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micro, macro, why all the transactions?
jandrsn
Member Posts: 187
$500 dollars, US, gets you perferred housing in Richard Garriott's new Ultima-ish game. $200 gets you access to Drizzt in the newest Neverwinter game. SWOTOR has a cash shop to unlock content even for subscription players. Dead space 3 has day 1 microtransactions. Dark and Light sure took pre-orders.
Are we as gamers that gullible that no other industry, at least that I can think of, are susceptible to these ridiculious cash grabs? I've never seen a pre-order car that has extras, nor a pre-order pair of pants, or anything.
I get that small teams of devs (and by devs I include coders, managers, art people, etc...) might need a bit of cash infusion make a game, but why the constant hunt for 'big whales' to finance everything?
At $15 a month US, plus a $50-60 dollar box sale, in three months I'm still around where I'd be at buying a used newish game at a gamestop type store at one a month, and most single player games don't hold my attention more than a month straight. Why do I need to get whacked with microtransactions on top of that?
I get the fact that yes, some people will pay for anything once they get excited for something. But if a signed Peyton Manning jersey might sell for $1000, do you stop making unsigned #18's? Or half-ass the ones you do make?
My sister got a masters in non-profit business management, and by almost random chance ended up as a video game tester for Warner Brothers. Every time we'd discuss gaming, a). She obviously knew more than I did about video games, since she got paid for it and I just have spent money on it for a good twenty years now, and b). It's about profit. My talk of fun and that sense of fulfillment didn 't register in her brain.
I know that this will get flamed and ignored, but I can't play a cash shop game again. I won't get NGE'd again. I will buy a boxed game and subscription, but I draw the line at micro/macro cash transactions.
*edited for wall o'text, sorry wrote this on a nook
Are we as gamers that gullible that no other industry, at least that I can think of, are susceptible to these ridiculious cash grabs? I've never seen a pre-order car that has extras, nor a pre-order pair of pants, or anything.
I get that small teams of devs (and by devs I include coders, managers, art people, etc...) might need a bit of cash infusion make a game, but why the constant hunt for 'big whales' to finance everything?
At $15 a month US, plus a $50-60 dollar box sale, in three months I'm still around where I'd be at buying a used newish game at a gamestop type store at one a month, and most single player games don't hold my attention more than a month straight. Why do I need to get whacked with microtransactions on top of that?
I get the fact that yes, some people will pay for anything once they get excited for something. But if a signed Peyton Manning jersey might sell for $1000, do you stop making unsigned #18's? Or half-ass the ones you do make?
My sister got a masters in non-profit business management, and by almost random chance ended up as a video game tester for Warner Brothers. Every time we'd discuss gaming, a). She obviously knew more than I did about video games, since she got paid for it and I just have spent money on it for a good twenty years now, and b). It's about profit. My talk of fun and that sense of fulfillment didn 't register in her brain.
I know that this will get flamed and ignored, but I can't play a cash shop game again. I won't get NGE'd again. I will buy a boxed game and subscription, but I draw the line at micro/macro cash transactions.
*edited for wall o'text, sorry wrote this on a nook
Comments
Your sister sounds like she has a good head on her shoulders and knows what she is talking about. I like her already!
Think about it. Your sister (not a "gamer"?) actually has a job in the industry and an inside view of what it takes. Over the star struck gamer who is all about fun and the next game because somehow they are going to be made "somehow".
yes, companies can be scummy and fleece their customers. They aren't necessarily angels. But it takes more and more and more and more money to make these games.
Now do the math.
A "triple A" game takes 100 million to make and requires x amount of dollars to keep running and keep updating. With all that entails.
And if there are investors they will want to make money as well. Most people who invest, or if it's an investment firm, expect to make money for their investment.
That's a lot of purchases and subscribers.
Now look at your retirement fund. Not sure if it's a 401K, mutual fund or Roth IRA or "whatever". Is there anyting in your portfolio that absolutely sucks and is not making money? And if it isn't are you really going to keep it and keep pumping money into it?
Contrary to popular belief, fun games make money. If a game is not fun, eventually it's not going to make money. It is always in the interest of the developer to make a fun game. Whether they can do it or not is the question that always remains to be seen.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Your sister sounds like she has a good head on her shoulders and knows what she is talking about. I like her already!
Think about it. Your sister (not a "gamer"?) actually has a job in the industry and an inside view of what it takes. Over the star struck gamer who is all about fun and the next game because somehow they are going to be made "somehow".
yes, companies can be scummy and fleece their customers. They aren't necessarily angels. But it takes more and more and more and more money to make these games.
