I am morally opposed to exposing children to faux-gambling to make Blizzard or Valve an extra buck -- or get them to spend an extra 20 minutes in game. The argument that loot boxes are "only cosmetic" is also a terrible argument. The game experience involves customizing your character. Cosmetic items are by definition part of the game and, therefore, enhance gameplay. Many lawsuits were lost a few years ago where dozens of skin selling/trading/gambling sites had to be shut down. At least I'm happy governments all over the world took a stand.
But unfortunately, this trend won't stop until consumers also take a stand and vote with their wallets. I was excited for Battlefront and the new Shadow of War games but decided not to buy (or pirate) either. On the other hand, maybe litigation is the only way to change these exploitative grey-area practices.
The issue is unlike previous anti-consumer practices (like day-1 DLC), no more does one customer = one wallet vote. Sure, 50 of us could not buy the game, but that one whale who spends $3000 has just outvoted us with his wallet.
It's even more systemic than that - vicariously living through streamers opening lootboxes is a favorite for many gamers. Even just some kid who sets up their own Twitch stream can get an uptick in views if they persistently open lootboxes on stream. The thrill of the gambling carries over well for some reason so much that it's often enough to satisfy the viewers' own little internal gamblers.
> How much of a core gaming experience is "what one of your characters is wearing"?
In every game, from CS:GO, to Overwatch, to WoW, people seem to care what they're wearing. If it's so unimportant to the game, why do people care? Why do people spend real money on cosmetics that have "no impact" on gameplay? Drop this contrarian nonsense, it's clearly important to the game. "Purely cosmetic" is a misleading non-material weasel word.
It's social cachet. You get to show off. You could decide to not care what clothes you're wearing, or you could be someone who likes to show off their labors.
This isn't important to the "game" - you can still win/lose just as well - but it's an important social aspect for those who want to show off. (I make no judgement on those who like to flaunt the fancy gear - it just makes me want to beat them even more while wearing ugly game-cosmetics that I didn't pay anything for.)
Some of these cosmetic options become popular with certain player types because of effective camo uses as well. For instance, a lot of the darker and blacker item skins in the CS series have always trended strongly on the marketplace for that reason. Certainly more games try to mitigate against that (the rarest are often the brightest/most peacocky), but there are still utility choices in the cosmetics based on how they appear to opposing players.
And, on the other other hand, there's a reason why Tencent is the largest gaming company in the world now, and it seems to involve free games that are mostly / overwhelmingly pay-to-win.
> At least I'm happy governments all over the world took a stand. But unfortunately, this trend won't stop until consumers also take a stand and vote with their wallets.
This is naive. If the only solution you proffer is one of consumer boycott then the problem will never get better. Boycotts rarely, if ever, affect anything. And given the nature of the problem — the addictive nature of some game mechanics and dependency on the reward mechanisms of the brain — I think it is borderline foolhardy to believe simple “free will” to be a solution of any seriousness.
If it's faux-gambling now, at what point does it start to fall under some sort of real gambling regulations? Doesn't the US at least regulate online poker and similar games?
You are about 5 years too late. Skin trading is already actual gambling, there are many sites that allow you to buy skins then gamble with them and cash out money. This isn't a hypothetical, it is a business model and I would be amazed if publishers were not aware of it.
Steam's market is also regularly used for actual money laundering through trades and inflated buy orders.
I was only superficially aware of that type of stuff (I play CS:GO every now and then) but not what skin trading actually was nor the money laundering aspect of it. Seems that if Valve wanted to do something about it, they would, right? e-sports are very popular now and they make you use their Steam phone app if you do want to trade something on the Community Market. I guess since it's not technically illegal and they get a cut of it, they don't mind looking the other way (or maybe don't think of it as a negative).
It's becoming quite obvious that Valve has very little interest in making their community in any way "good". Given how badly Steam Greenlight (and now Steam Direct) have gone -- with cheap (to produce, not to purchase) asset flips just dumped on the front page with no real vetting from Valve or the community -- I wouldn't put money on them even giving enough of a toss to notice that they're encouraging children to develop addictive tendencies via online gambling simulators. And if they have noticed it's "not their problem".
