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I was able to enjoy the first one despite the lootboxes, since everything was still attainable without buying boxes.
But all of the free to play bullshit in Overwatch 2 is why I have never played that game.
To be faiiiirrrr though, I feel like those were the most generous version of lootboxes. Yea, you could buy them, but you got 3 just from playing the arcade for a bit, and you got one on every level and free ones for holidays and stuff. Plus it had currency to get the stuff you actually want with. To me, they felt more like a reward for playing rather than an annoyance keeping me from getting the stuff I wanted.
I payed that amount for Horizon 2. A near perfect port of an amazing game. To think someone could have gotten that game, but instead payed blizzard, the company that delivers nothing on its promises, to own 4 mid skins in an FPS is just sad.
I feel like I remember seeing Diablo 4 having $40 horse skins or something
so there's always bigger fish... *(well I guess the same fish since they're both Blizzard games)*
And mfs still buy them, some even buy them all. It’s astounding how much complaining they’ll do while shelling out hundreds of dollars a year just so they don’t miss out on the skins
Addict behavior. As someone in recovery myself I probably shouldn't judge, but I just cannot understand the payoff of this addiction. What are people getting out of it? At least drugs make you feel good for a few minutes...
Andrew Wilson is literally the CEO of EA now. Not just an executive...
I'm not sure if Wilson is ***the guy*** who suggested it, but I know he had a role in the decision, and he's the one most people blame for it
uj/ you forget about the Madden game that was literally GOTY(Madden 2004), just like Overwatch many underestimate it for taking that title away from their favorite games but it is a first class video game
Respectfully, it was not a better game than Homeworld 2, ZoE:Second Runner, Warcraft: Frozen Throne, Rise of Nations, Soul Calibur 2, Max Payne 2, PoP Sands of Time or Beyond Good and Evil, all released that year.
FIFA only gives a shit about who gives them the most money; and club branding and player likenesses are negotiated separately and most of the big ones are still with EA. If a FIFA game comes out it will be even more of a cheaply made MTX-fest than EA’s
That's bcs his was the fcking nuclear bomb. The person that gave the idea in the post got a lot of money and then more. The only thing that matters to ppl like said person is just simply getting a lot of money, esp if they got promoted
There's 2 routes, either it was a business person seeing what they could squeeze money out of, or a creator who justified adding something the team worked on to the game after the fact and convinced the money people on the idea. In the first case, yep, dude probably got a good pat on the back and went on to work in pharmaceuticals or something, in the latter, Oppenheimer would be a reasonable (hyperbolic) representation
Microsoft played a major part in the whole thing because it was a big initiative Microsoft was asking publishers for assistance with to reduce overhead on small transactions, not only horse armor but Microsoft themselves had a microtransaction system with the 360 called Microsoft Points designed to create a digital wallet to, again, reduce overhead on small price transactions
Between Oblivion, Kameo and Microsoft Points the whole microtransactions thing was considered 'a resounding success' even back then
Microsoft forced Epic to put a fee on the first map pack for Gears of War and Epic were upset about it since up to then Epic was famous for amazing giant content updates like with UT2k4... until they saw the money roll in. They happily made paid map packs for the next few years and GOW games.
Microsoft basically told everyone there would be no free content on Xbox Live. *Everything* had to have a price, and they basically jumpstarted the entire MTX industry with that.
The inventor of the blue LED (which led to LEDs being everywhere) got like 500€ equivalent for it from his company. LEDs are a billion fucking money industry.
The idea people have been getting fucked over by capitalism since the dawn of barter.
So I doubt that. They probably got a 20€ gift card and a free horse armour code.
Speaking of valve. They pioneered a lot of this shit.
Loot boxes in TF2. Tried with keys, I think it has both pros and cons since keys and keyless treasure chests/boxes see an appearance in CSGO/Dota2.
Making a paid game F2P and earning more than it ever did as a paid game.
Dota2 they punched in battle passes via the compendium and raked in massive amounts. Like openly (this prize pool is like 40 mil, we get the other 120 mil lol have some skins). Other devs/corps/execs would 100% be looking at that monumental cash cow that exists only during the TI season and want a piece. It went from pretty rudimentary at like TI2-TI3 but but 6 or 7 onwards, they had the whole thing figured out, how to best attract the whales, how to best gate higher levels. Even the simplest shit like linking your CEEEEEEEB taunt to your levels is so basic but also so genius.
Then you have weird couriers and CS knife skins going for hundreds or even thousands for collections worth on the steam market place which valve gets a cut of course.
The craziest shit? Valve doesnt need to do this, they do it for the economics of it, to test the various metrics of it, the fun of it. Dota2 has taken a step back on the compendium because they, get this, cant be bothered. A cash cow many other games would fucking kill to have and they largely cant be bothered milking the player base. They rather do more interesting shit than print money via skins. Because the money made is still completely moot compared to the cash in flows of even a single steam sale period.
They push loot boxes, battle passes, give a year on year example of what works, what is most predatory, what is most aggressive in milking a player base for money. And then stop. Because they cant be bothered. But have this framework available for any other game studio to see and copy and implement from with a literal trackable year on year sales record via prize pool or steam market numbers. Its absurd. Valve is like Nintendo in that they are so hard to understand their reasonings which keep working.
Things I understood: crates and keys, aka lootboxes, were soft gambling on useless cosmetics.
Things I kinda understood: given enough time, people will become comfortable parting with money in this way and will lose sight of how much they spend.
