Emphasis is my commentary.
-Working conditions. If this is your gripe then no AAA publisher or even F2P publisher should get your money. Because they all work employees to the bone.
done by a small number of publishers, and it's all "oh you get +1 skill point" which is the most meaningless lip service one can do
Small number of publishers being: EA, Ubi, Bethesda, Activision/Blizzard....basically all the major ones do this. They leverage the fear of missing out.
oh god, THIS one. Almost wrote about this one in my original post but decided not to then. They sell DLC just as big as DLC released for plenty of games, AAA or smaller. They just make sure to say "OH THIS IS AN EXPANSION NOT LIKE THOSE OTHER COMPANIES" when other companies don't care about appealing to the Gamers™ and just sell it in a straightforward fashion.
Compare and contrast Borderlands 2. It has literally 45 DLCs just for skins. CDPR markets their stuff that way because they make actual, playable DLC that is worth the money. You could buy Blood & Wine for the Witcher 3 or you could buy like 5 skins for Borderlands 2 (and another $20 or $30 for the actual playable DLC.) Which is a better value.
this is a small portion of games, and a smaller portion of those games have loot boxes disruptive to gameplay. But still. Small portion. Loot boxes are an annoying trend where they are implemented though, true.
I'd argue it's not a smaller and smaller again portion of games. I can think of at least 3 major releases in the last two years that tried this shit. Has CDPR done that? No. So they are bucking a trend when they could easily exploit their fans for more.
yeah, this is annoying, but it is again only employed in a minority of games. EA has it in some of their games, but the main offenders are pretty much just Ubisoft and maybe Bethesda.
And EA. And Activison/Blizzard. And Warner Brothers, at times.
obscene product crossovers that I'm aware of. -and this is... bad?
When the people you're buying your game from want it to appear on Cheetos and Danon Yogurt and fucking lettuce, yeah, I think that's a bad thing. When they're so hungry for money and exposure they'll stamp their logo on everything regardless of whether it relates to the game or even gaming, it signals where their heads are actually at. Shadow of War literally pulled this trick and every other in the book in their lead up to release, and guess what? Their SP game had paid microtransactions and loot boxes. It's a symptom of the thinking.
They don't do third party DRM above and beyond your digital distribution platform. -this one is conditional. GoG is definitely a good thing, for starters. But the extreme majority of games just use the digital distribution platform for DRM. Plenty of AAA games use third party DRM, but the effects of those are still debated and in almost every case do not affect the paying consumer. Even in the case of them negatively impacting gameplay, most 3rd party DRM is removed soon after launch anyways.
And yet CDPR doesn't bother at all, I don't have to put that shit on my harddrive, and they don't treat all customers like potential criminals until they've secured their dollar. And they succeed doing it. Which makes all the other publishers look like greedy idiots who will put profits before respecting their customers.
Yes, some of the things you mentioned are definitely bad, but those are largely only found in games by premium AAA developers waaay bigger than CDPR. Pretty much every other developer at their caliber doesn't do this kind of stuff (and they don't exploit their workers), but they don't get circlejerked by the entire internet for it because they don't base their entire marketing on not doing it.
Because most of those guys are self-published, including CDPR. They have the freedom to not be shitty.
With all of that going on, and the way games are going now, I don't have a problem celebrating a studio that doesn't spit in my face while also trying to reach deeper in to my wallet than the cost of their game.
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Topic: SALES Thread (Read 1457016 times)