Loot Boxes are Gambling - Get fucked EA

[Thunder]

Assuming the digital model is at least competitive in terms of profitability with physical media I don't see why the cost would become any more problematic when scaled up.

I imagine scaling up a digital service would lead it to become more efficient over time rather than less but I'm just making assumptions there.

First off, I'm just making assumptions here as well. The rate at which tech is cheaper over time, computer power increasing, rate at which games grow, blah blah blah all would illuminate the convo much more if we had hard facts behind those things

but for the sake of the imagination, its cost could be more problematic when the size of the digital service is scaled up because the rate of scaling up could exceed the rate that the technology improves and cheapens itself. Like, in 2017 my Game 1 uses 2000 units where each unit is 2$ but 18 months later when I come out with the sequel, Game 2, which uses 5000 units but the cost of each unit has gone down to 1$... but my total cost of housing that game due to.. servers/bandwidth/hellidk has gone up, net. Right?

edit: don't think it's that far-fetched of an assumption to make, either.. there was definitely a stretch of time where most games became two disc installs or disc 1 for x amount of time and disc 2 for the rest, right? So for sure the rate of what was needed to be put on the discs exceeded the rate that we developed larger-storing discs?

[Niiro]

I'm not clear on what you mean by "units" here.

If you mean that the demand on the servers goes up with the sequel that would be because you're selling more games which would justify the increased spending on servers.

[Aerin]

Some numbers for those that may be interested.

Why Gears Of War Costs $60 (Forbes 2006, back when there was a jump in price from $50 to $60)

Anatomy of a $60 video game (LA Times 2010)

Video Game Prices: Why Games Are $60, Where Your Money Goes, & Who Benefits Most (2015)

Gamasutra Game Developer Salary Survey 2014

Video Game Programmer Salary for 2017

[Ksandra]

Video Game Programmer Salary for 2017

Technical Director3 $96,000 $250,000

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA ;_; *cries*


(That's what hubby does and doesn't even make it close to the low end figure.)

I think those numbers are way off for a few reasons. 1. There are non-gaming jobs with those titles that may skew it. 2. Smaller companies usually don't post the salaries, so those numbers are going to be just from big name companies.


Sorry, tangent, it just made me want to cry of all the shit we could buy if hubby actually made that much. XD

[Aerin]

No problem, I'd say that you're right and that most people reporting for that would probably be from bigger companies. That is accurate for AAA though.

I should also say, that while the titles can be for other industries, the game industry does try to match as best as it can because they do know that if they can't offer a comparable salary the talent will go somewhere else. How well it can though differs a lot depending on the studio.

[Lokus]

I feel like I'm the only person that remembers paying $70-90 for SNES games or that Neo-Geo/3DO games were $100+. I was hella happy when prices went down with the PS1 and on.

[Ksandra]

I should also say, that while the titles can be for other industries, the game industry does try to match as best as it can because they do know that if they can't offer a comparable salary the talent will go somewhere else. How well it can though differs a lot depending on the studio.

That's actually part of the problem. There is a huge, and I mean huge, influx of people coming out of college with various degrees geared towards gaming (programming, design, etc.). It's actually hard to get one of those jobs because the competition to get it is so high. So companies can easily lower the salary and still get people.

[Aerin]

That's actually part of the problem. There is a huge, and I mean huge, influx of people coming out of college with various degrees geared towards gaming (programming, design, etc.). It's actually hard to get one of those jobs because the competition to get it is so high. So companies can easily lower the salary and still get people.

That certainly can be a problem and some studios do that (looking at you ArenaNet). The AAA studios is what everyone tries to apply for, but there's a lot more out there if you really look. When most gamers think of games it's usually something big on the PC or a console. I've seen a lot of grads come out of school and be only willing to apply to places like Blizzard, EA, or Bungie. Very few get into such places right out of the gate. It's actually a big reason why people jump companies a lot, because they won't raise your salary that much there, but if you jump ship to another company they'll generally give you a pay bump to convince you to come over. I've seen soooooo many resumes of people that have only been at various companies for 1 year or less. But it got them a pay raise.

