This is video games now, apparently
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The game is complete when everything in its design doc has been implemented. Whether the DLC appears on day one or day 21 is irrelevant to that.
Exactly. Games are released incomplete. Thanks for helping to prove my point.
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Dude, day-1 DLC is an incredibly obvious instance of price discrimination. It could only be more obvious if you had to haggle over the price of the game.
Price discrimination is only 'good' for consumers if it's imperfect (check) and some people who would have bought the product at the higher price get it at the lower price. But the lower price is what you would have paid for the game + all the day-1 DLC back in ye-olden-days.
That's why it shits people off - it's an obvious profit-maximizing strategy at your expense. I don't know about you, but I don't like it when people or companies take obvious steps to maximize the amount of value they can extract from me.
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@Lorne_Kates said:
What the shaqfu is that?
Welcome to the AAA game industry, an unsustainable mess of terrible ideas driven by bad management. It's not the first, it won't be the last, at least until that segment finally implodes.
That and most good game designers are driven out of the AAA industry by bad management. Some are now challenging themselves on the mobile platform which the only physical input sensible for use is a touchscreen.
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Dude, day-1 DLC is an incredibly obvious instance of price discrimination.
No, it's not.
That's why it shits people off - it's an obvious profit-maximizing strategy at your expense.
Look, you get a simple choice. Either buy the game or don't. Either buy the DLC or not. What I hate is the WHINING.
Because it's just whining that content costs money. Well, duh. Why is that whine-worthy? It's only actually objectionable if the company's engaged in false advertising, which even Lorne hasn't claimed is an issue.
So 1. there's no beef, and 2. stop whining about it.
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@Lorne_Kates said:
Some idiot designers think it's okay for an arcade fighting game, which requires split second timing, to have network multiplayer-- which is infamous for near-seconds long lag at any given moment
From what I hear, they're also still trying to convince us to rent a VM "in the cloud" which will stream video frames back to us with a latency tacked on to the already inevitable roundtrip latency from our keyboard/mouse/gamepad input. They've been talking about this for a decade and every time someone points out how shitty an idea this is, they keep saying "the technology isn't ready yet."
Oh, that happens due to technologically illiterate management listens to those cloud evangelists who are selling cloud solutions and decided that all games can and should be hosted on the cloud.
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I love how Valve implemented a whole system for distributing and installing DLC into Steam and then released some DLC that didn't use the system and then started using the system for flags like "this player has bought something from this game's store" or "here is the soundtrack of a game that costs money but you can have the soundtrack for free because we already released it on our website".
Also, fun fact: blakeyrat has spent $6.36 per hour and I've spent $6.34 per hour, but aliceif has only spent 4,92€ per hour.
I'm not going to work around Discourse's broken markdown implementation because it's hillarious.
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Price per hour of what? Gameplay? The amount they estimate it would take to finish the games? There's no tooltip or anything explaining that stat.
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I assume it's a price per hour you've had any game open on Steam.
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I... guess? I have no idea how it's calculated.
For what it's worth, its "price on sale" obviously doesn't include "buy 12 games for $2" bundle deals.
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Apparently you've spent $0.01/hr on Skyrim and $119.94/hr on Summer Athletics.
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It's only actually objectionable if the company's engaged in false advertising, which even Lorne hasn't claimed is an issue.
I don't mind DLC as a concept. It's a great way to deliver extra content for a game. I'm personally so far behind on games I can buy GOTY editions from the discount bin-- but I have put a bunch of money into Rock Band tracks and The Walking Dead Telltale game.
What is acceptable to whine/complain/rebel with your wallet is when a company either delivers an unsatisfactory or incomplete game (those are not mutually exclusive), and tries to sell as DLC what should have been included at release, for the release cost. Or frankly scummy business practices of taking a complete game, slicing it up into "episodes" or "seasons passes", for the sole purpose of selling the same game three times.
The former is frankly shitty and the company should be ashamed. The latter is just gouging, but if people pay them for it, then they'll do it. There is literally no way of telling a company "please make a choice to earn less money just because". They'll only stop if sales of a sliced up game are less than the sales of a whole game.
I'm in the "fine, I won't buy it" camp.
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Apparently you've spent $0.01/hr on Skyrim and $119.94/hr on Summer Athletics.
I've spent $0/infinity hours on Steam.
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@Lorne_Kates said:
and tries to sell as DLC what should have been included at release,
BASED SOLELY ON YOUR ASS-PULL OF WHAT YOU THINK "SHOULD" HAVE BEEN INCLUDED.
Not based on what the developers of the game itself think should have been included.
Look, I think my Ford should have come with a trunk lined in 24oz solid gold bars, but it didn't. What's my reaction? To get angry over the internet? To say, "those bastards Ford releasing an incomplete car, then forcing me to go to a jeweler and pay thousands of dollars to complete it!" No, I don't do that, because that's insane.
You are insane, is what I'm saying.
