The business of gaming: nickels, dimes, and quarters

Perhaps this is going beyond the focus of this topic blog, but why is it becoming increasingly acceptable for developers to sell games "open beta" style and then jump to the next incarnation, without fixing significant bugs (as opposed to adding new features that forum members beg for)?

Why are "free to play" microtransactions games using ficticious currency units to sell add-on products?

Don't you also love how you also get more of these fictious currency units per real currency unit by spending more cash on your credit card or Paypal, encouraging users to spend more?

And who is to say how the ficticious currency unit price for an add-on product will not bounce up and down, like you will see for instance with the price of bicycles at Halfords? So you perhaps buy lots of "supersmashinggreat" units on bulk thinking you get more value for money, but then your "kill everything on the screen gun" suddenly costs more "supersmashinggreat" units!

The voting analogy is faulty.

If you choose not to spend your dollars, it will hardly be noticed unless there are many like you, but even then, a Corporation will take a long time to realize this and react. EA, Ubisoft, Sony, HP et al are only now feeling the effects of their customer be damned policies.

OTH--voting gives immediate results, feedback and pinpoints your location.

I. e. I voted for third party candidates in the last three elections because there was not even one qualified candidate, nominated by a major party, running for office. Quite a few people I know did not vote because they believed their candidate would not win and became part of the silent voter pool that will never be noticed. If they would have voted, who knows what would have happened, but certainly the message to our ruling elite would have been much clearer.

@ The author of this article.
Where in general I agree with the body of your article, I must point out to you that EA earned its bad guy rep not because of micro transactions, but for the purchasing and gutting of some of the top named dev studios at that time. EA has used every tactic in the book to make itself successful. That includes the rape and pillage of the video game world.

R U a gamer, but hate choosing a digital platform? THEN GO OLD SCHOOL! Nothing beats a good bout of Punch-Out!! on an original NES...

Well it true EA gets a lot of bad rep but for me the worst is activision with what they did to the COD team after they bouth them out.

Another thin I bash about these online games client (origin/steam) is that I find they think ppl are fools. Example BF3 in store cost 60$ in origin Strore 60$
Please explain to me how a virtual copy cost as much has a hard copy ?! you have no printing,writing,translating(the cover for french or other lang),no distribution,no sharing profit with reseller ect.... PLUS I have to use MY bandwith(witch is capped at x gb per month) to get it (and im not counting that you have to do this again if you format your pc) .... no im not a ***** please dont make me feel like one. Digital copy have some advantages but the #1 should be price. Steam does the price thing better offering lots of deals BUT on a new game release your gona pay full retail even if your only getting virtual copies.

Just my 2cent

Cheers

I was expecting to read a rant by CliffyB on the evils of making money. Turns out instead he gave a full-throated defense of capitalism, free markets and EA. CliffyB is officially my friend.

We need more of him and less of David Jaffe.

Tomato, tomahto. I remember spending $15 on Strider and well over $100 on PvP in Street Fighter II. I believe Capcom was the master of arcade and money parting of teenage boys.

When I go to a movie I expect there is a ending and not have to pay extra to see it.

If I read a book, I not expecting to paid extra to read all the chapters.

If I am listening to a song, I not expecting to pay extra to listen to the entire song.

If the movies, books, songs did, make you pay extra then I would expect to be told that before I spend any money. I want to be informed they are 'limiting'!

When you buy a game, I should be told upfront some of the content is not in the price and I will be paying extra.

"And that brings me full circle to my main point. If you don?t like the games, or the sales techniques, don?t spend your money on them."

Agreed!

That's why it's an analogy. It's not perfect, but it gives an association for people to reference. Just because the results aren't immediate doesn't mean that it's not counted in the end. When the next Call of Duty comes out (which it inevitably will.....), Activision may begin to rethink things if the sales for it are half of what Black Ops 2 was. The initial sales are actually immediate because you always read about the opening week/weekend for games and movies. The sales figures are usually referenced for the first week of availability as well as how the game did over its lifetime. I hope to God that the next CoD flops the first week.

