My personal approach to what I call 'pleasure buys' (ie. things I want but don't need) is to wait 3 days after seeing the thing. If after that time it's still on my mind, then and only then do I even consider buying that thing. It is *EXTREMELY* rare that I buy something more than $10 on impulse. Even with small, inconsequential things like candy and soda. I've made the decision to not let myself get used to buying _anything_ without sitting on it for at least a little while, all to keep me from overspending and falling into this corporate trap that is so prevalent in video games (and beyond) these days.
Also a good idea to only buy things you can potentially return or refund. Preorders are easy to cancel. In-game you can apply for refunds but you will get banned, but chances are if you're doing it you don't want to continue playing
My wife and I use a similar technique in our personal purchases - "Let's think about it...", which generally means - "Let's not buy it, in a few days we will forget it."
Born in 95, grown up with cod 4/5 and mw2 as my first multiplayer games ever and simultaneously playing wow for the first time in wotlk - best time ever. I miss this kind of playing games so much, just simple, straight to the point. If you were good, you were good. If you were bad, you were bad. And thats it.
Cod 4 and mw2 where amazing you brought back some good memories I remember when we could play a game then stop playing for a month and not lose out on a battle pass or event items or monthly available purchases able items that dissappear if you don't that's why I don't play multiplayer shooter games anymore I'm expected to play every day to get a challenge completed for the battle pass that I paid for or I lose my money
Now you have lucksacks and payers telling you "skill issue" in Genshin Impact because they meet the DPS checks in the Abyss with either extremely luckily rolled artifacts with double the damage stats as your best one or 5star weapons. Genshin is like a refuge of failed raiders, low ELO MOBA players, and "can't progress in monhun because too hard" people pretending like that optional side content in Genshin built to be a playground for whales to see big numbers with their OP 5star characters and their personal 5star weapons is the Dark Souls of gaming and they are truly the "elite" equal to Challenger players and mythic+ raiders...
Imagine if a grocery store did this. No one buys anything in our store, they purchase "buyer tokens" outside, and than once inside they transfer those into "grocery bucks."
But the free cart only holds 52oz. You can buy the use of a full size cart for an additional fee. I also recommend the item booster, it makes every item a lootbox so you dont know whats inside, could be cereal or chopped liver, or both! In a hurry? Theres the Xp skipper (express payment skipper) available for 1408 grocery bucks that lets you cut in front of others to get to the front of the line, cut off your fellow human today!
Next Predatory moves: > Charge per bullet (EA) > Buy special ammunition (WoT) > Pay per Respawn (Early Warframe/GW2) > Buy Raid extra continues. > Charge .25cents per 10m of gameplay.
Without giving Maple Story too much credit here, while explaining the Maple Story problem the narrator even said "while investors..." So if we really want to track the source of the problem here, its when game companies turn to be publicly traded and need positive stonks year after year. Pushing more and more devs to go for the Fifa model because people are stupid. Maple Story was merely the vessel to which stocks could always go up while product quality goes down. In the early days people didn't make shitty games because no one wanted to play shitty games. The devs were making games as passion projects. Doom, Unreal Tournament, Quake, Starcraft, Halo.. literal classics. When the devs lost passion about their projects, thats when their games went down hill in quality and to make up for that they just add more and more monetization just doubling down on the horrible bullshit. For profit soulless games will always be garbage.
"In the early days people didn't make shitty games" You're 12 years old confirmed. There were thousands of terrible games back then. What an actual smoothbrain.
@@johansermartinez9287 you clearly missed the point and lack reading skills. He was saying the devs USED to be the people in charge. Investors and the people the investors want running these companies are now in charge. You gotta try better than that. (inb4 delusional non-argument reply)
I want to thank Asmongold for helping me overcome gacha addiction. Simply just reminding me how stupid these purchases are makes me doubletake my buying decisions, and allow me to sit on them for a while before ultimately deciding it's not worth it.
Or play gatcha games like Azur Lane which don't make you feel like you have to purchase something. But these two are the exception not the rule when it comes to gatcha's.
Yeah listening to Asmon really helps. I was also helped along by a friend who taught me this - "sleep on it". Just sleep on your decisions including Gacha limited-time sales. Just one good sleep and a day of work would wake you from the fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) irrational mindset. You have better places to spend your hard-earned income. As a reply here also mentioned, Steam Sales are awesome. I've been able to try out all these games I've missed out at -80% prices - FPSes, turn-based strategy, action-adventure, open world - the variety is stunning and I'm getting many hours' worth of joy. I won't be able to get the same amount of joy from that new SSR unit in my phone game, which depreciates in value from guaranteed power creep.
I'm so grateful to have grown up in the NES/SNES era so I have no issues going back to those games and enjoying them for the complete artistic masterpieces that they are. And I will always support indie developers who share that same passion and gamer first mentality which has given us such gems as Shovel Knight, Hollow Knight, Celeste, Blasphemous etc.
I might have written this comment myself. I have to imagine you grew up with megaman, metroid and casylevania and Kirby like me. All of those 2d sides rollers are fucking gems and always will be
I didn't grow up in that era, as I've grown during the 360 and PS3, but I still feel this. Even if I don't use it anymore, I'll always love my old 360, even though it's disc tray broke years ago.
Honestly what went wrong with gaming is gamers. I remember when gaming was niche as hell, and MMOS were a niche within a niche. The air was different, the community was small but very tightly knit. They stood up to game companies together anytime someone even breathed thoughts of p2w elements it was a cardinal sin for them to even think about adding p2w adjacent features. With the influx of "modern gamers" and the integration of predatory eastern gaming monetization into western games there is now a majority of people who could care less about standing up for themselves or for gaming as an artform, they now speak of how "p2w" a game is instead of if its p2w or not. A bunch of cucks eating up whatever generic slop these companies serve to them, even though the game dev companies are literally hiring psychiatrists to make games as addicting as possible to avoid having to make a good game. New gamers are overly complacent, they will make excuse after excuse for a bad game because they have invested into it already, want instant gratification and are completely fine with a company using them like a fleshlite as long as they can comment their obligatory "well, im having fun".. this is some advanced digital cuckholdry shit and they should be ashamed but as cucks they lack that ability.
The fact that you make so many references to your mom is heart warming. I had a brilliant relationship with my mom; not necessarily out of a shared interest like you, but nevertheless a great relationship. In addition, the fact that you speak openly about it makes it all the better. 👊🏻
Nah, it's only him. Bro don't have a nice relationship with his family, so it's unable to see any kind of love for your parents in any way other than sexual @@yeasure.7875
@@yeasure.7875 it's not just this generation, it's just immature people who have to be edgy the moment they sense vulnerability or heartfelt sincerity.
59:15 „these have not been added to make the game better, they‘ve been added to make the game money.“ sums up game development, well, life in 2022 perfectly…
I played Facebook games. I played Farmville. The name of the game was free gaming. How far can you get before you run into the pay wall. How comfortable is it to scrape against it until you get around it. If you couldn't get around it go play something else. There was a massive pool of Facebook games. I never gave them a dime. I had a 400 person friend list just to play these games. I played mafia wars too.
Son original MapleStory was the best leveling experience I have ever had in an MMO EVER. every 10 levels felt like and entirely new game without getting to complicated. Back tracking and throwing down 35k down in hennessy on the orange mushrooms was the most fulfilling.
The sad part about the bit about the people being responsible is that they had the odd stacked against them. Predatory practices. Imagine kids being told not to talk to strangers, especially ones that offer candy for a ride in their white van. The problem was, the predator(gaming companies) and the candy(loot boxes/gacha system) and the white van(battle pass system) came before the warning that no, these people should not be trusted, do not take the candy, do not ride the white van. So many were tempted by the candy. By the time people realized how dangerous the predators were. It was too late. It had taken root and was earning money. By the time people sounded the alarm and started speaking out, a formula for getting people addicted was made and written down. yes, to a certain extent people can be blamed for making the purchases, but its kinda hard to have expected them to say no. I mean, as Asmongold had said, most of the buyers were kids who didn't care enough about the purchases. The only reason people became aware was that some had started to become mature. Some earlier than others.
@@zyubat you insulting me based on a comment thread from a video 4 days ago is the biggest compliment you could ever give me. I’m glad I live in your head rent free because I called Tate an incel.
Asmongold, that story about your fan interaction in the grocery store is the gold standard for how to act. You probably made that dudes day. Good on you
When PC games started finally getting good for me was when I got Command and Conquer for Christmas in like 96 or 97. I had an old Packard Bell computer with Win 95 on it. I thought the cut scenes were absolutely amazing. Also it being the early days of RTS and just coming off playing Dune 2 on Sega Genesis made it even sweeter. The fact that you could control multiple characters in a game, build a base, and build armies was revolutionary for the time.
@@Snowsc-fg3sn there were plenty of garbage games back then not just on PC true, but that doesn't mean that PC gaming of that era was bad, so I can agree. We had plenty of great games, I won't repeat the same ones you listed, but, C&C Red Alert 1&2 (All the other C&C games) Age of Empires collection, Warcraft 2, 3, Frozen Throne expan., Duke Nukem 1&2, Xargon, Doom 1&2. But Asmon is correct these are all games that you get as a finished product with little to no updating.
What went wrong? Big business. Big business doesn't want innovation in an industry, it wants to drag it out as long as possible so it can milk it at every stage. That's why it hates games like BG3. It's too innovative, too inspiring. It also doesn't want the risk of innovating, it wants guaranteed returns for investors. It wants to pump out tried and true, formulaic, cookie cutter replicas of past products. It doesn't care if you hate the product after a short time, as long as you spent money on it. Then it can just pump the hype train for the next shitty product, and rinse and repeat. The same thing happened in the music industry. We need more BG3's. We need more products that push the envelope, break the mold, show us what we've been missing and inspire others to. "Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see." - Arthur Schopenhauer
The problem is with the consumers that keep spending money on clear predatory monetization, which incentivizes companies to make more and more predatory monetization methods. It wouldn't be such a problem if people didn't consume it. More often than not lazy games that are predatory end up getting more money than masterpieces that have no monetization.
The self control to say, "yknow what? I don't actually need this" deteriorates everyday but I hope ppl can stay strong in the face of disrespectful games.
Well, that's why it's called "predatory". It's constructed in a way to subtly put pressure and force you to pay even if you have no intention to. And those tricks are clearly effective, considering even people fully aware of them and with their guard up being tempted time to time. Imagine how it is for majority of people who are clueless about all this monetization and far lees passionate about games. There should be some personal responisibility, but currently monetisation got so invasive and powerful that it places disproportionate amount of pressure on personal responicibility. It's like having a huge pit in the middle of the road and only a narrow plank to cross it. Maybe we should do something about the pit instead of blaming the people that fall into it?
@@ashero2092 "Imagine how it is for majority of people who are clueless about all this monetization and far lees passionate about games." -- For real, I always thought it was so obvious, honestly, I can't even comprehend how it's possible for some people to be clueless about this. I just can't.
oh man, some of the absolute best memories I have in gaming were around the time where I only played maplestory and runescape all day. My god just the pure ecstacy of joining the unknown world and becoming the best out of your friends and having the coolest stuff, exploring and flexing together was just the purest fun of my life.
