What Went Wrong with Gaming?

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
21

Yes, but even worse, you get this piece, but cannot USE it without a subscription. Just google around if you are interested: this or this etc.
Now, that would sound insane, right? You pay for the car that has feature X, powered by electricity you provide, but then, you have to pay a subscription to simply use that feature X.

Well, this doesn’t sound so insane if you are a gamer because in gaming it is normal that you have to pay for content whose development you already payed for by buying the game (skins etc.).
It is just developing slower in the non-virtual space.

So, it’s not just a gaming industry problem, so, you cannot solve it just in “gaming”. It’s a systemic issue.

22

“Vote with your wallet” is such a BS argument when regarded either as the only solution or as a solution to any problem.

23

This is not exactly true. First of all, there are quite a few cartels in the industry, it’s just that they are not that obvious beyond the several big names. How many really big publishers are there today and how many were there 20 years ago? As with most sectors, there is direct and indirect consolidation.

Secondly, whenever there is an IP involved, the consumers have no real choice (and they are manipulated into this position). Whoever owns the IP, gets to dictate the terms. And they - the company owning it - is in position of power in the relationship with each individual customer. It is easy to say “but the customers hold the ultimate power” - but that’s only in theory. For each and everyone who tries to wield that power, there is someone who will comply, someone who will not even understand the issue and the vast majority who will simply not react.

24

Basically, very specific and clear terms what you are getting. In case of DT, for instance, the list of the cosmetics that are included in the game and the list of cosmetics that are separate purchases.

25

100%

Normies are the prime focus of mass produced mediocre bullsht. They can and will be trained to accept lower and lower levels of quality whilst paying more over time.

That and effin horse armor in Oblivion. Todd Howard and Bethesda are the original cnts that kicked this sht off. Never bought a Bethesda game ever since.

1 Like
26

You may not like what people spend their money on, but at the end of the day what people spend their money on is the ultimate determining factor of how the industry operates.

That’s honestly a ridiculous take. You’re sitting in the forum of a heavily monetized game that sells $20 cosmetics saying you’re boycotting Bethesda because they sold a $2.50 horse armor 17 years ago? They haven’t even included a single cosmetic DLC in their single player RPGs since.

27

I know. What I am saying is that “do not spend money” and “do not fall into the trap” are reasonable responses that simply don’t work because how humans behave.

28

I guess I just see “People spend their money on dumb things” as an annoyance and “People need to be controlled for their own good” as a serious threat to human rights, because I don’t trust anyone with the power to determine what is best for all people.

29

And that right there is why I don’t buy into the Republican narrative of letting companies regulate themselves while minimizing government regulation. It just doesn’t work. You need a third party regulatory body that is willing to step in and do its job of keeping these companies in check. These companies are not going to do what’s ‘right’, they’re only focused on maximizing profits while doing so, usually, at the detriment of consumers. In practice, competition is supposed to motivate financial institutions to continuously focus on improving their product in order to provide the customer with the best experience out on the market. Yet, this isn’t what happens. We keep seeing time and time again that corporations are perfectly happy with releasing sub-par products, and a majority is perfectly fine with purchasing these crapastic products irregardless of quality while even rewarding them for releasing in such a state.

It’s a one sided relationship. Since my fellow men is inable to do their part of being a responsible consumer then a third party that can be hold accountable and is transparent needs to step up.

3 Likes
30

You also have to remember that a very small amount of “gamers” actually finish a game. Most buy and only play for an hour or two, than buy another game. So what is the point in making huge and elaborate and functioning games when only 10% will see it and experience it?

I think halo franchise has the biggest procentage of people actually finishing the campaign, and it’s only like 45%?
With achievements showing how many actually finish stuff you can go back and check you favorite games, I promise they will have somewhere around 20-30% have unlocked the final boss achievement on normal.
Looking at games like dark souls, then it is usually just 5-10% that finish the last boss achievements.

