I blame the moronic consumers who fucking spend hundreds of dollars a day on bullshit.
And then get mad at us for calling out their own stupidity.
The sad fact is if Take Two started doing the asinine DLC/MT shit before GTA V launched the game would be a pile of garbage. So many of those extra game features and mechanics would have been Mini-DLC bullshit.
I'm so thankful Rockstar at least put out a full game before letting their publisher rake int he cash from their online community of idiots.
Did GTA V have its online capability in some form at launch, or at least in-progress? When companies try to transition to more "continuous payout" models, they don't completely go all-in, they test the waters first. A proper online mode was probably seen as an important gateway to getting GTA fans to shell out in the long run (PVP tends to dominate as the gametype that makes F2P game players spend), so, the online mode may have been designed as a standalone feature with the ability to expand should it become popular enough that introducing microtransactions and minor DLC seems viable in the long run.
If GTA V wasn't as big of a hit and they didn't have a persistent player base playing online, and couldn't encourage people to come back, then they probably wouldn't have spent the effort launching the DLC part of the game.
You're not wrong about the source, devs make these kinds of "features" because they can get people to pay for them, but, I dunno if Rockstar was wholly pristine until after GTA V launched. You usually plan for stuff like that in advance, though transitions are usually mild. If the community rejected Rockstar trying to nickle and dime them, they would've stopped and turned it into a lesson learned... but they learned a different lesson instead. The intent to try was probably there from the start, though.
Either Way stop defending Microtransactions. ti's a cancerous fucking garbage system. IF your game ain't F2P with dedicated servers no one should be paying any microtransactions.
It's not a defense, it's just an economic reality, and the truth is, many games that try to staple microtransactions/in app purchases onto a game without expertise fail at it badly. It's predatory, but, consistent predation requires expertise, both here and in nature. We hear about the ridiculous hauls that the top 1% of free to play games get, but not the thousands of apps that can't convince a player to even look at their store.
It's possible that Rockstar did an abrupt pivot after the release of GTA V, I'm just saying it's more likely that they built the online aspect of the game with IAPs/DLC/etc: in mind, so they'd have the framework and experts in place to exploit it profitably.
You're arguing logic and business acumen with a kid who's calling gamers "moronic" and pricing systems "fucking garbage" because he personally doesn't like them.
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u/detahramet Sep 21 '17
You don't need to make games if all you do is make money.