So I’m going to come at this from two perspectives. The first is Auticus the gamer. The second is Auticus the game developer that has a game studio and works with game studios and publishers and needs to make money. From that perspective I’m going to speak to you as both a game developer engineer and a commercial software engineer who will be next summer in his 30th year in the business.
- Heavy Mod support + locked content behind paywall? not exactly a match made in heaven, It wouldn’t surprise me if they take out mods, since it will be very easy to make mods packs of bazzar and Battlepass content for free.
Auticus the gamer and Auticus the game dev 1000% supports modding. I am a tinkerer at heart and love that the community is involved in making the games what they want. I doubt they will take out mods, and for right now I am going to go with what we currently have and know and not speculate because speculation doesn’t really provide us a good avenue to communicate.
The locked content behind the paywall and mods are to me two different things that can coincide with each other. And yes that means the community can just mod the items they want anyway.
- RPG/Solo/co-op focused part of the community are not exactly the target of this new monetization and will have an inferior experience (My co-op companion can’t loot my body if I die to safe my stuff? ridiculous).
I would prefer that items can be looted. Maybe not used but looted. Auticus the game developer understands why you cannot loot currently, because people will just give the middle finger and one person will craft everyone’s new things for them, so I am not bothered that I cannot use an item I did not pay for, but I would think that we should be able to loot it still. Or even better from pvp - let me convert it into its basic weapon equivalent since the items are all cosmetic anyway (revert cosmetic to default skin)
- Leisured type players will miss a lot of content since not everyone is an unemployed youngster without a family here and not everyone can play the game religiously to unlock the battlepass content (Which is why we buy all the DLCs, to not miss content in our more relaxed gaming schedule).
I am the dictionary definition of a leisure player. I have a full time job, run a full time studio and I normally put in maybe 30-60 minutes into the game a day on average. I am almost done with the battlepass, and its been out less than a week. I don’t feel that you need to play the game religiously to unlock the content.
I feel that one is a person that says “I WANT THIS RIGHT NOW NOW NOW I DONT WANT TO GRIND AHHHHH” which I have read on the forum, that this doesn’t matter because they want instant gratification; however I am speaking from the objectively incorrect statement that one needs to play the game religiously to unlock content. They made it so ridiculously easy to level the battle pass.
- Early Access and Complete Edition players are been directly scamed by this change, since the game advertised at the time as a complete package with paid and free future content, again, NO MENTIONING OF MICROTRASACTION, IN GAME STORE OR BATTLEPASS WAS MADE DURING ANY OF THE ROADMAPS FOR THE FIRST 4 YEARS AFTER LAUCH!!! said players have too many ours to refund the game and are now stuck with a product that was changed years after they bought it (100% false advertisiment, imagine you buy a house and 4 years after it’s been replaced by a bicycle by the company that sold you the house, are you supoused to take it with a smile? Not many ways to defend this particular point, this is not the game or monetization model that was advertised, promised or planned, period)
They never promised there would be no microtransactions. They said that the game content itself would be free. They have never lied about that. Sorcery is a free update, it is a game mechanic. The microtransactions are for cosmetics only. In this quote, you are simply tilting at windmills.
I bought the game day one, was in the beta in 2017, and 1000% disagree that I feel I have been scammed.
- Battlepass and Bazzar are monetization schemes designed for free-to-play games, not 25 dollar games (I personally bought it a 40 dollars during early access) and if they make the game free-to-play in the future to sustain this new model, they basically scamed every single player that bought the game in the pass 5 years so…
This is your opinion. It is neither right nor wrong, for it is yours. If that is your opinion, then your choice is to simply walk away. Auticus the gamer does not care about monetized cosmetics. Auticus the gamer will walk away from a pvp game if Auticus is playing pvp if I have to buy items to keep me competitive.
Auticus does not feel that appearing in rags with an illusion over me is pay to win either. What I mean by advantage is… the strongest weapon in game may give me 100 damage, but the bazaar weapon gives me 130 damage. THAT is an in-game advantage. Or the longest range of a bow is 100m but the bazaar has a bow with 180m range. THAT is an in-game advantage that I’d be 1000% against.
Auticus the game developer knows that you have to keep money coming into the coffers or else your publisher will abandon your game, and you basically will get one-off games with very little extra content if any where you will get your way - you’ll pay for the game once. And thats the game you will play forever more.