Now do the math.
A "triple A" game takes 100 million to make and requires x amount of dollars to keep running and keep updating. With all that entails.
And if there are investors they will want to make money as well. Most people who invest, or if it's an investment firm, expect to make money for their investment.
That's a lot of purchases and subscribers.
Now look at your retirement fund. Not sure if it's a 401K, mutual fund or Roth IRA or "whatever". Is there anyting in your portfolio that absolutely sucks and is not making money? And if it isn't are you really going to keep it and keep pumping money into it?
Contrary to popular belief, fun games make money. If a game is not fun, eventually it's not going to make money. It is always in the interest of the developer to make a fun game. Whether they can do it or not is the question that always remains to be seen.
8% is well over prime, yet it seems most studios need over 10% to get funding. You can say it's the market or whatever excuse you feel fits at the time. Doesn't make the investor argument valid imho. Developers promise the moon, give you the worst of suburbia, and then try to screw extra change out of the consumer base to compensate instead of making a solid game that'd give return profits over years instead of months.Bad business models seem to run mmorpgs these days; we need WoW returns now or nothing is the new norm, and it makes me sad.
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https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
Whether the game that is produced is good or not is irrelevent, it still cost a ton to make. A single artist easily costs upwards of 10k per month, and that is just salary and relevent software liscenses to do the job in the first place.
I did battle with ignorance today, and ignorance won.
To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled - because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance.
I had a conversation similar to this with a client of mine several months ago, we were talking about different investments and strategies. He is a partner with Price Waterhouse Cooper. On the area of investments while 8 and 10% is very good for a mutual fund, when they invest in a company, and he in particular with his business they expet 25-30% returns. It's the difference when you investing a few hundred monthly and when you are investing millions, expecatations on what is decent rate of return is very very different.
edit - on a side note, these returns aren't really any more risky than smaller mutual funds but under the law you cannot invest in them (depending on your country) until you have 25-50k free and clear to invest.
You make me like charity
That's part of the problem. Game development costs should be going down, not up. Not every game needs to create its own engine, and licensing an engine costs significantly less money than creating one from scratch. There's middleware for everything now - characters, menus, trees, you name it, and that brings development costs down. There's a labor glut (check any art school within a 50-mile radius of your home, and you'll see it has a game design curriculum), which means it should be cheaper to hire staff. Furthermore, advertising should be cheaper, since anyone who's buying videogames almost certainly has internet access, and e-advertising is both more demographic-specific and less expensive than mass media marketing. On top of all that, you don't even need to print physical media anymore (or at least not as much of it) thanks to digitial distribution, so publishing costs should be significantly lower than they were 5 or 10 years ago.
I'm not saying costs haven't gone up, since I don't have any inside experience in the industry; for all I know, they've skyrocketed. If it's not the engine, the labor, the marketing or the publishing, though, what's causing it? The Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 have been around since 2005 and 2006, respectively, and new PC purchases have fallen off a cliff in recent years, so the need to use bleeding-edge technology for razor-sharp visuals seems far less important than it might be if everyone were trying to keep pace with Moore's Law. Where is all the money going? I'm genuinely curious.
My point is and will be: why do video games need to be so based on the immediate cash returns instead of slow and steady over months or years? Let's put the screws to our customers now and then let them bicker amongst themselves a year from now, when our next cash grab game hits, wash rinse repeat...
I don't think the two are incompatible. Any game that is fun to play at the beginning, still has the potential to be fun to play a year from now. However developing content and structure that lasts that long does have a cost...
You might think labor costs are going down because there is a glut of educated staff from design/art schools, but in the end do you really want inexperienced staff spearheading your $100M+ project? You always need experienced people, people who can anticipate/plan/resolve the problems that will undoubtedly come about when things fall behind schedule, or your lead designer gets poached by the competition, or QA finds that game crashing bug with 1 day before the execs demand RC1.
Another place that adds to the cost is something called feature creep ... it's those "small" little additions that the execs/investors want or demand during the development pahse or worse if it is during the certification phase (console games).
There are also many more places that cost can be accumulated over the software's life cycle, take something as simple as a bug ... if it is caught by the programmer by one of their unit tests while he/she is still coding it is relatively cheap to fix, that same bug caught when the game is in the "gold master" stage can be thousands of times more expensive to fix. And that is just the tip of the iceburg when it comes to how costs can quickly add up and get out of control if the producer is not on top of his/her game and making some hard choices.