When me and my friends played maplestory almost 20 years ago, we didn't touch the pay elements once and it was still one of the best games out there. I feel like it gets a lot of slack for being that gacha game but coming home after school to hang out with friends and exploring over leveled zones was so much fun :)
yea MapleStory was a good game. The community, the grinding, the PartyQuests, boss raids, guilds etc were real and extremely fun without having to pay a single penny. It was quite WoW in cute 2D graphics.
You’d think once these company ceos got rich and comfortable they’d be happy with that and then just work on making good games. A lot of them were just normal people who made a good game and now they’re rich. There must be another influence for all these normal people to all the sudden want billions instead of millions. A lot of them were gamers themselves. I don’t get it.
If the gaming is top tier, no one would complain about paying money to play. -For example arcade games, pay quarter to revive, continue but the game doesn’t get easier.
It's a nice feeling to tell someone "I told you so", but it's not that nice when the thing I was talking about for over a decade means one of my favorite hobbies got ruined. The sad part it, we're currently on the edge of another great fall of video games and people are just as stupid as they were. Microsoft wants to monopolize game sales but in the same time you're not going to buy or own any of your games. Only your corporate overlords from MS decide and you have to keep paying. What's the people's reaction? "Shut up, and take my money!" Again... I remember when I was younger and I wished people didn't have to wait untill they make a mistake to learn, but today I'd wish they learned a lesson at all.
This is exactly why there has been a rise in the Indy gaming space. AAA might be getting worse, but, there is no shortage of great Indy games out there.
Not only is this fall going to happen for all of the same reasons that it did in 1982, but now even MORE reasons are making it happen as well, needlessly excessive, and needlessly existing, downloadable content, a lack of proper bug checking, lots of loot crate/loot box/gacha/pass/subscription nonsense, games literally being halfway done, the whole greed of both sides of the SAG-AFTRA strike, and other related organizations (yes, that also affects video games as well, including many indie video game studios), needless mergers, as well as some unavoidable reasons that are literally beyond the abilities of almost anyone in this situation to affect, i.e. disasters, war, overall economic downturns, etc.
I was always under the impression that the fake ingame currencies were a work-around against some kind of illegality. I think I remember watching a video explaining that casinos don't allow people to wager real money on gambling as it's against the law, so they sell chips as a "service", and then there's no laws about what people do with the chips. I figured microtransactions followed that same path.
There is truth to that, but it also works with confusing the players themselves. Because almost nobody would pay the raw amounts of certain cosmetics, but if it's connected to "luck" ?? Uhhh just one more try... ok one more.. ah i need 100 silver for another box... but only have 90 left (how weird) so im only spending money for 10 silver right? But the packs come in 300 silver ect. And to use the silver, you first have to exchange the tokens you get from xyz, and so on, further blurring the actual price of things..
Its less about real money gambling being illegal and more of the fact that people forget the chips are money in their brains while playing which makes them risk and spend more.
I always thought it was pretty ironic that my ti-83 calculator, the ultimate mathematical tool capable of solving all of the math, was the direct reason for my not understanding math. Drug Wars, Baseball, and Tetris I remember wreaking particular havoc on my GPA as the graphing calculator started to find use in my other classes as well. So much fun. So much getting yelled at by my parents.
We ruined video games by continuing to give these companies our money and not holding the dev studios accountable when they don't deliver on advertisements, promises, or take advantage of consumers. Stop buying crap and they'll eventually go away or stop...
@@tripninick8597 now this is also why we have MTX, why make premium games that people can pirate when you can just make F2P game with microtransaction instead?
@@tripninick8597 You should blame the drug users. I got nothing against the dealers. The users are always the problem. They have all the money, and money talks. They decide the direction things go, and they have made their wishes clear. I despise the consumers more than the greedy devs. They ruined gaming, not a few sleazy salesmen.
@@exodore2000 My dad had an Amiga. I remember he used to groan whenever I asked him to install The Perfect General because it always took over an hour. Wizkid, Pirates, Reel Fishing, so many amazing games from that era.
I have never spent money on a single micro-transaction. They tick the same boxes in my mind that gambling does and I have never been a gambler. When I was little I saw those little coin-op toy machines, saw on the little display sheet what I wanted, put the coin in, did not get what I wanted, and immediately thought "Well that was a waste of money." and never looked back. My first reaction was not "It didn't give me what I wanted, I had better try again." It was "It didn't give me what I wanted, this is unreliable, fuck this." This sort of thinking colors a lot of my consumer habits.
You are like 99% there man. If you would only stop calling yourself a "consumer" and fix that to "customer". Remember, you're not a human "resource", you're an employee. Don't let them dehumanize you.
@@fu102what? Consumer and customer have definitions lmao. If I sell you a lemon directly, you are my customer. If I sell my lemon to the store and you buy the lemon from said store, you are my consumer, not my customer. The word has nothing to do with "dehumanization". It's accurate in the business world. Your Steam's customer, your the developers consumer.
The golden era of online PC gaming, 1998-2005, is unmatched to this day. Finished, groundbreaking titles that you couldn’t find anywhere else but on a computer: Starsiege Tribes, Medal of Honor Allied Assault, Warcraft 3, Counter-Strike: Source, Wolfenstein, Vanilla WoW, Soldier of Fortune, Team Fortress, Quake 2 & 3, OG Call of Duty, Command & Conquer, StarCraft, etc etc. If you made the switch, you wernt going back unless it was something exclusive like Halo, Zelda, Mario, etc.
I want to see the timeline of the cometic armor for the horse versus the cosmetic armor for SWTOR for the hut cartel. The hut cartel brought in cartel coins that you start buying the cosmetic items.
I miss the old wizardry series and dnd pc games. I remember playing neverwinter nights for years. Had a blast making my own games (mods) and playing with others with what I made.
Gatcha-pon is actually something they have as physical items for kids over in Asia. Its been like that for decades. Not arguing it's not gambling but that "chance" style of earning something has been a part of their culture for a long time.
To be fair, we had physical toy gatchas in europe too. I can't speak for every european country but they definitely had them in France since at least the 2000s, I used to stare at them everytime my parents took me grocery shopping because the big supermarkets had a bunch of gacha machines at the tills.
Bruh, America had all of these things decades ago too, they just weren't called "gatcha". Every grocery store, restaurant, and arcade had toy, sticker, and candy dispensers for quarters.
Yes. I grew up with such machines and always begged my grandma to hand me a dollar for each turn. We call them Tikam Machines in my country. I still get tempted by them from time to time but I've managed to refrain from buying anything so far in my adult life.
I think that they should just pass a law that aggressively taxes game companies on the money they make from transactions after the initial game purchase or past a specific amount. That will encourage game companies to try to get more people to buy their game rather than get a small amount of people to spend a life-ruining amount of money on it.
unless the "tax" is around 100%, this won't prevent the game devs from monetizing their games. maybe they'd have to be more strategic but overall they still make money per purchase whether its 99 cents, 4 dollars, or 40 dollars
Just abuse anyone you know who spends money on micro transactions. Mock them incessantly. Gamers didn't gatekeep their hobby, and now the hobby is awful
Except then you kill so many popular long running games like that like path of exile or league of legends which is completely free to play beyond microtransactions. Those get daily updates from massive multimillion dollar teams working on them and new content every few weeks, initial sale? 0$ because its literally free so ALL of their earnings will now be taxed?? They're not going to update the game anymore and they'll just split off into making $60 low effort games again since the only real money they can make is on initial purchase when the government "aggressively taxes" the rest... As predatory as microtransactions CAN be, they're also absolutely still amazing allowing people to play games for free and essentially just tip the developers they like the longer players stick to playing their games. You're not going to buy microtransactions unless you're regularly enjoying the game and as long as you're just buying cosmetics that don't affect gameplay nor give people any real head start or benefit, then what's the issue exactly? What would you tell all the LoL and PoE players? "ohh well, just play console games now that we essentially banned those companies from being able to earn any money after the initial game release...", plus you'd also be complaining about how the government is unfairly taxing gaming companies by 90% of their income. Paying $60 just to try a console game is a horrible business plan for everyone, making the games free and allowing people to pay what they want to pay and what they can afford ensures everyone can enjoy the game completely for free and they can essentially tip the developers and help fund more content if the player CHOOSES to do so, no one is forced to buy microtransactions... There are some predatory microtransaction based game out there but why ruin the entire gaming industry just for a handful of bad apples? Microtransactions are the future and you can easily just force gaming companies to show the actual odds of the lootboxes they sell like "Hey, if you open this chest you can get this super rare knife skin but the odds are also one in a trillion chance so no one is really gonna get it no matter how many chests they buy", that would fix most of the exploitation when what you're doing is essentially gambling with lootboxes and they're forced to tell you the odds unlike casinos which can just freely rig everything.
Ok, this reminds me of the kpop industry and how they explore the buy without knowing what you are getting thing - every album from a kpop group comes with a certain member's special card/poster. But you don't know which member you re going to get, meaning, there are fans buying hundreds of albums just to get that one special member they cherish (companies also make certain cards/posters harder to obtain, allegedly the most famous ones). Wicked...
As a kpop stan i can verify. It is indeed just gambling but for photocards. I used to be hooked. Spent hundreds just to get my fav member. I coulda just bought the cards individually from resellers but not knowing my pulls was too enticing
47:00 What you have to remember about the OG gameshark is that it actually wasn't developed by any dev as a pay to win solution too their own game. It was a tool developed by 3rd partys that basically allowed you to hack your games. So it's not like devs were selling the pay 2 win solution too their own games like they do today.
Fix is simple, people got to stop spending money on bad games designed just to rake in huge money year after year. But people won't. People could have collectively not spent any money on Diablo Immortal but they spent tons, justifying its existence and rewarding this behavior. That's the problem in gaming, people aren't going to stop rewarding the shitty developer behavior so it will keep happening and keep getting progressively worse.
people are having fun playing the games, the practices are unethical but not illegal... thats just capitalism and the market economy at work. so......... that's that. I personally would never pay stupid amounts of money on paywall things, but millions of people are! their loss (or not, depending how you look at it).
Color me guilty I just downloaded rdr2 on my pc after already having it on Xbox. Love the game.. but not enough to play it without buying some gold right away.
@@johnd3124 So what that it's not illegal? It's immoral, just like the corrupt politicians that support this type of predatory behaviour mostly targeting children.
Not only devs bro, the corporates trash are behind this, u wouldn't believe, true is they also hire psychologist and other pro to keep us addicted, devs are only like soldiers
Ban DLC and cash grabs and watch them either happen, or see the entire video game industry implode worse than it did in 1982. Hopefully, the industry will come back, though. The blister needs to be popped and the balloon must burst.
Yes this is why I was excited for the direction that games were going, then all of a sudden the floor fell out and everything got tossed into the black hole that sucks money out of our wallets.
