I worked at an arcade during the era when they were basically considered dead. If we weren't the last arcade in the state we were probably one of the last five. The games that were genuinely popular offered at least one of two things: an experience you couldn't get at home without investing thousands of dollars, or a social experience that you couldn't get at home. Shooters with good gun controllers, racing games with the bucket seats and wheels. Dance dance revolution with an actually durable dance pad. Fighting games with a proper arcade button interface. The social experience of competing against the other local players in town or an entire crowd watching you nail a DDR routine or have an amazing fighting game streak. I think streaming and esports have finally started to really bring back the social aspects, but the tactility of those unique controller interfaces are still unmatched by home systems.
This is why I feel lucky I'm living on the eastern side of the world. I can walk for 5 mins and there would be an arcade. Malls still exist, Retail is still a thing, and arcades are littered everywhere, running a lot of latest games. WMMT, MaiMai, DDR A3, SDVX, BMIIDX, and more. We still have friendly tourneys, local matchup (4 player WMMT is a lot of fun), and online saving and matchmaking.
While I expect a lot of companies to try and force NFT and blockchain gaming on us, I don't expect it to ever become the norm simply because it requires a special wallet most parents don't have. Kids can convince parents to use their credit card to buy them fortnite skins or whatever, but convincing them to set up a crypto wallet and explaining how to do it is a lot harder. There also won't be situations where credit card information is stored allowing kids to buy tons of loot boxes and rack up all kinds of costs. While crypto does let companies exploit consumers in predatory ways making it appealing, it actually makes it harder to exploit children so it simply won't be the norm for video games.
the only way i can see that the public eye would easily accept nft's in gaming, if it would be the actual games so i buy the assasins creed nft and i can use it to play it on steam, epic, ... and i can even resell it, this would solve the digital second hand market issue but it raises a lot of other problems, and if a company can force you to rebuy something new instead of used one, they will force the new one on you so not happening
@@austin3853 Look up Internet Computer, it's a blockchain where you can host an entire game with all its assets in blockchain. So yes it's definitely possible in the near future!
@@vladdx thats not what he said, he said you can't TRANSFER BETWEEN GAMES which unless every game functioned the exact same way (or close enough) which even if that were the case, if there was a fishing nft game and a mil sim nft game, what are you gonna do with an nft of a fishing rod? or a lure?
@modelmajorpita and the first company that manages to simplify that whole process to a point that parents can indeed just "give their credit card" to their kid will become unbelievably rich and will push blockchain/nft shit into even more companies that we have rn. All it takes is for one company to prove that the system can make money and a lot of it. EA did that with lootboxes and now that shit is in every other game. Some company will find a way to implement cryptoshit into their game in such a way that it makes all the other companies copy it.
14:35 you can also relate play to earn to arcades as well, as on some games if you do well you get tickets and tickets can be exchanged. More full circle than you think the relation of Arcade games and the modern gaming industry
And just like those ticket spewing arcade cabinets, the rewards are nearly worthless and you only gain through sheer dumb luck or gaming the system itself (Back then, this would be going to whatever arcade machine had the best quarter-to-ticket ratio and hogging it until you had enough tickets for whatever prize you wanted).
You missed a monetization model from the 90s and 2000s: gamer guides. Many developers made their games so players would need to buy a gaming magazine or gamer guide in order to find the secrets of such game, or even being able to progress. Some secrets were impossible to find out without a guide, making this some kind of microtransaction in order to be able to unlock these secrets on a game you already bought.
I have no problem with DLCs if the content reflects the price. New Vegas DLCs were great and the stories were amazing. The problem is when a company realizes they can pump out copy-pasted cosmetic with a price tag of a DLC.
For sure, once companies realized people(Or at least a big enough number of a small group of gamers/whales)will pay 20 plus bucks for a texture or skin, when they used to pay that for entire game expansions, that's when it started going downhill.
@@EarthboundX I hated that skin monetization due to my background with online gaming with C&C renegade. So I had custom skins in my games it's what I was used too. I liked choosing my own crosshair and stuff. But expansions were sometimes full games like warcraft 3 expansion. BF 2142 was way cheaper but had a smaller expansion added some new stuff. Same with BF2. You can thank the consoles not giving you access to mod for the skins. I still don't care about skins. But locked off content from the start sucks. Granted I do remember arcades and The house of the dead was far to expensive for me. I wouldn't play games if that's the road we went down.
@@EarthboundX Actually you know what's the worse only had 3 games do it to me, technically 4 but I got ff7 remake free with ps+ I'm never gonna buy it. That's Final fantasy 15 and persona 5. Bought them day 1 and got the DLC for ff15 I loved ff15 and fishing was great so I didn't feel lost out. But then the PC royal edition added stuff so I didn't get the full game. So in order for me to get the PC edition i need to rebuy the full game on ps4 I can't just upgrade. Persona 5 again had a royal edition. So I didn't even buy Final fantasy 7 remake they did the same. Dragon Quest aswell. You are paying the most on day 1 and losing the most. That's the scummiest thing. So persona just the same and Square enix games never buy the first copies. Wait until the game is finally out. Instead of having to buy twice.
But that's the worst imagine buying a game day 1 only to find out you bought the worst edition and it doesn't matter season pass. You need to rebuy the game. It's final form of greed. Sadly done to great franchises. Atlus and Square Enix have trained me never to buy their games. And I would normally buy day 1 with them. But they punish you for buying day 1.
Diminished returns and rise of cost is deffo the issue with DLC. A good beefy DLC can reinvigorate a game that’s getting stale. But when you are shoveling out light effort junk the cost is not worth it.
Fun Fact: In germany we didn't have a arcade gaming culture because arcade machines fall under the gambling laws, and thus arcade halls were and are 18+. A real shame. Edit: I find it funny that someone refuted this by saying it wasn't the case in austria 🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@KiraTV1 To be fair, that is one thing I actually approve. Our government can be very strict due to being very very old testament religious. But arcades are a slippery slope to slot machines and the like. And obviously rather predatory set up.
It's kind of sad that arcades slowly vanished. In a way they were much more than just a place to play games. The arcade in my town was like a social hub, I spent a lot of my youth hanging out there with mates.
Agreed, arcades and skate rinks were my childhood and teen years. What was especially nice was that you had a great social environment, usually a snack bar, and at least with arcade machines you had a pretty predictable idea of what you were getting for your "microtransaction" so to speak.
@@iamjustkiwi Yes exactly, I used to skateboard alot so I was in town all the time and in between skating I would be in the arcade. We had pinball machines, pool tables, snack bars, an area to just sit and chill in, it was more like a social hangout for kids. Now kids sit at home alone screaming abuse at each other over their headsets. The cost was always a problem in the arcades but I used to just play games I was good at so I would get the most out of my money. I could complete games like Street Fighter for instance from just one credit. Doing that you could actually spend hours in there with very little money. Plus we used to just spend a lot of time watching each other play the games too.
