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[Flying Dice]

It's fucking on-disc DLC gated behind hundreds of hours of grind. The premium currency you use to buy loot boxes is also used to unlock heroes. Do the math.

And way to single out the sole point you might potentially have a shot at justifying.

[Maximum Spin]

What do you mean? AAA budgets are higher than ever.

And the games suck worse than ever, too.

Hm, do you think they actually buy suckiness directly at a 1-to-1 rate somehow?

[Reelya]

Suckiness is proportional to costs, because at $200 million a pop, they become risk-averse, so they make samey shit they know will sell. There's no way off this treadmill. If things really worked in the cookie-cutter / "template" method like Flying Dice suggested then they'd be more willing to innovate, because that would keep costs down.

It's fucking on-disc DLC gated behind hundreds of hours of grind. The premium currency you use to buy loot boxes is also used to unlock heroes. Do the math.

And way to single out the sole point you might potentially have a shot at justifying.

Single player games always had content you had to play for hours to see. Is it really any different then? this isn't really that different to bitching that you can't see all the cutscenes of a game right at the start without playing through it. That's "on Disc DLC that you have to grind for hours to see".

But it's also just about the only thing that makes the numbers work out for modern AAA multiplayer games. if people can see all the content straight away in a multiplayer game, they stop playing quicker and they don't spend enough to keep the servers running. Do the math. "Game" or "not game at all". The game looks like it would cost about the same as making CoD. And even 10 years ago they were hitting $200 million dollar development budgets for content of this level.

Content costs are proportional with polycounts, and they have motion capture, facial animation, particle systems and everything else to build. Plus people bitch if each pebble and blade of fucking grass isn't unique now, so they have hugely escalated costs for environment and level design. Whiny bitches expect everything to look real to the exact limits of each hardware generation. The more polys and higher-res the system can throughput, the better the physics processing, the higher the content development costs are. And people still bitch. People get systems capable of throughputting 15 terabytes a second of video data and bitch when new games don't deliver exactly that for the same price as they did for last-generation console games. There's more stuff in games now, it costs more to make. A 1 million poly model just costs more money to make than a 100,000 poly model. And people not only expect you to have more models, they get upset about you re-using models the way they used to. So you need much more expensive models and terrain-pieces plus you need many more of them that you did before. People want every Rebel trooper to have a unique face now. Carbon-copies don't cut with the PS4.

It's as simple as that, and "templates" which you shove "nouns" in don't reduce the price of that. $200 million for a top-notch game now, probably more.

[Jopax]

That is not the same holy shit dude. You're equating story progression and completing a game with locking competitive online tools behind grindwalls/paywalls. By your logic they should just start charging for unlocking cutscenes for money so you don't even have to play the game you bought, because hey, they gotta pay for the game you're skipping somehow, right?

What they're essentially doing here is taking a F2P economy and charging you 60+ dollars to be able to take part in it. That's not how this shit works or should ever work, F2P goes off the model of being free but requiring time or money to progress. P2P is where you pay upfront so you don't have to invest anymore money or time, you got the whole product.

Edit:

And the whole reason this is happening is as Jim Sterling put it so nicely "They're not happy with making some money, they need to make ALL the money."
Did anyone really ask for such stupidly high graphical fidelity that you don't even see it unless you stop playing and focus on a single pebble? Or did they go and pour money into doing that before asking if it was actually neccessary for the game to be good and playable? Because surely, if everyone was demanding the toppest of top tier graphics to such an extent then we'd see nothing but super duper highly realistic games as everything else would just not sell.

[Rolan7]

I love when people emphasize on-disc DLC as if it's economically any different from other paid content. It's irrationally offensive in some "I physically hold the bits, how dare they deny me!" way. It's honestly pretty funny.

(None of the bits have value, only the licenses to use them. Hence why rom sites are legal, and more ethical than second-hand game sales. Particularly industrialized like gamestop)

[Reelya]

I love when people emphasize on-disc DLC as if it's economically any different from other paid content. It's irrationally offensive in some "I physically hold the bits, how dare they deny me!" way. It's honestly pretty funny.

(None of the bits have value, only the licenses to use them. Hence why rom sites are legal, and more ethical than second-hand game sales. Particularly industrialized like gamestop)

Also I'll point out that if you can see Vader in the game, then the content is not really "hidden". If you can see a character in a game is that hidden DLC? The only thing locked is the option to play that character yourself.

That is not the same holy shit dude. You're equating story progression and completing a game with locking competitive online tools behind grindwalls/paywalls. By your logic they should just start charging for unlocking cutscenes for money so you don't even have to play the game you bought, because hey, they gotta pay for the game you're skipping somehow, right?

What they're essentially doing here is taking a F2P economy and charging you 60+ dollars to be able to take part in it. That's not how this shit works or should ever work, F2P goes off the model of being free but requiring time or money to progress. P2P is where you pay upfront so you don't have to invest anymore money or time, you got the whole product.

If people want that level of content but also F2P then this is what makes it work out. Remember you had to buy WoW in shops, then pay ongoing fees for online play as well.