That's what I really like about the new wow expansion. It actually feels like they cared for a good experience again and not just about creating content that gains a lot of player hours because time spent on content equals to a good game for some people. One good experience was in a "battle pass" and I mean faction rep levels that resemble it a lot. It unlocks that people from that faction treat you nicely. When I read that I thought: "yeah... that's cool. why waasn't that here before? I can remember being called the hero of whatever in every cinematic, but everytime I cross those npcs over there I get some line about how they dislike me. cool idea." So it's not like they can't use those mechanics in a way that enhances the experience for players. It's just that they choose to instead prefer to make money with it.
They are plenty of ways to add transactions to games that I might agree with. But there are plenty of ways that they abuse this power as well, and that I don't agree with.
The bit about separating real world currency from game currency is really interesting because it mostly targets people who are functionally mentally handicapped. There was a study published in a journal of psychology which studied inmates in the American prison system and gauged their IQ and then asked some interesting questions. By and large, people in jail have very low IQs. Bellow 90 with a large portion of those being around 80. And they discovered something very interesting. They asked inmates to make up a story about 2 people which they name and each of those people have a line of dialogue. For instance: Mary and Joseph meet in a stable. Mary: I am pregnant. Joseph: Who's the father? Simple right? Well, for you and me, yes. But if you have an IQ around 90 you take your time, around 80 and you can't do it. Then they asked to tell a new story with 2 new characters talking about the original story. If you have an IQ around 90, you are completely lost by now. If you have an IQ of around 100, you can just about do it. And then they ask for a new story with yet 2 new characters talking about the previous 2 characters talking about the original story. If you are struggling with this, it is very likely your IQ is bellow 110. So when Diablo Immortal has like 3 different premium currencies, they are basically targeting everyone of average intelligence and below. It is the same principle. You basically stop being able to attribute real value to the in game currencies. If you are below average, you are even more screwed and you are likely unaware that there is a link between real world money and whatever currency you are buying with the other premium currency. And that is very interesting.
There is a second aspect to it that isn't mentioned in the video: Selling randomized lootboxes for real money is considered gambling in some countries and would be subject to rather strict regulations. The definition in the law specifically refers to sales where the buyers can't be sure of what they get for the money. Using an arbitrary ingame currency, especially one that the players can also get by playing (usually locked away behind insane ammounts of grind), bypasses those rules. The real money trade that the law regulates only concerns exact ammounts of gems/platin/whatever. Whatever happens with ingame currencies after that isn't covered by the law.
IQ does not matter that much. Even when a person can calculate the real cost he would rarely do that. The result btw will be mindblowing in most cases. I once calculated what i would need to spend to get a fighting chance in one of those common mobile "rpg"s and got totally blown. To barely compete i needed 5 legendary characters, legendary characters could be random summoned with a chance of 1/40 and the real world cost of a summon was about 3 USD so to barely compete one would need about 600 USD and that game was probably not the worst of them as you could grind over long enough time to get them without paying.
@@hamiller666yea Belgium had diablo immortal banned for lootboxes and gambling. I played it for about 2 hours and uninstalled it because you could immediatly see how bad it was in that aspect
The problem with mmo's and even most games made today is they make a game that is good enough to get you hooked, but frustrating enough to make you want to buy 'lootboxes'. Back in the day, Gaming devs would make games they themselves would want to play, but now those devs are leaving and now we have a new bunch of devs who only see working in gaming as a job rather than a passion.
to be fair unless its indie, most AAA studios are beholden to holding companies/shareholders, a la square enix, so unless its a indie studio or non invasive corporate, dev's are literally just the cogs in the machine bro, they literally have no say according to most of the crunch stories, plus the market saturating with so many ways to play (console/pc/mobile) and lack of proper quality control (sonic 06/boom/colors launch, cyberpunk launch, gta definitive launch) makes game development near impossible to be passion driven, case in point how modders/hackers have to save/conserve alot of these games, and do a much better job at it (super mario 64 decompilation vs 3d all stars collection)
That reminds me of an interview with bungie devs from this year and they talked about their motto at one point nad it literallly went from "we make games we want to play " to "we make experiences tha make friendships" they said it had some to do with racial exclusion and shit with making games for middle aged white dudes mf just say yall are ashamed and wouldn't wanna play your peoducts anymore💀
Pay to win also came from browser games!!! Way earlier than FB games. Around the same time as Maplestory was first out, the browser game market changed as well. From just simple strategic games like Travian or Tribal Wars (where all mobile games got their inspiration from). They were purely strategic at first, only had a QoL premium account thingy that added like tabs and queue’s. This changed after a few years when they added options where you just straight up bought progression in the form of ‘halving building times’. Stuff like that became rampant and now only a fraction of people still play these games. While they were soo fun at first! Anyhow; my point is that the pay to win aspects in games today started in this market as well.
depending on how you look at it... the most fun / disgusting thing about all of this... imagine all this money going straight to developers ...instead of the pockets of investors / shareholders / management
The devs of clicker heroes had a cash shop for gems to use for boosts and such... in their idle game. They later posted that the handful of people who spent thousands on their game made them feel awful, and they promised the sequel would just have an upfront purchase price. IIRC the sequel is in early access, but it's got a flat purchase price and no shop, as promised.
@@Axis9712 Here's how I do it: I allow myself to spend up to $60 on microtransactions for F2P games. Any game that is sold and contains microtransactions, I refuse to buy. The exception are full expansion packs, which fall under the same old category of money for content. In fact the best gaming experiences in some of the best games I've ever played were expansions. Blood and Wine was better than the base game of The Witcher 3. The Ringed City, Ashes of Ariandel, all three DS2 expansions, The Old Hunters, and Artorias Of The Abyss all had better bosses and generally better content than their base games. That is because they are content that had more time to develop. It's like a director's cut, an ultimate vision. So I happily support that. If everyone just adopted this mindset, this shit would literally cease to exist by 2024. Isn't that a sad thought? That people are such weak little drones that they cannot do this?
@@gokublack8342 You already paid for the content on your drive. You just need to pay more to actually unlock it. That's theft. That's like buying a can of beans, getting 2/3rds of its content, but then finding a lock with a card reader at the bottom that you need to swipe to get charged an extra $1.50 to get the last 1/3rd of the beans. Cosmetic or otherwise, any microtransactions in games that aren't F2P are theft. They're locks on content you already paid for and that is taking up space on your drive.
@@gokublack8342 No, and you're clearly grabbing at fallacies by making that argument. Expansions are not on your drive when you buy the game. They are gigabytes worth of content that are months to years in the making just like the game itself was. For example, Elden Ring. It is now close to a year old. There'll undoubtedly be an expansion or two. That means From will have been working on it for a year or more. Completely original content with brand new mechanics, weapons, armors, enemies, music, etc. This is an entirely different concept from making a game and just launching it with paid locks on some of its content, which is what games like the upcoming Diablo 4 are doing for example. And we know that it's what they're doing because much of the microtransactions are already public. They're literally designed to be locked until you pay more, even though they come with the rest of the game meaning you've already paid for them.
I had some really dope old school PC games though.. There was one with like time travel, and another one with like chess and battles.. There was also that one Spider-Man game with all the unlockable suits.. that was really dope (I think I got a free CD of it inside a box of cereal..) Adventure Pinball: Forgotten Island was mad dope too. But the golden age of gaming didn't come until Warcraft 3 Custom Games.
Nobody seems to mention, before horse armor, MapleStory also had cosmetics you could buy except they were rentals so that cool shirt and hat were only temporary and then youd need to buy them again to keep the look (I think they charged a larger price for permanent)
"just cant wait to be king" level of lion king for NES is intentionally an arbitrary memory-puzzle on a timer, where you end up in one-way-loops and death traps. It is also visually VERY unique and pretty, so it looked nicer to observers, while the players got stuck in this "level of chance", till they memorize the correct path. It was designed with game rentals in mind.
agree with asmongold’s point about personal accountability but i would appreciate it if he led the charge on getting streamers to stop spending money for content. if every streamer said “im not gonna pay for microtransactions and you’re a loser if you do” it would lessen it to some degree
He already said in the past he's not doing that anymore because he no longer wants to be the sole guy trying it and getting blowback from it. He is done dying on that hill.
That will literally never happen, the more people who do that, the more money there is for creators who don't, which attracts more creators. Time to join reality and come up with a real solution.
We used the blockbuster rental slang but...that meant you could rent it and beat it on a rental..double dragon 3 in the arcade was pay to win look it up I rember it was crazy
46:40 Super Off Road in the late 80s sold an advantage. You could continue to add credits to both power up your car to make it faster and handle better, and to buy as many nitros as you wanted, to be able to boost your way to a win.
An ideal battle pass for me would be, it is free for everyone. But it is time gated, but if you decide to buy it you don’t have a time limit. You just keep leveling it up along side any new one that comes up. So if you play a lot you can potentially unlock everything but if you have a life outside gaming like a family you can opt to buy it and get everything at your pase.
I was just discussing this with my best friend of 28 yrs. We're both 38 and have both been gaming since NES was new(ish). Asmond made a good point at the start - this isn't new, but it used to be that you would get tangible rewards for your efforts or very small monetary expenditure (I still have the Tshirt with 8-bit Link on it, holding up the Master Sword that says "Sword Play" on it that came with a pre-order of TLOZ: The Wind Waker and still wear the fucker lol). Anyways, gaming has NEVER been cheap, but it was a one-time expenditure. Now, you like a game and want to "buy" that game? Then you better be ready to sign on for a 2 yr long expedition of spending. Gaming has become pretty trash, at least in a vacuum, but in today's late-stage Capitalist society, it still beats the fuckin' pants off of most other hobbies. Does that make us yearn for the gaming of yesteryear? Of course. But gaming is still fun for the most part. They need to do away with pay-to-win microtransactions. That would be a massive step toward gaming getting back to what it used to be. Or, as close to it as is possible in this day and age.
49:17 COD elite was the first battle pass style system I ever noticed. It wasn’t exactly a battle pass. But gave access to challenges and prizes as well as exclusive tags and badges. In 2011
In addition to all of this, I feel like people often forget about the external factor. I think that having player count trackers for every onlihe game is a huge reason why games just waste your time now. Because the devs know that tons of people wont even buy a game unless it has 50-100k players on steam, so obviously they are gonna stretch it out.
Star Wars Trilogy Arcade, Metal Slug, Galaga, Resident Evil, and Gauntlet Dark Legacy were some of my favorite arcade games. I got the hidden rank of Grand Admiral on the Star Wars game once. Broke 15 million on Galaga and was so proud of that achievement. No one in my town or maybe even the entire county could top that score.
@@Psilocybin77 Canada money was worth far less than the dollar back then to be fair. Even in the 90's we still had arcades that played for 10¢. They may have been dying out by then, but still existed here in the US.
sweet video. Lots of huge points and it definitely is depressing seeing games come out how they are lately. Even more sad knowing its the norm and will get worse.
Just have to stop giving these corrupt companies the money so they stop doing this obvious rip-offs. Sure, the chance of it not working at all in the grand scheme of things is high, but atleast you get to save yourself from getting milked by these predators that invaded the gaming industry.
The crazy thing is that Nexon, Maplestory's owner, also has Mabinogi. While Mabinogi has gacha's it's hardly demanded you get them to progress in the game. Two extremely different playstyles of game from the same company.
