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Predatory tactics in gaming are worse than you think (www.gamedeveloper.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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I want to shed light on a tactic that involves collecting data as you play, feeding this data into complex algorithms and models that then alter the rules of your game under the hood to optimize spending opportunities.

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[–] 2 points 1 year ago (25 children)

Nah, some thoughts.

But not everything is black and white. And in the spectrum of grey there are plenty of in-game sales that are better than the alternative.

Again, I would much rather buy the characters one by one and have the all-in-one box come out later than have to wait for the big box and pay full price for it.

I am genuinely baffled about why you think that's worse than "pay me for the game every month or I take it away". I am even more baffled by how you think that distinction is somehow logical beyond personal preference. Your being adamant about this doesn't make it make sense.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (24 children)

    Charging for anything inside a game is like applying a dollar value to soccer goals. It's a category error, exploited for profit. I am fundamentally opposed to this system of manipulating people into wanting arbitrary nonsense and then charging actual money for it. Your glib endorsement of that manipulation does not make it rational.

    And this is the shallow end. Characters, you can almost sorta kinda argue, as sloppy expansions. Skins? Fuck off. A bottomless pit of manufactured discontent. Plainly sufficient to wring billions out of people for a game that's "free." Or for a game that's forty fucking dollars and will gladly take another hundred dollars every single year. And characters in a 1v1 fighter are drastically different from MOBA bullshit, where having the wrong options can ruin an hour of four other people's lives.

    People are rightly incensed by efforts to charge $80 to own one video game.

    This is an entire market of games where you can pay $1000 and still not have the whole thing.

    Something's fucky.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

    Skins are fine. They are entirely optional. Something existing doesn't mean you must own it.

    That's the part where we're not going to agree. Well, the maximalist holier-than-thou stance in general. But otherwise, you see things existing as an affront to you personally. This skin was made by someone and put in the game, and so I'm entitled to it, so it either shouldn't exist or it should be mine.

    That just doesn't track. I don't feel any more entitled to some random bikini costume than I do to some random statue bundled with a collector's edition. It's faff some people may want, but I'm not being attacked because somebody is buying and selling collector's edition of Cyberpunk for 200 bucks, just like way I'm not attacked by someone buying some in-game costume.

    Also, you do know pro football players get bonuses per goal, right? That comparison means different things depending on whether you know that and both are confusing.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (5 children)

    Woe betide the poor bikini artist!

    Nevermind their efforts were directed that way so the publisher could rake in hundreds of dollars, per year, for what's obviously the least impactful element of the game. Costumes would normally be an unremarkable detail - some callbacks, some easter eggs, whatever - but now they cost more than the rest of the fucking game.

    Do you imagine they took more effort than the rest of the fucking game? Like the horny bonus costumes are worth more than all the effort spent on balance, and netcode, and designing the actual characters. I'll assume not, and underline: that's the total disconnect between price and value. That's the predatory exploitation, laid bare.

    Those skins are the entire reason the game exists. That's what makes all the money. Street Fighter has been reduced to bait on that hook. And it still costs forty fucking dollars.

    Also, you do know pro football players get bonuses per goal, right?

    This subject has the most aggressively off-topic replies. 'There's different forms of value. Some are artificial. You can't just buy more soccer goals.' 'Uh--! But--!' No.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    I fundamentally disagree with your stance that any form of premium content is 'predatory'. You know what you're buying, and no one's putting a gun to your head forcing you to buy it. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's predatory.

    Predatory is when gambling-based business models obfuscate true costs and result in players literally financially ruining themselves. Predatory is when FOMO strategies are aggressively pushed to pressure consumers into buying things they otherwise wouldn't. Predatory is when subscription services keep players locked into an ecosystem, with the threat that they'll lose everything if they stop paying (and it's still extremely weird to me that you called this better).

    If you want to go after that kind of stuff, I would be with you. But calling everything predatory actually just makes it harder to talk about real problems. You are ruining this word.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Scams work by choice. Putting a gun to someone's head is a mugging. Scams, you walk into freely, and still get robbed. You don't quite get nothing... but for the money, you don't get much.

