MudMan

Well, we’ve gone from 24 and 5 to a 10 year compromise, so we can agree to disagree on that basis.

That said, I do disagree. You are underestimating how relevant arcades were in 2001. Soul Calibur may have been an early example of the home game being seen as better than the arcade game in 1999, but it was an arcade game first, I had played the crap out of it by the time it hit the Dreamcast.

And I was certainly aware of Maple Story before it was officially released here. And of course I mentioned WoW as the launch of the GaaS movement, but that’s not strictly accurate, I personally know people who lost a fortune to their extremely expensive Ultima Online addiction in 1997/98.

I am still not convinced that the experience of those gamers was any better or worse, me having been there in person. The kids in my life seem perfectly content with their Animal Crossings, Minecrafts and even Robloxes. The millions of people in Fortnite don’t seem mad about it. I sure was angrier about that Resident Evil business at the time than people are about the Resident Evil remakes now. Hell, I got pulled from playing a fantastic remake of Silent Hill 2 by an even better JRPG in Metaphor ReFantazio, and neither of those games features any MTX or service stuff. And of course that’s not mentioning the horde of games in the 20-40 range that are way better and more affordable than anything I had access to in the 90s.

People are nostalgic of the nostalgia times, reasonable or not, and time has a way of filtering out the nastiness, especially if you were too young to notice it. I was wired enough to hear the lamentations of the European game development community being washed away by Nintendo and Sega’s hostile takeover of the industry and their aggressive imposition of unaffordable licensing fees. I was aware of the bullshit design principles being deployed to milk kids of their money in arcades. I had strong opinions about expansion packs and cartridge prices. It’s always been a business, it’s always been run by businessmen.

Best you can do is play the stuff that’s good and ignore the rest.

Second best you can do is be publicly mad at the business driving unreasonable regulations that are meant to do the public a disservice.

Third best you can do is start archiving pirated romsets to privately preserve gaming history, blemishes and all, so we get to keep having this argument when the next generation of gamers are out there claiming that Fortnite used to be cool when it was free and had a bunch of games in there instead of requiring you to sign off your DNA to be cloned for offplanet labor or whatever this is heading towards.

They absolutely do. The market is full of remasters, remakes and re-releases. Having the originals readily available presumably diminishes the value of those, by the count of publishers.

That is not the same as saying that old games are available. Most of them are not, the market keeps reissuing the same handful of hits and landmark games (although we’re in an era of deep cuts now, we even have a Pocky & Rocky remaster, somehow). But they can’t set up regulations where you are allowed to lend out Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin but not Resident Evil 2, so here we are.

No, I’m arguing that if you’re trying to identify an era where the industry at large was not overmonetizing that’s your timeframe: From the death of arcades to the birth of modern casual gaming/F2P/Subscription services. By the numbers that’d be 2001-2005.

Before then you have arcades acting as the first window of monetization, where a whole bunch of console games started and where a lot of the investment went. After that you’re balls deep in modern gaming, with games as a service that are still live today, from World of Warcraft to Maple Story.

That’s a handful of years, at best. Any other interpretation has to ignore huge chunks of the industry that were behaving in the same way that makes people complain today. Either you dismiss arcade gaming despite it being the tentpole of the entire industry or you’re dismissing the fact that subscription and MTX games were already dominating big chunks of the space.

So no, it’s not 24 years. It never was 24 years.

And for the record, we knew at the time. We’ve been complaining since the 90s. I wasn’t joking earlier, “Ubisoft greedy” today is a carbon copy of “Capcom greedy” in 1997. I’ve been stuck in nerdrage Groundhog Day for thirty years.

Well, no, we’re talking about everything. Everything before 2010, explicitly.

I would guess most people just fill in whatever moment of their childhood there was when they would buy a thing and enjoy a thing and not worry about it too much.

Me being me (see the old codger self-identification up there), I substitute in the late 80s and 90s, when I would plead and beg for coins to squeeze in another 60 second gaming session and then go on to save for months in order to get a lesser version of that same experience at home for anywhere between 60 and 90 bucks (140-220 adjusted for inflation).

In the grand scheme of my memories, the five years after arcades were relevant and before Microsoft started charging a monthly fee to play online and Facebook started a games division are too short of a blip to consider a golden age. My nostalgia is on ranting angrily about having to purchase Street Fighter 2 for the fourth time and having Capcom re-sell the PSOne version of Resident Evil a third time for the privilege of having added analogue stick controls.

