I have to agree. As someone who doesn’t care about cosmetics, if I get a free game because a bunch of corporate slaves are willing to let their papa Bobby Kotick milk them like cattle then I’ll take it.
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Halo infinite player most of them are no ex-players will nit be playing OW2, the reason infinite failed is being of the live service/microtransaction, halo players want none of tgat garbage, it is the reason i never bought abd i have bought every single halo collectors edition but this one for that reason i wilk not support tgat garbage, i would rather see my favortie game end forever then it become a cash grab
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This is a complicated topic.
There’s been a trend with every company, be it gaming related or anything else where they aim for constantly growing profits year over year. This is likely encouraged due to the fact that investors primarily put money in companies that constantly grow since they want higher returns on their investment. GDP per capita does not grow at the rate required for these consistently growing profit targets to work in the long run and there’s only so much audience you can attract before you stagnate.
The more a company grows and tries to increase its profits the harder it’ll get and so they have to figure out new ways to either attract more people or charge more from their existing customers. You can achieve the latter morally by providing more (meaningful) services to your users that they can pay for or immorally by simply changing your product so it looks different but in reality is the same and at a higher price.
Take Netflix for example - grew consistently over the last 20 years and all of a sudden they have less content, charge more money, have a worse user experience and unsurprisingly their stock took one of the bigger hits during this crash.
Yes, constant growth is a requirement for economic reasons (and greed) but it’s not sustainable at this rate nor is it a pleasant experience for customers.
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From what I heard, it was mostly because the content in the paid battle passes was just a bunch of recolors and not much unique about it.
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It’s not a good standard but the standard it is never the less. So you either roll with it and give your game a fighting chance or you end up on the sidelines with a tiny player base and way less content.
It is a real tough case to make that oh well don’t roll F2P when pretty much all the top game and the worlds biggest esports are all F2P. Same for all the top earning games, all F2P.
Most popular MMO? F2P. Top BR games? F2P. It’s pretty tough to argue with the success of F2P right now.
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I have yet to see a reasoning behind this other than “to be attractive to investors so they can make MORE money”.
That’s neat and all. but can we as consumers and gamers agree that this is NOT IN OUR BEST INTEREST?
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Fair point and that’s true, hard to argue when it’s profitable. It is however an inferior, exploitative experience that we as a community allowed to happen. If people weren’t so gullible and had the mental capacity to resist the urge to give into this nonsense we wouldn’t be in this situation. They’ll just keep finding more ways to exploit us for money if we keep letting them.
That’s primarily it really. You do have to aim for slightly higher profits YOY simply due to inflation but nowhere near the amount companies are going for.
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The part that baffles me, constantly, is people defend it like it’s our problem as consumers. No… not at all. In fact we as consumers should be fighting them to make sure that while we ARE paying, we are paying fairly and unmolested as a customer.
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I’ve always loved this childish argument just because we dont like the direction of the f2p route theyre taking hiding behind countless and overpriced microtransactions. Gee idk, maybe the reasoning why we despise this f2p route is probably because we’d like to spend our money wisely and not get scammed to spend ridiculous money on trivial items.
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it was inevitable since blizzard/activision is a company first and foremost being led by one of the most cutthroat ceo’s - bobby kotick. now we have to ask ourselves how much do we love the game of overwatch. i mean im willing to spend money since overwatch is probably my favorite online competitive shooter of all time (well maybe unreal was hmm). its just how much will i spend? how much is too much…
with overwatch 1 i paid the base price of 40 bucks and in the next 6 years i think i bout 4 skins worth 10 each … so around 80 bucks i think. with overwatch 2 i already spent 40 bucks for the get in beta package lol… considering the skins i may actually drop more money but yea i will have my limits. also we dont know how inflated the prices will be or if it will be the same as diablo immortal? 
ANYWAYS THE PANDORA’S BOX HAS OPENED… WILL WE SURVIVE?!?
dunkey: i would actually play to NOT play most games out there"
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There are lots of companies that are 100 year old companies that don´t have this ¨grow at any cost" mentality like StateFarm or Tabasco. They are also private companies that haven´t been infected with the disease of growth at all costs. At my last company they actually laid people off from our customer interaction team in order to make the financial reports look better in the short term because of decreased costs but we ended up losing more customers throughout the rest of the year than we gained because people were so dissatisfied with the service. It was a subscription based app for fitness that provided personalized meal and fitness recommendations, and people went from being able to have live chat based convos to not hearing back from someone for a day or two.
The American capitalist system is a cancer on the world.
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That’s not how F2P works. The skin cost way more because it will subsidize people who play the game without spending a dime. You expect all players to buy $20 skins? No, it’s only a portion of people.
And also:
- Servers cost money
- Server maintenance cost even way more (i work in IT industry)
- Devs don’t work for free
- Advertisement
- Cinematics made by 3rd parties
- And of course, the investors
You think all of those cost (MONTHLY) will be covered by people who bought the game for $60 once…six years ago? Drinking Starbucks a week cost way more and you expect to be handed free content forever with $60, lol.
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This is way better than what valorant does with new heros.
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Sigh. You read nothing of what I said did you? I’m fully aware only a small portion of people are going to pay so they have to jack the prices up. That makes the whole experience worse for everyone and makes it so you can get far less for much more money.
Actually, yes. You put a lot of emphasis on server costs but in fact Blizzard has their own data centers for which they’ve absorbed the cost of many years ago and they’ve more than paid for themselves. And even if they hadn’t, those are still expenses which are closely monitored and accounted for. How else do you think they keep track of profits if not by being aware of exact costs and what’s required to make profits on top of those costs?
Even if those initial $40-60 somehow weren’t enough you can’t forget that they also sell lootboxes on the side, merchandise and OWL.
Again, try reading. I’m more than happy to pay a one time fee for the whole game instead of being overcharged for content that is trivial to create.
Pro tip: try buying your own coffee beans and making your own coffee, ends up being cheaper and better. : )
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I’d argue that the players like these companies and the games they create more because of the consistent and large scale content they can put out. Despite many players hating balance in League of Legends, which game has more players? Which game is putting out successful music? Which game has a bigger eSports scene? etc. The things you are fighting against are what make games successful and popular. Even if you were somehow to win this battle you’d only be getting yourself another $60 sequel every few years.
Blizzard putting a high quality game on the market for F2P players will be huge. I was stuck playing Paladins for so long because I couldn’t afford Overwatch, and I left as soon as I could. Now anyone can make that same choice for free.
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Paid games going F2P is more often than not bad.
It basically means game wasnt making them enough $ (ppl would buy the game as other options) and by goign F2P they know ppl will tyr it out.
Then microtransactions to offset initial game cost.
However, rarely does this end up in a healthy way. Games quality fails to stay up & cheating/bots become rampant causing the ppl who paid for theg ame to lose interest over the lack of quality they are use to.
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No we can’t.
Because I don’t agree.
If I agreed it would mean that I have seen into the future and I know how much the pass costs, what it contains, how long it lasts, etc etc.
Until then everything else is fear based speculations, assumptions and doom-saying that is largely irrelevant to any discourse on the topic.
Knee-jerk reactions to something you haven’t seen? I don’t agree to that.
Now when we have some solid information from a reliable source and the pass is predatory then yes, we riot.
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you… don’t agree that this statement:
“they have to make as much profit as they possibly can.”
made about the publisher of the game
is not in the gamer and players best interest? That a focus on maximizing profit without regard for anything else is likely NOT what the player should support?
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Conclusion:you know nothing and all you wrote is totally useless assumption…
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