I find it hillarious that people pay more for a "pixel karambit" in CS, than I pay for my IRL karambits...makes me chuckle every time
(And do not spin a IRL karambit near CS players, they get real jittery/nervous
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What should Sony's Acquisition Plans Be? *spawn*
- Thread starter RDGoodla
- Start date
(And do not spin a IRL karambit near CS players, they get real jittery/nervous
)arandomguy
Veteran
It's worth noting that CSGO introduces skins and loot boxes for the first time in 2013. Counter-Strike the mod entered open beta in 1999 and the first stand alone retail release (well bundled with other mod turned games as well) was in 2000. Counter-Strike source was released in 2004 until 2013 (replaced by CSGO, but CS games are really iterative sequels). CS was essentially a forever game/franchise before loot boxes and skins.
Blizzard games have also essentially been forever games I'd argue ever since Starcraft in 1998 which was a RTS that didnt even have any concept of loot.
I'd argue the first popular MMO Everquest was released in 1999 and the 2000's on the PC became the MMO era (well hardware enthusiasts might not see it this way as they were never covered really in hardware circles/review sites), especially once WoW came to fore. But aside from WoW this also started the trend of Korean producers releasing F2P MMOs into the global market.
Battlepasses also weren't even really a thing in F2P games until really around the mid 2010s when they started appearing and I don't think really started momentum in mass until latter half of the 2010s. People were already playing DOTA2 for 2 years before Valve first used a battlepass. People were playing LoL for 8(?) years before they first used a battlepass.
It's really online gaming expanding that's driven the growth of these types of games. This is why the trend started earlier on the PC as I don't feel consoles really truly fully entered the online era until the PS4 generation.
What do you mean by "UE5 slop"?
To be clear I'm not fundamentally saying that the blackhole titles can't be dethroned. My original line of discussion here was that it was understandable that Sony chased GaaS titles, because you can see that if you are able to supplant an existing gaas, you stand to reap massive rewards in doing so, and once you're established, it's very hard to supplant you. With respect to the health of the game industry, when we talk about non gaas, and non f2p titles, they are struggling to have the effect they once had.
We used to have rock band, and guitar hero, Sing Star, all sorts of adventure, etc huge game variety, huge innovation, and today, we have very little of that. And recently, we had Baldur's Gate 3, which imo, is probably of game of multi-generations, it's very rare for a game to come along and just re-write what it means to be a single player RPG. They did it. And it won it's awards, it's probably the most played single player game currently will be for some time if you look at hours played. But even then, it's just a fraction of the amount of what a successful gaas can do in terms of reach and hours played. Granted hours played shouldn't matter for a single player game, but if players aren't willing to explore outside of their choice of gaas, that's where I'm seeing the issue here.
And so it's very hard for non-gaas titles, to compete with gaas titles. Every single time your game hits a low point for whatever reason, or even if it doesn't, your friends call you back to play X which is a gaas game, and you put down your SP title and go back at it and never return to your sp game for months.
If we only have SP titles, perhaps many more games would be bought, there would be a larger distribution of the revenue in the gaming industry spread around. Right now, it's very very concentrated in blackhole titles.
This isn't to say blackhole titles can't lose out, but they are often just replaced by another blackhole title.
We can probably see in realtime when a new 'game' is released, especially if it's f2p gaas, you can see the population move from game to game. And then over time, people may move back. But I don't think I've ever seen a game that wasn't designed ground up to be a f2p gaas have that effect. A handful of titles probably came close, maybe Hell Divers II?
To be clear, I enjoy gaas titles as much as the next person. I don't like the idea of F2P gaas titles. I think people should have some skin in the game to stop cheating at the very least, some commitment to play the game beyond the first hour. But if the discussion was, hey, did F2P ruin the health of the game industry? Ie, did kill our variety and innovation in the game design, I think it did. And I don't blame platform holders and developers trying to pivot to survive this.
When I think about the console strategy which is to sell hardware at a loss and make money back up in selling 5-6 titles, or have them subscribe to a service for X number of years.
With F2P Gaas, firstly, both platforms service F2P gaas without subscription. So suddenly, you may not make back the loss on your console.
Selling hardware could be a financial detriment, see Xbox for instance. If people are buying your console and going straight to fortnite and nothing else, that's a major problem for a platform holder, and you better be making decent profits on your console, because the strategy of making it back up in selling 3-5 titles, may not to come to fruition.
and if they are sucked into F2P games that are constantly pushing out new content, constantly trying to get you to come back to keep playing it, they can wait for games to be on sale, or on the used market, or at the library. And so that speaks to why, consoles are quickly to moving to digital, they need find some way to recoup the costs of selling hardware at a deficit, and sadly, they are under massive pressure to sell titles under priced because why pay $100 dollars for a new game, when you can just wait for the price to drop to $40 while you enjoy your F2P/gaas games.
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Most UE5 games: obnoxious narrative-driven games with poor character development/writing and boring stories. Almost every big release now is just generic junk made in UE5, so yeah of course people are going to just stick with the actual fun multiplayer 'forever games' (with the side benefit being these games are actually optimized well and don't run like shit).
Like always there are many bad games and many good games. People arent staying in GaaS games because all other games turned into bad UE5 games. That's just a story you created for the sake to have an argument. Games like Fortnite and many F2P games aren't that special. These games are designed to keep you glued pretty much like how social media and junk food are designed to keep you addicted despite the toxic waste that feed into people's heads and bodies. These games are transitioning the gaming industry by attracting and gluing newer generations of gamers.
This is a graph for Fortnite
And that graph ignores the below 18 which is a HUUUGE market.