Don't forget that when a company is publicly traded, they become obligated to do what's best for their investors (to what extent a corporation's fiduciary duty is legally binding is debatable but this definitely impacts decision making). So even if a company like Blizzard wanted to stop doing this shit, there would be serious pressure from their shareholders and board of directors to do it anyway.
This box physically cannot disappear without legislation either, due to one existing legal concept; Fiduciary Responsibility. If you are not making your shareholders as much money as humanly possible (in most cases a giant positive, but not in gaming), you will be held legally accountable for it and lose your company. The only way around this issue, is to make a rock solid argument, preferably using most of Josh's video as evidence, of why this design in the long run will destroy your company by making your consumer base leave, compared to the FromSoftware or successfull Indie models of long term slow, steady valuegrowth. However, that also vastly limits your ability to grow your company and offer competitive sallaries. As somebody who abhors government over-regulation in most markets, I still recognise the only way to save both the videogame market and videogames as an entertainment medium from a new cataclysmic collapse, is airtight regulation and tying most of these abusive methods directly to the same laws used to regulate casinos. Chop the infected limb off.
Timestamp: 1:03:30 These moments when he talks about something and then something else confirms the thing he was just talking about. This got me thinking about what I know about psychology and the human brain. We live in this world and make predictions, and sometimes our observations and what we think of those observations turn out to be correct. This reminded me about a scene in the 2nd movie (I think) of national treasure 2, when nicholas cage and the women were locked in a cell after having a fake argument and they talked about making guesses and turning out to be right. That got me thinking about a poem made by Bobby Sands called- "Rhythm Of Time". Then ALL of this got me thinking about infants not knowing anything at all to them acquiring information as they get older, and this led me to the realization of one thing....when you have figured out how the world works holistically, you are presented with two choices, sacrifice your morals for profit in some way, or keep your morals and live a role that you've convinced yourself belongs to you.
48:15 Chivalry 2 does a decent job of this, the battle pass levels up whether you have it or not and once the season ends the battle pass stays and gives you the option of which battle pass to put your xp towards
Platform exclusivity can be a positive thing in certain scenarios: (1) The game might never be made otherwise in some cases, such as Bayonetta 2 on WiiU. (2) It's much easier for a developer to properly optimize a game for one platform at a time. (3) It allows a developer to take full advantage of a specific platform's unique capabilities (when those exist).
about battle passes, I think more could be done like deep Rock galactic: when the pass expires, all items within become added to some loot pool, nothing becoming unobtainable but the pass being an easier way to access those items and allowing you to do so early. then again i guess it works in deep rock because of how the loot mechanic is, and both the access to said loot and the pass itself being completely free.
Ahhhhhh Oblivion. Great fucking game. The Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles came with my game of the year edition I got in High School. All the other DLC I downloaded for free off the internet. If anyone still plays Oblivion there is a fully voiced guild/quest chain mod on Thenexus with an archiology guild and interdimensional beings. Was pretty bangin'.
Damn I had the same game back in the day. GOTY edition with Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles. That was pretty amazing. I got the game for 10 dollars because there was a tech store close to my parents’ house that was closing and had a sale to get rid of the stock. I played that game to death. But I never enjoyed any mods since I played on xbox 360 back then. Might need to check that out.
A remake of the Legacy of Kane games would be absolutely amazing. That was my favorite series ever as a kid (Soul Reaver 2 in particular). That would be so good with current gen graphics and mechanics made by a competent studio.... Vicarious Visions comes to mind.
1:00:50 The next game predatory step; throttle controller/keyboard functions so they work only about 50% of the time until the players pay $100 to have the inputs restored to normal function for a few days (real world time).
Funny hearing Asmon say "console games in the 90's where expensive, man". When all across my entire country , you got 50 videogames in one cassette for 10 $ . I am serious , my mom bought me one cassette that had the original Super Mario Bros , Contra , the sequels of Mario and Contra , Ninja Gaiden , Bomberman , Tertris , Pacman , the Omympics games , Motocross race , that Kung Fu game , and many others and it cost her the change after buying groceries... such good times
Those were bootlegs, of course buying stolen games is cheaper. That's why they were cheap, prone to failure, and could break your console. That's why you never saw new releases.
@@RobotMasterSplash and those "bootlegs" were indistinguishable from the originals... My friend had an original copy of Super Mario and Contra and he was always bragging about how : "only _the original could be beat because cheap copies locked the final level and looked_ worse" . Then he visited my house to play my bootleg games , and he realized how foolish he was... both were identical . LMAO
@@RobotMasterSplash the whole "don't _buy copies, buy original or your kids console will explode_ dud" where campains to sacare parents and avoid piracy
Yeah, problem is the ease of bootlegging cassettes and floppies was why every dev with any sense went over to the cartridge consoles where you couldn't do that.
Anime or waifu games like Genshin Impact is not a predatory as you think, it's not a pay to win game, because the game is easy.. this game made attractive character or waifu as a selling point.. and we as a weeb fell for it damn...👁️👄👁️
The only battle pass system I like is in conquers blade. Where even after a season ends, you can go back and play prior seasons and still earn them. It takes a little more effort that doing them when they are active but they can still be earned.
as for the battlepass thing, i like the concept of "get everything at the end of a season" however, for people who ddi finish it early they could maybe get a glow effect or like.. a paint job to show their prestige in a way that would be slightly noticeable but not feel unfair
I’ve been a fan of Fromsoft for like 10 years now. They’re to me like my last light in gaming. I’m afraid one day they’ll look at what are these companies doing for money and will join them
The Double Dragon 3 arcade had weapons and stuff for real-money purchase in the arcade. That was 1990, and an example of “pay for more power, back in the day.”
I loved maplestory, it was the first mmo that was 100% free to play with a cash shop that basically only had cosmetics. They started adding in pay to win mechanics and totally killed the game but at one point it was an awesome game. Great music too
@@DeiNahMuTha what game are you thinking of? I'm sure there are others but maplestory was the first big mmorpg I know of that you could play the entire game for free, it came out in 2001.
I think another add on to what you said about us being younger and not thinking about it as much, is the simple fact that back then, if games weren't hard, you would beat them in 10-20 minutes. They couldn't store a lot of data so they had to artificially make the game longer by making it harder. More failed attempts, taking breaks and coming back later, etc. Jurassic Park The Game in SNES was hard, there were no saves and it was difficult to figure out where to go. I never beat it, it just took too long. But I'm sure that game was actually kind of small and short in reality. If just one of those factors were removed I'm sure I would have beaten it very quickly.
Command and Conquer for life, I have the entire collection on my steam now. But I'm a die hard boomer shooter. Started with Wolfenstein and Doom and haven't quit since. So thankful for the reboot of the style with the new upgrades of modern hardware. I remember when gaming went pretty much was only on console, and I'm only just coming back to pc in the last few years. But middle school lan parties with Duke Nukem and Shadow Warrior were clutch.
i remember playing floppy disk games on the pc many many years ago when i was a kid and some where really good, some where better then some games today, and i still have the original nintendo and a few games for it lie snake rattle and roll, bionic commando, bubbles, adventure island, probotector was a gr8 game
Happy New Year :)
Happy new year mate !!! May your cups be full of various teas and drinks. 😊
The man, the myth hisself!
Happy new year Josh 🥰
:)
I watched the react-ception live on your channel, that shit was hilarious 😂
My personal approach to what I call 'pleasure buys' (ie. things I want but don't need) is to wait 3 days after seeing the thing. If after that time it's still on my mind, then and only then do I even consider buying that thing. It is *EXTREMELY* rare that I buy something more than $10 on impulse. Even with small, inconsequential things like candy and soda. I've made the decision to not let myself get used to buying _anything_ without sitting on it for at least a little while, all to keep me from overspending and falling into this corporate trap that is so prevalent in video games (and beyond) these days.
Also a good idea to only buy things you can potentially return or refund. Preorders are easy to cancel. In-game you can apply for refunds but you will get banned, but chances are if you're doing it you don't want to continue playing
I buy whatever I want whenever I want because I always make good decisions.
My wife and I use a similar technique in our personal purchases - "Let's think about it...", which generally means - "Let's not buy it, in a few days we will forget it."
The thing is most things online showed to be up for a limited time so you don't have that time to think if you actually need it.
@@Jonathan-rw8uw breath in......now breath out. breath in....now breath out. breath in....now breath out. Feeling better man?
Born in 95, grown up with cod 4/5 and mw2 as my first multiplayer games ever and simultaneously playing wow for the first time in wotlk - best time ever. I miss this kind of playing games so much, just simple, straight to the point. If you were good, you were good. If you were bad, you were bad. And thats it.
Cod 4 and mw2 where amazing you brought back some good memories I remember when we could play a game then stop playing for a month and not lose out on a battle pass or event items or monthly available purchases able items that dissappear if you don't that's why I don't play multiplayer shooter games anymore I'm expected to play every day to get a challenge completed for the battle pass that I paid for or I lose my money
Now you have lucksacks and payers telling you "skill issue" in Genshin Impact because they meet the DPS checks in the Abyss with either extremely luckily rolled artifacts with double the damage stats as your best one or 5star weapons.
Genshin is like a refuge of failed raiders, low ELO MOBA players, and "can't progress in monhun because too hard" people pretending like that optional side content in Genshin built to be a playground for whales to see big numbers with their OP 5star characters and their personal 5star weapons is the Dark Souls of gaming and they are truly the "elite" equal to Challenger players and mythic+ raiders...
You missed out. Check out Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault.
I'm not even into shooters but playing the original Battlefront 2 on PS2 with my cousin... Irreplaceable
Born in 85 here, you still missed out on the 10 most fun years of gaming. But that may be my nostalgia talking
Imagine if a grocery store did this. No one buys anything in our store, they purchase "buyer tokens" outside, and than once inside they transfer those into "grocery bucks."
And you get more grocery bucks if you buy double the amounts of tokens first! 800% value brooo😂
But the free cart only holds 52oz. You can buy the use of a full size cart for an additional fee. I also recommend the item booster, it makes every item a lootbox so you dont know whats inside, could be cereal or chopped liver, or both! In a hurry? Theres the Xp skipper (express payment skipper) available for 1408 grocery bucks that lets you cut in front of others to get to the front of the line, cut off your fellow human today!
You better delete this shit before anyone with enough power to do this sees it.
@@erraldstyler well they better start hiring more security then.
@@erraldstyler To late have you heard about stores doing suge pricing
Next Predatory moves:
> Charge per bullet (EA)
> Buy special ammunition (WoT)
> Pay per Respawn (Early Warframe/GW2)
> Buy Raid extra continues.
> Charge .25cents per 10m of gameplay.
Without giving Maple Story too much credit here, while explaining the Maple Story problem the narrator even said "while investors..." So if we really want to track the source of the problem here, its when game companies turn to be publicly traded and need positive stonks year after year. Pushing more and more devs to go for the Fifa model because people are stupid.
Maple Story was merely the vessel to which stocks could always go up while product quality goes down.
