Games are an Expensive, Time Stealing Nightmare | Salari
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 พ.ย. 2023
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As the games industry has grown, so have the ways in which it attempts to get money from its customers. Whether that's through DLC, microtransactions, loot boxes, battle passes, or anything else you can imagine. These practices have been designed from the ground up to exploit player's fears of inadequacy and missing out, to the point where they feel it's necessary to make substantial financial investments to feel as though their commitment to a product is worthwhile.
However, in more recent times, video game publishers and developers have been after something far more valuable - your time, and in an industry where there's a new live service game launching seemingly every week, there will naturally be winners and losers. What we don't speak about enough, is how dire the cost of losing it.
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I remember a game being 100 hours long is too much for some players but these live-service games are asking for years of your life
Those fart nite virgin bux tho!
Yeah, games are ridiculously long now. It's exhausting.
Yeah. Nowadays I try to look for games in the 6-20 hour category to finish/complete just cause I know my attention will wander. Unless it's a must play title like elden ring or bg3 but those are experiences unto to themselves.
Or there's the roguelikes which take up to an hour at most on a single run.
I agree. I love open world games but I've been playing Witcher 3 and Red Dead Redemption 2 for about 4 years now. I just want to finish them.
@@biobasher Yeah, the good thing about those 6-20 hour games is they don't have padding. They're for - get this - ENTERTAINMENT instead of feeling like a job you got to do to hopefully find some actual FUN in your VIDEO GAME. It's crazy what so many gamers put themselves through these days, wasting their money on chores.
I really hate the scarcity tactic, since it’s extremely effective on children who don’t have great control over themselves.🐱
Pokemon is notorious for this, it's why I stopped playing those games. There was always a date I'd missed for an event where I could get some random Pokemon. Eventually I realized I could never actually fill up my Pokedex because I was the only person I knew playing them 🤷♀️
It's actually extremely effective on adults too it's likely you just notice it less. We need to stop this "won't somebody think of the children" attitude when it comes to video games (and a lot of other things too)
Children don't have great control over a lot of things. Their parents/caregivers are responsible for them and I'm tired of pretending they're not
Not to mention that growing up being constantly gratified for being impulsive tends to make you retain that behavior through adulthood
It's not just in-game items that get the artificial scarcity treatment, when you collect a free game on steam or wherever you will see the caveat "while supplies last". What supplies, it's not a limited quantity physical product, it's just a flag that gets set on your account when you get it and you just download a COPY, no limited resource gets moved and nothing gets lost. I passionately despise the whole pretense that a non-physical item can be scarce when it can be easily copied ad infinitum.
@@v.heywoodi mean, yes, but i can still be upset that US education is basically concerned with brainwashing children into good little worker bees happy to lick the Corporate Boot.
It's still insidious that when I was a child, corporations weren't as free to openly market garbage toys to children. My parents definitely saw a distinct difference between kids a little older than me and my sister being less rabid about the newest fad crapola. I love the internet, but having been about 14 when I first experienced dial up, I can see how kids that have only known life after the web have been altered by it compared to people who did not have the world constantly at their screen / fingertips
I feel like something that scares me that much more about kids being manipulated is that it extends to the school yard. I've heard a lot about kids being bullied in school for not having a good skin in a game like Fortnite, and like...as much as I would have wished for a childhood where it was more normalized to play games, it sounds like we're in such a obnoxious and scary version of that timeline.
Edit: Since a lot of the comments on this have been about the fact that kids will always find something to bully people over, I totally agree about that. My larger point is mostly just that it sucks that it's that much harder for people to find video games as a form of escapism. Like sure, people were bullied for liking video games, but at least while they were playing them they could just get lost in the game. Having it be another potential outlet for all this stuff just sucks to see.
Wow that's pretty upsetting and sad. Feels like the sort of thing that would have been a joke in a show, or a dark comedy :(
Because children will look for any excuse to bully others, if they can get away with it. And differences in money will always be an easy low-hanging fruit. It used to be expensive clothes, then gadgets, now it's video game FOMO. Different time, same principle.
That's been happening between kids or teens for a long time, whether with games, what's in their lunch, whether they got to go on field trips, whether they had the latest recess craze, what brands their clothing are, what backpack they have, and many other things.
The big trouble today is that the crap follows them into digital space and is not contained in the school yard, halls or classroom. Kids were often spread out outside of school, but the internet provides a digital space for bullying, envy and competition 24 / 7.
@@kathycoleman4648 Yeah, I think that's mostly what I was trying to get at. I think I'd take escapism that people thought was nerdy over something I couldn't even lose myself in on that level. Not that there aren't plenty of options nowadays for games that aren't like that, but it just sucks that it might come with the territory if that's what you want to play.
All those kids who went to hell for not buying Bonestorm...
As a broke teenager who could only afford one or two games a year at best, 100+ hour games were a godsend. But now that I'm a busy adult who has other hobbies and responsibilities, I appreciate games that don't go past the 50-hour mark. There are still outliers like Elden Ring which I still enjoyed and even 100%-ed, but some games are just... obviously padded out to extend the time you spend on it.
even if you work and such why would that stop you in playing a 100h+ games really? and anyway, how many games are "really" more than 20h to finish outside very few outliers.
you dont need to 100% a game to have fun
@@siyano I didn't say I've completely stopped playing 100h+ games. Just that I've become more selective about it. When I only have the weekends to play games, I prefer to play ones where I feel like I've made a lot of progress per session.
One of the most terrifying games about mobile game in-app purchases is that those apps can be killed at any time. The amount of money spent on in-game goods for things that become either unplayable or unsupported by the company is hard to imagine, especially with the speed at which companies are axing things that aren't making as much money as they wanted.
Yup, many gacha mobile games get the ax simply because the devs do not have enough funds to maintain it. And many have debuted for less than a year.
Mega Man X DiVE is one of those rare exceptions that the devs made an Offline version.
Too bad Eroica, Witch Weapon, Captor Clash, Kickflight, and others I can't remember don't get the same treatment. But those games don't have the luxury of having something be complete while just extending it.
Avatar generations got the announcement for shout down in December, after i bought some stuff there 😅
@@KenzoKenja Eroica's getting shut down too in December on the 23rd. 😮💨
I guess sometimes mobile games need to be just pay-to-play, I guess, when it comes to that. Mobile games can be free too, but not pay-to-win free if they needed money as well. Rather, cosmetics or merchandise of the game being for the paying part instead of being slowed down with a disadvantage like a cooldown timer unless payed for an advantage.
...like EVERYTHING bought or stored online or bound to online services: music, games, books, movies; you name it, it's only rented.
Only with life-service games it's not so bad, since you're already bound to the server, buying things doesn't make you more depending on the goodwill of the provider than you already are.
A lot of this comes down to FOMO marketing. It's very insidious.
As a transformers collector, this hits pretty close to home.
This is going to sound weird and most likely won’t apply to a lot of people but…playing a lot of F2P games has numbed me to the excitement of gambling.
With Genshin Impact, I liked playing it to explore the world and interacting with interesting characters. The main thing I didn’t like about it was the amount of grinding it took to level up your characters. I’d usually stick with 4 characters I thought complemented each other very well in terms of skills and elemental abilities. I’d occasionally switch one of them out for a specific boss or puzzle, but then I’d go back to my usual party when doing story quests and exploration.
Here’s how all of this pushed me away from getting super invested in the wish system: each new character you unlock starts at level 1. So now you have to grind to catch them up with your main party. Other people might have the time and/ or money for that, but I don’t.
