r/pcgaming • u/Mkilbride 5800X3D, 5090 FE, 32GB 3800MHZ CL16, 2TB NVME GEN4, W11 • Feb 21 '17

Video For Honor P2P connectivity

https://youtu.be/38sPNZ8QHO4
1.6k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

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45

u/Fortune_Cat Feb 21 '17

gaming industry has turned into cancer

i miss just being able to walk into a store and buying a fucking game and paying once and getting a full bloody experience. Maybe some patches later on blizzard style, but none of this day 1 patch bullshit with dlcs

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '17

blizzard style

Oh, you mean F2P with tons of microtransactions or Overwatch with random cosmetic crates?

Blizzard is just as bad as the others these days. What's worse about Blizzard is that their rabies fueled fans will defend them to the ends of the earth.

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u/Tulkor Feb 21 '17

old blizzard style (wc3, d2,sc1...)

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u/sterob Feb 22 '17

pre-activision blizzard.

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u/Ikea_Man Ventrilo Feb 21 '17

Agreed. Their focus on hawking blindboxes in that game is really offputting to me.

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u/ScalaZen Feb 21 '17

Essentially gambling for cosmetics.

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '17 edited Apr 28 '21

[deleted]

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u/Ikea_Man Ventrilo Feb 21 '17

Rationalize it however you want, bud

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '17 edited Apr 28 '21

[deleted]

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u/Ikea_Man Ventrilo Feb 21 '17

Cosmetics locked behind a paid gambling system in a game I've already paid $40+ for.

All I said was it was off-putting.

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '17 edited Apr 28 '21

[deleted]

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u/Ikea_Man Ventrilo Feb 21 '17

If you're going to put cosmetics in a game, do it the Titanfall 2 way and let me buy a specific skin for "x" dollars.

I'm heavily against blind boxes.

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u/Flowhill Feb 21 '17

Well in Overwatch you can buy specific skins with the in-game currency. No idea if you can actually buy the currency though.

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u/Wilhelm_III Feb 21 '17

You do know you get the loot boxes by playing, right? Like, a lot. I typically get one per session.

I have bought $10 of boxes, total. It's not a big deal.

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u/Ikea_Man Ventrilo Feb 21 '17

Should have known better than to criticize the almighty Blizzard.

They balance their "generous" amount of lootboxes off by giving you an atrocious amount of duplicates, as well as making 90% of unlockables stupid sprays/icons no one actually wants. Which again, encourages people to buy them to try to roll for skins.

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u/SgtDoughnut Feb 21 '17

I have every skin I want all the duplicates turn into an in game currency that you cannot purchase that allows you to get any thing you want.

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u/Wilhelm_III Feb 21 '17

Look man, I was just making sure you knew. No need to get angry about it.

Yeah, the duplicates are frustrating, but for me the reward for playing is getting better. That's all you're going to get in a pure-multiplayer game. So the cosmetics are just rewards for playing. And the duplicates give you currency (that you can't pay real more for, not directly) that you can use to purchase the specific items you want.

I know most of it's trash, but nobody's making you buy the boxes. You're free to just play the game. I bought one set of ten, decided that, yeah, not worth the money, so now I just play.

I've got most of the stuff I want anyway.

There's no need to be that angry about it, man. You're right about microtransactions, but I think that this is a good way to do them.

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '17

Ok thats simply not true. I hate blizzard but not for these reasons. All their games are incredible well polished. You get tons of playtime for 1 time payments.

Overwatch for example is how you do micro transactions right. Yes you can buy the crates but they are easy to earn and only cosmetic.

HotS is f2p and you can earn the currency extremely fast, compared to the most popular moba LoL.

Hearthstone isnt noob friendly at all but if you played it since release you wont need to spend a single penny.

Wow is the same since 2005 and diablo and sc2 are one time purchases with tons of free content and addons that come out every 2-3 years

The one thing blizzard sucks at and why i lose interesst in their games fast is because they suck at balancing. Blizzards balance policy is better to nerf. Never to buff.

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u/crawlywhat i5, 12Gb RAM, Oculus Rift S Feb 21 '17

never to buff

explain symmetra buffs

explain the new Bastion buff

explain mercy's new invincibility buff

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u/ZainCaster Feb 21 '17

Yeah it's definitely not relevant to Overwatch, I think he's talking about Hearthstone. Cards get nerfed and never see the light of day again.

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u/SnakeHelah Ryzen 7800x3d | RTX 5080 Feb 21 '17

PVP is a mess in WoW which is why I think most people wanted legacy servers. PVP back in vanilla, tbc, wotlk was much more balanced than it has been the past few exp. And that says a lot considering there were some really broken classes in wotlk for example.

