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[MetalSlimeHunt]

As I've been saying, people shouldn't want an everything burger game. There's a limit where you get closer to tech demo to game in viability and we goddamn sped over the line at a 100 MPH years ago.

Maybe it'll all come crashing down. God I hope so.

(Also, I'm not against subscription models. Those were great. Bring back subscriptions and put the eight year olds back in their cages.)

[Reelya]

I'd argue that "online" is in fact the reason for all the drama. People expect "games as a service" now. But when "services need to be paid for" enters the equation, the same people flip their shit about it.

Remember before, games were shipped on a disk and you were done, basically. Onto the next thing. Now, they have a dev team, but then another "service" team who are permanently working on the game after it's launched.

Working out fair ways to pay for that is the issue here. Lumping server costs in with the game at launch penalizes those who only want the single-player, or those who don't play very often, and it'll reduce your total sales. Also with that, fat chance keeping the servers running for any length of time.

Subscriptions also penalize players who don't play very much while rewarding those who play a lot. And needing a subscription is going to cut into your initial market, meaning dev costs per shipped game are higher, increasing the launch price, and penalizing all players no matter if they're into the online play or not.

Micro-transactions is seen as a path of least resistance, because it provides the least mandatory payments, while making the game accessible to the widest range of people, which reduces overall per-person costs.

[redwallzyl]

The point is, like with Walmart. They outcompete you. That's the point. Smaller studios weren't able to compete.

Whether that's fair or shitty isn't the issue. not competing is not competing. If they can't compete, then winding the clock back to that business model isn't the answer.

And it directly contradicts you're "they went for too much" argument. Only those who went for more survived.

~~~

The argument that every one of the 125 smaller AAA studios from 2005 all went broke because they were literally all in an upsizing arms-race actually sounds very implausible actually. You'd have to posit that everyone decided to expand at exactly the same moment, whereas different studios all have different multi-year development cycles with funding locked in well before that. Some studios are there making the same game for a good 5 years at a time. The idea that every one of them, regardless of size all decided to upscale in a short time-window doesn't seem very plausible, given that companies have been upscaling or downsizing on their own timetables based on their needs for decades.

Walmart out competes people by being blatantly exploitative and unethical to the extreme. they basically run on legal slavery so of course they win but its not the kind of winning than benefits anyone other then them. They literally make the world poorer.

[Reelya]

Also Reelya, I gotta say, for someone who ardently defended Hugo Chavez and is this forum's foremost anti-colonial poster, this is a really weird position for me to find you standing up for.

This doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. Why should games be run for free? There's nothing socialist about that. It's just dumb. Having hundreds of server nodes, which an AAA online game needs, costs big bucks per month, plus the number of employees needed to run that and moderate things.

Game that have an ongoing online component have ongoing costs that somebody needs to pay for.  Socialism never promised free shit for nothing. You get what you worked for, no less, but no more either. That's the core principle of Marxism: Nobody else is entitled to a cut of your labor, but conversely, you aren't entitled to a cut of anyone else's labor.

So some douche can't play Vader straight away without playing for about 40 hours, because the company needed to work out a way to let that person play for free. Boo fucking hoo. That's nothing to do with politics, it's just being an entitled and lazy little shit. Also if everyone is playing Vader wtf is with that even? It's going to make the game retarded from the start if 4 vaders are on one team.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Battlefront isn't a F2P game, and if companies let go of pretending dedicated servers are bad shit could just about run itself. Ain't nobody official backing CS:Source servers anymore, but there they are. Or to a more extreme degree, the servers seen in resurrection projects for games where they wouldn't cough up some server software like RE: Outbreak or Battlefield 2.

Before you respond with "games as service" recall that I'm against that model. Make the game. Make some expansions later if you want. Don't have an active team on it outside of that.

EA's progression model is intolerable to the actual players, which is at least as bad as the servers dilemma if not the game's development cost in total.

[AzyWng]

I'd argue that "online" is in fact the reason for all the drama. People expect "games as a service" now. But when "services need to be paid for" enters the equation, the same people flip their shit about it

Reminds me of that one picture that was making the rounds on iFunny a while back. Something along the lines of a video being titled "A criticism of Capitalism" or someshit, followed by an 8-year-old shouting with the caption "Why the fuck does everything cost money!?"

When people actually are memes, sometimes it's good. When people actually are 8-year-olds, sometimes it's good.

This is neither of those times.

[Reelya]

idk, I'm suspecting that some of the development costs weren't actually covered in the box-price itself hence they plan to actually recoup total costs through the online play. So, sure they could offload the servers, but but they'd probably have to scale back development quite a bit.

I found a number references putting a figure on it, saying SW: Battlefront II actually clocked in @ $235 million, making it the third-most expensive game of all time. It's quite possible that they're not actually hitting a profit on that until the online component is factored in. Only GTA V and CoD: MW2 cost more to make.

... cue the standard objection "yeah but some of that money was for marketing". But that misses the point. If you spend $1 million in marketing, it's to get more than $1 million in additional sales. That is the whole point. And if you get more sales, then the total costs of development - including marketing are split between more customers. That's just how it is.

[Eric Blank]

How the fuck has this entirely un-funny discussion lasted so damn long without getting its own thread?

[Maximum Spin]

I find it intensely funny.

[IronTomato]

I find it intensely funny.

+1

* IronTomato sits in the corner eating and contributing nothing noteworthy

[CABL]

@ AAA & gaming industry:
Don't blame the gaming companies for scummy practices: Blame the whole system aka capitalism. People enjoy shitting on communism for mass murders, yet they forget that capitalism existed for longer than communism, and the capitalism of the older times's main achievements were black slaves, wiping out Native Americans and overall assholery towards anything non-European. Even if the game industry crashes, the cycle will start again, until the very system (Capitalism) is destroyed.
TL:DR: Want to change gaming industry? Destroy capitalism first.

@ Gamers boycotting AAA studios:
That's never gonna happen, friendos. We are too busy fighting each other over which console is better. Okay, maybe that's gonna happen in the future, but there's a Russian saying, "Until the thunder strucks, the man won't rebaptize himself".

[Jopax]

So I looked up the sales numbers for Battlefront. 14 million copies in six months. If every one of those was just the minimal 60$ then they made their money back more than 3 times over (if we take the 200 million dev cost as true). And that's without counting the DLC/season pass.

So why did Battlefront 2 need those F2P things shoved down it's throat if the game was a sequel to a smash hit and by all accounts a better game that would most certainly sell just as well, if not better. Is 14 million copies sold just not enough to keep EA out of the poor house, are server costs that freaking huge that they need to turn the game into a P2W shitfest in order to keep them running?

[Reelya]

They're not making anything like the actual box costs from retail sales. It just doesn't work like that, the retailer gets a big cut of that. Also if it's a console version, the console maker also takes a cut.

It's just plain irrational to think some amorphous "they" made the full $60 from each sale. It's just plain not in the realm of reality, guys. It's actually much more reasonable to assume that about 1 dollar in three actually made it's way to the people who made the game.

[hector13]

14,000,000 x 60 = 840,000,000

840,000,000/3 = 280,000,000

Also, you seem to be missing the point.

It’s a Star Wars game. The first three characters you think of are Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, and Darth Vader. Do you think that not being able to play as iconic characters from the series will help or hinder overall sales?

There are other ways to encourage players to spend their money by making a Star Wars game a generic sci-fi shooter.

[Tawa]

I don't get what the big fuss is about. Battlefront II is a great game.