Hot take - while it’s obviously greedy for the publishers to be charging for this, the real problem is the idiots who are paying.
Right?
Companies would never employ predatory behaviour to prey on customers, and have never had to be regulated before. It really is the customer’s fault for engaging.
Yes - it really is the customers’ fault.
It’d be different if games were a necessity - then the idea of “predatory” behavior would be relevant, since we’d be talking about someone taking advantage of the fact that the consumer has to buy the thing in question.
But games aren’t a necessity - not even close - so any consumer is at any time entirely free to say no to any transaction without suffering any meaningful ill effects.
And any consumers who, in such a situation, do not say no to a bad deal have nobody to blame but themselves.
While I, to some extent, agree with you; it is predatory behaviour by those companies and I don’t like it.
And some people are weak to such practices. Customers have to be protected from themselves to some extent, as has been shown in other industries.And any consumers who, in such a situation, do not say no to a bad deal have nobody to blame but themselves.
Do you suppose that choosing not to wear a seatbelt, a very bad deal, should be left entirely up to individuals, um, “stupid” enough to take it?
Yes.
Wow. I wasn’t expecting so much contempt for your fellow man.
I would say that there’s almost nothing that demonstrates more contempt for one’s fellow man than decreeing that they shouldn’t even be allowed to make their own choices.
A plastic casing over a table saw “limits what choices a person can make.” This is a very anti-covid-vaccine argument you’re making.
But that’s fine. I suppose being victim to an unregulated casino means you deserve to rot in Rancho Charleston or whatever.
Nobody’s safety is at risk here, it’s just people who can’t wait 3 days paying more money. It’s bullshit that companies will have a completed game but delay releasing it so people can pay extra for "
earlyon release access" but the solution is simple: don’t pay for it.Nobody’s safety is at risk here
Correct. Very astute.
but the solution is simple: don’t pay for it.
Sure. But of course, the point of doing that is to suggest to companies that this is naughty behavior. This is naughty behavior, isn’t it?
I do believe I did call it bullshit in the post you’re replying to. However, people paying for it implies acceptable behavior, doesn’t it?
Nooooo-ho-ho-ho, no it does not. You can justify a lot of evil shit with that line of thinking.
Many people are bad at delayed gratification. It’s a little strange to me. Like, I occasionally do impulse buys, but some people are just like “omg I need this sparkly horse armor preorder bonus or I’LL DIE”
I don’t know if that’s a skill that can be taught or what.
Agreed, I don’t blame the publishers for this. It’s clearly working on some amount of population that makes it worthwhile when they do the spreadsheets. The only beta game I’ve purchased recently lets you self-host servers and I was happy with the state it was in even if it was dropped and died all together. I refuse to purchase just about anything else that is still in “beta” or “early access”. I remember when “Beta” meant “download this game and play it… If you like it you can buy it next month”.
It’s that population that actively makes games worse for all of us as publishers can choose to just be lazy. I was stupid happy when BG3 got the praise it got on launch. That’s what it used to be… that’s how it should be.
It’s that population that actively makes games worse for all of us
That’s exactly why I don’t cut them any slack. Their dumb choices don’t just harm themselves - they harm me and all other gamers, insofar as they’ve made it so that publishers can get away with putting out unfinished, buggy, unbalanced crap.
Sure - the gamers might spend a while ineffectually bitching on forums and handing out 1 star reviews, but that’s just meaningless noise. The ONLY thing that matters to the publishers is whether or not people buy the game, and those dunderheads not only buy the game - they line right up to buy the next one too.
Or, now, line right up to pay extra for early access to the next one.
My favorite is it’s $60 game with a promise to not be scum, then 6 months later add in the scummy shit and battle passes so you can’t refund it.
Well, if a publisher pulls that crap, you need to remember and then never buy anything from them again.
At this point its more of a whitelist than a blacklist. It happens a lot and people just go on like they didn’t just get ripped off.
FOMO is a hell of a drug.
FOMO is death anxiety, the light that illuminates all consciousness
I mean … the consumer plays a bigger part in the practice by enabling publishers.
I 100% blame consumers for this. If it wasn’t profitable they wouldn’t do it.
It’s a relatively new entry in the ‘bullshit companies are pushing’ category. It only works as long as the game isnt pure garbage that is going to lose 90% of its playerbase in two weeks and the die out in less than a year… Since everything is trying to be live service these days.
