Greedy Publishers Have Won And Normalized Paying To Play Early
Greedy Publishers Have Won And Normalized Paying To Play Early
Paying to access a game like Assassin's Creed Shadows three days early is now just standard practice
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.
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.
I'll grab early access for either a new studio or a studio with a history of taking their early access to full completion so that there can be more options, but not for IP that's in the hands of mega studios/ones with a long history or ones with a history of giving up on previous early access projects.
I got Valheim, Rust, and Raft all early access and I've thoroughly enjoyed them as well as seeing how they have been developed since I don't know much about game dev and it's interesting to me. Kinda like watching plants grow.
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.
The average person is fucking stupid, and half of the population is stupider than that. It's why gatekeeping is good, it's why popularity is bad, it's why the hipsters were right.
Start being patient gamers. The games from five years ago aren’t far behind the games of today gameplay and graphic-wise and usually are a fifth or less of the price of a new game.
Often too they’ve removed shit like crappy DRM and fixed problems that existed on day one.
I just finished another playthrough of Psychonauts 2 (an actual masterpiece of video gaming) yesterday. If you want an amazing story about loss and acceptance, coping and healing, this is the one for anyone. It has excellent tight gameplay mechanics, the music is amazing, the writing is awesome, the designs are fresh... It's just everything a sequel/video game should be.
It's installing as we speak. I finally picked it up during the Steam sale, and I'll be playing through it with my kids before their school starts again in a month or so. They watched me play through the first one just before Psychonauts 2 launched (timing wasn't planned), and now I'm ready to jump back in.
This is so true. I had to learn to be patient with games a long time ago. It saved me a ton of headache with the Helldivers 2 fiasco. I'm still a little sad about it, it looked like a great game. Too bad Sony came out and solidified themselves as a company I won't do business with...
If a game was fun on day one, it will be fun on day one thousand. If it's not, your only interest was in graphical wow.
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.
Yup, just say no. Join us at !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works.
FOMO is death anxiety, the light that illuminates all consciousness
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 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.
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
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.
I've been playing Stalker Gamma for the last couple of weeks and am blown away by the quality.
Utterly free and very very configurable.