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pentyne posted:Some companies are just giving it away a year later. Bioware may have dicked consumers around but they're still selling Mass Effect franchise DLC at full price years after the fact, and some exclusive DLC items actually require the end user to construct a loving time machine to go back and buy a bottle of Dr Pepper when the promotion was running
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Jun 28, 2015 02:50
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Why is everyone freaking out about Forbes mentioning this? They have thousands of essentially freelance contributors that churn out all sorts of random clickbait poo poo under the Forbes name, it isn't like anyone important is talking about it. One of the articles linked in this thread is by a dude that has written a total of four articles, all about video games, with titles like "Arkham Knight's First Ending Is Great, Its Second Is Bad, And Its Third Is Insane."
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Jun 28, 2015 02:58
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Gils posted:XCOM did it but since the preorder bonus was the Guile hair not selling it for everyone would be unthinkable I think I got Civilization for free because I preordered it. People hate when stuff goes free later. Teamfortress 2 went free to play like 10 years after release. No one was buying it anymore so it made sense to give the community a boost to increase hat sales. But people were pissed that now anyone could just come in and play this thing they paid money for.
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Jun 28, 2015 05:50
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Dr_Amazing posted:I think I got Civilization for free because I preordered it. When City of Heroes went free-to-play, they actually pre-empted the pissed-off people who didn't want to deal with free players by making a subscriber-only server. There was nothing different about the VIP server, it was just something that non-subscribers couldn't play on. After a couple months that server was effectively dead, in part because its community was exclusively elitist assholes so teaming went about as well as you expect. EDIT: Since this is the dumb marketing thread, I should say that online games going free-to-play is not one of them; it's actually a very profitable move in comparison to the old subscriber model, and the only MMO still using that model is the one big enough to be making mad bank anyway. That doesn't mean that a bad free-to-play model can't tank your game. When Champions Online went free its developers were desperate due to their publisher being utter assholes, so they listened far too much to the wrong people. So when the game went free-to-play, non-subscribing players were inferior in every way. Not only did they gate the freeform character system that was the game's entire selling point behind the $15 a month subscription fee, the pre-designed character setups free players got were poorly-designed and actually had less powers (I think two or three less at max level). They eventually got the chance to buy freeform character slots, but had to pay fifty dollars to make one freeform character. Someone subscribing, for reference, can have eight. Cleretic has a new favorite as of 06:28 on Jun 28, 2015 |
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Jun 28, 2015 06:15
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Dr_Amazing posted:I think I got Civilization for free because I preordered it. With TF2 a big part of this was that people who were banned from servers could easily hop back on under a different account and continue being asses. Aimbots and such became far more common too since people would just play them on throwaway accounts. Overall it was really good for keeping the playerbase alive but it still had its downsides.
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Jun 28, 2015 08:41
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Also the compensation for having paid was just a bunch of benefits free players could get by spending even a cent in the store when the game cost obviously a hell of a lot more than that. No I'm not bitter 
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Jun 28, 2015 08:53
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pentyne posted:Some companies are just giving it away a year later. Bioware may have dicked consumers around but they've released all the pre-order freebies for their games down the road.
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Jun 28, 2015 09:21
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Dr_Amazing posted:I think I got Civilization for free because I preordered it. Hell, the same thing happens even when no real money is involved. I remember way, way back in the basic World of Warcraft before expansions, ridable mounts used to become available at level 40 at a cost of a full 100 gold. It was usually the first time that a player would actually be saving up a significant sum of in-game money for something. There was also an option for even more expensive mounts costing 1000 gold at the maximum level 60. At one point Blizzard decided to make them significantly cheaper and also make them available from level 20 on, probably to make leveling more bearable. A surprising amount of people flipped their poo poo. They'd been grinding for their own mounts for so long, they considered it an insult that other people could get them more easily now. I think the phrase "slap in the face" was used a lot. 
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Jun 28, 2015 11:04
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Archeage community blew up when they tried to lure back past-subscribers by giving them the expensive status symbol riding dolphin.
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Jun 28, 2015 14:07
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Tunicate posted:Archeage community blew up when they tried to lure back past-subscribers by giving them the expensive status symbol riding dolphin. Wasn't that the game where some goon guild leader was a pedophile and his guild members defended him?