Great vid, Kira! One thing I'm surprised you left out was the rise of "pay forward" models like Patreon and Kickstarter, where the developer gets paid to produce the game, rather than getting their compensation when the game's done. Also, any discussion of arcade monetization is incomplete without mentioning that they invented Pay-to-win, using the now-famous line "Insert Coin to Continue." Gauntlet was the popularizer, and a devious one since the game's publicity played coy with the fact that it couldn't be won- you could top the leaderboards, but the game had no ending. While few examples were that extreme, there came a point in the late arcade era where winning was more about having enough quarters than enough skill.
I've been a gamer since the days of the Atari 2600, and got to experience the heyday of arcades when I was a kid. The important difference, to me anyway, between the arcades and the current videogame industry is that the arcades provided consumers with finished, working games (and the tech of arcade games was far superior to anything that could be played at home). Major developers nowadays rush out half-assed iterations of franchises that are buggy and incomplete and flush with microtransactions. And this cynical, greedy approach is working, unfortunately, in that it's very profitable, and gamers are the losers in this equation. Indie games are a bright spot in the current videogame landscape. Major publishers are no longer interested in making great games, only great cash cows that they can milk for endless years, rather than making something new. And it's almost killed my interest in gaming.
I get what you are trying to say, but it doesn't really work. Compare the cost of game development over the years and how long it takes to make one. Pac man took almost two years and had nine people. According to various articles, that was the longest production time for a game up to that point. Now games can take a decade, involve hundreds of employees and cost hundreds of millions. There are few companies willing and able to spend that much money over a long period of time with no incoming revenue. If we want immersive, amazing graphics, and new gen games, we will have to deal with games launching incomplete with bugs. Also, cannot compare Zelda to say Cyberpunk due to the vast amount of code, interaction, and player freedom within the game. The more lines of code you have, the greater the chance of bugs.
@@taoofjester4113 Well for one, we honestly dont need ultra realistic next gen graphics for every game. Stylized graphics like cell shading work very well when done right, and can be way cheaper and easier to produce assets for. Look at stuff like Borderlands, a very well received game series in general. Nobody is saying big games are easy to make, but QA is exceptionally lacking these days. Its fine if a big game has some scattered bugs, its expected and sometimes even funny. But when you have egregious game breaking bugs and save file corruptions literally in the main, most played parts of the game, you gotta doubt that a single soul actually tested it. Pac man took 2 years to make because they are literally designing from the ground up at that time, and making an arcade game was also a feat of electrical engineering too, beyond just the code (which was incredibly low level). These days you can replicate pac man in under a day by yourself with basically any game library. We have progressed greatly in making the games, why havent we progressed greatly in designing and bug testing the games? Large game company greed and not giving a damn about the players. Why pay QA people to find game breaking bugs when you can offload that to your players? The players wont be happy when their 20 hours of progress corrupts, but who cares, you have their money lol. Why design really good, in depth game systems when you can shovel in some barebones stuff thatll get players past the steam refund mark (like much of 2077)?
@@kurrwa yeah, there hasn't been a single good game in the last decade. Not one. Anywhere. Oh how I long for the glory days of pong, where people put dots on the screen because they loved moving dots. And all video game companies were not for profit entities. No, they were all charities ran by people that did not have a salary. They toiled 28 hours a day just in hopes of hearing a fan say thank you.
Dude sometimes when the cabinet was old and/or janky, the quarter you sit on the screen bezel to say "I got next" would fall through the crack and lost into the machine. I am still more mad about that than any dlc/rng that has ever been offered to me.
Such great memories of bonding with whoever you were "sharing" that machine with because they had next or you were swapping off, giving each other hints or rooting each other on.
well, you still have to keep in mind that with an arcade you don't just pay for "playtime" you're essentially renting the device for that time, keeping others from playing as it is a public place, alsso those machines needed mor emaintenance so it's more comparable to e.g. themepark rides. Nowadays games cost pretty much nothing in terms of maintenance or even development (most money goes towards advertisement) relative to how much money they make, which is why I see the current times as way worse...
@@lycanwarrior2137 Well online games still cost a fraction per player compared to what an arcade did cost back in the days, so I still think my statement is pretty valid. Even if the servers cost like more in maintenance(they probably don't), they can also handle a hundred fold + more players compared to a small arcade hall
@@tedkaczynskiamericanhero3916 hmmm... i wonder how much of that money was marketing money considering all the hype created etc. ... 😂 Usually the game itself eats only a fraction of the budget I don't doubt that they paid that much for this game, they had to pay salaries but If a company fcks up and doesnt deliver what it promised or takes too long to deliver at the cost of the customer, thats Kinda sh*ty if you ask me.
@@tedkaczynskiamericanhero3916 You say that like hundreds of millions of dollars in costs is a lot for a major corporation. The profit margins in the gaming industry are obscene.
i had a thing when i was a kid called the "sega channel" from comcast, had a bunch of games each month but it hardly ever worked correctly. it was an awesome idea but way ahead of its time, it was right at the beginning of broadband internet. from what i can remember it was around 20 or so games and cost 60 dollars a month, but you had to download it to the cartridge but once you turned the console off you'd have to redownload whatever game you wanted to play. awesome video. stay real. glad you're covering something different then what everyone else seems like they are. stay you bro
My friend Shanna had SEGA Channel, but from Charter Cable. That's how I first got to play Zombies Ate My Neighbors. Can't remember how much it cost, but it didn't last very long.
The clear difference in todays monetisation compared to the ‘good old days’ is tangibility and trust. Nowadays it makes it so much more risky to pay for something digital compared to handing over a coin and getting instant gratification. In todays age you constantly need to be alert to not get scammed by the seller. In my opinion it’s not only games I see this happening, there are tons of industries where people take advantage of the end user. It’s sickening! Good video, love your content.
One thing that stands out with NFTS is that they arent as of yet a successful technology. They are being pushed hard by tech people who havent yet accepted them as a failure. In general these are people who have been very successful in the tech sector so they cant really accept that this technogy isnt good. No one wants to admit they have been backing the wrong horse.
I was ready to devote most of my net income for some unimaginable experience like the futuristic, better-than-real-world VR MMOs everyone joked about back in the day. Instead it's the same damn games we've been playing for decades, and they're only innovating on how they hunt whales.
Great video, but The Secret Missions for Wing Commander came out in 1990 and it was such a huge success for Origin that they designed Wing Commander 2 (1991) with expansions in mind. Blizzard copied everything: Blackthorne from Flashback, Warcraft from Dune 2 and expansion monetization from Origin Systems. (In a different timeline Overwatch is just a Team Fortress clone with orcs.)
I think another factor people payed that amount is because it was new, there was no standard before that. So there was nothing to weigh the price against the price point. Excellent vid bro, enjoyed it
Kira you always impress me with your clear, concise delivery of information. Edited cleanly to illustrate your points, no bloat or filler. This is why I will continue to engage and support your content. Thank you.
I think you also need to keep in mind with arcades is timing and lives is important so other people can have a go. It was money grubbing in terms of the cost per go, but to the consumer was seen as the necessary trade off
Gauntlet was the worse of it. Like the other games, if you were good, you could play a long time on one quarter. Gauntlet said fuck that made sure you need health badly.
