Regardless, when a great piece of software that happens to have a price tag fails to sell, whose fault is that?
Don't blame developers/publishers for going instead to the only model that pays the bills these days.
The market has pretty clearly spoken and decided that people prefer cosmetic micro transactions with free to play games. Just because it doesn’t match the Hacker News gaming utopia template doesn’t mean anyone is doing anything wrong.
This is especially true for multiplayer games where a lot of children don’t have money to buy the game but their presence on the platform adds value to the people who do have money to spend on it.
Markets are powered by billions of instances of “what someone wants” but that doesn’t mean the resulting market movements are always a good indicator of what everyone wants as an environment. Sometimes aggregate human activity results in a crappy experience for most participants. “The market has spoken” is a glib, ideological phrase that can be used to dismiss any discussion about ways we could steer and improve markets to make them do a better job at facilitating human happiness and flourishing.
All that the market discovered is that there is a huge number of "whales" that can be exploited. The "fun" will begin once the whales have squandered their money and will either leave entirely or, and that's the scenario I fear, some (or someone's relatives) will raise a sob story in front of their local newspaper or politician... ending in a repeat of the early 2000s with videogames being blamed as a whole for the excesses of a few, and religious and other moral fundamentalists getting ahead.
Playing a competitive FPS game casually with all age groups is lot of more fun and attractive to most gamers a la Apex/Warzone/Fortnite/Valorant/CSGO.
By charging up front you remove an enormous player base and create a worse matchmaking experience for all players. Long gone are the days of buy a Call of Duty game for Christmas.
You could be right though, and it is addiction. That would in fact be uncool.
My only data-point though is a friend of mine who has spent hundreds of dollars (or more?) on Star Citizen ships and he is the disposable-income kind of gamer.
I wonder how many people on HN complaining about this model actually even consider themselves gamers.
I'm a gamer. I spend 30-40 hours/week on PC games. I think the "Free-to-play with paid cosmetics" (Apex Legends, Rocket League, Splitgate, tons of other games that follow this model) is perfectly fine.
I think part of the problem is that it's hard to have a conversation about this model because someone will always make references to games that are pay-to-win (Most mobile games) or gate content behind a paywall (Not sure which games do this today), which are an entirely different beast and not a part of the conversation.
EDIT: Just remembered League of Legends. It gates content (characters to play) behind progression, or you can pay money to unlock them immediately. But paid characters aren't necessarily more powerful, and they're constantly making adjustments to characters to try to keep them balanced. Any experienced player will tell you that paying money for a character perceived as being overpowered is foolish as it's guaranteed they'll eventually get nerfed.
My critique, pushing as much of the blame onto the gamers, was meant to point out that everyone/no one is to blame.
Sure, personal responsibility is important. In the end the only person who can free an addict from the quagmire of addiction is them. But that doesn't stop us from regulating the fuck out of tobacco companies, heroin dealers or casinos to reduce the harm they do to their victims.
The elephant in the room is that we as an industry hold the power to alter people's psychology on a greater scale than any drug. But people stay silent because it delivers the paychecks and the shareholder returns...
There are also plenty of games that implement a cometic lootboxes that don't impact gameplay model that are totally fine.
The patronage "platform" would be the new Apple/Google and would likely be riddled with corruption
That being said I'll stand by artificial scarcity being bad thing and clarify that while I don't have some master plan on how to create a functioning society where we don't have to impose artificial scarcity on the digital world; I absolutely think that is something we should be dedicating a lot of effort to. I reject the premise that we need to deny some people things that can be copied essentially for free.
Again this just sounds like an emotional argument -- you seem convinced on a purely intuitive level that artificial scarcity is bad without actually explaining rationally how the harm it does outweighs the benefits.
There is a _very simple_ argument (which I'm not claiming is _true_ in all cases, but it is at least compelling, so anyone claiming the contrary needs to address it) in favor of artificial scarcity: taking away a major monetization strategy (often the only viable one) massively reduces the incentive to create high-quality products and we all end up poorer for those cultural outputs not existing.
Ahahaha, to be quite honest I don't find that argument compelling at all. Profit motives seem to be making software much much worse, not better, compared to what I know is possible. I'm often finding myself reverse engineering/hacking things just to make them usable. From where I'm standing the current system is not doing a very good job. I can often make notable usability improvements in the systems I interact with and IP laws, the main driver of digital artificial scarcity generally prevent me from sharing them. I feel like I'm constantly fighting hostile software that's just trying to extract value from me in some way rather than actually solving my problems.
Most of the decent games have migrated there. I barely use it, but I think it works out to two bucks with the other iStuff I'm happy to pay for, and having a few games on my tablet or phone can be nice when I'm traveling.
Your right about a good concept winning a lot of good will and making success possible with less polish, but these days it doesn’t subtract the “risk of never being discovered” if you make an iOS app your just one of millions in the App Store if it’s on steam the shovelware isn’t as bad and discovery is better but it still requires market understanding in order to stand out.
Discovering a game concept like that is hard, but it does happen.
AFAIK it costs $100 +30% to publish on Steam. It only takes 260 people to buy your game at 50 cents to break even. If your game can't sell 260 copies at 50 cents then it's just that, worthless.
Why not just release your game for free, for free? Does it have to be on Steam? Does it have to make money?
It doesn't take zero time to ship a bespoke finished game, your calculus is asinine.
Do you have to have a place to sleep?
Seems to me like making a reasonable amount of money to help towards these goals is not an unreasonable thing to hope for. But maybe you can prove me wrong?
Thanks for the clarification!
Also free health care, electricity, water, and Internet.
Then I go back to writing system software.