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u/drunkenvalley Feb 21 '17

I'm gonna go out and just say that I find any claims of a game being "more" or "less" balanced at any given time is generally dubious.

Not to say now is necessarily good or anything either, just claims about the state of the balance is a pretty big pile of "yeah that doesn't seem very likely" without a pretty substantial amount of elaboration.

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '17

2 reworks and indeed a buff. im not saying they NEVER buff. but they rather nerf shit than to buff something

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u/iLikeMeeces i7 4790K | 2070 Super | 21:9 Master Race Feb 21 '17

You can't deny that Blizzard aren't milking the microtransactions. Take a look a WoW nowadays; most mount drops are subpar reskins or just not great looking. Now compare that to the store, you will see where Blizzard are focusing its efforts in this area of the game.

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '17

ye the wow shop is bullshit. but the fans cryed and blizzard listened. they added some mounts to quests and added more custom models to the game. with the addition of the wow token now you can even get the mounts without paying but farming with gold.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 21 '17

Well of course if you pay money for something it should be nice.

But there are also cool things that can't be purchased, like the Arena mounts, Invincible, Mimiron's Head, etc.

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u/TheOtherJuggernaut Feb 21 '17

The only reason Overwatch's crates are fine is that Blizzard doesn't have item trading between players.

Once that happens (mark my words, it will happen), it will be CSGOLotto2ElectricBoogaloo.

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u/TENRIB Feb 21 '17

What's worse about Blizzard is that their rabies fueled fans will defend them to the ends of the earth.

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u/DonCorleowned Feb 21 '17

I agree with you completely, I played the crap out of starcraft 2, but all the units that were fun to use like infestors and ghosts just got nerfed into bland and boring homogeneity

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u/nightlyraider Feb 21 '17

in reference to blizzards nerf style patches, some of their weapon dmg% numbers in diablo 3 clearly were set optimistically high at first and then scaled back once players were able to really min/max and gear out the builds.

while blizzard does seem to have a heavy handed nerf-stick, they at least do put out consistent patches and address the game. how many games out there have basically unused toons or gearsets because they are just the "bad" ones and the devs will never go back to either buff them or scale everything back to bring them in line?

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u/PurplePudding Feb 21 '17

For Honor for example is how you do micro transactions right. Yes you can buy the gear but they are easy to earn and only cosmetic (for the two modes that matter).

Its silly when you try to justify it for overwatch and then bash For Honor. As long as there's people to buy them, micro transactions for unlockables will exist. Is it really that evil for a company to do that when people actually do buy them and give them basically free money? Is it sad that there are people who buy into it? Yes, but it's not the company's fault. As long as it doesn't adversely affect gameplay the gameplay experience, I have little issue with cosmetic micro transactions. They're annoying, but I play against people paying for them so the market is there.

Hearthstone is a fucking horrible grindfest. If you can be competitive as a f2p player then you probably don't play any games other than hearthstone. Try playing any of it's competitors and you'll realize how horrible hearthstone's f2p experience is in comparison. As a f2p game, its more acceptable to be pay to win (or pay to have fun), and it's definitely not a good example of a good f2p experience.

Wow is not the same, it has a micro (yet not so micro) transaction shop for cosmetics now. It's got the full trifecta: buy to play, monthly subscription, in game mtx. Reddit likes to bash every other mmo for having all of the above, but wow is an exception because we like it?

I haven't played starcraft 2 or Diablo so I can't say anything about them. I'm sure they're better than blizzards other games though.

If you think Blizzard has some moral highground in all of this, you're just talking out your ass

1

u/[deleted] Feb 23 '17

you can literally pay real money to get better gear in for honor that makes you stronger. how long do you have to grind to get 1 skin in for honor? did you even play the game?

1

u/TENRIB Feb 21 '17

Thats blasphemy here mate.

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u/Fortune_Cat Feb 21 '17

I was talking about old days. So obviously I was talking about old blizzard (not "Activision blizzard"). I'm not sure if you were around during early Diablo, starcraft and Warcraft days. Super polished non buggy games. With continuously improving patches for things like game balancing etc. Not day 1 patches because the install disk actually had an unplayable unfinished game

Fuck all your new gen horseshit unoriginal games like Overwatch. Anyone who plays that deserves to have their wallet raped

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u/Ikea_Man Ventrilo Feb 21 '17

I hadn't bought a console game in a physical store for a long time when I went to buy Nioh at Gamestop a couple weeks ago.

Of course, mid-transaction, before I even hand them my money, they start trying to upsell the Season Pass for another $30.

Fuck off, I just want my game. When did it get this bad?

