Video game unlockables

Making a profit on a product is not jewry, user. It's business. I don't want to sell shit at a loss, because it's communism. Btw, your .webm is broken. The picture disappears once you play the .webm.

Do what Timesplitters did and put unlockables behind challenges where you have to git gud in the game's mechanics to get new stuff.

Microtransactions are Jewish cancer and kill video games. They are not needed for profit. They there simply to give the middle finger to the consumers and milk cash from the sheep.
Your browser is broken. The video works fine,

I think multiplayer unlocks are fine as long as
A) They arent just complete upgrades over the base weapons/characters/equipment/whatever
B) The method of unlock doesnt take fuckloads of hours of grinding

I think TF2 did unlocks pretty decently before it went to utter shit.
1-Gives you a bunch of character-specific achievements, most of which can be easily achieved with a little effort or just within a few rounds
2-Complete a certain percentage of them to prove that you've gotten the basics of the character down
3-Enjoy your new toy that lets you play the character in a slightly different way, but not just a straight upgrade

They're not needed for profit, but they increase it. If you portion content in several hour segments and release DLC, microtransactions and shit as time goes on, people will feel compelled not to abandon the video game. They'll feel it is still alive as they play it and continuously be given new opportunities to explore things they have not seen before. Normalfags seem to like it, just look at game completion rate since reduction of long campaigns. It's a very sound business model. And the webm - it plays audio, but it has no visuals like the pic in the thumbnail.

Works when you save and run it with vlc

It's simply a pointless nuisance that limits your options for a long while or requires you to farm pointless cheevos, especially when you're playing a new account or when a bunch of people feel like hosting an old viddy game and bam everything needs to be unlocked.

They make plenty of profit on flat sales, they're just greedy as all fuck.

Shitshow Destiny had a 250 million dollar budget between development and marketing (200m was marketing), and it had over 750 million in profit the first week. This was before they started adding digital jewry into it.

Fuck off with your shit understanding of economics.

Even when these things do not directly effect gameplay, and even if they never lead to non-cosmetic microtransactions, they are a cancer. This mindset allows the following things
>Paying for dual audio This has happened already if you didn't know.
Are you just a youngfag, or did you somehow forget that before microtransactions, things that were purely cosmetic were unlockable only by playing the game because they're part of the game you already paid for. Microtransactions are absolute cancer in any form.

user, capitalism shouldn't be restricted in any way, after all you should sell weapons to certain undesirables who'll use them to shoot you.
Unfortunately EA has enough capital to invest into social engineering and borderline brainwashing so nobody ever actually stops buying their shit.

Makes me think of Debilitas from Haunting Ground/Demento.

My shit understanding of economics? Name 5 games that sold outrageously (or remotely close to AAA games like FO3 or whatever) without significant marketing budget, jack ass. Destiny was a blunder, because that's what happens when you have incompetent PR team sitting on their ass inventing uninspired methods to promote product. Often AAA games turn a profit, because execs do not let PR teams run wild with retarded ideas. If AAA games were unprofitable, then they would not be made due to lack of funds. You should be the one who learns something about business before you talk about shit you have idea about.

Dota only has cosmetic items for sale for four fucking years and they've managed to not include any of the cancer you're spewing

What methods would that be?

Are you the literal Ubisoft QA shill who said you support all their business practices like pic and link related simply because it would be good for your personal business with them in the future?
nichegamer.com/2017/09/28/18k-gold-laden-assassins-creed-origins-headphones-cost-59000/

And not all Triplayy games with microtransactions games have had EA tier practices in them either. Are you seriously telling me increasing cosmetic microtransactions haven't normalized microtransactions in general?

It doesn't matter what tripleayy is doing, Dota 2 is a case and point where you can sell only cosmetics and not devolve into your bullshit "normalization". EA was spewing DLC bullshit before Dota 2 even fucking existed. If this slippery slope of yours is real why hasn't Dota done what EA was doing? Wasn't it "normalized"? The idiots who pay for optional pixels and the idiots who pay for bullshit optional game content, which one is more retarded?

Beats me, but that's the first conclusion you come to when you've never heard of destiny beyond some cookiecutter paid articles with funding like that.

I am a sales director, I am telling you what works and what doesn't work. These sales practices increase profit margins and since gamers are dumb cucks they happily pay up. It's done because it works and it's profitable. The only rule in trading, business, commerce whatever. Data so far points to these business practices working well, so I support this because it means I make more money. Period.

I kinda want to make some really really fucking retarded game. With fake difficulty (read PRNG modifiers out the ass). It should be almost impossible to beat, but be very short (like maybe 1-2hrs).

It would unlock a real game. The actual game. But it would not be announced, and hidden behind a virtually impossible to win "game" as an unlockable.

How do you think we got here? Just because some things are going over the edge like EA doesn't mean all things will, even after EA does. But more on average will do it the more microtransactions are used in major games.