So from a pure business standpoint, why should you care about the game as a whole when so few of your actual customers even experience it?
Your core consumer isn’t You, but Bob who pays and plays for 5 hours and never picks it up again. He is the focus of game companies now, not you.

This is pretty much what you are seeing as the problem and what went wrong. Game companies became run by finance and finance cares about money first.
It is the same in everything. In the 70s manufacturing companies went through the same thing and it changed our world forever since before 70s it was engineers who ran companies that knew and understood their products and made them with pride.
That went away when CEOs became banks and stockbrokers who simply saw profit and growth as the point.

This is also why bioware went to sh… , it had nothing to do with EA. It was the founding doctors who left, they were the fundamental engineers who worked with, saw and rewarded passion. When they were chased out, by the consumers mind you, the company went to sh… and haven’t recovered. And we can see similar trends in all large AAA companies, look at Dice, take two etc

So… Who is to blame?
CEOs go for profit, consumers want quick, easy and free while a vocal mob of gamers always want more for less.

How do you monetize that in a fare way? Should games be an, insert coin to play for one hour?
You died, try again for 1buck?
Play free, but buy cosmetics!
Play free, but buy this super nuke to troll all players on the map!

Should we go back to old, build in the dark for 5years and make it completely functioning and perfect, never needing a patch… Yet only have meager sales and 10% finish the game and go bankrupt?

In order to grow the entirety of gaming they have had to lower risk, and lowering risk means releasing broken games, increasing marketing and catering to those who actually give you money.
So yes, vote with your wallet isn’t bad, but not buying something doesn’t help, only buying things does.

That small indie studio making an amazing but obscure game? Give money or they will disappear. Crowdsourcing isn’t just Kickstarter, it is also throwing money at a studio you want to survive, in spite of horrible capitalistic tendencies.

Personally I think influencers, youtube etc is more to blame, since the perceived image of a game can harm something far more than anything else, and the fear of that backlash is keeping game companies from releasing and lowering risk. Since a small amount of negative can grow into a huge beast that never settles down and than you are bankrupt again.
So, give those you enjoy money, cut them some slack and understand things arent perfect and they are working and trying their best.
Failure has to be acceptable and encouraged otherwise nothing gets made or better.
Imagine if a child were berated for not learning to walk in a day, rather than encouraged to try over and over for months.

2 Likes
31

Ideally people just decide what is best for themselves. Yea, the result isn’t perfect, but you can’t regulate every consumer choice that makes a certain hobby or industry worse.

Take Warhammer 40k itself as an example: Every complaint about miniatures being too expensive, and power creep being the main feature of every new codex and edition stands in stark contrast to the fact there are literally hundreds of other miniature wargames out there that nobody is willing to give a fair shake. Like 90% of the miniature wargamers in the world have simply decided that 40k is the one, screw everything else. They will moan about GW treating them badly all day, but they will never just pick up another system.

The fact that there is no serious competition to 40k is objectively bad for the hobby. It’s so bad for the hobby that 40k is literally killing other GW games. But there is no way to fix it, because it’s the players that have created this situation entirely voluntarily. Even the government wouldn’t be able to fix this, because what are they supposed to do? “Woah woah, put those Space Marines down, you don’t get to play with those until you finish a mandatory game of Dropzone Commander followed by a round each of Battletech and Kings of War.”

The same thing is true of the TTRPG market where people simply insist that D&D is the only game they will ever play, even though the vast majority of players would have way more fun if they picked a system that suits their actual play preferences.

3 Likes
32

What you are describing here is a very black and white perspective. People are making illogical and/or poor choices all the time, just like they are all the time prevented from making a lot of them for their own good and/or for the good of society.

My point here is that, while we are unlikely to get what some of us would like, certain predatory practices should be regulated. I.e. that it is not enough to reimbourse the individual complaining about misleading advertisements or announcements. After all, a lot of addiction inducing practices are scrutinized by the regulators. Another point is, let me be explicit, that the relationship between an average individual customer who is a natural person and a company is almost always unbalanced in favour of the company.