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Jun 28, 2015 14:28
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Slime posted:Wasn't that the game where some goon guild leader was a pedophile and his guild members defended him? That's every game.
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Jun 28, 2015 16:42
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Baba Yaga Fanboy posted:That's every game. Vilerat, no! 
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Jun 28, 2015 16:50
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Slime posted:Wasn't that the game where some goon guild leader was a pedophile and his guild members defended him? yup
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Jun 28, 2015 16:57
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That actually drove me away from the game. I'd be asking for help leveling or something and NOPE, more arguing about whether grooming a preteen is technically pedophilia.
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Jun 28, 2015 22:28
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Perestroika posted:Hell, the same thing happens even when no real money is involved. I remember way, way back in the basic World of Warcraft before expansions, ridable mounts used to become available at level 40 at a cost of a full 100 gold. It was usually the first time that a player would actually be saving up a significant sum of in-game money for something. There was also an option for even more expensive mounts costing 1000 gold at the maximum level 60. If you aren't an MMO player and want the perfect insight into the average MMO grognard's mindset, just look at the subtitle for the WoW subforum: quote:"Casuals" don't get emotionally invested in the game; they play it for fun.
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Jun 28, 2015 23:04
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U.T. Raptor posted:I don't think that black hole gun from Mass Effect 2 was ever made generally available, but I believe most of the rest was. The pre-order offers have gotten pretty out of hand lately. Watch Dogs had like 12 different "bonuses" A Fancy 400 lbs posted:That actually drove me away from the game. I'd be asking for help leveling or something and NOPE, more arguing about whether grooming a preteen is technically pedophilia. Isn't ArcheAge the one with all female characters with massive boobs in stripper outfits? Most anime waifu mmo's are hot garbage without goon guilds making GBS threads it up.
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Jun 28, 2015 23:04
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pentyne posted:Isn't ArcheAge the one with all female characters with massive boobs in stripper outfits? Most anime waifu mmo's are hot garbage without goon guilds making GBS threads it up. if by archeage you mean literally every mmo, yes
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Jun 28, 2015 23:05
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Everquest 2 had fairly realistic armor, for a fantasy game. Aside from the monk, who could have some sort of weird angled-straps top (if I remember 9 years ago correctly), the most revealing armor a woman could get was a v-neck breastplate. Like, t-shirt v-neck, not even any cleavage. And nobody played it.
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Jun 28, 2015 23:15
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pentyne posted:Isn't ArcheAge the one with all female characters with massive boobs in stripper outfits? Most anime waifu mmo's are hot garbage without goon guilds making GBS threads it up. Archeage is some kinda sandbox game where you can arrest griefers or something, I haven't played it. You're probably thinking of TERA. Or maybe Scarlet Blade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpwBG2Dtpmk 
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Jun 28, 2015 23:27
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22 Eargesplitten posted:Everquest 2 had fairly realistic armor, for a fantasy game. Aside from the monk, who could have some sort of weird angled-straps top (if I remember 9 years ago correctly), the most revealing armor a woman could get was a v-neck breastplate. Like, t-shirt v-neck, not even any cleavage. The story of Everquest 2's failure has less to do with marketing and more to do with the shittiest timing imaginable, but yeah fantasy boobs probably would have helped their numbers a bit.
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Jun 28, 2015 23:29
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Everquest 2 did try to fight back with "no server wait times" ads. Didn't it also have an in game pizza command?
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Jun 28, 2015 23:40
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Everquest 2 could not have had more dull and generic art direction.
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Jun 28, 2015 23:42
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WebDog posted:Everquest 2 did try to fight back with "no server wait times" ads. Didn't it also have an in game pizza command? /pizza
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Jun 29, 2015 00:21
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If MMOs are a current topic then 'the entirety of Wildstar' could qualify. The list of ways they hosed it up will be taught for years in game dev classes but from a strictly marketing perspective it was awful because the entire idea behind it was that World of Warcraft had become 'too casual'. Wildstar would cater towards the silent majority of MMO players who wanted a 'real challenge' like the old World of Warcraft circa 2006, where hardcore playing was really rewarded and gear wasn't just handed out like candy. For a comparison take any sport that has had rules changes to make the game better, and then a bunch of dudes come along and say they're going to make a league using the old rules because it'll be the real way it's supposed to be played. Last time I checked in the thread Wildstar had maybe a couple of hundred people playing their raids because the vast majority of people actually like playing an MMO where you're rewarded consistently, instead of having to slam your dick into a vice for hours a night. On the last financial statements of their parent company, Wildstar was making something like £2mil per quarter which is disgustingly, ruinously low for the genre.