One of things I don’t like about loot boxes is that it doesn’t involve shooting avatars. I didn’t buy CoD WWII so that I could take sixty seconds to load The Headquarters, wander around, push the lever, wait for the drop animation, wait for the opening animation. Only to get a box full of shit I already have (I’ve just quit opening them now). I want to shoot shit, not stand around doing paperwork.
So in summary, if this is the direction games are going, I guess I’ll start looking at more board games, and get better on that mandolin. Because this is not how I care to spend even a minimal amount of my gaming time.
Ironically, you like the game less, the more it gets close to true military life experience :).
That said, I sympathize. Things tangential to the core gameplay should be... tangential. The problem is that these days, the idea of what constitutes "gameplay" differs is different for the studios than it is for the players.
I don't think it's ironic. Games are not there to be accurate simulacra of life; that's what life is for. People usually play games to escape from the tedium of realism. If I wanted to spend more of my time grinding, I'd work longer hours.
which is why i find the genre of Simulation so interesting. of which Flight Sims seem to be most well known, most typical example of. In the old Falcon 4, there was a large manual that one required just to operate the radar screens. and folks would learn them . Perhaps it provided some feeling of mastery over a complex task - and knowing it derived from something from reality/nature meant that task was in some way grounded in "truth".
In something newer like the DCS series each aircraft has rows of knobs - that represent reality as closely as possible. Of course you can expand Simulation to all sorts of domains. e.g. for tanks Steel Beasts is almost a game in the proper sense, but quite simulation influenced (actual militaries use it to train tank teams).
Finally, why restrict yourself to avation/military... you could truly attempt simulate any experience. essentially, you would de-gamify it.
i think the core values of simulation are free-form structure, customization, exploration, experimentation.
Are engaging with these sims "fun"? I dont' know, but folks sure seem to spend a lot of time "playing" them. They must be getting something out of it.
I'm interested how far you could take this, how far you could expand into something engaging that not along the well-trodden path of flight/military/car stuff.
People who own planes generally report it being fun to fly; it is just also extremely expensive to do often and there is a massive element of risk if you don't know what you are doing or your luck with the weather runs out for you and your small plane that you are flying with your limited skills. I don't be know many people who report "going into the military was extremely fun and I would do it constantly if I just had access to enough sufficiently-evil enemies to kill".
> I don't be know many people who report "going into the military was extremely fun and I would do it constantly if I just had access to enough sufficiently-evil enemies to kill".
That statement to me shows you even have difficulty conceptualizing what a non-gamified model even look like! (.e.g "sufficiently-evil enemies to kill").
Simulation has much more elements of tedium (no "pacing"), just like real life.
Or the learning curve is not constructed just so to be the perfect on-ramp, just like real life. The learning curve is simply what nature/environment demands.
e.g. "Enemies" are not "sufficiently evil", or even presented to you at proper game-enjoyment level times/pacing.
It is why simulations are not really "games", they are not "fun" (but the can be, but that isn't the "point"), but my point was that something draws people to them, and they engage with them. It's interesting to think about why.
I brought that up to isolate the moral ambiguity of war, not to imply something about gamification. The reason I did that was because, without that comment, I think you would have to be a sick and twisted person to consider shooting at and killing other people to be "fun", even if it were thrilling and challenging and engaging and whatever else you find "fun".
Flight simulators do not have the same moral quandary, so we don't have to worry about it there: we can ask the question "is flying fun"... and you seem to have ignored my premise which is that the answer is apparently "yes": people who own planes report that flying is fun.
However, most people can't fly, as it requires you to have a ton of disposable income to own the plane and contract the hanger and pay for the fuel. The people I know who own planes hardly ever get to fly them, and when you do get to fly you are often almost "forced to" in order to keep your training up to date.