1000% against that idea from both gamer and game developer.
- Whales might get some money to the company, but mid-to-low economy players (most of the player base) will jump ship, which doesn’t really assure the long term survival of the game itself or its community.
You’ll forgive me but not only do you have no data to back any of that statement up, you are speaking as if you both know the economic status of the global player base, and you are speaking for the global player base on whether or not they will jump ship, and then you are using those assumptions to jump to a conclusion. This statement cannot be debated because there is no data to back anything up.
Auticus the game developer who has to sit in marketing meetings for games both video games and tabletop miniatures games also knows that you are very wrong. This same jump to conclusions can be read all over Games-Workshop forums and media, and Games-Workshop and its games has been reportedly since AOL chat room days of the 1990s been ready to “die any day now” for the same reasons of their pricing model and the alleged whale hunting.
The simple truth is that gamepasses are not seen as evil by as many people as you’d like to believe. Yes a vocal minority screams about it and yes in marketing sessions people will complain about it, but a lot of people also praise it as something that is fun for them to engage in. The bazaar in and of itself is also not a bad idea, both from me as a game dev (because people WILL buy cosmetics to customize their appearance) but as a player (because I like customizing my appearance and I don’t mind dropping $5 / $10 on some things, I do it in Sea of Thieves, I do it in Path of Exiles, I’ve done it in most gmaes. I have restraint and only buy the things I want and it amounts to fractionally less than what I spent on miniatures as a hobby.
The bazaar is in this case very overpriced, and as such I don’t know that it will get them what they want, but maybe it does who knows. I bought a couple things out of it myself /shrug/.
- The game still have many issues, exploits and bugs that should have been the focus (polishing) to bring in new players and costumers instead of deviating resources to put in a model that probably broke another hundred things within an already buggy product…
This is the same mantra marched out at every game studio since internet days anytime a studio would march out a game update. “WHY DIDNT YOU FIX THESE BUGS THAT ANNOY ME FIRST ARGHHHH”
Thing is - much like you don’t know the global economic status of the player base and you don’t know the global opinion of battle passes and you don’t know the marketing efforts that went into this, you also have no idea what resources they allocate. Teams like this have a dedicated bug team. I know Conan Exiles has a dedicated bug team. Then they have a feature enhancement team which includes a game dev or two and artists putting new content into the game.
You may feel that is a bad decision. Thats your right to that opinion. I can tell you right now that after 30 years in the business that there is no such thing as a bug-free game, and no matter how many bugs you fix, there will be bugs, and it is a known truth that the internet will never be short of individuals screaming at us to fix more bugs before new features.
You will find if you venture out and do your own game studio that that is not sustainable. You need to both improve quality of life, and you need new features.
This is not just true in video games but commercial software as well.
So… I do agree that there are bugs that need fixed, but I as a gamer have fully LOVED the sorcery update (this is the most fun I’ve had with the game in a couple of years) and I as a game dev know what you are asking for seems elementary and obvious to you - but is not how the software world works in general. If you’d like to try for yourself - have at it. Start a studio, and make that promise for a bug free game before moving onto a new feature.
You’ll be broke and looking for a new job very soon after I promise, because you will have no revenue coming in since you will solely be trying to fix bugs, which are in and of themselves feature updates that can break other things, and you don’t charge for bug fixes. And because you are solely trying to fix bugs, you are not producing new content, which means no revenue is coming in. Additionally the average attention span of the average gamer is very small, and no new content is seen by many studios as death for that game.
That is also the opinion of gamers - a game without new DLC or new features in a timely manner will be something that they abandon. (which leads to no revenue stream which mean you get to try to pay your mortgage and feed your family off of the good will of others because you are just simply trying to make all the bugs go away).
My last words in this long wall of post
I strongly feel that you need to step back and realize that you can’t use data that you don’t have for your arguments and to form your opinions around. You can’t parade around your opinion as a fact based on data you jumped to conclusions to get. You just can’t hold any water if thats the argument you are trying to pass forward. Additionally a piece of advice that I picked up long ago: most often the loudest people complaining are not the majority - but because they are the loudest and most common voice - people assume that they speak for everyone and that echo chamber feeds those people into thinking that everyone else agrees with them.
Cheers.