That arcade stock footage was a trip down memory lane. I remember playing Periscope, probably at some point in the late 70's. I have also unironically paid to play Pong at a time when it was the coolest thing going. Most of my arcade money always went to pinball, though. I didn't and don't like having to remember specific movements or sequences, so lots of popular arcade video games were uninteresting to me. Pinball always felt new and exciting.
This kind of video is actually interesting to watch, beside you forgot one thing about arcade machines: Arcade machines generally brings in them a kind of bios where arcade owners can change difficulty, number of lives, and other aspects of the game. Depending on how greedy the arcade you go is, the game probably will have the hardest and most quarter gobbling arcade machines.
Hmm 🤔 are you sure about that, fruit machines yes that's totally how they are, not so sure that was carried over to arcade games though, never heard it claimed for the arcade games b4 & I played a lot of them in a lot of places and I never noticed any variation in difficulty on the same games in different locations, it's entirely possible I'm sure but are you sure you're not confusing something you heard about fruit machines with arcade games machines?
I will be using this awesome video for an Essay in college discussing the negative state of monetization that's currently upon us. Thank you for the quality and time put into making this video. Cheers!
You never cease to impress with your indepth analysis and presentation of facts and opinions. I truly appreciate the effort you put into your work. Keeping people informed of the past, and reminding us to not lose hope for the future. Keep up the good work. God knows we need it in these uncertain times.
Not sure I agree with the comparison between arcades and MTXs. The issue with MTXs now, at least for me, is having them in already full price 60-70 dollar games. Arcades didn't make you pay say the equivalent of 60 bucks in their day, and than make you pay 25 cents more for each life/amount of time on top of that. Arcades I consider their own separate thing/market. Even with MTXs in Free to Play games, as much as I mostly hate the mobile game market and all its BS. They at least let you try a game for free for a bit, before you have to decide to pay to get anywhere, or spend 100s or 1000s of hours.
Fantastic video man. It makes me feel old, but I remember everything from every old clip you used. good research, great little time capsule of the subject. thanks for the solid content.
The thing about arcade machines is they were state of the art tech and often offered new experiences you couldn't find anywhere else and that's a million miles away from copy-paste P2W mobile game number 2743, even if they are both P2W in a sense. They were awesome and people will pay for awesome, even if there's also a crowd who will pay for any brain dead trash there will always be a market for good games.
Maybe I'm just being a boomer here but I find myself playing new games less and less. At this point I don't even care that much about things like this since there's plenty of other games I could play from the last 40 years or so.
I have played video games since first putting a quarter in Pong when it was the only coin operated video out there, and I continue to play to this day. I will not ever play a game that requires a blockchain purchase even if the entire industry goes that way. No way, Jose. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever.
Horse armor was not received very poorly. While there were people who mocked Bethesda and people genuinely angry over it there were also a very large number of people that defended Bethesda and the DLC. While it's true that Horse Armor wasn't the first DLC I think it was the one that popularized the practice and made more companies see how profitable it is.
Dude, I’ve been binge watching all your content all day at work (shhh) and love it. Well done! Btw, this is not one of those ‘bot’ “good job” comments, in a real fella :-)
I can’t help think of Bella Sarah, which was a game you played by buying cards in grocery stores which had codes you entered into the online game. It was entirely built on individual purchases with little mini games going on in the background
Happy Friday! It's cool to see some bars have brought back the arcade style entertainment. I can't accurately be described as a gamer but you give me a craft beer and some dig dug and I'm having a good time
for some reason im missing your uploads and im even a member of the channel. really weird youtube things. Thank for another great video just watching :)
Thanks for the video. I think this might be another concept, you could adapt towards other more or less gaming-related themes. Hope you doing well, have a good time Kira. :)
Very interesting video Kira, I think people like to forget a lot of history and think shitty monetisation is just a new thing, but it's always been there. As you said, people just grow to accept it, it becomes the insidious status quo. But I will always say no to play to earn, that can fuck right off.
People aren’t forgetting history, there is just a radical difference between arcades or expansion packs and pay-to-win or lootboxes. I’m kind of disgusted he’s going this far to normalize modern monetization.
what happened to VR? just a few years back we had a lot of progress in that space and new products coming out. I thought and hoped that more companys and enthusiasts would continue developing the tech but it doesnt seem like big companys are not interested in evolving the gaming industry anymore and take the easy money road with NFT and crypto. Sad to see and hopefully it will be a focus again.
I can come up with a few reasons: - At least $200 (or $300?) for hardware made specifically to play games, $700+ for the htc. Consoles are more expensive but more convenient to set up and use - Decently spacious area for comfortable field of play - Lots of development time spent on making things not feel disorienting or buggy since the player is further immersed into the experience - Simply just being a novelty product: VR doesn’t really give much to mainstream gaming, as most games just aren’t built for hands-on gameplay that the hardware offers - “we will add blockchain to our games” is easier to say than actually develop VR tech lol
I would disagree on the bit about the pricing of arcade cabinets. Sure, 25c seems A LOT, depending on the game BUT ... compare it to the cost of the cabinet itself (not even the overhead costs, just the cabinet). For a restored cabinet (not a new one) you would pay something between 4k and 5k ... for even coming close to 'break even' i nterms of money spent, you would have to play a wooping 18.000 games of pacman ... 18 ... THOUSAND ... I've played The Binding Of Isaac in several of it's iterations/versions and 1001%ed it, several hundred hours and I'm not even partially on my way of 18.000 runs of BOI and that's just one example. The thing is, the games themself changed A LOT. The usual PC or console game released after 1990 wouldn't even be possible to be meaningfully played on an arcade cabinet, as they pretty early on got rid of the usual fail state of PAcmen, Donkey Kong or Space Invaders. For todays standards, pay-per-run would indeed be egregious but that's not because pay-per-run is inherently scummy or overly expensive, it's just because buy-to-play has become WAY cheaper AND 'modern gaming' usually doesn't work well with the general concept of pay-per-run ad most games couldn't even be played on a per-run-base And in regards of the Elden Ring comparison ... for the full price of the game, you could die 239 times ... seriously, NOONE who would pay-per-run would suck hard enough to even come close to this number, not even by a long shot *g* Yeah, it's 'hard' but come on, it's pretty much Toddler-Souls compared to DS1 f.e., playing Elden Ring in an arcade would actually be a bargain ^^
I think what this video is really missing is the talks of psychological conditioning. For example, did you know that Overwatch lootboxes were designed using the same principles that slot machines use to get you addicted? It's true, they adhere to the same principles of using flashing lights, sounds and colors to give you a sudden jolt of addictive dopamine regardless of if the contents of the lootbox are any good (and of course it's an unskippable animation so you MUST subject your brain to it's full effects). Arcade cabinets didn't do this and the worst they had were "quarter muncher" games that were so punishingly difficult as to be impossible to complete without spending X amount of dollars. And it doesn't stop there. Battle Passes are often so insane with their progression that I remember doing the math for Paladins, and I would have to play 2+ hours every single day to get everything in the Battle Pass. Many companies will simultaneously offer players the option to pay for Battlepass levels and this is usually on-top of the initial fee to gain access to the good content of the battle pass to begin with because many companies have a substandard "free" Battle Pass that you can upgrade to a "premium" level so that they can pressure you with FOMO by showing you all the stuff you COULD have if you had just bought the Battlepass already. NFTs are just another iteration of the psychological conditioning tied to games monetization because it's just using the already extremely well-documented psychological conditioning that causes people to fall prey to pyramid schemes or supposed "Multi-Level Marketing" companies. All the push for NFT/crypto "play-to-earn" games amounts to is the mask of AAA gaming coming off. Because to engage with and to sell products that are most closely related to pyramid schemes and MLMs is to ostensibly admit "We only pretended to give even a single shit about video games because it's a multi-billion dollar industry and nothing else. Fuck you and fuck your video games. Give us your money, you filthy, disgusting pay-pig." tl;dr - We really need to talk more about the psychological manipulation tied to games monetization because modern games monetization by itself isn't bad, it's the cancerous greed tied to it.