I think the perception that EA is evil comes from a decade and a half of putting out middling or down right unfinished/crappy games. At a premium. I purchased Nascar Sim racing from them when they bought the Nascar rights. Problem was the game was buggy beyond belief. Playable in single player if you had the patients to put up with the problems. I tried, hell alot of people tried. They set up leagues, paid for the servers ect. Only to find out the online was broken beyond repair. One patch and no fixes later everyone gave up. They put out a game, didnt like the sales figures and cut bait. Personally I only have one EA game on my system BF3. It is better than it was but it is still a glitchy, buggy, hack-a-thon that I rarely play.

Conversely, I have almost every game Valve has made. While some bugs, glitches, hacking exist, Valve at least makes them near perfect in short order. They try, they care, they listen, they encourage modding. This is why people support/defend Valve. EA in my experience has none of these qualities.
This sounds like a Valve love song but you know what, not once have I had a bad experience with Valve or Steam.

I would love to see EA get their act together, because Im sure EA has plenty of great people that care. The folks running EA just dont listen to them.
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I'm not going to bother joining in the discussion, but I'd like to say... Cliff's been at the company 20 years? He looks pretty good for a 35-40+ year old haha.

@St1ckM4n, congrats on 1000 posts

This thread has been slightly confusing to me as I'm not used to anyone else being named Cliff.

Ha, thanks! I didn't even notice I was getting close!

The arcades were pretty hard or I was pretty broke I don't think I have ever beat a arcade game, however the topic is on console\pc games idk why the article even brought up arcades. Arcade games still exist and eat up your quarters. The first SNES game I had was Street Fighter 2. It came along with super mario. If I remember right it was around 50$. If you think about inflation games should be much more or we were being charged way to much even back then.

I haven't been to a newer arcade in over ten years. You would think they would rock socks given consoles 1080p limitations.

So many comments maybe ill read the rest later

I never buy any DLC for any game whatsoever (except full blown expansion packs but 1 dollar for a skin? 10 dollars for a wow pet? never )

You yourself got me used to expect extra content for my games for free Cliff, I was an avid Unreal Tournament player in the early 2000, and one of the best things about it was how you kept releasing map packs for free, inoxx map pack, bonus map pack 1,2,3
they were awesome, everyone had them, they were integrated into tournaments and as a result UT grew into a E-sport

Now they release one call of duty a year, with DLC map packs, the community is splitted, some people have the maps, some not, and who cares about taking years to become a pro if the whole game gets scrapped soon cause Call of Duty whatever crap is coming

Same thing happened with Warcraft III, Blizz used to release new maps frequently and add them to the rotation, I ve been used to get extra free content for my pc games ALL THE TIME, now everything seem to be about delivering as little as possible to be called a full-game, then release everythingi remember a controversy when epic wanted to make a map pack for gears of war in X360 for free and microsoft stopped them, telling them they had to charge money for it

nowadays all I play is starcraft 2, if blizzard starts charging me 2 dollars for extra maps every month and then I cant play because I dont have the maps that the rest of the community does, and because of that the community gets spplitted, diminishes and then dies, then I will lose interest and abandon the game

If developers want to release games with the minimum of stuff in order to make me buy the rest with DLC so I spend $80-100 per game ....then I say.... BRING FORTH THE SECOND GREAT VIDEOGAME CRASH....

I think a major publisher will have to go bankrupt or get purchased by a rival before any them understand this simple rule: when the customer buys something it's theirs. Microtransactions and "software as service" is greed disguised as good business. I typically buy games new if these models failed and we all went back to the way it was these companies would still make money.

The problem isn't making money it's that industry wants to make its nut coming and going. I don't hate EA's Origin or Valve's Steam services, I just dislike not being able install and run a game without these damn clients. I don't see either of these services as a step forward and I think there are many who share my feelings on this. And truth be told, many of these games are total @&* which is why sales have slumped. As someone else has said let the second video game crash happen; it sounds like it's needed to restore order.

