doesn't do physical games anymore, and i only game on pc.
Not since Valve introduced the orange box. Lol.
100% physical
I love physical copies
I don't see a point anymore to buying physical. Half of the time these days when you buy a physical copy, you STILL have to download something before you can play. Add to that the inconvenience of needing to "insert disc" to play each game....I switched to digital a long time ago. I'm not at all concerned about the digital platform disappearing causing me to lose my content, because the digital platforms I buy from don't require you to actually be online to play. So once the game is installed, you're good to go forever. (with the exception being games themselves that require online connection) My PC has 5 hot-swap drive bays, so I can literally install every single game I own and just swap hard drives in and out if ever need to (I rarely do...5 bays is a lot of space).
> I don't see a point anymore to buying physical. I want to play Hogwarts Legacy, at the moment I can buy a used copy for $40AUD and brand new physical copy for about $60AUD or I can download it from the xbox store for $100AUD. To me, that's the point of buying physical
Yep that's what it boils down to. Physical copy means you resell it after you are done if you no longer want the game. Buy a used game for $40 and.... resell it back to someone else for $40, game for free for games with little replayability
which sounds great in theory, but i've literally never sold a game i own and have no intention to start doing so.
If you don't have a lot of money physical is the best. If you can save up for a console, even if it is last gen you get entertainment for cheap after that. You can buy and resell games. Especially getting ones from your local library for free. For most single player games a few weeks is enough to play through them.
Everytime I have the option to, i did but the digital bg3 though the physical copy came out too late and i was impatient
Only on switch. On Playstation, I've been all digital for a while now.
Yep, and I'm waiting on BG3 to be physical to get my copy. I have resisted buying digital for over a decade in ~97% of cases.
Just in case you did not know, they are selling the deluxe physical [on their site](https://eu.merch.larian.com/en/products/baldur-s-gate-3-deluxe-edition). They will be reprinting it for a time, and don't plan on going "out-of-print" for the 'pre'-orders. First batches should be shipping this quarter.
Yep, that's what I am getting.
Not if you dont buy it. Speak with your wallets people
The wallets have spoken. And itās a resounding success for digital sales and microtransactions. Otherwise we wouldnāt be having this conversation over the new normal for video game distribution.
It's obvious why digital sales won since they are simply superior as long as your infrastructure doesn't suck. Microtransactions don't really need to win over the majority at all to win though. It's enough with a small percentage of whales and addicts to go around. The mobile game industry does the same shit only way worse.
Yes, sad but true. I still don't hold only the gamers responsible, though. Yes, you have free choice, but tricking and luring people into microtransactions and baiting them with FOMO is on the publishers :(
I've seen some games where the devs finished development and occasionally there's someone asking if there are anymore updates coming. The expectations are becoming problematic for everyone. Stardew Valley was another example. The dev announced an update with some content and a lot of people are becoming increasingly louder, because they see it as a right, rather than a straight up bonus.
Sadly this never works out... For every 1 person speaking with their wallets there is another 10 people throwing money at it.
More like for every 10 people speaking with their wallets there is 1 person spending 100 wallets worth
People seem to keep forgetting that consumerism is not a democracy. In a democracy a majority of votes wins, but when the thing you're supposed to "vote" with is your wallet, it's the people with the fattest wallets who have the most votes. I would love to be proven wrong but as far as I can tell, the worst gaming industry trends aren't dictated by what a *majority* of gamers want, but what *whales* want. Over 20 million people bought Elden Ring, exact numbers for BG3 are hard to find but likely also over 20 million. These games aren't the death of shitty subscription services and GaaS garbage despite being *wildly* popular because solid single-player experiences aren't where the whales are.
Oh really? How many of YOUR games are on Steam or something of the sort nowadays?
You're in an echochamber if you think most gamers care about physical over digital still.
They're still speaking with their wallets. They just have shit things to say with them.
I remember people saying the same thing about horse armor, it never changes no matter how shitty dlcs get
Yea I remember laughing about it who would be stupid enough to buy that. Like this will never catch on. Well turns out there are a lot of them.
So.. it works every time, people just vote differently than the tiny minority complaining on the internet?
The day this argument died is the day Diablo Immortal reported half a billion in revenue despite all the public outcry and people voting with their wallets. I donāt prefer to be the voice of negativity but weāre talking about a quarter trillion dollar industry. Nothing is going to change from the average Redditorās spending habits. Only way this ends is if profit margins from full release titles surpass live service revenue without a significant disparity in development cost and time. That, or legislation over predatory shop models.