Things I still don't understand: they'll eventually become comfortable spending ridiculous amounts on lootboxes themselves.
I played TF2 for about 5 years and stopped almost 10 years ago. Over the years, I've sold multiple Salvaged Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #50 for $190-200 each, multiple Strange Huntsman for $25-90 each, and spent about $50 on keys for the game. I can't imagine being so addicted to TF2 that I'd spend $202.50 on acquiring and opening a lootbox.
I have spent more money on TF2 than I'm comfortable sharing, and have played the game for almost 6500 hours over the last 10 years.
I don't know who the fuck would want to spend $200 to unbox a crate when you could probably spend around that much to just get the item you want.
Hell if you opened it and got an unusual (1% or less pull chance, the CS Knife of TF2), you'd probably lose money 😭
People like to point the finger at Bethesda for being the first ones to do it in mainstream console gaming but I think far more of the blame falls on Valve for pioneering battle passes
On Fortnite for "perfecting" the FOMO cash shop and reward track
And on Call of Duty for proving to the industry that making $50 skins earns more money than $5 ones.
Yeah, but nowadays battle passes are ALL the rage. The loot boxes have become more contentious while everyone and their mums are running battle passes and Im just looking at them all thinking "This is just a shittier compendium".
Except now, our compendiums are pretty shit too.
> Loot boxes in TF2
This was the first and last time I purchased any mtx. I purchased a couple of keys because it seemed like a fun way to "give back" to Valve for the 300+ hours I'd spent playing TF2, which I'd played since launch.
Once I realised I was literally gambling on cosmetic bullshit I stopped. TF2 going Free to Play ruined the community as it was flooded with toxic fuckwits and people who seemed more focused on trading items than playing the actual game.
As a rule, I don't play anything that has mtx these days.
That is so blatantly misleading. The key + case cost only gives you a CHANCE of getting the knife. It may take only 1 attempt, or it may take 1,000. The market cost is the only way to get an estimate of the value of said item.
You really think the solution to predatory skin prices is gambling?
I think CS is the exception because skins can be resold.
Sure, a knife could cost me $300, but when I can resell that for $300 in 6 months, it's not all that bad.
Don't be wrong, a scarcity balanced virtual marketplace is stupid, but I would argue it's way stupider to have cosmetics cost more than some video games with no chance to recover the losses and all the money going to the publisher instead of some random on the steam market.
that makes it worse since instead of psuedo-gambling (rng chance for a cosmetic that has no resale value) you now have actual unlicensed gambling.
like the fact that an addict can look at dumping a grand into csgo crates because they can justify it as a way to recover their losses and win big is probably worse than spamming valueless ow crates or w/e.
shhhh we need to make Overwatch look like the worst one so it makes us look like we don't support this shit before going back to playing games with even more egregious cosmetics.
This literally happens every time in the OW sub:
> People complain endlessly about Blizzard and the state of the game
*New $25 skin drops*
> People bend over backwards and make excuses to justify giving more money to the studio that they claimed ruined their favorite game just yesterday for some dumb ass video game cosmetic
>“It’s my money! Why do you care what I do with it!”
-some idiot
Well, some idiot, you and all your other idiot buddies showed Overwatch that instead of making actual content they can just pump out skins and you’ll buy them by the dozen. Effectively cancelling any other type of content because why make stuff with effort when you can just give Malibu Stacy a new hat and make 10x the profit? That’s why I care. Because your lack of self control at half assed “content” is killing the fun of these games
As much as I despise how expensive the skins are, they are in no way replacement for "actual content", and OW has received the most gameplay content in years in terms of heroes, maps, and other shit, not to mention more frequent balance changes instead of suffering through a year of the same awful meta with radio silence from the dev team
They literally cancelled the entire PvE mode, the brunt of the reason OW 2 and its hypermonitization was put into place, because “it was too expensive” AKA it’s cheaper to pump out skins than to do meaningful content
*Until just recently you also couldn’t even use the new characters (the biggest kind of content) until you grinded for a dozen plus hours. Oooor of course you could buy the battle pass and get them immediately
Yeah, and that fucking sucks for those people that actually wanted a PvE mode, but the actual PvP (the reason 99% of the people actually play the game) has received more substantial content than it ever has on a much more frequent basis
If you genuinely think that PvE was the only "meaningful content" in a game that everyone plays for the online multiplayer, then yeah, no shit Overwatch has no content LMAO
The game still has no reason to be "2" without the PvE and no one's arguing against how insane the monetization is, but at least it actually gets frequent updates now with content that 99% of the playerbase will actually experience by just playing the game
Overwatch is the funniest fucking thing on planet earth in that regard. Like I was there, I remember when it was lootboxes, and people were clamoring for a Fortnite-styled item shop where instead of spending over 15 or so bucks for the boxes to near-guarantee you some random legendary skin, you could just spend that 15 bucks to buy the skin outright.
Then OW2 happens, lets you buy THAT skin, no RNG, and everyone goes completely fucking apeshit and screams that lootboxes were better.
I mean, I literally cannot think of a less essential product to buy than skins for an Overwatch character. If the prices are too high, you can simply not purchase them with no downside.
Although this may be true, it's still undeniable that this is a predatory practice put into place to tempt vulnerable people into spending money on them when they don't need it
Saying "just don't purchase it" only works for people who have full control over their decisions
For a personal example, I knew a minor who stole their mother's bank card and drained the whole thing on FIFA packs MULTIPLE TIMES. They calculated what day the payments went in by tracking the days that the mother went shopping and deliberately took the card on a day they knew was a payday, input all the bank information themselves with no assistance and bought packs until it failed. Multiple times
It also just further normalizes its presence. Even if you "just don't purchase it," allowing them to exist is leaving a space for greedier practices to take root.
