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CharlieFoxtrot posted:At least with loot boxes they are chasing after whales. At least the theory is that it doesn't matter if 99 people begrudge the extra money and never buy any of that stuff if one person ends up spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars This is correct. Even if the majority do not use or hate microtransactions/loot boxes, a small portion of your userbase can make the whole thing worth while. A handful of players can pay for a development team of hundreds making updates, events, and major overhauls for the game. The Colonel posted:hell, i guarantee that if lootboxes were in a game that wasn't a super major aaa title the way they are in something like shadow of war there'd be even stronger backlash against it because the dev wouldn't have the clout of being a humongous video game studio putting out huge releases with enough power to bash reviewers into giving their games good reviews and enough popularity for people to try and ignore it JoJo's Bizarre Adventure All-Star Battle was a $60 game with microtransactions, a F2P style stamina meter, and paid alternate costumes. It did not end well for them. DLC Inc posted:"in 2017 Ubisoft has made a great Mario XCom knockoff while WB Games has taken the chickenfucker seasonpass+loot box throne" sounds like something I'd have never believed 8 years ago It's also the best reviewed Ubisoft game since Far Cry 4.
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Oct 9, 2017 21:19
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exquisite tea posted:I honestly don't know how Larian gets away with selling Original Sin 2 for $45 because the production values and quality of voicework far surpass any other CRPG to date, and PC is the only platform it's on right now. Although they get government support, public funding, and research grants, Larian's labor costs are high and the local talent pool is tiny in Belgium. It's part of the reason they opened an office in Quebec with the Canadian government's help. It's still impressive what they've been able to pull off with a relatively small team. Out of the recent Kickstarter CRPGs, Larian has had the most critical and commercial success.
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Oct 11, 2017 20:24
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FirstAidKite posted:Thanks ESRB... :| Players usually purchase in-game currency to use on loot boxes rather than paying for it directly. Players are getting exactly what they paid for since the transaction is for in-game currency, even though the currency is effectively a middle man to use on winning prizes. The opportunity to use the currency on various services/loot boxes is a bonus feature since players got what they paid for. In other words, players are paying for in-game currency and the opportunity to use the currency for a chance at winning 5 Star Saber/Mercy With New Hat/Maximum Katana +6 is a freebie. Blizzard used this loophole to skirt divulging loot drop rates in China. It's pachinko levels of transitive property.
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Oct 11, 2017 22:56
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SEGA is teaming up with Hooters to sell Chili Dogs for the release of Sonic Forces.
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Oct 16, 2017 12:14
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Visceral is closed but the Star Wars game they were working on will continue development in another studio. Amy Hennig from Naughty Dog was working on it as creative director. I wonder if the game began as a single-player Uncharted style game that got rebooted into a service game. The market has changed so much from when the game was initially announced. In the press release, it was stated:Patrick Soderlund posted:It has become clear that to deliver an experience that players will want to come back to and enjoy for a long time to come, we needed to pivot the design. I can't wait for Andrew Wilson's Star Wars Battlegrounds featuring loot boxes. Andrast posted:EA is running out of studios to close. Despite their reputation, EA has actually moved away from closing down studios and mass layoffs. Many of their games require large teams and it's become very difficult for them to staff up developers. It's much easier and more cost effective to have underperforming studios work on more marketable IPs. So Visceral Games stops working on Dead Space for Battlefield and Bioware Montreal becomes a support studio for the rest of Bioware. For them to close down Visceral rather than have them work on Battlefield/Battlefront spin-offs or restructure them into a DLC factory suggests they couldn't salvage the developer
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Oct 17, 2017 20:24
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Olive! posted:Didn't the marketing team for Dante's Inferno do a bunch of stupid poo poo? Like... hiring people to pretend to be christian protesters, and sending reviewers boxes of meat or something? This was during an era where EA wanted their studios to be specialized in certain genres and have a sense of individuality. So EA Redwood Shores got renamed Visceral games and marketing gurus got no oversight in trying to appeal to hip young audiences. Hence, the 'your mom hates Dead Space' and the fake Christian protest for Dante's Inferno. Also, DICE got to be the wacky Swedish developer.
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Oct 17, 2017 23:58
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Internet Kraken posted:I'm pretty sure the reason Visceral got disbanded was because they hadn't produced anything of value in years. You can argue that its all EA's fault that Visceral even ended up in this state (I'd be inclined to agree), but I'm not gonna weep for the passing of a company that was basically already dead. EA gave Visceral quite a few stays of execution. They always pivoted them to a more marketable IP rather than close them down after a bomb. A few game journalists on Twitter suggest that the game had been in development hell from quite some and the axe finally fell. CharlieFoxtrot posted:I have no strong feelings about Visceral and so it's more that they kicked Amy Hennig to the curb and are redistributing the assets to another subsidiary in what feels like a really blunt way. If Amy Hennig is leaving Visceral and the project is being rebooted by a new team, this would be the second time after what happened during Uncharted 4's development. From Soul Reaver to Uncharted 3, she shipped a AAA game about every two years.