Another one that helped me avoid bad spending habits was Let It Die. A rouge like souls like that does the arcade thing where it respawns after death for a token. Now, a lot of people would probably buy a bunch of tokens to try and cheese there way through the game. But I’m a crazy person who actually learned how to play the game without spending any physical money. I basically treated the game like a crafting project: something that kept my hands busy and I took my time with because it helped me relax.
The main point I’m trying to make is: don’t let the game own you. Don’t let it be your reason for existing. Don’t let it be the main reason for making money. If a game is acting like you need to spend large/ frequent amounts of money to have a good time, you’re in a bad relationship and you need to get out!
I used to spend money on Genshin to acquire new characters but nowadays I don't. I no longer play daily quests but I stick to world quests that I find more interesting. As for events, they are okay if I like the gameplay, otherwise I leave them alone if I am not interested
What's worse than spending lots of money to have a good time is spending tenfolds the amount of time to have a half decent good time. Time is money. And the longer you play the more time you work for the game as a free asset.
There's a reason player population is important to games even if 90% of those players don't pay a single cent, because the 10% that do pay needs it's fodders, it's peasants, it's walking free ads, etc.
This is also why stuff like battle passes and premium accounts became the trend. Begging on the streets for an hour or two every month to play the game with a premium account is much more time efficient than playing the game for free but having no premium bonuses.
You and most people do that, most people playing f2p games don't spend any money on it, I play Genshin since Launch and have never bought anything and I have the characters I like.
A small minority of people are the ones actually spending a lot of money and carrying the game, the whales, the rest of people either don't spend anything or spend just a little, like buying the pass.
I started playing Genshin in September 2022 and would occasionally spend money on welkins & bp. But I’ve now reached a point where I feel that spending money for it is ridiculous. I mean, I like Diluc and his skin but $30? I’ll pass💀💀. The characters will always be here, even if it takes a good 3-5 months to save up lol.
Even with the limited sales windows and every other tactic and excuse, you're still always just paying for data that is already on your hard drive. It is taking up space in your game files whether you own it, or can even buy it, or not. Imagine having to pay extra for a side dish already on your dinner plate, or to use a room in your house that you just bought, or paying extra to use the heated seats in your own ca- Oh...
Ah, the days when people cared about on disc dlc. Much like horse armors, such concerns are already 6 feet under piles of other corporate exploits to complain about.
Fun fact: Even if TH-cam blocks you for using an ad blocker, you can still watch the video in a private window or when it's embedded in a Patreon post, and you can still like and comment to help a creator you're a fan of.
what i do is i alternet between multiple (3)youtube account: because, they aren't blocked all the time, so i can watch a few video before it's blocked again .
Can you? I can never find the like button on an embedded video.
@@MorbidEel There isn't, but you can watch it embedded and then click through to TH-cam to leave likes and comments even when the video itself is blacked out with the anti-adblocker message.
Also tampermonkey has scripts that auto skip the ads, it's better than having to use a private window every time you want to watch a video.
You can use an alternative frontend like invidious as well
I had to quit Genshin because it was killing my free time and my wallet. The only free to play thing I do now is MtG: Arena because, ironically, the online version of that game is LESS predatory than the analog version where you are dropping tons on booster packs any time you want more cards, while there are at least free-to-play options to get boosters in Arena. But that probably is more a damnation of analog Magic than it is praise for Arena, lmao.
Though honestly, the amount of time vampired away by videogames absolutely pales for me in comparison to TH-cam. It's just too easy to thoughtlessly click through to another video and another and another. I was never that susceptible to channel surfing as a kid, but it turns out it was just because general audience content was not that appealing to me. TH-cam is a monster when it comes to getting stuff done in my life. Especially if I'm at all tired and I'm an adult now: I'm always tired.
I actually quit Arena due to how poorly structured it was for free to play players. I was free to play when Death's Shadow (one of my favorite creatures) dropped on Arena, worked my ass off on there for like a month (or however long there was between announcement and release) to try to get enough wild cards to craft a set of Shadows. They dropped, I crafted them, played the deck for the full first weekend they were out, and had to stop for a couple months after that because of life things. I went back, my account was missing its Death's Shadows, I contacted support about it and they told me I never had them. I quit the game after that because after calculating how long it would take as a F2P to get them back, it came to something like a month of consist playing and I still would need to finish getting the pieces of the core of the deck that I hadn't gotten prior and had just been playing without.
I get my digital card game fix from Master Duel now, which is a legitimately very free to play friendly game, ironically given its made by Konami.
agreed, genshin or gacha games in general, are time vampires, I also quit facebook because of that, you just find yourself scrolling through useless stuff for 30 minutes without even noticing it, while I love youtube, I also want to limit my time it but making this comment now isn't exactly helping that....
When I listen to people talking about gaming, fun is rarely mentioned. I think that's a big tell.
A big tell of what sort? That some things are obvious and don’t need to be explicitly stated?
@@BenjaminWalburn Since i don't know what is his point. I may try to tell you how i interpreted.
He is simplifying it. The idea here is that gaming is more about "being the best", "i lost because this noob in my team", "i got skins", "i paid for that" and stuffs like that.
While, in my time, a millenial that i'm (i'm not against modernity, just saying), people "just played", and had fun. Pros don't cared about noobs on their servers, the first time Counter-Strike player would play against the best player, and everybody just laughed.
People would joke, but would not discourage you when seeing you doing noob things. The "i just want to have fun and relax" mentality was understood at a higher level. You had nothing to prove: "it is just a game, bro". Few people were proud, and they were mocked.
The reason people played was not to "be pro", or "to have things to be proud and to scratch on someone's face", it was merely to have fun, to laugh and stuffs like that.
At my time, the lan-houses were place people just met. Some people went there just because their friends were there, even if they don't even played, they also don't cared to just sit and watch someone playing.
I agree. Almost all through this generation, the most I hear about is framerate, ray tracing, photorealism, and how many hours a game is. I think it is why I navigated more towards Nintendo lately again. Hi-Fi Rush is pure fun as well as Super Mario Bros. Wonder. Both games leave a smile on my face. I also really love Baldur's Gate 3 so far and has the kind of gameplay I dreamed as a kid. I'm glad the gameplay was talked about with people wanting more out of games. Similar to Zelda TotK (although I have burnt out on that game).
I remember when people would passionately talk about the music, the emotions they felt, cool set piece moments, and how fun a certain level or section of the game was.
It seems more like a chore.
@SophiaTheReckless You may be right about that, but it is anecdotal, so in my view, you were unlucky to be in a bad ambient.
But i think it is hard that in most places (lan-houses, internet, arcades) and most games i played (and i played a lot, i basically only play multiplayer) i had majorly fun matches when i was teen.
I played Doom, Quake, Unreal, HL, CS, BF, War3, fighting games, MMOs and more...
If you were on a competitive ambient, that is another topic. Competitions should be taken seriously.
It's so frustrating that explanations for these flagrant abuses are still necessary. But of course they've been so successful for a reason. Thanks for keeping up the work!
As someone who lost an entire year of my life to video game addiction this hits home
I really like hoyo's new game hsr and played genshin before then, but I never recommend their games because they're gacha.
I'll note Genshin does not get so hard you need to roll for characters to progress, but gacha is naturally predatory, and gambling should not be available to literal children.
the only game i reccomend that is gacha is girls frontline (im us) due to the game being about upgrades and composition rather than higher star goes brr thats still in effect but you can have a party of 2 and 3s be better than 4s and 5s until endgame if you do it right
I love genshin and have played regularly and also spent some money on it, but the amount of players who have spent hundreds of dollars and still call themselves low spenders is pretty astonishing
@@thecoolestofthe834s2 love that game too, however it is just not as intuitive to play as its other counterpart Neural Cloud. Beside, lore section and game section in between can be unbearable as it is not like arknights where you can read story in a button prompt after beat the story
@@noamsiebert5056 I guess they mean they are low spenders if you count it each month individually.