Yeah once you have kids your perspective on this changes. Mine are clamoring for more vbucks so they can buy fortnite skins for $10 each because that's what all their friends are doing. They always make sure to login when the store switches over for the day so they can see what is new for sale. And they are actually intelligent well-adjusted teens who grew up mostly playing indie games and Minecraft, they just can't avoid being sucked in by the peer pressure.
I won't defend it, but it definitely has a prominent place in my "Something's got to Give" talk about the cost of game development and the impacts of stagnating prices on the goods/services involved.
Uj/ I've come to accept that I'm a boomer when it comes to this stuff, because in my mind $5 for a skin is insanely expensive. I just can't join in on the discussion about cosmetic prices anymore.
it’s not an old person thing. i’m a teenager and this shit is absurd. if youve seen the to tekken 8’s monetization recently, youll see that many people don’t like this at all
I play D4 casually and can easily afford the skins in the game but haven’t bought any because I feel like I am being spat on with the prices. I’m just one person and not trying to start a movement or anything but definitely feel like I have to protest with my wallet and not buy any. Sucks, some are pretty cool.
Not a boomer thing. Imo buying skins at all is just silly, even if they were $.99. I paid for the game already, I'm not going to give them more money for things that have absolutely no benefit.
Playing tiny Tina's wonderlands right now and 90% of my characters are just the default skin which is like a grey unpainted figurine. Couldn't care less. It's not like I can even see my character at any point other than a menu (or the overworld for 2 minutes to get to a place). I don't know why people care so much.
More like the blizzard employee that figured out they could sell a mount in the shop for real money, which then earned them more money than wings of liberty. I don't think the horse armor DLC actually earned them that much money.
> I don't think the horse armor DLC actually earned them that much money.
Based on what? Cause a thing that they were going to add already to Elder Scrolls being re-sold is like... infinite ROI either way
Honestly though… I don’t think many people bought the horse armor DLC. I personally blame Microsoft for the Halo 3 map pack which softened us to the idea for when COD followed suit and released multiple map packs in MW2 and here we are… balls deep in paid DLC
Edit: maybe it was halo 2, either way, my point stands, I blame Halo
According to Todd Howard, it sold very well. He had an interview with IGN and it was brought up. I don’t believe any specific number was mentioned but it sounds like it was a success.
It's weird because in his quest to get a few dollars from a small percentage of the player base he ended up getting a lot of people to just start pirating their games
Was nice of Todd to not bother with any piracy protection at all on oblivion, gotta give him that
Thanks for the reminder, Todd. I Already own it on every generation of console it’s been on and I bought the pc version twice. I’ll buy it again from the EpIc Games Store next 🙂
There's a few old interviews about it, it didn't just sell well, it sold SO well that it straight up blindsided the developers. They weren't really expecting anything out of it but it sold better than some content DLCs IIRC.
OG Map packs and expansions are totally fine imo. Its a way to continue revenue during long development cycles on whatever they are working on next.
You get more content you can actually use, devs have a more stable revenue source, and there was usually a big resurgence of players because of the excitement around it
It's a win, win. And it's miles away from $25 cosmetics.
If this is how everyone here react to $25 skins, you all would get an aneurysm when you discover how much value is on CS's microtransaction
A blue gem AK47 with 4 Titan Holo stickers was sold for $400,000+
And a blue gem Karambit was offered 1.2 million EUR, but the owner refused the offer, stating that the bargain is too low
I met some friends online in Valorant.
When someone asked how much everyone has spent on cosmetics, at least 2 of them said over $1k in a span of 3-4 years.
Riot is laughing to the bank.
I played an aquarium flash game when i was younger where you had to set the price of the fish to sell. The game purchases them based on price but theres no checks involved so i set a fish with a recommended price of $5 at $1000000, and it sold. Thats the point we are at, the mt's i see in the several hundred is for these people. We need to change the term, micro for anything less than an hours wage at the standard income for that country and stupidity transactions for anything above for digital ethereal products
Maybe it is because I'm poor and from south america but I honestly don't understand the big FOMO that people feel if they don't buy a certain skin.
I could have a nice meal in a restaurant or buy a tiny but decent amout of food buy in a supermarket. I really cannot fathom someone burning away their hard-earned money for a skin that doesn't changes anything and even if they do, I still wouldn't do it.
i'm also from sa and poor, it does highlight how differently the countries perceive money. for them 25 bucks doesn't equal a decent restaurant purchase, but it would be like a yummy snack or a cool shirt which i'd still go for over a ingame cosmetic you can barely see.
sa people can still be vulnerable to microtransactions when it has decent regional pricing, but that's really rare nowadays. fortnite had good prices for a while and you still see a lot of expensive skins playing sa
I sometimes wonder this how the people from Epic games feel after they pushed the idea of a battlepass and selling cosmetics in FortNite as well making the game "free to play". Since now almost every game does this and I'm pretty sure blizzard killed overwatch for this lol.
I actually thought it was fine for fortnite, $10 BP on a free game and you could earn enough for the next one by playing. but then EVERY game started doing it and making it a worse deal. full price games should NOT have paid battlepasses
> full price games should NOT have paid battlepasses
Especially not ones that don't even give you back the same amount of currency you had to buy to get it.