In the early days people didn't make shitty games because no one wanted to play shitty games. The devs were making games as passion projects. Doom, Unreal Tournament, Quake, Starcraft, Halo.. literal classics.
When the devs lost passion about their projects, thats when their games went down hill in quality and to make up for that they just add more and more monetization just doubling down on the horrible bullshit.
For profit soulless games will always be garbage.
"In the early days people didn't make shitty games" You're 12 years old confirmed. There were thousands of terrible games back then. What an actual smoothbrain.
This is so ridiculous. Do you really think the devs are the people in charge?
@@johansermartinez9287 you clearly missed the point and lack reading skills. He was saying the devs USED to be the people in charge. Investors and the people the investors want running these companies are now in charge. You gotta try better than that. (inb4 delusional non-argument reply)
No,no,no...the real problem is all the people who buy, promote and justify this crap.
@@luxinterna3370 that’s a backward way of thinking.
I want to thank Asmongold for helping me overcome gacha addiction. Simply just reminding me how stupid these purchases are makes me doubletake my buying decisions, and allow me to sit on them for a while before ultimately deciding it's not worth it.
Or play gatcha games like Azur Lane which don't make you feel like you have to purchase something. But these two are the exception not the rule when it comes to gatcha's.
never gacha, only gachi ♂
Yeah listening to Asmon really helps. I was also helped along by a friend who taught me this - "sleep on it". Just sleep on your decisions including Gacha limited-time sales. Just one good sleep and a day of work would wake you from the fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) irrational mindset. You have better places to spend your hard-earned income.
As a reply here also mentioned, Steam Sales are awesome. I've been able to try out all these games I've missed out at -80% prices - FPSes, turn-based strategy, action-adventure, open world - the variety is stunning and I'm getting many hours' worth of joy. I won't be able to get the same amount of joy from that new SSR unit in my phone game, which depreciates in value from guaranteed power creep.
Legit his whole plan, this gonna save you so much money my friend happy new year
How can you fall prey to them in the first place
I'm so grateful to have grown up in the NES/SNES era so I have no issues going back to those games and enjoying them for the complete artistic masterpieces that they are. And I will always support indie developers who share that same passion and gamer first mentality which has given us such gems as Shovel Knight, Hollow Knight, Celeste, Blasphemous etc.
You should play “the messenger”
@@CarlosMorenccc oh heck yes the Messenger is great.
True brother
I might have written this comment myself. I have to imagine you grew up with megaman, metroid and casylevania and Kirby like me.
All of those 2d sides rollers are fucking gems and always will be
I didn't grow up in that era, as I've grown during the 360 and PS3, but I still feel this. Even if I don't use it anymore, I'll always love my old 360, even though it's disc tray broke years ago.
1:04:40 "No, it's the player's fault for buying them."
You got that right.
Honestly what went wrong with gaming is gamers. I remember when gaming was niche as hell, and MMOS were a niche within a niche. The air was different, the community was small but very tightly knit. They stood up to game companies together anytime someone even breathed thoughts of p2w elements it was a cardinal sin for them to even think about adding p2w adjacent features. With the influx of "modern gamers" and the integration of predatory eastern gaming monetization into western games there is now a majority of people who could care less about standing up for themselves or for gaming as an artform, they now speak of how "p2w" a game is instead of if its p2w or not. A bunch of cucks eating up whatever generic slop these companies serve to them, even though the game dev companies are literally hiring psychiatrists to make games as addicting as possible to avoid having to make a good game. New gamers are overly complacent, they will make excuse after excuse for a bad game because they have invested into it already, want instant gratification and are completely fine with a company using them like a fleshlite as long as they can comment their obligatory "well, im having fun".. this is some advanced digital cuckholdry shit and they should be ashamed but as cucks they lack that ability.
The fact that you make so many references to your mom is heart warming. I had a brilliant relationship with my mom; not necessarily out of a shared interest like you, but nevertheless a great relationship. In addition, the fact that you speak openly about it makes it all the better. 👊🏻
Sweet home alabama
@@goose_cluesI mean, what else was Asmon supposed to do after he broke both arms?
@@goose_cluesthis generation makes everything weird ffs
Nah, it's only him. Bro don't have a nice relationship with his family, so it's unable to see any kind of love for your parents in any way other than sexual @@yeasure.7875
@@yeasure.7875 it's not just this generation, it's just immature people who have to be edgy the moment they sense vulnerability or heartfelt sincerity.
59:15 „these have not been added to make the game better, they‘ve been added to make the game money.“ sums up game development, well, life in 2022 perfectly…
I played Facebook games. I played Farmville. The name of the game was free gaming. How far can you get before you run into the pay wall. How comfortable is it to scrape against it until you get around it. If you couldn't get around it go play something else. There was a massive pool of Facebook games.
I never gave them a dime. I had a 400 person friend list just to play these games.
I played mafia wars too.
BRO!, Mafia wars and Farmville was the shit back in the day.
I miss Mafia Wars!
the whole reason i have Facebook account in the first place was Because Facebook games. XD
(kinda the only social media account i have)
@@kmeanxneth thats what facebook initial strategy for people to get hook up.
they went hardcore social media. they would not have much people
I miss vampire wars😭😭😭💔
Son original MapleStory was the best leveling experience I have ever had in an MMO EVER. every 10 levels felt like and entirely new game without getting to complicated. Back tracking and throwing down 35k down in hennessy on the orange mushrooms was the most fulfilling.
yup
The sad part about the bit about the people being responsible is that they had the odd stacked against them. Predatory practices.
Imagine kids being told not to talk to strangers, especially ones that offer candy for a ride in their white van.
The problem was, the predator(gaming companies) and the candy(loot boxes/gacha system) and the white van(battle pass system) came before the warning that no, these people should not be trusted, do not take the candy, do not ride the white van.
So many were tempted by the candy. By the time people realized how dangerous the predators were. It was too late. It had taken root and was earning money. By the time people sounded the alarm and started speaking out, a formula for getting people addicted was made and written down.
yes, to a certain extent people can be blamed for making the purchases, but its kinda hard to have expected them to say no. I mean, as Asmongold had said, most of the buyers were kids who didn't care enough about the purchases. The only reason people became aware was that some had started to become mature. Some earlier than others.
gaming? nothing. monetization? everything
I hate how true this is
Adjust gaming prices for inflation.
These are businesses that must make profit to stay in business.
It is what it is.
Incel seb
@@shiiswii4136 ok troll
@@zyubat you insulting me based on a comment thread from a video 4 days ago is the biggest compliment you could ever give me. I’m glad I live in your head rent free because I called Tate an incel.
Asmongold, that story about your fan interaction in the grocery store is the gold standard for how to act. You probably made that dudes day. Good on you
Note for myself: 55:24
When PC games started finally getting good for me was when I got Command and Conquer for Christmas in like 96 or 97. I had an old Packard Bell computer with Win 95 on it. I thought the cut scenes were absolutely amazing. Also it being the early days of RTS and just coming off playing Dune 2 on Sega Genesis made it even sweeter. The fact that you could control multiple characters in a game, build a base, and build armies was revolutionary for the time.
@@Snowsc-fg3sn there were plenty of garbage games back then not just on PC true, but that doesn't mean that PC gaming of that era was bad, so I can agree. We had plenty of great games, I won't repeat the same ones you listed, but, C&C Red Alert 1&2 (All the other C&C games) Age of Empires collection, Warcraft 2, 3, Frozen Throne expan., Duke Nukem 1&2, Xargon, Doom 1&2. But Asmon is correct these are all games that you get as a finished product with little to no updating.
Dude looks like MoistCriticals Alolan form
Lol 😂
So great 😅😅
Holy shit underrated comment
HAHAHAHA Im fucking dead
😂
What went wrong? Big business.
Big business doesn't want innovation in an industry, it wants to drag it out as long as possible so it can milk it at every stage. That's why it hates games like BG3. It's too innovative, too inspiring.
It also doesn't want the risk of innovating, it wants guaranteed returns for investors.
It wants to pump out tried and true, formulaic, cookie cutter replicas of past products.
It doesn't care if you hate the product after a short time, as long as you spent money on it.
Then it can just pump the hype train for the next shitty product, and rinse and repeat.
The same thing happened in the music industry.
We need more BG3's.
We need more products that push the envelope, break the mold, show us what we've been missing and inspire others to.
"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."
- Arthur Schopenhauer
That quote goes hard
The problem is with the consumers that keep spending money on clear predatory monetization, which incentivizes companies to make more and more predatory monetization methods. It wouldn't be such a problem if people didn't consume it. More often than not lazy games that are predatory end up getting more money than masterpieces that have no monetization.
Whenever I'm tempted to pay for something stupid, the biggest reason which stops me is that I don't want to support bad business practices.
The self control to say, "yknow what? I don't actually need this" deteriorates everyday but I hope ppl can stay strong in the face of disrespectful games.
Well, that's why it's called "predatory". It's constructed in a way to subtly put pressure and force you to pay even if you have no intention to. And those tricks are clearly effective, considering even people fully aware of them and with their guard up being tempted time to time. Imagine how it is for majority of people who are clueless about all this monetization and far lees passionate about games.
There should be some personal responisibility, but currently monetisation got so invasive and powerful that it places disproportionate amount of pressure on personal responicibility. It's like having a huge pit in the middle of the road and only a narrow plank to cross it. Maybe we should do something about the pit instead of blaming the people that fall into it?
@@Thanatos2k A fool and his money are easily parted. This is 100% on the consumers.
@@ashero2092 "Imagine how it is for majority of people who are clueless about all this monetization and far lees passionate about games." -- For real, I always thought it was so obvious, honestly, I can't even comprehend how it's possible for some people to be clueless about this. I just can't.
oh man, some of the absolute best memories I have in gaming were around the time where I only played maplestory and runescape all day. My god just the pure ecstacy of joining the unknown world and becoming the best out of your friends and having the coolest stuff, exploring and flexing together was just the purest fun of my life.
When me and my friends played maplestory almost 20 years ago, we didn't touch the pay elements once and it was still one of the best games out there. I feel like it gets a lot of slack for being that gacha game but coming home after school to hang out with friends and exploring over leveled zones was so much fun :)
Flak?
@@Rain1 hate, scourge, destaste, bashing on it
@@Chaotic818 he said slack but I think he meant flak
yea MapleStory was a good game. The community, the grinding, the PartyQuests, boss raids, guilds etc were real and extremely fun without having to pay a single penny. It was quite WoW in cute 2D graphics.
I still play maplestory if I'm honest. Its very different now, but I still enjoy it deeply
You’d think once these company ceos got rich and comfortable they’d be happy with that and then just work on making good games. A lot of them were just normal people who made a good game and now they’re rich. There must be another influence for all these normal people to all the sudden want billions instead of millions. A lot of them were gamers themselves. I don’t get it.
If the gaming is top tier, no one would complain about paying money to play. -For example arcade games, pay quarter to revive, continue but the game doesn’t get easier.
