Good to see them calling these shitty AAA publishers and their terrible, anti-consumer ideas out.
To be honest, I mainly bought the game to make a statement & show my support for what type of treatment & product I want as a customer. Nowadays everything just seems to want to milk me, games are quite often literally designed around it so that it becomes a core part of the games themselves. And I'm so damn over all of this bullshit.
A lot of us just want to have some fun after work and it is not fun when you feel served up like a buttered hot meal. I don't want to feel like my games are consuming me.
Between my partner and I we've spent 850 hours playing BG3 since October.
That's more than basically any other "live service" or subscription based game I've ever played, especially for the time period.
Phenomenal game that made the team fabulous amounts of money and won awards while all the consumers left happy.
Definitely raises the bar for AAA
I can see how Game Pass popularity could be bad for a number of studios, as he says in the article. But, I’ve never understood how Game Pass’s existence was anti-consumer.
We always get these baffling quotes like “Microsoft insists on renting you your games, and you will like it.” or “I’m not going to be forced to pay $17 a month just to play my games”. GP never gained popularity off Microsoft forcing people into it, people voluntarily signed up, even when MS continues to make their games available for direct purchase.
The previous quote from Ubisoft even seemed more like an investor excuse than a threat to gamers.
The thing is that this guy is not the head of a public company where shareholders demand massive and continually growing profits. So he acts in the interests of the consumer, the customer, the gamer. But if this was a public company, shareholders would buy shares and then demand he do something to grow that share price, so they can sell the shares later for profit.
When that happens we see that CEOs do everything they can to maximize profits, like promising release dates in earnings calls.
The difference between private and public companies is the single biggest threat to us all because as soon as the company acts in the exclusive interest of profit, everything else gets fucked. And most do.
That means employees, customers, everyone. Only the 1% benefit from the gutting of everyone else.
I mean yes, but also no. I work at a private company and profits seem to be the only thing to get anyone with a title to move their ass.
Most Directors or below have their teams, or customers, or the product front of mind. But once you get to VP seats they just.. don’t, it seems.
And this is super anecdotal, I know, but.. basically my point is private vs public doesn’t necessarily mean anything.
This guy is just a good guy. He knows what matters to people and speaks from his heart, not his wallet.
Thats either because your boss privately wants to hoard wealth, or is trying to set the books up for a clean sell.
Public means you sacrifice everything in the name of profit.
Private means you operate on the ideals of the private owners.
A private owner can have ideals of profit. A public company cannot have idealistic shareholders.
Technically public still means you act in the interests of the owners, aka shareholders (at least in germany anything else is illegal), it's just that naturally that will always be profit for the majority.
Those top level folks are sometimes "incentived" by bottom line targets and other end targets. So sure, you do get greedy people inside private companies.
I don't think shareholders driving for infinite profit is easily disregarded.
I mean, now that the video streaming industry has shown us how the endgame looks like for subscription models, you'd have to be crazy to want that for the videogame industry.
Whatever short-term gains you can get in convenience or price by buying into their penetration stage are not worth contributing to leading the hobby down that road even an iota.
It's not even about what we want, but what the stakeholders and decision-makers push for in order to rack in more profits.
The gaming industry was at its highest in terms of fun and variability and innovation when the industry was still figuring out best ways to make mad money, no matter how ethical or morally bankrupt - now they know they can use fear of missing out and predatory tactics to lure people into essentially gambling in a free-to-play online game, or pad out a singleplayer one with mechanics that contribute nothing to the gameplay, but manage to fool game journalists (the ones that weren't already paid) into praising the game for its deep and branching loops, attracting more investor money or something.
A lot of people accuse us gamers of being a whiny crowd that cares too much and doesn't like to have fun, but I guess yeah, we do care a little too much and that's why so many of us try to actively influence the industry to go into a better direction when we vote with our wallets or write reviews or discuss games and practices in ways that can be hopefully seen by the industry's decision-makers.
Not to say there isn't just as many (if not more) gamers that don't care enough and still pour money into games and practices that are ultimately making the industry worse, only to make the stakeholders and CEOs wealthier.
Only reason I never got into World of Warcraft
Honestly I don't regret paying a subscription for WoW. Maybe it's different now, but when I played it felt fair. You got reliable servers, frequent updates,somewhat reasonable balance changes, and seasonal events. You didn't get any loot box bullshit, just playing the game regularly generally got you the rewards with minimal effort.
Sure expansions also cost extra, but that was $30 and about 1 every 2 years.
