Would you tip game devs?

iron_monkey said:
No, most of them can get ******. They're lucky we dont demand refunds for some of the **** we get served these days.Denuvo, beta testing, unfinished buggy games, in game monetisation, ptw, live service and the latest fad alpha games.
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Pay2eins normalised now, I don't remember the last time I heard anyone mention it.
I remember when Bethseda first tried to sell micro dlc... the horse armor was basically a meme and look where we are now.
any crappy practice can be normalised because gamers hold no power
 
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tbh i think it depends on a number of factors not just one thing.
there are a number of games i spend a large amount of time in, and often i think i'd like to show my appreaciation for their efforts, by randomly tipping £5 or something
like the factorio dev team as example. or the dwarf fortress deve duo. FTL / Uplink

plenty of times i brought a game on discount and relised it was worth a lot more than i purhcsed it for. yes i know the flip side is a recomenedation may make some one buy full price.
everyones looking for a cheap deal, including the companies.

the vr game industry needs cash injection, for more and getter games. EchoVR anyone? one of the best favorite sports vr titles on quest. in fact i'd love to see th Echo series on quest 3.

i see it as a possible way to fund future development.
dlcs can be hit and miss, and still require a lot of time to create and balance.

everything costs money, and anyone who has done any hosting will undestand nothings free and its hard to actually generate extra cash. staffing/bandwidth/dev team updates/patchs/servers/support staff ect
OpenSource Projects are good examples, of not enough cash in some instance.
there isnt really the margins their used to be as best i can tell,

i do agree though that some companies would likey skim a good percentage if not all of the tips instead of going to devs.
you also get in to issues of which devs does it go to, the emplyed company dev team? and/or the additional outsourced dev team. it gets merky when you get to details.
and with out transparancy or knowing its an indie team i'd question what and were any tips were/would be going

Edit i read the article after writing so i wasnt biased by it. i feel the article also reflects most of my feelings on it..
but it deosnt point to the flip side. those games that are £10 or £20 but you get 100s of hours out of it.

i do think most people are hung up on the Blizzard angle though based on the comments
 
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rumple9 said:
Blizzard are taking the P now

Blizzard president suggests you should be able to leave a $10 or $20 tip for the devs
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Jesus :cry::cry:.
Blizzard is the one of the worst game companies out there, milking game addicts for years with subscriptions, reeally, they are a worse PoS than EA or Ubisoft imho. They have contributed very little to good games imho, yes they have contributed to games like DOTA2 or LoL via W3, and to many MMO's, but I feel their contribution has been negative overall...

Diablo 3 is a perfect example, how can the most perfect version of your game be on an inferior platform emulated on pc (Diablo 3 on switch emulator) ? They are taking the **** with their always online DRM ****.
They also keep prices of old games way too high.

Blizzard is single handedly responsible for ruining so many lives as well, without the players knowing it. Creating whole armies of regular people with the social skills of autistic people... I guess only Casino game makers are worse, but I personally boycotted Blizzard and have not spent a single penny on those ******** even though I own over 1000+ games legitimally. The MMO principle to have a monthly subcription to play your game simply did never click with me and I will keep opposing it.

I understand the attraction of an MMORPG's, I've faffed about with other MMO's around puberty, but I feel they actually contibuted more negatively to game addiction with pointless grind than any other publisher and general decrease of life quality of players rather than actually living your life IRL.
 
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As for tipping, yes, good games, that are an honest price.

From the last few years only Factorio comes to mind.

In the old days, Microprose games, I would gladly pay the devs now to make ST:BOTF 100% stable and modern pc capable. And others, but BOTF comes to mind initially for me :p. I would tip openTTD makers much money as well. Or game enthousiasts fixing bugs in old games or making them modern pc compatible for good classic games.

Otherwise, they have already cashed enough.
I do my best not to pay Ubisoft, EA (bar the <5€ deals for good games), and other greedy Devs. Capcom are also ******** with anti gamer polcies, I mistakenly bought Streeft fighter 5 recently, I think it is **** compared to 4, now I regret my buy.

Any dev or publisher going overboard with DRM (I can understand minimal DRM but they are taking the **** since the late 90's with DRM tbh, with cracked versions being superior to the malware ridden official crap) an anti modding policies can also go **** themselves, I hope they go bankrupt, *****...
 
