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[ZeroGravitas]

WB backpedaled on their idiocy and decided to stop selling the preorder of the "charity" DLC as well as any future sales of it. They also refunded any existing purchases of said preorder (fucking pre orders for microtransactions...). They decided instead to just make a charitable donation and make the DLC free.

You can read their spin and tripe here. I'm sure it says something like "oh our intention was always to be generous and helpful and we totally weren't trying to hide anything and the internet people were being evil to us boo hoo hoo". I'm sure it's as legitimate and honest as their defense on their loot box scheme that you can see here.

Either way. The case is closed. No more fake charity bullshit. Fuck this asshole company though.

I disagree; turns out the problem was EXACTLY what I predicted it would be:

Yep. They've said they will not be taking any profits from this. period. I wonder where the rest of the money goes though..

it's pretty simple. they're legally not allowed to do this without registering in 6 states, so they're probably just going to make an offsetting donation of their own without explicitly linking the two.

but hey, maybe they're going to pocket it. it's not like we won't find out.

from them:

Our decision not to promote the donation outside the U.S. (even though we intended to donate the money) caused many to question where funds from other territories were going. Answering that direct question itself could have triggered compliance obligations or put us in violation of cause marketing laws in some of the 241 territories in which the content was available.

you can't run an unregistered (ie illegal) charity, tell everyone you're running an unregistered charity, and then expect no state with registration requirements will take notice.

[nenjin]

I don't WANT less work going into games, actually.

Production costs will likely stay right where they are.

Those costs are all man-hours, aren't they? Pay for art, pay for coders, pay for testers, etc. In order to bring that down, you'd either need to bring down wages (Because the professionals will TOTALLY love their companies for THAT one) or reduce man-hours invested in the game somehow, which would likely take the form of less actual effort going into the games, which just makes things worse.

Gotta think bigger. Localization teams. Multinational voice actors. Multinational marketing and PR departments. Online and TV ads. Subcontracting out 3rd party tech. Divisional headquarters.

Sit through an entire Assassin's Creed credits real sometime. It will seriously take 20 minutes, because that's how big of an organization rides on the success of the game. I seriously doubt the $ figures mentioned for games are strictly the man hours worked by the dev studio that did the majority of the work. I think it represents the cost to the publisher as a whole.

you can't run an unregistered (ie illegal) charity, tell everyone you're running an unregistered charity, and then expect no state with registration requirements will take notice.

How did their legal department honestly overlook this?

[Madman198237]

I have, in fact, sat through the entire credits reels of SEVERAL videogames, just to listen to the music.

I get what you're saying, but if you ONLY recruit multinational voice actors, you're cutting down on the talent.

And aren't you still going to have to pay them for the work done?


But yeah, there ARE some places they can lose costs, but presumably not many without compromising game value---otherwise, wouldn't the "oh so terribly greedy" companies already have found those places?

[nenjin]

Well, I'm kind of biased here. I think a lot of the melodrama AAA games put in their games is overrated and could be cut. Video games still want to try to be movies and movies are damn expensive because they invest tons of money just in feels. Which is generally a good thing in my book, for video games. But sometimes it's what those feels they want to achieve cost, and what they're actually worth to me, is out of sync. It's why I didn't play hardly any of the ME games. The hundreds of hours of recorded voice acting wasn't worth it to me. Main stories in games like FO or Skyrim or Witcher 3...eh. Take em or leave em, honestly, they're the last things I do if I even manage to play all the way through the game.

So it's not that I want less work per se...I want more work pointed at the things I care about: content, mechanics, scope. And less work pointed at the things I don't. I think "Story" is often a huge investment in games that guides a lot of what it is, and when the story is overblown in importance the cost associated with it goes up. Painstakingly rendered cutscenes, big name Hollywood voice actors, tons of side characters that are there to check boxes in an otherwise bog standard revenge fantasy story. Etc... (Although I will say that Alastair Duncan is worth every penny they're paying him.) I think way too much importance is put on that, and it creates a disproportionate impact on where costs actually are in a game.

[Chiefwaffles]

On the subject of "AAA games should cost more", I somewhat disagree. They've reduced the costs of distribution by going digital, netting themselves more profits, yet this hasn't cheapened AAA games at all. Not to mention poorer regions of the world that used to get games cheaper are slowly reaching the point of paying full price. Like I now have to pay over twice the amount I would've bought games for 15 years ago. They're steadily getting more and more out of their customer base, questionable dlc and cash store practices or not.

"They've reduced the costs of distribution by going digital"

I wouldn't agree with this at all. Steam takes a 30% cut on all games sold through their store. Steam makes all of its money through this. Whereas I'd wager Gamestop makes significantly less money off of selling new games (Unfortunately I can't find a concrete number from a reliable source but supposedly they make like $10 off of a $60 game). Hell, a big part of game retailers' revenues is used games that they don't have to buy from the developer/publisher.
And physical copies of games costs cents per disc, so that's not particularly a factor either.


EDIT: "Anatomy of a $60 Video Game". Which I happened to unintentionally find while doing something unrelated minutes after posting this. How about that.

According to this, the retailer gets a $15 margin and distribution costs $4. Making the cost $19.
The article also has some other costs listed (Returns,  Platform royalty, Publisher) but I believe those also apply to digital sales as well. For contrast, steam takes the aforementioned 30% cut which would be $20. So according to this article (which still isn't extremely reliable. It was posted in the blog section of the LA times in 2010 and the data came from the founder of OnLive) digital distribution should cost roughly the same as physical distribution.

