For those who grew up without DLCs and microtransactions and games went unchanged after launch. How has the adjustment been to current day monetization and game updates?
Has there been changes to what games you choose to buy and play?
It pushed me straight back to uncompromising piracy, and a total refusal to give money for any reason unless the game is fully offline and on physical media.
I believe in piracy for "demo" purposes. If the studio "forgot" to provide an official demo, you as a consumer should take matters into your own hands and provide the 'demo'. Delete it when you've played a 'demo's worth', which did have a fairly industry standard meaning back in the day.
When I became willing to play this 1 older game that shall remain nameless, and pay for it, I went looking for a Game Of The Year edition to pay for or some such. For some reason, this particular game never released a comprehensive GOTY. They expected you to download a quite silly amount of expensive DLC for trivial features. Slightly more powerful items in a RPG, basically. Those items even had the effect of ruining the game balance, so I'm not convinced it was even a good idea to have the DLC. Yet they expected you to pay for it sight unseen.
This was all driven by some kind of big corporate trick or scumbagging. I think it was an EA published title. Because they were clearly being greedy with an older title, I said to hell with them. It is one of the only games I've played in its entirety, that I didn't pay for, that wasn't abandonware. If you're gonna be like that and your price on goods is not reasonable, I don't feel I have to cooperate with you.
Now that I know what's going on with DLC games, and also the low level of quality that's going to result when a publisher engages in such practices, I'm not likely to seek a 'demo' of such a game at all. I will probably retain my demo only, not pirating purity in that regard. But to the extent I've ever been impure, that once, it was directly driven by the DLC. I was like waaaat, srs, gtfo.
I remember the first time I came in contact with DLC, coincidentally it was my first Steam game: Supreme Commander 2.
My first thought was: “What the fuck is this? Why isn’t this in the game?”. Later on, when DLC were getting more substantial, my thoughts changed to; ”Are they just rebranding Expansion Packs?”.
As other people noted, I don’t care about cosmetics. Even for Dota 2, which I’ve put over a thousand hours in and have played it 10 years, I just sell them on the marketplace to fund my next summer sale. The only time I buy stuff is when I want to support the game’s development.
My gaming time is too limited to worry about battle passes and shit like that. I just wanna click heads and farm creeps.
Edit: the one thing that does bum me out though is that back before item shops and shit, skins and unlocks used to mean something. Like, you’d see some dude in your Halo 3 lobby with a dope-ass helmet and you knew that he earned that from getting a Killtacular with only deagle headshots. Now it’s just, dude’s level 150. He must’ve swiped for the ultimate edition, XP boosters, or has too much free time.
Paying once for a game was so nice. You pay and then you can finish the game at a your own pace. There are still games like this but more often now even if you pay someone is always trying to get another 2.99 or 9.99 from you. Before you could get a cool skin because you did something now you pay.
I take some satisfaction in always being the most boring character in a multiplayer lobby. In halo 3 I worked so hard for the samurai or ninja armour but now it feels like it isn’t part of the game at all.
Getting updates has been extremely nice as well though. There's plenty of old games that had design issues or you wished something was a bit more fleshed out. Back then, you didn't really expect much in the way of updates though. PC got some patches but it was mostly bugs. Console was totally stuck with what you got.
While I'm not a DLC person, I can't deny it can be fun watching a game you play continue to evolve.
Contrary to what you might think, games received updates far earlier than the introduction of DLC and Micro-transactions. Doom, for example, had many update patches post launch. Only, the game wouldn’t update automatically. You had to know that the patches existed, and where to find them to download them.
Games are actually different in so many ways other than this, that I can’t make a straight comparison, other than to say that before DLC, you just bought expansions on a disc, and before that, you had to buy an entirely new “Turbo” or “Super” edition of the game to get any updates.
These days I hardly buy new since games are so expensive. And I only buy DLC if the game itself has earned the money I'm going to spend. I keep that mentality with any games that have additional costs. I spent a ton of time playing Genshin Impact, so when I put money in the game it felt like it had already earned that much based on the enjoyment I got. I try to stick to that as much as I can.
