Not going to lie, needing a PlayStation account feels pretty unrelated to the actual game to me. Akin to complaining about how something shipped on Amazon instead of, you know the actual product.
Your difficulties with needing a PlayStation account, like shipping, is going to wildly vary depending on location.
Fair, but given the degradation of gaming these days I think a lot of people who aren’t paying attention have an outdated and understated view of just how bad things are. A parent might be thinking: wow had a subscription, so this game with micro transactions isn’t all that bad, not recognizing just how tuned modern predatory gaming has become at extracting money and addicting its users.
WoW mostly addicted people to playing (consuming their time), you can go hours and hours of gameplay without inputting more money. But mobile games maximize extracting maximal profit for minimal gameplay. There’s no functional difference between a gacha pull and a slot machine pull. It’s an endless, mindless set of pretty lights where you just hit the buy button over and over and over. If you sat people down and made them watch (with a running cost total) most people would immediately see the resemblance to a casino.
I think it’s helpful to break things down into more granular levels of predation, just to help clarify how bad it’s getting, even if all of it is problematic.
I don’t allow myself to play any mobile games anymore. Spent like $300 on one of those idle games. Not worth it. I refuse to play any free to play titles at all, no matter the platform these days.
Haven’t played WoW in awhile, but do they now have ‘you can spend unlimited money’ mechanics? Previously it was just stuff like mounts and character transfers and stuff. I know you can also sell tokens for gold, but I thought gold kind of becomes irrelevant at some point. The best gear is bind on drop right? Theoretically I guess you can pay gold for boost runs, which probably counts as an endless money sink.
I kind of have a mental separation in my head between games with unlimited money sinks (like games with energy mechanics) where you can spend and spend and spend and it never stops, vs games that have a finite of things to buy.
It can still be way over priced, but there’s a maximum amount of money you can throw at the game. Even Diablo 4, with a relatively huge and highly priced number of cosmetic items has effectively a maximum price (though every new cosmetic increases that price). Vs Diablo Immortal allowing you to spend 10s of thousands of dollars and still need to keep spending. I think unlimited money mechanics should be outlawed or at least fully classified as gambling and regulated accordingly.
That would be great. The only time I’m ever adjusting the slider is the dimmest 5%. The top 50% of the slider really doesn’t matter to me. It’s annoying trying to hit exactly the right pixel on the low end though
Nobody seems to care that WoW expansions get rolled into the base install later on.
The trick is to have the merge happen a lot later. Like 1+ years, not a few months. That’s long enough that anyone who’s a decent fan and actively playing is going to typically shell out the money. It also makes it easy for new and returning fans to jump in. I’m absolutely certain that there are lots of potential Sims 4 players that see the $500+ worth of DLC and just… never start playing because it’s completely overwhelming. Especially when you see the titles and realize stuff that seems basic isn’t included in the base game: seasons, pets, etc
My problem with endless DLC isn’t the cost, but the fragmented result of each ‘feature’ needing to stand separately and not interact with any other DLC feature. You end up with some really janky gameplay where nothing works intuitively and the stuff you can implement is all hurt by those limitations.
Not to mention the sheer code hell that all this results in with an exponential increase in possible install states to account for. Which the devs just give up on and the game becomes a little buggier with every new expansion.
Honestly think they should move to a sort of MMO model. Charge for the most recent expansions and older DLC eventually gets merged into the base game. Cuts down on complexity and most of your sales will happen in the first year anyway.
I just tend to think of it as the further enshittification of life. I’m not even that old and it’s super obvious how poorly most companies are actually run these days, including my own. It’s not that we’re doing more with less, it’s a global reduction in standards and expectations. Issues that used to be solved in a day now bounce between a dozen different departments staffed with either a handful of extremely overworked people, complete newbies, or clueless contractors. AI is just going to further cement the shitty new standard both inside and outside the company.
Yep. And the good mods take a while to make too. If your game is dead 3 months after launch, who’s going to still be motivated to keep working on a big overhaul type mod?
I think too many people forget that Skyrim was actually popular enough without mods to bring enough modders to the table to fix the rest of it. Bethesda seems to have forgotten that they actually have to deliver a mostly fun and mostly playable game for a proper modding scene to take root.
90% of the games I play are now made by indie or medium sized studios/publishers. I’ve bought several AAA games in that time frame, but almost universally they’ve failed to hold my interest and I typically regret my purchase. I can’t remember the last AAA I bought that I would consider a ‘favorite’.
Also I’m growing more and more detached from what modern, AAA games even feel like. Opening up a game like fortnite or COD where they’ve shoved dozens of different game modes into an all in one program is confusing and overwhelming. It’s off putting to me and I feel like having a ‘get off my lawn’ moment.