[Ludorum Rex]

I don't know what the numbers are like these days, but 10 and 20 years ago the developers and publishers shared far less than 70%. It was more like 5%-10% for the studio and 10%-40% for the publisher. It was a big reason for the big crash of the 80s and the almost-extinction of the PC game market. Physical distribution costs have gone down a lot, but that's to a large degree because digital distribution forced the many middle men to take a lesser share. There is a reason the retailers and distributors fought so fiercely against Steam. We had to pay them just to get shelf space, and the whole business arrangement was very much in favor of retailers and distributors.

[ZeroGravitas]

you can't run an unregistered (ie illegal) charity, tell everyone you're running an unregistered charity, and then expect no state with registration requirements will take notice.

How did their legal department honestly overlook this?

They didn't - they probably just thought they could get around it with the fine print saying "in these 6 states your donation isn't going directly to the family." Which is exactly what caused the kerfuffle of "well where is it going then?" The situation probably evolved more like:

producer: we want to do this charity thing
legal: ok but in these states we'd need to register as a charity and do all this paperwork and we dont want to do that
producer: ugggh but can't we just do it and make a donation ourselves
legal: ok that works, we'll just write the fine print that we're not collecting money in those states

-a week later-

marketing: halp

[Kagus]

Wouldn't it have been easier to just say "we will match 30% of sales from (DLC) during the period of x.xx to x.xx as a donation to 'X' charity"?

And, while they're at it, maybe donate to a cancer research/treatment charity in the hopes of preventing similar heartbreaks in the future, rather than just throwing money at the family of the deceased until they stop sadding?

[Man of Paper]

Yeah, as soon as I read the last few posts I wondered why they didn't just say they'd match x% of purchases for the DLC and donate them to the family/charity. Maybe those states and foreign countries use umbrella legal terms that would still cover that though, I'm not too sure. Still, the hasty backpedal maneuver always makes me wonder how shady things were planned on being.

[Damiac]

To me this whole 'charity' dlc thing was layer upon layer of wrong:

1. Guy on the team dies. Very sad obviously, team decides to make a tribute to him.  Great, good for them, very nice.
2. For some reason, it's decided that the guy's family should have a charity (fine) and that the onus should be on the players of this game to provide for this guy's family (what? At this point we're in weird decision territory, but not "you bad people" territory)
3. Company presents it as a heartwarming tribute, available as a DLC, with proceeds going to the family charity.  (Weird again, really weird, and getting to a place I don't want to support, but still, not bad people.  People die all the time at all companies, but McDonalds doesn't ask me to buy a special happy meal toy dedicated to the guy who died.  My company makes industrial machines, when a co-worker was badly injured, we collected money internally, but never ever thought of asking our customers to kick in for it!)
4. Marketing and legal get together, figure out how they'll do it, put together a video, provide a disclaimer, bla bla bla. (Nothing new here)
5. Disclaimer obviously leaves a question of "Where does this money go".  People ask "Where does this money go". (Nothing wrong or new here)
6. WB plays hurt feelings company, of course we won't profit from it. (They should have expected this question, and provided a clearer answer.  This is kind of stupid, but whatever)
7. Big Internet Deal is made of this.  People continue to ask "What happens to the money that isn't donated".  WB just points everyone to the clearly not adequate previous answer and acts like that should be enough. (This is getting stupider, and at a certain point you've got to ask if this is intentional obfuscation)
8. Marketing realizes they're in a terrible situation, comes to their senses, and gives the nice tribute out for free, donates to the family on their own, and provides a link in case anyone wants to help out.  This is clearly what should have been done in the first place, but fine, they finally did the right thing.
9. Company sends out a press release on this, and continues to play up the hurt feelings company "Of course all the money was going to go  to the charity. Those bad bad lawyers just wouldn't let us say that" (Screw you WB, you don't deserve a lick of good faith at this point)

So good for the devs for doing this nice thing.  Boo to WB for being at least really stupid about it, and more likely being shady and trying to profit from it.

Also, this nicely sidelined the discussion about LOOT BOXES IN A SINGLE PLAYER GAME that the dev likened to cheat codes from the old days, which the "journalist" forgot to retort were FREE!.  Honestly, I don't think WB is clever enough to have done that on purpose... but that's a whole other thing...

[lordcooper]

No, I will not pay an equivalent of my month's grocery bill to buy a game. Any game. Any game whatsoever.

There is no way that anyone needs that much money in order to produce games. Divinity: Original Sin was outright named game of the year by big-name critics, and was kickstarted with less than a million. You don't need millions and millions of dollars to produce this stuff, they just spend millions and millions of dollars because we keep giving it to them.

An awful lot of Kickstarter campaigns aren't funded solely through Kickstarter.  Especially with the more expensive one, it's usually a mix of KS and company/personal funds or they have investors/publishers lined up who want to see them raise x amount on KS first, to gauge interest in the game.  Some are quite up front about this, some aren't.

[Fewah]

I actually pre-ordered the gold edition.

All the micro-transactions aside, which aren't really needed and the game isn't based around competitive play really.

I really like open end games like this, as they create almost a role-play situation for yourself where you can set your own goals and desires.

Looking forward to it anyways.

[Damiac]

For all the negativity surrounding the sketchy ass practices of the publisher, I am still looking forward to this game with some interest.  I enjoyed the first one, although I wouldn't have paid full price for it.  I'd say it's worth $20 to me.

Unless I hear incredible things about the game once it's out, I'll probably wait for the same price point for the new one.  Because I have noticed that the amount I spend on a game influences how much I enjoy it.  If I pay very little or nothing for a game, it really can't disappoint me, at worst I just don't play it.  If I pay a lot for it, it's more important to me that I enjoy it, and it makes every little problem seem that much worse.

[scriver]

I'm looking forward to it too. I haven't pre-ordered, but I'm thinking about it.

[Fewah]

Seems like the hype on this has really gone down the closer we get to release.

Think they might of shown all their cards early and left little to be discussed now.