I have been playing more Indie games than ever mainly because the games are finished when they come out and even cost less than $70 piece of crap AAAss games...
It's egregious with Bethesda's open world games. Just wait a year or two after release and you can buy the game patched and bundled with dlcs on deep discount
The really sad thing is that what most of these games actually need is later release dates so the devs have enough time to actually finish them without crunch.
If they don't play it when it's new and going to make them money: most streamers will never play it. Because they're performers, not players. I mean, it's generous calling them performers, but still. It's better than a lot of the accurate things I could call them.
TH-cam videos guides and reviews as well. Lots of views if you're early with that content for a large release. Decent coverage might also gain you a new wave of subscribers. I follow a number of rogue-lite/like channels who do guides and some have complained about them not getting early access impacting their reach for new games.
But regular consumers feel a similar thing. You want to be part of the discourse, want to comment on videos, etc. While I'm personally not affected directly, I still know that feeling of annoyance when I watch a video on YT, have some great insight and realize that the video is too old for my insights to gain traction. It's always worst with puns...
@@DrZaius3141 It isn't even exclusive though, other than the price aspect. It's not like some games where the developers give them a key ahead of launch that nobody can get without being on a special list they have. It's just... give me more money and you get it a few days before you can get it for a little less money.
@@TalesOfWar It's literally months in some cases. I've seen people streaming games that are not due out for months, and by the time they are released, it's so dull because it's been beaten to death by streamers
It's not paying to play early. It's paying to play first. It's an important distinction, and one I think needs to be made because "pay to play early" doesn't totally capture the cynicism behind this move. People aren't paying to play a game early, they're paying for the game to be delayed for everyone else.
@@trenvert123 I mean it's the same for any luxury good where the only value is the social credit of owning it, they're never marketed like that because they would instantly lose said credit if it was explicit, it needs to be implicit and therefore luxury good will pretend to have some higher quality or something unique about them that justify their pricetag when really you're just paying for the fact that they're luxury good. Obviously game early access isn't exactly a designer brand handbag but it's the same psychological mechanism where the customer needs to be able to lie to themselves about what they're doing.
Yes, people already DO pay to play early. By buying the game at full price. I do not like to pay extra to get a game t release so I buy it 1, 10, 15 or 25 years later whe the price is better.
@@ailithtwinning6806 Well, "game's not for sale now, thus abandonware therefore free" is a metric, but I'll pay tiny ammounts just for the convenience of having it on a digital download platform otherwise. I mean, Planescape Torment is almost 25 years old now so frankly 25 years is young in game time since most of the games from 2001-2019 were totally shit.
It's a status symbol. Mostly for men with a very short ... Don't quote me on that, I heard this while listening to "a friend". A Porsche driver. Have a GG:P
I remember when I first found out about this method of scamming people by changing words. World of Warcraft, during its beta, had a detriment to exp, called 'unrested' or 'exhausted' or something; which was removed bit by bit over time if you stayed at or logged out in certain friendly zones. People hated it. So they renamed the normal exp to 'rested' and called it a bonus, and the debuffed exp became the standard, normal exp. People loved that. Nothing as changed but the names. The system was the exact same. At that moment I learned that simply renaming a bad thing to make it the new normal and renaming the normal thing to make it look better makes people think it is good deal. From that moment onward, I saw everything that does such a thing as the scam it is. Shops giving discounts? The normal product is overpriced by that much or more. Early access for buyers? You mean delayed release with paid exceptions, right?
Department stores in general, yeah. The most depressing thing about it is... the general customer base LOVES this scam. They get to feel all smart and savvy and pat themselves on the back for all the "deals" they are taking advantage of. So much so that most customers prefer the "overpriced deal" system over just lowering the damn prices and calling it a day. Not only is this tricking people, but it's tricking people in a way they'll thank the damn companies for. There is an entire field of psychology dedicated to finding these "dark patterns" in the human psyche, then exploiting the shit out of them. Every major company keeps some on staff, or at least, consults them before any given move.
@@duncanlutz3698 yeah the entire field of marketing, which is 1-2% of global GDP, is a scam. it's meant to create artificial demand for products that we dont need
@@ellahyland1705 J.C. Penny wanted to end sales by no longer abusing customers with fake sales. A pair of $20 pants, and always cost $20, was sold to customers as on sale fifty percent off, and again, it never sold at $40, it always sold at $20. So, they decided to no longer use fake sales with implied regular prices steeper than they ever sold it at, and it nearly bankrupted them! People didn't WANT to buy $20 pants for $20, they wanted to buy $40 pants for $20 even though they were told in advance that the pants they were buying were NEVER $40! People are fucking stupid and it's why we're going to die as a species.
Damn...I'm 35 years old and what you just said made me sad Jim. To the new generation, dlc, pay2win, lootboxes and other awful things are simply common because that's the world they grew up in
I'm 51. To see the bloated behemoth the games industry has become is utterly depressing, as is the thought of younger generations not knowing that it even could be otherwise. I started with the 8 bit home micros, when games were a cottage industry whose giants were the likes of Ocean Software and US Gold. Games were seen as children's toys and priced accordingly. Aside from a few pages of previews in a games magazine, the way to learn a game existed was to see it in a shop or read the reviews in the magazine. Mind you, it turned out that even then unscrupulous companies tried to manipulate review scores by threatening to pull advertising. But the best of the magazines knew their readers' trust was more important than any one publisher's ad revenue, and we knew which of the magazines we could trust. Of course the games industry even then was all about making money. It is, after all, a business. But it seems to have been better when games weren't yet so lucrative as to draw the most soulless, avaricious briefcase wankers in to run the show. Aside from Alan Sugar, of course.
Shifting baseline effect is brutal. It happens with serious things like environmental regulation too. Nobody alive today has ever breathed clean air, drank clean water, or seen wildlife populations at the level they're supposed to be. So when someone is looking at something like fish or insect populations and sees that the population is 50% of what it was when they started, they think "that's not too bad". Not realising that, when they started, the population was already 2% of what its supposed to be.
I have a picture of Steph in my wallet, so whenever I feel the need open my wallet to buy a brand new collector's edition of a game, with battle passes, DLCs n'shit, I just look at her disapproving stare and put my wallet away...
That is...the most sad but hilarious thing I've seen on this channel, and I mean that in a good way. Congrats, now I gotta contemplate getting one as well lol
Same, I wanna play Forspoken, just because the go woke go broke crowd is insulting it, so it probably isn't that bad. But the last time I checked, it was $60. I would pay 30 bucks or so for a game. But anything beyond that is a no from me.
If a game is good on launch it'll still be good in a couple years. if a game is terrible on launch you have a chance of it being good in a couple years.
@@trenvert123 unfortunately sometimes a game just fails to succeed on its own artistic and mechanical merits; not, as the 'sad sweaty freak' demographic insists, just because it has a (gasp) woman in it. not every studio lands a dishonored 2 or metroid prime or horizon zero dawn; forspoken really is a dreary and joyless slog, through an empty and uninspired world, with a tiresomely clunky plot. i couldn't recommend it as anything more than a time-filler. the soundtrack is good though
The thing I find particularly gross about charging for "early release" is that early release actually provides a pretty extreme benefit to a lot of games. Any game with remote servers, really. Think of how many games have released, and their servers are slammed on day one as everyone tries to play the game. Now imagine you can convince half those people to slam the servers a week early instead. And they're charging for it. They're charging people to solve a technical problem on their side.
hated patch days on wow, every fucking idiot had to be on for release which fucked up the servers for everyone. just play when you usually do, don't ruin the time i'm awake and playing because you need your 15 minutes of the new stuff.
One aspect of pre-order early access that I'm surprised to not have seen anyone (including Steph in this video) talk about, is that reviews for games can't be published until the actual release date, which given the growing trend of unfinished, unoptimised and buggy games on release has absolute potential to be exploitative, as players can't post reviews for the game on Steam, Metacritic, etc., often not even for a short period until after the launch.
review embargos are a case-by-case decision by publishers; starfield in particular lifted its embargo the day before the quote-unquote 'early' release date. redfall's embargo, by contrast, was supposed to stay in place until the *moment* of release, because bethesda knew full well they were pushing out a major turd and needed to get it out the door to as many sales as possible before major critical sources could publicise its issues. bethesda hadn't been confident in doom 2016, so they decided to embargo it until release day and only sent out review copies the day prior. they've mostly stuck to release day embargos since 2017 when dan stapleton obliterated Prey's metacritic average before release by giving it a 60 based on a single save-system bug he was told was already fixed in the current build. other AAA publishers tend to be a bit less paranoid, but the lack of consequences for bethesda emboldened a lot of them to bring embargos closer and closer. most non-AAA companies lift their embargos well before release (because reviews are a method to remind people your game exists and is coming out soon); but it is very telling that so many industry observers considered starfield lifting it 'days in advance' of launch (in reality, still just one day before the de facto launch) was 'a sign of confidence'.
Fair enough for flat out published reviews by game's journalists / reviewers, but specifically I'm referring to reviews published by the gamers themselves on platforms like Steam and Metacritic, which I don't think are effected by publishers lifting embargos.@@ratcarpet
Back when Sears was a thing, they got in serious trouble over how horrendous their price hike then discount game was. The discounts were consistently pricier than the original price.
That's something you still got to look out for. A lot of places claim a sale but the so called original price never actually existed and the sale price is just what they were charging last week or a few cents less when it wasn't on "sale". I've noticed this a ton at grocery stores I regularly shop at and am familiar with the prices. Shit just happened last time I was at the grocery store. The onion soup recipe mix is $2 dollars on sale down from $2.5 this week...except I buy this all the time and it's been $2 dollars for months. Another fun one they've started doing is not selling you stuff at the regular price unless you buy 2 and claiming that's a sale.
Alternatively, JC Penney got slammed for *not* price hiking things for discounts and just selling things for what they actually cost the company. It cost them a ton of money because consumers *want* to feel like they're getting a bargain. Extra Credits did a great video on it.
Re: the ending monologue - This is not about them selling you something of value. It's about them holding the customer hostage. You pay to access Starfield a week early because if you don't, you have to spend an entire week dodging spoilers and being acutely aware people are playing it without you. They are trying to create a situation where people who aren't buying into the early access are, essentially, socially tortured by those who did (unwittingly or otherwise), and then selling them relief from the torment.
I never understood why pre-order were a thing in the modern era of gaming. Pre orders made a little more sense when everything was physical but now there’s digital downloads so no such scarcity exists anymore. I guess when publishers are releasing half-finished or overly buggy games they wanna get that money up front before people can be disappointed
As far as I'm concerned, the only benefit is a game I was going to buy anyway gets to show up at my door on release day and it saves me the trouble of going slightly out of my way to GameStop (only real game store around me). Though I'll admit that it sure helps that I'm not interested in pretty much all of the AAA games that are obviously prone to being unfinished messes. So I've yet to be burned by pre-ordering, nor do I get the sinking feeling that I'm encouraging industry BS by doing so, nor do I anticipate it happening in the future for me.