Let's see. We could assume a fairly low 20% of the 116million PS4s subscribing to PS+. That's 23 million in sales a year. Yeah, the 138 million a year isn't a lot, but it's more than the cost of maintenance for servers.
@@vxicepickxv where is the 20% from? It's not just about maintaining the servers but actually paying the developers/publishers to get the games onto the platform in the first place
"today, an arcade is a mostly empty room where you can win a stuffed minion from a claw machine and see if you still remember the dance moves to Cotton Eye Joe on Dance Dance Revolution. spoiler, you do but your knees can't handle it as well now"
As we all clearly remember, there was a time not too long ago when Steam was overrun by literal piles of horse manure and almost everyone were crying out for more curation on the platform. As is turns out, today there is a veritable boom in indie titles of every shape, flavour and form and even if 99% of all devs and pubs go the blockchain/NFT route, the 1% that is left will keep me busy for the rest of my life, happily so. The last AAA game I touched was Fallout 4 and I unironically find a better community, better dev support and a much better experience with smaller titles.
@M ... I guess it depends greatly on what you think a good game is and while I can agree that they are literal bugfests they are also unlike any other games, especially with mods. I think Fromsoft has never made a good game (because from my point of view those kind of games are not good, and i am not even mentioning how terrible the PC ports are). See how that works? Round two.
@M you obviously haven't delved into the modding community it seems. Less rhan 0.1% of mods do any "fixing". The other 99.9% make fantasy dreams come true. (Also that was a really pathetic attempt at a jab. Do you even have an uppercut?)
@M Bethesda games in the Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises are an anomaly. The base games are ok to good, but they become spectacular with mods. To me they are like canvasses on which the community paints. My FO4 install has a mod directory that is twice the size if the actual game. Then there is something like Enderal for Skyrim or New California for New Vegas. So yeah i am not disagreeing with you per se. I will keep on buying the Bethesda stuff as long as I know they can be modded to Valhalla and back. (I made a bunch of mods myself and it was a fun thing in of itself)
The “purely buying a game” model still exist in indie and low-budget games (AA, lower-AAA) games, and these lower budget games tend to be ruled by artists and developers rather than investors, marketers and accountants.
Excellent video! Another good sign is that current game dev tools allow small teams to produce games that used to take massive numbers of people to create. The future is very bright for indy devs.
When I was a kid we couldn't afford to buy games for the consoles we had (NES, SNES, GENESIS) - we would go to blockbuster and RENT the games for a few days. Because we only had a game for a few days, we would be rushing to beat the game as fast as possible, to then move on to the next one. The convenience of getting to play the same game over and over again for free did not really hit me until SHAREWARE on PC - then I was swimming in lots of free demos, and buying games (like doom 2) that were truly stunning. I digress, but, the video game rental business was huge, and it was kinda the same as renting time at the arcade, although much more affordable.
Kira, would you say that there is a generational population of gamers born AFTER the arcade era, but BEFORE lootbox mechanics, who are the loudest complainers about the micro-transaction model? For us, lets say millennials, micro transactions are contrary to the way we grew up playing games, and yet the newer generations are far more accustomed to the idea.
While all my friends were playing UO, I was playing the english/western version of Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds . Interesting fact they brought in a cash shop years later when KRU took over.
Yes that's how we started and we've come full circle. The problem is we got away from it for awhile because we saw how anti consumer it was, and how development was about maximizing profit instead of making something great. But there was a little time there that we saw what it could really be so now we should know better xD
“The Arcades where the _W o R s T_ period for micro transactions in gaming.” But of course, because the other alternative was _literally_ buying your own personal arcade, which in those times we’re so expensive that most people could only ever dream of ever owning one. But of course, the other alternative would’ve been to make those arcade games literally _free._ Yes, sure, what an absolutely amazing idea, I wonder what could’ve possibly gone wrong…
The history part of this video was spot on. Thankfully, the NFT trend became a huge flop, as your ending correctly predicted: when the buyers don't buy a product, the market will adapt and stop selling that.
Thanks for this! I was actually trying to come up with a historical list of widely accepted practices in the video game industry that could be considered anti-consumer. In short, there are a lot, and it is kind of depressing when you look at at as a whole.
I worked at an arcade during the era when they were basically considered dead. If we weren't the last arcade in the state we were probably one of the last five.
The games that were genuinely popular offered at least one of two things: an experience you couldn't get at home without investing thousands of dollars, or a social experience that you couldn't get at home.
Shooters with good gun controllers, racing games with the bucket seats and wheels. Dance dance revolution with an actually durable dance pad. Fighting games with a proper arcade button interface.
The social experience of competing against the other local players in town or an entire crowd watching you nail a DDR routine or have an amazing fighting game streak.
I think streaming and esports have finally started to really bring back the social aspects, but the tactility of those unique controller interfaces are still unmatched by home systems.
This is why I feel lucky I'm living on the eastern side of the world. I can walk for 5 mins and there would be an arcade. Malls still exist, Retail is still a thing, and arcades are littered everywhere, running a lot of latest games. WMMT, MaiMai, DDR A3, SDVX, BMIIDX, and more.
We still have friendly tourneys, local matchup (4 player WMMT is a lot of fun), and online saving and matchmaking.
While I expect a lot of companies to try and force NFT and blockchain gaming on us, I don't expect it to ever become the norm simply because it requires a special wallet most parents don't have. Kids can convince parents to use their credit card to buy them fortnite skins or whatever, but convincing them to set up a crypto wallet and explaining how to do it is a lot harder. There also won't be situations where credit card information is stored allowing kids to buy tons of loot boxes and rack up all kinds of costs. While crypto does let companies exploit consumers in predatory ways making it appealing, it actually makes it harder to exploit children so it simply won't be the norm for video games.
Yeah this shit is fucking stupid.. keep NFTs out of our games!
the only way i can see that the public eye would easily accept nft's in gaming, if it would be the actual games
so i buy the assasins creed nft and i can use it to play it on steam, epic, ...
and i can even resell it, this would solve the digital second hand market issue
but it raises a lot of other problems, and if a company can force you to rebuy something new instead of used one, they will force the new one on you so not happening
@@austin3853 Look up Internet Computer, it's a blockchain where you can host an entire game with all its assets in blockchain. So yes it's definitely possible in the near future!