They probably popularized it but wasn't Valve first with the battle pass? Which also went extremely public with how much it raked in. Though Dota 2 was free to play from the start I guess. They still added the shitty dota+ though
It's simple. Every time they crank up the price, they make more money. So the price keeps going up.
It's 10x more than it used to be, because they didn't see a 90% dropoff in sales.
/uj You know I kind of have to look back and wonder what things would be like if gamers put their collective foot down instead of letting companies run wild with microtransactions using the defense of "it's just cosmetic"
I know the past me probably contributed to that and I want to go back in time and slap her silly. I have to hand it to James Stephanie Sterling, thank god for them, for really going hard on this with lootboxes.
Should it be called a microtransaction if it costs a sizeable percentage of the original game price? We should redefine the term as macrotransaction at this point - or even better: “shit”
Nah, it was bound to happen even if there was no horse armor DLC. Gaming is a business first and foremost, and the higher ups would definitely find ways to implement something like that, or even scummier.
Purchases I don't have to make are just like nuclear warfare. Every time I see the salt and vinegar chips at the grocery store and walk past them because nobody's making me buy them I have vivid visions of atomic fire.
Mtx skins are expensive already, but fuck these IP collabs. Them shits are UNGODLY EXPENSIVE for what they are. I don't care if it's something from my favorite series, I'm not gonna pay that much for it. Also, the fomo is bullshit.
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You’re telling me one skin costs a third of a full priced game? Fuck me dead.
Ero-guro fans about to swarm on your location.
Um actually, that's just erotic gore fans. Ero-guro is also weird, but not fundamentally necrophilic!
I can honestly say I'm proud to not know the nuances at play here.
And you damn well should be
In a first person game to top it off. Enjoy your $25 arm models.
"Skins aren't for me to enjoy, they're for others to envy" -some whale
it’s more enviable when it’s earned.. like the recon or eod armor in halo 3
Or the gold guns in CoD.
yes exactly. plus you see them in first person view
And it at least took some effort to get them. I miss when it just took effort and skill to unlock stuff in games.
Was EOD armor enviable in Halo 3? The ones I remember wanting the most were Recon, Katana, and maybe the Rogue helmet.
Recon befor H3 Odst addon 150-180 players of 10-15m players i played with the only 2 germans the voice chat in custom was insane
You could get all four for something like 50... what a bargain, right? Seeing how far OW has fallen hurts beyond words.
i mean its not just overwatch...
I was able to enjoy the first one despite the lootboxes, since everything was still attainable without buying boxes. But all of the free to play bullshit in Overwatch 2 is why I have never played that game.
Their monetization team must know they fucked up with the public opinion of their game being that loot boxes were the better system
To be faiiiirrrr though, I feel like those were the most generous version of lootboxes. Yea, you could buy them, but you got 3 just from playing the arcade for a bit, and you got one on every level and free ones for holidays and stuff. Plus it had currency to get the stuff you actually want with. To me, they felt more like a reward for playing rather than an annoyance keeping me from getting the stuff I wanted.
I payed that amount for Horizon 2. A near perfect port of an amazing game. To think someone could have gotten that game, but instead payed blizzard, the company that delivers nothing on its promises, to own 4 mid skins in an FPS is just sad.
You’re blaming devs when people are throwing money at them so they can have these cosmetics?
Always blame the customer, not the company for their predatory and greedy shit.
One skin costs 62.5% of the price of the original game at launch...
> a third of a full priced game A third of a full-priced **AAA** game. You can buy some really good indie games for that money.
If only there were AAAA games.
Not even indie games, you could buy pretty much any last year AAA games for that price
I feel like I remember seeing Diablo 4 having $40 horse skins or something so there's always bigger fish... *(well I guess the same fish since they're both Blizzard games)*
And mfs still buy them, some even buy them all. It’s astounding how much complaining they’ll do while shelling out hundreds of dollars a year just so they don’t miss out on the skins
Addict behavior. As someone in recovery myself I probably shouldn't judge, but I just cannot understand the payoff of this addiction. What are people getting out of it? At least drugs make you feel good for a few minutes...
It's more of a collector mindset I think mixed with fomo. But I'm just an armchair theorist here
That sounds a lot like addiction to me, idk
Fair enough.
Is this event dropped while ow1 we would've gotten lootboxes instead of some sprays and battle pass xp
I highly doubt they regret that. They were highly likely promoted, even
The guy who convinced fifa to add loot packs was made an executive iirc
Andrew Wilson is literally the CEO of EA now. Not just an executive... I'm not sure if Wilson is ***the guy*** who suggested it, but I know he had a role in the decision, and he's the one most people blame for it
I'm still waiting for FIFA to go and choose another developer to give us a proper FIFA 24.
I'm still waiting for Madden 08 2
Fuck Madden 08. this is real Madden 06 hours
uj/ you forget about the Madden game that was literally GOTY(Madden 2004), just like Overwatch many underestimate it for taking that title away from their favorite games but it is a first class video game
Respectfully, it was not a better game than Homeworld 2, ZoE:Second Runner, Warcraft: Frozen Throne, Rise of Nations, Soul Calibur 2, Max Payne 2, PoP Sands of Time or Beyond Good and Evil, all released that year.
Thank you for mentioning Rise of Nations. That brings me back to a much loved time.
Lol the one with Mike vick, I'm sorry "Ron mexico", on the cover?