Ahah! this made me think of something else that may see an appearance - enforced digital scarcity. Something similar to how Nintendo only released that one Super Mario collection for a few months and then pulled it from sale... forever... (or so the plan is, for now at least).
@@Gerd0 The last AAA game I bought was Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Indie is where it's at for me, that's where you see genuine innovation these days. Thought SotTR is a good game, it's the exception rather than the rule when it comes to AAA. I don't follow the console market so I don't know how well served they are by the indie market, but on the PC there's no shortage of amazing games developed by small teams with a shoestring budget or even a single person that absolutely destroy what these mega publishers are squirting out.
That isn't even play testing...the version of the game that releases early is the exact same as the one that releases 5 days later. I don't mind it that much honestly...if people are stupid enough to pay a $20 upcharge for a 5 days exclusivity that's their problem. And if they are paying for it, that means it doesn't bother them so at this point, the publishers would be stupid to not do it.
I'm someone that plays sports games and it's wild that single player games have early access. Like Steph said FOMO. Very few games to me are worth buying day one because of how incomplete the game is and the 'promise' of road maps and season passes.
if there's any single group that these companies can count on to buy things "early", it's content creators. because having days of videos and blog posts ready to go in advance of anyone else gives them an advantage with engagement and income compared to if they sat on their hands and waited for the rest of the world to catch up. they've essentially monetized review embargos, in a way.
which then feeds into the fomo of the people that would normally just wait. Who start slurping up all the content desperate to play themselves. I mean, what even is an extra 20? Yeah. Fuck being part of the poor man's launch, I'm rich.
@@ferinzz I did enjoy the "it isn't officially released yet so don't judge it for being so meh" crowd. Like they'd be able to fix fundamental limitations with the engine or poor gameplay mechanics and decisions in a week.
yeah the issue is, it's considered a necessity now by streamers, if they want in on a game and it has an early release version, then streamers have to get that, or they're behind the other streamers who are also doing so. and then on top, that drives further sales of those early launch versions... it's sickening, but i get why streamers feel they have to do that, or give up on playing a game "at launch"
They do, it's called Steam sales - there's not much I pick up on release now, I give it 4 to 6 months for the sale & by then the most egregious bugs will generally be ironed out.
Absolutely! Zilla’s ability to not only learn but actively improve upon my presentation style has blown me away. As much as I was set on being a solo editor again, I couldn’t ignore the fact that Zilla’s help has not only helped my scheduling, but actively made the videos more entertaining.
I still remember the days when the release date for a game wasn't even that big a deal. Games would show up a day or two before their supposed release on store shelves, for no extra cost. How far we've fallen...
Of course this is what the tRIpLe aAa industry has cooked up next. 'All the money' seriously isn't enough for them - as we already knew, but still. Still! "Playing something early" is, basically, just pushing back the release date for everyone else. You're not exactly breaking any embargos here, gamers.
I've spent years not caring about release dates, only buying games months or years after release, complete and at a discount. Patience saves you a lot of money and disappointment. This is especially true considering how broken and incomplete games tend to release right now.
Imagine buying a digital deluxe edition of a game a week after launch and one of the bonuses was playing the game 4 days early. What the hell are you even buying at that point. A digital artbook that you could google and costume pack for £10 extra? Not worth it in any way.
Not really, the perk was delaying the release for everyone else which is not really a perk but a disgusting demonstration of Capitalism working as intended.
Pay for patches is my guess for their next con (could say some DLCs are this already). Either a small fee for each one or they rehash the online pass thing and ship two versions of games, one without a code, another with a patch code that is £15 more expensive than your basic broken version. They'll say its only fair because we never used to have patches...
Can you imagine if nintendo forced people to pay for the patches in Zelda TOTK that fixed things like item duplication? That would be hilarious. "We don't want you to dupe items in game! But we're not giving you this patch until you pay for it!"
I remember preordering "The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess" on the Nintendo Gamecube where not only I get the game, but also have the walkthrough guide with a poster/map of Hyrule as well. It was a nice piece of something for me to have in my collection. Nowadays, I now get weary in how games get too expensive over time. I can't imagine a decade later or so that the least expensive games would hike up to more than $70 brand now, and the only way to purchase them is if they are on sale. Especially when you can find used games that sometimes are affordable depending on the years going by and the discount. So there's no point in preordering games anymore when I can just get them later whenever I want to.
They want as many people as possible to pay for their games before they're release them so they can pocket the money before the reviews are in to let us know which ones are bad. And of course then they manipulate gamers into being personally invested in a game's success so every attempt is made to delegitimize even mildly negative reviews. (Even though like Stephanie said they almost always eventually become the prevailing opinion.) NEVER prepurchase ANYTHING.
I feel like the early playing is targeted directly at content creators (or in MK's example: kontent kreators) so that if they get it early, they'll get more engagement from their followers who aren't going to pay up for the early access. It's a small minority, but as you've always said Steph, video game companies will go for every last nickel if they could.
A streamer on Twitch with anywhere from 5 to 20k followers and watchers streaming the game "early" is likely going to convert a majority of those watchers into sales. It's like advertising that was paid for by the streamer
Yeah, but usually companies gave early access keys to content creators, as it is good marketing and mutually beneficial. So they are just charging people to do a service they used to pay for. Just like way back companies hired game testers and now people pay to be a part of testing. I'd say "gamer culture" and it's hype addiction makes videogame fans really easy to exploit.
I'm sure those creators would buy into it, but are there other types of players who really want those games before the gate is even opened? Steph imagines those who bought RE5 a month early probably regret it, I think those people might think the earliness alone is worth the price tag. In the MMOs I play, whenever new items are available, the in-game economy has those items trade 3x or higher than it would in the long run, yet there are always people who are willing to buy it at the high point just to be the early ones. Is there any mental exploitation going on here besides the obvious?
The MK1 early access felt more like a way for the publisher to extract a tax out of competitive players because they got about a week of practice before everyone else joined. A week of early practice makes a TON of difference in a competitive fighter.
The Early Access scam also includes an attempt to control the initial narrative around the games. In Starfields case, the graphs on Steam show a significant difference in the balance of positive to negative reviews during the Early access period and afterwards - and the front-loading of the review system has meant that it's taken far longer for the aggregate review score to come down to a level actually reflective of the games quality. Between this, the 'selective review copy' fiasco and the general tone of Bethesdas public comments since the game came out, I was feeling that there were just a few too many red flags around this release - both Bethesda and Microsoft were desperate to make this game out to appear far better than it is, and deflect / downplay any criticisms regardless of how valid they may be. I had my suspicions, but then the Microsoft leak happened and it turned out the actual situation was far worse - and those were old docs. Imagine claiming that Starfield was your companies biggest release, when it only reached 10m players in two weeks while being offered at no extra cost on a subscription service with 30m+ subscribers. Meanwhile, Fallout 4 shipped some 12m physical copies (that people would have actually chosen to pay for) in week 1 - & I know this isn't the actual number of copies sold to customers in the first week, but it's as close as I can find to it. Hell, Skyrim shipped 7m in its first week back when it originally released and the market has more than doubled in size since then. They're desperate to make Starfield look like a tentpole game and some industry-defining success, and it just isn't. At this point, I'm beginning to suspect that maybe things haven't gotten any better at MS in the time since those leaked docs were put together.
Throughout my childhood all the way to my mid 20's gaming was my primary hobby. So it's wild to me just how little I care now all because of the industry's practices. I very very rarely buy new games at launch anymore. The most recent being Elden Ring. Before that TLOU 2 (actually bought for me) and before that I actually don't know. Resident Evil 7 maybe. Now I pretty much only buy games years after launch, heavily discounted in sales, and I truly don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. Even Tekken, a series I religiously bought at launch since Tekken 2, I haven't so much as looked at Tekken 7 because I saw how much DLC that there was for it that even when it was massively reduced to like 30 quid for the complete edition I just wasn't fucked to buy it. A lot of my friends have kids and more responsibilities so it make sense that they have less time for games but honestly I just spend my down time doing other things that bring me far more joy than the gaming industry can manage these days.
It's really disturbing how much of cash cows they've become. In past games, there was at least some effort put in since technology hasn't advanced to such a point where you can crank out something that's AI-generated in minutes. Engine, voice, graphical environments and all. It's not a mystery why game industry folks unionized.
I wonder if fighting games will ever move to a yearly release schedule with only minor tweaks to characters, like sports games. I have been a Tekken fan since 1 and 2, it's depressing to see characters locked behind paywalls these days.
I already know what they're gonna monetize next. The actual character creation. It's a huge part for some of us, the visual look of our character. Paying extra to get unique customisation options that are only available for one week. Comes with a special digital edition with early game access. It's surely the next step for AAA games.
I remember reading a report from gamebiz that the "average gamer" was middle class men with salaries over 64K a year. I always think about that when someone brings up $70 isn't that bad of a game or that games used to cost $80 30 years ago so we should be grateful. I do genuinely believe that portion of gamers is driving gaming to be so egregious along with vulnerable people who can't control their FOMO. I saw a survey done by a gaming company where they asked how many games a month u buy and there was no answer for me to say 1 game, 7 months ago. Or how much money you spend on games every month and for me that's I buy a game 7 months ago and then no more money.
@@Goatse-monogatari_no_homo In a world where people told me who died in Infinity War the day after that film released I can totally see people being pressured into buying games on release. This whole attitude of "just don't use social media for the next year, forehead" is absurdly unrealistic.
2 things - Congrats to Z. Mann Zila for co-editor! Their work has been as I've mentioned in other comments a wonderful play off between the two of you. And to say the sound of all of your simps IMMEDIATELY pulling the credit cards out of their wallets when you mentioned OF was audible from about a 5 km radius is an understatement. In short, Thank God for you and your fantastic cadre of friends and associates!
I think alot of "early access" is for the streamers (or want to be streamers) if your first you have a chance to stand out and either get a name for yourself or not. However with some many people doing it, it kind of kills the advantage.
For literal years now, there's been predictions that the videogame industry would have another crash. Well, I think it might actually be happening soon. At least when it comes to the Triple-A game publishers. If they're selling you brand new games a little bit earlier than the day they're supposed to release, then I have to wonder what they need the cash earlier for. I mean, other than lining their pockets. A reckoning within the major game publishing industry is coming, and they seem to know it.
I hope the industry wipes itself out. It's like a crusty beast laden with bloodsucking parasite, more parasite than animal, but what else is new with capitalism? Of course, it's never the people at the top who suffer, which gives people another excuse to keep paying. Cleanse it with hellfire. It's beyond due.