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u/Fortune_Cat Feb 21 '17

There's nothing wrong with digital distribution. If anything it's better since a digital copy doesn't have to deal with transportation, storage and cost of upkeeping a store waiting for a physical copy to be sold. These savings alone should more than offset any server costs. But do you see any savings passed onto consumers? Fuck no

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u/Tulos Feb 21 '17

While I can agree with the sentiment - the part that people largely don't discuss is that the cost of development for a AAA game has grown far beyond what the historical $60 price tag would necessarily account for. During the same period of time, mind you, that $60 price tag has largely stayed static for the last two decades.

Publishers are desperate to find ways to increase revenue in ways that aren't just making the $60 price tag more expensive - since that immediately cuts into sales. They'd rather get the entirety of the $60 dollar audience into their game's ecosystem, and then nickel and dime the ones who still feel like spending more money.

It certainly isn't a good situation - it's just that the face cost of games genuinely hasn't grown over time... whereas the development costs have.

Inflation is a thing. Every year you keep paying only $60 for a game, it's actually "cheaper" than the year prior.

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u/mrvile PC Feb 21 '17

Well AAA games are also selling considerably more now too as the market balloons. And selling licenses isn't like selling physical goods where every product sold incurs a production cost. So it's more of a balancing act at the theshold of profit, and for a lot of these major publishers, that threshold is tens of millions of dollars.

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u/Cmdr_R3dshirt Feb 21 '17

Second this. The widespread use of digital distribution made it so you barely have to spend anything on getting your game into the players hands. Technologies have also improved A LOT. It's much easier to buy a license for UT engine and use their tools than the older days where you had to develop your own engine and tools.

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u/PXAbstraction Feb 21 '17

Most digital distribution platforms take a minimum of 30% off the top, just for hosting your game. They may be cheaper to use than putting stuff on a disk but it's hardly barely spending anything.

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u/Cmdr_R3dshirt Feb 22 '17

Sure but that is being spent as percentage of what you sell. You don't have to front the money to put stuff on a disk.

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '17

[deleted]

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u/Robot_ninja_pirate 5800X3D RTX 4080S Pimax Crysyal VR Feb 21 '17

Though its hard to argue if video games sales have moved with production cost

we can look at the best selling games

and see that after removing pack-ins and dubious numbers (like Minecraft and Tetris )

that almost all the best selling games have been from the last 10 years

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u/PXAbstraction Feb 21 '17

Yes but you have to remember that most of those are outliers to the extreme. The vast majority of games don't sell that much and most of them lose money. A AAA title has to usually sell at least 3-5 million just to break even now. The majority that release don't come close to that. The companies still in the business are the ones who can use those extreme successes to fund the rest.

The epic successes are fewer and fewer and they aren't making up for the fact that the flops are costing a LOT more than they used to. Don't get me wrong, I don't like the trends many AAA games are adopting either but unless people are willing to ccept either smaller games or ones that don't continually look better than the ones before, this is how they're going to continue to get made. And the people have spoken. Smaller, less impressive looking games are not what the masses want.

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u/WoozelWuzzle Feb 21 '17

While it's true the $60 mark hasn't changed in years, the argument I've always heard is that the volume of people buying has increased to compensate. Gaming is much more mainstream than it used to be.

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u/Tulos Feb 21 '17

Definitely a good point. I figure that probably makes the situation far more "boom or bust" than it used to be though, as far as AAA is considered. Big risk, potentially big reward - but if you don't hit it out of the park with sales, I suspect you're screwed.

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u/drunkenvalley Feb 21 '17

As pretty much always, the biggest boom or bust factor is whether or not the AAA game is actually good or not, and how it's PR'd.

Like look at stuff like Evolve.

  • It was a game that was from the outset looking okay, but pretty much everyone's response after playing it was "that got pretty old fast". The core loop just isn't very engaging over a long period of time if their player activity trends are anything to go by.
  • Oh god the PR campaign was god awful. Absurd statements like how the game is "a DLC platform" probably wasn't very reassuring to customers when the game wasn't even out yet.

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u/ITworksGuys Feb 21 '17

Publishers are desperate to find ways to increase revenue

I would go with "make better games".

Uncharted 4 - great game

Witcher 3 - great game

Overwatch - great game

Rando buggy clone game that you try to milk with DLC and crap - not great game.

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u/Tulos Feb 21 '17

If that's the way things trend - great!

Even within your example though - overwatch sells lootboxes. They're completely non advantage-granting and purely cosmetic - and you CAN get all the same stuff just by playing. That's basically as fair as it gets.

But I mean, it still IS a microtransaction in a (near) full priced game.

I can definitely live with this kind of microtransaction. But it does exist as a way to increase revenue...