Making an MMOs is not as simple of A + B + C = D .... otherwise all the WoW clones would have made just as much money.
I'll grant you that you don't want someone fresh out of art school leading your team, but there's no reason not to select some of the best and brightest who have been recently trained on the latest technology to do the lower-end jobs. Also, according to the IGDA's own charts, very few lead artists or programmers are making more than $6,000/month:
Programmer:
Salary Info
Low: $55,000 (programmer with 1-2 years experience)
High: $85,000 (lead programmer/technical director with 6+ years experience)
Average: $62,500
Highest: $300,000
Artist:
Salary Info
Low: $57,000 (artist with 1-2 years experience)
High: $68,000 (lead artist/art director with 6+ years experience)
Average: $58,500
Highest: $200,000
Granted, the $200k and $300k are substantial numbers, but they're the exceptions to the rule. Those are the superstars of the industry, and very few games will want or need those. The high-end monthly income of a lead programmer tends to be $7,083/month, with the average programmer making $5208/month. Artists make even less.
As far as bugs and feature creep go, I agree that those are problems, but they're not problems that are new to the industry; they've been around since the beginning. As such, their existence shouldn't mandate higher development costs unless games are so significantly more complex now than they were 5 years ago that they generate far more bugs and require significantly more QA as a result. That's certainly possible for individual games such as Skyrim, but I don't think the industry as a whole has been moving towards exceptionally complicated and layered titles; if anything, they've been streamlining to capitalize on a more mainstream market for quite some time.
To be clear, I'm not just talking about MMOs here. The OP included both single-player games and MMOs in their post, so I was addressing both in mine. Many MMOs are undeniably more labor-intensive than they were before WoW made quest advancement an all-but-mandatory feature. WoW launched 9 years ago, though, so while I'm sure MMO development costs rose as an immediate result to WoWs new model and success, those costs shouldn't have continued to escalate once that transition was made given the other things I mentioned (vastly increased labor force, cheaper advertising, cheaper publishing, more middle-ware, et cetera).
Businesses are designed to make money, we'd like to believe developers are interested in making good products, but their often or eventually just owned by typical corporate money grubbers.
Mutual self interest, that is the way good business is conducted. The producer and consumer each respect the others interest and agree to fairly exchange based on what they want and require. Unfortunately, its the small company which is the most in need and is most willing to be equitable, while the big company tends to abuse its control over the market to make a killing on a widely distributed product.
I don't however believe that retail and subscription are somehow innocent of abuse while MT is all scammy. I will say that more abusive methods are employed to make money in MT, but when a big time company like blizzard who makes a killing on any of their games sells poorly delivered games like D3, and charges retail, subscription, and optional MT for WoW which is making more than enough money... Yeah, its abusive. They've admitted to over a billion on that game in revenue, no amount of production and upkeep even comes close to what their making.
They can get away with it though, so they will keep doing what makes money. Consumers just have to be more responsible with money, and at some point, the government may have to make sanctions on certain kinds of abusive sales since humans in large are unable to be responsible with their money...
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes.
That way, if they get angry, they'll be a mile away... and barefoot.
My thought is that developers, regardless of how small or large have a plan (and hopefully it's good). And if they are smart they have a good business plan.
They figure out their budget, they then figure out how much money they want/need to make and they figure out how to monetize their game.
Then the fun begins.
There are delays, maybe bad managment or maybe they run into issues where they find that what they wanted doesn't work or doesn't work well. They have to change their plans and that runs into delays whch then create budget issues. Maybe they figure out that they need a certain software product because what they want to do doesn't quite work with the tools at hand.
They might have to hire new people which costs additional money because of advertising, recruiting agencies and loss of productivity as the people interviewing have to stop what they are doing to do interviews.
I can't tell you how many articles i've read about game developers that folded because they ran out of money. Honestly, the more I read about the industry the more I wonder why people continue to seek it out or continue to invest in it!
Then they launch their game and they hope to get sales/subscribers or a good amount of people playing who "hopefully" will use their cash shop.
Additionaly, when you see salaries you have to realize that the salary you see is not what the employer is paying. The employer is paying much more than someone's 55k per year. Payroll taxes, benefits, worker's comp, training, etc. I tall adds up.
So when I see companies trying to figure out how to get more income, it doesn't come as a suprise. Espeically because 15.99 per month is not what it used to be because of inflation. It's not surprising that companies are desperate to find new revenue streams.
Now, having said that I did say that there are some scummy companies and I meant it. There is a difference between paying what is not only fair but what is going to get a good return for their efforts and gouging the customers.
