Enshittification infects all.
I think we can stop this one at least
E: word
This is what I thought when micro transactions in paid games started around 10 years ago. I was wrong.
Ubi will pull the classic pretwnt it was an accident, then in two years slowly roll it out. People will kick and scream, but still buy their shit. Then it’ll become normalized and slowly get worse. Next gen of kids growing up used to this won’t know what the big deal is when we complain.
Same cycle over and over with all kinds of stuff over the past 20 years.
Fair AAA will always have a core demo who don’t care as long as their addiction is fed, but I think the fuss we raise should at least keep it out of the majority of games, and make people implementing it feel kind of scummy, so that’s something.
Like MTX are relegated to a very specific “type” of game which is instantly identifiable, and not that well regarded compared to more, uh, pure (?) games.
Summed up: ads and dark patterns will always work on a certain segment of the population, but they don’t necessarily get to be seen as normal or cool.
Gamers continue to tell these companies that they’ll put up with anything while complaining online and continuing to purchase shitty games from shitty companies. Rinse and repeat.
This is 90% on consumers. Stop buying shit if you want change and I mean in any industry.
this is what companies want you to think. it’s like expecting drivers to be sensible so that we can reduce deaths from traffic accidents. it’s not a solution. we have traffic lights, seat belts, all sorts of security systems and regulations on car manufacturers (though not nearly enough).
consumer protection doesn’t happen by telling everyone to be sensible. regulation is needed.
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where did you get “don’t go outside” from?
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neither statement is true. we just talked about this.
And how are you going to convince, let’s see, something like 130 million people to just go along with that plan?
Do you actually want change or are you just bitching?
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And how do we get that, bud?
One congressperson at a time.
Hahahahahahahaha hahahahahah…
You got a better alternative, than pulling down your pants and bending over?
You think voting in a system built to keep those in power and those like the ones in power isn’t functioning exactly as intended? Are you 12? Grow up.
Are you 12? Grow up.
Noticed you’re not answering the question…
You got a better alternative, than pulling down your pants and bending over?
though not nearly enough)
Yes…there’s enough. There’s a reason a new car costs 30k. We don’t need radar, adaptive cruise, and fucking front facing cameras (yes, thats a real thing) standard.
I just want a heavy duty roll cage, a 200cc engine, and seat belts. All for 2k.
(The car safety standards are a sore point for me)
Gamers as a population really have to stop FOMO’ing into the newest games because their friends do.
Even if it’s blatantly obvious it’s going to be or is a bad game people still buy them because of the network effect.
90% on consumers? I don’t know I’d go that far… If a company is evil but provides a service people still desire, that doesn’t make the evil company being evil the fault of the consumers. Like saying gun control in America is resisted primarily by its citizens when we are well aware that company lobbying is mostly at fault and most citizens are actually for some amount of gun control.
Anyone who supports a company knowing how they conduct their business causes harm etc, is complicit. Once that information is learned a choice has to be made.
That only works if there’s meaningful competition. With megabrands like Nestle who make 1/4 of the grocery store, or game publishers like Ubisoft who receive 1/4 of the industry’s revenue any kind of boycott is dead before it begins.
In a society with a functioning government, megabrands who abuse their neighbors and/or customers would be hit with significant fines and be heavily regulated out of the bad behaviors, but the US hadn’t had a government interested in helping the common person for over half a century
I don’t disagree. I disagree with the idea that it’s 90% the fault of the consumer.
How is it not? We’re all to blame.
The consumer is 90% to blame for the actions of an international corporation who have analyzed and manipulated their target demographic? If it were a relationship you’d be victim blaming. If I hit you for being stupid, is it your fault because you were stupid or is it my fault for thinking hitting you was a solution?
Oh geeze… Ok, bud. You’re right. You’re the smartest. Nice work.
Way to shoehorn your opinions on gun control into a thread about forced ads in video games. If we ask nicely, will you share your thoughts about Trump as well?
He’s a cunt
he’s a cunt.
Weird how I said nothing about my personal opinion on gun control and only said that the primary force stopping gun control was arms lobbying.
The death of the sun will arrive before gamers actually do a boycott that is successful, because boycotts (especially for popular franchises or products) don’t work. If you rally up 10,000 people for a boycott, it’s less than 1% of sales AAA studios get and 70% of the boycotters are still going to buy the game regardless.
No change is going to happen ever, so the best thing to do is to start ignoring the AAA gaming industry altogether on a personal level.
A boycott only works if there’s meaningful alternatives. When one publisher effectively owns an entire genre of games. Expecting consumers to boycott is exactly what the big publishers want because it’s inneffective, what the publishers don’t want is for regulators to start paying attention
Stop buying shit if you want change and I mean in any industry.
so we should boycott every industry out there?
yes
I mean, do you want things to change or do you just want to complain?