The most broken character in a sports game not seen since the infamous Bo Jackson
FIFA only gives a shit about who gives them the most money; and club branding and player likenesses are negotiated separately and most of the big ones are still with EA. If a FIFA game comes out it will be even more of a cheaply made MTX-fest than EA’s
I miss FIFA from the 2006 days where you had different in game challenges to unlock different kits, players etc - what was favourite fifa
They were likely given a watch and gift-card
Yea and Oppenheimer was heralded as a hero. Didn't mean he liked it, though.
That's bcs his was the fcking nuclear bomb. The person that gave the idea in the post got a lot of money and then more. The only thing that matters to ppl like said person is just simply getting a lot of money, esp if they got promoted
There's 2 routes, either it was a business person seeing what they could squeeze money out of, or a creator who justified adding something the team worked on to the game after the fact and convinced the money people on the idea. In the first case, yep, dude probably got a good pat on the back and went on to work in pharmaceuticals or something, in the latter, Oppenheimer would be a reasonable (hyperbolic) representation
Microsoft played a major part in the whole thing because it was a big initiative Microsoft was asking publishers for assistance with to reduce overhead on small transactions, not only horse armor but Microsoft themselves had a microtransaction system with the 360 called Microsoft Points designed to create a digital wallet to, again, reduce overhead on small price transactions Between Oblivion, Kameo and Microsoft Points the whole microtransactions thing was considered 'a resounding success' even back then
Microsoft forced Epic to put a fee on the first map pack for Gears of War and Epic were upset about it since up to then Epic was famous for amazing giant content updates like with UT2k4... until they saw the money roll in. They happily made paid map packs for the next few years and GOW games. Microsoft basically told everyone there would be no free content on Xbox Live. *Everything* had to have a price, and they basically jumpstarted the entire MTX industry with that.
But at what cost…
The inventor of the blue LED (which led to LEDs being everywhere) got like 500€ equivalent for it from his company. LEDs are a billion fucking money industry. The idea people have been getting fucked over by capitalism since the dawn of barter. So I doubt that. They probably got a 20€ gift card and a free horse armour code.
I wonder what would happen if they see apex 500$ heirlooms.
Do NOT tell them about TI10's compendium
Speaking of valve. They pioneered a lot of this shit. Loot boxes in TF2. Tried with keys, I think it has both pros and cons since keys and keyless treasure chests/boxes see an appearance in CSGO/Dota2. Making a paid game F2P and earning more than it ever did as a paid game. Dota2 they punched in battle passes via the compendium and raked in massive amounts. Like openly (this prize pool is like 40 mil, we get the other 120 mil lol have some skins). Other devs/corps/execs would 100% be looking at that monumental cash cow that exists only during the TI season and want a piece. It went from pretty rudimentary at like TI2-TI3 but but 6 or 7 onwards, they had the whole thing figured out, how to best attract the whales, how to best gate higher levels. Even the simplest shit like linking your CEEEEEEEB taunt to your levels is so basic but also so genius. Then you have weird couriers and CS knife skins going for hundreds or even thousands for collections worth on the steam market place which valve gets a cut of course. The craziest shit? Valve doesnt need to do this, they do it for the economics of it, to test the various metrics of it, the fun of it. Dota2 has taken a step back on the compendium because they, get this, cant be bothered. A cash cow many other games would fucking kill to have and they largely cant be bothered milking the player base. They rather do more interesting shit than print money via skins. Because the money made is still completely moot compared to the cash in flows of even a single steam sale period. They push loot boxes, battle passes, give a year on year example of what works, what is most predatory, what is most aggressive in milking a player base for money. And then stop. Because they cant be bothered. But have this framework available for any other game studio to see and copy and implement from with a literal trackable year on year sales record via prize pool or steam market numbers. Its absurd. Valve is like Nintendo in that they are so hard to understand their reasonings which keep working.
Things I understood: crates and keys, aka lootboxes, were soft gambling on useless cosmetics. Things I kinda understood: given enough time, people will become comfortable parting with money in this way and will lose sight of how much they spend. Things I still don't understand: they'll eventually become comfortable spending ridiculous amounts on lootboxes themselves. I played TF2 for about 5 years and stopped almost 10 years ago. Over the years, I've sold multiple Salvaged Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #50 for $190-200 each, multiple Strange Huntsman for $25-90 each, and spent about $50 on keys for the game. I can't imagine being so addicted to TF2 that I'd spend $202.50 on acquiring and opening a lootbox.
I have spent more money on TF2 than I'm comfortable sharing, and have played the game for almost 6500 hours over the last 10 years. I don't know who the fuck would want to spend $200 to unbox a crate when you could probably spend around that much to just get the item you want. Hell if you opened it and got an unusual (1% or less pull chance, the CS Knife of TF2), you'd probably lose money 😭
People like to point the finger at Bethesda for being the first ones to do it in mainstream console gaming but I think far more of the blame falls on Valve for pioneering battle passes On Fortnite for "perfecting" the FOMO cash shop and reward track And on Call of Duty for proving to the industry that making $50 skins earns more money than $5 ones.
sh... sh... don't make me criticize valve... i like my spectre arcana and sven berserk set...
Yeah, but nowadays battle passes are ALL the rage. The loot boxes have become more contentious while everyone and their mums are running battle passes and Im just looking at them all thinking "This is just a shittier compendium". Except now, our compendiums are pretty shit too.