I feel that. I cannot justify spending 70+ dollars on a game, just to be able to play 50% of what the game is supposed to be, and also have to put up with numerous game-breaking bugs. If I have to spend money on DLC for an ALREADY $70 game, im never touching it. The exception being games like Civilization, where the game is complete, and the DLC is not only cheap but often bundled together with ALL OTHER DLC for a significant reduction in price.
In addition, it seems most AAA games these days are, in addition to being ridiculously expensive, often times buggy messes for the first 6 months of their release.
THEN THEY NEVER GO ON SALE UNTIL THE ONLINE GAME COMMUNITY IS DEAD OR DYING.
THEY ALSO ARE OFTEN TIMES P2W (looking at you CoD with your paywalled weapons, and Battlefront with characters locked behind an $800 paywall or 2000 hours of playtime).
Now, give me a F2P with cheap cosmetic MTX that don't break the game, and I'm in.
98% of the games I buy are on sale, most of the times they’re bundled with DLC and if they aren’t, I set a sale alarm for the DLC I’m interested on. Microtransactions are not an issue either. I’ve enjoyed COD, CSGO, LoL, Fortnite, and other F2P microtransaction-riddled games without spending a dime, or by just spending trivial amounts (less than $30 in a 5-year span).
Back then, we had expansions.. Also, pre-internet days, micro transactions came in the form of secret stuff locked behind passcodes that were only published in magazines or super expensive official guides, which as a kid, you could only dream of having as a birthday present or so.
DLCs, when done right, aren't the worst. Like others have said, it's just expansion packs rebranded. The memes about selling you the rest of the game after releasing it was funny. It's wild how people used to be up in arms about is what the norm is now.
What I entirely missed the train on is the GaaS/season pass nonsense. I can't wrap my mind around it.
[Warning: Is 3 comments long]
[Tldr: I'm too experienced and jaded to be the industry's target ez-prey dolla-dolla demographic, but trying to be hopeful]
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It was first expansions that you could buy. Like add-ons to the game that added content. You'd buy them in a store and have to install them separately over/in the original game.
Then they were served over the internet and would just install themselves.
Then there were patches and stuff.
Then... Those started to sort of blur together. Different companies would give them to you for free, others would charge you for it. Most pc titles only charged you for the big additions, and PlayStation stuff was also largely free services. But Microsoft on xbox was like lolno u gota pay. And everybody followed suit.
And now you pay for the game, the expansion, skins, save slots, storage space for items, quality of life fixes, new audio, etc.
And now it is the sole purpose of the "game" studios, the worst thing to happen:
"Games As A Service"
You pay for everything and the game is designed around selling stuff. It's not fun, it's bad quality, it's expensive, and it's just the way things are now for everything except small foreign indie studios.
Specifically those things together. Small AND Foreign AND indie. I was looking at what games I actually liked playing in the past ten or so years, and almost every single one was a small studio, in Scandinavia or croatia or Asia, and was an independent studio. I was SHOCKED.
I get that games in the 80s and 90s (I'm only 33 but I know my history, I started gaming in the late 90s) used to cost 60-70$ and have gone DOWN in price despite massive and constant inflation. But instead of accounting for the real need for now cash to still develop games with the same scale, features, depth, and quality by just increasing the price, they've chosen to itemize the price behind the lie of a free trial of an intentionally limited and frustrating "game" full of mechanisms to coerce you to constantly spend money.
I've worked in construction, and this is the same unethical behavior a lot of contractors do. They start out with a low price, and "find" problems that you're basically forced to do change orders on. It's super predatory and deeply unethical, and the same thing that the game industry is ALL moving towards.
I really wish studios would just come out and say "this is how much the game costs us to build if you want lv 1 quality, this for lv 2, and this for lv 3. This is how much we forecast it will cost you players for each level." And just try to gague interest and make the best possible game possible within some forecasts, with maybe ranges of price with the final price being different at the end. I know that's probably too much to ask, but GaaS is soooo, so frustrating.
I love gaming. I played, in their eras, a lot of the greatest games of all time. And NONE of them felt like you were ripped off. Not even for the mediocre titles. And it feels like the scopes of games now are just taking a decent minigame from some masterpiece game of the past, adding in some extra features, polishing it up a bit, selling it at full price, then selling extra bits piecemeal to try to make even more money. Like, bro, that was a MINIgame in ff8! You didn't even have to play it, it was just there if you needed a break from the rest of the game!