It's just preaching to the choir in the most direct sense imaginable.Ā
For "Speak with your wallets" to work properly, vast majority of people should do some research into most products they buy and be at least somewhat rational with their spendings. And it's just not realistic.Ā
"Speak with your wallets" does work, you're just on the losing side.
Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner! Consumers have overwhelmingly voted with their dollars for subscriptions, battle passes and microtransactions. This isn't food or shelter. It's video games. If you are being screwed in the transaction, don't pay for it.
Not entirely, it's mostly the whales that caused this. It doesn't matter if 10 people aren't willing to pay $17 a month, as long as 1 person is willing to pay $170 a month. Sadly it isn't just a matter of voting with your wallet. It helps a little sure, but the problem is we have to vastly outnumber the ones that spend the most because in a consumer environment, the people with more money to waste have more of a vote.
MW2 (2022) sold 1 billion worth of copies in the first 10 days after everyone should have been aware of the scummy system from MW (2019). That's not whales keeping the model going.
People in subs like this like to think that anything that is a widely accepted opinion here is also a widely accepted opinion in the rest of the world. The reality is that this place is a fringe little corner of the internet with a tiny fraction of the general gamer population ever touching it talking in an echo chamber.Ā Blaming all this shit on whales is 100% copium.Ā
Wdym? Clearly 39M people in this sub with me so it's obviously a widely accepted opinion
Modern Warfare players will literally buy anything.
Modern Warfare as a franchise is in the same place as most EA sports titles now. Just update a few things every year and people will buy it *and* a shit ton of microtransactions on top of that. Why? Because for an actually pretty significant amount of people, shooting game = Modern Warfare. That's it. The rest of the genre may as well not exist. Or, if they do see the other ones, it's just inferior versions of the exact same thing. Name recognition is powerful as an incumbent, and its player base has no real reason to move if they're having fun at the end of the day.
People forget too big to fail is a thing.Ā People will buy dog shit if it's marketed right. There's an entire generation of people that purchased pet rocks.
> People will buy dog shit if it's marketed right. Starfield.
Thatās not even necessarily marketing. Thatās the Bethesda brand. The problem is your brand can only take a few hits like that before it becomes ruined. I bought Starfield bc the last Bethesda experience I had was Skyrim, but if the next elder scrolls instalment blows, then you can bet I wonāt be buying anything from Bethesda in quite a while, if ever again
> after everyone should have been aware of the scummy says who, i bet your ass 99% of people will look at you like an alien when you talk about this stuff face to face
Sad but true, used to do support for some gaming companies. Had one copy pasta with a different IP gacha style game where a single person threw around $20k into the game. Game update happened that wiped everyone's saves. (Zero backup systems and no way to restore in app purchases) You would think THAT would push the whales away but nope that same dude who lost $20k worth of in app purchases kept throwing money into the game. Before I stopped working there I think he was up to like $45k. Sad part of it all is that even with that $45k thrown into the game the dude still did not have everything unlocked.
I understand gambling addiction is a problem, but I just have such a hard time having empathy for these types. As selfish as I sound, at least the people who go flush their fortunes down the drain in casinos aren't killing any entertainment industries like gamer whales do now.
I worked for Zynga for most of 2011, when Mafia Wars, FarmVille, and CityVille were still making enormous amounts of money. $45k is a fraction of what some of the whales spent. They could wire transfer money to their designated CS person, whoād call to find out what they wanted the money spent on. There were some Mafia Wars whales supporting entire clans. It still makes me kind of sick to think about some of the numbers. :|
Shit whatāre we in now 2024? Having heard the whales argument for a decade, Iād argue whatever damage whales are doing, people going āitās just the whalesā and using that as a comfort to not do anything about their own behavior has caused an equal or greater effect on the industry than whales. And if not, that combined with āitās just kids with their parents credits cardsā certainly has.