It's a nice feeling to tell someone "I told you so", but it's not that nice when the thing I was talking about for over a decade means one of my favorite hobbies got ruined. The sad part it, we're currently on the edge of another great fall of video games and people are just as stupid as they were. Microsoft wants to monopolize game sales but in the same time you're not going to buy or own any of your games. Only your corporate overlords from MS decide and you have to keep paying. What's the people's reaction? "Shut up, and take my money!" Again... I remember when I was younger and I wished people didn't have to wait untill they make a mistake to learn, but today I'd wish they learned a lesson at all.
I want to pay €60,- and get the full experience.
I dont want the feeling of being gamed.
This is exactly why there has been a rise in the Indy gaming space. AAA might be getting worse, but, there is no shortage of great Indy games out there.
Not only is this fall going to happen for all of the same reasons that it did in 1982, but now even MORE reasons are making it happen as well, needlessly excessive, and needlessly existing, downloadable content, a lack of proper bug checking, lots of loot crate/loot box/gacha/pass/subscription nonsense, games literally being halfway done, the whole greed of both sides of the SAG-AFTRA strike, and other related organizations (yes, that also affects video games as well, including many indie video game studios), needless mergers, as well as some unavoidable reasons that are literally beyond the abilities of almost anyone in this situation to affect, i.e. disasters, war, overall economic downturns, etc.
I was always under the impression that the fake ingame currencies were a work-around against some kind of illegality. I think I remember watching a video explaining that casinos don't allow people to wager real money on gambling as it's against the law, so they sell chips as a "service", and then there's no laws about what people do with the chips. I figured microtransactions followed that same path.
You have a point. I think that's probably true.
There is truth to that, but it also works with confusing the players themselves. Because almost nobody would pay the raw amounts of certain cosmetics, but if it's connected to "luck" ?? Uhhh just one more try... ok one more.. ah i need 100 silver for another box... but only have 90 left (how weird) so im only spending money for 10 silver right? But the packs come in 300 silver ect. And to use the silver, you first have to exchange the tokens you get from xyz, and so on, further blurring the actual price of things..
Its less about real money gambling being illegal and more of the fact that people forget the chips are money in their brains while playing which makes them risk and spend more.
I always thought it was pretty ironic that my ti-83 calculator, the ultimate mathematical tool capable of solving all of the math, was the direct reason for my not understanding math. Drug Wars, Baseball, and Tetris I remember wreaking particular havoc on my GPA as the graphing calculator started to find use in my other classes as well. So much fun. So much getting yelled at by my parents.
Runescape did the same to me😂
90's games were some of the best. Red alert, command and conquer, dune, mech warrior, earth siege :D
I liked it when Soulcaliber/Ultimate Alliance (or any game) had a unique character on each system. Or how they each had a unique level/area/boss.
We ruined video games by continuing to give these companies our money and not holding the dev studios accountable when they don't deliver on advertisements, promises, or take advantage of consumers. Stop buying crap and they'll eventually go away or stop...
Are you seriously blaming the gamers instead? Lol
@@sarahwallace1103 i dont buy games hombre. I'm old school and i pirate them if its not free
@Culcia your logic is the same with blaming drug users instead blaming the drug dealers lol what a failed mindset
@@tripninick8597 now this is also why we have MTX, why make premium games that people can pirate when you can just make F2P game with microtransaction instead?
@@tripninick8597 You should blame the drug users. I got nothing against the dealers. The users are always the problem. They have all the money, and money talks. They decide the direction things go, and they have made their wishes clear. I despise the consumers more than the greedy devs. They ruined gaming, not a few sleazy salesmen.
My all-time favorite arcade game(which we also had at home on the Commodore) was Asteroids. That was such a fun game. So simple yet satisfying.
I had the Vic 20, Commodore 64 and Commodore Amiga 500 they were great so many good games. Also he forgot paying for a save in Metal gear Survive.
Rainbow islands..paperboy...
@@exodore2000 My dad had an Amiga. I remember he used to groan whenever I asked him to install The Perfect General because it always took over an hour. Wizkid, Pirates, Reel Fishing, so many amazing games from that era.
@@ChickenPizza I remember calling in late to work once because I was playing Sword of Aragon on Amiga.
I have never spent money on a single micro-transaction. They tick the same boxes in my mind that gambling does and I have never been a gambler. When I was little I saw those little coin-op toy machines, saw on the little display sheet what I wanted, put the coin in, did not get what I wanted, and immediately thought "Well that was a waste of money." and never looked back.
My first reaction was not "It didn't give me what I wanted, I had better try again."
It was "It didn't give me what I wanted, this is unreliable, fuck this."
This sort of thinking colors a lot of my consumer habits.
How quickly can we get you as a CEO of Gaming?
Literally the exact lesson that i had as a child, Never gambled or bought micros in my life
You are like 99% there man. If you would only stop calling yourself a "consumer" and fix that to "customer". Remember, you're not a human "resource", you're an employee. Don't let them dehumanize you.
@@fu102what? Consumer and customer have definitions lmao. If I sell you a lemon directly, you are my customer. If I sell my lemon to the store and you buy the lemon from said store, you are my consumer, not my customer.
The word has nothing to do with "dehumanization". It's accurate in the business world. Your Steam's customer, your the developers consumer.
The golden era of online PC gaming, 1998-2005, is unmatched to this day. Finished, groundbreaking titles that you couldn’t find anywhere else but on a computer: Starsiege Tribes, Medal of Honor Allied Assault, Warcraft 3, Counter-Strike: Source, Wolfenstein, Vanilla WoW, Soldier of Fortune, Team Fortress, Quake 2 & 3, OG Call of Duty, Command & Conquer, StarCraft, etc etc. If you made the switch, you wernt going back unless it was something exclusive like Halo, Zelda, Mario, etc.
I want to see the timeline of the cometic armor for the horse versus the cosmetic armor for SWTOR for the hut cartel. The hut cartel brought in cartel coins that you start buying the cosmetic items.
I miss the old wizardry series and dnd pc games. I remember playing neverwinter nights for years. Had a blast making my own games (mods) and playing with others with what I made.
Gatcha-pon is actually something they have as physical items for kids over in Asia. Its been like that for decades.
Not arguing it's not gambling but that "chance" style of earning something has been a part of their culture for a long time.
To be fair, we had physical toy gatchas in europe too. I can't speak for every european country but they definitely had them in France since at least the 2000s, I used to stare at them everytime my parents took me grocery shopping because the big supermarkets had a bunch of gacha machines at the tills.
Bruh, America had all of these things decades ago too, they just weren't called "gatcha". Every grocery store, restaurant, and arcade had toy, sticker, and candy dispensers for quarters.
Yes. I grew up with such machines and always begged my grandma to hand me a dollar for each turn. We call them Tikam Machines in my country. I still get tempted by them from time to time but I've managed to refrain from buying anything so far in my adult life.
I think that they should just pass a law that aggressively taxes game companies on the money they make from transactions after the initial game purchase or past a specific amount. That will encourage game companies to try to get more people to buy their game rather than get a small amount of people to spend a life-ruining amount of money on it.
unless the "tax" is around 100%, this won't prevent the game devs from monetizing their games. maybe they'd have to be more strategic but overall they still make money per purchase whether its 99 cents, 4 dollars, or 40 dollars
Just abuse anyone you know who spends money on micro transactions. Mock them incessantly. Gamers didn't gatekeep their hobby, and now the hobby is awful
Except then you kill so many popular long running games like that like path of exile or league of legends which is completely free to play beyond microtransactions. Those get daily updates from massive multimillion dollar teams working on them and new content every few weeks, initial sale? 0$ because its literally free so ALL of their earnings will now be taxed?? They're not going to update the game anymore and they'll just split off into making $60 low effort games again since the only real money they can make is on initial purchase when the government "aggressively taxes" the rest...
As predatory as microtransactions CAN be, they're also absolutely still amazing allowing people to play games for free and essentially just tip the developers they like the longer players stick to playing their games. You're not going to buy microtransactions unless you're regularly enjoying the game and as long as you're just buying cosmetics that don't affect gameplay nor give people any real head start or benefit, then what's the issue exactly? What would you tell all the LoL and PoE players? "ohh well, just play console games now that we essentially banned those companies from being able to earn any money after the initial game release...", plus you'd also be complaining about how the government is unfairly taxing gaming companies by 90% of their income.
Paying $60 just to try a console game is a horrible business plan for everyone, making the games free and allowing people to pay what they want to pay and what they can afford ensures everyone can enjoy the game completely for free and they can essentially tip the developers and help fund more content if the player CHOOSES to do so, no one is forced to buy microtransactions... There are some predatory microtransaction based game out there but why ruin the entire gaming industry just for a handful of bad apples? Microtransactions are the future and you can easily just force gaming companies to show the actual odds of the lootboxes they sell like "Hey, if you open this chest you can get this super rare knife skin but the odds are also one in a trillion chance so no one is really gonna get it no matter how many chests they buy", that would fix most of the exploitation when what you're doing is essentially gambling with lootboxes and they're forced to tell you the odds unlike casinos which can just freely rig everything.
Ok, this reminds me of the kpop industry and how they explore the buy without knowing what you are getting thing - every album from a kpop group comes with a certain member's special card/poster. But you don't know which member you re going to get, meaning, there are fans buying hundreds of albums just to get that one special member they cherish (companies also make certain cards/posters harder to obtain, allegedly the most famous ones). Wicked...
As a kpop stan i can verify. It is indeed just gambling but for photocards. I used to be hooked. Spent hundreds just to get my fav member. I coulda just bought the cards individually from resellers but not knowing my pulls was too enticing
Metal Slug at laser tag is my childhood arcade experience. The "local" factory building converted into a gamespace was called Infinite Amusements.
47:00 What you have to remember about the OG gameshark is that it actually wasn't developed by any dev as a pay to win solution too their own game. It was a tool developed by 3rd partys that basically allowed you to hack your games. So it's not like devs were selling the pay 2 win solution too their own games like they do today.
Yeah, that's why they ended up getting sued because it could also manipulate copy protection code.
Fix is simple, people got to stop spending money on bad games designed just to rake in huge money year after year. But people won't.
People could have collectively not spent any money on Diablo Immortal but they spent tons, justifying its existence and rewarding this behavior.
That's the problem in gaming, people aren't going to stop rewarding the shitty developer behavior so it will keep happening and keep getting progressively worse.
people are having fun playing the games, the practices are unethical but not illegal... thats just capitalism and the market economy at work. so......... that's that. I personally would never pay stupid amounts of money on paywall things, but millions of people are! their loss (or not, depending how you look at it).
Color me guilty I just downloaded rdr2 on my pc after already having it on Xbox. Love the game.. but not enough to play it without buying some gold right away.
@@johnd3124 So what that it's not illegal? It's immoral, just like the corrupt politicians that support this type of predatory behaviour mostly targeting children.
FOMO is more powerful than crack cocaine it’s a literal direct attack on the subconscious ego.
Not only devs bro, the corporates trash are behind this, u wouldn't believe, true is they also hire psychologist and other pro to keep us addicted, devs are only like soldiers
Imagine what kind of games we would have if all companies were trying to create the best game possible
Ban DLC and cash grabs and watch them either happen, or see the entire video game industry implode worse than it did in 1982. Hopefully, the industry will come back, though. The blister needs to be popped and the balloon must burst.