    What game could sell for $130, on sale, and be taken seriously? That shit only works because breaking it up into little pieces obfuscates the total cost. Same shit as "five easy payments!" in TV infomercials.

    And $130 is the low, low end. So many of these games, especially the ones that slog on for years, have thousands of dollars in stupid shit you can blow your money on. Gambling makes it worse - but worse isn't necessary, for it to be bad.

    calling everything predatory

    Can we please go one interaction without you lying to me about my own opinions? I called skins predatory. Because Jesus Christ, have you seen Fortnite? They could ditch whatever mechanisms you consider beyond-the-pale, and the whole game would still exist as a funnel to exchange your whole wallet in exchange for playable references.

    I will again grant that this is the gentle end of the spectrum. But it's all the same spectrum. There's no hard cutoffs between thirty-seven characters at five bucks apiece, and pay-to-win weapon unlocks. Grinding instead would be worse. It's even less like an actual product. All incentives point straight toward maximum revenue through engineered frustration.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Can you go one interaction without the excessively hostile tone?

    We started this conversation because you said that the act of selling anything at all in games is predatory.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I literally didn't. I said it's inseparable from this business model, eight hours later. The comment you're replying to explains how it's all one spectrum - including the things you, personally, would call predatory. The only specific examples I've given are skins and skip-the-grind.

    What I get in response is 'do you still beat your wife?' over the apparent impossibility of updates that already happened, and repeated misrepresentations of how this thread started. You have quoted me directly and then been wrong in the next comment. I sound aggravated because you've been aggravating.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    There is no exploitation in charging different prices for different things. Prices aren't based on how much a thing costs to make, they're based on how much people are willing to pay for it. Welcome to supply and demand.

    Cosmetics are (relatively) cheap to make and sold at a high margin because they are subsidizing a game that is sold at very low price. Turns out the sticker price in DBFZ with its what, 24 characters at launch is twenty bucks or so cheaper than good old Street Fighter 2 with its eight characters.

    There are a bunch of ways we've been shaving cost from games to keep that somewhat artificial price point. Selling people who are willing to spend more a bunch of non-game-relevant stuff at a higher margin is just one of them. You are extremely outraged by this for some reason, I am very glad.

    Because yeah, sure, I spent like 200 bucks in my copy of the game (probably a bit more, I got the Switch version, too) and I subsidized a number of more casual players that only bought the base game.

    That's cool. I get more people to play against and they get a cheaper game up front. I played that game for 500 to 1000 hours, I spent 3-5 cents per hour. I have no regrets. Didn't even have to pay a subscription for it, my physical version will live forever and I can still play my Steam copy with forty-plus characters.

    You are commited to being mad about this on our behalf, turns out us spenders don't need your protection. If you don't like it, that's fine. You don't have to get it. We'll pick up your slack.

    Which is not to say everything is fair game or that there aren't predatory practices at play in gaming. It's to say you're obscuring those by crying wolf because you like being mad about things and have fixated on this in particular to an unreasonable degree.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (16 children)

    This is an entire market of games where you can pay $1000 and still not have the whole thing.

    Those aren't the games we're talking about. We're talking about DBFZ, an example of fixed DLC being sold at a reasonable price, which you want to dishonestly conflate with more predatory models in order to say that nothing should be sold ever.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (15 children)

    "We" includes the guy saying "skins are fine," in reply to the same comment.

    Quick search, and... yeah FighterZ specifically still has a $60 base price, a $95 version with some annual pass, and a $110 version with additional content not covered by the pass... and several eyebrow-raising "stamps." There's three hundred of those. They seem to be static character images? They cost several dollars each. So do the voice packs. Music's $15 per pack. Assuming - assuming - the character bundles are cheaper, and include everybody, there's also $80 of them.

    So you can definitely spend at least $200 and still be tickled for a deluge of whateverthefuck stamps are for.

    Two of those character unlocks were day-one. Not quite the obvious scam of on-disc DLC, but still pretty fuckin' blatant. 'Hey thanks for buying our game, and extra-buying the exclusive preorder bullshit... saaay, you didn't want the powered-up versions of these popular characters, did you? Well don't be a freeloader, pay up.'