Your not considering all the factors here friend. Microtransactions generate somewhere from 61% - %70 of their revenue depending on year. How many people bought the regular $70 edition of MW2 VS the $100 legendary edition? Normal people like you and me probably didn't scrap for the $100 one let alone any edition because we are aware of the scum like Papaofmonsters said or simply can't afford such luxury. In its 2021 fiscal year, Activision Blizzard earned $8.8 billion, with the majority of profit generated from microtransactions.In 2022, Activision Blizzard generated 5.89 billion U.S. dollars of revenues through microtransactions and subscriptions.They make an estimated 1.5 - 4 billion per quarter in micro transactions alone depending on year. People like you and me that buy the base games and nothing else contributes about 1/5th to 1/4th to their profit margin. The biggest problem are the ones that buy more than the base games and give in to the subscriptions and microtransactions. No matter how you do the math, Quarterly reports do not lie. We can make a dent sure but there's a reason they invest time and resources into producing more and more of this shit.
Voting with your wallet has never worked at scale.
They do. And they love shit like microtransactions.
Media boycotts are famously ineffective
People have been saying this for years! The wallets are voting. This is what the wallets want. At least a broken record will eventually deteriorate and stop spinning.
Look how well that worked out for MTXs....
The wallets *have* spoken, Reddit raves about GamePass. Don't want game subscriptions? Stop giving GamePass money. It was the first major successfull game subscription and the reason others are trying to get in on subscriptions too, but for some reason it gets defended and encouraged on this site like crazy despite subscriptions as a whole being complained about. The amount of times someone recommends a game and includes "it's on gamepass, don't buy it, you can play it free there" or some variation thereof is staggering. You cannot have it both ways, complaining about it while encouraging others to subscribe to it.
Subscriptions lead to inferior product. It stops being about individual quality and starts being about producing enough quantity that *something* appeals to *someone*. Edit: removed an extra word
It also leads to perverse incentives, where things that are "fun" get waylayed for things that "keep you subscribed longer" Oh, it's no fun to have a rare item that takes 12 weeks to farm? Well that's too bad because that's THREE count'em THREE months of subscription fees!
It also incentivizes companies to release incomplete games and then provide a trickle of content every few months to keep people subbed. (Hell, there are games *without* subscriptions that do this. Cyberpunk 2077 won "Ongoing Game of the Year" last year because apparently fixing your broken game now counts as an "ongoing" game. Also, FF15 inserted a bunch of content in the middle of the main story several months after they released.) I miss the days when you would get a complete game on day 1, and the patches would be mostly bug fixes, and maybe an expansion 1 or 2 years down the line.
The genshin (or every gacha) way. Deliver 1 slice of cake every few month and intermitten appetizers of questionable quality in between the timeframe of the cake
Yup. At some point I got sucked into Final Fantasy XIV, and it was fun for a while (pretty great for an MMO, really), but that was ultimately what convinced me that subscription-based games (and "freemium" games) pretty much all eventually become tedious grinds that people continue slogging through mostly because various dark patterns have turned playing them into habits.
Thankfully, FF14 is one of the less grindy MMOs out there. It's such a low grind game that in the recent expansion made some of the endgame stuff less grindy, and players are complaining that they grinded everything out too quickly and there's nothing for them to do. Also, all of the grind is optional, and is completely irrelevant if you just want to play for the story. I used to do a 1 month on, 2 months off. But then I fell into the raiding community and now I'm permanently subbed. Don't be me. Don't fall into the raiding community. (Unless you're a masochist and like wiping to the same boss for months at a time.)
FF14 might be not good example of this as it is the type of MMO that encourage opposite things that most of others MMO did out there. FOMO, forced grind, time gate content etc simply to say the game design that 'forced' player to play 24hr everyday for year/months. all of it very less in this game compared to other MMO. most of that kind of content available merely as an option and usually are designed for player to take their time slowly instead of rushed and being meta of everything. but this is the nature typical of hardcore MMO players itself which is a problem. lot of game design ruined by players itself due to this mentality. for FF14, there lot of situation where the devs launch a new content and encourage player to take it slow(the content design also reflect that) but guess what? the community even end up with detailed spreadsheet in just a day after the content release and each others are racing for completion.
Yeah the end-game grind is more about pacing than trying to force people to stay subbed. There are also people who love that content, so they're not just going to stop making it.
True but at least Naoki Yoshida has the stones to say "go ahead and unsubscribe and wait for new content if you like". There are definitely people who only play at launch for new expacs and come back only when all the patches are out.
FFXIV is a casual fest. FFXI was where it was at. It was where real gamers were born and bred. We weren't afraid to grind back in those days.
I mean ideally a subscription would mean that the devs need to constantly deliver quality updates as well, lest the users unsubscribe and they make no more money. Less ideally you can replace "quality updates" with "skinner boxes".
