Good to see them calling these shitty AAA publishers and their terrible, anti-consumer ideas out.
To be honest, I mainly bought the game to make a statement & show my support for what type of treatment & product I want as a customer. Nowadays everything just seems to want to milk me, games are quite often literally designed around it so that it becomes a core part of the games themselves. And I’m so damn over all of this bullshit.
A lot of us just want to have some fun after work and it is not fun when you feel served up like a buttered hot meal. I don’t want to feel like my games are consuming me.
I can see how Game Pass popularity could be bad for a number of studios, as he says in the article. But, I’ve never understood how Game Pass’s existence was anti-consumer.
We always get these baffling quotes like “Microsoft insists on renting you your games, and you will like it.” or “I’m not going to be forced to pay $17 a month just to play my games”. GP never gained popularity off Microsoft forcing people into it, people voluntarily signed up, even when MS continues to make their games available for direct purchase.
The previous quote from Ubisoft even seemed more like an investor excuse than a threat to gamers.
The thing is that this guy is not the head of a public company where shareholders demand massive and continually growing profits. So he acts in the interests of the consumer, the customer, the gamer. But if this was a public company, shareholders would buy shares and then demand he do something to grow that share price, so they can sell the shares later for profit.
When that happens we see that CEOs do everything they can to maximize profits, like promising release dates in earnings calls.
The difference between private and public companies is the single biggest threat to us all because as soon as the company acts in the exclusive interest of profit, everything else gets fucked. And most do.
That means employees, customers, everyone. Only the 1% benefit from the gutting of everyone else.
I mean yes, but also no. I work at a private company and profits seem to be the only thing to get anyone with a title to move their ass.
Most Directors or below have their teams, or customers, or the product front of mind. But once you get to VP seats they just… don’t, it seems.
And this is super anecdotal, I know, but… basically my point is private vs public doesn’t necessarily mean anything.
This guy is just a good guy. He knows what matters to people and speaks from his heart, not his wallet.
Those top level folks are sometimes “incentived” by bottom line targets and other end targets. So sure, you do get greedy people inside private companies.
I don’t think shareholders driving for infinite profit is easily disregarded.
The difference between private and public companies is the single biggest threat to us all
Nah. One does not build a company to provide a service but to earn money. “Well-being of the company” only matters if you are sure you can sell it for more if you grow it more
There are many different reasons than to pursue continually escalating profits.
There are a hundred different reasons to start a company other than to make profit. Don’t be fooled by the lies of market capitalism. Some people want to create a legacy that generates income for themselves and their employees, maybe even their children. Not everyone is looking to sell to the highest bidder. With that said, the bigger the company, especially if they plan to go, or already are, publicly traded, or are owned by private equity firms whose sole focus is profit and value of the entity the more likely the assumption is true.
Maybe turn the AAA stock into a meme stock, have gamers buy that shit up and give reduced game prices to stock holders to incentivise gamers to buy them. Et voila, No demand for profit that costs quality in the gaming experience.
I agree — some gamers do not understand that the gaming industry is grown up now, or at least old enough to play in the big boy money league. And the big boys are not in the business to make games; they are in gaming to make business. Inherently different decision-making process.
Also, before someone buys something, someone has to sell out. So why do we always have a problem with the buyers, aka investors, whose intentions are clear but not the sellers?
Indeed, the game devs aren’t “In it for the art” anymore, they aren’t John Romero and John Carmack making Doom “Because it’s cool” or Wolfenstein 3D “because I liked that Castle Wolfenstein game on the ZX Spectrum or whatever”
It’s Cigar Munching old men who don’t know what a Mario is, and don’t care, they just know that the chart goes up when they release a product with a trending name, regardless of content.
I mean, the Doom guys were also doing it for the money, at least as a big motovator. But it was less profit-drivem, way more small and less corporate, with way less money on the line.
I mean, now that the video streaming industry has shown us how the endgame looks like for subscription models, you’d have to be crazy to want that for the videogame industry.
Whatever short-term gains you can get in convenience or price by buying into their penetration stage are not worth contributing to leading the hobby down that road even an iota.
Only reason I never got into World of Warcraft
Honestly I don’t regret paying a subscription for WoW. Maybe it’s different now, but when I played it felt fair. You got reliable servers, frequent updates,somewhat reasonable balance changes, and seasonal events. You didn’t get any loot box bullshit, just playing the game regularly generally got you the rewards with minimal effort.
Sure expansions also cost extra, but that was $30 and about 1 every 2 years.
For a game that ate all your free time, it didn’t hit your wallet that hard.
Yeah, it kind of just keeps the agreement honest.