    If I buy the game, right now, all of those characters are in the game... but I don't get them. I can get my ass kicked by them. But I can't select them. Not until I pony up at least double the price of the actual game. And then apparently I'll be subject to the same predatory bullshit for some JPEGs in chat. (If all characters are unlockable through gameplay, but you can 'pay to skip the grind,' that is predatory bullshit.)

    This game is one of the less skeezy examples, and they still manage to turn an unremarkable amount of content into an obscene total price. It's on sale on Steam, and it still costs $130. 'But you can pay less up-front!' is the problem.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Man, you really should play the game if you're trying to be mad about the additional content. It's really good and it's ten bucks on sale right now. Forty to get all the extra content. Well worth it.

    The stamps are mostly premium edition filler. There are hundreds in the base game and nobody is particularly mad at the three jpegs they try to sell for two bucks as a way to pretend they added two bucks of value to your premium bundle.

    The music pack is pretty solid, though. Lots of licensed anime music. Can't argue with blasting out Solid State Scouter when playing with Bardock. Just... remember to disable it if you're going to stream the game, you will get dinged for copyright infringement on Youtube. You want to get mad about something? How about selling people music as part of a game and then accusing them of infringement for streaming the game they paid for? How silly is that?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (3 children)

    'I consider this game's business model fundamentally intolerable, and its total price divorced from reality.'

    'So why aren't you playing it?'

    You are not a serious person.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (2 children)

    Who said "why aren't you playing it"? I said you should play it. Very different things.

    I know why you're not playing it. It's because you're a sourpuss that doesn't like good games and does like being angry on the Internet.

    I'm saying you should change that and play good games. Don't even need to spend hundreds on them. Just throw a tenner at them on sale, give them a look, maybe.

    Also, and I say this with utmost sincerity, I am not a serious person. Wish I was even less serious. I'm a bit too stiff for comfort, really.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    "We" includes the guy saying "skins are fine," in reply to the same comment.

    Yes, optional skins are fine. I agree with that statement.

    If I buy the game, right now, all of those characters are in the game... but I don't get them. I can get my ass kicked by them. But I can't select them.

    This is a good thing, because it means that you can still remain compatible with any opponent even if you choose to stay on the base game. The alternative was the old model where you HAD to buy every upgrade from Street Fighter IV to Super Street Fighter IV to Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition to Ultra Street Fighter IV, or else you were left behind and could no longer play with the rest of the playerbase that moved on to the latest edition.

    Would you rather have that be mandatory? Is that the model you want to go back to?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (8 children)

    Skins are predatory bullshit. Skins are surely the majority of this abuse, by revenue. Skins are the easiest way to charge $1000 and still give someone a fraction of the content in one video game. Skins aren't trivial to create... but you sure can crank 'em out.

    The model I want to go back to is where buying the game means you get the whole god damn game. Letting people have content, but not use it, is inseparable from anything you'd acknowledge as predatory. We can try to split those hairs, and we would fail. Nothing short of addressing the business model will solve those problem.

    The only reason this bullshit can even sound defensible is that Capcom used to be even worse. Like if they sent a guy to your house to take a hammer to your cartridge, and now you can pay him five bucks at the door. Is that better? Probably. Is it tolerable? Nope.

    Imagine if this applied to literal versions. 1.1 drops, with bug fixes for save corruption and some balance tweaks, and Steam wants another ten bucks for it. Would you respect if someone scoffed, 'do you want them to make you buy the whole game again?' Plainly not. Incremental changes to the game you already bought... should just go in the game you already fucking bought... because you already fucking bought it.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (7 children)

    You didn't answer the question.

    It's a good thing that this model allows them a source of revenue to develop more content, while still being able to offer patches for free so that players on the base game still get to enjoy compatibility. That's good. The alternative is we either break compatibility, or the content doesn't get made at all since you don't seem to want anyone to get paid to make it.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (6 children)

    I did. I just didn't give you the clean yes-or-no you're prepared to posture about.

    The alternative is we either break compatibility, or the content doesn’t get made at all since you don’t seem to want anyone to get paid to make it.

    Do you have object permanence?

    Because you keep pretending we didn't go over the obvious alternatives, repeatedly. You forgot your own examples include games that did not have this business model, but still plainly got made, and had major updates, and took a shitload of your money.