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Oct 18, 2017 13:06
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Cowcaster posted:i'm not asking why they create fat stacks, i'm asking why they were implemented as a way to make money Loot boxes solve a lot of problems that have been plaguing the selling and development of games: - Publishers like them because they make a lot of money and keep players within the game's ecosystem. This means a successful game with an attractive microtransaction model can suck the oxygen out of the room and keep players from playing something else, such as a game by a competitor. Furthermore, a game purchased at a discount or second hand doesn't mean you've lost that much revenue. Someone who purchased Overwatch used can still enjoy the game and spend hundreds of dollars for loot boxes. The game is even $40 on PC. With a game like Dishonored 2, there is a limit to how much money a publisher can extract out of a person who buys the game second hand. - Developers like them because they can continue to field a large team after launching a game. They don't have to downsize content creation staff after launching a game and immediately go into pre-production with a smaller team for the next project. Loot boxes can pay for a large team to keep churning out content, events, and more loot boxes. If their game lacks mass appeal or has a less than successful launch, a small number of dedicated whales can still support the game long enough for the team to address problems. - Casual users like loot boxes since they typically play a handful of games each year and don't mind investing more in a game they really enjoy. For example, someone might like FIFA and enjoy playing Ultimate Team and building up the perfect team. Casuals typically value their free time over money so they're not too hung up over purchasing power boosts/shortcuts with in-game money. Even if they don't purchase any microtransactions, they do enjoy engaging in special events and having microtransactions subsidize lengthy post launch support. - Whale/power users like them since they enjoy purchasing power boosts and vanity items. They don't mind spending a small fortune to beat the house on loot boxes. Even though they make a small portion of the playerbase, a handful of whales can effectively pay years of post launch content by a large team. The type of players who dislike or outright hate lootboxes are people on forums like these who grew up paying $50-$60 single-player games and feel increasingly marginalized with where the gaming industry is going. They are not the target of loot boxes. Many publishers already have had success with microtranstions on mobile/PC F2P games so they have a good idea who to target when bringing these monetization systems to traditional games. The only people who can stop this practice are casuals and whales. However, they're more likely to play another game with more generous drop rates than to swear off loot boxes altogether. Many children are growing up in an environment where these types of microtransactions are common. So I expect them to become even more commonplace than they already are. Dr Cheeto posted:Hey maybe if you're setting a target of 5 million sales for a loving Dead Space game the problem isn't with the consumer. It's in the interest of big AAA publishers to continuously raise the cost of game development. This might sound counter-intuitive. Why not encourage an environment where development costs are low and developers can take more risks? However, high costs means a high barrier to entry. The big publishers value the longterm stability of their business over innovation, growth, or even short term profits. If it takes tens of millions of dollars to develop and promote a game, then very few new entrants can come in and disrupt the market. Even the large multimedia giants have a difficult time entering the gaming industry. Warner Bros. Games had to spend years building up their studios and Disney shuddered its game developers in favor of licensing out its IP. Square-Enix even described the North America/Europe market as an oligopoly. Rising costs also makes risk taking incredibly punishable since so many development resources are tied to each project. You end with an industry where brinksmanship is the norm and it's very difficult to deescalate costs. We see this in a lot of industries where the big players raise the cost of doing business to prevent new entrants from usurping them. Crude oil companies operate rigs at a loss to stave off the growth of shale oil and renewables. In the movie industry, we're seeing ballooning costs of making blockbuster movies. This means the big studios have most of the marketshare and mid-sized studios have difficulty moving up. New Line Cinema was a rising star until the release of The Golden Compass where it ended being eaten up by Warner Bros. Similarly, we saw THQ, which was a top five gaming publisher at one time, struggle to pivot to AAA and eventually get eaten up by the other big publishers.
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Oct 18, 2017 19:41
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Olive! posted:Has Neogaf ever been relevant? This isn't my hot take or anything, I genuinely can't remember a time where Neogaf was a popular and renowned site. Miiverse outlived Neogaf. Huh.