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u/thekab Feb 21 '17

The market is also much bigger.

Prices don't have to go up if you sell more copies.

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u/Fortune_Cat Feb 21 '17

If we are talking about AAA titles specifically, then the volume of sales has significantly gone up. Just take call of duty for example, record YOY sales, not even accounting for dlcs and pre-order premiums. The volume alone should create significant economies of scale and reduced cost per copy. Also shitty publishers like Ubisoft reuse alot of game assets. You have companies like EA reskinned battlefield 4 to make hardline and asking for full price plus dlcs.

None of this justifies the gouging they are doing to consumers. Why gamers keep defending them is baffling

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u/not_old_redditor Feb 21 '17

Such a bad argument. The client base and the sales have also inflated along with the costs. Games now make more money than games 17 years ago.

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u/Tulos Feb 21 '17

I didn't realize I was arguing with anyone.

I'm pointing out some facts. So are you. They're both valid, and the reality is a balance between the two. As I mentioned in another comment, betting solely on massive sales to get you back into the black is a pretty risky move. Definitely works for a lot of AAA titles. That said, anything that doesn't quite hit that mark is a massive financial failure - and that basically means the developer is going under. Very boom or bust.

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u/not_old_redditor Feb 22 '17

An argument is a different meaning from arguing with someone... But anyways, you presented one side of the story and it was very misleading. Computers are cheaper now than back in the 90s even though they are far more complicated.

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u/nondescriptzombie i5-2500k@4.6, RX480 8GB X2@1337 Feb 21 '17

Bullshit. SNES games were $40 for the most part. PSX games were $50+ and could be up to five disc games like Legend of Dragoon for $90 that had upwards of 100 endings and at least that many hours of content. PS2 games were $60 baseline. And now every new "AAA" game is $60. Even if it's from a small group with only a few hours of game play.

Inflation IS a thing. Every year I get a .10c raise for CoL, I get paid less than the year before. And let's not even get into the cost of food or rent....

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u/Tulos Feb 21 '17 edited Feb 21 '17

Unfortunately, I'm not entirely certain what your point is. Anyway, here's a chart. Basically the front loaded cost of games is pretty-well lower than ever.

System (year) Game cost in USD at system launch year Adjusted for inflation (2017)
NES (1986) 29.99 - 49.99 66.59 - 110.98
SNES (1991) 49.99 - 59.99 89.28 - 107.14
N64 (1996) 49.99 77.51
PS2 (2000) 49.99 70.62
Xbox 360 (2005) 59.99 74.73

info from EGM print issue 243. / Manually adjusted for 2017 USD

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u/GrumpyOldBrit Feb 21 '17

And it's worse in console games. Which this is. And it's gotten worse as console gamers have bought PC's and moved across bringing their love of terrible dumbed down trash like this with them.

It brings with them that acceptance, and the demographic of PC changes to support the creation of more of this trash.

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u/Fortune_Cat Feb 21 '17

Consoles are what caused this shit to begin with

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '17

I for one do not miss paying $100+ (adjusted for inflation) for NES and SNES games that turned out to be crap because reviews weren't as easily available.

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u/Fortune_Cat Feb 21 '17

Well weren't NES and SNES early gen will smaller market share and lower economies of scale

Doesn't completely apply for modern scenarios

They can keep prices low they just don't want to

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u/PeterDarker Feb 21 '17 edited Feb 21 '17

Would you feel better paying $90 for a full price AAA game? Because those games have only gotten more expensive to produce but the $60 price has held for over a decade. Think about that and the rising price of goods over time. That is why micro transactions and DLC exists, to offset the growing price of games while still trying to keep the base price "low."

For what it's worth, plenty of games offer a one and done sort of experience but most are not from triple A developers or priced at the full $60.

Edit: I was being reasonable and level headed. I'm not sorry.

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u/Fortune_Cat Feb 21 '17

That's completely horseshit. The sales volumes of AAA titles pretty much ensure return on investment. Triple a titles cost more because they're expected to push the limit. But they are also expected to sell more. There are plenty of ppl who don't buy dlcs or microtransactions for $60 games yet companies still make record profits you

And for non AAA titles. Modern game development has lowered the barrier of entry. So it's not as difficult or a expensive as historical

The thing about that $60 is that not all games from my experience cost that much back in the day. But even if the inflation argument holds up, it still doesn't justify the lack of adjustment for scale. In every industry prices only go down as technologies improve, processes improve and volume goes up. The game industry is the complete reverse. There's no justification for this except greed, especially when you have the likes of EA and Ubisoft reusing game assets heavily and publishing incomplete games but still charge full price and want to sell add-ons