They really want to force gamers to buy the old games, just as they were, because those are next to free to adapt to a different platform and people will pay for them.

Not to be my usual old codger, but a lot of these game in questions were microtransaction-based to being with, in the very Farmville-y format of charging you a quarter for each set of three lives and then being ungodly broken and difficult to make sure those three lives didn’t last any longer than a minute each and entice you to pay for three more.

This absolutely sucks, is based on unjustifiable logic and takes the side of business over a demonstrable common good, but let’s not pretend the business logic behind it was invented in 2005. Game publishers have been game publishers longer than many of the nostalgic posters have been alive.

I mean… cool?

Thanks for sharing, I suppose?

deleted by creator

I got into the millions with a mid-to-high end CPU and was… fine. I mean, fine at 40-ish fps, not fine at 240 fps.

To me the bigger issues were with balance and broken features that were hard to diagnose because city builders are so opaque by design. I can play a strategy game at 30 fps, been doing that for decades, but I need to have some way to figure out how the game is supposed to work.

In any case, it’s less that I’m not “accepting” of games being broken, it’s that I think I and everybody else are starting to wise up to the fact that you can just… wait. Why play CS2 at launch if you can give it a year while you do something else and play a better version of it that costs half as much?

I mean… it’s the best survival horror remake since what? Dead Space? It’s aimed at people who like good games.

For the record, a 3:1 or 4:1 split between consoles and PC isn’t necessarily unusual for AAA stuff, particularly for a game that is strongly associated to the PlayStation brand that isn’t cheaper on PC. This game runs heavy, if you’re on a laptop or an older PC and have a PS5 that is a common sense purchase.

Great game, though. Really enjoying it so far. And like the other poster said, not a remaster at all, it’s a full remake. Not that I wouldn’t have bought a good remaster of the original. It’s been hard to get solid versions of those games, historically.

I didn’t even bother. On the machines I have with Win 11 it’s either not installed or functional but entirely optional. That whole recall feature never got implemented and honestly at this point I don’t know if it’ll ever be.

It’s not even about persuasive rhetoric. The way this seems to work is they’ll blame some real or imagined failure on whatever group they want to abuse, they will claim victory if whatever target does poorly for whatever reason and if they do well they just move on to the next target.

It’s a fortune teller racket. You don’t engage with it, you mock it sometimes to remind people that it’s absurd and you ignore it otherwise.

Okay, but the reaction to that can’t be “boys will be boys”. “People aren’t rational or objective” isn’t what you say to excuse a collective behavior, it’s what you say to explain why it’s wrong.

What’s even worse is if that’s used that as a justification for people being hostile on issues that you agree with or support but not on issues where you don’t. Which I suppose in itself is part of the “not being rational and objective” thing.

No, he’s not conflating the thing he’s talking about with the thing he isn’t talking about because of his job title. That’s absurd.

Never mind that I’m increasingly realizing people don’t understand what his job title actually means, you’re arguing that he shouldn’t talk about an unrelated subject because you’re pissed off at something else you understood to be related to an attribute he has, not to a thing he said. That’s a bonkers argument.

I genuinely hate this train of thought, where people pick sides on anything and everything and get tribal about it regardless of how trivial it may be. The fact that it’s about something relatively mundane makes it more depressing, actually. That’s not to say you shouldn’t have issues with monetization or with AAA games or whatever, but it’s not sports or even politics, those issues are unrelated to the specific people working on it and they aren’t an existential struggle. Having those issues doesn’t mean you should join whoever is being hostile or insulting to people related to Ubisoft online.

Oh, and for the record, it totally happened on Star Wars. Even if the game didn’t exist it was in the process of happening on Star Wars as a thing everywhere. But also, it happened on Star Wars Outlaws specifically.

I’d also make a case that Outlaws didn’t do worse than expected because it had battle passes or MTX. Lots of moving parts on that one, but that’s a bigger conversation meant for a place where people aren’t having a hostility catharsis thing. We’re probably not in the collective mood for a nuanced analysis of the commercial performance of franchise creative products here.

It depends on what the money guy is saying and doing. I have no need to rag on people because of their job title if they’re not messing it up. Valve has had economists working on monetization for them, you don’t see audiences publicly stating that they’re sure that guy is an asshole because they work on monetization.

And no, it’s not an unfortunate job title. This may come as a shock to people, but you DO need money to make videogames. And however you’re going to monetize yoru game, you need someone looking at that. You may not like how they’ve monetized AssCreed or Outlaws or The Crew or whatever, but they also have The Division and XDefiant and Rainbow Six Siege and Brawlhalla. I would be shocked if they didn’t have a monetization design department.