For instance I have spent maybe $700 in genshin impact but this is over the course of the whole game.
I have very rarely paid for the $100 top up and those were when I had stimulus money.
But outside of that I spend maybe $50 some times and mostly $25 or $10 packs.
So I mostly buy the smaller packs and now I hardly spend anything at all.
I just simply see a character that I want and if I can afford them at the moment I get them.
Now that I have gotten so many characters that are Overpowered new characters are not much of a priority.
The point I am getting at even low spenders will accumulate how much they spend over time.
So if you spend $10 a month every month for 3 year's it's true that you are a low spender.
But over time you have still spent a lot of money.
It is gacha, but I mean...
Play the game doing anything you want, for a month or two collect the currency for desired character. Pay if you desire, but besides characters(game can be completed fully with free characters) and extra farming(if you cannot wait a day), everything is free. Roll the gacha for literally 5 min. That's all. Play the whole game for free, spend 5 min a month on gacha, all other time - enjoy exploration, story, soundtrack, etc.
Talking about Genshin, idk about hsr.
The small amount of times I have bought loot boxes or the equivalent of it in any game I immediately regret it without even opening whatever gatcha thing I bought. I am extremely compulsive and If you put a shiny cool thing in front of me and ask me for 5 dollars it’s extremely hard for me to hold myself.
The quite effective deterrent I have is price equivalence - how many actual games that will give me TENS OF HOURS of quality engagement can I get on a steam sale for the same amount that I'd spend in a gacha game to get a very limited number of rolls that will probably not even get me anything? It also helps that I'm naturally very stingy.
But it's very different for someone that is compulsive and/or easily manipulated into spending, which, sadly, is what these entire systems are built around with help from psychology and behavior experts. Looking at the "institutional" side of it, it's baffling how such a thing is even legal, let alone normalized and accepted.
Stay strong, friend.
I bought, I think, 10 lootboxes in Overwatch once. I got all garbage, so I never bought any again. If Blizard wasn't so stingy with the good stuff, they might have gotten a lot of money out of me back in the day.
@@abadenoughdude300 It's not baffling at all. You have to remind yourself that laws are made by people in the government. And who are these guys? Old geezers without any idea of what's happening in the world - aside from the stuff they get fed via MSM. So if the MSM don't talk about someone shooting up a school - for which they can use video games as a scapegoat to farm parents' votes - video games might be non-existent to these people.
6-7 year Overwatch veteran here. I easily have thousands hours in the game, I was a top 500 player and a complete addict.
With all that said: OW1 lootboxes were significantly less destructive than the OW2 Battlepass. I'm not joking or exaggerating. In OW1 I had every cosmetic in the game without having paid for a lootbox once. At least if you played the game a lot, you could get currency from duplicates and just buy what you wanted. It was unrealistiv for casual players, but you *did not* have to pay to unlock cosmetics at all. In OW2? I don't even own 35% of what's been released, you literally cannot obtain majority of cosmetics now unless you pay up, doesn't matter how much you play. They are making more money than they ever have, I am still shocked Blizzard managed to somehow make a system even more predatory and successful than lootbox system.
Same (Also, top 500? Damn, impressive!). I never found Overwatch's lootbox system bad despite all the outrage around it, especially after they removed duplicates. It was completely realistic for a persistent player who enjoys the game to get literally every single cosmetic by just playing. Everyone else, as you said, could spend reasonably easily obtainable currency for what they really want. And while the game was buy to play, the basic edition was pretty cheap, and you really didn't need anything over the basic edition.
Eh, the cosmetics have reached the "goofy nonsense that doesn't match the artistic vision of the game" stage anyway, I just can't get excited for a skin of some clown ass character from some crossover bullshit that doesn't stylistically match the base game anyway.
Good thing we got our single player campaign with aaaall the features we got promised :). Blizzard is like a romantic partner that keeps on cheating, but we never have the courage to break up. I really believed in OW2. I was certain, this time, they wouldn't f it up
I was never that hooked into OW1 as you but I do play Heroes of the Storm regularly (Blizz's MOBA) whose lootboxes are equal to OW1's so I believe you. One could do that and it was not that unreasonable
As a casual Overwatch player, I didn't manage to get a single non-default model skin for any of the characters I picked most often before I stopped playing (though a few were of different colors). I think that I put a good 50 hours into it by then, which is *a lot* for a regular person to spend on one game.
I've been playing Genshin since 1.1, Spent a lil here and there, I was just moved by the latest chapter finale. I love the game. And I would NEVER recommend any new players to play it. When my friend asked what its about I listed like,,, so much pros and cons because I wanted them to know what theyre going into.
This was my first gacha game. The first time I felt the gambling addiction setting in was with Xiao banner in patch 1.3 thankfully I slept on the idea of buying Genesis crystals. And since then I felt better and learned to regulate my feelings and expectations of this game. Its not just simply... a game... it will tempt you... and it will affect your mental health if you are not aware that it is designed to do exactly that.
I feel bad about the teens and my young adult peers who might not know any better.
I'll be honest, I spent some money on a few characters, and a LOT on one in particular. The ones I spent a little bit of money on were Ayaka, Wanderer, (this one was probably not necessary to spend money on) Kirara and the archons (though I don't have Raiden yet). Ayaka, Wanderer, and Kirara were for world traversal and I only spent money on them on the last day of their banner so I only needed their C0. I want all the Archons and the same thing happened with Zhongli I only paid money on the last day. I got Nahida before I spent my first cent. And Venti and Furina C0 and her weapon came from leftover crystals for Neuvillette. I spent a lot of money on him to get him to C6. I got that well before I thought I would and actually ended up with about a fourth of the crystals left over, so I pulled for his weapon. And I got that on the second ten pull of that banner.
I actually don't particularly regret spending for Neuvillette because he's just so powerful and I love helping other players if they either need or want help with anything. The only one I regret spending money on is Kirara. Funnily enough, other than Neuvillette she was the one I spent the most money on. I got TWO Yoimiya's before getting her.
I have exceptional spending control and spent exactly 0 cents on Genshin and I'd like to say that even for people like me playing it is unfortunately pain, since you can't ever get the things you want, so when you're not indifferent about the characters anymore, it starts being extremely frustrating - sort of like emotional pain. Even though you know that if the monetization model was sensible, it might easily be the best game you ever played. In the end, I stopped playing, since even all that shit which didn't rely on paying felt abusive as shit, such as dailies. Whenever I get reminded of the game I feel sad knowing just how good it could be.
exactly, it's a great game but I would never recommend anyone to play, especially if they're vulnerable to gambling mechanics like kids, teens and young adults, gachas are kiddy casinos.
@@Alice_Fumoyeah, as a "fun game", genshin is so much wasted potential, but as a "cash cow" it's doing exceptionally well at that.
@@Alice_FumoI guess my experience is just completely different, I also never spent in it but my experience is fine, I play for the story, I can do everything without struggling , I have all the characters I like, I can do abyss fine, I play since launch and I have like twelve 5* characters, but maybe I'm just different because I just want to know what happened to khaenri'ah amd the sibling.
This is why I perfer playing indie games
Indie or retro is the way.
Certainly helps that those games also tend to have low system requirements meaning that you don't have to constantly upgrade your rig.
This is why I stick to single player games and single player modes of PC and console. They’re often less predatory. I stay away from all mobile games except for the basic, classic solitaire. I also limit playing modern games. I’ve been replaying a lot of older games I haven’t played in years or games I never played that have sat in my Steam catalogue for years.