@@vladdx thats not what he said, he said you can't TRANSFER BETWEEN GAMES which unless every game functioned the exact same way (or close enough) which even if that were the case, if there was a fishing nft game and a mil sim nft game, what are you gonna do with an nft of a fishing rod? or a lure?
@modelmajorpita and the first company that manages to simplify that whole process to a point that parents can indeed just "give their credit card" to their kid will become unbelievably rich and will push blockchain/nft shit into even more companies that we have rn. All it takes is for one company to prove that the system can make money and a lot of it. EA did that with lootboxes and now that shit is in every other game. Some company will find a way to implement cryptoshit into their game in such a way that it makes all the other companies copy it.
14:35 you can also relate play to earn to arcades as well, as on some games if you do well you get tickets and tickets can be exchanged. More full circle than you think the relation of Arcade games and the modern gaming industry
And just like those ticket spewing arcade cabinets, the rewards are nearly worthless and you only gain through sheer dumb luck or gaming the system itself (Back then, this would be going to whatever arcade machine had the best quarter-to-ticket ratio and hogging it until you had enough tickets for whatever prize you wanted).
You missed a monetization model from the 90s and 2000s: gamer guides. Many developers made their games so players would need to buy a gaming magazine or gamer guide in order to find the secrets of such game, or even being able to progress. Some secrets were impossible to find out without a guide, making this some kind of microtransaction in order to be able to unlock these secrets on a game you already bought.
I have no problem with DLCs if the content reflects the price. New Vegas DLCs were great and the stories were amazing. The problem is when a company realizes they can pump out copy-pasted cosmetic with a price tag of a DLC.
For sure, once companies realized people(Or at least a big enough number of a small group of gamers/whales)will pay 20 plus bucks for a texture or skin, when they used to pay that for entire game expansions, that's when it started going downhill.
@@EarthboundX I hated that skin monetization due to my background with online gaming with C&C renegade. So I had custom skins in my games it's what I was used too. I liked choosing my own crosshair and stuff. But expansions were sometimes full games like warcraft 3 expansion. BF 2142 was way cheaper but had a smaller expansion added some new stuff. Same with BF2. You can thank the consoles not giving you access to mod for the skins. I still don't care about skins. But locked off content from the start sucks. Granted I do remember arcades and The house of the dead was far to expensive for me. I wouldn't play games if that's the road we went down.
@@EarthboundX Actually you know what's the worse only had 3 games do it to me, technically 4 but I got ff7 remake free with ps+ I'm never gonna buy it. That's Final fantasy 15 and persona 5. Bought them day 1 and got the DLC for ff15 I loved ff15 and fishing was great so I didn't feel lost out. But then the PC royal edition added stuff so I didn't get the full game. So in order for me to get the PC edition i need to rebuy the full game on ps4 I can't just upgrade. Persona 5 again had a royal edition. So I didn't even buy Final fantasy 7 remake they did the same. Dragon Quest aswell. You are paying the most on day 1 and losing the most. That's the scummiest thing. So persona just the same and Square enix games never buy the first copies. Wait until the game is finally out. Instead of having to buy twice.
But that's the worst imagine buying a game day 1 only to find out you bought the worst edition and it doesn't matter season pass. You need to rebuy the game. It's final form of greed. Sadly done to great franchises. Atlus and Square Enix have trained me never to buy their games. And I would normally buy day 1 with them. But they punish you for buying day 1.
Diminished returns and rise of cost is deffo the issue with DLC. A good beefy DLC can reinvigorate a game that’s getting stale. But when you are shoveling out light effort junk the cost is not worth it.
Fun Fact: In germany we didn't have a arcade gaming culture because arcade machines fall under the gambling laws, and thus arcade halls were and are 18+. A real shame.
Edit: I find it funny that someone refuted this by saying it wasn't the case in austria 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Interesting, never knew that but if I had to guess a country that had this law it would be Germany :D
@@KiraTV1 Haha yeah it fits xD
@@KiraTV1 To be fair, that is one thing I actually approve. Our government can be very strict due to being very very old testament religious. But arcades are a slippery slope to slot machines and the like. And obviously rather predatory set up.
@Denis Ich rede überhaupt keinen Müll.
@Denis Ach ja und wieso?
It's kind of sad that arcades slowly vanished. In a way they were much more than just a place to play games. The arcade in my town was like a social hub, I spent a lot of my youth hanging out there with mates.
Agreed, arcades and skate rinks were my childhood and teen years. What was especially nice was that you had a great social environment, usually a snack bar, and at least with arcade machines you had a pretty predictable idea of what you were getting for your "microtransaction" so to speak.
@@iamjustkiwi Yes exactly, I used to skateboard alot so I was in town all the time and in between skating I would be in the arcade. We had pinball machines, pool tables, snack bars, an area to just sit and chill in, it was more like a social hangout for kids. Now kids sit at home alone screaming abuse at each other over their headsets.
The cost was always a problem in the arcades but I used to just play games I was good at so I would get the most out of my money. I could complete games like Street Fighter for instance from just one credit. Doing that you could actually spend hours in there with very little money. Plus we used to just spend a lot of time watching each other play the games too.
Great vid, Kira! One thing I'm surprised you left out was the rise of "pay forward" models like Patreon and Kickstarter, where the developer gets paid to produce the game, rather than getting their compensation when the game's done.
Also, any discussion of arcade monetization is incomplete without mentioning that they invented Pay-to-win, using the now-famous line "Insert Coin to Continue." Gauntlet was the popularizer, and a devious one since the game's publicity played coy with the fact that it couldn't be won- you could top the leaderboards, but the game had no ending. While few examples were that extreme, there came a point in the late arcade era where winning was more about having enough quarters than enough skill.
I've been a gamer since the days of the Atari 2600, and got to experience the heyday of arcades when I was a kid. The important difference, to me anyway, between the arcades and the current videogame industry is that the arcades provided consumers with finished, working games (and the tech of arcade games was far superior to anything that could be played at home). Major developers nowadays rush out half-assed iterations of franchises that are buggy and incomplete and flush with microtransactions. And this cynical, greedy approach is working, unfortunately, in that it's very profitable, and gamers are the losers in this equation.
Indie games are a bright spot in the current videogame landscape. Major publishers are no longer interested in making great games, only great cash cows that they can milk for endless years, rather than making something new. And it's almost killed my interest in gaming.
I get what you are trying to say, but it doesn't really work. Compare the cost of game development over the years and how long it takes to make one.
Pac man took almost two years and had nine people. According to various articles, that was the longest production time for a game up to that point.
Now games can take a decade, involve hundreds of employees and cost hundreds of millions. There are few companies willing and able to spend that much money over a long period of time with no incoming revenue.
If we want immersive, amazing graphics, and new gen games, we will have to deal with games launching incomplete with bugs. Also, cannot compare Zelda to say Cyberpunk due to the vast amount of code, interaction, and player freedom within the game. The more lines of code you have, the greater the chance of bugs.
@@taoofjester4113 Well for one, we honestly dont need ultra realistic next gen graphics for every game. Stylized graphics like cell shading work very well when done right, and can be way cheaper and easier to produce assets for. Look at stuff like Borderlands, a very well received game series in general.