Yes this is why I was excited for the direction that games were going, then all of a sudden the floor fell out and everything got tossed into the black hole that sucks money out of our wallets.
Directors , actors , writers, and video game programmers
When Asmogold talks about his Mom. The way he says " My Mom " you can tell he really loves her.
48:00 look at chat's response. They don't want what they paid for haha
That's what I really like about the new wow expansion. It actually feels like they cared for a good experience again and not just about creating content that gains a lot of player hours because time spent on content equals to a good game for some people. One good experience was in a "battle pass" and I mean faction rep levels that resemble it a lot. It unlocks that people from that faction treat you nicely. When I read that I thought: "yeah... that's cool. why waasn't that here before? I can remember being called the hero of whatever in every cinematic, but everytime I cross those npcs over there I get some line about how they dislike me. cool idea."
So it's not like they can't use those mechanics in a way that enhances the experience for players. It's just that they choose to instead prefer to make money with it.
They are plenty of ways to add transactions to games that I might agree with. But there are plenty of ways that they abuse this power as well, and that I don't agree with.
The bit about separating real world currency from game currency is really interesting because it mostly targets people who are functionally mentally handicapped. There was a study published in a journal of psychology which studied inmates in the American prison system and gauged their IQ and then asked some interesting questions. By and large, people in jail have very low IQs. Bellow 90 with a large portion of those being around 80. And they discovered something very interesting. They asked inmates to make up a story about 2 people which they name and each of those people have a line of dialogue. For instance:
Mary and Joseph meet in a stable.
Mary: I am pregnant.
Joseph: Who's the father?
Simple right? Well, for you and me, yes. But if you have an IQ around 90 you take your time, around 80 and you can't do it. Then they asked to tell a new story with 2 new characters talking about the original story. If you have an IQ around 90, you are completely lost by now. If you have an IQ of around 100, you can just about do it. And then they ask for a new story with yet 2 new characters talking about the previous 2 characters talking about the original story. If you are struggling with this, it is very likely your IQ is bellow 110.
So when Diablo Immortal has like 3 different premium currencies, they are basically targeting everyone of average intelligence and below. It is the same principle. You basically stop being able to attribute real value to the in game currencies. If you are below average, you are even more screwed and you are likely unaware that there is a link between real world money and whatever currency you are buying with the other premium currency. And that is very interesting.
There is a second aspect to it that isn't mentioned in the video: Selling randomized lootboxes for real money is considered gambling in some countries and would be subject to rather strict regulations. The definition in the law specifically refers to sales where the buyers can't be sure of what they get for the money. Using an arbitrary ingame currency, especially one that the players can also get by playing (usually locked away behind insane ammounts of grind), bypasses those rules. The real money trade that the law regulates only concerns exact ammounts of gems/platin/whatever. Whatever happens with ingame currencies after that isn't covered by the law.
IQ does not matter that much. Even when a person can calculate the real cost he would rarely do that. The result btw will be mindblowing in most cases. I once calculated what i would need to spend to get a fighting chance in one of those common mobile "rpg"s and got totally blown. To barely compete i needed 5 legendary characters, legendary characters could be random summoned with a chance of 1/40 and the real world cost of a summon was about 3 USD so to barely compete one would need about 600 USD and that game was probably not the worst of them as you could grind over long enough time to get them without paying.
Me when I spread misinformation on the internet
@@hamiller666yea Belgium had diablo immortal banned for lootboxes and gambling. I played it for about 2 hours and uninstalled it because you could immediatly see how bad it was in that aspect
So basically you're saying I'm like 200 IQ because that's very easy to do those things 50 times over with 70 more characters
The problem with mmo's and even most games made today is they make a game that is good enough to get you hooked, but frustrating enough to make you want to buy 'lootboxes'. Back in the day, Gaming devs would make games they themselves would want to play, but now those devs are leaving and now we have a new bunch of devs who only see working in gaming as a job rather than a passion.
to be fair unless its indie, most AAA studios are beholden to holding companies/shareholders, a la square enix, so unless its a indie studio or non invasive corporate, dev's are literally just the cogs in the machine bro, they literally have no say according to most of the crunch stories, plus the market saturating with so many ways to play (console/pc/mobile) and lack of proper quality control (sonic 06/boom/colors launch, cyberpunk launch, gta definitive launch) makes game development near impossible to be passion driven, case in point how modders/hackers have to save/conserve alot of these games, and do a much better job at it (super mario 64 decompilation vs 3d all stars collection)
That reminds me of an interview with bungie devs from this year and they talked about their motto at one point nad it literallly went from "we make games we want to play " to "we make experiences tha make friendships" they said it had some to do with racial exclusion and shit with making games for middle aged white dudes mf just say yall are ashamed and wouldn't wanna play your peoducts anymore💀
@@agssilv5919 I remember when Googles motto was ''Dont do evil' and they changed it to “do the right thing.” back in 2017...
Pay to win also came from browser games!!! Way earlier than FB games. Around the same time as Maplestory was first out, the browser game market changed as well. From just simple strategic games like Travian or Tribal Wars (where all mobile games got their inspiration from). They were purely strategic at first, only had a QoL premium account thingy that added like tabs and queue’s. This changed after a few years when they added options where you just straight up bought progression in the form of ‘halving building times’. Stuff like that became rampant and now only a fraction of people still play these games. While they were soo fun at first!
Anyhow; my point is that the pay to win aspects in games today started in this market as well.
Blockbuster hard games are the ones that forged us in the fires of gaming hell and made what is around now a trivial inconvenience at best.
depending on how you look at it...
the most fun / disgusting thing about all of this...
imagine all this money going straight to developers
...instead of the pockets of investors / shareholders / management
The devs of clicker heroes had a cash shop for gems to use for boosts and such... in their idle game. They later posted that the handful of people who spent thousands on their game made them feel awful, and they promised the sequel would just have an upfront purchase price. IIRC the sequel is in early access, but it's got a flat purchase price and no shop, as promised.
It really makes me sad, extremely sad , to see how bad things are.
I hate to imagine where we would be in next 10 years.
@@Axis9712 Here's how I do it: I allow myself to spend up to $60 on microtransactions for F2P games. Any game that is sold and contains microtransactions, I refuse to buy. The exception are full expansion packs, which fall under the same old category of money for content. In fact the best gaming experiences in some of the best games I've ever played were expansions. Blood and Wine was better than the base game of The Witcher 3. The Ringed City, Ashes of Ariandel, all three DS2 expansions, The Old Hunters, and Artorias Of The Abyss all had better bosses and generally better content than their base games. That is because they are content that had more time to develop. It's like a director's cut, an ultimate vision. So I happily support that.
If everyone just adopted this mindset, this shit would literally cease to exist by 2024. Isn't that a sad thought? That people are such weak little drones that they cannot do this?
@@gokublack8342 If you already paid for the game, you should be against it.
@@gokublack8342 You already paid for the content on your drive. You just need to pay more to actually unlock it. That's theft. That's like buying a can of beans, getting 2/3rds of its content, but then finding a lock with a card reader at the bottom that you need to swipe to get charged an extra $1.50 to get the last 1/3rd of the beans.
Cosmetic or otherwise, any microtransactions in games that aren't F2P are theft. They're locks on content you already paid for and that is taking up space on your drive.
@@gokublack8342 No, and you're clearly grabbing at fallacies by making that argument. Expansions are not on your drive when you buy the game. They are gigabytes worth of content that are months to years in the making just like the game itself was. For example, Elden Ring. It is now close to a year old. There'll undoubtedly be an expansion or two. That means From will have been working on it for a year or more. Completely original content with brand new mechanics, weapons, armors, enemies, music, etc.
This is an entirely different concept from making a game and just launching it with paid locks on some of its content, which is what games like the upcoming Diablo 4 are doing for example. And we know that it's what they're doing because much of the microtransactions are already public. They're literally designed to be locked until you pay more, even though they come with the rest of the game meaning you've already paid for them.
I had some really dope old school PC games though.. There was one with like time travel, and another one with like chess and battles.. There was also that one Spider-Man game with all the unlockable suits.. that was really dope (I think I got a free CD of it inside a box of cereal..) Adventure Pinball: Forgotten Island was mad dope too. But the golden age of gaming didn't come until Warcraft 3 Custom Games.
Battle Chess was ahead of its time.
Nobody seems to mention, before horse armor, MapleStory also had cosmetics you could buy except they were rentals so that cool shirt and hat were only temporary and then youd need to buy them again to keep the look (I think they charged a larger price for permanent)
"just cant wait to be king" level of lion king for NES is intentionally an arbitrary memory-puzzle on a timer, where you end up in one-way-loops and death traps.
It is also visually VERY unique and pretty, so it looked nicer to observers, while the players got stuck in this "level of chance", till they memorize the correct path.
It was designed with game rentals in mind.
agree with asmongold’s point about personal accountability but i would appreciate it if he led the charge on getting streamers to stop spending money for content. if every streamer said “im not gonna pay for microtransactions and you’re a loser if you do” it would lessen it to some degree
He already said in the past he's not doing that anymore because he no longer wants to be the sole guy trying it and getting blowback from it. He is done dying on that hill.
I think most players doesn't watch streams
That will literally never happen, the more people who do that, the more money there is for creators who don't, which attracts more creators. Time to join reality and come up with a real solution.
We used the blockbuster rental slang but...that meant you could rent it and beat it on a rental..double dragon 3 in the arcade was pay to win look it up I rember it was crazy
My 90's mall had a software store where you could "rent" games, and it was about 1/2 the price of what it cost to rent a console game.
46:40 Super Off Road in the late 80s sold an advantage.
You could continue to add credits to both power up your car to make it faster and handle better, and to buy as many nitros as you wanted, to be able to boost your way to a win.
An ideal battle pass for me would be, it is free for everyone. But it is time gated, but if you decide to buy it you don’t have a time limit. You just keep leveling it up along side any new one that comes up. So if you play a lot you can potentially unlock everything but if you have a life outside gaming like a family you can opt to buy it and get everything at your pase.
What I like about Asmongold is that he draws more attention to videos that should be seen, he actually promotes his fellow youtubers.
I was just discussing this with my best friend of 28 yrs. We're both 38 and have both been gaming since NES was new(ish). Asmond made a good point at the start - this isn't new, but it used to be that you would get tangible rewards for your efforts or very small monetary expenditure (I still have the Tshirt with 8-bit Link on it, holding up the Master Sword that says "Sword Play" on it that came with a pre-order of TLOZ: The Wind Waker and still wear the fucker lol). Anyways, gaming has NEVER been cheap, but it was a one-time expenditure. Now, you like a game and want to "buy" that game? Then you better be ready to sign on for a 2 yr long expedition of spending. Gaming has become pretty trash, at least in a vacuum, but in today's late-stage Capitalist society, it still beats the fuckin' pants off of most other hobbies. Does that make us yearn for the gaming of yesteryear? Of course. But gaming is still fun for the most part. They need to do away with pay-to-win microtransactions. That would be a massive step toward gaming getting back to what it used to be. Or, as close to it as is possible in this day and age.
lol there is no such thing as late-stage capitalism because capitalism is the default
Thank you for saying what a lot of youtubers/streamers are afraid/ignorant to say. It's the player's fault. We need to hold ourselves accountable.