I think a bigger crash is coming than just to the games industry, but time will tell. It's hard to distract people with bread and circuses if they can't afford the bread and circuses because of all the upselling and FOMO.
Well, no crash, but heavy correction is already happening. Anything without a budget for marketing a la Starfield lands into disappointing sales right now. First of all, publishers did not spread out their releases, and second, there are quite fatigue in players as they have very long games to finish or come back to. Companies have quite a lot of money to burn but next year it will be quite stripped down for releases, and lot of devs will be out of work for considerable time unfortunately.
There won't be another crash. They don't _need_ and aren't getting the cash earlier. The "earliness" only comes for the player, in the form of """early""" access. What the companies get out of this is not money earlier but MORE money. If they just opened preorders and the only option was $60, then people would pre-order for $60. But now make two options, one for $60 and one for $80 "early access" and suddenly a lot of those pre-orders are for $20 more than they otherwise would have been. The companies are getting more money at the same time, they're not getting money any earlier.
You mentioning how the 2010s were when the poisoning was in full swing made me realize that it poisoned me as well, in a way. I used to be excited for a lot of new games - big and small. Did a few midnight launches, took a day off here and there, treasured the discovery of a new world I’m going to step into. That slowly chipped away until it just… stopped. I didn’t even notice when I reached this point, or when was the last release I was genuinely excited for, with a capital E three times as tall as you are. I see a bunch of interesting games in the times ahead (mostly independent), but nothing in the same postal area as how it used to be. I still find great games, but on my own time.
the hypernormalisation of the commercial hype-cycle, alongside the general quality slip of actual release experiences and predatory monetisation of most titles, has definitely killed the sense of genuine excitement people seem to have once felt about major releases
As I've aged, the lust to play a new game asap has dwindled so much that my standard acquisition process these days is to wait until the game is being sold for less than half the launch price before I buy it. Sometimes that takes only a couple of months for an aggressive Steam sale, or it's 18 months after launch buying a boxed copy at my FLGS, but either way I get a bug-fixed version that's often had extra content added to it for free, and have just as much fun as anyone else did, for less money.
Company's will eternally demand more money for less product, and so long as those with substantial disposable income and no financial literacy keep paying them it will only get worse.
Ironically, there's a hobby programmer that's all but being harassed because he won't take money for his game he's making because he wants to make a labor of love.
Totally agree. It goes a bit beyond "hey, there's something I'll let all people buy in 2 weeks, but I'll let you buy today for more". In this day and age, the product you're getting is objectively worse 2 weeks before. There's bugs. There's multiplayer and download infrastructure that people need to properly configure. If you think about it, companies should be paying you to play their game early, since they're going to use the data for adjustments. That's what I love about (free) open betas. You get to play the game, devs get to see how it performs with lots of people playing it.
This sad age of gaming makes me glad to be a nomad who usually plays games on day (some number you're probably not thinking of). It also makes me sad that because I'm a nomad, I have to exclude any titles that are always online or once-per-session. But meh, too many games exist to ever get through the ones that pique my interests. 😹 Keep fighting the good fight, Steph.
Perfekt. - I've been saying a lot of this for years. :( Crazy how many people simp for companies to take advantage of them. - Paying for access a week "early" is almost as bad as paying for an NFT. See how mad people get when you compared the two. - "2010's: the great poisoning of video games" Yep. I used to talk about all of these subjects to friends and acquaintances. Had a lot of people vehemently defend all of these predatory practices. "Oh but DLC gives the devs more money, isn't that good?! aren't you bad cause you dont want devs paid?!" Some of the stupidest conversations/arguments I've ever heard. - As someone who worked at Gamestop for a long time, I've heard MANY (too many) people tell me they buy the latest games on release/pre-release, and could possibly never play them, but they just HAVE to get them as early as possible. It's "keeping up with the Jones'" but for nerds. People gotta stop consuming so much.
There really needs to be a term other than early access, because the Early Access you get from things like Baldur's Gate 3 (on PC), World of Horror, etc. are not the same thing as these early release scams.
Yeah, the term is misleading on purpose for marketing. It should be "release access" as you pay to play on the actual release on the game, not 5 days later, where people get late access
Great episode! This trend gets especially nefarious when it comes to games with competitive play. Fomo and actual disadvantage for not jumping on the corporate slop train.
15:30 You've touched on classism before and I think that's where this exclusivity comes from. Upper classes will pay a LOT to be part of 'exclusive' clubs and societies even though it's rarely worth the money. The same psychological mechanisms are at play here and are depressingly effective.
This is the very reason why I always wait until honest reviews are out to determine whether it’s worth the money or not. Why pay extra for an early unfinished game when everyone else will be able to pay less for a finished product.
Being able to play “early” is one of my recent hates, I’ve seen at least one game grant “early access” no matter what edition you pre-ordered. Like, that’s not early access…that’s just the release date.
All I got out of this is that the game industry's self-regulating itself is not working. A trade Commission needs to step in and start busting heads. That's the only way they will stop.
It's almost as if free-market capitalism is actually just an excremental idea thought up by scammers and grifters and "the invisible hand of the free market" was a god they made up to sell their big scam to the masses.
I miss all the inserts we used to get in video games. Instruction manuals, art books, maps, etc. Now all that stuff is deluxe premium early pre-order limited release collector's edition bonus material that you pay extra for.
Pay extra to access it even sooner, y'know, before the day 1 patch. Yeah, sounds like a solid gamble. Also, I think this is really aimed at streamers and content creators, so they will not only pay to get in on it, but also to create that FOMO.
I think the attitude around "spoiling stories" also feeds into the desire for early access that then gets monetized by these companies. I'm immune to spoilers -- knowing information about a game/story doesn't ruin the experience for me -- but some people act like it's the end of the world if they come across any information from media they haven't interacted with yet. And then the defense to this becomes -- watch/play/read it day 1 so that you can get ahead of it.
People acting like spoilers are the worst thing in the entire world is definitely not helping the sense of FOMO around games. And the definition of 'spoiler' keeps ever expanding, it feels like, where people are even avoiding trailers because oh no what if there are spoilers! It's super weird, imo.
Thankfully, I'm old enough that I have (mostly) learned how to manage my impulse control, ignore Fomo, and just be patient. Generally, when one of these big titles comes out, I wait until it's first discount sale, minimum, before buying them. By that time they usually have been patched enough and have enough mods to make it good enough to play. Doesn't change the fact that game companies should stop selling early-access titles as complete titles though...
oh my gosh, thank you for including the futurama clip. The other day in a conversation i actually said "I am technically correct, the best kind of correct." and legit could NOT remember where I got it from.
It doesn't make sense to us adults, but I can imagine it being crucially important if you're 12 unfortunately. In the harsh world of playground politics whether you can afford to waste money on early access or not could quite possibly determine your worth as a human being in the eyes of your peers.
A game's release date is OBJECTIVELY the day in which the game is released to the public. If you can go to an official storefront, buy a version, and start playing it.. Then the game has been released. I don’t think this is something you can be subjective about. So I think the concept that gamers are paying full price for a video game, and then are artificially paywalled out of playing it until a week after its actual release day is particularly scummy, evil and should be illegal. At the very least there should be regulations on the terms. “Early access” should be correctly labelled as “play the game at launch” and the late versions shouldn’t be able to be labelled as “day 1” where they’re actually “day 5” as this is false advertising. Whilst my take on this is a bit more critical, I’m just glad this is finally something someone in games media is discussing.
A brilliant man already suggested paywalling reloading. I mean, you're already 20 hours into the latest Call of Duty or whatever. What's a small charge for an extra reload? I know someone irl who doesn't seem to realize the monetization schemes at play and literally said "You don't have to buy them" when I said "Man, they are designing games for and around these monetization schemes, knowingly and at the cost of player experience."
I had massive FOMO for Starfield but I really wanted to finish BG3 first so I held off. Now that every video, discussion and stream are not all about Starfield, I don't feel the need to jump it to it anytime soon. Whether it be genuine desire or just marketing the pull to be part of the zeitgeist is powerful!
I looked at Starfield (by Bethesda) and realized it was from Bethesda and then thought back to Fallout 76 and Fallout 4 and asked myself "has Bethesda improved?" and lo, the answer was a resounding lol no.
Yeah. I noticed that as long as I don't let the hype in. Don't watch new release trailers, just hear about new releases through the grapevine, without immersing myself within the hype-cycle, I don't jump into any games or movies or shows. And I don't get spoiled on them unless I want to, because I'm so far removed from the communities who would spoil it for me.
Their targets are people who don't care about money, TH-cam contributers and people who have to show off, because they have nothing else. I am surprised, that they still seem to make so much money that way.
Totally spot on with this, it seems to be a new tactic since GamePass took off, now they need to find a way to get people to buy their half finished games early and letting you play a whole 3 days early is enough for some of those who have much less dopamine than money. However I wanted to point out a small mistake - That Final Fantasy 7 Deluxe comes with a physical artbook and CD. I had to look it up because honestly, I believe that Squeenix would do that, but it look likes for the extra $40 they are willing to print you a book and CD for now.
Minecraft and Planetary Annihilation (PA) were two sides of the same coin. Minecraft did early access (before it got named as such) with an increasing price until release, get in early for lower price. PA did a kickstarter, and more expensive tiers got earlier builds, more access and more influence. But PA also did something odd and released for purchase on Steam with the early builds, but using the expensive tier prices so as not to screw over the initial groups of backers. It was a very odd time.
I was considering buying Mortal Kombat 1 Premium Edition until I saw that all I really got for the extra £30/$40 was to play it a week early. My reaction was quite literally akin to the Jackie Chan wtf meme.
It's shit like this that made me decide to not buy MK1 on release, and wait until they released an ultimate edition that comes with all the DLC characters + costumes
MK1 is a huge scam with all the early access, pre-order locks chars, microtransactions, DLC fighters and other BS. I am gonna wait for a Komplete Edition for 10-20 bucks like MK11
The MK1 deleuxe editions are especially nefarious because they locked a bunch of characters behind the $90 version or whatever, and that's not even with the season pass! It's a new type of greed
@@nobodyinparticular9640 I don't like to pirate myself, but I'm a huge advocate for it. So long as the industry is participating in any form of corporate greed, pirate all you can!
I can't remember the last time I've played a Triple-A game... I guess Skyrim, probably? The Indie scene is so robust these days (and much more affordable), that I just don't have either the time or the money to play the 70 dollar games. And I feel like that's the right choice.