Nobody is saying big games are easy to make, but QA is exceptionally lacking these days. Its fine if a big game has some scattered bugs, its expected and sometimes even funny. But when you have egregious game breaking bugs and save file corruptions literally in the main, most played parts of the game, you gotta doubt that a single soul actually tested it.
Pac man took 2 years to make because they are literally designing from the ground up at that time, and making an arcade game was also a feat of electrical engineering too, beyond just the code (which was incredibly low level). These days you can replicate pac man in under a day by yourself with basically any game library.
We have progressed greatly in making the games, why havent we progressed greatly in designing and bug testing the games? Large game company greed and not giving a damn about the players. Why pay QA people to find game breaking bugs when you can offload that to your players? The players wont be happy when their 20 hours of progress corrupts, but who cares, you have their money lol. Why design really good, in depth game systems when you can shovel in some barebones stuff thatll get players past the steam refund mark (like much of 2077)?
Simply in old age games were made from pure passions. Now games are made by numbers in excel how to make the highest profits in the shortest time
@@kurrwa yeah, there hasn't been a single good game in the last decade. Not one. Anywhere. Oh how I long for the glory days of pong, where people put dots on the screen because they loved moving dots. And all video game companies were not for profit entities. No, they were all charities ran by people that did not have a salary. They toiled 28 hours a day just in hopes of hearing a fan say thank you.
Silly friend, you are acting like games didn't have bugs and that there weren't major problems. Yes they did. Don't have selective memory.
Dude sometimes when the cabinet was old and/or janky, the quarter you sit on the screen bezel to say "I got next" would fall through the crack and lost into the machine. I am still more mad about that than any dlc/rng that has ever been offered to me.
Such great memories of bonding with whoever you were "sharing" that machine with because they had next or you were swapping off, giving each other hints or rooting each other on.
well, you still have to keep in mind that with an arcade you don't just pay for "playtime" you're essentially renting the device for that time, keeping others from playing as it is a public place, alsso those machines needed mor emaintenance so it's more comparable to e.g. themepark rides.
Nowadays games cost pretty much nothing in terms of maintenance or even development (most money goes towards advertisement) relative to how much money they make, which is why I see the current times as way worse...
People who have to maintain online games would beg to differ...
@@lycanwarrior2137 Well online games still cost a fraction per player compared to what an arcade did cost back in the days, so I still think my statement is pretty valid.
Even if the servers cost like more in maintenance(they probably don't), they can also handle a hundred fold + more players compared to a small arcade hall
Games cost a shit load of money to develop what the hell are you talking about?
Cyberpunk 2077 (allegedly) cost 174 million to make lol
@@tedkaczynskiamericanhero3916 hmmm... i wonder how much of that money was marketing money considering all the hype created etc. ... 😂
Usually the game itself eats only a fraction of the budget
I don't doubt that they paid that much for this game, they had to pay salaries but If a company fcks up and doesnt deliver what it promised or takes too long to deliver at the cost of the customer, thats Kinda sh*ty if you ask me.
@@tedkaczynskiamericanhero3916 You say that like hundreds of millions of dollars in costs is a lot for a major corporation. The profit margins in the gaming industry are obscene.
Great video, thanks Kira!!
Thank you for putting out such quality retrospective and informative content, Kira. Great job man
@@KiraTV1 I whole-heartedly second that. You are such a quality content creator. Hope your health is improving.
i had a thing when i was a kid called the "sega channel" from comcast, had a bunch of games each month but it hardly ever worked correctly. it was an awesome idea but way ahead of its time, it was right at the beginning of broadband internet. from what i can remember it was around 20 or so games and cost 60 dollars a month, but you had to download it to the cartridge but once you turned the console off you'd have to redownload whatever game you wanted to play. awesome video. stay real. glad you're covering something different then what everyone else seems like they are. stay you bro
My friend Shanna had SEGA Channel, but from Charter Cable. That's how I first got to play Zombies Ate My Neighbors. Can't remember how much it cost, but it didn't last very long.
The clear difference in todays monetisation compared to the ‘good old days’ is tangibility and trust. Nowadays it makes it so much more risky to pay for something digital compared to handing over a coin and getting instant gratification. In todays age you constantly need to be alert to not get scammed by the seller. In my opinion it’s not only games I see this happening, there are tons of industries where people take advantage of the end user. It’s sickening! Good video, love your content.
One thing that stands out with NFTS is that they arent as of yet a successful technology. They are being pushed hard by tech people who havent yet accepted them as a failure. In general these are people who have been very successful in the tech sector so they cant really accept that this technogy isnt good. No one wants to admit they have been backing the wrong horse.
What benefit can an NFT provide over a centralized server hosting the same artificially scarce digital goods?
I was ready to devote most of my net income for some unimaginable experience like the futuristic, better-than-real-world VR MMOs everyone joked about back in the day. Instead it's the same damn games we've been playing for decades, and they're only innovating on how they hunt whales.
Great video, but The Secret Missions for Wing Commander came out in 1990 and it was such a huge success for Origin that they designed Wing Commander 2 (1991) with expansions in mind. Blizzard copied everything: Blackthorne from Flashback, Warcraft from Dune 2 and expansion monetization from Origin Systems. (In a different timeline Overwatch is just a Team Fortress clone with orcs.)
I think another factor people payed that amount is because it was new, there was no standard before that. So there was nothing to weigh the price against the price point.
Excellent vid bro, enjoyed it
Kira you always impress me with your clear, concise delivery of information. Edited cleanly to illustrate your points, no bloat or filler. This is why I will continue to engage and support your content. Thank you.
I think you also need to keep in mind with arcades is timing and lives is important so other people can have a go. It was money grubbing in terms of the cost per go, but to the consumer was seen as the necessary trade off
Guessing that's why arcades are still relevant in Japan and other parts of Asia.
Gauntlet was the worse of it. Like the other games, if you were good, you could play a long time on one quarter. Gauntlet said fuck that made sure you need health badly.
The cheapest date I ever had was a young lady who could play hours on Gauntlet on one quarter.
@@antondovydaitis2261 if such a woman exists, you better have married her.
@@taoofjester4113 I would have, she was magnificent in other ways, but it was not to be.
That arcade stock footage was a trip down memory lane. I remember playing Periscope, probably at some point in the late 70's. I have also unironically paid to play Pong at a time when it was the coolest thing going. Most of my arcade money always went to pinball, though. I didn't and don't like having to remember specific movements or sequences, so lots of popular arcade video games were uninteresting to me. Pinball always felt new and exciting.
This kind of video is actually interesting to watch, beside you forgot one thing about arcade machines:
Arcade machines generally brings in them a kind of bios where arcade owners can change difficulty, number of lives, and other aspects of the game.
Depending on how greedy the arcade you go is, the game probably will have the hardest and most quarter gobbling arcade machines.
Hmm 🤔 are you sure about that, fruit machines yes that's totally how they are, not so sure that was carried over to arcade games though, never heard it claimed for the arcade games b4 & I played a lot of them in a lot of places and I never noticed any variation in difficulty on the same games in different locations, it's entirely possible I'm sure but are you sure you're not confusing something you heard about fruit machines with arcade games machines?
As someone who grew up in the arcades, this is a great summary. Thanks for putting the time in to create this.
