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[MCreeper]

There are crates for real life money in it?

Googled. Yep, there is. It's not only idiotic game for cutthroat price, it's idiotic for cutthroat price that tries to make you pay money in game. In SP, even. This is disgusting.

[Cruxador]

Big corporations could afford legal battles of such magnitude that this hypothetical Shitty Gaming Company would go bankrupt, then they could buy the patents from the wreckage.

What if Shitty Game Co. just... Doesn't incorporate? Do like an LLC or something. Or sell the patent to someone you trust to not use them for a pittance. Someone not even related to the game industry, perhaps. This'd be an unprofitable thing to do and would scarcely do more than annoy the target companies, but you're greatly overestimating the failure condition.

[Teneb]

One thing I love is that when loot boxes and microtransactions are compared to paid cheat codes, actual corporations such as Gamestop literally said that cheat codes only used to be free because they couldn't find a way to charge for them.

Spoiler: They even stopped pretending pre-order stuff is a bonus, it's like they don't care anymore because they know people will still pay. (click to show/hide)

That's an actual, real, ad in the spoiler, by the way.

[nenjin]

Unless you're Disney, patents don't exist in perpetuity.

i think you're mixing and matching a few different topics here

You're right, I was thinking the copyright on Mickey Mouse. My bad.

[MrRoboto75]

It would be kind of fun to make a game where this would be part of the game world, though. (If I had a zillion dollars.)

Basic idea: dystopian future where the poor unwashed masses are rising in a (futile) armed rebellion against their billionaire masters.
Actual concept: you can play a prole scum (rebel or working for the man) for free. No progression, no levelups whatever. If you pay (buy the game), you can play a thug with persistent level progression. Thugs can be rebels or working for the man. If you pay more (DLC/lootbox/bonus stuff) you can be elite cyborg enforcer for the man.

If you pay a shitload, you can be a billionaire mastermind. Instead of even having a character on the battlefield, you just take part by piloting various drones and robots. When you die, you just spawn another drone as your character is safe and sound in a bunker somewhere... So not only do you get persisent progress, you get unlimited number of respawns.

So the game is unfair to start with and it is part of the story... and maybe abhors actual resentment towards the rich ruling classes among the proles. Communist Propaganda the Game.... do it blatant enough and it works as a statement against the whole model.

W40K Eternal War almost did something similar.  It was originally pitched that free to play players would only have access to one faction, the Orks.  Who are, in fluff, more or less an out numbering mass of barbaric rabble.  They never went with it though, instead FTPs get the basic soldiers for all the playable factions.

[Frumple]

It makes little sense for this to be currently in use because Activision only got the patent right now. But I can totally see them using it in the future.

Um, if you'd look two or three posts down from the first one, the patent was filed back in 2015, is currently in use in nothing, and apparently wasn't even filed by their game dev wing. If they were going to use it they wouldn't have had much trouble just going ahead in the interim, but go figure the company decided the misshapen brainspawn of one of their R&D teams was in fact a bad idea.

As isp notes, a lot of weird and/or massively stupid crap gets patented and never actually used for anything. Get concerned when anything of note actually tries to implement the feature.

[Trekkin]

I wonder how long it will be before there exists a game with no actual content, just an infinite series of paywalls and "ad-lite experiences", all of them also monetized above and beyond that. Maybe add a pyramid scheme multi-level marketing element where people can rope in other people in lieu of paying themselves. All powered by a development team consisting entirely of accountants and marketers.

It is inevitable, I think: gamers will pay to not see the ads they paid to see about further pay-to-view ads, all with tracking systems rewarding them for doing more of that relative to their peers.

EDIT: The more I think about it, the more possible it seems to chain existing schemes together into an emergent fractal Ouroboros of infinite payment for nothing but further promises of jam tomorrow. Forget a pig in a poke. We can sell a Klein poke, and people will keep inverting it forever looking for the pig.

[etgfrog]

The problem is there is no way to prove if a game is using said patent or not. I wouldn't be surprised if its implemented into overwatch, actually, I take that back, I would be surprised if it wasn't.

[MrRoboto75]

Eh, they already try to force sell boxes by locking like 75% of the skins behind yearly temporary events.  They don't really need shitty matchmaking on top of that.

[etgfrog]

Eh, they already try to force sell boxes by locking like 75% of the skins behind yearly temporary events.  They don't really need shitty matchmaking on top of that.

Just because they don't need it, wont stop a company from trying to get even more money. Its very subtle on how the brain will associate things that happen within a short time-span, like when you buy a skin then you go on a slight win streak or making sure you don't get matched up with any toxic players for the day. They could even take that a step farther and force people who talk bad about the game into bad situation, like terrible team members.

Actually, with how the stock market works, they are heavily encouraged to get as much money.

[MrRoboto75]

I'm just saying its redundant.  They already encourage box sales by making most of the worthwhile loot time sensitive.  If you don't buy you're gambling on if you can get the drop you want in X days, or banking coins throughout the year until the holidays hit.

Trying to bank a matchmaking bonus on top of that is rather pointless since most OW events encourage you to play wacky arcade games anyway.  And matchmaking bonuses will shoot them in the foot if they're going to push competitive and the e-sport angle.

And why on earth would they give complainers more bad matches?  So they quit the game?  That means no further box sales.

[ollobrains]

well they can either license it out to other companies and make profits, or other companies cant use it ingames and such a dodgy business practice remains the sole right of activision to put themselves out of business and the rest of teh industry may try and avoid matchmaking its players with others just to push a microtransaction

[Cruxador]

I wonder how long it will be before there exists a game with no actual content, just an infinite series of paywalls and "ad-lite experiences", all of them also monetized above and beyond that. Maybe add a pyramid scheme multi-level marketing element where people can rope in other people in lieu of paying themselves. All powered by a development team consisting entirely of accountants and marketers.

It is inevitable, I think: gamers will pay to not see the ads they paid to see about further pay-to-view ads, all with tracking systems rewarding them for doing more of that relative to their peers.

EDIT: The more I think about it, the more possible it seems to chain existing schemes together into an emergent fractal Ouroboros of infinite payment for nothing but further promises of jam tomorrow. Forget a pig in a poke. We can sell a Klein poke, and people will keep inverting it forever looking for the pig.

I feel like this has probably already happened in the East Asian market. Some of those mobage are pretty much this anyway.

[OutOfManaException]

Fortunately, I think this might be computationally impossible or at least so expensive as to not be worth it.

Essentially, introducing anything like this increases the complexity of matchmaking by an order of magnitude. Hence why you can't "block" people to stop them joining your games. If you could, it'd make matchmaking take so long that it'd be hours to find a game.

[Ludorum Rex]

Fortunately, I think this might be computationally impossible or at least so expensive as to not be worth it.

Essentially, introducing anything like this increases the complexity of matchmaking by an order of magnitude. Hence why you can't "block" people to stop them joining your games. If you could, it'd make matchmaking take so long that it'd be hours to find a game.

It is not a computational issue, but (as you also mention at the end) a waiting time issue. It can increase queue times. However, this is contingent on other factors. If skill parity is less of a concern then it is much less of an issue. So this kind of manipulation is easily doable in games with a high player count and a forgiving skill floor and/or ceiling. It can be as simple as adding an MMR modifier based on the time since last MTX purchase.