    Do you honestly not know the difference between "nothing inside a video game should cost real money" and "everything should be free?" Because that impossible confusion would explain a lot of this conversation.

    I know you understand charging money for things inside a game can be abusive. You have no trouble calling gambling or FOMO "predatory." Would you respect someone telling you, that just means you don't want those games made? Fortnite, banned! Call of Duty, deleted! Never made it past 1.0! How much of that shit would you take, from someone insisting "at least it's not pay-to-win?" Pay-to-win is worse, surely. So anything less abusive than that must be fine. And if you don't respect all the money developers get from pay-to-win, you must want them to to starve.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (5 children)

    I did. I just didn't give you the clean yes-or-no you're prepared to posture about.

    If I ask you a yes-or-no question, and you say 'nuh-uh', you did not answer the question. In fact, you haven't answered a single question I've ever tried to ask you over the course of this conversation.

    Do you play competitive fighting games at all? Do you know anything at all of this world?

    Do you seriously think having to pay for every edition of SF2 and SF4 separately is somehow better than being able to continue playing against anyone even with the base game?

    Should the games I know and love be able to exist in the form that made them the games I know and love?

    You forgot your own examples include games that did not have this business model, but still plainly got made, and had major updates, and took a shitload of your money.

    No, I gave you an example of a game that broke compatibility and was widely criticized for doing so. It is not a model that we should ever go back to, no one else in the world besides you likes that. The new model is better because it preserves compatibility. Do you understand the point I am making here?

    I know you understand charging money for things inside a game can be abusive.

    Yes, sometimes some things can be. But you're arguing that everything is, and that is what I disagree with. And I feel that by being so aggressive towards things that are perfectly reasonable, you only end up making it harder to talk about real problems.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    Should the games I know and love be able to exist in the form that made them the games I know and love?

    Are we still pretending that paying for whole editions doesn't serve the same function? Are we still ignoring subscriptions because they make you feel icky? Are we still not acknowledging games that get updated for years, to keep sales up, and then have sequels?

    It is not a model that we should ever go back to

    Well there's one question answered, albeit still on the basis of 'ick.' It existed - it was profitable - but we can't do it ever again because that's the same as a whole existing game being banned. Blah blah blah.

    I understand that compatibility is preferable. I am telling you it's not worth preserving this business model. This is the gentlest this business model could possibly be, and it has still created a typical 1v1 with a total price that's fucking bonkers.

    Compatibility is also possible through the just-update-the-damn-game model. Like how nobody charges five bucks for improved netcode. That also costs money to create, and is surely a key part of improving past the initial version. Funny how it's just taken for granted as part of the game you already bought.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    We can't go back to an objectively worse model because no consumer in the world besides you would be okay with it now that a better model is possible. You cannot be serious trying to say you think we'd ever go backwards.

    The current model is updating the game. Everyone gets to play the latest update even if you do not pay for the DLC.

    I am also still baffled that you can somehow claim with a straight face that subscriptions are better. Subscriptions are a lock-in model that threaten you with losing everything as soon as you stop paying, so you'll have to keep paying forever to keep your game. If anything in this conversation is predatory, it's subscriptions!

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    'Stop calling everything predatory, you're killing the word!'

    I didn't call everything pr--

    'You know what's predatory? Paying for services!'

    I'm out.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Please explain to me how a lock-in model that forces you to keep paying forever in order to keep what you already paid for is better than just being able to buy something once and have it.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago*

    The comparison is wrong. If the products you demand require continuing revenue - a subscription model allows rational consumer decisions. That's why most consumers look at it and say 'no thanks.' Real-money charges inside games make more money than subscriptions, not because anyone wants to pay $130 for a video game, but because it obfuscates that price.

    The real question is, if FighterZ has now been funded by all those piecemeal sales, and is - in its current state - your favorite game... why the fuck isn't it $60 to buy it all once?

    Like, you don't want the Street Fighter IV model where each normally-priced game is a tiny upgrade. But you can buy whatever the last version of SF4 is, at a normal price, and it's the whole goddamn game. If FighterZ doesn't seem to be getting any more updates or content, why is it still priced for excuses about development costs?

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