Also, I love great graphics. I love tech and think a lot of the technical progress we've made in the past decade has been really cool....
But I just don't give a shit about any of it if the game sucks. The other day, my brother in law bought the group of us this weird Japanese game, made in 2019 but looked like it was made in 2001 called Earth Defense Force 5. It has some technical issues and honestly looks embarrassingly bad. But - it's FUN! It's a bit limited in scope for a full price game, but it's ACTUALLY fun.
Contrary to that, we bought diablo4. I liked Diablo 3, especially after they added a ton of lategame stuff after the expansion, it is honestly a super good game. Diablo has always been a fairly small scope, somewhat casually playable party game - it has never been a long dramatic epic, that's just not what it is, it's a fun game that you play with your friends and grind out new gear. D3 was colorful, goofy, adventurous, and felt good (only after the expansion).
But d4.... is both literally and metaphorically brown. It isn't colorful, it's built around a micro transaction shop and basically a quarterly subscription meant to draw you in and keep paying. There's a reason I didn't play world of warcraft - I thought it was overpriced and grindy, meant to slow your progress to make you play longer.
Compare that to guild wars.. you buy the game.... And that's it. An mmo that you just play when you feel, no subscription. They sell expansions every few years and have a cash shop, but most of the things are silly skins or hats or musical instruments. You aren't SUPPOSED to buy them all, they're just there to further support the studio if you want. (There's the bag limitations, but I forgive that for all the other positives).
Things have changed. I don't buy AAA games basically ever since basically the ps2 era. I'm always watching and waiting though. I remain hopeful, watching dunkey and total biscuit before he died, and zero punctuation, and a few others. But, very few things made me want to buy them, and none have motivated me to do so on consoles. I think PC is superior in every way, but I love consoles and have been looking for an excuse to buy the new PlayStation now for a LONG time. The dualsense almost made me do it, but the games were just so MEHHHH and derivative, and I just bought the controller and use it on pc anyway. It's a bit dumbly designed, and is somehow inferior to a lot of the previous controllers, I really think the ps2 was peak controllers minus the long throw L/R2 triggers. Did you know that the buttons on the PlayStations in that era were analog? The BUTTONS. It would know how hard you were pushing them and the GTAs of that era used them for throttle. They didn't have to do that! But, xbox was all shitty stolen design and super cheap and nicked and dimed at every chance they could, even forcing developers that WANTED to give free content to sell it so as to not set a precedent (ex: valve l4d map packs).
So, to try to close this book of a post out, yes, there have been changes to what games I buy and play. I am a hell of a critic, a cynic, and am sad and depressed games are like this now. I'm aware of how it all happened, but I'm no happier for it. I miss super integrous critics that would outright fail games for good reasons and act constructively to everybody's benefit, and how they were super influential and gamers world actually listen to them.
But now, instead of word of mouth "play this it's fun", or somebody showing me a game every few months and it looks awesome...
Instead of those ways, I hear that trailers for a game have come out, watch it, and I'm either immediately deflated and disappointed, I've got red flags shooting up that just end up being true, or I'm entirely not interested in another fad battle royale early access game.
Now, I do the thing for streaming series and movies:
Don't buy into hype. Ever. Just don't. Don't play anything new. It's all shitty and it's always broken. And don't play anything that doesn't look and review and gameplay and has real, organic lasting feedback unless it's a few years old and people are STILL playing it. It's the "if it's good, it'll stick around" test. Let it get fixed. Let it get patched. Let the suckers waste their time. It'll be around in the future no matter what. And if it's good, it'll still be good later. I know this isn't the best for the studios, but they need to stop making fucking bad games with bad business models. I do absolutely buy full price games if i actually think they're good. If you, publishers, want to milk all the suckers and people that can't help themselves, I don't like it but I can't do anything about it, but you won't see a cent from me. D4 being GaaS and ultra brown and me buying it was a calculated mistake. I was sure that Blizzard wouldn't fuck it up, but they did. I'm also sure that they'll fix it. So we'll see.