Right, so they’re forever games because they’ve hypnotized players into playing them forever.
Outside of hardware forums, the normal people I talk to are all sick of AAA and when they do game it’s multiplayer f2p stuff. When writing is bad there is no reason to play narrative driven games.
If the industry came out with more RDR2 and less Immortals of Aveum or Jedi Survivor we probably wouldn’t have this problem as much (although, multiplayer games have always been popular and have basically always transcended generations, someone earlier mentioned CS).
Dominik D
Regular
If only games were made in another engine, stories would be so much better!
Epic is going to have to purchase Final Draft and Obsidian now
Fortnite is a super special game. Nesh may have been a bit dismissive with his tone, but I don't think he's wrong either.
For a BR game, it's the only one that does this:
It's literraly like a slot machine sound, where your body is waiting for these audio cues, and going holy shit, yes, I've hit it, where is that chest. BR itself is an incredibly cool concept, but it's super full of dopamine because everything in that game matters so much. Each small victory matters, killing someone matters because you take their loot. And it's this cycle of anticipation of preparing for the next fight, jumping people, or not, killing people, and taking their loot, getting more powerful until the crescendo of taking the chicken dinner.
I'm not going to pretend to know it all, I probably know very little. But for instance HeathyGamerGG provides a pretty indepth view of the addiction games and battle royale has over people. If you listen a bit, you sort of get it. I'm not going to say the only reason people play BR games is because it's addictive. That would be too simplistic. But if we look at PUBG which I thought was a raw BR title, Fortnite adds a lot of additional stuff that hooks players harder, than just enjoying the BR gameplay loop
If Fortnite changed the sound the loot chests made I think it would make zero difference to the number of people playing. If they removed the sound it might have a negative impact because it would add more rng to your initial drop because it helps you locate loot. Pretty much everyone plays with visual audio queues so you even have a visual indication for the sound.
But in the scale of things if you’re going to call that sound predatory or addictive then that applies to every cool sound in games. It’s essentially saying all good sound design is addictive and maybe it is.
But if we think people aren’t playing Story
Game because the sound in Fortnite is addictive then I don’t know where we’re at. I think the biggest issue the industry is facing is that tastes have changed. People more often want social experiences, or to be part of a bigger experience. So plsy with friends, play with strangers, be a part of a wider social phenomenon. Ubisoft is making 2006 games for middle aged people and wondering why no one cares.
But in the scale of things if you’re going to call that sound predatory or addictive then that applies to every cool sound in games. It’s essentially saying all good sound design is addictive and maybe it is.
But if we think people aren’t playing Story
Game because the sound in Fortnite is addictive then I don’t know where we’re at. I think the biggest issue the industry is facing is that tastes have changed. People more often want social experiences, or to be part of a bigger experience. So plsy with friends, play with strangers, be a part of a wider social phenomenon. Ubisoft is making 2006 games for middle aged people and wondering why no one cares.
the idea is that it's more loot boxy, than other games. There's a whole segment out there where we banned loot box MTX for a reason.
I don't disagree, that the taste of the industry has changed. But we're at this discussion point where people want things other than Gaas, and say, games that push the visual boundaries, etc, but the tastes of the industry is just largely gaas. For me the health of the industry from an innovation perpsective is much harder than before. But UGC is quickly becoming the most important growth feature in gaming.
In many ways, I think the only counter for platforms is to go smaller, much smaller. 2-3 years tops in development, release and go and then create an entirely new game, no sequels. THe iteration speed of Fortnite is just so fast; one can see how massive UGC became with certain games, and UEFN became a thing shortly after and now it's massive. Super massive actually, its' so tempting to try to make something there, I think about it monthly actually.
Fortnite is like the roblox for older kids I guess. But yea, I fully agree with you, but full circle, it's also why I don't blame Sony trying to secure one of those spots for themselves, unfortunately that backfired for them outside of Hell Divers 2.
It does look like nothing is going to change in this space, so the first party titles that they do release, Sony and MS will just need to be okay with smaller returns. I don't think it's a healthy thing, like you said earlier, margin is everything. So their only reasonable response is to scope down and release more titles, than releasing bigger experiences but less often.
arandomguy
Veteran
Gaming's been around long enough now that that there's been multiple generations and generation gap. The older gaming generations basically remind me of how when they (including me) were gaming and their older generations were leveling these same criticisms are gaming in general and lamenting why gamers wouldn't just watch sports, tv, or read a book/newspaper instead.
The activities enjoyed by other demographics but not yours are just objectively bad and there's something wrong with that demographic or they are being tricked. It's the age old story. Most people hate change and don't understand it, it wasn't just your elders.
The activities enjoyed by other demographics but not yours are just objectively bad and there's something wrong with that demographic or they are being tricked. It's the age old story. Most people hate change and don't understand it, it wasn't just your elders.
Every cartoonish game ever has chest sound effects. Even games as simple as Zelda have funny chest sound effects. It also sounds nothing like a slot machine, and slot machines aren't addictive because of the sound they make.
How is this not like every game ever? Should you not feel rewarded by killing enemies and getting stronger?
Why exactly is 'dopamine' bad for gaming? Why shouldn't you feel good playing it?? Don't all games give you 'dopamine hits'?
Loot boxes in the game world are nothing like loot box MTX. MTX loot boxes (as can be seen in CSGO and TF2) are essentially just slot machines as you are betting the $2.50 it costs for a key that you will unbox something worth >$2.50 (sometimes much more, like thousands of dollars).
Unboxing loot in a game of BR is no different from looting enemies or unlocking chests in almost every game ever.