You've got to look at the quality of games and really compare the two, valve to ea. I bought BF:Bad Company 2 and remember playing the beta thinking wow, this sure is glitchy. There was a glitch where if you scoped in with a sniper it would zoom out and give you the normal view non magnified. I complained on the forums and I sent emails and did plenty of searching (many MANY people had this issue) and despite all this that glitch is STILL in the game. Now if you think they just moved on to other projects and decided not to focus any attention on the game YOU WOULD BE WRONG. Months after reviving thousands of complaints about this bug (and many others) BF:BC2 got a nice little uniform/re-colored gun DLC and a vietnam patch. If that doesn't demonstrate where ea/dice's head is and a clear understanding of how the quality of their games is suffering and they're just in it for the money I don't know what is.

That sniper glitch is STILL in game by the way.

/facepalm @ author

Not only do you miss WHY ppl are po'd.. but you also consistently miss the fubar disaster of games EA continues to push.. that are no better than typical M$'s "betas"

The old EA that was good yrs ago is dead and gone... let it DIE same as disco.

What I'm referencing is the proclivity of vocal gamers to fail to see the forest for the trees; the egocentrism of the current generation. If you read over any web forum or comment section dealing with devs, publishers, DLC, etc., you'll find no shortage of users who jump on the anti-corporate bandwagon and cry rivers of hate towards EA et al. for being "greedy" and "trying to line their pockets" with paid DLC, exclusive content, and other paid content/services.

They're upset because they have to pay for things that, in any other software industry, you'd have to pay a huge premium for (Photoshop, anyone? How about 3D Studio Max or Pro Tools?). However, instead of being critical of the situation, they rant on about corporate greed and how they're getting the shaft while the big firms are raking in money. All the while alluding to two important points: (1) games are luxury goods and (2) demands for more complexity in games exacerbates Murphy's law.

Point (1) should be self-evident, so I won't go into detail. (2), however, seems to be somewhat of a conundrum for a lot of the outspoken. They want more content, better looking content, and they want more complexity in the way the game interacts with them. This drives up costs AND it opens the door for more bugs in the final product. Yet, they want low price points, near-perfect performance on day 1, and they want "day 1" to be exact and absolute. When they don't get it, when a dev pushes a release date back 6 months, or they stick a price tag on it, there is massive flood of noise about how X company is ripping everyone off for the sake of greed. Instead of considering the business reasons that might be behind this, they just toss it up to an evil corporate culture out to raid their bank accounts. It's unproductive and, in a lot of cases, ignorant (a favorite number to reference in related writing & comments is sales revenue, absent important figures such as net income after tax and cash flows).

Now, does this mean the devs and big corps aren't at fault for their poor performance? No. In recent years most big names have been putting out junk, as far as I'm concerned. Having purchased Diablo III on launch, I can tell you that some of the decisions corporate makes with regard to their products are absolutely insane from a consumer perspective. Online MP in Spec Ops: The Line is also a good example of half-baked ideas from corporate. But most of these things are a response to the broad market, something that completely escapes most related discussion. Paid DLC, micro-transactions and other sales mechanisms are there because they work and standard unit sales alone don't cut it anymore. If you don't agree with the practice, you don't spend your money. Companies that get the formula right (Activision/Blizzard) will do well, companies that get the formula wrong won't (Electronic Arts).

Recognizing this requires a big picture (macro) view of the situation. The most vocal gamers tend to be more "micro," considering only themselves in the equation, ignoring other important factors in the process. Hence, they're too daft to understand Cliff's point. To them, his entire article will be viewed as an exercise in corporate apologetics.

Screw that guy. So essentially gamers should just grab their ankles and accept there being no used game market (you can't give away or re-sell old games you no longer play), and also allow game companies to continue to fleece players with DLC (if you can afford it; they don't care if you can't) pay-to-play. The old Nintendo days were nothing like that.