I used to play Star Wars Galaxies back in the 2000s and I loved that game. But it kind of became my life for a couple years. So because of that I stay away from any games with a social aspect and limit my social life to offline.
Might I suggest the Fear and Hunger games? You sound like you might enjoy those.
Sigma male space will still consider you less of a man. probly even more so now that you are playing solo games.
@@MauseDays …why do you care if this person is a man?
The worst thing about this is that I've read about some Gacha games having separate "paid" and "free" pulls, with the chances of getting 5-star characters and weapons from free pulls dropping permanently, once you've had any paid pulls. Because the developers know at that point that you're willing to pay for the game.
I don't have any proof of whether this is true or just rumors, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me if games like Raid: Shady Ledgers does this...
gacha are just predatory, not P2W but it's still nasty
It'd be a big deal if that's true because gachas are legally mandated to disclose their drop rates. It's not surprising that a gacha would try something illegal tho
Final Fantasy Brave Exvious: War of the Visions does this and the paid banners are ALWAYS far superior, guaranteeing the character or weapons every time or, in some cases, just flatout giving you fully leveled characters and equipment.
Usually the banners are just separate in the Japanese gacha. The freemium gacha that has the good stuff can only be gotten from playing the game or paying, and the free banners almost always just have nothing good.
How would that be illegal if the public drop rates are consistent with the paid drop rates? The free ones aren't gambling.
I'm here for Salari doing a fancy French accent to mock a millionaire :D Great video as always!
Thank you for uploading this at such a perfect time when I was teetering on the verge of paying real money for a 3% chance of winning Swim Suit Gold Ship and Mejiro McQueen in Umamusume Pretty Derby after losing all my hard-earned free in-game currency in their brutal gacha spin.
Stylosa, an Overwatch TH-camr, revealed by accident some time ago that many content creators are given battle passes and skins FOR FREE so they can make videos hyping them up. This is why many content creators have defended Blizzard's actions.
It was also revealed, i think for Overwatch 1, that many content creators were given hundreds of lootboxes PRECISELY so they make those "let's open hundreds of lootboxes and see what pops out!!" videos and that these lootboxes were rigged with higher rates so the creators could fake more reactions.
I'll never forget the transition from the ps3 to ps4 era when online gameplay became an additional expense. I know price of the industry went up but man. Still disappointing we can't go back outside of mmo games
That wasn't because of costs going up, but simply because the 360 trouncing the PS3 convinced Sony that enough people would be willing to pay for PS+ if it was required even if they cut back on all the other offerings it had.
@@redsilversnake oh wow thats....much worse than my delusion led me to believe
I often hear that "you could have unlocked the separate ways in the original RE4!". I think people oversee the fact that the "original" RE 4 is a gamecube version, which did not have the SW campaign, it was added in the PS2 port. You can even play RE4 HD in steam and notice that the base game has real-time cutscenes but SW has prerendered ones in bad quality.
I have some existential crises when i think about how much time games take to play and to beat, like im not getting younger but theres only more games releasing, getting longer, maybe better, all while the endless backlog only grows too.
Sigh, i love games, i want to play all the good ones that are worth playing, but theres so much bloat in games bc each needs to suck as much your lifespan as possible. And then i got into a certain infamous open world gacha at launch and now im stuck in sunk cost fallacy until it dies or i do lol 💀
I wish he would have mentioned that the industry "regulated" loot boxes by switching from the direct purchase of loot boxes to the purchase of in-game currency that is only used for the purchase of loot boxes.
You expect an industry propped up by venture capital which in turn is protected by the government to play fair?
The venture capital will just legally bribe their way out of it, while the would-be competition gets hit.
@@sintheemptyone8108 Kind of? Yeah, go ahead and call me naive, but I think scrutinising the wormy behaviour of corpos is constructive.
@@HappyFaceSticker It is only naive if you refuse to acknowledge the trade-offs of regulation, something you're clearly not doing here.
Just means you'll have bloat to clean up to get the system working again the way it should. I don't see why we should be solely anti- or pro-government... unlike what many would like us to think.
@@sintheemptyone8108 Well, my thinking is as follows, "Since we're 40 years into the de-regulated, free-market experiment of Reganomics, and I am not satisfied with the current state of things, I would like to try some regulation please, since I have literally never known what a pre-Regan/Nixon/Busch era economy looks like... but I've heard good things."
I have a counter argument to your last statement on not voting with your wallet. Action speak louder than our words. Companies don't give a dam what we think or say. We've been vocal about these practices for years and it hasn't gotten better, it's gotten worse. The only way to get things to change is to hurt them financially. You can't reason with these guys and anyone that thinks we can is coping.
This. I've been saying for a long time that the "shitty" practices in the gaming industry like microtransactions spiraled out of control because people kept paying for it. And unfortunately as long as someone wants to stand out and look better than everyone else, they're gonna keep buying that shit.
You just need to be smart about what you're playing. There were a ton of single player games which came out this year that didn't ask for a single extra dime or your time.
Stay away from live service games, or those that monetize interactions.
I wouldn't say gaming in its entirety is evil or a waste.
The vast majority are not that smart and greedy companies don't target them anyway, they target the addicts, the kids that don't know any better, the whales who buy anything anyway and the people who just mindlessly buy whatever they want and ignore any negative.
Look at the kid who used THOUSANDS of dollars from their parents' bank accounts because he wanted a specific character in FIFA. Look at the dude who spent LITERAL MILLIONS in a game in China. Look at the dude in Fire Emblem Heroes, a mobile title, that wasted thousands of dollars trying to get the character Hector when the game first launched.....AND HE STILL DID NOT GET HIM.
These are the people these companies try to grab and manipulate.
basically this, yea
this is pretty much the best time ever to be a gamer, shame the great games are rarely the popular ones
@@marcoalves9029 popularity is what sent great games like fallout towards a downwards spiral mfker
Yeah a lot of people are consume to live service games too much that they forgot what an actual good game is. Play games like Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Sea of Stars, Baldur's Gate 3, Super Mario RPG, Sonic Superstars, Red Dead Redemption Remastered, Bayonetta 3, Persona 5 Royal, Balan Wonderworld, Pikmin 4, Yakuza, Final Fantasy XVI, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Horizon: Call of the Mountain, God of Whore Ragnarok, Star Ocean: Second Story R, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Resident Evil 4, Pokemon Legends Arceus, etc. These offered high quality gaming experience and won't force you to pay a penny as you play.
@@VOAN Balan Wonderworld is debatable. creative yes. feels good to play?... not quite. fun to break with two people? Heck yea!
22:55 This is pretty much why I decided to learn Blender. I don't want to gamble for waifus, so I learned to make my own. My main inspiration was Deino, the 3D modeller, though, so they have a pretty narrow appeal.
I want to do this too. I found a channel recently called Pirate Software and he talks about how it's never been easier to make games.
i just draw my own waifus too!
@@animeking1357 I haven't watched anything by them, but I am learning to make games. I learned a bunch of C#, and I'm working on an FPS and a SHMUP in Godot. Both are very early in development though, as I'm also going to college.
@@henryfleischer404 Definitely gonna start trying to use C# as well.
Makes sense
This is why I'm into retrogaming, emulation and free open source games. I have alternatives and the industry isn't seeing the backside of my coins until they get their collective shit together. . . . Which I'm already assuming will be never.
Bethesda rightfully deserved flak for the horse armor, and we've all heard of Nexon and Japan's gachapon, but a lot of people forgot Valve was the first Western AAA developer to introduce gacha mechanics in a hugely popular game (you had to pay to play TF2 back then!) back in early 2010, and they've largely escaped a legacy of criticism and scrutiny that they should have deserved. Look at the mess that is CS;GO gambling, the rigged gambling sites and the in-game economy used to money launder.
