Re: Two Random PC Business Facts

On 14/06/2024 16:00, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

On Thu, 13 Jun 2024 13:10:17 -0700, Dimensional Traveler
<dtravel@sonic.net> wrote:
 

On 6/13/2024 10:22 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

 

The truly sad thing is how so many gamers have become acclimatized to
this sort of thing. There's an entire generation of gamers who no
longer expect to receive full and complete games for their purchase;
who are shocked when they learned we used to get things like cheat
codes or fun extras like 'big head modes' and extra characters for
free, included in the base game. Which isn't to say publishers weren't
money-grubbers back in the 80s and 90s either (you just have to look
at arcade game design to disprove that theory!) but even they never
took it as far as modern publishers.
>

They also didn't have an internet ecosystem with things like PayPal to
make MTX feasible at current tech.

 Yeah. If Arcade manufacturers of the 80s could have socked players for
more, they certainly would have.
 

It was a sound business model and I didn't think it was that expensive (10p a go) as long as you were half decent at the game and even less so if you played with friends and spent more time watching someone else play than playing yourself.

(but maybe I'm still just sore at the $1USD in quarters I shoved into
"Dragon Lair" back when that game was the new hotness only to die
thirteen seconds later. ;-)
 

Oh I remember Dragon's lair and for us I think it was 50p a game. I never played it more than a few times before I realised that you weren't playing a game as such but instead can you remember what to do to avoid dying like you did last time.

Not that Paypal itself is required these days. All the modern MTX
happily accept payments from (slightly) less skeevy payment vendors,
including credit cards and banks. I'm pretty sure that if Steam could,
they'd put a box in everybody's house to take cash if they could.
 Still, there was an era -mid 90s to early 2000s- when publishers
seemed to be competing on the quality of their product.  That isn't to
say there weren't some bad games back then but the way to financial
success was to invest in your development teams and let them crank out
games people wanted to play. Now it seems to be "crank out any old
shit, you'll find some suckers who'll play it and then monetize the
hell out of them".
 

There's still lots of games out there that are based around the idea of you pay us money and we'll give you a game you like. Unfortunately the big money seems to be made with here's a game that's just about adequate and now we'll chuck the sink of phycological warfare at you to keep you paying and playing.
The bit I don't understand is overall they don't even seem to be particularly good games but people buy them in their droves anyway.

Still... gotta give mobile games at least THIS much credit; they do
give you more bang for your buck than 13 seconds of gameplay. ;-)
 

I do play quite a few MTX mobile games just to pass the time but I've never spent money on them. Basically it's play until the soft paywall kicks in and then delete and find another one.