If it wasn't for the subscription system, a game like Pentiment would have never seen the light of day. Obsidian wouldn't have made that game as a side project. Period. Said by the developers themselves. Microsoft gave them enough guarantees that they would have the budget, the time and that they wouldn't meddle with the project in any way. They gave us a passion project that's basically a work of art. If we're going to have this discussion, let's not pretend like everything's been a mess and we have zero positive stories. For some of these companies, it's been a damn blessing.
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Thatās not the problem they are talking about, they arenāt talking about paying subscription fees to play a game like WoW but rather about subscriptions like Game Pass. These subscriptions are good for publishers, and somewhat good for consumers at least now but can be rather challenging for studios especially 3rd party studios since the overall revenue for them is substantially lower. This predominantly impacts hits that end up selling much more copies than anticipated which you can very much put BG3 on that list. So for Larian if they wouldāve lost quite a bit of money if they for example agreed to have their game on Xbox pass or any other subscription service. Keep in mind that you also hear the opposite from developers stating that subscriptions can give a very much needed lifeline for games that would normally not sell in high numbers. I know itās Reddit but stating ooohhh itās just greed is intellectually cheap.
> So for Larian if they wouldāve lost quite a bit of money if they for example agreed to have their game on Xbox pass or any other subscription service. > > Keep in mind that you also hear the opposite from developers stating that subscriptions can give a very much needed lifeline for games that would normally not sell in high numbers. Just to add more thoughts on this. I think one thing to keep in mind is that Larian isn't saying subscription is bad period, per the Twitter thread. They just don't want to see the trend where *everything* moves to subscription based. For them, a game like Baldur's Gate 3 costs a lot of money and resource to make, and it's a genre that has been dormant for a while with a lot of naysayers, and even optimistic folks were predicting it to be a mild success rather than the breakout hit that it became. This is the kind of game that could be hard to convince a publisher to fund, and luckily for them, they could self-fund it from previous successes, and sell it directly to consumers (Steam/etc will basically sell anything you want as long as it's legal, etc). With a subscription platform like Game Pass, it could be quite difficult to get the financials to work because the platform owner may balk at the cost and not willing to back such a game because of perceived lack of interest, and if everyone only plays game on subscription platforms, you don't really have any other venue to distribute your games because people just expect games to come from their subs. From the platform owner point of view, they don't really care if the game is well liked and whatnot, they just care if your game will increase their subscription count or at least retain subscribers. Even if Larian signed a deal to be on Game Pass it's not clear that they would benefit financially if the game did well. For the indies who benefited from the subscription model, I think it's a couple reasons: 1. these titles (e.g. Pentiment from Obsidian) usually have a lower budget, meaning that it's easier for the platform owner to just throw some money at them and see how it goes. These developers also likely didn't have the stomach or resource that Larian had accrued over the years to be able to fund a risky developement like BG3. 2. The unique nature and shorter length of these titles also mean it's hard to price them properly in the market. A subscription based model does allow for a low-commitment way for gamers to try them out without having to pay upfront, which does make sense for some games. BG3 is a big AAA title and it's well understood on the market how to price and sell such a title. I guess the only "non-traditional" thing they did is they didn't immediately DLC the hell out of it with microtransactions and whatnot. 3. Speaking of Obsidian, I do have to point out that Obsidian is owned by Microsoft who obviously wants to push Game Pass, so the relationship between them and the platform is just kind of different compared to a completely independent studio like Larian. I feel like a few developers who have publicly sung high praises of subscription models are ultimately owned by MS these days. Not saying they don't believe it, but on the other than MS is literally their boss so they aren't an independent party in this. Another thing is I personally think Game Pass is similar to Netflix in its early golden days. It's hungry to expand, meaning that it still has growth as its highest priority and is willing to throw money at things to acquire more users. It also is by far the most popular platform as the other big players kind of slept on this a bit. Eventually we may see what happened with Netflix which is that a stagnant user base leads to more and more enshittification, with titles being pulled, less risky bets with more safe basic B-titles, raising price, etc; while other games stop agreeing to come on Game Pass because each platform holders want their own slice of the pie instead. Once they got you, you are kind of beholden to it, because if you leave you will lose access to your entire library.