It is weird how for some, we never noticed this under just recent with Starfield, Lies of P and Mortal Kombat 1 all doing this back to back to back. Definitely also helps to push digital sales too if you can install the game early on and just immediately jump into the game days before anyone else who decides to wait. It has been tempting, but I’ve yet to bend the knee to this tactic. Still, it is kind of crazy how games are being treated kind of like review codes (only that they cost more than usual for those not in that particular loop).
Eh. The sword of Damocles isn't hanging over the CEOs' heads. They can walk away and have money for the rest of their life. That sword is hanging over the heads of everyone who works for them.
Fun fact about James Stephanie's time as a flower shop employee - back before her transition she once received a call from a grieving fella who thought her voice (when she was a man) was so feminine that it sounded like the customer's dead mum. James Stephanie then had to conduct the rest of the call thinking 'oh god, I sound like his dead mum' Source: a really old Podcastle episode
I love these early access periods. It's saved me so much money letting other people pay extra to play games early so they can tell me the game isn't worth it at all to buy. And I get 20% staff discount in video games. 😂
hey! i have an idea of what they'll do next. Monetised patches. "Oh the game you paid $70 for is full of game breaking bugs? Don't worry, we just released a patch that fixes some of them, it only costs $10. If you bought the deluxe edition you'd have got the first 2 patches for free!" And then instead of looking through a list of DLC to figure out which ones you actually care enough about to buy it'll be looking through the patch log and trying to work out which of the bugs you can live with and which ones you're willing to pay money to fix
The point of early access is that you can brag to your friends. "I know something that you do not know yet. I found out early what the graphics look like."
Great video, as usual. While watching, before you got to it, I was thinking early access was driven by FOMO, because I feel it myself from time to time when presented with that "opportunity." Now when I see it I try to reframe it as not so much missing out, as other people doing one last beta test of the thing to find all the problems. Because the AAA developers can't release a game without some problems anymore. As for what's next, I heard news that the mid-life Xbox Series X was going to ditch the optical drive and be digital only. That's what I think will be next. The death of physical media and the aftermarket marketplace of games.
It looks like the DRIBBLE A industry is in a bit of a bubble economy right now. Once it bursts, they'll be in deep shit and we'll be pointing and laughing about the pitfalls of greed and hubris.
I hope some company forgets to give the early access players the Day 1 patch because "it's technically not the street date" Congrats to Z. Mann Zilla really got the visual vibe that suits the Sterling style.
It’s like these companies are trying to ring everyone dry before some law gets passed. But unless these video game micro transactions start going on sprees at schools they won’t even be acknowledged let alone penalized.
Taking into account that most AAA games lauch nearly broken and in dire need of patches that only come out weeks or months after launch, I can't for the life of me imagine why anyone would want to get their game early.
Steph, you were genuinely a really big help for me not just accepting the idea of identifying as nonbinary generally speaking (I'm from an incredibly rural and traditionally republican area), but also becoming more in-tune with my own gender-identity. Ever since I started thinking about this stuff I've only felt more and more free and self-aware. It's like I had a weight on my mind my entire life and only within the last couple years realized it. You were the first content creator I watched religiously who publicly came out as nonbinary, which wasn't just brave but seriously a kind thing to do for all those in your audience who never considered that as a true option for whatever reason. You're an inspiration. You already were an inspiration before that, too, because you've always been consistently loud about the human cost of the video game industry, when so many people brush it under the rug. You're among the best journalists in the video game industry, if not the best, and I really respect how much borderline-insane passion you must have for gaming to keep doing this job through the years when so often, you're quite literally the "Cassandra of video games". So I wanted to thank you. Thank you.
I was in a public discord vc about 8 hours before starfields (proper) release. 3 people joined and asked if we thought it was worth it to buy the early access, 2 of them bought it after being told when they could buy it normally. we're so fucked.
Yep -- some guy on Reddit was upset to find he bought the wrong version and decided to return it and pay the extra $30 so he didn't have to wait five days to play it.
Reminds me of the rested xp mechanic from world of warcraft. In its earliest form it was a debuff that reduced your xp gain after a certain amount of time playing and it was hated. But the same mechanic reworded to you get bonus xp for a period of time after logging on was well recieved. If the framing was that they hold the game back a couple of days unless you buy a special edition or preorder or whatever there would be more visible backlash. But they do that exact thing and say you're getting a bonus for getting the special edition and so many people easily excuse this.
I’m glad that you’ve taken the time to talk about this. Even though I’m very good about keeping myself in check to not impulsively spend money on pre-orders and deluxe editions unless I am 100% certain I will enjoy the game, I will be the first to admit that the idea of getting something early is very tantalizing for me as a neruodivergent person, *especially* if it’s something I’m really passionate about. So I can see this being something that will hook neurodivergent folx in very easily, and I shudder to think of the consequences of something more egregious than just getting a game a week early happening in the future. I wonder if you’re planning to take a crack at Square Enix again, since it seems their plans to get their plan to invest so much time and money into live services seems to be biting them in the ass right now and, as you pointed out, that deluxe edition for “Final Fantasy VII Rebirth” is just pathetic.
Yeah, the only preorders I’ve ever done are for games that came out overseas first before being localized years later, so I can already look at stuff online about the game from its original release about whether there are major problems or not
Actually, I had to fact check Steph's FFVII Rebirth Deluxe Edition claim due to pre-ordering the game myself as an X-mas present, and the Deluxe Edition actually _does not_ include a digital soundtrack and artbook, but rather a physical mini-soundtrack CD and a hardcover artbook... --the latter which is usually reserved for Collector's Editions, so it actually made me kinda happy to see that they offered the artbook with the Deluxe Edition so that people who want it don't have to sell a kidney and also get a cumbersome Sephiroth figurine along with the purchase... --said figurine being, aside from the Deluxe Edition stuff that's also included in the Collector's Edition, _the only_ non-digital thing you get with the Collector's Edition btw... Also, as per the product descriptions on Square's shop: "In-game items may be sold at a later date." Which I'm just gonna go ahead and very boldly assume means "all of the DLCs and digital content will be purchasable at a later date." So yeah, Square are still pretty scummy, but they're _not quite_ as bad as Steph made them sound _this time around,_ in _this_ particular example, with _this_ particular edition, of _this_ particular game.
We just had Payday 3's launch where the 'early access' barely functioned because of always online features, and then utterly implode the moment the main core of players joined a few days later.
I remember this happened with ESO, and I was so confused, and my friends all seemed to just take it at face value, and I had to go over it a few times with them because I felt like I was going mad. The price was the same, the game was the same, there was literally no difference between buying on "Day 1" and buying on "Day negative 5", but somehow, in our sample size of about 4, I was the only one that could see it. I couldn't understand it, there wasn't even a real incentive for them that I could see, because you could "pre order" on day negative 5, and "pre play" immediately, so what was in it for them, apart from just confusing people into thinking that there was some benefit to an actual preorder from before Day negative 5 which was the real day 1. Of course what I didn't see then was the long game of normalising and expanding. Making it just so staggeringly meaningless as it was then made it easier to fly under the radar, as people either took it at face value, didn't notice, or were more just confused than upset
![[LIVE] : ONE ลุมพินี 78 | คู่เอก "ปกรณ์ vs ฟาบิโอ"](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/LSOmgl0Th2c/mqdefault.jpg)
This is especially hilarious considering AAA games already charge $70 to play them early, since no AAA game ever arrives finished 🤣
It came to a point that when a game is released in a stable state it get praised for it
I have been playing more Indie games than ever mainly because the games are finished when they come out and even cost less than $70 piece of crap AAAss games...
Stinger, I hadn’t even thought of it that way!
They release unfinished anyway. Then people pay double-extra to play extra-unfinished games.
It's egregious with Bethesda's open world games. Just wait a year or two after release and you can buy the game patched and bundled with dlcs on deep discount
@@alexdasliebe5391It is like paying extra at a restaurant for a half-baked pizza that is still stiff and cold
The really sad thing is that what most of these games actually need is later release dates so the devs have enough time to actually finish them without crunch.
Yes, paying for "early access" is paying to be a beta tester.
Great new idea. EA being the first to open a patreon so fans can ensure that the game is released “when its done”.
Exactly, most of my friends agree that a game is worth buying one or 2 years after, when all is fixed and there might even be a sales discount.
It's the "influencer fee" that every Twitch streamer will happily pay so they can be part of that first wave of coverage.
If they don't play it when it's new and going to make them money: most streamers will never play it. Because they're performers, not players. I mean, it's generous calling them performers, but still. It's better than a lot of the accurate things I could call them.
TH-cam videos guides and reviews as well. Lots of views if you're early with that content for a large release. Decent coverage might also gain you a new wave of subscribers. I follow a number of rogue-lite/like channels who do guides and some have complained about them not getting early access impacting their reach for new games.
But regular consumers feel a similar thing. You want to be part of the discourse, want to comment on videos, etc. While I'm personally not affected directly, I still know that feeling of annoyance when I watch a video on YT, have some great insight and realize that the video is too old for my insights to gain traction. It's always worst with puns...
@@DrZaius3141 It isn't even exclusive though, other than the price aspect. It's not like some games where the developers give them a key ahead of launch that nobody can get without being on a special list they have. It's just... give me more money and you get it a few days before you can get it for a little less money.
@@TalesOfWar It's literally months in some cases.
I've seen people streaming games that are not due out for months, and by the time they are released, it's so dull because it's been beaten to death by streamers
It's not paying to play early. It's paying to play first. It's an important distinction, and one I think needs to be made because "pay to play early" doesn't totally capture the cynicism behind this move. People aren't paying to play a game early, they're paying for the game to be delayed for everyone else.
Yep. If they marketed it as, we will make everyone else wait while the people who gave us more money get the game first, people would be more upset.
@@trenvert123 I mean it's the same for any luxury good where the only value is the social credit of owning it, they're never marketed like that because they would instantly lose said credit if it was explicit, it needs to be implicit and therefore luxury good will pretend to have some higher quality or something unique about them that justify their pricetag when really you're just paying for the fact that they're luxury good.
Obviously game early access isn't exactly a designer brand handbag but it's the same psychological mechanism where the customer needs to be able to lie to themselves about what they're doing.
Yes, people already DO pay to play early. By buying the game at full price. I do not like to pay extra to get a game t release so I buy it 1, 10, 15 or 25 years later whe the price is better.
@@ailithtwinning6806 Well, "game's not for sale now, thus abandonware therefore free" is a metric, but I'll pay tiny ammounts just for the convenience of having it on a digital download platform otherwise. I mean, Planescape Torment is almost 25 years old now so frankly 25 years is young in game time since most of the games from 2001-2019 were totally shit.
It's a status symbol. Mostly for men with a very short ...
Don't quote me on that, I heard this while listening to "a friend". A Porsche driver.