They said nothing about boycotting the industry. Buy games from good companies and good indie devs, that’s not a boycott.
Voting with your wallet doesn’t work. Nobody will call you to ask why you didn’t buy a product, and marketing will just come up with a bogus reason on why sales are poor.
Talking about it on social media helps a lot more.
You can do both you know.
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Guess who doesn’t have to login to a Rockstar account? That’s right, pirates.
Pirating games isn’t nearly as attractive as other media. Big studio Games are usually released in a broken state and pirate sources rarely keep titles updated.
This happens mostly with less popular games. Stuff like GTA, Call of Duty, RDR, Starfield, etc, stays up to date in pirate sites.
Mostly a paradox issue, and they already admitted it’s intentional:
“What we want to do is provide people who bought the game legally a better service. With frequent updates; good and convenient services; that’s how we fight piracy,” he said. “I hope it works. I keep my fingers crossed.”
The forced rockstar account is 100% of the reason I refunded GTAV without ever playing it, and it’s the reason I wont ever get RDR2.
Rdr2 sucks anyway, it’s the Avatar of videogames.
What sucks about the game? Having to use the Rockstar launcher is a pain but imo the game is brilliant.
The whole game is a confusing mess.
Fundamentally, the game acts like it’s a huge open world game where you live a cowboy, but in reality the whole thing funnels you into a boring and annoying story.
Hours of tutorials on all the things you can do in the game, but while you’re playing you can’t be bothered to sit through the same skinning, cooking, hunting, tracking crap over and over when baked beans do the job better.
This pretty much sums the whole game up, you have so much money from the first storyline bank job, you never need to do a single side quest and all the features are repetitive busy work so they’re not worth doing on their own merit.
The morality system is pointless when the character’s arc is completely set by the story other than the last 1 decision which makes any difference at all.
Nothing in the game is difficult, so just using the same tactics of revolver or rifle solves literally everything. Or the pre mentioned baked beans if you actually need a heal at any point.
The whole thing feels like too many ideas that don’t work together.
To each their own. Thanks for the detailed response!
Honestly, I think the bank job at the beginning of the game as part of the story being removed could fix a lot. Nothing makes sense when the plot revolves around making more money and you have so much you never have to worry about it. I thought I accidentally found an exploit or something.
But there’s so many strange ideas. Like you reach st. Denis and are able to buy fancy clothes, but your character looks like shit at this point which ruins the whole thing. Who thought that was a good idea?
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How much fucking money do they need?
all the money. literally nothing less than all the money in the entire world is enough.
And even then, they’ll want more. That’s capitalism
Yep. For that you need a finance industry, so you can get people to give you money they haven’t even earned yet. The important thing is you don’t stop spending or else the whole thing collapses
Most video game companies, or at least the huge ones, are all paying a negative tax rate.
They’re a publicly traded company – stock price has to go up.
So more. Always more.
As much as we let them keep making.
I wonder if adguard for desktop or portmaster would be helpful for this issue. I can’t get portmaster to work on my system, mostly because some of its processes require the execution of BAT files, my antivirus will block those.
It’s not how much. It’s how much more. They expect and require infinite growth.
Ah, my hard line stance of “never buy anything ubisoft” is still working out for me.
I would a very happy person if most things in this World that reliably make one feel as “I’m doing the right thing” and frequently make one “Give oneself a pat on the back” required so little expense, time and effort as “never buy anything from Ubisoft”.
It’s like winning the “well done dude” lotery once every couple of months without spending a cent.
Ubisoft, epic, ea, Blizzard/Activision…
I wont say Bethesda because I’m hoping for another Doom or Quake.
_EA is the fucking devil. They bought my favorite game, Ultima Online, and ruined it. _
Ah, my hardline stance of “don’t buy profitable products you can get for free” is still working out for me.
And this is why retro games and open source games make up the bulk of my gaming experience
Please share some of your favorites!
Bro, I don’t entirely disagree with this sentiment but I would argue that open source isn’t always great despite how anyone feels about it. Unless you are categorizing open source with indie games. In my experience open source games are typically not great in the slightest at all. However, I agree with this sentiment if open source is being referenced to indie games. A game doesn’t really have to be FOSS to be great.
The issue isn’t really games like Assassin’s Creed either the issue is big companies. Assassin’s Creed isn’t my game but I hear the newer ones are good. Assassin’s Creed wouldn’t need to be open source to be good.
In my experience open source games are typically not great in the slightest at all.
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is probably the most-sophisticated zombie survival game I’m aware of, albeit not graphically beautiful.
You can literally be a drug addict tweaking your way through the Apocalypse!
I love my Armored Core and Baldur’s Gate for obvious reasons, but there are some absolute gems in the FOSS scene too (And I’m not even gonna mention all the indie stuff) like Mindustry, Xonotic, Zero-K, Shattered Pixel Dungeon, Unciv just off the top of my head.