Glassdoor can also help looking at how much a company pays its employees.

[Zealot]

I feel like I'm the only person that remembers paying $70-90 for SNES games or that Neo-Geo/3DO games were $100+. I was hella happy when prices went down with the PS1 and on.

$70 for Shining Force II new, no regrets.

Sent from my SM-G935V using Tapatalk

[Ksandra]

That certainly can be a problem and some studios do that (looking at you ArenaNet). The AAA studios is what everyone tries to apply for, but there's a lot more out there if you really look. When most gamers think of games it's usually something big on the PC or a console. I've seen a lot of grads come out of school and be only willing to apply to places like Blizzard, EA, or Bungie. Very few get into such places right out of the gate. It's actually a big reason why people jump companies a lot, because they won't raise your salary that much there, but if you jump ship to another company they'll generally give you a pay bump to convince you to come over. I've seen soooooo many resumes of people that have only been at various companies for 1 year or less. But it got them a pay raise.

Glassdoor can also help looking at how much a company pays its employees.

Yeah that's how hubby got his job at his currently company. Last dude left due to pay raise. He is one of two TDs. The second one left about a month ago for a job with higher pay, so he's now lead TD. Which would be an awesome thing if it came with a pay raise.

[Talint]

That's actually part of the problem. There is a huge, and I mean huge, influx of people coming out of college with various degrees geared towards gaming (programming, design, etc.). It's actually hard to get one of those jobs because the competition to get it is so high. So companies can easily lower the salary and still get people.

It's not just degrees. Degrees are still held with skepticism.

It's way more based on who has the most amount of demonstrable experience combined with who sells themselves the lowest.

[Thunder]

I'm not clear on what you mean by "units" here.

If you mean that the demand on the servers goes up with the sequel that would be because you're selling more games which would justify the increased spending on servers.

I see, I was worried we were using "scale" differently

units were because the game required more of your servers (and whatever else?) since the scale of the individual games you produce go up over time (vs the cheapening of tech over time). Right? We're not creating the same game over and over again as tech gets cheaper/better. We're making more complex games and it isn't crazy(?) to imagine that the rate of increased complexity in video games is larger than the rate at which technology becomes cheaper

[Niiro]

How quickly server tech becomes obsolete and needs to be replaced/updated is beyond any guess I'd hazard to make but this concern would really only apply to games with online multiplayer, if we're just talking about digital distribution as a delivery model then such things are kind of moot because the servers are just for hosting data for download. How simple or complex a game is makes no difference there.

[Talint]

How quickly server tech becomes obsolete and needs to be replaced/updated is beyond any guess I'd hazard to make but this concern would really only apply to games with online multiplayer, if we're just talking about digital distribution as a delivery model then such things are kind of moot because the servers are just for hosting data for download. How simple or complex a game is makes no difference there.

Publisher platforms (Steam, Origin, U-play) require online connectivity, and as such many AAA games do as well. It's not just online multiplayer ones.

[Niiro]

I can't speak for the others but Steam does not require online connectivity.

I'm not sure what kind of data the servers would be handling for offline games beyond what's needed for DRM or something.

[Talint]

DRM is one. Metrics is another, developers track how players play. Patches and updates, which is arguably tied to digital distribution anyway.

[Darus Grey]

Most games these days collect some sort of data on how the games being played(which imho is fine, that data is incredibly useful to a game developer), most games don't require online connectivity to accommodate this though.

Typically they'll collect the data locally and upload it in the future when the game is ran and a connection is present.

[arus2001]

The shitty thing about EA's titles, is that your loot box purchase becomes irrelevant because they're going to make a release Battlefront in 2 years anyway. Overwatch, yeah it has lootboxes, but I guarantee you 4 years from now, we're still going to playing Overwatch 1 and not Overwatch 3. Your 40 dollar purchase in 2015 is going to get better and better as they add new content.