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Oct 22, 2017 02:39
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Viewtiful Jew posted:Anyone hear anything about the a WSJ story on Capcom today? Like how they've been doing financially for the past year or so? It looks to be fake: https://twitter.com/mochi_wsj/status/922627025411510272 Besides, who would want to buy a company with the headcount of Take2 and the billings of Deep Silver? tap my mountain posted:It's still ridiculous to me that the new MvC game is getting upstaged by a legit good looking DBZ fighter The game is coming out as the same day as Monster Hunter World. Bandai-Namco having a grudge against Capcom? Sunning fucked around with this message at 02:08 on Oct 24, 2017 |
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Oct 24, 2017 02:06
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Ubisoft is expecting Origins to sell more than Syndicate but less than Unity (less than 10 million). If Super Mario Odyssey sells like Galaxy 1 or 2, it'll clear 10 million in a couple of years.
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Oct 24, 2017 05:10
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homeless snail posted:maybe they'll patch one in later, konami seems perpetually a couple years behind No PC version either. MGSV did well on Steam. Then again, they might not have the staff for it. They closed down KojiPro LA.
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Oct 25, 2017 04:07
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AC Switch will have to be a leap forward. Pocket Camp's feature set is very impressive.homeless snail posted:speaking of bad games, the animal crossing phone game with crafting, timers, and microtransactions, yikes It'll be Free to In Training posted:I actually like super Mario Run a lot but it was a complete commercial failure because they had the audacity to charge money for a video game. Also the always online part sucks I have a feeling Super Mario Run was supposed to be F2P until late in development. It has a lot of the typical F2P hooks but most of the content is locked behind a price wall.
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Oct 25, 2017 04:36
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Not to the extent of Warcraft but China saved the movie from being a total flop.
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Oct 25, 2017 16:33
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Dr Cheeto posted:D3 is dead now? Didn't that warlock thing just drop a few months ago? There was supposed to be another Diablo 3 expansion like Reaper of Souls. However, it can cancelled and some of the content was rolled out as patches. It's why there has been a long dry spell for the series. Blizzard is hiring for Diablo 4 which is likely to be focused around co-op and lootboxes.
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Oct 26, 2017 23:04
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corn in the bible posted:it's funny how transparently they tried to make this game appear to be like witcher 3. it even has knockoff witcher vision (i mean, uh, animus vision!) to highlight treasure you can loot, it has the weird road-following horse thing, it has the job boards, and it's clear they tried to at least give context for the various activities this time too, so there's usually a person in the world who gives you something to do with a little story behind it rather than just expecting you, as the player, to clear out every area by yourself. ultimately you still clear icons on a map, but at least you get to meet people with little stories while you do it. They've taken a lot of elements from The Witcher 3 and MGSV. Maybe the next one will take after Breath of the Wild and Horizon Zero Dawn? Cowcaster posted:looks like spain might be having a civil war It's like one of my
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Oct 27, 2017 18:08
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an actual dog posted:no it's a thing, like Battlefield was a huge hit and literally all that game did was throw together old star wars stuff in a reverent way. Even though it's a Star Wars game, EA is footing the bill while Lucasfilm is licensing it to them. They have a lot more to lose if the game appeals to just Star Wars enthusiasts instead of a more mainstream audience.
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Oct 27, 2017 21:26
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The big publishers are fine with funding games that are driven by creative aspirations rather than a profit motive. EA has the EA Originals label, which published Unravel and will publish Fe and Sea of Solitude in the future. Ubisoft published Child of Light and Valiant Hearts. Acti-Blizzard revived the Sierra brand for legacy games like King's Quest and Geomertry Wars. After shutting down Irrational Games, Take2 let Ken Levine start a small team within the company as Ghost Story Games. The red thread connecting these games is that they have modest budgets and small teams. If the games bomb, then they're out 5 million dollars instead of 50+ million dollars. Even if they don't make much money, they're mostly a way to appease and retain veteran staff who are burnt out on blockbusters and want to jump ship to work on small indie games.
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Oct 27, 2017 21:52
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Tias posted:Hello, this is my first time in Games Help us remember the name of a game!!!!
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Oct 29, 2017 16:41
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Can someone tell me if there is a thread where people can help me identify a game from some facts I know about it?
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Naughty Dog was supposed to work on Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale but were busy with The Last of Us. Are we in the worst timeline, Ellie?
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Oct 30, 2017 19:39
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I said come in! posted:Jesus, the new Last of Us Part II trailer is brutal as gently caress. And God of War has PG-13 violence.
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Oct 30, 2017 20:27
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homeless snail posted:"over 15 million pc units sold", the game box generating robot beeped out The number's out of date. It's around 18 million units now. PUBG might sell more units in ten months than the entirely of Capcom sales catalog for this fiscal year. CharlieFoxtrot posted:Will there be PUBG - Cortana integration Subsidiaries of Bluehole include Bluehole Ginno and Bluehole PNIX.
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Oct 31, 2017 23:44
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