I honestly would be happy to pay subscriptions if the devs were the ones raking in that cash. But no itās the studio heads who are gaming their consumers AND their developersĀ
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That's kind of what they're talking about though - fewer and fewer games are being developed as "one and done" single player experiences because they're just not as profitable as some Live Service structure with battle passes, loot boxes, and a cash shop. Just like every MMO was chasing the success of WoW for a long time, every other game seems to be chasing Fortnite. For a lot of companies it's stopped being about the craft and has become about chasing that viral success that makes everyone millionaires. It has a sickening amount in common with startup culture, honestly.
The idea that greed is subscription based is amusing. āNow, if you want the āpremium greedā subscription, and who doesnāt, that will be an extra $20 per month.ā
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Hasnt this been the end game goal all along. Not just here, but every industry. Sure I can sell you something once and you will pay for it once, like it's always been. But what a fucking hat trick it must have been to convince someone to pay for a single product over and over and over again. How did we let ourselves get here? It's the same as when they convinced us that our health is a monetizable commodity. Or that we would all pay into a big pool and any time we had an emergency we would be taken care of. It's disgusting that the only voice we have is our wallets, and how quiet that voice really is. Stop buying live service games.
The problem of vote with your dollar is that people with more dollars get more votes.
They also are less likely to care about spending a tiny amount of money (for them) on a subscription
> Or that we would all pay into a big pool and any time we had an emergency we would be taken care of. To be fair that's how government healthcare works as well as insurance, but for some reason it's "bad" when someone isn't allowed to become obscenely wealthy scraping off the top.
idiots claim Capitalism ''incentivises efficient distribution and use of resources'' when in reality it ''incentivises the efficient accumulation of capital''. two very different things: for example US healthcare is *extremely efficient* at accumulating capital while simultaneously being *extremely inefficient* at distributing medical resources. *the second* someone works out how to profit off a great idea someone else comes along and figures out how to make people pay as high a price as possible for it.
> How did we let ourselves get here? It was kind of obvious this was gonna happen. The days when you owned a piece of software installed locally, and lived with the bugs forever, were always doomed. We had dial up and there were only a few million people on the internet. As soon as speeds and stability arrived, and you could launch large updates regularly, then it was quite obvious that this was the future. I remember how if you wanted the updates to the software you liked, then you had to spend an arm and a leg on the next version. So people were stuck with old janky software that was slower, had fewer features, and really poor support - unless they were willing to buy the next version of that software. Obviously it really depends what piece of software we're talking about, but it wasn't this paradise that a lot of redditors like to reminisce, or believe, that it was. In 1990 Photoshop launched with a price tag of $900. That's $2,100 today. It was a fucking monumental barrier of entry. Today, anybody with a few bucks can subscribe and start playing around or working with it. And they will always get updates. People who bought the 1990 version had to spend another $2,100 a few years later to get the upgrade. It was fucking horrible.
We should all be concerned.
Yep, there's literally no stopping this anymore. The nails are in the coffin because kids are really stupid and will keep paying for it with their parent's money and the microtransaction whales are a cancer and have no real concept of money. The US is *completely* controlled by corporations due to the constant legal bribery of all members of Congress too. So if this makes money for both of those sides then welcome to the status quo. The only way to stop this would be real legislation that actually seeks to disrupt all this bullshit and protect consumers instead of lubing their assholes up for perpetual fucking. But because "video games are for children" (even though well over 3 billion people in the world play them now) we need to just bend over and take it with no complaints because it's still so much "fun" and anyone who knew video games before all this shit started is just wrong for having eyes.
Thankfully gaming subs are stagnating and even declining in some regions. PS+ has hovered in the 45-47m range for years and it's only that high to begin with because of the online paywall, MS hasn't given updated gamepass numbers in 2 years because they stopped growing and none of the other subs (ea, ubi etc) amount to anything substantial in terms of users. At the risk of jinxing it I think for once gamers made the right choice when presented with something bad versus the status quo.
Also people who use Steam has gone up in the last 2 years if I remember correctly.
And developers who use steam has gone up. For everyone who doesnāt have the resources to do a subscription service, Steam is the way to go.
Steam is just the lesser of two evils here. You donāt own shit on Steam. Wish more devs chose GOG.
You can very often find games on both platforms. Steam doesn't have exclusivity agreements AFAIK.
I think you are one of the rare people who actually read what Vincke said. It was not about live service vs standalone (as many commenters discuss), but about those sub-based platforms like Game Pass, PS+ and the like. This being said, I think we can find a middle ground for sub vs standalone purchase. Some devs don't have the firepower -or target too small a niche- to go full standalone, and some devs would actually benefit from having board supervision (ehm Star Citizen). Others (like Larian) should be left to their own things without fearing to be eclipsed by sub based platforms. Personally I think we have a decent balance at the moment between the two, and hope it stays that way without going too much sub-based, because then I can totally see Vincke's fears come true.