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Jun 29, 2015 00:46
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Lumberjack Bonanza posted:The story of Everquest 2's failure has less to do with marketing and more to do with the shittiest timing imaginable, but yeah fantasy boobs probably would have helped their numbers a bit. Did it come out just after WoW or something? I know they were roughly contemporaries, but I didn't get in to it until after a year or two, after the exchange servers came out. As a foolish teenager, I thought I could make money by grinding on EQ, Because I didn't realize how quickly the market would get inflated, and how there would be gold farmers playing non-stop for 18 hours a day. It also really sucked when I joined compared to even a year later. Zero PvP, your character was really generic at the beginning until you got like 20-30 hours in. You started as one archetype (fighter, rogue, priest, mage), got to level 10 and picked a category, three for each archetype, and then got to 20 and either got shoved into a sub-category based on your alignment or got to choose between two classes for a few of them. That meant that your first 10 levels were boring as hell. Compared to WoW, progress took much longer, and most MMOs rely on making numbers go up to make up for the fact the gameplay is boring as hell. I got in around 2006 or so. The guy just up from me said people considered WoW hardcore at that point compared to now. EQ2 players considered WoW as being for casuals. There was no fast travel until ~4 years after launch, and at launch you literally wouldn't get any new abilities past a certain level unless you paid a significant chunk of money to buy the skill. The game was incredibly CPU-bound. It was designed before dual-core processors were a big thing, and it leaned more on the CPU than the GPU. So with a dual-core machine, your framerate and graphics sucked, but you could zoom around at double speed for some reason I don't understand, because I don't get how programs interact with cores. Planetside (the original) also had that dual-core "speedhack" thing going around for years. To stop yourself from being a lovely rear end in a top hat, you had to change the affinity so it would only run on one core. It wasn't uncommon to see someone who either didn't intentionally, or just didn't know about it. I know that's a lot of words about a failed(ish) MMO, but it's nothing compared to the time I spent on that game. I wouldn't say completely wasted, because I enjoyed a lot of it, but I also ran into a lot of people that I realize now were even more obnoxious and spergy than I was as a 14-15 year old. E: I did really appreciate how all of the female characters didn't have giant tits hanging out, though. Even as a teenager, I understood what being pandered to was. 22 Eargesplitten has a new favorite as of 01:11 on Jun 29, 2015 |
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Jun 29, 2015 01:01
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Pierson posted:If MMOs are a current topic then 'the entirety of Wildstar' could qualify. The list of ways they hosed it up will be taught for years in game dev classes but from a strictly marketing perspective it was awful because the entire idea behind it was that World of Warcraft had become 'too casual'. Wildstar would cater towards the silent majority of MMO players who wanted a 'real challenge' like the old World of Warcraft circa 2006, where hardcore playing was really rewarded and gear wasn't just handed out like candy. When WoW first started and created the idea of "raiding" it was 8 loving hours and everyone had to be on point or fail. 8 years later a bunch of people got into MMOs because of the fun and social experience it offered, but a tiny minority raged against casuals and noobs and so Wildstar was formed by former WoW devs. Wildstar's goal was "all these loving pussies playing at MMOs don't know what real gaming is, we need to bring it back to the old school, sacrifice your life to play gameplay, and anyone who disagrees is a loving scrub" WoW only succeeded because at the time it was hilariously better then the competition. EQ2 vs WoW was like kindergarten vs college. Blizzard had studied the MMO game and worked out a way to break past the lovely, terrible mechanics of the current examples and ran with it. An 8 hour raid in 2005 was still insanely better then what the competition was doing, but back then getting near a million subscribers was considered a massive success. pentyne has a new favorite as of 01:07 on Jun 29, 2015 |
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Jun 29, 2015 01:04
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I never played WOW, but I'll always love UO for how totally unforgiving it was. That was a game designed around getting strong enough to stomp on other players.