For a game that ate all your free time, it didn't hit your wallet that hard.
Yeah, it kind of just keeps the agreement honest.
“We need ideas to find a way to monetize our active playerbase!”
“We already are. They pay us money each month. In turn, we continue to make sure the game is fun and has stuff that keeps them interested.”
“Aha! Carry on.”
The subscription also helped with spamming. There was plenty in wow, but it was nothing compared to f2p ganes that I've tried.
I used to hate subscription games with a passion, but seeing what followed, in-app purchases, lootboxes and FOMO-driven battlepasses, turns out subscriptions were the lesser evil.
Unfortunately it works the same way as with StarCitizen, you're aware it's a ripoff, but if you want to play this particular type of a game, pay up or leave.
With MMORPGs specifically, here are the options:
This creates effectively a pick-your-Devil situation with these games. No good monetization, pick whatever feels least predatory for you
Here's an idea, I give you money for a game, I download it off the store front, I keep it forever.
"You only have a licen..."
Shut the fuck up, if buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing.
Fucking BASED.
I mean, no shit.
These days we are expected to be subscribed to tons of shit, including stuff that simply doesn't justify subscriptions. We know it's not a benefit to us, but to the companies that dish them out.
Not to mention the sheer amount of amazing indie games coming out lately. Why even check out this gacha and subscription games?
This too! So many genuinely good games at genuinely good prices. This is true even on Switch, where Nintendo is known to put AAA efforts into genres otherwise filled entirely with indie games (not to mention the Nintendo tax)
Baldur's Gate 3 boss
Wow, Larian really breaking the 4th wall in this game.
One of those boss fights where you really regret having to fight him because he actually has a good point.
Probably still evil though.
He’s right
God damn I love Larian studios.
That's a big part of it. Right now, Microsoft tries to put a number of big titles in their subscription service, a bunch of filler titles they can buy from publishers for cheap, and maybe a few that sold more popularly than they expected.
If subscription gaming becomes the majority, Microsoft and other streaming providers get to pick the contenders and not much else gets seen. Games like Lethal Company won't have a sudden boom in popularity because it wasn't on Microsoft's radar.
As much as I agree with his sentiment, this title is bullshit - he never wrote "gamers don't want subscriptions" but that they shouldn't want that due to where it might lead.
"Gamers" aren't some hivemind entity that wants a specific thing. Many people don't worry whether an idea pushed by the publishers will have a long term negative effect on the industry, they just want to have fun with their hobby.
Look at microtransactions - there's a lot of negative discussion about them and yet they bring huge amounts of money, who's to say if the same won't happen with subscription services? We might not like it but majority doesn't necessarily care.
Sorry for being pedantic about a title but third-parties changing someone's words is a bit of a pet peeve of mine.
Micros rake in the cash because they exploit the stupidity of "whales" (people with more money than sense).
My point is that however you feel about microtransactions they are successful and that's why they're so common.
With subscription services you and me can think "I want to own it and play whenever" but a lot (not only casual) players see it as "I pay a few $ and get access to a huge library of games I can try out for the next month".
As I wrote initially, just because more dedicated audience doesn't like the direction industry is moving in doesn't mean majority will care enough to stop it.
Wait, a CEO said that? What's the catch?
Larian is privately owned. They don't have stockholders to appease with short term gains.
Which is weird because they remain shareholders for years, so you'd have thought they want long-term gains.
I think I've come to the conclusion that "businessmen" are just idiots.
They're gambling addicts
He's a CEO of a relatively small company that is product focused. He has yet to grow and focus margins in any serious way.
Corporations want gamers to want mass subscriptions because they want to rent out their games forever instead of getting only a single payment for their product. And then they find flimsy excuses to push subscriptions for products that do not warrant subscriptions but are mutilated to squeeze some way of adding subscriptions into them. And then the corporations let games without subscriptions fail while pretending that subscription-based services are delivered because there's demand and not because they don't want to deliver finished products that don't generate easy endless trickling revenue streams.
Tell Sony, they got so fucking greedy with their PS Plus.
No one wants mass subscriptions. "Gamers" is a red herring.
I mean, this is a very Captain Obvious take. The problem is; it won't change and it'll only get worse.
Good. This guy is not a piece of shit then, unlike that other guy who runs Ubishit.
Oh dear he's not been a good CEO is he, he isn't talking out his arse at all.
Ubisoft: Whatever, hold my subscription.
I hope they don't say gamers need to pay a subscription fee to keep their purchased games.
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