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If a game comes out with an expansion pack on the same day and the game has parts of it blocked off until you buy the expansion pack, it's probably one of those zero-effort mobile games.
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The publishers/top management took effort to convince the designers to do this. Technically, it ain't zero. Developers try not to bite the direct hand that feeds them.
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If it's any consolation, SFV sales has been plummeting hard since week 1 so the game is on it's way to become yet another massive flop after Street Fighter x Tekken, which polluted the waters so damn bad Namco has sent its version of the crossover into vaporware land.
Sony should have made with Capcom what Microsoft did to Rare: buy the company for the sole purpose of getting the franchises and give everyone the boot so they could put in charge people both willing and able to properly program and design games.
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The root of the problem that DLC/freemium is trying to solve is that the price of a AAA game has stayed at $60 for a decade, while the costs of making said games have likely grown quite a bit. It's a tough sell to the public that the true unit cost of a game is probably triple digits, but it's also tough to find skilled developers and artists who are willing to work 60-80 hour weeks for $40k/year.
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Netplay for fighting games isn't completely terrible if it's done right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GGPO is considered pretty damn good as far as I'm aware, and from what I've been told SFV uses a similar rollback algorithm.
The PC master race has known for around 20 years now how you compensate network latency. It's called client side prediction. How did that become a new thing again?
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Japanese fighting game developers rarely talk with Western FPS developers.
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Given the story line in the average Japanese fighting game, I'm not even sure the people developing them are humans.
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It's not that hard to come up with the idea yourself.
"What if we let the client do what it thinks it can do and then the server decides ultimately who was first and then rubber band to the state which actually happened? Brillant!"
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I don't like it when people or companies take obvious steps to maximize the amount of value they can extract from me
That's silly. You're silly. “I don't like it when people try to earn money by selling me something at a price I am willing to pay for it”. Trying to earn money is what people do. One day when you get some responsibilities of your own and stop pissing your money away on games you don't even like, you'll understand.
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You know, for less than half the £40 it costs to buy Street Fighter 5 with all its weirdity you could buy a copy of Streetfighter II and a PS2 to play it on.
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Goddamned, you guys are worse than Boomzilla.
Yeah games these days! So awful!
Nah. I just found a new game and it's awesome!
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You of course haven't read the design doc, so you have literally no way of judging whether a game was released "complete" or not. You're just ass-pulling, then bitching based on your ass-pulling.
Maybe he should just call it a bug, then?
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I never thought I'd see other IT folks making the same lame-ass argument. "Well it came out day 1 so it clearly had to have been built alongside the main game and sectioned off later, right?"
Nevermind testing, distributed teams, market timing, printing physical disks, shipping to warehouses... no, clearly, the only thing that influences when a game is released is when the development effort is complete, games are released the very femtosecond a single developer is done with their portion. There's never any chance to get ahead on DLC.
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BASED SOLELY ON YOUR ASS-PULL OF WHAT YOU THINK "SHOULD" HAVE BEEN INCLUDED.
If I'm paying for the game, that is literally all that matters.
Not based on what the developers of the game itself think should have been included.
The developers have no say in the matter. It's management making that decision, and they are shit at making those decisions.
You are insane, is what I'm saying.
You're the one buying a Ford, and you call me insane? Wow.
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You don't even play games. Who the fuck are you to make this claim? How about naming a single piece of evidence? What game, specifically, are you referring to?
While I haven't played it, my understanding is that Alan Wake shipped this way... on the Xbox 360 at least, it was released later on PC with the DLC episodes included.
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@Lorne_Kates said:
If I'm paying for the game, that is literally all that matters.
Well yes, but you're not the one deciding what the product is. The game isn't bespoke, it's mass-market.
@Lorne_Kates said:
The developers have no say in the matter. It's management making that decision, and they are shit at making those decisions.
Goddamned you pedantic dickweed. You know what I meant by the word "developers", don't play dumb. It doesn't work.
@Lorne_Kates said:
You're the one buying a Ford, and you call me insane? Wow.
Yeah, well, you still haven't given a retort to the argument I made.
Look, here's your complaint: "you released this game in an unfinished state! And I have to pay more for DLC to finish it!"
You tell this complaint to a game developer and they'll be like, "huh? Of course we completed it. I mean we wouldn't have released it if it hadn't been complete. What are you talking about?"
And you know what? I'm with the developers on this one. Because this is the same telepathy problem I frequently have. You're complaining about something that only exists in your mind, but then arguing that some entity in the real world (the world outside your mind) ought to do something about it. Well... what?! How could they even imagine that your brain has a different image of what the complete game looks like than the game they shipped? If you go to them and say, "I demand you complete the game and give it to me" how would they even know what features/content they need to implement to satisfy you?
I'm not backing away, here. Lorne: your argument is literally crazy. Your argument is the schizophrenic guy yelling at his State Representative at a town hall meeting to do something about the alien communication devices.