Look, Ubisoft is struggling, particularly on the expensive AAA stuff that is their traditional bread and butter. I would say they are very late to the party at breaking free from their framework mindset where games are largely built on a bit of a template. They need a new approach to coming up with game concepts, if only for PR’s sake. But please, please, stop feeding the anti-woke mob’s bad faith nonsense and stop trying to find indivduals to try to pin structural anger about certain corners of game development. We can -should- be better than that as a community.

Also, good for them for reversing course on the The Crew server stuff and for doing PoP The Lost Crown, that game is awesome and underrated. Would love to see them diversify into more mid-size stuff like that, because they nail it suprisingly often when they do.

Right.

Except “the money guy” isn’t the monetization designer, which is what it seems this one guy has been his entire career. “The money guy” has some nondescript title, like “head of sales”, or is just the CFO of the company. Or isn’t even part of the company and just sits in a board with a bunch of other people and periodically shouts at the CEO to make more money.

Bet Chassard was super glad when he got promoted from being a game economy designer in a bunch of mobile games and got a fancy “monetization director” title instead. Irony is a bitch, because you KNOW he wouldn’t be getting half the crap he’s getting if he still had a job with “designer” in the name.

For the record, economy designers, monetization designers and, presumably, monetization directors, whatever the difference may be, have as much of a chance at being nice guys who care about their jobs and are attuned to their audiences as anybody else. I don’t know this guy, and I don’t know if he’s any of those things, but what he wrote doesn’t suggest that he’s not. If people dogpiling think they’re delivering karmic justice or disproving his point, they’re almost certainly doing neither.

I would be a lot more willing to agree with you if “nobody” hadn’t been driving a massive harassment and hate campagin complaining about “DEI”. I mean, it pops up explicitly right in the comments of the piece linked here. “Nobody” has been busy.

I can’t believe we haven’t learned anything since “it’s about ethics in games journalism”. “It’s about monetization in AAA games” now, apparently.

FWIW, I don’t know this guy, but I don’t believe for a second that he would love it if his competitors failed. People have a wild, distorted idea of how AAA game development works and how people making it (leadership included) look at these things. The guy went online to say he’s frustrated at seeing industry insiders siding with an online hatred campaign and people are all dogpiling because hey, his title sounds like the thing I don’t like, so the assholes being assholes online must be justified this time.

Look, much as the heavily online audience likes to pretend otherwise, most people making these games are perfectly nice, care about what they do and even have some degree of attunement to their audiences. Corporate dynamics are more than capable of producing dysfunctional results without an evil mastermind pulling the strings.

Also FWIW, I mostly agree with him. If you’re in the games industry get the hell off of LinkedIn comments at all (as Chassard just learned the hard way), but especially don’t be on LinkedIn cheering for colleagues doing badly. That’s just rude and unprofessional. You are allowed to keep your opinions offline and should exercise that right when it comes to commenting on your colleagues’ livelihoods.

I mean, a bit of context may go a long way here.

How can you wish a company to fail simply because they do not cater to you or that the produce does not please you is beyond me. We are all on the same boat, please please please, stop spreading hate, we should all uplift each other instead of bringing each other down.

I get it, pithy joke, why let it pass, but still.

Is that good, though? I don’t want realistic and challenging AI opponents, at least not most of the time. It works for a 1v1 fighting game, but you don’t want every enemy in Diablo being a smart, human-like entity capable of min/maxing their build and acting with real self preservation. You want them to act as a pincushion so you can test if your build is doing good damage and to watch them pop like so much bubble wrap.

So yeah, for 1v1 fighting games I want a human, but that’s not an intrinsically better solution than a “dumb” AI. It’s the opposite of that in most games, I’d say.

There are remarkably few MBAs acting as creative directors, but it’s true that the place where the motivations framework thing is most popular is triple A games as a service stuff. Honestly, it’s mostly used as a way for creatives just doing game designery things to explain how the game designery things align with the marketingy things and the businessy things. That’s part of why I don’t love it, it doesn’t really do much, it’s mostly a translation layer.

Yeeeah, the motivations stuff for game design is very popular right now with devs big and small. It kinda rubs me the wrong way, although it’s hard to articulate exactly why.

I think it sits at an intersection of still wanting to look at players as behavioral data, but at the same time being sorta generic and too broad to inform much of anything specific. Still, that’s not to say you can’t do good work using it.