This game is just like the WoW model except they've replaced earning upgrades for the subscriptions.

[Jopax]

I did an edit, but whatever.

And both models are fine by me. But they are fine as separate things that each has their own pros and cons, for both the makers and the players of the game.

What is a giant nope to me is when for purely greedy reasons a publisher tries to merge the two, so that they can have their cake and eat it as well.

[Reelya]

I just think the "purely greedy" thing is reading too much into it. It's an extremely competitive market. People don't have room for greedy. Margins just aren't that good and no company has a monopoly here. They're purely trying to make running the game cost effective so that it doesn't get shut down by upper management. How many surviving MMOs are there vs closed-down ones?

And the thing is, they probably need to actually be recouping about the same amount of money per player per hour played as e.g. WoW would. That's break-even. Only 10% of players are likely be putting any money down at all, so for those guys they have to be gouging them in order to just cover the server costs for the other 90% of players. And those people aren't going to keep coughing up the required money to run a AAA MMO game without offering them some exclusive content that's actually desirable. So there's basically no way to do this without restricting the content that non-payers can see. The logic doesn't work out otherwise: if it was too easy to earn the gated content without paying then people wouldn't pay for it, and the game wouldn't break even on operating costs, and then servers would be shut down or the game just completely cancel leaving anyone who actually spent $80 at launch for this with an unplayable game because it was closed down less than a year later.

The box costs just covers the development cost for an AAA game, which is $150-200 million for something like this.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

"Cost effective" to the managers of these AAA companies is an unreachable irrational bar. It's not a coincidence that indie games, sometimes ones made by literally less than a staff of ten, are more complete and more "economic" at low costs than these megabucks loons who spend all the money on marketing and then embark on a course of only having a fraction of the game made with EXCLUSIVE KONTENT so they can drop it and make a sequel once the lootbox gambling dies down and the parents find out how many kids have stolen their credit cards.

Stardew Valley, Undertale, Hellblade, Hollow Knight, the things all these games have in common is that they're meaningfully complete games and didn't require all this bullshit check-slinging to be more competitive economically and artistically than anything EA's made in the last six years. I'd tell AAA devs to pick up that model themselves, but the devs there are bordering on indentured servitude with how much control they have and benefit they get for their effort. The poison goes goddamn deep for them.

[Jopax]

Yeah, the reason those games cost so much is again, greed. They want maximum returns and profit, so they pour in lots of money, because that's how these things work, right? You put in more money, more money comes out. And they're gonna keep pushing this until the entire house of cards collapses on them.

Because for every huge, overhyped game that sold big purely on hype and then fizzled out within months of release you can name several smaller, reasonable titles that didn't need 200 million dollars to be made or didn't need microtransactions and lootboxes to continue development.

Hell, if severs are so damn expensive to run, why not bring back dedicated servers, remember when those were a thing?

[Reelya]

The problem with citing the indie successes is that you're only citing the hits, not the flops. If big-studios opened an "indie division" then they'd have to make many games, and they'd be getting the average of hits and flops. Plenty of entirely worthy indie games hardly sell at all. The pros are in fact looking at both hits and flops when deciding whether investment in that model is worthwhile.

The basic problem is that for each notable indie hit that made money for it's creator, there are probably about 50 others who poured all their personal money into their dream game and it didn't amount to shit. The losses of those aren't factored into the indie-worship. e.g. all the indie studios who go bust and can't pay their employees. For a big company to take that tactic they'd have to be even more picky about which games they backed than they are now. It wouldn't in fact give them breathing space to innovate at all. That's why no big studio even attempts to do this

[Jopax]

But even if it flops it isn't a 200 million dollar flop. How many indies would have to flop to match just The Old Republic in terms of money wasted?

[Egan_BW]

tl;dr BUY MOAR INDIE GAMES.
Loads and loads of good stuff coming out all the time. Probably enough hidden masterpieces that you could spend all your time playing them. Many more well-made, but flawed, or just weird games. And obviously uncountably massive numbers of overall shitty games that you might just enjoy anyway.

[Reelya]

Hellblade for example is not a model that could be widely emulated. It was made by a team of 12, each one was a veteran at exactly one task and wore only one hat. So they were already trained to 100% ability at major studios, and hand-selected to work on the game. That model isn't widely emulatable because it doesn't provide any sort of training pathway for new people to learn the ropes. There's no mentoring and support when you only hire one guy to do rigging and animation and he's an industry veteran who learned rigging and animation from older veterans at major studios. It's just not viable for the whole industry to down-size in this way and only hire extremely skilled veterans. The supply of extremely-skilled veterans who are cost-effective because they require no training and can do the whole asset pipeline for a specific thing by themselves is extremely limited, and in fact those people can only really be trained in large numbers with a traditional studio system.

Hellblade, then, is a definite outlier because it's really exploiting expertise which only exists because of the studio system.

[hector13]

To be fair, EA has been synonymous with shitty games for years, so the game was going to suck prior to this, anyway.

Does it say how much the heroes in the game were going to cost anywhere?