And you have yet to bring up One. Single. Specific. Game. that you think obviously fits this "was released in a non-complete state". Even you can't back up your own insane argument.
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my understanding is that Alan Wake shipped this way
Alan Wake was an early attempt at making an episodic game. It looks like they meant to release it episodic, and then backed off when it didn't test well, so they made the game feel episodic but bought as one piece.
Having googled the DLC, which I didn't play, it was widely received as "the ending the game should have had", but not in the sense that it was already there and just needed to be unlocked; fans really hated the ambiguity of the ending (I certainly did), so they put out a DLC to add clarity.
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I'm not backing away, here. Lorne: your argument is literally crazy.
Today is opposite day!
How could they even imagine that your brain has a different image of what the complete game looks like than the game they shipped? If you go to them and say, "I demand you complete the game and give it to me" how would they even know what features/content they need to implement to satisfy you?
His point is that they also came up with the DLC. And they could have included the DLC with the game instead of separately. Which to him looks like they left out a bit in the initial release.
I think your week of playing hermit at home is causing your language skills to atrophy or something.
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your language skills
E_ASSUMES_FACTS_NOT_IN_EVIDENCEBy definition, aren't all IT workers language skill impaired?
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His point is that they also came up with the DLC. And they could have included the DLC with the game instead of separately.
Well they could have done a lot of things. They could have packaged a dead wasp inside every game box.
In any case, even Day 1 DLC would have delayed the game release significantly, and by the time the new release (including the Day 1 DLC) was through all the approvals and disk copying and etc. then the Day 27 DLC would be ready to go and Lorne would complain about that.
So it's not just a dumb complaint, but it's a complaint that is literally impossible to satisfy. Unless you just want the entire concept of DLC to go away forever.
Which to him looks like they left out a bit in the initial release.
Yes, but it doesn't look like that to me, or anybody else who's sane.
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Arc System Works has started actually releasing Blazblue and Guilty Gear there now, finally. I'd definitely recommend those, though the former is much easier to play. Unfortunately for you, you can't change the gender of the characters.
Well I guess I'll phrase it differently: Street Fighter might only exist at this point due to nostalgia purchases.
It's still the top tournament fighting game afaik. Which is why they released this one so early: there's a tournament on the way. It's a bad excuse, but it's somewhat understandable. It's apparently incredibly good, despite being a complete waste of money in its current state for anyone who isn't entirely focused on multiplayer.
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Goddamned you pedantic dickweed. You know what I meant by the word "developers", don't play dumb. It doesn't work.
Maybe if you used the words that mean what you want them to mean, you will be understood.
One. Single. Specific. Game.
Except. I. Have.
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Nah. I just found a new game and it's awesome!
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Nah. I just found a new game and it's awesome!
Where has the day gone?
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BAHAHA, that thing thinks I've spent $1529 on games? It's probably closer to $30 since they're almost all from those $1 Humble Bundles.
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I haven't bought a game on a disk for like half of my lifetime now.
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Ok? Congratulations?
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When's the last time you bought a game that had physical packaging?
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When did Halo 5 come out? November?
Yes, dude, I'm sure you're all "PC MASTER RACE OOO OOO OOO OOOOOOOOO" but the vast majority of gamers play on consoles, and the vast majority of console games are purchased in disk form. Cope with the reality.
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Why would you purchase a disk that contains a game that is already out of date enough by the time it goes to market that you have to redownload the entire game anyway?
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I guess the only possible answer is that I am a dummy stupid know-nothing idiot moron.
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you can't change the gender of the characters.
New business proposal: Guacamole Games, Inc.
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Somewhere along the line someone thought that single console full or split screen was dead, but realized that they'd lose a bulk of their sales if multiplayer was a thing of the past.
So, instead of offering internet as an additional form of multiplayer, they just substituted it.
I guess it's because kids are entitled brats and bitch to their parents until they each get their own copy of a console or something. But we all shared a console back then, even across multiple dorm mates in college.
I remember pitching in to play together.
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@boomzilla said:
Nah. I just found a new game and it's awesome!
Where has the day gone?
I'm on my 5th 2nd level piece.
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The PC master race has known for around 20 years now how you compensate network latency. It's called client side prediction. How did that become a new thing again?
Aside from this industry being filled with idiot cavemen proud of reinventing square wheels? Hmm...
Perhaps people have gotten used to the shitty roundtrip latency inherent in lockstep RTS games, due to LoL/DOTA/etc. being heavily promoted for e-sports? Not that RTS controls or lockstep replication are good design for a game where 95+% of the time the player is CONTROLLING ONE CHARACTER.
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"What if we let the client do what it thinks it can do and then the server decides ultimately who was first and then rubber band to the state which actually happened? Brillant!"
In all fairness, it's very tricky to get it just right and perfectly smooth, especially if your game entities aren't kinematic. Dead reckoning becomes a lot harder when there's friction, collision response and uneven terrain involved. I believe that some games accept a certain amount of error in the player's displayed position to make the experience less choppy.