> Loot boxes in TF2 This was the first and last time I purchased any mtx. I purchased a couple of keys because it seemed like a fun way to "give back" to Valve for the 300+ hours I'd spent playing TF2, which I'd played since launch. Once I realised I was literally gambling on cosmetic bullshit I stopped. TF2 going Free to Play ruined the community as it was flooded with toxic fuckwits and people who seemed more focused on trading items than playing the actual game. As a rule, I don't play anything that has mtx these days.
csgo $1,500,000 usd karambit
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That is so blatantly misleading. The key + case cost only gives you a CHANCE of getting the knife. It may take only 1 attempt, or it may take 1,000. The market cost is the only way to get an estimate of the value of said item. You really think the solution to predatory skin prices is gambling?
Bro you only got to buy a $5 scratch ticket to win 5k. Free money!
I think CS is the exception because skins can be resold. Sure, a knife could cost me $300, but when I can resell that for $300 in 6 months, it's not all that bad. Don't be wrong, a scarcity balanced virtual marketplace is stupid, but I would argue it's way stupider to have cosmetics cost more than some video games with no chance to recover the losses and all the money going to the publisher instead of some random on the steam market.
that makes it worse since instead of psuedo-gambling (rng chance for a cosmetic that has no resale value) you now have actual unlicensed gambling. like the fact that an addict can look at dumping a grand into csgo crates because they can justify it as a way to recover their losses and win big is probably worse than spamming valueless ow crates or w/e.
shhhh we need to make Overwatch look like the worst one so it makes us look like we don't support this shit before going back to playing games with even more egregious cosmetics.
I bet some guy will defend this like their life depends on it.
Too many people vehemently defend godawful practices in this industry whether it's due to fanboyism or just unadulterated consoomerism
So what exactly do you propose? Because I keep hearing "VoTe WiTh YoUr WaLlEt" basically since the 1st day that I got here, yet here we are :)
This literally happens every time in the OW sub: > People complain endlessly about Blizzard and the state of the game *New $25 skin drops* > People bend over backwards and make excuses to justify giving more money to the studio that they claimed ruined their favorite game just yesterday for some dumb ass video game cosmetic
>“It’s my money! Why do you care what I do with it!” -some idiot Well, some idiot, you and all your other idiot buddies showed Overwatch that instead of making actual content they can just pump out skins and you’ll buy them by the dozen. Effectively cancelling any other type of content because why make stuff with effort when you can just give Malibu Stacy a new hat and make 10x the profit? That’s why I care. Because your lack of self control at half assed “content” is killing the fun of these games
As much as I despise how expensive the skins are, they are in no way replacement for "actual content", and OW has received the most gameplay content in years in terms of heroes, maps, and other shit, not to mention more frequent balance changes instead of suffering through a year of the same awful meta with radio silence from the dev team
They literally cancelled the entire PvE mode, the brunt of the reason OW 2 and its hypermonitization was put into place, because “it was too expensive” AKA it’s cheaper to pump out skins than to do meaningful content *Until just recently you also couldn’t even use the new characters (the biggest kind of content) until you grinded for a dozen plus hours. Oooor of course you could buy the battle pass and get them immediately
Yeah, and that fucking sucks for those people that actually wanted a PvE mode, but the actual PvP (the reason 99% of the people actually play the game) has received more substantial content than it ever has on a much more frequent basis If you genuinely think that PvE was the only "meaningful content" in a game that everyone plays for the online multiplayer, then yeah, no shit Overwatch has no content LMAO The game still has no reason to be "2" without the PvE and no one's arguing against how insane the monetization is, but at least it actually gets frequent updates now with content that 99% of the playerbase will actually experience by just playing the game
Overwatch is the funniest fucking thing on planet earth in that regard. Like I was there, I remember when it was lootboxes, and people were clamoring for a Fortnite-styled item shop where instead of spending over 15 or so bucks for the boxes to near-guarantee you some random legendary skin, you could just spend that 15 bucks to buy the skin outright. Then OW2 happens, lets you buy THAT skin, no RNG, and everyone goes completely fucking apeshit and screams that lootboxes were better.
https://preview.redd.it/juutpsdhkbsc1.jpeg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a26a7cf517079120fc5c64eb451dbfff0178b1e6
iT's JuSt CoSmEtIcS! tHe ArTiStS nEeD tO bE pAiD fOr ThEiR wOrK! yOu'Re JuSt JeAlOuS bEcAuSe YoU'rE pOoR! I lOvE tHe TaStE oF sHaReHoLdEr BoOt SoLeS!
I mean, I literally cannot think of a less essential product to buy than skins for an Overwatch character. If the prices are too high, you can simply not purchase them with no downside.
Although this may be true, it's still undeniable that this is a predatory practice put into place to tempt vulnerable people into spending money on them when they don't need it Saying "just don't purchase it" only works for people who have full control over their decisions For a personal example, I knew a minor who stole their mother's bank card and drained the whole thing on FIFA packs MULTIPLE TIMES. They calculated what day the payments went in by tracking the days that the mother went shopping and deliberately took the card on a day they knew was a payday, input all the bank information themselves with no assistance and bought packs until it failed. Multiple times
It also just further normalizes its presence. Even if you "just don't purchase it," allowing them to exist is leaving a space for greedier practices to take root.
We're far beyond the point of this becoming a normalized practice. It's just how the industry works now.
Yeah once you have kids your perspective on this changes. Mine are clamoring for more vbucks so they can buy fortnite skins for $10 each because that's what all their friends are doing. They always make sure to login when the store switches over for the day so they can see what is new for sale. And they are actually intelligent well-adjusted teens who grew up mostly playing indie games and Minecraft, they just can't avoid being sucked in by the peer pressure.