Have a GG:P
I remember when I first found out about this method of scamming people by changing words. World of Warcraft, during its beta, had a detriment to exp, called 'unrested' or 'exhausted' or something; which was removed bit by bit over time if you stayed at or logged out in certain friendly zones. People hated it. So they renamed the normal exp to 'rested' and called it a bonus, and the debuffed exp became the standard, normal exp. People loved that. Nothing as changed but the names. The system was the exact same.
At that moment I learned that simply renaming a bad thing to make it the new normal and renaming the normal thing to make it look better makes people think it is good deal.
From that moment onward, I saw everything that does such a thing as the scam it is. Shops giving discounts? The normal product is overpriced by that much or more. Early access for buyers? You mean delayed release with paid exceptions, right?
Furniture stores have been doing this for forever. No one was ever going to pay $4k for that couch. The sale price is the regular price.
Department stores in general, yeah.
The most depressing thing about it is... the general customer base LOVES this scam. They get to feel all smart and savvy and pat themselves on the back for all the "deals" they are taking advantage of.
So much so that most customers prefer the "overpriced deal" system over just lowering the damn prices and calling it a day.
Not only is this tricking people, but it's tricking people in a way they'll thank the damn companies for.
There is an entire field of psychology dedicated to finding these "dark patterns" in the human psyche, then exploiting the shit out of them. Every major company keeps some on staff, or at least, consults them before any given move.
@@duncanlutz3698 yeah the entire field of marketing, which is 1-2% of global GDP, is a scam. it's meant to create artificial demand for products that we dont need
Rejoice comrade! Big Brother has graciously increased the chocolate ration to 3 pieces a week! (Last week the ration was 3 pieces)
@@ellahyland1705 J.C. Penny wanted to end sales by no longer abusing customers with fake sales. A pair of $20 pants, and always cost $20, was sold to customers as on sale fifty percent off, and again, it never sold at $40, it always sold at $20. So, they decided to no longer use fake sales with implied regular prices steeper than they ever sold it at, and it nearly bankrupted them! People didn't WANT to buy $20 pants for $20, they wanted to buy $40 pants for $20 even though they were told in advance that the pants they were buying were NEVER $40! People are fucking stupid and it's why we're going to die as a species.
Damn...I'm 35 years old and what you just said made me sad Jim. To the new generation, dlc, pay2win, lootboxes and other awful things are simply common because that's the world they grew up in
Which is sadly why they defend it and-or don't see a problem with it. That predatory system is so ingrained in them now that they just nod.
I'm 51. To see the bloated behemoth the games industry has become is utterly depressing, as is the thought of younger generations not knowing that it even could be otherwise. I started with the 8 bit home micros, when games were a cottage industry whose giants were the likes of Ocean Software and US Gold. Games were seen as children's toys and priced accordingly. Aside from a few pages of previews in a games magazine, the way to learn a game existed was to see it in a shop or read the reviews in the magazine. Mind you, it turned out that even then unscrupulous companies tried to manipulate review scores by threatening to pull advertising. But the best of the magazines knew their readers' trust was more important than any one publisher's ad revenue, and we knew which of the magazines we could trust.
Of course the games industry even then was all about making money. It is, after all, a business. But it seems to have been better when games weren't yet so lucrative as to draw the most soulless, avaricious briefcase wankers in to run the show. Aside from Alan Sugar, of course.
Shifting baseline effect is brutal. It happens with serious things like environmental regulation too. Nobody alive today has ever breathed clean air, drank clean water, or seen wildlife populations at the level they're supposed to be. So when someone is looking at something like fish or insect populations and sees that the population is 50% of what it was when they started, they think "that's not too bad". Not realising that, when they started, the population was already 2% of what its supposed to be.
Dlc isn't awful though. It can be awful absolutely but dlc isn't bad by design.
Day one dlc is shit though
I've had people tell me that "every studio has crunch" as that is also now part of the games cycle. People will defend crunch it's.. really sick.
I have a picture of Steph in my wallet, so whenever I feel the need open my wallet to buy a brand new collector's edition of a game, with battle passes, DLCs n'shit, I just look at her disapproving stare and put my wallet away...
Yes. That's why you have that picture in your wallet. For no other reason, absolutely.
That is...the most sad but hilarious thing I've seen on this channel, and I mean that in a good way.
Congrats, now I gotta contemplate getting one as well lol
@@emilbovbjergthe nudes are on my homework folder
That is an excellent idea. I need an ‘Apple wallet’ version. That has to be possible…
@@emilbovbjerg got in there with an implied wank joke before me :(
This is why I always buy a game a year or two after it releases.
Same, I wanna play Forspoken, just because the go woke go broke crowd is insulting it, so it probably isn't that bad. But the last time I checked, it was $60. I would pay 30 bucks or so for a game. But anything beyond that is a no from me.
Yep, Year 2-3 on a Steam sale. Magnifique!
Relatively Bug-free and feature replete, as well
If a game is good on launch it'll still be good in a couple years.
if a game is terrible on launch you have a chance of it being good in a couple years.
@@trenvert123 unfortunately sometimes a game just fails to succeed on its own artistic and mechanical merits; not, as the 'sad sweaty freak' demographic insists, just because it has a (gasp) woman in it. not every studio lands a dishonored 2 or metroid prime or horizon zero dawn; forspoken really is a dreary and joyless slog, through an empty and uninspired world, with a tiresomely clunky plot. i couldn't recommend it as anything more than a time-filler. the soundtrack is good though
Same👌
The thing I find particularly gross about charging for "early release" is that early release actually provides a pretty extreme benefit to a lot of games. Any game with remote servers, really. Think of how many games have released, and their servers are slammed on day one as everyone tries to play the game. Now imagine you can convince half those people to slam the servers a week early instead. And they're charging for it. They're charging people to solve a technical problem on their side.
not to mention how many games wind up using it as paid beta testing in general
That’s interesting, had not considered this angle before
hated patch days on wow, every fucking idiot had to be on for release which fucked up the servers for everyone. just play when you usually do, don't ruin the time i'm awake and playing because you need your 15 minutes of the new stuff.
I'm immediately reminded of every single Blizzard release ever. The servers NEVER work on release
Payday proves you wrong, had early access of 3 days, servers were dead for most of those 3 days, and most of the 3 days after aswell
One aspect of pre-order early access that I'm surprised to not have seen anyone (including Steph in this video) talk about, is that reviews for games can't be published until the actual release date, which given the growing trend of unfinished, unoptimised and buggy games on release has absolute potential to be exploitative, as players can't post reviews for the game on Steam, Metacritic, etc., often not even for a short period until after the launch.
review embargos are a case-by-case decision by publishers; starfield in particular lifted its embargo the day before the quote-unquote 'early' release date. redfall's embargo, by contrast, was supposed to stay in place until the *moment* of release, because bethesda knew full well they were pushing out a major turd and needed to get it out the door to as many sales as possible before major critical sources could publicise its issues.
bethesda hadn't been confident in doom 2016, so they decided to embargo it until release day and only sent out review copies the day prior. they've mostly stuck to release day embargos since 2017 when dan stapleton obliterated Prey's metacritic average before release by giving it a 60 based on a single save-system bug he was told was already fixed in the current build.
other AAA publishers tend to be a bit less paranoid, but the lack of consequences for bethesda emboldened a lot of them to bring embargos closer and closer. most non-AAA companies lift their embargos well before release (because reviews are a method to remind people your game exists and is coming out soon); but it is very telling that so many industry observers considered starfield lifting it 'days in advance' of launch (in reality, still just one day before the de facto launch) was 'a sign of confidence'.
Fair enough for flat out published reviews by game's journalists / reviewers, but specifically I'm referring to reviews published by the gamers themselves on platforms like Steam and Metacritic, which I don't think are effected by publishers lifting embargos.@@ratcarpet
Back when Sears was a thing, they got in serious trouble over how horrendous their price hike then discount game was. The discounts were consistently pricier than the original price.
Oh my god, Sears...now that's a name I've not heard in a long, long time
@@makeitthrough_ I feel so old in remembering that name, and place.
That's something you still got to look out for. A lot of places claim a sale but the so called original price never actually existed and the sale price is just what they were charging last week or a few cents less when it wasn't on "sale". I've noticed this a ton at grocery stores I regularly shop at and am familiar with the prices.
Shit just happened last time I was at the grocery store. The onion soup recipe mix is $2 dollars on sale down from $2.5 this week...except I buy this all the time and it's been $2 dollars for months. Another fun one they've started doing is not selling you stuff at the regular price unless you buy 2 and claiming that's a sale.
@@makeitthrough_
I heard they tried to implement capitalism internally. It did not go well, obviously.
Alternatively, JC Penney got slammed for *not* price hiking things for discounts and just selling things for what they actually cost the company. It cost them a ton of money because consumers *want* to feel like they're getting a bargain. Extra Credits did a great video on it.
Re: the ending monologue - This is not about them selling you something of value. It's about them holding the customer hostage. You pay to access Starfield a week early because if you don't, you have to spend an entire week dodging spoilers and being acutely aware people are playing it without you. They are trying to create a situation where people who aren't buying into the early access are, essentially, socially tortured by those who did (unwittingly or otherwise), and then selling them relief from the torment.
The only spoiler for Starfield I know about is that you can select pronouns in it. I know there are lore videos for Starfield, too.
It’s not hard to avoid spoilers. Not hard to ignore a game until you’re ready to play.
You take FOMO too seriously bud.
I never understood why pre-order were a thing in the modern era of gaming. Pre orders made a little more sense when everything was physical but now there’s digital downloads so no such scarcity exists anymore. I guess when publishers are releasing half-finished or overly buggy games they wanna get that money up front before people can be disappointed
why would they get rid of the early sales just because they did away with the physical copies? i mean they didn't reduce the price at all.
As far as I'm concerned, the only benefit is a game I was going to buy anyway gets to show up at my door on release day and it saves me the trouble of going slightly out of my way to GameStop (only real game store around me). Though I'll admit that it sure helps that I'm not interested in pretty much all of the AAA games that are obviously prone to being unfinished messes. So I've yet to be burned by pre-ordering, nor do I get the sinking feeling that I'm encouraging industry BS by doing so, nor do I anticipate it happening in the future for me.
Ahah! this made me think of something else that may see an appearance - enforced digital scarcity. Something similar to how Nintendo only released that one Super Mario collection for a few months and then pulled it from sale... forever... (or so the plan is, for now at least).
@@collin1240 That is what NFT's are.
@@Gerd0 The last AAA game I bought was Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Indie is where it's at for me, that's where you see genuine innovation these days. Thought SotTR is a good game, it's the exception rather than the rule when it comes to AAA. I don't follow the console market so I don't know how well served they are by the indie market, but on the PC there's no shortage of amazing games developed by small teams with a shoestring budget or even a single person that absolutely destroy what these mega publishers are squirting out.