Hey sales director, did other games having cosmetic DLC cause your shit company to develop current profitable cancerous DLC ala>>13801782

Have you considered that there is no slippery slope, and that the reason it works is because noemalfags have enabled it from the beginning? "Normalization" implies normalfags disliked the practice but they've been enabling it since conception.

SJWs and women aren't good at games so that's sexist and racist.

In almost every game, you are "unlocking" new content, like new levels as you play through the game and such.

The question you need to ask is "what purpose does the unlock serve?".
In a good game, it comes down to either of two:
You don't want to give the player access to the final level when he hasn't even played through the fucking tutorial. This is especially the case in RPG games where you'd essentially be skipping 90% of the story.
Giving players gimmicky customization options is also a terrible idea when the player doesn't even have a grasp on how the game even would be played.
Simply dangling a reward in front of a player, even if insignificant, will make players attempt whatever stupid challenge you present. In that case, the process of unlocking the unlock becomes content.

The "bad" features you mention all come down to a third reason that has become very prevalent in gaming and are what people truly despise:
Any game that tries to monetize on basis of playtime, whether it's through subscription or microtransactions, is incentivized to do this.
Rather than having developers design the game so that the content sticks around for the exact amount of time that is the most enjoyable; we see publishers pushing for content outstaying its welcome.

Ultimately it's just a big grey line between proper pacing & challenge and padding, and where the line is placed differs on a person-by-person basis. What we're seeing now in the industry is publishers slowly trying to pad more and more in order to maximize monetization, consumers calling them out on it in the process.
I believe the bigger cancer here is not the grind4unlock, but the chest-gambling bullshit, as that is the thing that allows publishers to obscenely price unlockables. When you sell a specific unlock to a player, the player will call you out on 100 bucks being outrageous. But when you instead sell 1% chance to get an actually decent unlock for 1 buck, and completely hide the fact that the chances are abysmal, then it's a lot easier to serve extremely overpriced products to players.

Should be like 90s unlockables; can be unlocked via cheats or completing a portion of the game.

Microtransactions and ads should only be in F2P games as it's their only method of revenue, not in indie or AAA games. If I buy a game, I shouldn't have to buy extra shit.

Used to be that way. Thanks to modern DLC though that shit is always paid/grind content now. Hell even cheats in some games are paid content as well.

Nier: Automata
Cuphead
King of Fighters XIV
Splatoon (the first game had little marketing beyond a few trailers since the team was unproven)
Bravely Default (sold well enough to get a Square Enix representative to mention they might change their dev priorities)
The Senran Kagura games receive almost zero marketing but they make tidy profits with each title. The same is true of the Trails games, the Atelier games, the Yakuza games, and many other AA titles.

Would you like more? Your entire point seems to be that a fool and his money are soon parted (true), so therefore the industry should do nothing but try to part fools from their money (false). It's pretty funny you'd think anyone here would believe you're a sales director who doesn't understand the value of diversifying investments or developing a loyal playerbase.

Have you honestly not paid attention to AAA games this year? They're flopping more than ever and with more frequency than ever, either due to diversity hires or bloated marketing budgets (Dead Space, famously). There's either a crash or a recession on the horizon for this industry, and the publishers have no-one to blame but themselves. They created an atmosphere where every single game must have loot boxes and DLC and pre-order bonuses and annual instalments and all this other shit - and yet they're surprised when customers become fatigued.

How many decades has this been said for now?

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Never heard of any of them except for splatoon because a girl I know likes playing that for some reason. Oh and cuphead I guess, what with its cringy fanbase being spammed here when it released. None of them sold remotely close to AAA games with even just semi-competent marketing teams.

You want to say that these AAA games are flopping, but really, they are not in the way you think. Normalfag gamers have often opposite opinions to here. This place is not representative of gamers. Sure, you'll see that a game is shitty and won't buy it. Most normaltarded gamers won't see that and will buy anything at the first impulse because they are retarded. Lots of "silent majority" gamers buy these games without looking at publishers and regardless whether they play the game down the line or not, they already paid for the game. It doesn't matter what comes after first two months, because on average sales plummet after that regardless whether your game is good or not. Building a loyal fanbase? Who? You? Anons do not spend money on games, they pirate games. Normalfags are the best market because they are too dumb to torrent games. It's the same reason why SJW shit is pushed around every corner - because commie faggots are too dumb and computer illiterate to run a torrent client so they buy retarded content. Building a loyal fanbase is basically doing what star citizen did. Find a bunch of impressionable retards, resonate with what they like and then sell to them some of their dream-flavored shit. That's a loyal fanbase, not people who will buy just some games from you and finish it there. People vote with the money and demographics that spend the most are the most loyal in the eyes of business.