Regardless, it is worth noting that you have now slipped into the territory of having defined a simulation as something inherently not fun, so we should ask if a flight simulator even qualifies for your circular definition, and it turns out it doesn't :/.
So, the reason why a true combat simulator (with the caveat that the enemy is "sufficiently evil") would be "not fun" is that most of combat is "hurry up and wait", maintaining your equipment, and doing training exercises. What makes a first person shooter fun is that you get to do only the parts that are thrilling, challenging, and engaging: even your gun is maintained by other people.
A flight simulator is thereby not really a simulator, as if it were 99% of your time would be spent making money to buy fuel. You would only get to fly a couple times a month at most, and your plane would even be in the shop a lot. You would be managing your flight certification credits more than your air traffic control, and you would have a pretty limited set of destinations.
In Flight Simulator, you can fly any plane, from anywhere to anywhere, the plane always works (unless you ask for it to not work), you get to decide how bad (aka, "exciting") the weather is, and the fuel is effectively free. You get to spend all of your time doing the parts that are thrilling, challenging, and engaging.
The closest you can get to this experience in the real world is flying commercially, whether for a large airline (in which case you do get to fly large aircraft--which is both interesting and boring--but mostly in good weather on someone else's schedule) or you start your own small business flying people around (in which case we would expect a bunch of sales and accounting hours).
Getting your License requires a significant money and time investment. The kind of investment that a significant amount of people cannot make. Meanwhile FSX is under 20 dollars and runs on a laptop from 2007, which a nice joystick costing about 30 dollars. It even lets you turn down the simulation-ness, if you just want to play around instead of follow checklists.
> In the old Falcon 4, there was a large manual that one required just to operate the radar screens. and folks would learn them .
I still have it around... in the preface, one of the lead game designers (IIRC) tells the story of how he went up a twin-seat F-16 with a pilot who was consulting for the game, who in mid-air proceed to let the guy fly the bird... and actually, he did pretty well!
This is why I qualified my statement with "usually." The other use for games for practicing real skills. Flight simulators are a great example of this, as the best ones actually count as credit towards a pilot license. The joy of these sorts of games is the same as playing with music synthesizers, or some new complicated software, or building a side-project, or studying math.
Pushing a button to get a drip of dopamine doesn't qualify for this category either.
It's expanded pretty far outside those realms already. Aside from the obvious ones like The Sims, Sim City, Roller Coaster Tycoon etc, sports simulators are huge (FIFA, Madden, Football Manager), cooking/retail simulators are big business on consoles and especially as mobile games (https://www.tomsguide.com/us/pictures-story/628-best-mobile-...), Euro Truck Driver and a million variations are making plenty of money, and I just came across Farming Simulator 17 - https://www.humblebundle.com/store/farming-simulator-17
"Life" is not classified as a proper game because of a very unfortunate combination of gameplay mechanics - it has permadeath, suffering (unheard of in pretty much any other game), lots of grinding, and it's very unbalanced. Any one of these alone is OK, but taken together, they make for a shitty, and ultimately one-time experience.
Extra Credits did a good video on AAA game pricing recently (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhWGQCzAtl8) that talks about why developers are going down the lootbox and microtransaction roads.
Their argument is basically that AAA games are just way too cheap. The price has been at $60 for a long time, and even though the market has expanded since then, it's still not enough to cover the development costs, which have skyrocketed. Finding other revenue streams has become a necessity. The alternative would be $80 or $100 AAA games.
I am a fan of Extra Credits, but I was actually disapointed in that particular video. I thought they failed to acknowledge many other aspects of video game monetization.
I encourage you to check out Jim Sterling's video "The Sixty Dollar Myth" as a good argument for the other side.
Or lowering production costs. Less reliance on expensive licenses and must-be-bigger-than-the-last-one sequels and more original content instead would be a good starting point.
Relying on more original content would actually be more expensive if they were trying to maintain the same quality. Having to develop a new IP and new story from scratch, plus new assets and models, plus the major chance that it might not actually succeed... it's a risk-averse model. Everyone knows that CoD will sell, or Madden, or GTA. It's guaranteed money, even if it's a relatively small profit. Small profit is better than maybe zero maybe negative.