It's sad to see how the industry has changed since then, with the numerous Gen-X and Millenials with marketing or psychology degrees getting jobs in gaming. One can look at Genshin to see how many people were introduced to gacha and how many were quick to become copium addicts while defending it. When people parrot "it's f2p friendly", you really have to wonder how our standards dropped so low.
It is F2P friendly in that 99% of the game is so easy that you don't need any of things spending would get you. All of the game can be played and most of it can be completed without paying anything. If you are trying attribute anything else to that statement then that is on you. It certainly has issues(such as misleading presentation of rates, 50/50, 50/50x2 for weapon banner) but trying to refute "f2p friendly" looks misguided or uninformed.
It is also P2W since you can definitely pay for power but it is also overkill levels of power. You don't need it but you can have it.
Did genshin really do that much to introduce people to gacha/lootboxes? It is by no means an innovator in that area nor in the stinginess of its rates and mechanics.
@@MorbidEel Every person I know, including myself, who does or did play Genshin had not played a dedicated gacha game before, often specifically avoiding the business model. Many or them, again including myself, have tried other gacha games since.
Anime BotW was a powerful gateway at the time, and might still be.
@@MorbidEelthanks for proofing his point, genshit white knight
Big difference is that in tf2 you can trade those things, you don't like that hat you got? Well maybe someone else does and this guy had the hat you wanted. You can't do shit with the bad pulls in a gacha, it's all actual wasted money.
@@voices0000 I can say that I went in the other direction: I'd played a lot of gacha before (honestly with little to no spending; I couldn't afford otherwise, I was an adult and had some idea of how effort translates into money for entertainment before this became a thing, and it's usually obvious the exact level of effort and development that went into the games in question), and I mostly wanted to see Genshin Impact out of curiosity as to how the standard template would translate into open-world. I was surprised to see actual quality plus a combination of not forcing payments to keep participating and visible reinvestment of profits into the game, which has kept me around. I still wouldn't recommend playing the game to anybody with impulse control issues, but it can also serve as a gateway out.
I've been so in love with BG3, I bought the very minimal DLC just to show appreciation for creating such a beautiful game and characters. I played for hundreds of hours and I cherish them.
Kind of like donating in Patreon. Even if it's not hundreds of hours... I do like it when you read my username out loud. and cats. WORTH IT :D
I mean it's kinda the same way with horse armor. $2.50 for really cool looking armor isn't exactly a huge burn
But that's a bit flawed logic. You already paid for the game, you don't need to donate to support the game, you already supported. And it's not even donating to the developers, since they are paid in salary. People who work on games got paid before the game is launched. The money from buying don't go to the developers, it goes to their bosses.
@@LightiningHoboThat is true but it's more about the studio's future or the game's future we have seen studios closing thanks to a bad game or low performance
A small correction: duplicates in Genshin are mostly desirable, since duplicates unlock additional abilities for characters (and improve effects of weapons). The devs make you want to get your waifus and husbandos 2-7 times.
I don't, the game is already easy enough, if you're not a ret4rd at building characters, you can beat Abyss 12 with 9* with C0 characters but that doesn't stop the practice from being scummy.
i stopped gaming around 2018 for disability related reasons and tbh, seeing how the industry has declined, i think i dodged a bullet
Good run-down on almost everything that's wrong with modern gaming. You forgot just one important thing: "Stop pre-ordering videogames!" ;)
Okay, you got my attention🤨 I can't imagine a title got my blood up like this one 🤣 I'm sure I'll love it and agree 😋
Edit: 16:44 okay, I'm with you. In the art vs commerce thing- commerce always turns beautiful creations of passion into sad zombie nightmares
Agreed, as an artist, it's distressing to walk the line between making money, by feeling like I have to pander, and getting to make the stuff I really want. Definitely rough!
I was scammed by a mobile game once. Now I'm unwilling to purcase anything from any game. I also don't pvp in pay to win games, because they have turned non paying players into mobs for spenders to murder. I guess I grew up, and the developers didn't. Games were better before they were online.
Dead Or Alive 1 & 2 each time you beat the game you unlocked a new costume, each character had like twenty costumes, encouraging one to beat the game 200 times. Have you seen the amount of DOA costumes for sale in the modern era? They want to sell you $400 worth of digital clothing and beating their game 200 times unlocks NOTHING.
that's really scummy but $500 for all skins is still nothing compared to gacha games, there's youtubers who spend $500,000 on a single game and still haven't collected all the characters, weapons etc.
I love gambling!
*Opens up Super Mario 64 DS and starts a game of Picture Poker*
Yeah... This is the life.
Me too!
*Goes to the slots in Pokemon Leaf Green*
I am so glad i avoided all these games for the most part. really wish the industry was just healthier and for people instead of toxic and for money
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.
1 Timothy 6:10
@@ImCelticlol rather, the root of all money is evil. it's not that money causes evil, its that evil people want lots of money
The reason I can never play City Skylines is because Im a train and tram guy, and the basic way to move arround during summer is by foot or bike.
And when it comes to achitecture my city would be entirely Medival Baltic + Jungendstyle + Baroque and plenty of parks.
I will always contest the "Life is suffering" statement from Buddhism. I believe the better translation from the sutra is "Life has suffering".
Good video I forget how bad it is because I don't have much time to play and I only play games that don't include this practice.
The beauty of the gacha mechanic is its similar to the Candy Land. Candy Land isn't a game, as there are no decisions made by the players. But it's still a game if you believe it's a game.
So, too, goes the gacha. It's only gambling to those who are bad at math or impulse control. Otherwise it's just a premium purchase with a "surprise discount" mechanic attached. Or not a purchase at all if you don't even pay for the subscription option. (Which is MUCH more reasonable than the rates for immediately getting resources now - $0.25 for 90 draws is $22.5. Or 45 buckeroos to get one copy of a specific character in the worst possible situation.)
Genshin is an especially interesting example since it doesn't use the standard Yu Gi Oh power inflation most games use. So characters from three years ago are still just as usable. As an action game and not a jRPG, you can always get better at actually playing the game. ... also there's the fact the entire point of the game is to pick flowers and look at the sunsets, the rpg number stuff is an extra garnish on top at best.
There's pros and cons to everything - when I was young I always wished my favorite games never had to end. This model makes that possible, and for $0 at that. It's always been for those invested into a game. If you're only going to play something for a week at most and then move on, why care?
This is especially more pertinent to how games have plateaued - sequels aren't upgrades like they used to be during the rapid improvement back in the 90's. Diablo 8 will be exactly the same as Diablo 3 and 4. Same five classes. One measly lousy class for the expansion. $200 for the first box, $170 for the second one.
That's if they don't replace developers with robots like everyone else by then, of course.
Just be like me. Play games from 2006 over and over again.
The best unnecessary money I ever spent on a game was spent in Path of Exile. I have a totally aesthetic only little red frog, wearing a little golden crown, running along with me on my adventures. I also bought some fireworks. Happy to spend a tenner or whatever it was coz that game is free and excellent, the devs deserved it ^_^
As someone currently suffering through the UNFINISHED Cities Skylines 2... this hits home.
Modern game design has tapped into the frankly ingenious method of modelling gameplay loops from your average workday, habitualising the inane, bullshit tasks these games offer as "content". Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the spate of gacha games that are nothing more than your "pump & dump" scams designed to make as much money as possible in the shortest span without offering anything more than a FOMO addiction. And what's worse is that people actually defend these business practices 😅
The popular justification for gacha games I've seen is the "but they're popular in Japan" excuse. Do Japanese players actually like gacha or have they been conditioned to accept it?