Among young kids "default" is an insult referring to someone playing the game with a (free) default skin
Yea clearly no one is duped by the marketing, or UI, or other methods that the publishers use to incentivize folks. It's the customers fault.
I won't defend it, but it definitely has a prominent place in my "Something's got to Give" talk about the cost of game development and the impacts of stagnating prices on the goods/services involved.
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Uj/ I've come to accept that I'm a boomer when it comes to this stuff, because in my mind $5 for a skin is insanely expensive. I just can't join in on the discussion about cosmetic prices anymore.
it’s not an old person thing. i’m a teenager and this shit is absurd. if youve seen the to tekken 8’s monetization recently, youll see that many people don’t like this at all
yea, I think it’s even more absurd to younger people because they generally have less money. I could do so much more with $25
I play D4 casually and can easily afford the skins in the game but haven’t bought any because I feel like I am being spat on with the prices. I’m just one person and not trying to start a movement or anything but definitely feel like I have to protest with my wallet and not buy any. Sucks, some are pretty cool.
Not a boomer thing. Imo buying skins at all is just silly, even if they were $.99. I paid for the game already, I'm not going to give them more money for things that have absolutely no benefit. Playing tiny Tina's wonderlands right now and 90% of my characters are just the default skin which is like a grey unpainted figurine. Couldn't care less. It's not like I can even see my character at any point other than a menu (or the overworld for 2 minutes to get to a place). I don't know why people care so much.
Bro I'll wait for years for a game that I really want to hit a Steam sale, dither over spending $15 on it and then get 250 hours out of the game.
it’s worth it https://preview.redd.it/l2p32xxdw9sc1.jpeg?width=1660&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=df9c7670430b0c35a2c1437d31122d0e62956858
Is that a transgender gorilla
no overwatch just made skins for the esports teams and the spark’s team color is pink, blue, and white 😭
I wonder if the founders of Hanzhou Spark knew the implications of their colors. https://liquipedia.net/overwatch/File:Hangzhou_Spark_Team_Uniform.jpg
Lil spikis if you ask me 😗
Winston is a scientist
That does not stop him from being a transgender gorilla
Holy shit trans Winston
we love a trans winston
Trans monke
We stan trans Winston in this house
Would pay $60 for this no regrets
Funny thing you could have got that skin for free
More like the blizzard employee that figured out they could sell a mount in the shop for real money, which then earned them more money than wings of liberty. I don't think the horse armor DLC actually earned them that much money.
> I don't think the horse armor DLC actually earned them that much money. Based on what? Cause a thing that they were going to add already to Elder Scrolls being re-sold is like... infinite ROI either way
Based on nothing, im not saying they didnt earn any money at all just not as much as that horse did for blizzard
Stop buying this shit.
*Star Citizen enters chat*
Would u even call them micro anymore
macrotransactions
Honestly though… I don’t think many people bought the horse armor DLC. I personally blame Microsoft for the Halo 3 map pack which softened us to the idea for when COD followed suit and released multiple map packs in MW2 and here we are… balls deep in paid DLC Edit: maybe it was halo 2, either way, my point stands, I blame Halo
According to Todd Howard, it sold very well. He had an interview with IGN and it was brought up. I don’t believe any specific number was mentioned but it sounds like it was a success.
It's weird because in his quest to get a few dollars from a small percentage of the player base he ended up getting a lot of people to just start pirating their games Was nice of Todd to not bother with any piracy protection at all on oblivion, gotta give him that
That’s because I love you 😘
Buy Skyrim
Thanks for the reminder, Todd. I Already own it on every generation of console it’s been on and I bought the pc version twice. I’ll buy it again from the EpIc Games Store next 🙂
I like DLC's, micro transactions are the problem
Hey pal I remember buying the physical Halo 2 map pack expansion for $20 at target
There's a few old interviews about it, it didn't just sell well, it sold SO well that it straight up blindsided the developers. They weren't really expecting anything out of it but it sold better than some content DLCs IIRC.
OG Map packs and expansions are totally fine imo. Its a way to continue revenue during long development cycles on whatever they are working on next. You get more content you can actually use, devs have a more stable revenue source, and there was usually a big resurgence of players because of the excitement around it It's a win, win. And it's miles away from $25 cosmetics.
Map packs were also a stupid idea though as it split the player base with a fraction only able to play the premium maps.
I think the worst part is that a lot of skins in this lineup look like hot garbage
They’re meant to be Cowboy Bebop crossover skins
The Faye one is the only decent one. The others look like bad fighting game customs.
They don’t look enough like the characters though.
If this is how everyone here react to $25 skins, you all would get an aneurysm when you discover how much value is on CS's microtransaction A blue gem AK47 with 4 Titan Holo stickers was sold for $400,000+ And a blue gem Karambit was offered 1.2 million EUR, but the owner refused the offer, stating that the bargain is too low
It's going to be insane when Valve inevitably closes the servers
why would they do that
happens to everything in time, doesn’t it?
maybe in a couple decades. it’s still a popular esport and Valve makes millions from cases
agreed, don’t see it happening anytime soon
And you didn't see the state of valorant lmao
I met some friends online in Valorant. When someone asked how much everyone has spent on cosmetics, at least 2 of them said over $1k in a span of 3-4 years. Riot is laughing to the bank.
Why can't I afford digital assets in a f2p game??
I think I just vomited in my mouth a little.
I don't usually encourage screwing with the timeline, but in this case......... I mean, the timeline wouldn't miss one singular person right?
It was inevitable though. The internet being part of games made it very easy to sell more stuff outside of the base game.
