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Francis rages about Microtransactions

all this in a game with LESS content than Forza 4. people bagged on Capcom for their costumes and fighter prices, but they still always provided the same amount of content in the base game that you'd expect from their previous fighting games.

RE5 got made fun of for it's $5 deathmatch mode. Right so. That was ridiculous, but RE5 itself offered plenty of content when stacked up next to RE4.

this? you get less cars. less tracks. you have to pay $50 for the season pass if you want to get about the amount of content 4 shipped with, and unlocking everything takes longer now.

why? we all know why. no gamer was complaining about how quickly stuff unlocked in Forza 4. it's greed plain and simple. yes yes, they're a business. I know. but there are ways to sell a product without overtly trying to squeeze every last penny out of your customers.

and consumers notice this kind of shit. you'd think Microsoft would know that by now.
 
I agree, I was fine when Valve added a in game store to Team Fortress 2. The store mainly sold cosmetic items, but it did sell weapons too. It is fairly easy to get weapons from playing the game and the store was just a faster way to get the weapon you wanted. Plus most of the weapon models were made by people in the community so it's only fair they get paid for their weapon models.

Of course now the game is Free to Play and Valve didn't really alter the drop system (aside from free players not getting as much backpack space or rare drops) so again I was fine with it.

Exactly. I think there is room for what the big publishers want. But they have, have, HAVE, to be very careful about what they decide is going to be microtransactions, what goes into DLC and the core game experience. If you get it wrong it sours the whole image of the publisher, developer and makes the people who you want to please mad at you.
 
I had no idea this guy made serious videos.

Clicking that video and hearing his regular voice was a bit of a weird moment :lol.

Done lots of excellent videos as both.

I agree with him entirely. Sell me a game and then a month or so later sell me some actual content. As in, levels, or stories or whatever. I don't give a shit about buying anything aesthetic, and I sure as hell am not going to pay extra to bypass parts of the game I already paid for.
 
The unfortunate truth is that most companies make 80% of there profits from 20% of there customers. This is true across so many many industries and I think games are no different. The 20% who will be willing to continue to pay for microtransactions on full priced games over and over again, will be more than enough to continue to make it worthwhile to do so. WE can vote with our wallets but the minority who won't will be enough to ensure nothing changes. I sure hope I'm wrong though
 
Microtransactions can totally work in a full price game. But only if you're selling assets, skins and the like.

It doesn't compromise the game to do that. I think that's what most peoples apprehensions are, it's certainly mine.

Is Valve the only company who has done that and 100% not touched gameplay at all?

edit:

guess not.

I agree, I was fine when Valve added a in game store to Team Fortress 2. The store mainly sold cosmetic items, but it did sell weapons too. It is fairly easy to get weapons from playing the game and the store was just a faster way to get the weapon you wanted. Plus most of the weapon models were made by people in the community so it's only fair they get paid for their weapon models.

Of course now the game is Free to Play and Valve didn't really alter the drop system (aside from free players not getting as much backpack space or rare drops) so again I was fine with it.
 
A bit late to respond to this but Angry Joe has done it a bunch of times before, the latest is his BF4 rant a few weeks ago.

I remember watching that one but dont recall him going off about microtransactions as much? Will watch it again now that you mention that one in specific.
 
That´s how i see it too. I was thinking i might get one at the end of the generation for cheap and the few exclusives that are worth playing, but i´m just through with Microsoft. The DRM, the forced Kinect, the anti used, the always online. Glad that they 180ed those restrictions, but micro-transactions (that aren´t even micro lol) for full priced games. I can gladly say fuck em.

Yep. It's just fascinating how in my mind Xbox turned from most beloved console (360) to dead to me in the span of two years. Of course it was a long time coming what with MS locking out the entire online and multiplayer portions of other publishers' games to me, that I had already bought, behind an artificial paywall. I mean in that sense none of this is unexpected and we are ourselves to blame (well, others, I always refused to pay for Gold. At least with PSN+ you can pretend that it's a game subscription service).
I'm amused by the fact that Boogie cited Blizzard expansions as the predecessors to DLC when in fact the very first game expansion disks were, oddly enough, extra cars for a driving game.

Back in 1989.
A driving game that is near and dear to my heart.
Test Drive II: The Duel.
Which, I owned for the Commodore 64 and then subsequently repurchased for the Amiga.
I still remember purchasing the Supercars and Muscle Cars floppy disks from my local computer shop (which was called Neutron Computers).

$T2eC16V,!wsE9suw)ph9BQvMvhzWJ!~~60_35.JPG


How many cars did you get on this disk? 5
You got a Lambourghini Countach, a Corvette ZR1, a Porsche 911 RUF, a Lotus Turbo Esprit... and, my favorite, a Ferrari Testarossa.
And it retailed for about $25 or thereabouts.

628815915_tp.jpg


The fun twist is this.
Test Drive II: The Duel was developed by Distinctive Software and published by Accolade.
This studio was purchased a couple years later in 1991 by Electronic Arts and remolded into EA Canada.

And who conceived the first ever expansion disk for a driving game back in 1989? Distinctive Software's co-founder... who happens to be this guy...

Don-Mattrick-president-Interactive-Entertainment-Business-at-Microsoft-1904037.jpg
c3e.jpg


Also brofist on Ferrari Testerossa in Test Drive II.
 
I'm amused by the fact that Boogie cited Blizzard expansions as the predecessors to DLC when in fact the very first game expansion disks were, oddly enough, extra cars for a driving game.