This is like watching my childhood in fast-forward! Love the new videos, love the old videos, keep um comin! 👍
I will be using this awesome video for an Essay in college discussing the negative state of monetization that's currently upon us. Thank you for the quality and time put into making this video. Cheers!
You never cease to impress with your indepth analysis and presentation of facts and opinions. I truly appreciate the effort you put into your work. Keeping people informed of the past, and reminding us to not lose hope for the future.
Keep up the good work. God knows we need it in these uncertain times.
That Torpedo-thing looks kinda awesome.
Not sure I agree with the comparison between arcades and MTXs. The issue with MTXs now, at least for me, is having them in already full price 60-70 dollar games. Arcades didn't make you pay say the equivalent of 60 bucks in their day, and than make you pay 25 cents more for each life/amount of time on top of that. Arcades I consider their own separate thing/market.
Even with MTXs in Free to Play games, as much as I mostly hate the mobile game market and all its BS. They at least let you try a game for free for a bit, before you have to decide to pay to get anywhere, or spend 100s or 1000s of hours.
Game dev student, my lecturer in the first semester gave a longer version of this video. So good job on the research!
THIS is the content I subscribed for. One of your best videos in a while, man.
Fantastic video man. It makes me feel old, but I remember everything from every old clip you used. good research, great little time capsule of the subject.
thanks for the solid content.
Top tier content Kira. Thanks.
The thing about arcade machines is they were state of the art tech and often offered new experiences you couldn't find anywhere else and that's a million miles away from copy-paste P2W mobile game number 2743, even if they are both P2W in a sense. They were awesome and people will pay for awesome, even if there's also a crowd who will pay for any brain dead trash there will always be a market for good games.
Maybe I'm just being a boomer here but I find myself playing new games less and less. At this point I don't even care that much about things like this since there's plenty of other games I could play from the last 40 years or so.
Wow, I never thought about it this way but yeah, arcades are pretty much the worst way to monetize games.
I have played video games since first putting a quarter in Pong when it was the only coin operated video out there, and I continue to play to this day. I will not ever play a game that requires a blockchain purchase even if the entire industry goes that way. No way, Jose. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever.
Horse armor was not received very poorly. While there were people who mocked Bethesda and people genuinely angry over it there were also a very large number of people that defended Bethesda and the DLC. While it's true that Horse Armor wasn't the first DLC I think it was the one that popularized the practice and made more companies see how profitable it is.
Dude, I’ve been binge watching all your content all day at work (shhh) and love it. Well done! Btw, this is not one of those ‘bot’ “good job” comments, in a real fella :-)
Absolutely brilliant video! Love the direction and the theme. 1 vote for more deep dives!
I'm always ready for new Kira content, it's on point every time!
I can’t help think of Bella Sarah, which was a game you played by buying cards in grocery stores which had codes you entered into the online game. It was entirely built on individual purchases with little mini games going on in the background
While I knew a lot of these facts, there were some surprises here as well, and the video is put together very nicely. Great job!
Happy Friday! It's cool to see some bars have brought back the arcade style entertainment. I can't accurately be described as a gamer but you give me a craft beer and some dig dug and I'm having a good time
Another masterful video from Kira. 5:32 best metaphor ever.
Now this is the makings of a legendary video.
for some reason im missing your uploads and im even a member of the channel. really weird youtube things. Thank for another great video just watching :)
Thanks for the video. I think this might be another concept, you could adapt towards other more or less gaming-related themes.
Hope you doing well, have a good time Kira. :)
Very interesting video Kira, I think people like to forget a lot of history and think shitty monetisation is just a new thing, but it's always been there. As you said, people just grow to accept it, it becomes the insidious status quo. But I will always say no to play to earn, that can fuck right off.
People aren’t forgetting history, there is just a radical difference between arcades or expansion packs and pay-to-win or lootboxes. I’m kind of disgusted he’s going this far to normalize modern monetization.
Love content like this, keep making videos like this!
Really Great editing work and a huge +1 for use of the greatest font in the world :)
what happened to VR? just a few years back we had a lot of progress in that space and new products coming out. I thought and hoped that more companys and enthusiasts would continue developing the tech but it doesnt seem like big companys are not interested in evolving the gaming industry anymore and take the easy money road with NFT and crypto. Sad to see and hopefully it will be a focus again.
I can come up with a few reasons:
- At least $200 (or $300?) for hardware made specifically to play games, $700+ for the htc. Consoles are more expensive but more convenient to set up and use
- Decently spacious area for comfortable field of play
- Lots of development time spent on making things not feel disorienting or buggy since the player is further immersed into the experience
- Simply just being a novelty product: VR doesn’t really give much to mainstream gaming, as most games just aren’t built for hands-on gameplay that the hardware offers
- “we will add blockchain to our games” is easier to say than actually develop VR tech lol
This is the highest tier of content on youtube (documentary-like videos), if it only were longer...
Really enjoy these documentary-style videos man! Keep up the great work! :D
@KiraTV Really enjoying your new stuff. Your old stuff was good too, but these documentary style videos are great, keep it up
I would disagree on the bit about the pricing of arcade cabinets.
Sure, 25c seems A LOT, depending on the game BUT ... compare it to the cost of the cabinet itself (not even the overhead costs, just the cabinet). For a restored cabinet (not a new one) you would pay something between 4k and 5k ... for even coming close to 'break even' i nterms of money spent, you would have to play a wooping 18.000 games of pacman ... 18 ... THOUSAND ... I've played The Binding Of Isaac in several of it's iterations/versions and 1001%ed it, several hundred hours and I'm not even partially on my way of 18.000 runs of BOI and that's just one example.
The thing is, the games themself changed A LOT. The usual PC or console game released after 1990 wouldn't even be possible to be meaningfully played on an arcade cabinet, as they pretty early on got rid of the usual fail state of PAcmen, Donkey Kong or Space Invaders.
For todays standards, pay-per-run would indeed be egregious but that's not because pay-per-run is inherently scummy or overly expensive, it's just because buy-to-play has become WAY cheaper AND 'modern gaming' usually doesn't work well with the general concept of pay-per-run ad most games couldn't even be played on a per-run-base
And in regards of the Elden Ring comparison ... for the full price of the game, you could die 239 times ... seriously, NOONE who would pay-per-run would suck hard enough to even come close to this number, not even by a long shot *g*
Yeah, it's 'hard' but come on, it's pretty much Toddler-Souls compared to DS1 f.e., playing Elden Ring in an arcade would actually be a bargain ^^
Loving these new themed videos man. This channel is gold! If you sold loot boxes, I might actually buy one without feeling dirty. Lol!
Man do I miss expansion packs, reading the game manuals, unfolding the maps & pinning them to my wall.
Nicely done and actually more interesting than I expected. 🤘
Thank god your back Kira! Great content as per usual
Unexpected video but very informative. Pls more content like this!
I think what this video is really missing is the talks of psychological conditioning. For example, did you know that Overwatch lootboxes were designed using the same principles that slot machines use to get you addicted? It's true, they adhere to the same principles of using flashing lights, sounds and colors to give you a sudden jolt of addictive dopamine regardless of if the contents of the lootbox are any good (and of course it's an unskippable animation so you MUST subject your brain to it's full effects). Arcade cabinets didn't do this and the worst they had were "quarter muncher" games that were so punishingly difficult as to be impossible to complete without spending X amount of dollars.
