Here's another example where trying to chase the live-service money train has just ended up with a subpar product that people abandon or avoid almost instantly.
Unfortunately I suspect the wrong lessons will be taken away from this as well - e.g. the console/PC gaming market is too fickle, etc.
There's been more than enough examples of great IPs being ruined by overly aggressive monetization.
The reason why it still happens, and will continue to happen, is because the games that generate the highest return on investment are the ones with aggressive monetization. Clash of Clans made way more money than Baldur’s Gate 3. Investors and shareholders don't care about rave reviews and game of the year awards. They want money. I just wish they'd keep it to new IPs instead of ruining a great series.
It's frustrating because like ... people could just not spend money on garbage. Like there are exploitive games that make a ton of money, right? How do we get people to stop spending money on them?
We probably can't because many people are morons who can't pass the marshmallow test.
I don't like the blaming the victim mentality here. Sure, the games aren't super great, but they use skinner box mechanics to get players to feel like they have to pay. Skinner Boxes are literally dopamine machines, meant to program behaviors. To fully lay the blame on the players instead of acknowledging that the games themselves are mostly to blame feels pretty gross.
My post came out more victim blaming than I meant. "how to get people to stop paying for exploitive games" might be regulation or education. I don't have an answer.
On the other hand, casinos have been around forever so maybe we're stuck as long as we're human.
Needs some form of regulation. The new generations are so indoctrinated into skins and battle passes that they talk about how much they should cost instead of if they should even exist in the first place.
No education will change things, they have grown up with these cancerous monetisation methods, countries just need to ban it, like they were starting to do with lootboxes.
I did read somewhere that "default [skin]" has shown up as a playground insult.
People who buy shitty games which then encourages more shitty games are villains, not victims.
If we could figure out how to get people to stop spending money on things that are awful, the world would look a lot different.
So what you are saying is maybe the free market is not that efficient.
What would be a more efficient economic model (with objective of getting quality goods in people's hands)? A cooperative?
Makes me wonder if other economic models collapse under their own weight too.
Let then take all the wrong lessons and drown in incompetence. There's no lack of indie companies these days ready to replace big game companies.
It's one of those games where you gotta ask, who asked for this? It seemed like the second game was doing very well. They should have gone the route of Counterstrike and just done and in place upgrade with the same content, but better.
Payday 2 was good for a while, but then it got buried under a mountain of DLC and people slowly stopped playing because of the aggressive monetization. They came out swinging with the same tactics in Payday 3 with only minor content improvements, so people weren't as motivated to buy the same game again.
Cities: Skylines 2 appears to be going the same route.
To me, this is actually why I’d want a Team Fortress 3 rather than more updates. The wave of cosmetics in some way turned the previous game a bit unplayable.
There was a Payday 3?
Booted it up for the first time today to play local co-op with my husband. Or so I thought. After fighting for 15 minutes to make an account, which already pissed me off, it turned out they removed the local co-op option. Not interested anymore.
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