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Jun 29, 2015 03:14
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What could be more authentically Italian than a motherfucking hotdog pizza?  
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Jun 29, 2015 04:36
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22 Eargesplitten posted:Did it come out just after WoW or something? I remember that CGW (I think, might have been PC Gamer) made a big deal of reviewing and comparing EQ2 and WoW in the same issue the releases were so close.
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Jun 29, 2015 06:43
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EQ2 Initial release date: November 8, 2004 WoW Initial release date: November 23, 2004 (Source: Wikipedia) I remember that timeframe very well because I was playing RO with a friend and he was seriously excited over WoW. I kind of mocked him for it, a little bit. I miss those days when the genre seemed so new to me. 
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Jun 29, 2015 06:54
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catlord posted:I remember that CGW (I think, might have been PC Gamer) made a big deal of reviewing and comparing EQ2 and WoW in the same issue the releases were so close. Yeah, they both came out in November. Poor bastards. Makes stuff like the Saturn versus the PS1 look even.
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Jun 29, 2015 06:57
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A game without cleavage? What, was it made by monks from the sixteenth century? I ain't playing that poo poo unless I can ogle at some luscious titties. Who's with me?
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Jun 29, 2015 07:10
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Lumberjack Bonanza posted:Yeah, they both came out in November. Poor bastards. Makes stuff like the Saturn versus the PS1 look even. I wouldn't be so sure, EQ2 only launched at a bad time. The Saturn... that's a fantastic story of rushing-to-market going horribly wrong. Sega got increasingly nervous about the PS1 when the Saturn was coming out. The Nintendo 64 was something they could compete with, but the PS1 threatened them a whole lot more. So the Saturn got rushed to release, and they tacked on hardware that it wasn't actually intended to have: 3D rendering. The Saturn was intended to still be based around sprites and such, taking a similar approach to graphical quality to what Nintendo would later take with the Wii, of basically doing better at what the old tech was doing instead of going all-new. But they didn't exactly have time to get good 3D rendering, and instead got hardware so cut-rate that their polygons had four sides. This made the Saturn incredibly hard to make games for, especially early on before developers found a workaround that let them make triangles. But of course, this is Sega, and one thing could have possibly saved them: the flagship title, Sonic X-Treme. Not a launch title due to the fact they had to learn how to do both 3D graphics and 3D games, it was still going to be an attempt to revolutionize Sonic and be the Saturn's crown jewel. ...Only the entire thing was so mismanaged that the developer was working on two completely different game engines. While the main levels were a weird gravity-experimentational platformer not completely unlike Mario Galaxy (a style later used for Sonic Lost World on the WiiU), the boss fights were done with a fish-eye lens and controls more like the contemporary Mario 64. Higher-ups liked the boss fight engine much more than the platformer engine, so they demanded that the entire engine instead be built on that... either not knowing, or not caring, that this meant most of the game had to be thrown away way too close to their Christmas release date for them to be able to do this. In an effort to make the game happen at all, the game's head programmer moved into the offices and binge-programmed so hard that he caught pneumonia and nearly died. He had to bow out after that, and without the head programmer the Saturn's flagship title never got finished. So, yeah. There may be other stories about bad gaming releases, but even Everquest 2, KOTOR 2 and Arkham Knight can say 'at least we didn't put any lives at risk'. Cleretic has a new favorite as of 07:38 on Jun 29, 2015 |
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Jun 29, 2015 07:35
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Dr_Amazing posted:I never played WOW, but I'll always love UO for how totally unforgiving it was. That was a game designed around getting strong enough to stomp on other players. That kind of illustrates one of the biggest problems with "hardcore" games and why free PVP inherently leads to problems. There are the uber hardcore MMO fanatics that will happily play 20 hours a day, every day just so they can be the top dog but most of us can't sink that amount of time in so we're the ones getting creamed. As much as the hardcore types complained about the existence of Trammel it...kind of became necessary. When a game is "attack whoever you want, whenever you want, all the time, forever" you end up with the most powerful characters just running amok and making the game not fun for anybody else at all. A game that you're guaranteed to lose probably isn't all that much fun and a game where your progress could be just flat out annihilated by another player at any time and there is nothing you can do about it is going to have trouble retaining