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Day 1 DLC
Microtransactions
Premium currency
Lootboxes
Battlepasses
Exclusive levels
Invite boosts
When did gaming become so predatory?
Join me as we dive back to the arcades, and journey through gaming history to identify the moments gaming went from being fun, to financial, and ask, what went wrong with gaming?
Special thanks to:
Callum Upton for the Assassins Creed 4 footage
and
DLOW1O for the Fifa footage (https://www.twitch.tv/dlow1o)
Thank you to the supporters on Patreon, Youtube and Twitch who keep the channel alive and allow me to make independent videos like this one.
source
Don't shit on dota. It's the best free to play game ever. The most motivating battle pass part was the International prize pool increase.
What really boils my proverbial is games publishers claiming they need to up the price of games; that 60 dollars is an unreasonable amount of money to charge for so much content. All the while acting like the flat fee you pay when you buy a game is their only source of income. They have monetised everything they possibly could, are making record profits from it, and they've got the barefaced cheek to say that isn't enough. Worse, in the middle of a global recession.
If the game free to play, the battlepass can be justified for the dev to gain some money for free game. The problem rn is that a paid game costing 70dollar have those itmes/cosmetic locked in dlc even making a day one dlc.
Very well said, if anything it could have been longer.
I used to play project gotham racing on the original xbox and xbox 360. Every car was unlockable. If you had the best car in the game it meant you had 100% completed with platinum medals (for doing it in the fastest times). It was an almost impossible challenge, there was always a mission or two where they gave you a crap car and expected you to do something frame perfect. But if you did it the sense of achievement was incredible and you were given this obscure but awesome digital toy to play with.
Fast forward to gran turismo. Not every car is unlockable so what is the point grinding the base game (even though I will)? If I go online to compete I will be going up against people who have far superior cars, not because they are great drivers and have grinded through the game to unlock them, but because they have spent money I am not willing to. What is the point?
As you say, the core gameplay mechanic of achievement has been replaced with one that can be paid for and as such the game is objectively fundamentally broken but also hugely addictive and profitable. It's the kind of situation only the government can step in and fix really. I think you have highlighted the right culprits, if ingame currency was banned entirely I think that would be a good first step.
For me it is back to the classics. Maybe I should dust off project gotham and give that another crack.
I completely agree with all of your arguments and facts. I'm not someone who was born in the 90s, but I tend to prefer games from said era: they might be simpler, but there's so much more passion that went into those games than those of today. They're so much more fun, too, and they lack any trace of monetization. Today, everything is a subscription: Netflix, Prime, Apple TV, you name it. It's a shame that the mentality on making a product shifted from "making it good and (maybe) long-lasting" to "release it and make them (the customers) pay for a renewal, more or deluxe content (such as DLC or additional parts).
One of my least favorite sales manipulation tactics is the strikethrough price. This is a like the cost $9.99 being crossed out and replaced with the price $1.99. It makes you feel that the item is on sale and you have to buy it now before the sale is up. Often, there is no sale. The item was always $1.99. The strikethrough price just preys on your fear of missing out. I think many of these tactics should be illegal.
I'm gonna make a AAA-game and give players the ability to purchase another full price just so they win the game instantly. That way they dont have to play it anymore and I make twice the money.
– Game Companies, eventually
great video. I assume that the pie chart you're showing is more theoretical and it serves its purpose but I wish you did some more research to see how much money/manhours/whatever resource game titles having been using on what parts of the game. Big ask I know but it would have taken a well reasoned video to one with very strong evidence.
So we have to pay to get your other content thatโs exclusive? Same as the topic of this video ๐
Then you got an Apogee-Game, Shareware meant getting the first Episode for free, and if you pay, you get the others. That was honest. And you could get masses of SHarewaregames for DOS for free. Unless you were a console-loser.
And Games like Bio Menace and Jazz Jackrabbit 1 didn't have to be unfairly difficult for the sake of arcade-players keep playing. They were unfairly difficult, because they wanted to. And if you play Bio Menace, you wouldn't want your character look different, after all, he has the most fashionable look available in that time: Mullet, Mustache and V-Neck.
Around 2008 give or take, things like Iron man came out and Big bang theory was huge and it made being a nerd "cool" and one of the main "nerd" activities was gaming and one of the meccas of gaming nerds was WoW so it really started there then there was a flood of new "Gamers" and the corps pay people to watch social trends they noticed and they started "main streaming" Gaming, There a bit more too it but thats the bare bones of it.
It changed with those mobile crap auto everything 'mmorpgs' where u can put in money on everything, too.
The last good mobile MMO was oac1. And even they ruined the game after Tier4
Its the consumers. Those that are willing to pay are the ones ruining games. Those are the ones responsible.
The profit motive ruins everything :/
Games are Buisness, Films are too.