To the person who initially posted this: I want to know how old you are, what your history and experience is in gaming, and why you even care or want to hear what bitter old gamers have to say. Assuming you're gen z or alpha, or at least younger than me, the fact that you asked this leads me to believe you've either noticed the old gamers complaining ISN'T totally unsubstantiated, or are curious. Well, I'm curious, too. I want to know from the people that DO buy and HAVE BEEN buying AAA games, why you do that? I want to know if it's just me, or what about me and my experience makes me not see these games as fun or valuable? Are they really as mindless as I've found on my own? Or is there something I'm missing in my bitterness? Do I know too much and have played too many good games? Or have I created masterpieces out of nostalgic memories? Why can't I find newer games fun? Am I unable to be developed for? Or am I just not worth as much? What's the deal? Where are the games I want to play?
There's literally no WAY that I'm a small democratic of untapped low-prioritized gamers. Do people in my experience group just whine too much and expect too much? Because we're probably very much willing to pay. If ff7 remake were actually good, released all at once, and was 500$ for the FULL game that succeeded the fun that we had while he playing the original, there would be obvious questions, but TONS of people would still buy it. Video cards in 2000 cost like 250$ high end, and ff7 was 50&, about 1/5th the price. High end videocards now are 2000 and 1/5th is about 400$, so not super far off, really. Sure, wages and cost of living are FUCKED up right now, but it's the same for everybody, including developers. Just, you need more developers for longer, now, since it takes more people longer to do the same amount of playable content. It doesn't HAVE to, but we all want fancy new graphics and mocap and studio recorded and mastered orchestra and shaders and complex sound programming and layered animations and all the other complexity it takes. Why not just pay more, all at once, and have games be ACTUALLY good?
Apparently because you make more money on addicting kids to micro transactions than you do being fucking responsible.
Once again, unethical business practices doing the same shit are to blame. And WHY do they do that? Because stockholders and corporations dictate maximization of profit and not what's good for the workers or the consumers. It ALWAYS comes down to this. Always. And us old fucks know it and don't support it and do our best to educate the ignorant. We say "don't do that" and "that's bad" and "it used to be better" and "go play this old game so that you'll know better". But unfortunately, graphics and dopamine farms far outweigh smelly old, paced games with some old technical flaws, and unless played fully, can't even draw an audience when compared to the dopamine fix and the invigorating outrage and frustration you get from playing CoD16: Black Hawks 5 - BloodTide deathmatch in 8k HDR @120fps vsync on a 70 inch oled on the brand new console. So cooooooool~ "Hold up, just gotta buy my season pass, the dungeon key, renew my sub, buy this 40$ emote dance that's super funny, and this skin. Yeaaah, 70$ for a Zelda game is a bit much for a game though, nobody's gunna buy that.."
<---- translated to Nintendo-eese: "Hi, we either want more microtransactions instead of paying $10 more for the game, or we want the game to be a little shittier in every way... and ALSO microtransactions."
I've come around to it Expansion pack tier DLC like From put out are fine, we had those before the horse armour. Working in development now, I can see the crazy costs in any content creation. Well managed games can create ongoing funding streams that let the games reach their full potential that software as a discrete product can't without the most permissive publisher backing. For me they need to take the approach of, "we're trying to get people to pay out of a sense of gratitude rather than obligation" to make me want to spend though, I typically won't even think about it unless I've gotten a couple of dozen hours of entertainment out of them already and want to see them continue. It's a high risk model though as most people probably only have room for 1-3 live service style games in their life and no one really wants to be hanging around the also rans. I mostly play PoE, Genshin, and MTGA (lapsed) for context, and have spent several hundred at least on each of them. Feels very worth for the entertainment I've gotten out of each of them, but I could have in theory played any of them f2p.
I find it shapes how I choose games. I like to be a completionist. I choose not to play games that have tons of dlc that is part of the core game.
Examples: I skipped out on the new soul calibur. Unlocks are a huge part of the appeal of mastering tourney games.
I skipped out on Stellaris and don't really play cities and skylines. It feels incomplete when you play it.
I do play some games and buy dlc because the xpacs feel like it's renewing and changing the game: Xenoblade 2, sims 4 (actual xpacs), crusader kings, grim dawn
And some games I'm just lucky enough that the devs just keep giving me thousands of hours of work for free: terraria, Stardew, Starbound, Subnautica, monster sanctuary, anything by larian studios, etc
I love it when a game is well thought out and complete but I wholeheartedly understand the need for patches and dlc to extend sales of an IP for the stability of small gaming companies.