@@juliak7084 "The popular in Japan" excuse for gacha crap is the worst kind of uncritical response, even if the state of gameplay in those nations is different. I think games like that are popular in the East because of their "pick-up & play" format, which makes them easier to game in and out during commutes, etc. I don't think there is a general consensus on the popularity of gacha there: it's only because of anime aesthetics and the "chance" element in gacha that make it so tantalizing. Frankly, these games follow the same formal mechanics and psychological approach to marketing as do slotmachines in casinos, and it's pretty low for any art form to be in.
@@based_sam...I mean this just makes you out to sound ignorant. Are you someone who believes that the barrier of Entry being that you need to either own a console(which depending on the market was either inaccessible or extremely overpriced) or a PC isn't a factor
What about the price tag for the game which is another Barrier of Entry and considering how disinterested you are in Gacha do you actually think these games can't or aren't a form of Art.
Because it's the same bad rhetoric games have had in general for decades and to say it's lesser or devoid of quality is pretty shit.
Paying 70 or 90 depending on where you live for a product isn't a better monetization it's what you know and accept
But if your someone who isn't susceptible to skinner box tactics( reminder of why Subscription model are shit but are considered okay in the west) being able to use your phone especially in a high demand work culture and play on hardware you NEED to have is a good
The monetization can get out of hand which is why for the easily susceptible providing protection is key but there are plenty of intuitive Gacha that are art
It like me saying RPGs aren't all the same.. it would be a lazy take and a bad presumption
@@demonking-zm3rs lmao. Ignorant? Listen, if you play Gacha that's fine. Just acknowledge this shit is predatory and we'll be fine.
@@based_sam Your literal "takedown" was Japanese/ Eastern Players are conditioned to accept Gacha. Which Historical Context and a Huge Cultural Shift would like a word.
If it's a topic you want to have a shallow take on that's fine most people don't really argue the exploitative nature of the
"Traditional Monetization Model"
But unless your willing to do research asserting your own critque as fact is pretty shit.
But I'm not going to argue especially when the comment was made as a lazy parroting of other people opinions.
I Just dislike bad rhetoric spreading because the people spouting this shit typically don't bother to see if what they say makes sense
TLDR Eh issue was more the Rhetoric and misinformation never said Gacha doesn't have issue but the issue is that 99% of players don't spend and 1% do and that's a problem
But it's at the end a monetization system truth is that gaming is an expense and even the non predatory models come off pretty hostile to players
Less barriers to players playing games is a net good and alternative to whatever the industry is doing now.
I was there in 2006. I yelled about it then and I'll yell about it until my cold grave
Shoutout to Monolith Soft for their DLC. After having experienced Xenoblade 2's DLC prequel story Torna and the free epilogue included in Xenoblade 1 DE, I immediately purchased Xenoblade 3's DLC when it became available for its prequel story in its last DLC wave released many many months after release and was not disappointed whatsoever. Quality content and as always, MonoSoft continues to deliver some of the best storytelling in gaming since the 90s.
Approaching this medium without a Fomo mindset has kept gaming pretty fun and worthwhile for me. With how much publishers try to bleed our wallets, it's important to know how much you are getting out of the price tag.
There are plenty of games now that don’t do this and are fun. just dont play mainstream stuff and you’ll find something
Just to throw my hat into the argument. In my opinion video game addiction isn't the problem, it's merely a symptom of the players deeper issues.
As a person with ADD, I had to start researching and filtering out games that sport addictive in-game spending. This included TF2, a game that I played for thousands of hours and that I still love, because the risk of spending money was too high. I sold all my items and haven't touched the game in over a year now. If I feel the itch to return, I play TF2C instead. Good riddance Valve.
A playing player can also be a pirate, not everyone will pay.
which is why online features are made a core system into many games nowadays so they can't be pirated or if they're pirated, they're missing a lot of features.
@@f.b.l.9813 There are 30 years of good game backlog and growing. If you cant get new games youre just gona play the classics.
Dude, I put 400 hours into Genshin Impact, minimum.
8 hours a day, for months since its release date.
I don't regret having played it, though I quit cold turkey because my Completionist Brain would have burnt a hole in my wallet trying to get all the Seasonal Heroes.
I spent $450 dollars, but at just $1 per hour of game time, I STILL to this day say it was worth the price.
I sort of quit the game due to the new story and regions losing my interest.
But yes, I would still say all the money I spent on that game was worth it too.
Mihoyo is a rare game developer out of all the other Western "AAA" studios who actually invests back into its product and game and actually improves the game meaningfully.
@@aglis_ Yup.
Mihoyo is a Chinese Developer, now known as Hoyoverse - not to be confused for a Western Studio.
Gameplay-wise, the first update that broke the perfect game illusion for me was the Dragon spire Mountain, with the blizzard and new collectible there.
It felt very limiting for exploration.
That cat is a genius move
This industry needs to crash and soon. Corporations have remained unchecked and have become so greedy they are pulling any and all underhanded tactics at the expense of consumers.
This is exactly why I almost exclusively play arcade style (pick up and play), indie, and playstation narrative type games. My time and wallet are respected.
Pretty much why I stick to emulating older titles. It's cheaper and, after a quick search on HowLongToBeat, I know if I have the time to play a certain game.
Feel the same way as someone who avoids multiplayer. Sticking to single player only games has insulated me from a lot of these predatory schemes.
@@pizzarat3275 and excessive toxicity to boot, a win-win all around. Shame my main circle of friends is into BRs and comp shooters. I just chill with them in discord for a bit, then switch off to co-op and single player games. Have been a lot happier since switching off ultra-hardcore mp games. 👍
While I agree that you can escape it by playing single player games there are still good experiences to be had with multiplayer games as long you have the irl friends component. I don't have problem with multiplayer games as long there no pay to win, toxic community, microtransactions overdrive and other predatory practices.
The truth is people should have decoupled from big publishers years ago. I don't say all big games are bad but few of them are truly worth most people's time and money. While I get your point about playstation narrative type games Sony wants their big live service game badly considering they are throwing massive money.
Whenever I'm tempted to pay microtransactions or get loot boxes, I think of the Prozd vid where he says, "oooh, an ultra rare jpeg, a thousand dollars well spent!"
This is why the likes of Digital Extremes with Warframe and presumably Soulframe should be the one setting the standard for what an F2P LSG game monetization should be. Unfortunately, we keep on getting gacha monetization in games.
I felt like the OW loot box system after the drop chances were made public and adjusted was decent. It never impacted gameplay and it was purely cosmetic and youd get a decent amount of in game currency for duplicates and had a decent drop rate, with the least of what id call "filler" content. The fomo shopping also didnt hit as bad (before the fall) because during events you were given extra boxes and extra boxes for doing event related content. If you liked the game and played relatively regularly, you generally werent starving for in game currency or cosmetics. It was more so time vs money situation. If you werent really playing and wanted the skins you probably needed to buy boxes.
It was the only loot box system I found ok in any game I played. OW2 shop system is arguably the worst i think Ive seen in any game.
A lot of these tactics were in free to play MMORPGs for years before they started bleeding their way into other industries. But I remember being infuriated at this sort of thing being in games like Overwatch (which was, at the time, not free.) It was only excusable in games like MMOs because the base game was free. The fact that this stuff ended up in games we already pay for is absurdly gross.
As a teen I bought a bunch of lootboxes for a mount in TERA, got totally ripped off, and never bought another lootbox again.
Another great video, Salari. I love MOBAs and sunk hundreds of hours into SMITE, but holy shit is it bad for your mental health, so I've sworn off them.
me playing genshin, while listening to this video like a podcast: ''well my dear archon, i always have known you where that, but i will still devote most of myself to you nevetheless, but don't ask for you premium weapon though''
I played Genshin for a few months when I realized I was just gaming to grind to win characters I was never gonna play with and I never looked back.