If you think crash is incoming, then think again. "crash is coming" is a meme that probably outdates gamergate. I think I started hearing it come 2011? 2012? So far gaming has only grown.

Wew fucking lad.

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Do you even play games nigger?

Pay attention user.

He wants money, regardless of whether it comes at the expense of quality.

Starting to doubt about your job user

Sure user. I'll play a round of cnc or TA from time to time. But they don't make games like that anymore because they were not as profitable as watered down garbage for normalfags. Imagine working in a job you got into because you loved games and by now you've been working with games you hate longer than the games that got you here in the first place. Wanna trade jobs?

How the fuck did you miss Nier Automata? We had pics of 2B's ass posted constantly for the past months.

>Starting to doubt about your job user
>He wants
Read.

archive.is/UJIwv
SNK described it as "very profitable" and it single-handedly made their focus on video games worthwhile. Please don't tell me you're some SFV apologist who thinks KoF is "niche."

6/10 I thought you were serious.
Cuphead sold over a million copies in, what, two weeks? It was made by two people and had roughly zero press besides a journalist who was dumber than a pigeon. Scaling that up for a AAA video game would mean upwards of 10-15 million sales with some modest trailers. Show me the game that's sold that well with that little marketing.
Nowhere did I say this place was representative of gamers. You seem to be making the retarded assumption that Holla Forums anons don't base our laughingstock threads on anything but what we want to be true. This isn't the case: Lawbreakers and Stillborn are the obvious examples, but even Battlefield Kangz and Wolfenstein The New Colossus sold poorly compared to what they needed to make. Fuck, do you remember when nu-Tomb Raider sold 5 million copies and was deemed a financial failure? The Destiny 2 threads were full of screenshots of the negative trend in player numbers before the player tracking website shut itself down to obfuscate the data.
But you just spent five posts telling us how games-as-a-service monetization makes money. If it's such a small sliver of revenue compared to launch sales, why bother torpedoing a developer or publisher's reputation over it? Why bother setting up the infrastructure needed to support it? Why bother bolting it onto an existing business model that was never intended to support it?
Lol.
LAWL. Is that why Sunset failed? Is that why Watch_Dogs 2 had such a shitty launch? Is that why Lawbreakers is dead in the water? Is that why Mirror's Edge: Catalyst was a bomb despite redesigning Faith to be a stronk independent mattress woman who didn't need no man?

Unlo–what? ooh! you mean DLC?

The kind that require complete mastery of the game and can't be bought with real money. You know, the way it used to be before normalfag cancer infected gaymin'.

b-b-b-b-b-b-but some of us have a life! we can't be bothered to play the games to that degree!

I remember people said that about MMOs, which they're a bit right because MMO's do take up a lot of time. But now I see that for even games like Devil May Cry.

...

MMO's seem to be built on the P2W stuff from the start, specially Korean ones, as for DMC, yeah, some people were defending DmC's watered down gameplay by saying the old fans were salty about new players being able to do all those combos now without "being a no-life nurd" and the like.

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GOOD: SHIT YOU UNLOCK WITH SKILL
BAD: SHIT YOU UNLOCK BY RANDOM CHANCE OR REAL WORLD MONEY

THE END

I never said Destiny wasn't profitable, I said it was extremely profitable without the need for microtransactions. They later added them anyway. My point was that even shit games make plenty of money without super saiyan jewery even when they squandered the vast majority of their budget an incompetent developers AND had a vastly overbloated marketing campaign completely beyond reason, the uninspired turd was till profitable.

Did you not actually play the game?

Say what you will about western version, but as is Xenoblade X has the best unlockables and post-game.

Are you living under a rock?
Also AAA marketing sucks up all the profit in the sales, good games don't need huge marketing, they market themselves.
Marketing serves specially when you're delivering a piece of shit or a trap.
A relatively cheaply made (around 50.000$-200.000$ in development cost) game, if done well, can rack up millions without a single cent spent in marketing, the problem is that no publisher is willing to experiment or hire indipendent devs without fucking their shit up; and only indie devs are the ones trying to do new things. In the end if profit is the key, a low cost high profit game is more reasonable than a high cost high profit one.

IMO unlocks are for SP only, I can't think of any case where they make MP better.

A perfect example of this is RO2 with weapons improving with level giving experienced players even more advantage over new players. Once I had the 100 round magazine for the MG34 I was unstoppable and stopped playing with it because it became boring. From there I moved onto other weapons like the STV40 but eventually ran into the same issue due to the combination of improved accuracy and gained skill.
In the end I was playing with pistols and SMGs only and still finishing in the top 3 most of the time.

Goldeneye 64, the unlockable duel wield and cheats was brilliant and kept me playing much longer until I finally got duel P-90s on Caverns. Best of all these offer no advantage in MP as any cheats activated were applied to all players.

I hope you get your dick stuck in a gacha machine

Shoulda rename it as Spic of Fighters amirite

Yeah, I believe you. And my uncle works for Nintendo.