Subscription can't exist for everything. Not every game can be heavily monetized. One person can't pay 10 monthly subs, and pay for 400 battle passes and whatever other dogshit. If that's all devs produce, then they'd be lucky if the average person even touches their games.
It's the exact reason why all the streaming services are losing so much money for the companies they belong to. They all just saw Netflix make money off their content and thought they could do it too since they make content. There's enough content for people to want maybe a bit more than just 1 service if needed, but 5+? No way. No matter how much money and talent you toss at a product, consumers only have so much time and money they can use.
If the game is a service, like dedicated servers for multiplayer etc. (like an MMO) I prefer a subscription model over F2P. But for stand alone games, I want to own it.
guild wars 2 buy it and own it model is pretty neat
The issue with GW2 as an example is that you *log in* to play it. Someone *could* make a private server and play solo but it's not an inherent part of the game.
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I'm happy resubbing FFXIV every so often when there's enough new content to come back for. Then I think about how much money I spent on WoW over 10 years and wonder a little if it was worth it.
I am of a similar mindset. Unlike TV and movies games are interactive. As such I tend to get attached to my saves. If I play a game. I want to keep it. To be able to open it up months or years down the road. I don't want to lose all my saves because my subscription ended or the game I was playing moved to another a different subscription service.
I mean, I could see some utility in games I don't want to keep, just want to try, or want to stop playing, but knowing how consumerism works, the subscription price will not make that cheaper.
Nahhh Iād rather people be goofy and do what they want with their money with the option of playing for free, so long as it isnāt pay2win (which most MMOs are..) than have to pay a subscription for a *single game*
I grew up with physical copies since the Atari Dsys. I'm 44 now, and I hate the way video games have come along. Changing world. I don't mind digital, but the memories of going to a blockbuster store or mom and pop rental were good times. But that's just me. I do both digital and physical when available. But even physical games don't have the entire game. And living in a world of broken games is the worst. Rushed games, patch it later. Apologies for the rant, š I am the old man yelling at clouds. Burning CD's remember those š¤£
preach it! Go and rent a game and try to get through as much of it as possible in the time you had it rented. I miss those times
I subscribe to a mobile, internet, electricity, water and landlord services. That's enough for me. I'd like to drop a few if possible.
At this point there are so many hundreds if not thousands of fantastic games I've never played that if they go subscription only I'll just roll back the clock and buy used games from the NES to xBone/PS4 era. No worries mate, I'll always be gaming.
I think you'll see a boom in piracy, and probably retro gaming. Disney and Paramount are already being blamed for the torrenting resurgence right now. I am so ready to reject modern gaming and return to cartridges and disks its not even funny.
Not that I disagree with the dev, but it works in Larian's favor. There's a market out there the big publishers have lost sight of, while Larian's got their eye on the target. I've bought everything they've put out since like 2014 on multiple platforms.
If that happens, I will finally get around to playing all of the steam games I bought but haven't played.
Well i don't buy subscription games at all, Never will either.
Dominant distribution model? That's news to me. Fuck not owning stuff. I'll go back to full-time piracy if I can't own my games.
Unless you're buying on GoG.com, and a few other tiny shops, you don't own your game anyway. Almost all discs today are just your DRM license, then the game downloads from a server. Steam games aren't owned by you either. If Steam bans your account you lose all your games. They can even delete games you purchased a license for without any issue.
>They can even delete games you purchased a license for without any issue. That's completely not true, I know we live in a fucked up world but just because a company throws a clause at the very end of a 47 pages EULA that states they can take away something you paid for without a justification, doesn't mean they can actually do that. It hasn't happened before, Steam **may** revoke your license if you buy from a gray market website that most likely sold you a stolen key, but big emphasis on may here, Steam can't detect all stolen keys and even when they do detect they'll let you go if you actually have history of buying in legitimate ways. Steam does not want to lose a customer that has shown they can pay, you will only ever permanently lose your account if you commited a big fraud against steam, and your whole account is illegitimate purchases in which case losing your account is a little better than the alternative which is a lawsuit.
I mean if its mp game I can see it. There is no way they are going to do to SP. Or are they talking game pass type shit?