I just wouldn't assume that just because a company is charing for the box and has a sub and has a cash shop that they are automatically gouging you. It might just mean that they don't have enough players to keep the game afloat and the cash shop is a way to keep them running.
Heck, even GW2 has a cash shop and they are the original "buy the box and play with no extra money" company.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
There is no cash price for a house in RG's game. What you are looking at is an item from a list of 12 rewards for a donation level in a Kickstarter campaign. Why no one else noticed that your argument begins on a flawed premise is beyond me.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
WOW. You can buy $10 pet and $25 mounts.
Alot of what you say is true, and games should not be costing more money to build, but for some odd reason they are. The salaray numbers have alot of wiggle room depending on where the company is located. I know that in LA your average mid level programmer (not even a lead programmer) is making closer to $90k with the average lead making near the $120k. So your companies like Activision, Sony, Blizzard, Trion are paying a bit more.
Couple that with the poor economy and alot of companies are trying to do the same with less staff. that introduces the increased chance for those things like bugs to get caught later and later in the dev cycle so it ends up being more of a case of being nibbled to death by ducks. Skyrim is a good example, I believe that they only had a QA team of a dozen or so staff testers (which helps explain why it had a fair number of big bugs that should have been caught before it shipped). It needed to sell alot of games to make money. Kingdom of Amalur was another example of a game that had to sell lots of copies to make a profit.
While not a new thing to the gaming industry feature creep caused by the execs/investors seems to be getting worse. In the past creep was usually came about internally from the team members (mostly the ooo shiny! moments), but lately I am seeing more and more suits making noise at the design/brainstorming/user story sessions.
Some companies in the industry are also willing to invest more money into a game than they were in the past, so while the individual parts like labor, advertising, publishing, engines, ... are cheaper the extra money gets spent in other places, in the hopes of making more money. It is the philosopy of "if we spend more we will make a better game."
That's 100k x five year development cycle x say 50 people average = 25m for a lower end AAA MMORPG. If you get 200k players buying a box that's 6m to the developers. That leave 19m to get back, if 100k players stick at 15 a month it would take 1 years to pay back the investment, that doesn't take into account the running costs and advertising needed and doesn't take into account the returns you could have got investing elsewhere over the 6 years.
Basically if you invest 25m you need to have a success to get any return.
And 200k is pretty much a failure for any AAA game. Even games like AOC sold like 700k out of the gate.
My guess is when companies are considering 25-50M type investment, they don't do it on a whim. There will be market research, and what-not.
Oh sorry, guess a $500 dollar investment isn't a pay to get something scheme, it's a user friendly bonus?Great insight, thanks for that, Yyrkoon. I really should have realized the regional salary differences would be an issue, but It didn't even occur to me that feature creep had shifted from an interior source to an exterior one. It's a lot easier to reign it in when the source is close to the ground, but very difficult when the source is a grand piano suspended over your head by a string of store-brand dental floss.
i said "without".. yea WoW has tons of microtransactions besides just the pets and mounts.. last I remember you cna pay to change race, faction, all sorts of stuff
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
A game has to be free to play first before anyone can refuse to pay for a subscription. They're the ones who put the model out there, gamers were just stupid enough to fall for it.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
38 Studios is a recent example of a company that ran out of money while trying to make an MMO ... I beleive they were over $200M in debt even after Curt Chilling spent $50M of his own money. Your $100,000/year might only cover 1 programmer , and that would only be his salary ... add onto that his benefits and then multiply it by a dozen since you might need to start with that many more programmers to build a sub game. Now comes the artisits that could add up to 30? more people to your team ... now the HR people, Marketing people, QA, designers, CEOs, CFOs, CTOs .... your $100,000 a year is now about $3M/month. Now expand that out 5 to 6 years for an MMO now you are at $180M to $216M assuming you did not hire any more talent.
Other PC games run cheaper because you need less in terms of staff, and they take less time to make 6month to a year in development seems about average for a mid sized game. You can still wind up spending $30M to $60M if you are not thrifty with your budgets.
I am not saying all MMO/PC games take millions of dollars to make, but that recent games like the Star Wars MMO and Skyrim are expensive to make.
I am not sure what the expected profit margins are to be considered good, but software companies are usually in the top 3 industries when it comes to profit margins, so expect 20%+ ... I think somewhere in the above posts 30% was mentioned and that would not surprise me.
The days of 250,000 subs being good are long gone and left in the era before 2004 and WoW.