Mobile/Social Gaming Financial Models Scare Me

[jakj]

What does $60 buy you, nowadays? Let's see...

• One full-priced big-studio release.
  
• 3-12 indie releases.
  
• Four months of WoW or SW:TOR.
  
• Three months of every Sony MMO simultaneously.
  
• Six months of DDO.
  

Or...

• One polar bear, one ninja penguin, and one emperor penguin in Tiny Farm.
  
• Five hippopotomi in Aqua Story.
  
• Two strong dragons in Tap Dragon Park.
  
• Four 6-card booster packs in Rage of Bahamut.
  

If I were to pick just one of those "casual" mobile games, and spend just enough money to buy all of the unique things (utilizing discounts for large purchases as well as not spending money on consumables like boosts), I would have spent enough money to purchase World of Warcraft and all of its expansions as well as an entire year's worth of game time.

Need I mention that most of these mobile games are sprite-based, laggy even on newer phones with 1.2 GHz dual-core processors with a gig of RAM, 0-2 total music tracks (and some not even having sound output at all), -and- a lot of these games requiring adding as many as 40 friends and referring as many as 8 people to the game to even get some of the stuff that can't even be bought with cash?

Somehow, this bothers me.

[Nethaufer]

Horrible, isn't it? Main reason why I don't like to touch games like that. Even worse that there are some f2p games that have the same sort of model in them. Eugh, makes me sick thinking about it.

[Industrial Miner]

Jagex, which owns Runescape makes me sick. Just more ways to make money, without fixing the game much, just crapping it up more. I'm glad I stopped playing it.

Oh, and offtopic, I've read in the newspaper a few months ago that a little girl who plays a Smurfs game spent over $1400 for just some baskets of smurfberries. WTF, a whole basket could cost up to $50, for just a little shitty SMURF game!

[Nethaufer]

Jagex, which owns Runescape makes me sick. Just more ways to make money, without fixing the game much, just crapping it up more. I'm glad I stopped playing it.

Oh, and offtopic, I've read in the newspaper a few months ago that a little girl who plays a Smurfs game spent over $1400 for just some baskets of smurfberries. WTF, a whole basket could cost up to $50, for just a little shitty SMURF game!

Ah, aren't companies great at milking the children for their parent's money?

Also, has Runescape really gotten that bad now? I knew it was bad already, but not that bad. Although considering it won't run on my computer without the UI fucking up I guess it must have.

[jakj]

The only thing that drove me away from Runescape was the rabid anti-botting measures punishing innocents along with the guilty (one of my soapboxes). Bad enough that it randomly turns your camera to defeat auto-clickers, but I couldn't even set up very simple keyboard macros to condense fiddly repeated mouse movements to prevent my hand from going numb, without getting banned for botting. This, in a game designed for repetition and grinding. Fuck health and safety: Get the botters up the ass!

[Nethaufer]

I left it because I had reached the max F2P level. I came back to it because I had been able to get my mom to buy me a subscription. I then left it again when we got WoW. Say what you want about it, at least Blizzard knows what it needs to do with WoW and it does it right.

[hoho]

There are some games like that on PC as well.

In general I don't mind buying games "a piece at a time". Valve tried to do it with Half Life but kind of failed but having faster releases with somewhat less content and costing 20$ instead of $60 would make me quite happy. Had SC2 had three campaigns just as the original then selling them separately would have been OK in my book. Though them ending up delivering pretty big campaign for each faction isn't a bad thing either. Obviously all sorts of pay2win stuff + having to pay ludicrous prices for trivial stuff obviously is a big no-no.

My guess is the main reason why publishers don't want to split game into smaller pieces is that they hope to lure enough suckers that would buy the game without them figuring out if it's worth the price. I've bought several AAA titles in past year only to throw them in corner after a few hours. Had they've been split up into episodes I wouldn't have got more than first one. Had they had demos I probably wouldn't have bought even the first episode.

[Jay?]

I love demos, and its sad that more games aren't employing them now. for every game i can think of that i bought because of a demo, i can think of 20 games that, if they had HAD a demo, i would never have wasted my money on. Got Kingdoms of Amalur, because the demo sold me, but if there had been demos for F.E.A.R., god of war 3, or any number of the fiddly JRPGs that i tend to get, i would have had an extra couple hundred dollars to spend on actual good things.

As for mobile games, my biggest complaint is when they do things like that new tetris battle thing does, where you can buy coins to use superpowers. I've been ranked down so many times by people who are shit at the game, but had an extra 30 bucks to spend on sending double lines at me.

[jakj]

It's only the degree of money involved that makes me unhappy. I would have already spent money on all those games if we were talking 10 or 20 bucks, but hundreds? Fuck off with that. I could get a GTX 580 for what those games want out of me. I subscribe to wow and swtor both, hugeassed games with loads of content and fidelity with no time restrictioms, for what it costs to get a couple bloody fish.

My gods.

[Nethaufer]

I love demos, and its sad that more games aren't employing them now. for every game i can think of that i bought because of a demo, i can think of 20 games that, if they had HAD a demo, i would never have wasted my money on. Got Kingdoms of Amalur, because the demo sold me, but if there had been demos for F.E.A.R., god of war 3, or any number of the fiddly JRPGs that i tend to get, i would have had an extra couple hundred dollars to spend on actual good things.

As for mobile games, my biggest complaint is when they do things like that new tetris battle thing does, where you can buy coins to use superpowers. I've been ranked down so many times by people who are shit at the game, but had an extra 30 bucks to spend on sending double lines at me.

If there's anything Yahtzee has taught me, it's to stay away from JRPGs.

[jakj]

If there's anything Yahtzee has taught me, it's to stay away from JRPGs.

Yahtzee is a satirist, not a reviewer. If you use him for anything other than entertainment, you're an idiot.

[Jay?]

Yahtzee is a satirist, not a reviewer. If you use him for anything other than entertainment, you're an idiot.

I dunno, Yahtzee is useful, in that he brings all the worst qualities in a game to light. If you watch one of his reviews and say "well that'll get patched by the community" "i don't really give a flying fuck about that bit" or "these guidelines seem a little arbitrary" then you'll probably actually like the game.

If there's anything Yahtzee has taught me, it's to stay away from JRPGs.

That really is a shame, because there are a lot of JRPGs that are amazing games. Give Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne a try.

[jakj]

He can point out some of the worst parts of a game, sure, I'll admit, but you still should not base your opinion on his videos, even if you find yourself agreeing with him most of the time. Watch his video, get a few chuckles out of it, and then go watch at least one review of the game to see if the same things start coming up. You might be able to tell a lot about a game based on who chooses to emphasize or ignore flaws that are "obvious" to the "community".

My first JRPG was Evolution on the Dreamcast. (I don't count stuff like Final Fantasy on NES because there wasn't really a developed "JRPG" style yet, back then.)

[Nethaufer]

Yahtzee is a satirist, not a reviewer. If you use him for anything other than entertainment, you're an idiot.

You'd be surprised. Also, satire is amazing because the majority of what is said is true. If you say that about Yahtzee, then you could say the same thing about Colbert, which isn't true either. So you shouldn't just dismiss what Yahtzee says just because you think he's doing it to provide entertainment. Sorry that you think that way.