A big problem is often the mistakes we make in seeing things onesidedly. One main reason for the free VS paid battle pass is that you get to see what you would have gotten if you had bought it. It's the same reason why there are quests in Mmos where you have to visit the in-game shop. The idea behind it is to manipulate you by making you aware of what "you are missing out on" cause that's a necessity for us to be tempted to begin with. They confront us with this friction unambiguously to cause as strong a response as possible. What we have to do to protect ourselves is to try to always be looking for contradictions. Who is getting what for what and why would they do whatever in what specific way. Since I started thinking more dialectically about the practices of corporations the feeling these tactics cause is no longer jealousy for things I wish I had but other do but instead furry for their cynical attempt to manipulate
As a former hardcore elder scrolls online player…boy did Bethesda really run with that horse armor. 😮💨
14:03 It's wild how early Disney has achieved late stage copyright laws end game.
Seriously most companies weren't even remotely that money grabby at that time and Disney already invented artificial scarcity
It's fascinating how motivating "status" in online games are to some people. Motivating enough to make them spend thousands of dollars or thousands of hours of their lives grinding away. On the surface it makes no sense, their status in game has no impact on their actual status IRL. There are some really juicy psychology studies that can be done on this.
Though, let's be fair, those studies have probably already been done, by the industry, to more effectively exploit it rather than further understanding of the human psyche. *Sigh*
The ‘live service games are like a second job’ is so real. Now whenever friends express disbelief that I’m not up to date on new patch content, I have to remind them “Genshin Impact is not my job.” I’m so over the FOMO manipulation. I will play my recreational games as I damn please xD These free to play live service games are so insidious to younger folks, though. Younger people are drawn in by the low (aka no) barrier to entry, invest hours, and think “well I’ve played this so much I may as well give them some money anyway” and so it begins…
This is solid coverage. Ive just stumbled on your channel for the 1st time. Soon ill be taking a deep dive into your other videos.
My experience with the TF2 market is the functional items cost pennies (like, if you wanted a specific weapon), and the cosmetics cost potentially infinite amounts.
the only "upside" of a battle pass is that in most games you can buy them after completing the free one, which is what I usually do to not force myself to play and burn myself out. if I complete it, sure, worth the money - if not, I lost nothing.
I think for me the horse armor thing is like this: While sure it may have been cheap it's something that previous games would've just had as a part of the game. More and more games are leaving content out of their games only to sell it as micro-transactions and dlc. For example I started playing Devil May Cry 5 the other night. I'm gonna play the main campaign first but I do want to get the Vergil campaign as well.
It's cheap, only 7 bucks. Actually quite a bit cheaper than expected. Why couldn't it have been part of the main game though? Hell if they had to delay the game a few months to make it part of the main game it would've been fine.
Meanwhile for the opposite look at the game Terraria. The game is 13 bucks and has been getting free updates for 12 years.
i bought the dmc special edition which comes with virgil on the disk it was a launch title for the ps5. he was included as dlc for the ps4 vanilla dmc 5. but i get your point.
I love video games, but honestly the manifestations of industry greed (layoffs, predatory microtransactions, price increases) have really increased in the last few years and it fills me with duch disgust that i struggle to enjoy a lot of games the way i used to
FOMO is game developers' best friend
In my country it's the opposite, good players have actually started using default skins in fortnite and it has now become a trend.
idk where you live but thats always* been a thing here in the states[ in apex at least, default skin with just one stat like lv or kills]
I do apologise for not tuning into the recent streams. The Halloween seemed fun, I’m sure.
i was around Dota 2, my experience with the first compendium is far from what you described, the Toxicity actually lowered during the event, and the progress wasnt based around winning games, so during that time people were actually more relaxed and focusing on doing the side quests and helping total strangers increase their battlepass, i guess the fact that the most important thing in the battlepass was how many people purchased it, than what any individual player was capable of doing alone made it fell like a community effort, also the fact the money wasnt going only to the pockets of steam, but to the players of the championship
All these yakuza BGM tracks you've sprinkled through the video (including the fairly obscure unreleased Judgement jazz one) has reminded me to play more LAD Gaiden, thank you kind sir
Me feeling bad for having 1000+ hours in my trusty old Field of Glory turn based historical battles game.
Me looking at modern mainstream games and realizing i don't have it that bad. I guess I'm lucky though, I did not choose this hyperfixation, it chose me.
About 10 years ago, I liked all the shiny new ingame objects. Now, it's a poor substitute for getting to play more of the game I like.
actually i think the credit card companies would understand the excuse that the person REALLY needed moana lol
Voting with your wallet is the only thing that works, because money is the only language these big corporations understand. Words don't mean anything, if you don't change your spending habbits.
Turning players into payers
For genshin there are so many videos of people playing through all the content with just the starter 4 characters just to prove it can be done. Plus the game gives players free characters, including some OP ones, as in game event rewards a few times a year so its not necessary to use the gacha system at all. It's honestly a really easy game and mainly story driven. Id argue theres minimal difficulty creep and theres only like, one boss i would consider hard. I play a few times a week to keep up with the plot like a soap opera, and the only FOMO i feel is when i miss out on something plot related. But bc the game is so easy it actually loses its fun factor when you have good characters. I tend to build team comps of the worst characters in the game just to make it harder.
Damn, didn't expect me to see a 45 minute video. Excellent job covering this entire topic (timedrain/moneydrain etc etc)
I think it's weird that Genshin players main defense is that there are worse Gatcha games. Duh, of course there is. It doesn't refute the claim that Genshin still participates in bad business practices and playing these games enables this behavior.
I mean how many Triple AAA games do you buy that are either buggy have poor graphics are overpriced and generally waste your time to bloat the content...
Say you still enjoyed the games. Would it make sense to argue that everyone who bought that games are participating in bad practices by supporting these games
That these games shouldn't exist and that people shouldn't play them.
Genshin gets brought up a lot not because the people critiquing it understand the balance in its monetization but because its a easy reference
You don't need to gamble and not in the you need restrain to play way
The primary experience and the gambling are completely devoid of each other.
You never have to engage with it and it's never enforced. In most Gacha there's always a means of getting you back to the gambling
It's the same dumb logic when people say 'Think of the Children" using kids as a way to obfuscate the reality that adults are primarily the target for exploitation is a bad faith argument
When people say Gacha is Gacha and it's all predatory there having a bad faith argument. You've decided that it's all okay as long as you slap a 70 dollar price tag
Screw accessibility you've decided that only certain monetization are okay.
It's okay if Kingdom Heart or Resident Evil has pumped out like 8 games in short succession because I payed for several consoles or a PC plus the games
Planning for DLC before a game launch is fine because I'm not being manipulated
What about Fighting Games
With Genshin 9/10 your more likely to hear people be upset that they have no reason to gamble
I always feel so mixed because I know gacha is harsh for many..but I personally feel thankful I can play a wonderful game like Genshin for free. I just use what I get and save for guarantees. The free games with gambling systems have actually saved me money over the years.
Same here...if you don't have a gambling mindset these games are fantastic...you play all you want and can still get 'paid' content for free on an incredibly small chance basis. I played for dozens of hours and.never spent a dime...after like a hundred hours of gamin I consider 'donating' a.k.a. buying something in game for like $50....but usually it doesnt seem worth it...always another game I can play for free, LoL here I come!
People who are not in the right mental health/mood, or children with too much freedom on their parents' wallet, cannot say the same.
They are the real mark of the system, not you. Could be your own kid or niece/nephew or cousins, if you have any.