Everyone's not Blizzard, though, and I wouldn't rule out a potential OW2 4 years from now, anyway. Tech will still be evolving, and if we're looking at a Windows 11 or 12 that doesn't have the best compatibility with current titles, you can bet something new would be in the pipes, even if it's just a Remastered version.

Whenever it comes to post-launch revenue, I just have think back to FFXI in the late ToAU era. XIV production begun, even if we didn't know about it. Content trickled. WotG launched terribly incomplete and vastly rehashing old zones. It then took years to finish. We can speculate SE hoped we'd abandon ship for XIV, especially with Abyssea as a proverbial last hurrah, but Tanaka launched digital cancer and the rest was history. This process is pretty much why I'm soured on video game subscription fees because there is seemingly no provisions in place to guarantee what money we put into a title goes back into it. I don't discount server upkeep and related fees when thinking about this, but even in the era of 500k consistent subs at $15 a month, that's still 7.5m to play around with before whatever taxes. Were we getting $7.5m of content per month? Heck, even 50% that?

With the way things are creeping to always-online, it's not really much of a stretch to replace subscription fees with DLCs or lootboxes in whatever form they take. Again, how much goes back? Or maybe there should be a point where they're forced to tell us there is no future content plans outside of potentially minor bug fixes so we're not dropping money hoping for more.

At this point, I'm of the mind that any game sold in the US should have some sort of post-launch provision related to the above. Basically, whatever money they make from us, 70% must go back into its host title within a certain period of time, otherwise it's heavily taxed. The remaining 30% can go fund the FFXIVs or whatever. Meanwhile, more coders/artists/writers/testers/etc. could be hired or paid more relative to how much they're charging on things. If their plans aren't ambitious, then keep costs small. Like $1-3 for a costume. If content looks more like an expansion, then obviously the higher cost is more justified. And when they finally decide they are "done" with a game, after the fact sales would take on the form of residuals for all directly involved with a specific subject's creation.

Guess I'm just sick of seeing suits get rewarded while the peons have their hands tied, here.

[Fiye]

At this point, I'm of the mind that any game sold in the US should have some sort of post-launch provision related to the above. Basically, whatever money they make from us, 70% must go back into its host title within a certain period of time, otherwise it's heavily taxed. The remaining 30% can go fund the FFXIVs or whatever. Meanwhile, more coders/artists/writers/testers/etc. could be hired or paid more relative to how much they're charging on things. If their plans aren't ambitious, then keep costs small. Like $1-3 for a costume. If content looks more like an expansion, then obviously the higher cost is more justified. And when they finally decide they are "done" with a game, after the fact sales would take on the form of residuals for all directly involved with a specific subject's creation.

Guess I'm just sick of seeing suits get rewarded while the peons have their hands tied, here.

At that point its incumbent to do research on how much money goes where and who to support. EA showed that constant negative press can have really bad outcomes with battlefront 2 (2017)

[arus2001]

Is there any studio that really gets specific enough, though? Like, some mentioned how much Overwatch made, but there's not really any context on how many people worked on it or the average pay of people within the various divisions.

For the most part, shitty dev practices are why I don't pre-order things anymore. I don't want some bean counters to see 3 months out from launch they already have x amount of sales, so just push out whatever because, hey, they got the money lined up. Someone I know just recently got burnt on a game buy from Steam because they eventually hit a point where the title became unplayable on their PC, but since it'd been at least 2 hours in, no refunds. Telling them they should've researched the game beforehand doesn't really take away that sting, and it's certainly not a luxury that's readily available at a launch since not everything gets public betas and sometimes you get press embargos.

Then you get people like Ksan's hubby who aren't near whatever supposed average pay, though I doubt he's in some basement indy studio, either. Overall, I suspect whatever bad press EA is getting is more related to the fact their game is in the Star Wars franchise than it playing the lootbox card, as they're not the only ones out there doing it, getting away with it, and depending on who you ask, succeeding at it regardless of our distaste and scorn. Since we're no longer in the gaming era of games having to launch as is with no further support, I just don't see it a far-fetched notion to expect quality service if they want even more money.