Back in 1989.
A driving game that is near and dear to my heart.
Test Drive II: The Duel.
Which, I owned for the Commodore 64 and then subsequently repurchased for the Amiga.
I still remember purchasing the Supercars and Muscle Cars floppy disks from my local computer shop (which was called Neutron Computers).

$T2eC16V,!wsE9suw)ph9BQvMvhzWJ!~~60_35.JPG


How many cars did you get on this disk? 5
You got a Lambourghini Countach, a Corvette ZR1, a Porsche 911 RUF, a Lotus Turbo Esprit... and, my favorite, a Ferrari Testarossa.
And it retailed for about $25 or thereabouts.

628815915_tp.jpg


The fun twist is this.
Test Drive II: The Duel was developed by Distinctive Software and published by Accolade.
This studio was purchased a couple years later in 1991 by Electronic Arts and remolded into EA Canada.

And who conceived the first ever expansion disk for a driving game back in 1989? Distinctive Software's co-founder... who happens to be this guy...

Don-Mattrick-president-Interactive-Entertainment-Business-at-Microsoft-1904037.jpg


This is incredible. Mind is so blown.
 
But the thing that really pisses me off. The thing that has me fuming. I'm playing ACIV right now. I'm OCD. I collect EVERYTHING. Now there's time saver packs for everything. I could understand this if AC hadn't been a collect-a-thon for the past six years. Now it's like they are actually acknowledging the fact that it's a pointless grind and you can just pay two dollars to be done with it. That's bad game design. I'm actually surprised they hadn't monetized it earlier.
Wait, ACIV has microtransactions? Fuck! I already bought it, so now I supported microtransactions fueled game design.

It's really telling that apparently no reviewers found it important to tell us about these immersion breaking, cynical, game design damaging, heinous acts of publishers. Makes you wonder who they're really serving.
 
There are nothing wrong with microtransactions. The way they are implemented doesn't effect anyone. You don't want them don't buy them. Me personally I usually always buy them because I like to dominate easily. I always buy the time savers in NCAA football, I bought them in AC4, and will spend some tokens in forza 5 because I choose to. Paying for cheats is fine. If I want to buy Super armor in Dead space it doesn't effect you at all.
 
There are nothing wrong with microtransactions. The way they are implemented doesn't effect anyone. You don't want them don't buy them. Me personally I usually always buy them because I like to dominate easily. I always buy the time savers in NCAA football, I bought them in AC4, and will spend some tokens in forza 5 because I choose to. Paying for cheats is fine. If I want to buy Super armor in Dead space it doesn't effect you at all.

And here's your perfect customer, Microsoft!

KuGsj.gif
 
There are nothing wrong with microtransactions. The way they are implemented doesn't effect anyone. You don't want them don't buy them. Me personally I usually always buy them because I like to dominate easily. I always buy the time savers in NCAA football, I bought them in AC4, and will spend some tokens in forza 5 because I choose to. Paying for cheats is fine. If I want to buy Super armor in Dead space it doesn't effect you at all.
welp.
 
Wait, ACIV has microtransactions? Fuck! I already bought it, so now I supported microtransactions fueled game design.

It's really telling that apparently no reviewers found it important to tell us about these immersion breaking, cynical, game design damaging, heinous acts of publishers. Makes you wonder who they're really serving.

Shit I'm 50% through the game and I didn't even know there was microtransactions. They must be hidden somewhere.
 
Wait, ACIV has microtransactions? Fuck! I already bought it, so now I supported microtransactions fueled game design.

It's really telling that apparently no reviewers found it important to tell us about these immersion breaking, cynical, game design damaging, heinous acts of publishers. Makes you wonder who they're really serving.


Just as the publishers and other corporations, it seems they too are increasingly serving their wallets first and foremost now... at least the ones big enough to receive paychecks that is, i suppose there are some smaller outlets who still do the job for the reasons they initially set out to do it (which is to inform the people of the quality of games).

All this really is sickening, i feel that nowadays, whenever there's a lot of money to be made you can be about 99.8% SURE there's shady/questionable business practices at work somewhere in there.
 
Shit I'm 50% through the game and I didn't even know there was microtransactions. They must be hidden somewhere.
Whew. Luckily I discovered long ago that Ubisoft's collectathons are always inanely shallow, so I stopped bothering about them. Saves me more time than microtransactions can buy.
 
There are nothing wrong with microtransactions. The way they are implemented doesn't effect anyone. You don't want them don't buy them. Me personally I usually always buy them because I like to dominate easily. I always buy the time savers in NCAA football, I bought them in AC4, and will spend some tokens in forza 5 because I choose to. Paying for cheats is fine. If I want to buy Super armor in Dead space it doesn't effect you at all.

Nope. The game design changes when micro transactions are implemented.
 
There are nothing wrong with microtransactions. The way they are implemented doesn't effect anyone. You don't want them don't buy them. Me personally I usually always buy them because I like to dominate easily. I always buy the time savers in NCAA football, I bought them in AC4, and will spend some tokens in forza 5 because I choose to. Paying for cheats is fine. If I want to buy Super armor in Dead space it doesn't effect you at all.

And you think what you are describing is normal ?

Good lord. We're doomed.
 
There are nothing wrong with microtransactions. The way they are implemented doesn't effect anyone. You don't want them don't buy them. Me personally I usually always buy them because I like to dominate easily. I always buy the time savers in NCAA football, I bought them in AC4, and will spend some tokens in forza 5 because I choose to. Paying for cheats is fine. If I want to buy Super armor in Dead space it doesn't effect you at all.
What's wrong is the fact that the games design changes, it becomes more related to free to play games while the game is not free to play at all.

For those who don't get it, Jonathan Blow explained it all perfectly here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxFzf6yIfcc
 
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