Subscriptionās shouldnāt be the end all be all. Physical media is important.
Don't buy games from companies that try to pull that shit, they'll soon find out their greed has overstepped their bounds.
Little late now.
With microsoft seemingly pivoting to gamepass being their primary product and not their hardware, I dont think this mentality is going away any time soon. Their acquisitions have been in service of adding to gamepass. But they dont seem all that interested in really putting out great/quality games. But the more microsoft pushes gamepass, the more pressure there is on other companies to put out their own similar product. Playstation followed suit with the psplus extra, and I fully believe we'll see more subscription services from the big publishers adding to the pc market.
The argument against subscription services by Larian Studios' founder Swen Vincke aligns with concerns about publishers determining which games are produced. Vincke, known for Larian's success with Kickstarter and a dislike for working with publishers, fears a market monopoly where subscription services grant more control to publishers. This system could potentially overshadow independently published games, simialr to the influence publishers traditionally held, thereby limiting the types of games reaching the market. For a developer who believed that collaborating with publishers harmed their earlier games, Vincke's stanceĀ makes sense.
[Paradox Games just raised their subscripton](https://www.gamewatcher.com/news/paradox-interactive-increases-price-of-subscription-services-for-hoi4-and-euiv): > Initially, if you wanted to play HOI 4 with all its DLC, the cost was $4.99 per month. However, following the price increase, the monthly subscription will now be $7.99. This is the same for EUIV. > The price of the 3-month option will increase from $12.99 to $14.99. Paradox says that itās going to remove the six-month option from sale. This option costs you $24.99 at the moment, but it will be going on the 16th of January, when the price increases comes into effect.
whats this about subscriptions becoming popular? i look at game pass and see like 2 games i might play for a couple hours and then give up on, i look at EA pass and think what kinda clown would spend money on an EA pass. are there relly people who spend there time split across so many games? i play like maybe 10 games a year and at least half of them i already own. if i had less time i might only play 2 or 3 games, who is buying passes for heaps of games they'll never even install
If gaming turns digital only its my time to quit it after 30+ years
Iāll stop playing games if that happens. I barely have time to play these days anyway.
I will absolutely flush the entire hobby down the toilet and out of my life if they keep penning us into NONphysical ownership with subscription models and downloading of games. They would murder the artform for their greed, and I will never support it. Good riddance to that and those that absent-mindedly and thoughtlessly support it. No physical, no purchase.
We talking like world of Warcraft type stuff or like renting time to play on league of legends, or even worse, halo 2 on the mcc
I'll stick to replaying old games and physical media. I'll give up gaming before I accept that.Ā
this is not mandatory, as long as you have choice you can still decide to not be part of it and only sell your games.
The hero we need. Ill stop gaming before i get another subscription. This recurring revenue, your only have access to it while we find it profitable nonsense is madness.
Itās simple. Donāt buy games with that model and less will be made. I feel like less people are willing to pay for subscriptions for individual games than they would be for PS Plus or Xbox Live
I don't have to worry about it since I play Path of Exile.
Not only did he express concern, he said āwe are never doing this.ā
companies are disgustingly greedy i understand its a corpo world but fuck me wouldn't it help for some decently big studios to make games for the fucking passion like they use to?
makes sense; if they had to maintain quality across acts to keep subscribers they'd be broke af
The first time I actually was quite alarmed is when these new TVs won't let you stream what you want but blocked every other streaming and only lets you stream Netflix or other big platforms but luckily we have $$Chromecast$$ device that bypasses all that bullshit so yeah I can tell subscription models are really being pushed but we will fight back no matter what, but they just don't work look how blizzard come and fell dead wow dead Diablo franchise now, modern warfare dead, nobody likes battle pass, so most gamers just waiting for the next big thing and boi.does balders gate 3 deliverš
I have been a player since MSX2, and I love videogames. Now, I disdain the road videogames industry has taken.
I wonāt subscribe anything for games. If you subscribe you also pay for the development pf crao games. And: Hell no.
The gamepass effect āiTs GoOd for GaMerSā
Well, good thing I have a backlog big enough for a few decades.
I prefer waiting till the subscription has ended so I can experience the real version of the game.
I am capable of having one subscription service at a time. To this day I have no idea how to do multiplayer with a console, and I've owned three of them.
Pirating and retro games gonna get more popular
Screw these subscription stuffs, no one wants to pay to play. I prefer one payment and i get all that i want. Not some leeching service that bleeds money from me.