I bought FH5 platinum or whatever, which included ‘early access’, though that wasn’t a factor in my decision. This was so broken I referred to it as ‘alpha, maybe’. It took two months to fix traffic and random error messages with no details (“ALERT” [OK]). It was about 6 months before it was decent, and patches in the last year have caused weird new (seemingly unrelated) regression bugs.
Me and a tight crew who play almost daily, and I myself have 3.3k hours of game time (others have similar times) are worried about 6 being worse in every way. Throw in ‘car packs’ for $5 each when it was assumed that the platinum version got you fucking everything, or the fact that our favorite game mode is now (for the last ~16 months) riddled with bugs, or that 4 has massive issues when playing online for the past few years that they aren’t going to fix (lobby issues), or that 3 on the pc has online that is completely broken, known, never to be fixed.
I am considering picking up a copy of 6 on launch from yarr land and seeing if it is a massive pile of shit before I plonk down any cash. And with the… let’s say “disappointment” that these three games have been, if I do purchase another I am planning on getting the base game, not the money-grabbing bullshit edition (includes cars released weekly for 1y, and 2 expansion locations that are mediocre at best). You fucking played yourself, MS. Great job.
Similarly, Need for Speed whatever the latest is called, offered early access and bla bla. I wanted to trial it, as NFS has been a dumpster fire post-2012. Fuckers want me to pay money for a trial - are you fucking shitting me? Grabbed a copy from the seas, couldn’t get it going, said fuck it and just told anyone who asked me (as I’m a big NFS fan, so I have a bunch of people who ask my opinion on every release) to keep their $70. The cost has been as low as $5.99, but that’s still not low enough. Fuck EA.
Fuck the publishers, fuck the devs for not pushing back when they need more time, fuck abandoning games the second it’s successor is revealed, fuck game-breaking bugs getting green-lit into release patches because the devs are overworked. Just fuck the entire industry. For me, there are only an actual handful of good games that have come out in the last decade+ and not been the equivalent of consuming feces for $50+. I want my 90s and 00s gaming environment back, not this ball-squeezing blood-sucking hell we have now.
…anyway…
Have you considered to become a patient gamer? I always wait for a game to drop in price before buying it. That way you know from other people’s experience whether it’s a good game or not, and you save money. On hardware too! No need for the latest hardware if you don’t run the latest games.
My steam wishlist (I actually use ITAD but) is actually kinda that. Stuff I want but I can wait on, for one reason or another. Unless I’m quite excited about a game (Cities Skylines 2) or have multiple people planning on getting it for multi-player (Forza), it goes on the list and it doesn’t notify me unless 1) it’s 50% or more off, and 2) it’s the lowest price ever offered.
Lets me have stuff that might pop up randomly during a sale and ‘woo’, but also restrains myself from buying everything I’m curious about. Still have the latest hardware itch, though :p
Yes, I do the same with my wishlist. The only expensive games I consider are multiplayer games I can play with my friends. I bought Deep Rock Galactic, Sea of Thieves and Valheim for that reason
I’ve been buying the base-game ON launch day for a several years now for any games I’ve wanted to play ASAP.
Obviously if pre-ordering comes with pre-loading the game, that can be advantageous for some players, but with gigabit fibre I downloaded Forbidden West on PC in half an hour. And even with pre-loading, you could be buying a day or two in advance, not a year like I’ve seen some friends do.
Buying as late as possible, and hovering you finger over the refund option for the first two hours, you don’t really miss out on anything. I don’t think pre-order bonuses and such have ever been anything worthwhile. And any future content is something you can spend on when it comes out, IF you’re still down to play more of the game.
It’s kinda sickening how common it’s become for special editions to just be pre-orders for content that doesn’t exist yet, and 50% of the time it gets produced with 25% of the effort of the base game.
Maybe this article doesn’t mean thing like ffxiv, but ffxiv did something similar. In essence if you bought it before it early released, you got to play it those 3 days early. If you wanted to play it that time you could have just bought it and if you didn’t you just bought it 3 days later and played it anyway.
I think that for an online game that’s a great idea, specially ffxiv, because the people that are going to play the new expansion probably bought it weeks prior to the early access and people who didn’t probably haven’t still finished the last expansion, so they really have no real incentive to play the new one like NOW, all they do is tax the servers for all the people that actually want to play the new content.
It’s also a way to limit the user base into two peaks so that the servers don’t die too much.
I’m completely against charging extra for the early access though. Early access maybe good, paying for it obviously bad.
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