players. It's fun to be the guy doing the stomping but getting stomped isn't fun. Stomp guy wants people to stomp but stompees don't want to be around stomp guy. UO of course also had its fair of nasty problems. I played the game for a while but ultimately quit when a dead guy using an exploit with pet dragons was running around Trammel killing whoever he came across and having friends loot the corpses. I kind of just roll my eyes when I hear people lamenting old timey UO when you could just kill whoever whenever all the time and it was unlimited PVP all the time simply because that isn't how you retain a player base big enough to support an MMO. EVE was really one of relatively few games that did the "completely hostile, unforgiving world that hates you" thing properly, really. I never really played WoW much (I think it was a grindy, boring bag of poo poo wrapped up with a pretty bow) but remember hearing an old friend of mine that did talk about being "server police." Apparently some servers had major issues with people in the opposing faction deliberately going into areas for new players and wrecking all the quest givers so they'd have a harder time becoming not new. Eventually "server police" developed in very old, high level characters with high level gear that would keep the quest givers safe. Not 100% sure about the details but it's one of those things that makes me wonder "who the hell makes a game where that's even possible?" One thing that games need to deal with is how you prevent people from playing the game only to make it miserable for everybody else. That whole attitude of "hey let's make an online game with 100% player freedom where everything is super hardcore like in the early days!" is a guarantee of failure. I'll mention EVE again but it really impresses me that CCP managed to give griefers stuff to do within the game that's little more than just "part of the game."
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Jun 29, 2015 08:37
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Cleretic posted:I wouldn't be so sure, EQ2 only launched at a bad time. The Saturn... that's a fantastic story of rushing-to-market going horribly wrong. You left out the amazing part where Sega rushed the Saturn to release at E3 to try and undercut Sony, to which Sony replied with the infamous  at their own press conference by coming out and saying "$299" ($100 less than the Saturn) and then leaving.
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Jun 29, 2015 08:45
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Let's not forget the disastrous launch, where after announcing a september release, Sega said at E3 in may the Saturn was available in select stores RIGHT NOW without informing any developers beforehand so only a few games were available in the US(and pissing off all other retailers who did not get Saturns at launch) Sony's retaliation was "$299" as their sole announcement. Even though they were launching later, they were the cheaper alternative and had more games, so people waited for Playstations instead. Using quads instead of triangles of course didn't help either, along with using 8 processors making development hellish due to the complexity. Specs were pretty good, design was just terrible. I remember a gaming mag in The Netherlands opening up both a Playstation and Saturn, and stating outright that the Playstation's internal design was much cleaner and looked far better.
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Jun 29, 2015 09:34
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The ad campaign for the Sega Saturn in Japan was definitely something else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNEe04UwJ6Q Decius has a new favorite as of 11:19 on Jun 29, 2015 |
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Jun 29, 2015 11:17
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Sega also had a glut of consoles at the time too. Sega CD and 32x were still really new so a lot of Sega fans felt like they had just bought a console and didn't need a new one.
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Jun 29, 2015 13:42
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They felt burned more than anything else. Suddenly the incremental improvements Sega was offering smelled like sinking ships, and Sega's answer was essentially "buy the Saturn." It doesn't exactly inspire brand loyalty, especially when the projects themselves are being so mismanaged.
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Jun 29, 2015 13:51
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mind the walrus posted:They felt burned more than anything else. Suddenly the incremental improvements Sega was offering smelled like sinking ships, and Sega's answer was essentially "buy the Saturn." It doesn't exactly inspire brand loyalty, especially when the projects themselves are being so mismanaged. Also Sega of America and Sega of Japan started to fight amongst themselves over the way the consoles were managed. I want to say it was SoA that decided they wanted to support all of their consoles at the same time, comparing it to a car manufacturer offering everything from economy cars to luxury cars. That's insane, though, and could have been an outright lie to keep the Saturn from strangling the CD and 32X sales. So for a while, the Saturn had Sega competing with itself not just on the market, but internally.
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Jun 29, 2015 14:13
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