Dear game devs... the BS has to stop... ok?

mistersprinkles

mistersprinkles

mistersprinkles

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Are some of you old enough to remember a time when a game was actually completely finished and polished (obviously still within the margin of human error) BEFORE it was released? Because there was no internet and no way to push patches to users? When you could buy Super Mario bros 2 and pop it in your NES and you never needed to install anything, download any updates, etc? And you got the WHOLE game, on one cartridge, all at once. No expansions, no DLC, no loot packs. Everyone got the same game. A finished, whole, uncut game.

Then the BS started. It was slow and gentle at first. Once most PC gamers were online devs realized that they didn't need to TOTALLY polish a game before they released it. So what if it doesn't work on machines with X and Y hardware configurations? Screw those people. We'll take their money now and we'll push version 1.1 out to them to fix those issues in a month or two, and in the mean time they can go play outside with their friends.

Then the BS started to get a bit more severe. Enter the game expansion. "Hey, we know you payed $60 for Big Max's Smackdown Time 3... and you finished it... and you enjoyed it. So how about you give us another $25 and we'll give you a few new levels to play in the game! Maybe with a whole new story line!" People were irked. Suddenly, not only did your initial investment NOT guarantee a finished polished game, now it didn't guarantee the ENTIRE game. But we bent over and took it, and it became the norm.

Then devs got more greedy. It became more and more common for games to be released in a broken state, and the expansion became DLC, where DLC was basically like an expansion, but usually with less new gameplay content- and hell, sometimes it wasn't new gameplay content at all, it was just a shiny orange gun and some upgraded grenades, or some kind of pig dog wolf for you to ride around on and get from A to B faster. Where expansions would cost lets say 10,000 man hours of work to produce, DLC could be produced in just a couple of hours! Take the M16 from the game, make it orange, make it louder and more accurate, pack a pig wolf dog in with it, and charge $25. We grimaced, but many of us bent over and took it again, and bought the orange gun and the pig dog wolf.

Then the insanity started. "Free to play" mobile games that suck people with addictive personalities into spending thousands of dollars on in-game items, the production time for which in no way whatsoever merits the cost. This was no longer "art" like 8 hours of new gameplay, this was just money grabbing by increasingly greedy developers and publishers.

And now we arrive at today. Pay to win. Remember when PVP games were BALANCED? Zerg? Protoss? Terran? They all balance out. But hey! What if I told you that for only $50 you could buy the purple hydralisks and have an advantage over those other morons who weren't smart enough to also shell out $50 for the purple hydralisks?

And now Bungie... my beloved Bungie... is NERFING people's XP progress in Destiny 2 if they haven't payed their game dev overlords enough money. No longer is it just pay to win, it's pay to level up XP... :(

This is completely out of control. I REFUSE to buy any kind of expansion, DLC, or addon. I am of the Atari, intellivision, NES generation. I will buy your game, and I expect a FINISHED game with a level playing field, and no BS. If you s.o.b's hadn't gotten me addicted to videogames over the course of the past nearly 40 years I would boycott them... but I need my fix...
 
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I didn't mind the inevitable day 1 patch and so on when things actually got fixed, but now many little things just never get fixed unless there is massive public outcry usually driven by high profile streamers.

Increasingly find myself less and less inclined to spend money on the increasing pump and dump games where the developer obviously has no passion for what they are doing and little understanding of the game from the player's perspective.
 
Agreed!

I cherish current games like Overwatch because if you're inclined you can spend all the money you want, but the best you can do is buy a new costume or a golden gun for your character neither of which give you any gameplay advantages.
I still want the Grillmaster Soldier 76... Never got him.
 
That's what happens when money is the primary influence on how things evolve.

It's not just games, it's everything!

Is anything going to be done about it? Not if we keep on doing what we've been doing.
 
mistersprinkles said:
Join me in boycotting DLC and pay to win! Spread the word! :)
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I'm a fellow boycotter.
I will only purchase games in a complete state. That is GOTY Editions up to a year after release and only when known bugs have been squashed, these are at deep discounts too.

Since the pervasion of loot boxes in games I have started to boycott those games entirely. I have Overwatch, PUBG and Rocket League but was unaware of the loot box structure in games until recently. Now that more games have this function I have stopped buying them.