And it doesn't stop there. Battle Passes are often so insane with their progression that I remember doing the math for Paladins, and I would have to play 2+ hours every single day to get everything in the Battle Pass. Many companies will simultaneously offer players the option to pay for Battlepass levels and this is usually on-top of the initial fee to gain access to the good content of the battle pass to begin with because many companies have a substandard "free" Battle Pass that you can upgrade to a "premium" level so that they can pressure you with FOMO by showing you all the stuff you COULD have if you had just bought the Battlepass already.
NFTs are just another iteration of the psychological conditioning tied to games monetization because it's just using the already extremely well-documented psychological conditioning that causes people to fall prey to pyramid schemes or supposed "Multi-Level Marketing" companies. All the push for NFT/crypto "play-to-earn" games amounts to is the mask of AAA gaming coming off. Because to engage with and to sell products that are most closely related to pyramid schemes and MLMs is to ostensibly admit "We only pretended to give even a single shit about video games because it's a multi-billion dollar industry and nothing else. Fuck you and fuck your video games. Give us your money, you filthy, disgusting pay-pig."
tl;dr - We really need to talk more about the psychological manipulation tied to games monetization because modern games monetization by itself isn't bad, it's the cancerous greed tied to it.
Great video! You didn't touch on XBox Game Pass or PS+. Not sure how sustainable these are given their relatively low price
Let's see. We could assume a fairly low 20% of the 116million PS4s subscribing to PS+. That's 23 million in sales a year. Yeah, the 138 million a year isn't a lot, but it's more than the cost of maintenance for servers.
@@vxicepickxv where is the 20% from? It's not just about maintaining the servers but actually paying the developers/publishers to get the games onto the platform in the first place
Great insight Kira!
this was a really good video, well done man
Professional quality -- nice work
great video thx, got an ad for Maple Story before the vid started..wow twenty year old game still gets pushed. Never played it but seems sad
Here we go. Quality content, quality content creator.
Fascinating!! I learned stuff and I enjoyed the show.
"today, an arcade is a mostly empty room where you can win a stuffed minion from a claw machine and see if you still remember the dance moves to Cotton Eye Joe on Dance Dance Revolution. spoiler, you do but your knees can't handle it as well now"
Brilliant video mate.
I love your channel! Keep up the great content. I’m always looking forward to your new videos.
What is this production value?! Well done.
As we all clearly remember, there was a time not too long ago when Steam was overrun by literal piles of horse manure and almost everyone were crying out for more curation on the platform. As is turns out, today there is a veritable boom in indie titles of every shape, flavour and form and even if 99% of all devs and pubs go the blockchain/NFT route, the 1% that is left will keep me busy for the rest of my life, happily so. The last AAA game I touched was Fallout 4 and I unironically find a better community, better dev support and a much better experience with smaller titles.
@M ... I guess it depends greatly on what you think a good game is and while I can agree that they are literal bugfests they are also unlike any other games, especially with mods. I think Fromsoft has never made a good game (because from my point of view those kind of games are not good, and i am not even mentioning how terrible the PC ports are). See how that works? Round two.
@M you obviously haven't delved into the modding community it seems. Less rhan 0.1% of mods do any "fixing". The other 99.9% make fantasy dreams come true. (Also that was a really pathetic attempt at a jab. Do you even have an uppercut?)
@M Bethesda games in the Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises are an anomaly. The base games are ok to good, but they become spectacular with mods. To me they are like canvasses on which the community paints. My FO4 install has a mod directory that is twice the size if the actual game. Then there is something like Enderal for Skyrim or New California for New Vegas. So yeah i am not disagreeing with you per se. I will keep on buying the Bethesda stuff as long as I know they can be modded to Valhalla and back. (I made a bunch of mods myself and it was a fun thing in of itself)
This was very informative and fun. loved it!
Amazing video, Kira. Thank you
i do like the current kick of vids your on, very informative
The “purely buying a game” model still exist in indie and low-budget games (AA, lower-AAA) games, and these lower budget games tend to be ruled by artists and developers rather than investors, marketers and accountants.
Excellent video! Another good sign is that current game dev tools allow small teams to produce games that used to take massive numbers of people to create. The future is very bright for indy devs.
When I was a kid we couldn't afford to buy games for the consoles we had (NES, SNES, GENESIS) - we would go to blockbuster and RENT the games for a few days. Because we only had a game for a few days, we would be rushing to beat the game as fast as possible, to then move on to the next one. The convenience of getting to play the same game over and over again for free did not really hit me until SHAREWARE on PC - then I was swimming in lots of free demos, and buying games (like doom 2) that were truly stunning. I digress, but, the video game rental business was huge, and it was kinda the same as renting time at the arcade, although much more affordable.
Kira, would you say that there is a generational population of gamers born AFTER the arcade era, but BEFORE lootbox mechanics, who are the loudest complainers about the micro-transaction model? For us, lets say millennials, micro transactions are contrary to the way we grew up playing games, and yet the newer generations are far more accustomed to the idea.
If Blockchain is truly the future of gaming, I think it will be the thing to cause another late 80's style crash.
The meme about Grandpa Simpson yelling at the clouds comes to mind.
what an amazing documentary.
Thanks.
I don't imagine anyone cares, but I remember playing that Periscope game in the late 1960's.
Great video, thx for this!
These documentary-style videos are great
This video was amazing, I loved it.
Greetings from S-pain
Brought back so many memories.
While all my friends were playing UO, I was playing the english/western version of Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds . Interesting fact they brought in a cash shop years later when KRU took over.
Thank you for the interesting documentary. I wonder why these arcade halls seemingly never became a thing in West Europe.
Yes that's how we started and we've come full circle. The problem is we got away from it for awhile because we saw how anti consumer it was, and how development was about maximizing profit instead of making something great. But there was a little time there that we saw what it could really be so now we should know better xD
We watched this video in my game design class didnt even realize it was kira tv.
Oh really? That's super cool
“The Arcades where the _W o R s T_ period for micro transactions in gaming.”
But of course, because the other alternative was _literally_ buying your own personal arcade, which in those times we’re so expensive that most people could only ever dream of ever owning one.
But of course, the other alternative would’ve been to make those arcade games literally _free._
Yes, sure, what an absolutely amazing idea, I wonder what could’ve possibly gone wrong…
The history part of this video was spot on. Thankfully, the NFT trend became a huge flop, as your ending correctly predicted: when the buyers don't buy a product, the market will adapt and stop selling that.
Excellent video bruv
actually great video, thank u
Excellent video!
Calling it now, the big publishers are going to follow konamis lead move into the gambling industry.
Thanks for this! I was actually trying to come up with a historical list of widely accepted practices in the video game industry that could be considered anti-consumer. In short, there are a lot, and it is kind of depressing when you look at at as a whole.
Yoooooo!!! You mentioned Nexus!
It’s always wild to hear my childhood game: Nexus TK, be mentioned by someone I’m subscribed to