CEO's and COO's really don't like it when you point out to them that constant growth is a statistical impossibility.
Back in my day game studios paid game testers. Now players pay the studios to test the game.
My oh my how times have changed huh 😢😒 🤔
Then there's Bethesda, no need for quality control when players will fix the game and even finish it themselves.
That isn't even play testing...the version of the game that releases early is the exact same as the one that releases 5 days later.
I don't mind it that much honestly...if people are stupid enough to pay a $20 upcharge for a 5 days exclusivity that's their problem.
And if they are paying for it, that means it doesn't bother them so at this point, the publishers would be stupid to not do it.
And this is why i don't buy games at launch, I resent being an unpaid QA tester.
They paid testers back in the day? :v
I'm someone that plays sports games and it's wild that single player games have early access. Like Steph said FOMO. Very few games to me are worth buying day one because of how incomplete the game is and the 'promise' of road maps and season passes.
if there's any single group that these companies can count on to buy things "early", it's content creators. because having days of videos and blog posts ready to go in advance of anyone else gives them an advantage with engagement and income compared to if they sat on their hands and waited for the rest of the world to catch up. they've essentially monetized review embargos, in a way.
They get regular gamers by having the “early” access before a 3 day weekend. Starfield and Baldurs gate 3 on ps5 early access was Labor Day weekend.
which then feeds into the fomo of the people that would normally just wait. Who start slurping up all the content desperate to play themselves. I mean, what even is an extra 20? Yeah. Fuck being part of the poor man's launch, I'm rich.
It isn't early though is it, given EVERYONE has access to the exact same thing by just throwing a few more pennies at them.
@@ferinzz I did enjoy the "it isn't officially released yet so don't judge it for being so meh" crowd. Like they'd be able to fix fundamental limitations with the engine or poor gameplay mechanics and decisions in a week.
yeah the issue is, it's considered a necessity now by streamers, if they want in on a game and it has an early release version, then streamers have to get that, or they're behind the other streamers who are also doing so.
and then on top, that drives further sales of those early launch versions...
it's sickening, but i get why streamers feel they have to do that, or give up on playing a game "at launch"
AAA could have also spun it as "pay $80 to play it on Day One, or we can give you a discount if you wait a few days".
They do, it's called Steam sales - there's not much I pick up on release now, I give it 4 to 6 months for the sale & by then the most egregious bugs will generally be ironed out.
Good to see Zilla got hired onto the team. The edits recently have been amazing
Thank you so much!
Absolutely! Zilla’s ability to not only learn but actively improve upon my presentation style has blown me away.
As much as I was set on being a solo editor again, I couldn’t ignore the fact that Zilla’s help has not only helped my scheduling, but actively made the videos more entertaining.
Seeing the update to co-editor and the icon change was awesome, definitely a 10/10 change for the channel and excited to see everything going forward!
Burying the lead folks. Zilla went panda, PANDA!
Congrats Zilla! Well-deserved!
I still remember the days when the release date for a game wasn't even that big a deal. Games would show up a day or two before their supposed release on store shelves, for no extra cost. How far we've fallen...
Of course this is what the tRIpLe aAa industry has cooked up next. 'All the money' seriously isn't enough for them - as we already knew, but still. Still!
"Playing something early" is, basically, just pushing back the release date for everyone else. You're not exactly breaking any embargos here, gamers.
playing before the critics release their reviews, what could go wrong
I've spent years not caring about release dates, only buying games months or years after release, complete and at a discount. Patience saves you a lot of money and disappointment.
This is especially true considering how broken and incomplete games tend to release right now.
Agreed you’re smart :)
That's really sad
Patience almost never saves you money with Nintendo though unless you count those deals retail stores themselves do.
Imagine buying a digital deluxe edition of a game a week after launch and one of the bonuses was playing the game 4 days early. What the hell are you even buying at that point. A digital artbook that you could google and costume pack for £10 extra? Not worth it in any way.
Not really, the perk was delaying the release for everyone else which is not really a perk but a disgusting demonstration of Capitalism working as intended.
Pay for patches is my guess for their next con (could say some DLCs are this already). Either a small fee for each one or they rehash the online pass thing and ship two versions of games, one without a code, another with a patch code that is £15 more expensive than your basic broken version.
They'll say its only fair because we never used to have patches...
Can you imagine if nintendo forced people to pay for the patches in Zelda TOTK that fixed things like item duplication? That would be hilarious. "We don't want you to dupe items in game! But we're not giving you this patch until you pay for it!"
I really like the minimalist intro skits.
Makes it easier to share these videos with people who don't know the Jimquisition already.
The reason I was hesitant to watch Stephanie in the past was because I thought they were another Gamer Gater
The intro skits are always way way way too long
@@Gloomdrakewhat's wrong with gamergaters?
@@isauldron4337 Everything lol
I remember preordering "The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess" on the Nintendo Gamecube where not only I get the game, but also have the walkthrough guide with a poster/map of Hyrule as well. It was a nice piece of something for me to have in my collection.
Nowadays, I now get weary in how games get too expensive over time. I can't imagine a decade later or so that the least expensive games would hike up to more than $70 brand now, and the only way to purchase them is if they are on sale. Especially when you can find used games that sometimes are affordable depending on the years going by and the discount. So there's no point in preordering games anymore when I can just get them later whenever I want to.
I uses to have to wait six months to a year to buy a game due to budget, now it's to not get scammed.
They want as many people as possible to pay for their games before they're release them so they can pocket the money before the reviews are in to let us know which ones are bad. And of course then they manipulate gamers into being personally invested in a game's success so every attempt is made to delegitimize even mildly negative reviews. (Even though like Stephanie said they almost always eventually become the prevailing opinion.)
NEVER prepurchase ANYTHING.
I feel like the early playing is targeted directly at content creators (or in MK's example: kontent kreators) so that if they get it early, they'll get more engagement from their followers who aren't going to pay up for the early access. It's a small minority, but as you've always said Steph, video game companies will go for every last nickel if they could.
A streamer on Twitch with anywhere from 5 to 20k followers and watchers streaming the game "early" is likely going to convert a majority of those watchers into sales. It's like advertising that was paid for by the streamer
Yeah, but usually companies gave early access keys to content creators, as it is good marketing and mutually beneficial. So they are just charging people to do a service they used to pay for. Just like way back companies hired game testers and now people pay to be a part of testing.
I'd say "gamer culture" and it's hype addiction makes videogame fans really easy to exploit.
I'm sure those creators would buy into it, but are there other types of players who really want those games before the gate is even opened?
Steph imagines those who bought RE5 a month early probably regret it, I think those people might think the earliness alone is worth the price tag.
In the MMOs I play, whenever new items are available, the in-game economy has those items trade 3x or higher than it would in the long run, yet there are always people who are willing to buy it at the high point just to be the early ones.
Is there any mental exploitation going on here besides the obvious?
The MK1 early access felt more like a way for the publisher to extract a tax out of competitive players because they got about a week of practice before everyone else joined. A week of early practice makes a TON of difference in a competitive fighter.
That was a great way to announce a permanent change to the team, congrats to the new co-editor!
Thanks so much!
The Early Access scam also includes an attempt to control the initial narrative around the games. In Starfields case, the graphs on Steam show a significant difference in the balance of positive to negative reviews during the Early access period and afterwards - and the front-loading of the review system has meant that it's taken far longer for the aggregate review score to come down to a level actually reflective of the games quality.
Between this, the 'selective review copy' fiasco and the general tone of Bethesdas public comments since the game came out, I was feeling that there were just a few too many red flags around this release - both Bethesda and Microsoft were desperate to make this game out to appear far better than it is, and deflect / downplay any criticisms regardless of how valid they may be. I had my suspicions, but then the Microsoft leak happened and it turned out the actual situation was far worse - and those were old docs.
Imagine claiming that Starfield was your companies biggest release, when it only reached 10m players in two weeks while being offered at no extra cost on a subscription service with 30m+ subscribers. Meanwhile, Fallout 4 shipped some 12m physical copies (that people would have actually chosen to pay for) in week 1 - & I know this isn't the actual number of copies sold to customers in the first week, but it's as close as I can find to it. Hell, Skyrim shipped 7m in its first week back when it originally released and the market has more than doubled in size since then.
They're desperate to make Starfield look like a tentpole game and some industry-defining success, and it just isn't.
At this point, I'm beginning to suspect that maybe things haven't gotten any better at MS in the time since those leaked docs were put together.
Throughout my childhood all the way to my mid 20's gaming was my primary hobby. So it's wild to me just how little I care now all because of the industry's practices. I very very rarely buy new games at launch anymore. The most recent being Elden Ring. Before that TLOU 2 (actually bought for me) and before that I actually don't know. Resident Evil 7 maybe. Now I pretty much only buy games years after launch, heavily discounted in sales, and I truly don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. Even Tekken, a series I religiously bought at launch since Tekken 2, I haven't so much as looked at Tekken 7 because I saw how much DLC that there was for it that even when it was massively reduced to like 30 quid for the complete edition I just wasn't fucked to buy it. A lot of my friends have kids and more responsibilities so it make sense that they have less time for games but honestly I just spend my down time doing other things that bring me far more joy than the gaming industry can manage these days.
It's really disturbing how much of cash cows they've become. In past games, there was at least some effort put in since technology hasn't advanced to such a point where you can crank out something that's AI-generated in minutes. Engine, voice, graphical environments and all. It's not a mystery why game industry folks unionized.
I wonder if fighting games will ever move to a yearly release schedule with only minor tweaks to characters, like sports games. I have been a Tekken fan since 1 and 2, it's depressing to see characters locked behind paywalls these days.
We all know that a game being broken throughout the entire early access period is an *any day now* kind of thing, right?
I already know what they're gonna monetize next. The actual character creation. It's a huge part for some of us, the visual look of our character. Paying extra to get unique customisation options that are only available for one week. Comes with a special digital edition with early game access. It's surely the next step for AAA games.
I remember reading a report from gamebiz that the "average gamer" was middle class men with salaries over 64K a year. I always think about that when someone brings up $70 isn't that bad of a game or that games used to cost $80 30 years ago so we should be grateful. I do genuinely believe that portion of gamers is driving gaming to be so egregious along with vulnerable people who can't control their FOMO.
I saw a survey done by a gaming company where they asked how many games a month u buy and there was no answer for me to say 1 game, 7 months ago. Or how much money you spend on games every month and for me that's I buy a game 7 months ago and then no more money.
@@Goatse-monogatari_no_homo In a world where people told me who died in Infinity War the day after that film released I can totally see people being pressured into buying games on release. This whole attitude of "just don't use social media for the next year, forehead" is absurdly unrealistic.