CoD, Madden and GTA are big enough to make a profit at $60 though. We're not talking about those titles really. We're talking about the games that try to compete with them, and don't sell enough $60 copies to be worthwhile. Those are the games that need to reduce their production costs, or just not get made, rather than introducing things like loot boxes.
> Or lowering production costs. Less reliance on expensive licenses and must-be-bigger-than-the-last-one sequels and more original content instead would be a good starting point.
More likely, that would increase production costs. People pay for "expensive" licenses only when they are preceived to be a cheap way to buy an audience that will pay for the game, avoiding licenses and franchises in favor of "more original content" means more costs for content and more cost for marketing.
There is going to be a point where the price is too big and devs have to sacrifice some bells and whistles. You can rank up dev costs till infinity, but customers won't pay till infinity.
The crazy thing is that the workers actually creating those games are worked to the bone to get them done by the deadlines. The economic model is abusive on both sides (worker and player).
In Magic, booster packs are actually useful for drafting. Adults in the MtG community constantly stress that you shouldn't buy booster packs for yourself--they're made for draft play.
In pretty much all video games that have them, you can't draft with loot boxes, or it wouldn't make any sense. I played Destiny 2 recently and had a good amount of fun, but much of the game felt so artificial and designed around a boardroom-brainstormed economic strategy. It seems this has just resulted in chaos in the fan community. I strongly recommend Monster Hunter World instead. Loot-based, grindy action game, without loot boxes.
Also: I hereby regret that I didn't make contact with adult CCG communities when I was ~10-13 and into Magic and other games; with my cousin, we've spent plenty of our pocket money buying booster packs...
Ah, by draft we are referring to a mode of play in modern CCGs: one where players gather around a table, passing packs around and picking cards from them for the purpose of making a deck on the spot, and then playing with that deck in the subsequent tournament.
With drafting, having a randomized pack actually serves a purpose other than gambling, in that the unknown nature of the contents of the pack means that the people sitting at the table picking cards for their deck don't know what will be coming and what others have picked (which makes the act of this drafting itself an interesting skill and entertaining experience separate from merely "opening a pack hoping for a good card")
I agree, that is an important distinguishing point between trading card packs and loot boxes and I am glad that you mentioned it. Looking at trading card packs in isolation of drafting, I would call the two the same. But drafting does create a situation where trading card packs actually have an entertainment use beyond the gambling-like mechanic that exists when the pack is looked at in isolation.
It does for most formats, but drafting is $15 or less for a night of in-person gaming, potential prizes if you win (making your money back in packs is possible), and some cards you can keep for deckbuilding/trading later (of which only a few may be actually worth more than pennies, but still)
There are many of $15 indie games and board games (see: Star Realms) that offer many nights of fun, though...
I hate to think how many talented designers and engineers are building systems to convince their marks to spend more money than they intended to spend. Or maybe can afford.
I cant say that i want to support this direction videogames are going in. We get less content and still need to pay full price and then theres the pressure to buy all the dlc and microtransactions. At least before lootboxes you could buy exactly what you wanted, now you need to grind 100h and just hope you get the correct one.
Im happy i bought my overwatch key on g2a, those people buying keys in bulk and then doing chargeback can have the money rather than Blizzard.
edit: To expand upon, most of these costs are invented the game makers. In games like CS source you didnt need to buy any skins, you could make your own and replace the in-game models to see them client side and if you wanted everyone to see it you could have the server you ran the game on use it. But now no one lets you host your own server and prevents you from mixtering with the game files, so now you need to pay for simple recolors that you could have made yourself before or get through the community.
And another reason not to buy games anymore is that you really dont own them. When steam finally dies one day your 'license' expires and all your games are gone, not like it mattered anyway since more and more games require verification from servers owned by the developer/publisher either to play online or to verify your copy (doors in Diablo 3 are server side iirc). These servers then close down to force you to buy the latest game in the series. Or nobody bothers to keep them online when the company gets purchased or closed. And rarely to never at all do they let anyone set up third party servers because why would they.