So that means Destiny 2, Cod WW2, Forza 7, Battlefront 2 and Shadow Of War are on the no go list.

I'm having a great time playing through my huge back catalogue of feature complete games and revisiting some games now that I have an Oculus Rift.

I've bought a new steering wheel and will be picking up Touch Controllers (my Rift is 2nd hand) as I think VR sim racing is where I want to be at the moment
 
Or only buy the game when it's old enough to have been all patched up already and have a GOTY version on sale for a fiver. Works for me.
There's so many unplayed games in my back catalogue that I still want to play through I just don't feel the urge to buy new games any where near launch until they've dropped to bargain basement price levels. Totally agree with the sentiment though, the corporations running the industry can stick it somewhere dark for all I care, they don't deserve more of my money.
 
mistersprinkles said:
Agreed!

I cherish current games like Overwatch because if you're inclined you can spend all the money you want, but the best you can do is buy a new costume or a golden gun for your character neither of which give you any gameplay advantages.
I still want the Grillmaster Soldier 76... Never got him.
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I mean, it's not terrible, but you have to admit that Overwatch has most of the hallmarks of a f2p game yet is full retail price and they may only be cosmetics which isn't a new thing, even my favourite 'honest' games like Resident Evil have costume DLC these days, but where do you really draw the line. Full priced games with microtransactions is iffy - not that I really hate on Blizzard anymore, I've grown to really like them but a lot of companies these days are blurring the lines. Overwatch wouldn't of been tolerated some years ago, even from golden boys Blizzard. I will admit though that it's most likely Activision nudging them in this direction, but sometimes I really do wonder where will it end... World of Warcraft has added so many different forms of paid content it isn't even funny, (£10)pets, (£20)skins, (£20)mounts, (£9.99)sub, (£35.99)expansions, (£20)transfers, (£10)boosts, (£8-20)character changes, (£16)in game gold (something any other MMO would get crucified for), you name it and it's probably in the works and more is being added every year. It may be awesome when you think about it that veteran players can purchase subscription time with in game gold, but for every person that does that, somebody has paid £16 to get a WoW token in order to buy in game gold, which on the actual surface nets them an extra £6 for every person who purchases sub time with gold. It's not like it's an NPC who just deletes your gold from the game in order to extend your sub, Blizzard straight up make more money! What will they think of next.

Not an attack on Blizzard but I think they've always been an industry standard on 'honest' greed, the landscape of gaming sort of tends to change or move with them and they're getting worse by the year in terms of angles to mine money from the consumer. That for me outlines the future we're headed into.
 
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Lets not even mention the hordes of idiots paying full-price to alpha/beta test games these days. The Devs must be laughing all the way to the bank.
 
The passion has been lost on a lot of devs, they move to the studios that will pay them the most money rather than sticking with a project they're passionate about but risk not being able to afford a mortgage, 401k, health insurance and whatever else there is in the US where many are located. There's a notable difference I think between US and EU based studios but even over this side of the world, we're heading the same way as we near enough always follow suit.
 
I am old enough to remember the Spectrum and C64 and what you got was what you got. I used to buy magazines that had demo's of the games and you could decide from those if it was worth a buy or not. Games have certainly got bigger (and dare I say better now?) and I understand the need for patches but my gripe is with the way loot boxes seem to be a thing. I don't even mind DLC that needs to be bought but any game that has a pay to win system will not got my money.
 
I agree with everything in this thread, things like the Paid "Get in first with the Alpha testers!" packs that many in dev games are doing (even my beloved Pantheon and CU) which i absolutely refuse to support, there was a time when you simply signed up for a beta and waited to see if you got in... now they have even monetized this...

Anything and i mean simply anything that they tack on to give an ingame advantage via a paid route should be scrapped, period, end of story.. Paid stuff should only be for cosmetics and those alone, nothing else, ever.

And you are right about the state of how games are delivered now, we can all understand day 1 patches, but shovelling stuff out the door broken or missing features that later get added as "DLC" is insulting. I pay for a game i expect to get the whole thing, not some skinny version that you have to buy the extras for to make the full game.