2 things - Congrats to Z. Mann Zila for co-editor! Their work has been as I've mentioned in other comments a wonderful play off between the two of you.
And to say the sound of all of your simps IMMEDIATELY pulling the credit cards out of their wallets when you mentioned OF was audible from about a 5 km radius is an understatement.
In short, Thank God for you and your fantastic cadre of friends and associates!
I think alot of "early access" is for the streamers (or want to be streamers) if your first you have a chance to stand out and either get a name for yourself or not. However with some many people doing it, it kind of kills the advantage.
We can always count on the Videogame Industry to come up with a new predatory scheme
For literal years now, there's been predictions that the videogame industry would have another crash. Well, I think it might actually be happening soon. At least when it comes to the Triple-A game publishers. If they're selling you brand new games a little bit earlier than the day they're supposed to release, then I have to wonder what they need the cash earlier for. I mean, other than lining their pockets. A reckoning within the major game publishing industry is coming, and they seem to know it.
And it will be very ironic if Activision is the one to cause the crash....... *Again*
I hope the industry wipes itself out. It's like a crusty beast laden with bloodsucking parasite, more parasite than animal, but what else is new with capitalism? Of course, it's never the people at the top who suffer, which gives people another excuse to keep paying.
Cleanse it with hellfire. It's beyond due.
I think a bigger crash is coming than just to the games industry, but time will tell. It's hard to distract people with bread and circuses if they can't afford the bread and circuses because of all the upselling and FOMO.
Well, no crash, but heavy correction is already happening. Anything without a budget for marketing a la Starfield lands into disappointing sales right now. First of all, publishers did not spread out their releases, and second, there are quite fatigue in players as they have very long games to finish or come back to.
Companies have quite a lot of money to burn but next year it will be quite stripped down for releases, and lot of devs will be out of work for considerable time unfortunately.
There won't be another crash. They don't _need_ and aren't getting the cash earlier. The "earliness" only comes for the player, in the form of """early""" access. What the companies get out of this is not money earlier but MORE money. If they just opened preorders and the only option was $60, then people would pre-order for $60. But now make two options, one for $60 and one for $80 "early access" and suddenly a lot of those pre-orders are for $20 more than they otherwise would have been. The companies are getting more money at the same time, they're not getting money any earlier.
You mentioning how the 2010s were when the poisoning was in full swing made me realize that it poisoned me as well, in a way. I used to be excited for a lot of new games - big and small. Did a few midnight launches, took a day off here and there, treasured the discovery of a new world I’m going to step into. That slowly chipped away until it just… stopped. I didn’t even notice when I reached this point, or when was the last release I was genuinely excited for, with a capital E three times as tall as you are. I see a bunch of interesting games in the times ahead (mostly independent), but nothing in the same postal area as how it used to be. I still find great games, but on my own time.
the hypernormalisation of the commercial hype-cycle, alongside the general quality slip of actual release experiences and predatory monetisation of most titles, has definitely killed the sense of genuine excitement people seem to have once felt about major releases
As I've aged, the lust to play a new game asap has dwindled so much that my standard acquisition process these days is to wait until the game is being sold for less than half the launch price before I buy it. Sometimes that takes only a couple of months for an aggressive Steam sale, or it's 18 months after launch buying a boxed copy at my FLGS, but either way I get a bug-fixed version that's often had extra content added to it for free, and have just as much fun as anyone else did, for less money.
Company's will eternally demand more money for less product, and so long as those with substantial disposable income and no financial literacy keep paying them it will only get worse.
Ironically, there's a hobby programmer that's all but being harassed because he won't take money for his game he's making because he wants to make a labor of love.
@@vxicepickxvwho's that?
Totally agree. It goes a bit beyond "hey, there's something I'll let all people buy in 2 weeks, but I'll let you buy today for more". In this day and age, the product you're getting is objectively worse 2 weeks before. There's bugs. There's multiplayer and download infrastructure that people need to properly configure. If you think about it, companies should be paying you to play their game early, since they're going to use the data for adjustments. That's what I love about (free) open betas. You get to play the game, devs get to see how it performs with lots of people playing it.
This sad age of gaming makes me glad to be a nomad who usually plays games on day (some number you're probably not thinking of). It also makes me sad that because I'm a nomad, I have to exclude any titles that are always online or once-per-session.
But meh, too many games exist to ever get through the ones that pique my interests. 😹 Keep fighting the good fight, Steph.
Perfekt.
- I've been saying a lot of this for years. :( Crazy how many people simp for companies to take advantage of them.
- Paying for access a week "early" is almost as bad as paying for an NFT. See how mad people get when you compared the two.
- "2010's: the great poisoning of video games" Yep. I used to talk about all of these subjects to friends and acquaintances. Had a lot of people vehemently defend all of these predatory practices. "Oh but DLC gives the devs more money, isn't that good?! aren't you bad cause you dont want devs paid?!" Some of the stupidest conversations/arguments I've ever heard.
- As someone who worked at Gamestop for a long time, I've heard MANY (too many) people tell me they buy the latest games on release/pre-release, and could possibly never play them, but they just HAVE to get them as early as possible. It's "keeping up with the Jones'" but for nerds. People gotta stop consuming so much.
There really needs to be a term other than early access, because the Early Access you get from things like Baldur's Gate 3 (on PC), World of Horror, etc. are not the same thing as these early release scams.
Call it what it is, a beta test.
No, Baldur's Gate 3 Early Access was still a scam.
Yeah, the term is misleading on purpose for marketing.
It should be "release access" as you pay to play on the actual release on the game, not 5 days later, where people get late access
@@ultimamage3ok sure buddy.
@@ultimamage3 Would you like to explain your point in further detail?
Great episode! This trend gets especially nefarious when it comes to games with competitive play. Fomo and actual disadvantage for not jumping on the corporate slop train.
So much for day1 on gamepass.
This is probably the EXACT reason for this BS.
"Yeah, you didn't pay for day -6" because people who are blinded by money will do anything to weasel themselves into a bonus
We need to bring back the term "Day 0"....
15:30 You've touched on classism before and I think that's where this exclusivity comes from. Upper classes will pay a LOT to be part of 'exclusive' clubs and societies even though it's rarely worth the money. The same psychological mechanisms are at play here and are depressingly effective.
This is the very reason why I always wait until honest reviews are out to determine whether it’s worth the money or not. Why pay extra for an early unfinished game when everyone else will be able to pay less for a finished product.
Being able to play “early” is one of my recent hates, I’ve seen at least one game grant “early access” no matter what edition you pre-ordered.
Like, that’s not early access…that’s just the release date.
It's a bitchin jacket though Steph, well worth the crinkling
All I got out of this is that the game industry's self-regulating itself is not working. A trade Commission needs to step in and start busting heads. That's the only way they will stop.
It's almost as if free-market capitalism is actually just an excremental idea thought up by scammers and grifters and "the invisible hand of the free market" was a god they made up to sell their big scam to the masses.
There was some top-notch editing in this episode 🤣
Thank you so much!
@ZMannZilla thankyou for your work
I miss all the inserts we used to get in video games. Instruction manuals, art books, maps, etc.
Now all that stuff is deluxe premium early pre-order limited release collector's edition bonus material that you pay extra for.
Pay extra to access it even sooner, y'know, before the day 1 patch. Yeah, sounds like a solid gamble. Also, I think this is really aimed at streamers and content creators, so they will not only pay to get in on it, but also to create that FOMO.
I think the attitude around "spoiling stories" also feeds into the desire for early access that then gets monetized by these companies. I'm immune to spoilers -- knowing information about a game/story doesn't ruin the experience for me -- but some people act like it's the end of the world if they come across any information from media they haven't interacted with yet. And then the defense to this becomes -- watch/play/read it day 1 so that you can get ahead of it.
People acting like spoilers are the worst thing in the entire world is definitely not helping the sense of FOMO around games. And the definition of 'spoiler' keeps ever expanding, it feels like, where people are even avoiding trailers because oh no what if there are spoilers! It's super weird, imo.
@MsSjofn yeah but have you watched trailers these days? They basically spell out the entire story so there's no need to actually watch the movie 😅
I simply was not prepared for the Alice's Restaurant reference. My smile was enormous. Thank you for that.
I mean... I meeeeeeean... I kinda had to!
1:25 Garfield reference... well played.
12:50 Singer reference... I'm loving some of these deeper cuts!
Thankfully, I'm old enough that I have (mostly) learned how to manage my impulse control, ignore Fomo, and just be patient. Generally, when one of these big titles comes out, I wait until it's first discount sale, minimum, before buying them. By that time they usually have been patched enough and have enough mods to make it good enough to play. Doesn't change the fact that game companies should stop selling early-access titles as complete titles though...
oh my gosh, thank you for including the futurama clip. The other day in a conversation i actually said "I am technically correct, the best kind of correct." and legit could NOT remember where I got it from.
It doesn't make sense to us adults, but I can imagine it being crucially important if you're 12 unfortunately. In the harsh world of playground politics whether you can afford to waste money on early access or not could quite possibly determine your worth as a human being in the eyes of your peers.
Congratulations to Z. Mann Zilla. I was last week years old when I found out he's also the Sesamerot guy. Thank you for your work.
Thank you for your time!
i'm glad to see the editor evolved into having a formal position and a fursona
That's my secret cap'n... I always had a fursona! :P
lol pfp checks out
@@ZMannZilla lol your power grows
A game's release date is OBJECTIVELY the day in which the game is released to the public.
If you can go to an official storefront, buy a version, and start playing it.. Then the game has been released. I don’t think this is something you can be subjective about.
So I think the concept that gamers are paying full price for a video game, and then are artificially paywalled out of playing it until a week after its actual release day is particularly scummy, evil and should be illegal. At the very least there should be regulations on the terms. “Early access” should be correctly labelled as “play the game at launch” and the late versions shouldn’t be able to be labelled as “day 1” where they’re actually “day 5” as this is false advertising.
Whilst my take on this is a bit more critical, I’m just glad this is finally something someone in games media is discussing.
I wouldn't call this a "new" scam, pretty sure this has been going on for at least 7 or 8 years now with "early access"
A brilliant man already suggested paywalling reloading. I mean, you're already 20 hours into the latest Call of Duty or whatever. What's a small charge for an extra reload?
I know someone irl who doesn't seem to realize the monetization schemes at play and literally said "You don't have to buy them" when I said "Man, they are designing games for and around these monetization schemes, knowingly and at the cost of player experience."
"Rent and food and gas are so freaking expensive..."
"Well you don't have to live y'know.'
I had massive FOMO for Starfield but I really wanted to finish BG3 first so I held off. Now that every video, discussion and stream are not all about Starfield, I don't feel the need to jump it to it anytime soon. Whether it be genuine desire or just marketing the pull to be part of the zeitgeist is powerful!