Even though alot of them are just rehash of older titles or abandoned projects but even those are improved far beyond their original iteration. What I actually find problematic with FOSS games are stuff like low player count leading to a poor multiplayer experience and most games being very old school-ish (Xonotic is literally an arena shooter made on basically the Quake engine 🤷)
Down voted for not kissing OSS ass
Forza Horizon 4 did this but worse. It would be an unskippable 2 minute video ad ignoring your volume settings. It only played 5 times in my 45 hours of gameplay but it was so damn unacceptable that it’s reminding me to give that game a negative review.
Forza Horizon 5 does not do this. Get that game or something else instead.
Gamers continue to buy the games by publishers that do this and will continue to put up with it as they slowly boil like frogs.
It’s difficult to fight the slow conditioning that started with horse armor and Farmville. There’s no escaping it until we replace capitalism with something better.
The problem with the boiling frog metaphor is they would only stay in the water after being lobotomized.
Actually that makes perfect sense, carry on.
They are doing fucking what?!
What did you expect from a company whose logo is a turd seen from above!
Take it back…call it defective. Fuck that shit, I don’t care how good the game is, they’re not getting my money ever again.
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I don’t mind a little ad in the menu, about stuff directly related to game I’m playing. Those little “Hey we released a new content dlc to this exact game” infos can actually be informative. What I really can’t stand is stuff breaking the immersion of the game. I’m not even mad about product placements, when they fit the theme and are sparsely used.
Baldur’s Gate 3 was probably the best game of this year (?), but it has an advert for the DLC as soon as you launch it
However, it’s also probably one of the least-bad “triple A” games of this year when it comes to overall monetisation, that singular DLC of cosmetics and the soundtrack being the only one available
Unfortunately, I think this one is a losing battle
Advertising dlc is ok in my opinion, it’s for the product you’re using and not everyone checks for new dlc
I was going to ask where the ad was, but I forgot that I turned off the launcher specifically because of that. I have no idea about PS but you can add the following on PC to skip the lau8
--skip-launcherYeah, you absolutely can, but knowing to do that means that the advert has already delivered its message to you.
Futzing around with the launcher settings seems like more work than just clicking “no” on an advert that pops up.
You’re right, once. But adding that one time means I never have to see the launcher again. Clicking no means extra launch time and looking at it every time I launch the game.
But different strokes for different folks. If it’s not worth it to you then that’s cool. It was worth it for me and I thought I’d drop that for anyone else who may want it.
I have the same launcher settings set, so I mean I kind of agree? But you’ve seen the advert, and that’s basically all they want.
I just think it’s kind of weird how people react to things once they’ve filtered their thinking through the hivemind of the internet versus before.
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I mean I guess Divinity never had ads unless you consider the launcher an advert for their other titles, given that that’s basically what it’s there to do?
If you don’t consider anything in launchers to be adverts then I guess you can play BG3, because that’s where the advert for the DLC lives?
I really feel like if Larian had only given you the soundtrack and not the cosmetics, and just not called it DLC, that people really wouldn’t be so up in arms about it.
Sony didn’t have both versions readily available in the Playstation Store. While I did eventually purchase the DLC (which is the deluxe version, not a typical DLC), I’ll be damned that Sony didn’t make it easy to find the OG version in the store.
And I put that on Sony, not the game publisher. Regardless, BG3 has been a breath of fresh air to gaming this year. About time a studio put out a full game without divvying it up into expansions and DLCs.
I agree that BG3 is a great diversion from the usual. My point is kind of that if you’re a purist about this, you’re missing out on it, even though on the whole it bucks the trend.
That’s enough for me to never buy any of their games ever again.
Remember when they said that if we pay for the product, we dont get ads? :)
When piracy becomes more convenient to actually play the game sail those ships boys
It won’t be long for publishers to offer cloud gaming platform only exclusive titles.
And it won’t be long after that until these are cracked too. The ol’ cat and mouse game.
Cloud gaming environments are controlled and monitored. It’s basically a TeamViewer for you to game on a restricted host. You can’t just copy the binaries to your computer. You need to actually hack it and exfil the data, which is illegal btw. This will be very hard, except some stupid *** misconfigure the server.
It’s not just piracy, it’s archiving. How these games going to be played in centuries from now? It’s called the “digital darkage” and we’re living in it.
DRM and locking to cloud servers is like trying to assigning things to being lost to the future.
It would take a lot more for them to steal a game that has no public executables though, like they would need some proper hacking or corporate espionage
There’s a cracked Diablo 4 available and it’s “online only”. There are still bugs they’re working on but as far as I know it’s fully playable from start to finish.
That’s different, it’s not a game hosted elsewhere that you connect to via streaming. You download diablo 4, you have the game available to crack.
Yes it will.
Enraged gamer #40,679, can confirm.
I’m mildly perturbed at best, where’s our headline.