/rant
Overwatch is ONLY cosmetics in lootboxes, has high drop-rate in normal play. They give them out like candy. They literally gave you more at Christmas.
It's rubbish suggesting you have to grind, you earn lootboxes for virtually EVERYTHING because you are constantly earning XP for playing almost every game, QP or ranked or arcade.
There's a reasonable in-game currency, no external trading, and is frankly an example of loot boxes done right.
Your attitude is "I'd rather defraud the devs, even though the game I have is the opposite of Pay-to-Win."
He's refering to buying the game on g2a, a grey market key reseller that's notorious for using stolen credit cards to obtain the keys it's vendors sell to players. This often results in charge back to the devs who then feel compelled to allow the key to remain valid anyway for fear of public outcry.
> I seriously don't understand game culture these days. The rhetoric seems to hint at things I don't understand.
It’s not difficult at all to understand. If you pay $59.99 for something, are you entitled to ownership of the entire game? Or are you entitled to ten slot machines that randomly payout enhanced functionality at low probabilities? The majority of publishers seem to think the latter is a fair way of doing business.
Those games are all classics, but they would all be considered small indie games by todays standards. I guess the answer is check out popular (or especially not so popular!) indie titles if you're nostalgic for those days rather than be enraged by heavily marketed AAA titles.
Ah, divisiveness in the industry as a whole now vs then is probably due to the ubiquity of the web (specifically social media) and having a much larger audience with videogames as a stronger part of their core identity. The PC gaming market in the early and mid 90s was growing rapidly, but still pretty niche. There are also far more developers and a larger diversity in developers and players. Often with indie developers (and occasionally in AAA) the divisiveness is animosity toward developers for not making games that cater to the majority audience.
EA/Dice in Battlefield moved from a perfectly healthy grind-to-improve mechanic where you got improvements and unlocks by grind and achievement that actually felt worth doing (BF3 and BF4). I even had zero issues with the possibility of buying these perks for money.
Then they release their latest iteration and they completely ruin it. Some extremely complex mechanic of crates giving crap that seems to be cosmetic only? I mean who is feeling rewarded in any way by having a purple gun if it works the same?
In “simple” FPS I agree (e.g quake style shooters etc). But in BF where there is tanks and planes and a hundred modes I like the incentive it gives me to vary my playing with unlocks for “fly a plane for an hour” etc.
After a hundred hours or so you have most stuff and there isn’t much progression for many hundred hours after that.
I agree it shouldn’t be useless grind, it should be rewards for varying it up.
Such as just trying something, or getting 5 kills with a gun.
When you go out of your comfort zone, you are initially shit (naturally), so without the lure of an unlock “if I can just not suck for enough time to shoot down 3 planes” you stick with where you would have just gone back to the comfort zone otherwise.
Not something you need hundreds of hours of repetitive play to do. So perhaps “grind” is the wrong term for this type of progression. Getting to the end if the progression might be a grind if you want to do it deliberately. But I enjoyed the progressions of BF3 and 4 and I probably would have had less fun without it. I did the first 1000h because the first 100h had those rewards that compensated for me sucking as a player.
I don't know, I just get sick of the feeling that every game needs progression systems. Constant popups telling me I've accomplished something and here's your reward make me feel like all my accomplishments are meaningless and just exist to beef up an arbitrary number on a server somewhere. I really like FPSes, but I don't remember the last time I had fun playing a new one because the skinnerbox mentality takes so much away from the design.
I don't mind modern mechanics that don't have to do with telling me how great I am. Ironsights are great and even going back to Left 4 Dead 2 from 2009 felt like going decades backwards in design. Cover systems range from okay to really good. (Red Orchestra 2 being my favorite on that front) Regenerating health is... okay well I don't like regenerating health much because it encourages corridor based level design rather than the classic exploration you'd get from Doom or Jedi Knight 2 or whatever.