One of the videos reviewing the DT made a good point that the WH fans were sold on the 40k imagery and they are getting such basic stuff for the characters that it is very disappointing. I would agree with that, which is not saying that I am against paying for cosmetics as a rule.

4 Likes
33

Don’t get me wrong, if something is deliberately deceptive and straight up designed to trick people, or something is deliberately designed to exploit people who have gambling addictions and stuff like that I’m not against regulation.

But the notion that because secondary monetization makes for objectively worse games it shouldn’t be allowed is silly because we see again and again that when a company doesn’t use those monetization strategies the players themselves don’t reward them. Also yes, any given game that is heavily monetized would be better without the monetization, but would it even have been made without all the extra budget?

34

This would be a fair point if Darktide was actually finished, but it’s pretty much a counterpoint at the moment.

1 Like
35

Could you elaborate please

36

How so? The aquila store is not the reason the game didn’t get finished. Pretty much all of the significant issues with the game are design or technical. There is nothing that indicates to me that we’d have a much better game if their artists had worked on something other than cosmetics, and the UI doesn’t really eat a lot of development resources either.

37

I would say if the base idea is to have a MTX shop, and build the whole game around this system (looking at all the RNG systems) then this have a great impact on the dev time to develop the game.

2 Likes
38

The RNG systems have absolutely nothing to do with the cash shop though. Equipment and Cosmetics are completely siloed off from each other in Darktide. The fact that the equipment system is so garbage actually probably hurts their ability to sell cosmetics significantly, because people buy more cosmetics when they are invested in their character.

1 Like
39

I guess your opinion is all the RNG is a.) in place to make the game better?? b.) just looks bad but it isn´t??.

I just want to point out that if you have read documents on how to use such systems you will mostly end up with crazy RNG systems.
More in game time = more likely you will spend money. It is a very simple rule but it is in use for over 10 years now.

My meaningless opinion is as follow:
I still say develop a game around a MTX shop will always have an great impact on the time you need. And if it is only because you need to think about how you need to use RNG systems and calculate the numbers, or how to show buyed skins to other players.
But who am i and what do i know …

1 Like
40

Not true, it all harkens back to phone game mechanics, there’s been several threads about this already, but I’ll summarize it for you.
In Vermintide, you can open a UI tab for pretty much everything where you stand (start a mission right where you load in, access crafting), but in Darktide, you have to walk all the way to the store, the crafting, then the mission select. To do all of these in this order, which is very common, and most certainly known by the devs, you have to walk by the "micro"transaction shop 2 or 3 times. The only reason the hub exists in the first place is to advertise microtransactions, there is no other reason for other players to appear in your hub. It’s also why third person view is forced, which seems painfully out of place in the first place.
I remember at some point Fatshark released an official letter to players talking about how they planned Vermintide to be something around 100 hours of gameplay, and did not expect players to stick around for a thousand - implying that Darktide is planned for those players. This is why you have a timed shop to pad out your playtime. It also keeps you logging into the game periodically through the way, coincidentally also making you walk by the cash shop regularly. Having a weekly rotating cash shop requires them to keep you around for a long time to expose you to more rotations.
The very hard Penances to earn you skins tell you about the target audience. Other phone games with similar mechanics to Darktide have dynamic difficulty depending on how well you play, which wasn’t an option for Darktide penances due to it being too transparent. In phone games, the obfuscated dynamic difficulty is intended to keep you in the frustration zone, to always tempt you to buy their cash shop tools to help you advance, but not hard enough to make you quit. In Darktide, the frustration zone is dictated by the penances - very frustrating but kind of possible if you play hundreds of hours. Midway through it’s easier to just pony up the cash for a skin, because you don’t want to fail even more runs due to the conditions.
Also there are weapons in the game with the same model with different movesets that have the same name with just a “MK” slapped on them, it would be very convenient to be able to tell them apart at a glance, but they needed to take the modelling team off of the free content to produce more paid skins, so it’s also to the detriment of the core game.

In summary, the game is built around the cash shop, and it’s specifically a whaling operation.

9 Likes