Edit : "It's free to walk through a shopping district, but then your kid saw a toy in a shop that caught their fancy, then started throwing tantrums when you denied buying. Some parents are too weak and give in, ended up buying it anyway. And then the kid does more tantrums begging for the next toy to complete the set. The loop continues."
"...or worse, the kid stole access to your credit card."
@@ITBEurgava i don't have children and none of my niece/nephew or any other human being have access to my phone/laptop tho, so it's not my problem and i don't care about it haha so yeah i will always support the making of good gacha games like genshin impact and letting the masses be brainwashed to pay a lot of money for it so i can always enjoy it for free ❤
@@miruz3519 Sure, sure.
they may not have taken your money, but they have taken so much more of your time, just imagine how many more things you could've done and games you could've played if you didn't have to do those mundane daily chores err... commissions.
5 or 6 years ago I played one of these types of games on my phone (I forgot what it was called. It had an ancient Chinese aesthetic and you were trying to get people in your court to make you more powerful or something). I was part of a free to play guild and it was pretty fun until my guild collectively decided to save up our resources in order to win a competition against some other guilds. We wanted to get 3rd place in order to get some rarer resources which would have helped our gaming experience (Not even first place). The same three pay-to-play guilds would always win 1st, 2nd, and 3rd every week. (Those guilds had a minimum real dollar spend in order to stay part of them)
So on the appointed event, we waited until the last 5 minutes to spam our resources to win 3rd place, and then the pay-to-play guilds decided to spend 3x more than what they normally would, in the last 30 seconds, just to keep us out of the winning circle. They got a bit verbally abusive, told us to know our place and that free-to-play aren't allowed to win. We still had to grind a lot and watch a ton of ads just to do what we did, I played for about another week after that but then decided to quit. My mentality was that I didn't tell the other guilds to pay, and they would have won again the next week, they were such sore winners? Lol. We just wanted a win once every few months, so yeah I haven't played a game like that since.
Hah, mate, if you made them spend real life money just to beat you, you did win 😅
just realized you were using a ffxiv song in the background around the end, it’s very fitting
Hi, I'm here to address this problem directly as an independent game designer. I work with Tim Lang from New World Computing and I remember what games were like before people got greedy. I'm creating an infrastructure to contrast with the highway robbery that is AAA "gatcha goods" monetization and go back to setting the example of simple merit. If a game was good, you only paid once, your CD key was valid, and it was not the gamer's job to keep the company in business. As gamers, it's time to tell the corporate suits to git gud because we need better and we'll get better even if we have to get up to mischief to get it.
Time to change history, fellas!👹
For an on-and-off Path of Exile addict like me this will be a spicy one!
Absolutely agree with the points made here. The incentives for game development favor one specific kind of fun which is the one derived from addictive mechanics even if not all players need to necessarily be addicted for this effect to take place. It's amazing that there are still game studios, indie and otherwise which favor quality experiences beyond the highest profitability prospects.
What I'd add with my aforementioned experience as a video game addict, as far as such a thing exists... A company doesn't necessarily need to be scummy for it to be questionable to create a game that is meant to hook you without ever really letting go. It's a kind of fun to grind for levels, items, "free" microtransactions and yet... If a game is built in such a way that I can spend every waking minute of my life chasing almost impossible goals like its my job I do have to question whether that can ever be worth the "fun" for the player. Granted, one can easily make the argument that no one forces me or other addicts to keep at it as if I didn't know I was wasting my life. I won't deny that personal responsibility has to come in anyway at some point even with less addictive activities and the world can't have a pillow on every edge so no one ever gets hurt.
Well, if addictive game mechanics are here to stay at least I think that having players who spent upwards of 10.000 hours on your game shouldn't just count as a point of pride.
I think you need to leave in the scummy practices requirement otherwise you are potentially describing a fun game with great replay value.
@@MorbidEel Maybe my focus shouldn’t be so much on whether or not a certain type of „collectathon“ or grinding (gear) game is bad per se, that’s true. What’s important for someone like me who tends to play those games compulsively is to take care not to fall into that pattern.
Awesome and very interesting vid! Great job - thank you!!!
Things like these is why I've been going back to old games recently. I've really been getting tired of modern gaming shenanigans. Most of the old games that I was playing as a kid in the 2000's were 10 hour experiences or less on average but they were also so well designed that you just wanted to replay them as they were, without waiting for DLC or the next season of the battle pass. And even the big and long games of those times, like RPG's and open worlds, they were like 35 hours on average, 50 hours at most and didn't waste time with filler, like you'd have now a map with hundreds or thousands of icons for boring, unimportant content.
Deus Ex 1, anyone?
yep, I still have Battlefield 2, Command and Conquer Generals, Starcraft Brood War and emulators for Neo-Geo and arcade games so I can play Marvel Vs Capcom and Metal Slug on PC, the good old days when games where made by developers who wanted fun games unlike today where games seem like they're made by evil psychologist who know exactly how to pick at your brain and get you to either waste your time playing grindy stuff or make you bypass that grind through money.
I'm very glad you spend so much time talking about how a lot of these anti-consumer monetization practices have been taking place for a while now in many games & companies we're quite familiar with (TF2, CS, FIFA, Valve, Ubisoft, etc.), because I've seen a staggering amount of people hone in on Eastern gacha games specifically as if they're the root of the problem or are some different beast worthy of far more ridicule than what's been happening with a lot of Western companies. When in reality both have their flaws and also there's surely some interplay going on here with practices that see success in one place being tried out in the other and vice versa. *All* of it should be kept in check a bit more.
I tried playing Gensin, and I hated the feeling of making "wishes." It definitely felt like gambling, and that causes me an almost nauseating sense of anxiety whenever I engage in it.
stay away from the abyss then :/
@@DamslettesSIMP I played for a couple days and never looked back.
good, stay away from all gacha games, it's for the better.
@@ryanhollist3950 no, what I meant is the abyss of Genshin
I know it’s memed on, but things like micro transactions is why I love Stardew Valley. The only money I’ve ever spent on it (aside from the cost of running the computer, obviously) was the £15 it cost me 3 1/2 years ago and now I’ve got a worrying amount of hours in it, and mods out the arse.
I think the Genshin wish system is being portrayed a bit unfairly.
The game is free to play, no initial upfront costs like overwatch or fifa, and no ads either. So buying currency is the only way the company makes money.
However, you don’t HAVE to buy the currency in bulk packs, which are very expensive. What many players do is get the €5 subscription each month, which gives currency every day you log in, and a decent amount up front too. Then people just play (which also earns currency through quests) and save until the characters they want become available (the 5 stars available rotate, so they’ll always be back in the future). Also, getting duplicates in Genshin isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you get duplicates, they power-up the character/weapon.
There’s way, way worse ways gacha systems can be implemented. I’ve been playing for about three years, any money I’ve spent on the game has been worth it for me. Most people I know have had the same experience
genshin was an exception
But MOST Gacha games are about companies abusing people' gambling addiction, hiding casino behind "innocent looking games with girls & titties". It's not a secret and not a surprise, unless someone is 1st day on internet or refuses to accept truth. They make money of it.
So not being able to get all characters (just as 1 dupe) due to stingy currency gains, pity counts, rates or other reasons is a huge flaw of stingy gachas, which exists because of greed of companies, but it logically works, since noone cares about players or morals in casino, they are customers that give you money. The more you care - the less your income will be. Look at gacha games charts if need proof for gachas. See where Neural Cloud, GFL are and other generous games and where stingy games are. Some can pretend to care, it works for young audience very well. But not much above it.
This and content are reasons majority of people don't play gachas, but PC or console games.