Fortunately there are some devs out there who still subscribe to the ethos of giving players what the originally paid for and not rinsing their wallets for every last penny, take Crate for instance who made Grim Dawn, yeah they sold it in early Beta on Steam, but they sold the entire game with all future content that was tagged to be content meant for the release, yeah they added Crucible DLC, something you can live without if its not your cup of tea. And they done all of this for an extremely cheap price, while still adding more and more and more to the game, tons of content was and is still being added for free. They just released an expansion, which is almost the size of the original game again, and also very cheap. People like these should get supported, not the faceless Activisions and EA's of the world who dont really give a monkeys about what they are actually selling, they just want your money, your kids money and your pets money if need be.

Something has to stop, unfortunately i cannot see it happening unless there was a massive shift towards people boycotting games, which wont ever happen.
 
I've pretty much stopped buying mainstream "AAA" games. They stopped being good years ago. EA, Ubisoft, Activision, etc only make crap now. The priority for them is profit above all else and now it's finally starting to backfire.

If I was Disney I'd be taking the licence to make starwars game away from EA and giving it to a smaller, skilled studio who actually cares about the brand and it's fans. Imagine with someone like CDPR (Witcher 3 devs) could do with it. They would give you what you paid for too.
 
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Why do you think I haven't upgraded my Nvidia 970 yet? It's certainly not for lack of funds to do so, but because the business model for gaming now sickens me and has destroyed my enthusiasm for it, and I'm no longer willing to take part in it.

No point spending £500+ on a GPU when I have no intention of buying any more Triple A games. My 970 is good enough to run everything I play now, occasionally dipping back in to my Steam library of games form the 2010-2015 era.

The only reason I'll replace my 970 is if/when it fails.
 
Same here. I'm only running an rx480 because it covers everything I want to play.

I'm not going to pay £40+ for half a game, with the other half behind a paywall. I don't care how good it is.
 
I don't have a problem with loot boxes and micro transactions as that's how free to play make money for the developers. However when implement that model that's pay to win on top of a full priced game it moves to point of ridiculousness.

I hope SWBF2 is a turning point for the public and they stop buying these titles like zombie's and there been some evidence on twitter with pictures of unsold copies of SWBF2 next to empty shelves, so maybe just maybe we are at that stage.
 
Fairly sure there's been a rise in the popularity of key selling sites to coincide in the last 5 years as well.
 
I have plenty of older games which offer excellent replay value, so long as I can keep my current hardware going.

As noted in the similar thread on this subject, I have no problem buying a quality DLC for a core game - e.g. an add on plane or train for a simulation or additional worlds for Fallout 4 etc. I point blank refuse to get suckered into pay to win or loot boxes, etc.

With regard to unfinished software being foisted on the public, probably not heard of by many here but the latest "Trainz" software (TANE) is one of the worst examples. Now on its sixth sequential patch and still not right, each patch or hotfix often breaking something new or reintroducing previously sorted faults. The dev now pretty much moving forward onto their next version of the game with the hope blind fanbois will simply stump up the £40 or whatever to buy that and start the cycle over again.

Another distasteful practice, again looking at Trainz and N3V Games, is the tiered release, where you have a standard version with the basic content, a deluxe version with somewhat more and a collectors' edition with more again. The problem being in a game which a key part of is the construction sandbox to build your own routes etc., the standard owners will not be able to play something created that uses assets from a higher version.

Of course it wasn't all roses in the past - who can forget Frontier First Encounters which was totally bugge(re)d out the box. A patch was offered via floppy disc on application to the publisher and might have eventually made it on a magazine cover disk. But it didn't fix the appalling issues and eventually the game sank into Oblivion. At least Steam now has the two hour refund option, which also kind of replaces the old magazine demo disks - which were sometimes essential for seeing how a game rocked before buying.
 
Agree completely. And I'm also from the original generation.

The thing is, you don't HAVE to buy into the ********. I mainly game on pc these days and I have never purchased a single expansion pack or piece of DLC. I've always seen it for what it is, never liked it and most importantly never felt the need to.

I take my time with games though. Never rush through them and hardly ever finish them to be honest. Maybe I'm odd that way, but at least I'm better off for it, and not feeding the cynical corporate greed monkey.
 
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