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For free to play games (mainly indie, that aren't overwhelmingly P2W) then yeah, fair enough. Or games that were cheap on early access and continued to support the game and maybe add content for early adopters (i.e. Kerbal Space Program 1: Bought it very early on for around £11 and got all the expansions for free because of that - would happily have bought cosmetics/mission packs or whatever becuase they delivered a solid product).
I'd happily bung a mod developer £5-10 on PayPal/Patreon for a mod that gave me extended enjoyment of the game (i.e. Pugnacia or Primal Fear etc. for ARK:SE - ARK:SA has now gone down the 'premium mods' model, I haven't seen anything yet which has got my attention and a lot of the bigger mod devs have said they'd rather not paywall their stuff)

Am I gonna 'tip' a AAA dev/publisher after already paying a pretty large amount (via purchase or MTx/DLC)? - Not a chance!

Reeks of American mindset (as in - Tipping landlords, tipping for automated prcesses, or the general expectation in the service industry that servers work almost for free and survive off tips)
Pay your employees enough to live and charge enough to be profitable, don't expect the customer to meet your cost of business directly.
 
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So... looking in to some numbers (from what I can find with a quick search): GTA 5 had approximately 1000 devs and scored $1B in around 3 days, bare in mind this was 360/PS3 only, not including PC release, XB1/PS4 remasters, or GTA online (with all the associated shark cards!), apparently around $8.5B total revenue across it's lifespan to date... so average of $8.5M per developer who worked on it (obviously there's gonna be a large spread of income within that, but still).... they expect to make several million per person and are now telling us that GTA6 is likely to be $100+ for the base game?!
 
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A newly released game for £44.99 is about to get 5 years worth of updates, bug fixes, and new features. How can you leave a tip before it's finished? Then when the game is finished, it's price has dropped to about £5 or £10. So I can kind of understand leaving a tip if you bought the game for £5 and you really enjoyed it. However, a lot of the developers could have moved on to a different studio by then so the tip would go to the wrong people. So it's pointless.
 
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There is a mobile game called Shattered Pixel Dungeon on android.

It's completely free, no adverts or bs either, like literally free.

It's a bloody good game, spent a good couple hundred hours at least.

Anyway there is a bit there where you can donate, I think I donated about £10 and fair enough.
 
BUDFORCE said:
There is a mobile game called Shattered Pixel Dungeon on android.

It's completely free, no adverts or bs either, like literally free.

It's a bloody good game, spent a good couple hundred hours at least.

Anyway there is a bit there where you can donate, I think I donated about £10 and fair enough.
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That would be the exception to the rule for me.
 
professional game devs? hell no!

hobbiest devs who do stuff for free, sure!.

this whole tipping culture in an American thing and imo it needs to stop, instead it is worming its way over here.

instead people should get a fair days pay for a fair days work. if staff do really well then it is on the boss to promote them, if they are rubbish, either train them better or replace if they are just not putting in the effort.

tipping is just bad all round..... that said, i do tip my hair dresser a quid and taxi drivers / delivery drivers and even at restaurants.... does that make me a hypocrite? perhaps. i dont do it because i want to tho, but because society seems to expect it.

but ball socks to expanding to anything else. like i said we should be dialing back and not encouraging paying staff crap wages and using a tip as a carrot on a stick to dangle so staff are forced to put up with crap from customers.... just pay them an honest salary to begin with

The thing which gets me tho is games companies crow that games cost so much to develop now so they have to have things like loot boxes and half a game with the rest paid for etc etc etc.

but (much like the BBC paying the likes of Gary lineker millions) i dont care if it is some big shot hollywood actor like kiefer Sutherland (and bear in mind he was top of his game when in call of duty) voicing a character in a game. I am 100% certain there will be 1000s of voice actors who are competent enough to read from a script but who would demand a far FAR lower salary (but still a fair one based on the average salary of the country they are working in.... Christ i didnt even know Gary Oldman was in COD as well, because he was "playing" a Russian so despite completing the whole game front to back, that was totally wasted on me).

And I dont need to see a mocapped Gillian Anderson, or Mark Hamill or Gary Oldman in my games, i am fine with seeing them on telly. (note i am not picking on star citizen really.... indeed hell, i could have gotten the base game of that for $40 (I paid $70 i think) which so long as the game actually comes out I am fine with that cost)

but the principle stands, give unheard of people a chance, they are surely more indeed of the money and will cost a lot less and will do just as good a job
 
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