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Cake day: March 24th, 2022

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  • 50 dollars were console games. On PC you’d often find the same game at 30 dollars (disk) or 20 dollars (steam) on release. The difference was due to console makers taking a standard fee cut from every sale.

    The first AAA games back then to be released at 40 and 50 dollars on PC were COD MW1 and BF3, which set the trend for all other games since then. This was pure profit for the publishers, since there was no cut for console makers on PC. And before you say it, no, the Steam cut back then wasn’t even comparable (much less since it was a % cut and not a standard fee). In fact Steam hiked their cut because of the price hike triggered by EA and Activision, which is what then made EA pull their games off Steam and create Origin.


  • The budget is also a marketing ploy. The average person hears about a game costing hundreds of millions to make and they think “well then, it MUST be good”. It’s more or a pissing contest among publishers. Most of that budget does indeed go to marketing and executive wages/bonuses.

    And from the publisher’s perspectives, that’s really a good investment of the budget, because it doesn’t just drive up sales. It also cultivates customer loyalty and fanboyism (e.g. “we are spending all that money because we believe in the game, and we want to give our loyal fans the best experience possible” is a very common line in pre-release interviews).

    For example, there’s a false equivalency among gamers, propagated by this kind of propaganda: “I have to pay the high prices and engage in microtransactions/DLC, because that supports the game developers and their high budgets”. In reality, the people who actually make the game see very little of that money. Their wages, in most instances, are shit and do not reflect the hours they put in. However, gamers rarely want to understand that, and instead extend the publisher pissing contest among themselves (“the game I’m playing now spent more money than the game you are playing, therefore it’s the superior product”).


  • Spencer’s analysis is just an overview of the current symptom.

    This is the real disease:

    because it sees a new platform it can scale to feed the financial growth demanded by investors.

    Investors/shareholders demand infinite growth, but there’s finite space to grow (millions of games, few customers). This is why, in the past 2 decades we’ve been seeing the scummiest of practices being employed again and again, as well as a 300% hike in base prices. Capitalism has eaten gaming.

    But we’ve been observing this trend in AAA and AA publishers/developers mostly. Indie gaming is alive and well and evolving towards being better and better. Why? Because indie developers are not usually beholden to investors.

    Once you hear a gaming company you used to like has gone public, say your condolences and then run away.












  • The US is sanctioning 1/3 of the world’s population. Sanctions have murderous results on innocent people in an effort to swing public opinion in favor of more pro-US policies from countries. Their consequences have been described as worse than war for some countries. They are the equivalent of siege warfare: starving out a population of a country until it does what you want.

    It’s good that Latin American countries finally refuse to go along with this, especially as some of them have been targets of these very same sanctions before.



  • Depends who you ask. If you ask a Marxist, they’ll tell you that in an electoral system where elections are largely determined by who has the most money in order to reach the most ears, is not really a democracy.

    A democracy would be a system that gives you the right to actually and directly influence specific policy through voting (e.g. through referrenda), and direct control over representatives (e.g. ability to recall them if they are not doing their jobs).

    In Norway and Germany (to use your examples) people might enjoy a lot of personal freedoms and a high standard of living, but both domestic and foreign policy is still functionally determined by corporations and the rich elite.

    The economic system of capitalism makes it so governments realistically care more about the interests of business, rather than the interests of the citizens. And that’s an oligarchy. It’s just that some countries are better able to pacify their populace because they happen to have the resources to do so. But we still see that in Norway and Germany (and any other traditionally-regarded “good democracy”) the social welfare systems, that make them such appealing examples, are systematically diminished and destroyed. I do not think it’s the citizens who demand that.

    All this, without getting into the fact that we spend 1/3 of our lives in a feudal-like or dictatorial system we call “job”, where we hardly have the power to influence how it operates.