I looked at Starfield (by Bethesda) and realized it was from Bethesda and then thought back to Fallout 76 and Fallout 4 and asked myself "has Bethesda improved?" and lo, the answer was a resounding lol no.
Yeah. I noticed that as long as I don't let the hype in. Don't watch new release trailers, just hear about new releases through the grapevine, without immersing myself within the hype-cycle, I don't jump into any games or movies or shows. And I don't get spoiled on them unless I want to, because I'm so far removed from the communities who would spoil it for me.
The editing on "4 fucking ever" was so brilliant! LMAO
Hahaha, thanks!
The price hike to $70 wasn't the last good card they had. There's always the hike to $80. In fact, there's infinite numbers after $70! :]
Their targets are people who don't care about money, TH-cam contributers and people who have to show off, because they have nothing else.
I am surprised, that they still seem to make so much money that way.
Totally spot on with this, it seems to be a new tactic since GamePass took off, now they need to find a way to get people to buy their half finished games early and letting you play a whole 3 days early is enough for some of those who have much less dopamine than money. However I wanted to point out a small mistake - That Final Fantasy 7 Deluxe comes with a physical artbook and CD. I had to look it up because honestly, I believe that Squeenix would do that, but it look likes for the extra $40 they are willing to print you a book and CD for now.
Minecraft and Planetary Annihilation (PA) were two sides of the same coin. Minecraft did early access (before it got named as such) with an increasing price until release, get in early for lower price. PA did a kickstarter, and more expensive tiers got earlier builds, more access and more influence. But PA also did something odd and released for purchase on Steam with the early builds, but using the expensive tier prices so as not to screw over the initial groups of backers. It was a very odd time.
I was considering buying Mortal Kombat 1 Premium Edition until I saw that all I really got for the extra £30/$40 was to play it a week early.
My reaction was quite literally akin to the Jackie Chan wtf meme.
It's shit like this that made me decide to not buy MK1 on release, and wait until they released an ultimate edition that comes with all the DLC characters + costumes
MK1 is a huge scam with all the early access, pre-order locks chars, microtransactions, DLC fighters and other BS.
I am gonna wait for a Komplete Edition for 10-20 bucks like MK11
The MK1 deleuxe editions are especially nefarious because they locked a bunch of characters behind the $90 version or whatever, and that's not even with the season pass! It's a new type of greed
@@Purpletridentand then people say that piracy's bad.
Bah.
@@nobodyinparticular9640 I don't like to pirate myself, but I'm a huge advocate for it. So long as the industry is participating in any form of corporate greed, pirate all you can!
I can't remember the last time I've played a Triple-A game... I guess Skyrim, probably? The Indie scene is so robust these days (and much more affordable), that I just don't have either the time or the money to play the 70 dollar games.
And I feel like that's the right choice.
It is weird how for some, we never noticed this under just recent with Starfield, Lies of P and Mortal Kombat 1 all doing this back to back to back. Definitely also helps to push digital sales too if you can install the game early on and just immediately jump into the game days before anyone else who decides to wait.
It has been tempting, but I’ve yet to bend the knee to this tactic. Still, it is kind of crazy how games are being treated kind of like review codes (only that they cost more than usual for those not in that particular loop).
Eh. The sword of Damocles isn't hanging over the CEOs' heads. They can walk away and have money for the rest of their life. That sword is hanging over the heads of everyone who works for them.
We need Steph's fashion corner
The most heinous thing about early access is that it denied us an early Jimquisition dancing on the grave of NFTs.
AAAA YOUR VOICE! YOUR JACKET! YOUR EVERYTHING. So proud of you Steph.
Fun fact about James Stephanie's time as a flower shop employee - back before her transition she once received a call from a grieving fella who thought her voice (when she was a man) was so feminine that it sounded like the customer's dead mum. James Stephanie then had to conduct the rest of the call thinking 'oh god, I sound like his dead mum'
Source: a really old Podcastle episode
...it'd probably be crass of me to make a "mommy, sorry, mommy" joke in response to this information...
I love these early access periods. It's saved me so much money letting other people pay extra to play games early so they can tell me the game isn't worth it at all to buy. And I get 20% staff discount in video games. 😂
hey! i have an idea of what they'll do next. Monetised patches. "Oh the game you paid $70 for is full of game breaking bugs? Don't worry, we just released a patch that fixes some of them, it only costs $10. If you bought the deluxe edition you'd have got the first 2 patches for free!"
And then instead of looking through a list of DLC to figure out which ones you actually care enough about to buy it'll be looking through the patch log and trying to work out which of the bugs you can live with and which ones you're willing to pay money to fix
5 day early access*
*if the account servers dont meltdown first
The point of early access is that you can brag to your friends. "I know something that you do not know yet. I found out early what the graphics look like."
Great video, as usual. While watching, before you got to it, I was thinking early access was driven by FOMO, because I feel it myself from time to time when presented with that "opportunity." Now when I see it I try to reframe it as not so much missing out, as other people doing one last beta test of the thing to find all the problems. Because the AAA developers can't release a game without some problems anymore.
As for what's next, I heard news that the mid-life Xbox Series X was going to ditch the optical drive and be digital only. That's what I think will be next. The death of physical media and the aftermarket marketplace of games.
It looks like the DRIBBLE A industry is in a bit of a bubble economy right now. Once it bursts, they'll be in deep shit and we'll be pointing and laughing about the pitfalls of greed and hubris.
This was the game's biggest innovation 😂 gave me horse armor vibes when I saw it
I hope some company forgets to give the early access players the Day 1 patch because "it's technically not the street date"
Congrats to Z. Mann Zilla really got the visual vibe that suits the Sterling style.
Thanks so much!
As soon as I learnt the term FOMO, I talked about it to my boss and he was impressed. And for that I Thank gOd and the Jimquisition. Bisous Stef
It’s like these companies are trying to ring everyone dry before some law gets passed. But unless these video game micro transactions start going on sprees at schools they won’t even be acknowledged let alone penalized.
It's like these companies are holding the video games hostage. That is how I see this business pratice.
Correct.
Taking into account that most AAA games lauch nearly broken and in dire need of patches that only come out weeks or months after launch, I can't for the life of me imagine why anyone would want to get their game early.
Steph, you were genuinely a really big help for me not just accepting the idea of identifying as nonbinary generally speaking (I'm from an incredibly rural and traditionally republican area), but also becoming more in-tune with my own gender-identity. Ever since I started thinking about this stuff I've only felt more and more free and self-aware. It's like I had a weight on my mind my entire life and only within the last couple years realized it. You were the first content creator I watched religiously who publicly came out as nonbinary, which wasn't just brave but seriously a kind thing to do for all those in your audience who never considered that as a true option for whatever reason. You're an inspiration.
You already were an inspiration before that, too, because you've always been consistently loud about the human cost of the video game industry, when so many people brush it under the rug. You're among the best journalists in the video game industry, if not the best, and I really respect how much borderline-insane passion you must have for gaming to keep doing this job through the years when so often, you're quite literally the "Cassandra of video games".
So I wanted to thank you. Thank you.
That Alice's Restaurant nod. Brilliant.
I mean... I meeeeeeeeeeeean... I kinda had to!
I was in a public discord vc about 8 hours before starfields (proper) release. 3 people joined and asked if we thought it was worth it to buy the early access, 2 of them bought it after being told when they could buy it normally. we're so fucked.
Yep -- some guy on Reddit was upset to find he bought the wrong version and decided to return it and pay the extra $30 so he didn't have to wait five days to play it.
Reminds me of the rested xp mechanic from world of warcraft. In its earliest form it was a debuff that reduced your xp gain after a certain amount of time playing and it was hated. But the same mechanic reworded to you get bonus xp for a period of time after logging on was well recieved.
If the framing was that they hold the game back a couple of days unless you buy a special edition or preorder or whatever there would be more visible backlash. But they do that exact thing and say you're getting a bonus for getting the special edition and so many people easily excuse this.
I’m glad that you’ve taken the time to talk about this. Even though I’m very good about keeping myself in check to not impulsively spend money on pre-orders and deluxe editions unless I am 100% certain I will enjoy the game, I will be the first to admit that the idea of getting something early is very tantalizing for me as a neruodivergent person, *especially* if it’s something I’m really passionate about. So I can see this being something that will hook neurodivergent folx in very easily, and I shudder to think of the consequences of something more egregious than just getting a game a week early happening in the future.
I wonder if you’re planning to take a crack at Square Enix again, since it seems their plans to get their plan to invest so much time and money into live services seems to be biting them in the ass right now and, as you pointed out, that deluxe edition for “Final Fantasy VII Rebirth” is just pathetic.
Yeah, the only preorders I’ve ever done are for games that came out overseas first before being localized years later, so I can already look at stuff online about the game from its original release about whether there are major problems or not
Actually, I had to fact check Steph's FFVII Rebirth Deluxe Edition claim due to pre-ordering the game myself as an X-mas present, and the Deluxe Edition actually _does not_ include a digital soundtrack and artbook, but rather a physical mini-soundtrack CD and a hardcover artbook... --the latter which is usually reserved for Collector's Editions, so it actually made me kinda happy to see that they offered the artbook with the Deluxe Edition so that people who want it don't have to sell a kidney and also get a cumbersome Sephiroth figurine along with the purchase... --said figurine being, aside from the Deluxe Edition stuff that's also included in the Collector's Edition, _the only_ non-digital thing you get with the Collector's Edition btw... Also, as per the product descriptions on Square's shop: "In-game items may be sold at a later date." Which I'm just gonna go ahead and very boldly assume means "all of the DLCs and digital content will be purchasable at a later date."
So yeah, Square are still pretty scummy, but they're _not quite_ as bad as Steph made them sound _this time around,_ in _this_ particular example, with _this_ particular edition, of _this_ particular game.
We just had Payday 3's launch where the 'early access' barely functioned because of always online features, and then utterly implode the moment the main core of players joined a few days later.
This is to date my favorite video you've done. 100/10
I remember this happened with ESO, and I was so confused, and my friends all seemed to just take it at face value, and I had to go over it a few times with them because I felt like I was going mad.
The price was the same, the game was the same, there was literally no difference between buying on "Day 1" and buying on "Day negative 5", but somehow, in our sample size of about 4, I was the only one that could see it. I couldn't understand it, there wasn't even a real incentive for them that I could see, because you could "pre order" on day negative 5, and "pre play" immediately, so what was in it for them, apart from just confusing people into thinking that there was some benefit to an actual preorder from before Day negative 5 which was the real day 1. Of course what I didn't see then was the long game of normalising and expanding. Making it just so staggeringly meaningless as it was then made it easier to fly under the radar, as people either took it at face value, didn't notice, or were more just confused than upset