And I'm especially upset that the single "element" pulled in when a game has "RPG elements" is the leveling system. That's not what makes an RPG an RPG, that's just the system that best fits tabletop games.
I miss when I could hop into a game, and apart from skill, everyone is on the same level.
It likely didn’t have all those ornamented gold weapon variants either...
I’d be happy for the progression in BF1 to be shorter or slower because it has fewer items. But that buy-your-stuff system where you grind for the currency and then have to read up to not make a horrible mistake and buy the wrong thing, I’m not a fan of.
I never thought of any combinations as OP in the older games either tbh
First, I disagree with those who have been saying that piracy or purchasing keys from the grey market are solutions: those are just making the problem worse, not better. These gambling-like mechanics are coming from companies looking for a way to remain economically viable when their base prices stay the same even as the cost of development goes up, and stealing the product is just going to make this already bad situation much worse.
That being said, I am also firmly against the loot box model. While many genres of games use behavioral conditioning as a means to the end of making the game entertaining, the conditioning inherent in loot boxes represents a much tighter loop: one where the primary act of deriving enjoyment comes not from the experience of the game, but rather comes exclusively from that conditioning itself. When you look at it that way, the only difference between a loot box and gambling is that gambling has the additional harmful effect of being a "closed loop": that is to say, the solution to gambling may appear to a user to be "gamble more to make up your losses." But to me, that doesn't excuse loot boxes; it merely makes gambling a particularly egregious cousin within the genre of variable ratio scheduling-based "entertainment".
When I look at loot boxes, I see something that is (at least, in the general case) well-intentioned: the designers feel a need to find a way in this difficult market to retain viability, as mentioned recently by Extra Credits. They're in a hard spot, and a very personal one: indeed, their jobs and the jobs of their co-workers are on the line. Designers may also look at the entertainment caused by the reinforcement of conditioning and see that as providing value in itself: the act of "scoring big" on a random roll is indeed thrilling to people, and it is easy to believe that providing that to people provides them "value". But is it thrilling for the right reasons? Is that really value? Are we optimizing for the wrong measurement? My feeling is that this potentially well-intentioned pivot to loot boxes has and is derived from models of behavioral conditioning that feel harmful to end users even if they came from well-intentioned reasoning.
I would like to see the industry move away from this model; I know that right now a higher initial price tag is a hard pill to swallow, but at various times in the industry the price has been higher (adjusted for inflation), and the market accepted it. I think for example about the SNES era, where SNES games defaulted even back then to $80 for a new AAA game (adjusted for inflation, that'd be ~$140 today): the initial price was steep, but the market held and the people found value in it. There is also something to be said about profitability being obtained by being able to reach our much wider target audience - profit by volume, which is something that loot boxes take advantage of but that other models could take advantage of as well.
This is by no means an easy problem to solve, and I don't know where the industry will end up. The kinds of pressures mentioned recently by Extra Credits are very real, and loot boxes present a very obvious way to circumvent that issue. But I hope that an alternative model can be found; one that derives itself less from gambling and behavioral conditioning and more toward providing an obvious, easily calculable cost-to-benefit.
Yep. And this is why I play emulated and pirated games. These older games don't use loot boxes, DLC, or the myriad of other tricks and traps to sink more money after the initial purchase.
I'll also play more current games where I actually buy the game outright, although that's changed from computer to board games. I know what I'm getting with a board game. None of that stupid lootbox crap, or the Diablo3 method of forcing people to buy crap on eBay to play "single player game".
The game companies have forced me to migrate to local games. And Emulation serves its purpose very well. It assumes the same hardware, and just works. Yeah, it's breaking copyright, but well - I'd get screwed in buying legit. So well, whatever. Arr.
But unfortunately, this trend won't stop until consumers also take a stand and vote with their wallets. I was excited for Battlefront and the new Shadow of War games but decided not to buy (or pirate) either. On the other hand, maybe litigation is the only way to change these exploitative grey-area practices.