Thing is, I’ve seen funbucks stuffed into various single player games over the years. The first was probably Mass Effect 3, but some of the Assassin’s Creed games have it too.
But who are they for? Who buys them? They’ve never really felt like anything that would be useful. It’s usually just some crappy cosmetics, or something you can get through normal play. It’s like they’ve been stuffed in at the request of management, but also like nobody has ever checked up on what they actually put in, or whether anybody bought it…
The game industry was assaulted by the MBAs long ago. They have this financial concept of leaving money on the table. That if you aren’t skinning your customers alive for all they have then you are losing money.
Then there was that infamous power point slide that got leaked where, basically, the plan is to use games to bring in audiences then use gambling techniques to hook on whales then cash them for eternity. Thus “live services games” were born.
It feels like uncreative, predatory shit because it is. It’s a finance people idea, not a creative game developer idea.
I think the last few years has left them struggling with the reality that landlords and supermarkets also have that concept, and when it’s a choice between having a roof, food, or entertainment, then they’re way down the list.
Gamers reward good games
I don’t buy single player games with other monetization. You want another $30 you add another 30 hours of good content.
Wish granted, but it’s just 30 dlcs each around a full-game price and you gotta wait til they go on sale for $1 once every year at a random time.
I wish you were less evil.
CDPR get this, at least. Phantom Liberty, Hearts of Stone, Blood and Wine. All well worth it.
Yup I do not buy single player games that have monitizacion, indiana jones game was so far game of the year for me
Absolutely!
Games as a service is a scam.
I mean, MMOs were supposed to be continuously supported and developed during the enrollment period. Earlier iterations of the model had live DMs running encounters, active continuous releases to expand the game world and advance the storyline, and robust customer support to address the bugs and defects. Also, just maintaining the servers necessary to support that much data processing was hella-expensive on its face.
Games as a service don’t need to be a scam.
But eventually, the studios figured out they can do the MMO business model on any game. Justifying a fee for Everquest was a lot more reasonable than justifying it for a glorified Team Fortress knock off. Or a freaking platformer.
But they are a scam
I miss EverCrack.
Not the actual mechanics, things have come a long way since then. But the concepts. No end game. Mobs that take 100+ people all day to take down. And that last piece of armor you want, has a 2% drop rate off them. And even when it does drop, there are 10 of your class who wants it, and you have to work out who gets it. Levels took so long nobody worried about getting to cap, and just hung out. The grind and the community were the point. Not the next piece of gear.Oh and they were what weekly spawn on top of that too that were also open world spawns to boot, so quite often you had competition just laying claim to it.
Our server had some quite… colorful guilds that didn’t play nice and would train attempts, or bum rush it in an attempt to do more damage to steal the claim, among other nastiness. Imagine you spent hours getting 80 people together, prepping, and then getting ganked at the last minute. lol pure chaos.
The GMs were constantly involved sorting out the aftermath. Which was funny in its own right I suppose. Which is probably why they leaned hard into instances in later expansions.
Fun times. Dont think there will be another experience like it was its hayday.
Sounds like my experiences with Ultima Online. Right before they added paladins and necromancers, the shard where I played was quite “raw”. You really got the human experience, with everything: misery, dignity, psycopaths, etc.
And honestly I think that’s what’s missing in “modern” mmos: the human element. Or rather the social one. Which is ironic.
They are now way too friendly towards solo play and systems like ff14s duty finder removed the social aspect by automating group comp with complete randos that you will probably never see again since it was cross server.
In evercrack and even ffxi you were required to shout for groups from a pool of players on your own server so you got to know people. Who was good and who was not so good. You built a reputation.
It was a lot harder for sure, but it felt more meaningful.
I think it’s a bit more nuanced - for example MMOs. But for the most part yeah.
Neither don’t play them or ignore additional methods of monetization built into the game. It’s like they don’t exist.
If there is too much dlc, it makes me feel like the base game is an empty shell. Even if it’s not true, it turns me off from the game. Look at sims 4 and one of those city builder games.
Games as a service can be okay, in some situations. Ones we very rarely see due to (primarily) publisher greed.
If you’re paying for the game itself, at any point, GaaS is stupid and extremely exploitative.
If they choose to go that route however, the game needs to be free to play with separate monetization. They need to mebe things that are completely optional and don’t affect gameplay.
I appreciate the sentiment but the (very shitty) reality is single player games don’t come any where near the profitability of these multiplayer games in the current climate. Like no where even remotely close in terms of effort to profit. You can straight up clone call of duty every year, or add a few maps to fortnite, or add a new operator to siege, and monetize every tiny fraction of the game thru micro transactions and people will keep on playing and keep on paying.
Single player games operate pretty much the opposite. You buy it once. Play thru it. Beat it. And generally never touch it again unless maybe some dlc comes out and you might add a few more hours to it and then never think about it again.
I say this as a giant fan of single narrative games, it’s just a much smarter business move to pump out shitty online multiplayer games.
Fortnite was released in 2017, last year it netted almost $6 billion.
Call of duty has been dog water for like a decade. Its been the best selling game every single year since 2009 unless Rockstar releases a game (and Hogwarts legacy randomly dominating one year).
World of Warcraft came out in 2004. Last year they announced they had over 7 million active subscribers… Over two decades later.
Apex legends came out in 2019, last year it made over $3 billion.