In the 60s the USA focused on Western… Italians deconstructed it, Hollywood got s*d*mized and Europe took over until new hollywood came.
Games have becomes as stale with their "casual games" (as Pay-to-win is called in Germany), and sooner or later, they will fall on their face,…,badly.
Hollywood has locked onto Super Heros, much harder anyway. Soon, this Genre will crash, like Westerns did, and then there will be a Quake hurting the USA's Economy badly. Postmodernism (post 1990 era) is (or was?) the era of media. This era will end…. (I have no Idea, what comes next).
Josh's videos feel like such a spiritual successor to TB's old videos I love it
Capitalism.
Capitalism is went wrong with gaming.
Profit motive does not make things better, profit motive makes things more profitable. Generally at the cost of making things worse.
as a med student ฤฑ think addiction based games should be illegal and have regulations ontop of thatb to make it very discouraged
Feels like gaming is on the decline, itโs just a bunch of greed and bureaucracy now. Every game I touch I just get bored with and have no desire to even want the endless supply of micro transactions they have to offer. Starfield looked intriguing until we learned Microsoft will hoard it for themselves. Itโs that kindve stuff that ruins it Imo, EA and Microsoft have been huge contributors to ruining the gaming experience. Exclusive rights, taking parts out of the game before launch just to sell as dlc, politics, incorporation of ideologies, etc.
This is why I prefer playing classic games now.
No DLC. No pay to win. No online modes. No loot boxes. You just paid for the game and that was it.
if u pay full price for a game and still need to pay thats on u for not just playing tf2
I find it so interesting that game developers are secondary to making games these days and the business model is the primary concern. Clearly the gaming industry is changed forever, glad I was there for the glory days.
it's sad that rs3 and osrs make about the same amount of money even though one has way more players and the other has way more microtransactions ๐
I'm looking for to when my/this generation of parents have kids and simply refuse to give kids the money to pay for microtransactions. I refuse to pay for this shit… and more people need to do the same to move on from this shit.
Because if we don't.. this will be the norm… forever.
This is all true. Gaming and gambling, arcades and casino's, were not completely unrelated from the start of course. But at least there are spots of light in this modern gaming situation (great games that are not infested with MTX are still being made.) Something I personally find fascinating is how completely unfinished games get released, much more commonly than I remember from back in the day. Maybe I'm wrong though.
Ive stopped playing modern games because Im tired of being sold the shaft of the carpenter's hammer
I havnt even watched the video but like for real who plays new AAA games? I havnt played a new AAA games since metroid dread.
Amazing video
I think the turning point is as mentioned in the video, designing game systems which encourage various addictive habits to get you hooked onto a game.
Once internet became available to pretty much anyone, gaming leaned more towards its online and social aspects. I can bet that majority of people who once used to hang in bars, drink beer and discuss football with friends in their spare time shifted towards gaming ( as you mentioned FIFA, but can be any other sport). This allows them to fulfill the fantasy aspect of their favorite childhood activity, all the while being more engaging and allowing "interactions" with wider range of people and still offering something relevant to discuss with their friends.
So the term "gamer" changed from what it once used to mean, at least for those who believed themselves to be gamers. Your 4 year old nephew owns a phone? Yep, he's a gamer, alright. Your grandpa plays Farmville on facebook? Sounds like a gamer to me. You enjoy mashing buttons in no particular order. yelling at microphone while spamming profanity in chat? Well that's the sweetest part of it, who am I kidding.
Just play Indie games ๐๐ป
Maybe you just got old, lol. It happens to all of us.
Thank you josh
They have become like this because People give companies money from this. Its all consumers fault. If you People vote with your wallet they will stop this
Thanks, this was good. I think there was one more step earlier with expansions. From when they simply functioned like a small sequel, to when they seemed to chop the base game into 3 parts so that you only owned the whole thing if you bought the expansions – e.g. the civilisation franchise. Which is exactly when I started waiting a few years to buy a game, because they would lump it all together in one pack at a discount rate. Now I'm completely use to being years behind on gaming, and I feel fine.
What Went Wrong with Gaming? Capitalism. The prioritization of profits over all else.
Alternate video title: Why consoles before over powered Netflix/Youtube boxes
Oh , no Wargaming Products , raises eyebrow. I thankfully learnt early form the first game online i players F2P MMO Star Trek Online, they have visited some amazing harsh feedback in relation to their Loot boxes but yet for a long time were actually a generous F"PMMO but they are learning though slowly. Thankfully they taught me to play the game, don't get played by the game. However if you have any form of addiction that's impulsive , they are a bottomless pit of misery been delivered in the search of what should be fun
Great analysis, thx. And you can see this is even used in non-gaming apps.
A great well equipped video on gaming, now that's informative for ya non-video gamers!