Re:The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction
by TeMPOraL on Thursday July 18, 2019 @06:10AM
(#20468339)
> The difference from now to then is, that games offer endless online service and these also needs neverending development, bug fixing and people even demand new content. These costs are not simply covered by retail price.
It's a problem they created on purpose, so they shouldn't get to use it as a justification for their practices. It's not that players need "endless online service"[0] that needs "neverending development, bug fixing"[1]. It's that the companies figured out doing it this way gives them access to much more money, so they created the problem and used their marketing budgets to make it a new normal.
> but some payment models are justified and comprehensible
Yeah, but some feel like they're justified by self-serving arguments, in a case of creating a problem to justify getting paid for solving it.
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[0] - Which actually isn't endless, but works just for couple years until the next game in the franchise is made, or the studio gets bored, or bought out, or...
[1] - Tangential, but I still don't buy the whole "bit rot" thing as a natural phenomenon. I'm starting to believe that our industry has accidentally become good at making everything so fragile that it justifies endless work just to keep things running.
It's a problem they created on purpose, so they shouldn't get to use it as a justification for their practices. It's not that players need "endless online service"[0] that needs "neverending development, bug fixing"[1]. It's that the companies figured out doing it this way gives them access to much more money, so they created the problem and used their marketing budgets to make it a new normal.
> but some payment models are justified and comprehensible
Yeah, but some feel like they're justified by self-serving arguments, in a case of creating a problem to justify getting paid for solving it.
--
[0] - Which actually isn't endless, but works just for couple years until the next game in the franchise is made, or the studio gets bored, or bought out, or...
[1] - Tangential, but I still don't buy the whole "bit rot" thing as a natural phenomenon. I'm starting to believe that our industry has accidentally become good at making everything so fragile that it justifies endless work just to keep things running.