The list goes on and on and on. You just can’t compete with weirdos obsessed with showing off a wizard hat on their character in an online game or busting open a loot box to get a new weapon skin or something.
single player games don’t come any where near the profitability of these multiplayer games
True, but they are still very lucrative. You can make them, release them, generate a healthy surplus, and roll that into making the next game with plenty of cash to spare.
Also, you don’t have half your dev team stuck supporting a legacy release, constantly fixated on juicing engagement and monetization. There’s a lot less overhead involved in a single-iteration.
Fortnite
Call of duty
World of Warcraft
Apex legends
Had truly phenomenal marketing budgets. It’s the same thing with AAA movies. 25-50% of the budget goes to marketing, on a title that eats up hundreds of millions to produce and support.
You didn’t need $100M to make BG3. You didn’t need an extra $25-50M to get people to notice it and pony up. These bigger titles have invested billions in their PR. And that’s paid out well in the end. But it also requires huge lines of credit, lots of mass media connections, and a lot of risk in the face of a flop.
For studios that can’t fling around nine figures to shout “Look At Me!” during the Super Bowl, there’s no reason to follow this model of development.
Minecraft is the
most popularbest selling game of all time, and the single-player mode is still being updated. Granted, many people play on multiplayer servers, but still.And Minecraft has a huge pool of paid content, especially with Bedrock Edition
Sad but true.
On the one hand, you’re right that the market for micro transaction laden multiplayer games is much larger than single player games. On the other hand, the market for people who want single player games is still very large. You showed that yourself mentioning Rockstar games and Harry Potter.
So while many publishers want a piece of that larger pie, every publisher trying for it just leads to over saturation and greater odds that a game will fail entirely. So there is still incentive for publishers to release large single player games even if the pie is smaller since there may be less competition making it easier to stand out. And what the article is saying is that, within that pie, one way to stand out is to avoid micro transactions. And since it’s discussing single player games specifically, I don’t see a lot of relevance for bringing up multiplayer games that exist in a different part of the gaming world.
I feel the same about multiplayer games without gated progression and LAN server hosting. (Or local/splitscreen)
These days I can’t even play a multiplayer game with friends somewhere with shitty internet. And because of progression you have to force yourself to only play together, but never with different people or by yourself because then you will get ahead.
If I go to the steam page for a singleplayer game and see a bunch of paid DLC content, I usually skip it. Look at Stellaris, for example
Depends on how old the game is and how big the DLC is IMO. Rimworld, for instance, has quite a few DLCs now, but they are all well worth it if you like the base game. OTOH if a game just has cosmetic DLC or the DLC is coming out super near release that’s a red flag.
I’m of the opinion that Rimworld DLCs don’t actually improve the base game, they simply build an extra layer of isolated complexity ontop of the base game. I like the base game but I didn’t really enjoy the DLCs (at least not the first 2) because they didn’t actually expand the base game. They felt like mods I paid for.
Rimworld’s DLCs are kinda assumed purchases for the modding scene, too. I feel like this drives a lot of their sales TBH.
This describes just about all Paradox games made in the past 15 years, sadly. They release with a barebones concept, then slowly drip-feed content for 5-30 bucks a pop, each one usually sitting at “Mostly Negative” because it doesn’t fundamentally add or change anything most of the time, and the times it does- meh. Crusader Kings 2 was my bread and butter for a long time. Played Crusader Kings 3, and it felt like almost every helpful mechanic that existed in CK2 was stripped, and then added on again over the course of years. It was so infuriating, that I just don’t buy their titles anymore.
Vampire Survivors is an exception.
$ for hours on VS is insane, even with all the DLC it’s pennies. I feel like I’m stealing from the dev.
No, that is what “made for fun”-monetization looks like
At the very least, you can still pirate it and play cracked multiplayer with friends.
I made the mistake of buying the game year ago, and bought a bunch of DLC at 50% or greater sales, and now the sunken cost fallacy has taken hold on me, and I still want to buy more . . . . (at least I’m broke so I can’t right now hehehaha)
Unfortunately, that’s not sufficient to keep that bullshit out of big-budget single-player games. Publishers can force it upon developers - and will. Once a few games get away with it, the cult of executives will figure they’re losing money if they don’t fuck you as hard as possible.
Spider-Man 1, 2, Miles Morales & Dragonage: Veilguard also deserve to be mentioned. I’ll buy a game on launch at full price if it’s not loaded down with bullshit or shoving the rest of the game behind a paywall. Otherwise I’ll just be a patient gamer and get it in a few years cheaper and patched up.
And Multiplayer games like Helldivers 2
It is my favorite software as a service model.
They run a continuous story based experience that is extremely well done. They do offer the ability to buy in game credits, but if you play regularly there is no reason to as they show up frequently in game. Their cosmetic store only has a few items, but they cycle around so there will always be another chance to get them.
And when the devs did fuck up the gameplay, they admitted it and changed course. When Sony forced them to add in the PlayStation login the devs supported the players in pushing back and we now have an official review bomb cape.
Shoutout to FromSoft still having Bloodborne servers ready for me on my very first runthrough 10yrs after launch
This is pure unadulterated copium. Numbers don’t support this
Regardless, I’m tired of this shit. There is clearly room for both.
Making inoffensive microtransactions is such a tightrope walk. Just putting an up-front price is so much simpler on their end.
Hell yeah! Give us more of that!
What about games like Fortnite? Are they rewarded?
I would say its less that they’re “rewarded” and more like they’re turning every customer upside down and shaking them until the money falls out