49:17 COD elite was the first battle pass style system I ever noticed. It wasn’t exactly a battle pass. But gave access to challenges and prizes as well as exclusive tags and badges. In 2011
In addition to all of this, I feel like people often forget about the external factor. I think that having player count trackers for every onlihe game is a huge reason why games just waste your time now. Because the devs know that tons of people wont even buy a game unless it has 50-100k players on steam, so obviously they are gonna stretch it out.
Star Wars Trilogy Arcade, Metal Slug, Galaga, Resident Evil, and Gauntlet Dark Legacy were some of my favorite arcade games. I got the hidden rank of Grand Admiral on the Star Wars game once. Broke 15 million on Galaga and was so proud of that achievement. No one in my town or maybe even the entire county could top that score.
Galaga was a quarter well spent. Value for time played. :)
@@dmaifred or you could pirate it on your pc for free and compete with your neighbors.
@@ShapeshifterOS this was back pre PC
@@dmaifred Before pc it was a nickel at most not a quarter. Maybe even 10¢.
@@Psilocybin77 Canada money was worth far less than the dollar back then to be fair. Even in the 90's we still had arcades that played for 10¢. They may have been dying out by then, but still existed here in the US.
Amazing video. Sad times for gaming man, indeed. Very sad to see how far we have come as humans in making all these things....
Most games take a lot more money do make nowadays, they need to get the money someway
sweet video. Lots of huge points and it definitely is depressing seeing games come out how they are lately. Even more sad knowing its the norm and will get worse.
Just have to stop giving these corrupt companies the money so they stop doing this obvious rip-offs. Sure, the chance of it not working at all in the grand scheme of things is high, but atleast you get to save yourself from getting milked by these predators that invaded the gaming industry.
The crazy thing is that Nexon, Maplestory's owner, also has Mabinogi. While Mabinogi has gacha's it's hardly demanded you get them to progress in the game. Two extremely different playstyles of game from the same company.
Don't forget that when a company is publicly traded, they become obligated to do what's best for their investors (to what extent a corporation's fiduciary duty is legally binding is debatable but this definitely impacts decision making). So even if a company like Blizzard wanted to stop doing this shit, there would be serious pressure from their shareholders and board of directors to do it anyway.
Legend has it asmons copy of asteroids is still making its rounds on the school calculators
Tf2 was the first western game to do full scale loot boxes
But their trading system gave me some of the most fun I've ever had in gaming and I'm sure a lot of people would agree.
@@jcon2060 ''But'' You are part of the problem.
Gauntlet was lit af. One of the best games at all time.
8:54 Aside from a handful of great games, Warcraft 2, Fallout 2, half-life, Thief, Quake etc. 90s PC gaming was rough.
I remember when super Street fighter 2 came out it was $80. This is back in 1993. That was a lot. A lot of money back then
There’s a player in my rise of kingdoms clan who spends £1500 a day on chests 😂😂😂🤡
a day?
This box physically cannot disappear without legislation either, due to one existing legal concept;
Fiduciary Responsibility.
If you are not making your shareholders as much money as humanly possible (in most cases a giant positive, but not in gaming), you will be held legally accountable for it and lose your company.
The only way around this issue, is to make a rock solid argument, preferably using most of Josh's video as evidence, of why this design in the long run will destroy your company by making your consumer base leave, compared to the FromSoftware or successfull Indie models of long term slow, steady valuegrowth. However, that also vastly limits your ability to grow your company and offer competitive sallaries.
As somebody who abhors government over-regulation in most markets, I still recognise the only way to save both the videogame market and videogames as an entertainment medium from a new cataclysmic collapse, is airtight regulation and tying most of these abusive methods directly to the same laws used to regulate casinos. Chop the infected limb off.
Timestamp: 1:03:30 These moments when he talks about something and then something else confirms the thing he was just talking about. This got me thinking about what I know about psychology and the human brain. We live in this world and make predictions, and sometimes our observations and what we think of those observations turn out to be correct. This reminded me about a scene in the 2nd movie (I think) of national treasure 2, when nicholas cage and the women were locked in a cell after having a fake argument and they talked about making guesses and turning out to be right. That got me thinking about a poem made by Bobby Sands called- "Rhythm Of Time". Then ALL of this got me thinking about infants not knowing anything at all to them acquiring information as they get older, and this led me to the realization of one thing....when you have figured out how the world works holistically, you are presented with two choices, sacrifice your morals for profit in some way, or keep your morals and live a role that you've convinced yourself belongs to you.
48:15 Chivalry 2 does a decent job of this, the battle pass levels up whether you have it or not and once the season ends the battle pass stays and gives you the option of which battle pass to put your xp towards
Platform exclusivity can be a positive thing in certain scenarios: (1) The game might never be made otherwise in some cases, such as Bayonetta 2 on WiiU. (2) It's much easier for a developer to properly optimize a game for one platform at a time. (3) It allows a developer to take full advantage of a specific platform's unique capabilities (when those exist).
about battle passes, I think more could be done like deep Rock galactic: when the pass expires, all items within become added to some loot pool, nothing becoming unobtainable but the pass being an easier way to access those items and allowing you to do so early. then again i guess it works in deep rock because of how the loot mechanic is, and both the access to said loot and the pass itself being completely free.
Or even do what halo did and allow you to buy the battle pass when ever you want even after it expires so it reduces the amount of fomo
@@louisharland3071 thing is they don't want to reduce the fomo
@@agssilv5919 yea sad part about the gaming industry all the greedy executives designing everything with money first game later
Ahhhhhh Oblivion. Great fucking game. The Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles came with my game of the year edition I got in High School. All the other DLC I downloaded for free off the internet. If anyone still plays Oblivion there is a fully voiced guild/quest chain mod on Thenexus with an archiology guild and interdimensional beings. Was pretty bangin'.
Damn I had the same game back in the day. GOTY edition with Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles. That was pretty amazing. I got the game for 10 dollars because there was a tech store close to my parents’ house that was closing and had a sale to get rid of the stock.
I played that game to death.
But I never enjoyed any mods since I played on xbox 360 back then. Might need to check that out.
I bought and played it again last year, and it is still a good game.
Oblivion is so great, I'm just lazy so I haven't gotten back to it and the large modset available. Takes up a lot of time too, but so fun.
I now look at every new game with a raised eyebrow and think to myself “I wonder how they are going to try and get more of my money”
i havent spent a dime in my life
A remake of the Legacy of Kane games would be absolutely amazing. That was my favorite series ever as a kid (Soul Reaver 2 in particular). That would be so good with current gen graphics and mechanics made by a competent studio.... Vicarious Visions comes to mind.
1:00:50 The next game predatory step; throttle controller/keyboard functions so they work only about 50% of the time until the players pay $100 to have the inputs restored to normal function for a few days (real world time).
Funny hearing Asmon say "console games in the 90's where expensive, man".
When all across my entire country , you got 50 videogames in one cassette for 10 $ . I am serious , my mom bought me one cassette that had the original Super Mario Bros , Contra , the sequels of Mario and Contra , Ninja Gaiden , Bomberman , Tertris , Pacman , the Omympics games , Motocross race , that Kung Fu game , and many others and it cost her the change after buying groceries... such good times
Those were bootlegs, of course buying stolen games is cheaper. That's why they were cheap, prone to failure, and could break your console. That's why you never saw new releases.
@@RobotMasterSplash and those "bootlegs" were indistinguishable from the originals... My friend had an original copy of Super Mario and Contra and he was always bragging about how : "only _the original could be beat because cheap copies locked the final level and looked_ worse" . Then he visited my house to play my bootleg games , and he realized how foolish he was... both were identical . LMAO
@@RobotMasterSplash the whole "don't _buy copies, buy original or your kids console will explode_ dud" where campains to sacare parents and avoid piracy
Yeah, problem is the ease of bootlegging cassettes and floppies was why every dev with any sense went over to the cartridge consoles where you couldn't do that.
EA Games. Monetise everything.
Anime or waifu games like Genshin Impact is not a predatory as you think, it's not a pay to win game, because the game is easy.. this game made attractive character or waifu as a selling point.. and we as a weeb fell for it damn...👁️👄👁️
true, majority of them are f2p
The only battle pass system I like is in conquers blade. Where even after a season ends, you can go back and play prior seasons and still earn them. It takes a little more effort that doing them when they are active but they can still be earned.
as for the battlepass thing, i like the concept of "get everything at the end of a season" however, for people who ddi finish it early they could maybe get a glow effect or like.. a paint job to show their prestige in a way that would be slightly noticeable but not feel unfair
I’ve been a fan of Fromsoft for like 10 years now. They’re to me like my last light in gaming. I’m afraid one day they’ll look at what are these companies doing for money and will join them
Sooner or later, someone will buy them and kill them
miyazaki is a beast
Short answer: Became to popular and Mobile Games.
I will write the long answer later, currently to drunk/tiried from the new years Party.
8:20 He's actually underselling it. In the 90s cartridge video games were $70-80 because we had import taxes on Japan at the time.
The Double Dragon 3 arcade had weapons and stuff for real-money purchase in the arcade. That was 1990, and an example of “pay for more power, back in the day.”
I loved maplestory, it was the first mmo that was 100% free to play with a cash shop that basically only had cosmetics.
They started adding in pay to win mechanics and totally killed the game but at one point it was an awesome game. Great music too
The first mmo that was free to play? Lol what ? 😂
When did they release the game and when did you play it?
I doubt it's 1999.
@@DeiNahMuTha what game are you thinking of? I'm sure there are others but maplestory was the first big mmorpg I know of that you could play the entire game for free, it came out in 2001.
I can remember the first three arcade games I played:
1. Space Invaders.
2. Pac Man.
3. Moon Cresta.
I think another add on to what you said about us being younger and not thinking about it as much, is the simple fact that back then, if games weren't hard, you would beat them in 10-20 minutes. They couldn't store a lot of data so they had to artificially make the game longer by making it harder. More failed attempts, taking breaks and coming back later, etc. Jurassic Park The Game in SNES was hard, there were no saves and it was difficult to figure out where to go. I never beat it, it just took too long. But I'm sure that game was actually kind of small and short in reality. If just one of those factors were removed I'm sure I would have beaten it very quickly.
Command and Conquer for life, I have the entire collection on my steam now. But I'm a die hard boomer shooter. Started with Wolfenstein and Doom and haven't quit since. So thankful for the reboot of the style with the new upgrades of modern hardware. I remember when gaming went pretty much was only on console, and I'm only just coming back to pc in the last few years. But middle school lan parties with Duke Nukem and Shadow Warrior were clutch.
i remember playing floppy disk games on the pc many many years ago when i was a kid and some where really good, some where better then some games today, and i still have the original nintendo and a few games for it lie snake rattle and roll, bionic commando, bubbles, adventure island, probotector was a gr8 game
The Farm Ville hit hard, my grandma was obsessed with it.