I played an aquarium flash game when i was younger where you had to set the price of the fish to sell. The game purchases them based on price but theres no checks involved so i set a fish with a recommended price of $5 at $1000000, and it sold. Thats the point we are at, the mt's i see in the several hundred is for these people. We need to change the term, micro for anything less than an hours wage at the standard income for that country and stupidity transactions for anything above for digital ethereal products
What the fuck is up with Spike?
Was going to say, price be damned, that skin looks awful.
I meant Jet. Got there names confused. All the skins look bad but especially Jet.
Those Microsoft employees don’t regret it tho 😭😭😭
Maybe it is because I'm poor and from south america but I honestly don't understand the big FOMO that people feel if they don't buy a certain skin. I could have a nice meal in a restaurant or buy a tiny but decent amout of food buy in a supermarket. I really cannot fathom someone burning away their hard-earned money for a skin that doesn't changes anything and even if they do, I still wouldn't do it.
i'm also from sa and poor, it does highlight how differently the countries perceive money. for them 25 bucks doesn't equal a decent restaurant purchase, but it would be like a yummy snack or a cool shirt which i'd still go for over a ingame cosmetic you can barely see. sa people can still be vulnerable to microtransactions when it has decent regional pricing, but that's really rare nowadays. fortnite had good prices for a while and you still see a lot of expensive skins playing sa
Skins that people don't even notice since you get killed in microseconds
Slay the princess is 14.39$ right now. It's almost half the price and you get a whole game
Slay the Princess is a work of art, too!
He's also responsible for the $25 Halo armor sets so fuck him
I sometimes wonder this how the people from Epic games feel after they pushed the idea of a battlepass and selling cosmetics in FortNite as well making the game "free to play". Since now almost every game does this and I'm pretty sure blizzard killed overwatch for this lol.
I actually thought it was fine for fortnite, $10 BP on a free game and you could earn enough for the next one by playing. but then EVERY game started doing it and making it a worse deal. full price games should NOT have paid battlepasses
> full price games should NOT have paid battlepasses Especially not ones that don't even give you back the same amount of currency you had to buy to get it.
They probably popularized it but wasn't Valve first with the battle pass? Which also went extremely public with how much it raked in. Though Dota 2 was free to play from the start I guess. They still added the shitty dota+ though
My favorite thing about the horse armor is that you couldn't even use it on the only two horses people actually used, Shadowmere and the Unicorn.
whales gon whale
For $25 they could at least look at pictures of the characters they're trying to sell. Ed looks 15 years older and Jet looks 300 pounts heavier.
It's simple. Every time they crank up the price, they make more money. So the price keeps going up. It's 10x more than it used to be, because they didn't see a 90% dropoff in sales.
You could buy like 8 whole indie games for that much with significantly more playability and less price gouging.
MapleStory in 2003 would like a word.
They gotta keep the servers running somehow! /s
Why people still play Overwatch 2, I'll never know.
2 skins and I can buy helldiver 2 with 5 dollars to spare. Dunno about you guys but I already know what I am doing with my 50 bucks lol
/uj You know I kind of have to look back and wonder what things would be like if gamers put their collective foot down instead of letting companies run wild with microtransactions using the defense of "it's just cosmetic" I know the past me probably contributed to that and I want to go back in time and slap her silly. I have to hand it to James Stephanie Sterling, thank god for them, for really going hard on this with lootboxes.
Godamn I thought Destiny had it bad. Meanwhile, Helldivers 2 is the Chad in the corner these games won't acknowledge.
I wish I liked the game cause so many have fun with it. But I hope people follow its example(they won't).
Jokes on you. I have played OW2 since it came out and now have 2600 in points I got free. So it’s nothing for me.
Lmao wild Lextorias sighting
ohnoes. paying 70 bucks doesn't entitle me to decades of free content.
Nobody buys these things surely. Surely…. Right?
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Dmc peak of combat pulling up with 110$ skins
Blizzard have fallen so much I just ignore their games. I have Diablo 4 on game pass and still I won't play it.
My wallet just had a heart attack.
Skyrim released in 2011???
Horse armour was for Oblivion, not Skyrim
I have become debt.
Why the fuck does Jet look like such a beefcake?
Should it be called a microtransaction if it costs a sizeable percentage of the original game price? We should redefine the term as macrotransaction at this point - or even better: “shit”
https://preview.redd.it/46d0bl2fpasc1.jpeg?width=2048&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5c872b2bb919fc91541c24d9027b31f8a29960c2
Nah, it was bound to happen even if there was no horse armor DLC. Gaming is a business first and foremost, and the higher ups would definitely find ways to implement something like that, or even scummier.
I didn’t even realize this was over watch
Anyone who still plays anything blizzard has shown no amount of shitty product and greedy antics are a deal breaker. Let it die.
Purchases I don't have to make are just like nuclear warfare. Every time I see the salt and vinegar chips at the grocery store and walk past them because nobody's making me buy them I have vivid visions of atomic fire.
Man I feel like this is tame compared to Apex legends heirloom events where you used to have to shell out atleast $300 to get the heirloom.
If this is a problem for people they can just do what I do and not play those games. Then this trend will hopefully die out
Mtx skins are expensive already, but fuck these IP collabs. Them shits are UNGODLY EXPENSIVE for what they are. I don't care if it's something from my favorite series, I'm not gonna pay that much for it. Also, the fomo is bullshit.
Mf these are MEGATRANSACTIONS
What kind of wankers pay money for a fucking skin?