“We need ideas to find a way to monetize our active playerbase!”
“We already are. They pay us money each month. In turn, we continue to make sure the game is fun and has stuff that keeps them interested.”
“Aha! Carry on.”The subscription also helped with spamming. There was plenty in wow, but it was nothing compared to f2p ganes that I’ve tried.
If only they’d carried on with that idea.
I used to hate subscription games with a passion, but seeing what followed, in-app purchases, lootboxes and FOMO-driven battlepasses, turns out subscriptions were the lesser evil.
Unfortunately it works the same way as with StarCitizen, you’re aware it’s a ripoff, but if you want to play this particular type of a game, pay up or leave.
With MMORPGs specifically, here are the options:
- Free to Play. Enormous cash shop, often pay to win. Usually these games actually require the most money to play on high level, or waste your time by slowing down the grind and having an optional “premium” sub, which effectively makes it a sub MMO.
- Buy to Play. Much less predatory, rarely pay to win, but often with huge cash shop. Get ready to see tons of cool cosmetics that are only available through micro transactions, and the base game often receives scrapes from the table. Still, some of these games like TESO effectively force you to pay a sub by introducing a mechanic (like bottomless reagent bag) that make the game without them miserable on high level.
- Pay to play. Most obvious predator, nobody needs this much money to develop a game that already charges almost full price for base game and for all new DLCs, but also usually has the most tame cash shop. WoW for instance has a tiniest (comparing to games like TESO) cash shop with 20-ish mounts and pets nobody cares about.
This creates effectively a pick-your-Devil situation with these games. No good monetization, pick whatever feels least predatory for you
Here’s an idea, I give you money for a game, I download it off the store front, I keep it forever.
“You only have a licen…”
Shut the fuck up, if buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing.
Fucking BASED.
I mean, no shit.
These days we are expected to be subscribed to tons of shit, including stuff that simply doesn’t justify subscriptions. We know it’s not a benefit to us, but to the companies that dish them out.
Not to mention the sheer amount of amazing indie games coming out lately. Why even check out this gacha and subscription games?
This too! So many genuinely good games at genuinely good prices. This is true even on Switch, where Nintendo is known to put AAA efforts into genres otherwise filled entirely with indie games (not to mention the Nintendo tax)
I think the worst one I’ve seen recently was a note taking app on Android. Developer made a glorified PDF reader you could write on and wanted $10 to use the fucking app annually. I hope that dev ends up homeless and broken.
Jesus fucking Christ, why not charge a subscription for notepad.exe while you’re at it.
The worst I’ve personally seen was a subscription for an Android launcher. No actual cloud services attached and no way to pay outright. They wanted for a subscription for an app that launches other apps.
He’s right
That’s a big part of it. Right now, Microsoft tries to put a number of big titles in their subscription service, a bunch of filler titles they can buy from publishers for cheap, and maybe a few that sold more popularly than they expected.
If subscription gaming becomes the majority, Microsoft and other streaming providers get to pick the contenders and not much else gets seen. Games like Lethal Company won’t have a sudden boom in popularity because it wasn’t on Microsoft’s radar.
Wait, a CEO said that? What’s the catch?
Larian is privately owned. They don’t have stockholders to appease with short term gains.
Which is weird because they remain shareholders for years, so you’d have thought they want long-term gains.
I think I’ve come to the conclusion that “businessmen” are just idiots.
They’re gambling addicts
you’d have thought they want long-term gains.
They do. They just also want short-term and medium-term gains.
Incorrect. The shareholders are the private owners. They’re just not gambling douchebags trying to make themselves short term gains. :D
He’s a CEO of a relatively small company that is product focused. He has yet to grow and focus margins in any serious way.
Corporations want gamers to want mass subscriptions because they want to rent out their games forever instead of getting only a single payment for their product. And then they find flimsy excuses to push subscriptions for products that do not warrant subscriptions but are mutilated to squeeze some way of adding subscriptions into them. And then the corporations let games without subscriptions fail while pretending that subscription-based services are delivered because there’s demand and not because they don’t want to deliver finished products that don’t generate easy endless trickling revenue streams.
No one wants mass subscriptions. “Gamers” is a red herring.
Tell Sony, they got so fucking greedy with their PS Plus.
I mean, this is a very Captain Obvious take. The problem is; it won’t change and it’ll only get worse.
Good. This guy is not a piece of shit then, unlike that other guy who runs Ubishit.
We have nothing to worry about because no one wants to play ubisoft games already, I already bought Assassin’s Creed seven times I don’t want to do it again.
Was it Raphael or which BG3 boss said this?
The one with the heavy armor.