I used to experience FOMO over games in general. There was always some kind of technical advance to marvel at. But that ended in the past decade. Some of it because age, but also because my approach to games changed: it wasn't that important to see more content, especially when the content was getting relatively less risky and more predictable in most cases, the same kind of "put 3D people in a scene and animate them kind of poorly with bad movie dialogue" stuff over and over.
So I tend to pick up games after there's a lot of DLC and get the bundle depending on what it adds. The microtransactions are an "almost never", at most they're another obstacle to gameplay and I'll go find something else if it's too much.
The correct microtransaction for me is how pinball works: I play to see how much I can get out of one credit. If I meet the conditions to get a free credit I may play again, or consider that a win and walk away.
Unfathomably annoying, especially when it comes to modding games. The amount of times I've had mods or settings break because of some update that added useless content that I don't want is honestly disgusting. For the most part, I've stopped buying games near their release date because I'd rather buy the game when it's more feature-complete. The DLC scenario has become an issue in that it effectively translates to, "You will not get the game's content in it's entirety upon purchase", which is unthinkable in other scenarios.
Imagine going to a restaurant and paying the price of a meal just to be seated. If you want appetizers like chips and salsa, it costs $9.99 per bowl. Drinks (including water) are $5.99. Both for the appetizers and for the meal, you pay the waiter first, sides are $2.50 extra. After purchase, they'll give you an estimated wait time for your food, which may be delayed for any reason or cancelled altogether, even though you've already paid for it. The food comes out but it's not what you ordered, the meat is undercooked, the portions are significantly smaller than advertised, or it's actually a different dish altogether. You attempt to complain to the waiter, wanting to get the food you promised. The waiter tells you "Thanks for the feedback!" and leaves, never to be seen again. You hear grumblings from others around you that they're having the same problems. What they ordered is not what they got, or something hasn't been made properly. One guy waited all evening before they finally delivered enough food, piece-by-piece, to make up the meal he ordered. Eventually, after enough people have complained, the waiter comes back and gives everyone silverware. Nothing changes about anyone's meals, but you now have silverware (even though you likely already had some before).
You leave the restaurant, annoyed, with less money, and still hungry. You later find a social media post from the restaurant's cook complaining that their customers are self-entitled and are "expecting too much".
TL;DR - Its like fast food, but without the "fast".
... Or the "food"...
The rough equivalent to large DLC existed way back before one downloaded content -- one just got the sequel.
The line between that and the later expansion packs was kind of fuzzy, in that a sequel and an expansion pack could be pretty close in size.
Also, it used to be very common, on the PC, to put out a demo to try a game. Today, that's less common. I suppose to some extent the free-to-play+microtransactions model is just a logical extension of that.
I don't really think that the change has altered how I play much. I didn't get small DLC then, and I haven't played games where I would now, though I've no fundamental objection to them. Just haven't run into a game I've played where what's on offer is really what I want.
I'd be willing to buy more radio stations for Fallout 4 and similar games. Would like more music for Solaris too. When you play a game for a long period of time, the existing stuff gets a bit old, and both shipped with good soundtracks. But for whatever reason, game studios never seem to sell "audio expansion packs" and just leave that up to modders.
EDIT: I guess rhythm games probably sell audio expansion packs, but I'm not super-into the genre.
EDIT2: I have picked up DLC that's smaller than expansion packs necessarily were, on further reflection. Paradox makes a lot of games with DLC that wouldn't constitute an expansion, for example. Rimworld's DLC wouldn't be an expansion.
But the extreme a la carte "buy an outfit" thing or "buy a character" or similar just never seemed to have anything that I liked.
That is to say, I basically just didn't. Sometimes I'll grab a DLC that adds something I particularly want but usually I play the game first and then it's a waste because I don't actually go back through to play the DLC stuff :| :-\ And microtransactions... ugh. So often they're not micro, and never are they actually independent of the game itself when they have any mechanical effect. It's never "Here's the game, but if you wanna skip a bit you can pay for that" but rather "Here's the game, slowed down by 30%. If you want that 30% back then pay up!" Gross. Fair cosmetics (that is, it's still possible to play the dressup minigame without paying (/more) for it) to support an indie or free-to-play thing are fair, though, I think.
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