In the game Shinboi for PS2, you can unlock new characters by collecting the Oboro clan coins that appear in each level. The amount of coins that are available is dependent on which difficulty mode you're playing on, so if you want to collect them all, you'll have to complete the game multiple times on each difficulty. You start on Normal, and you must complete the game once to unlock Hard, then complete the game on hard to unlock Super difficulty. You get two new characters, and you unlock a special mission when you collect all the coins, and the rewards are unlocked at different tiers (i.e. you unlock Hotsuma's brother Moritsune by collecting something like 30 coins, you will then unlock Joe Musashi at 40 coins).

It's a good example because it challenges you to complete the harder difficulties, and it rewards you for doing so. The downside is that Moritsune and Joe Musashi are pretty much model swaps with Hotsuma, although they do function in slightly different ways (Both Hotsuma and Moritsune's life bar will steadily drain if the player doesn't continually kill enemies and consume their Yin; Moritsune's Yin gauge will drain faster, but he does slightly more damage. Joe Musashi doesn't have a Yin gauge, so you will not have to worry about maintaining a killstreak, but he is slightly weaker than Hotsuma, and he has infinite shurikens that do not stun enemies)

In the sequel, Kunoichi, it's essentially the same system as before, although you unlock three total characters, one of which who has a unique moveset, (Hitsui has a different moveset than Hibana, although Hotsuma and Joe reappear as they did in the first game), and you can also unlock Survival Missions, Time Trials, and VR Missions. The Survival Missions will pit you against a succession of foes, the Time Trials take place in the main story's admittedly small mission areas, and the VR Missions give you extra objectives to complete for the fun of it.

In both games, you can unlock various pieces of artwork; in the first game, the Oboro coins would unlock art work, while in the second game there are holographic cards that are scattered around each main mission that the player must collect in order to unlock said artwork.

In short, these two games handle unlockables pretty well.

I don't mind unlocking shit but having to grind hard and long for shit like what they've done with lootbox games is absurd and not what I mean.
In my perfect world specific unlockables aren't advertised, maybe "you unlock shit as you go", but that's a given with most games (how else do you get to the next level other than unlocking it?) but let's say they give you a level creator after beating Tiny Metal (they won't), I would shit my pants. I would have no way of knowing that was coming, being perfectly content knowing I bought the game that I bought and then getting what would be a huge add on for me after beating it. There would be people that would bitch about it such as people that looked up what was not advertised and thought that they deserved that content at the beginning as if it was a known part of the game to purchasers (in this case it wasn't), or people that have beaten the game so they know about it and pick it back up on something without a completed file for the game (maybe a password would be good to give once a person beats the game, this would solve for anyone with grievances I believe).
Unlockable content can be something that you could get really rewarding with but I think the biggest flaw is advertising the specific content (ie. "YOU GET A FUCKING LEVEL CREATOR") but failing to mention how much you have to grind to get it, or acting as if it isn't actually unlockable but readily attainable content at the start of the game. Or, if it's a feature from previous games in a series that fans have come to expect to suddenly lock it behind a grind wall when that was not the case in any previous iteration could be really frustrating or outright horse shit. Another way I could see end game unlockable content being a bad decision is if the content is markedly different from the base game and the base game you have to beat is simply shit, but the unlocked content isn't (I don't have an example but I'm sure there's at least one) just for giggles let's say the only way to pay Atari's Adventure is to first beat E.T., that would be awful.

So I'll make my own shortlists

Good/acceptable
- any unknown/unadvertised content
- advertised content that is clearly advertised as unlockable

Unacceptable/bad
- content that's expected from the get-go (be it expected from previous entries or advertised as base content)
- known/advertised content that is markedly better than the tasks required to unlock it
- anything that asks for real money either optionally or as a requirement

Specifically when it comes to methods of attainment there can be a huge variance of what's acceptable such as 100% completing a game, collecting all of a specific thing, or playing the game in a specific way (e.g. on a paddle board in the rain), which could be acceptable or could be shit depending on how quality actually doing those tasks is. Typically in game shops with in game currency gathered as a point system or at a steady rate at specific intervals (hundred bucks for each completed level) are acceptable.
Real money to unlock shit, for me, is absolutely unacceptable. DLC I judge case by case and ideally it's like a new, non physical version of Corkscrew Follies or AoE Conquers, but I'll stop right there on DLC and treat it as a separate subject.

I consider no list that I made complete

Unlock costumes and characters
Fuck DLC for ruining DOA

While revenue is a legitimate concern for any game maker, some of these F2P are plain cancer that only exist to siphon players and money from other, more elaborated and interesting games. Like, all those kids buying pixels on some korean grind-fest could instead have poured money into better games. Instead of X clones of whatever Skinner box people are addicted to, we could have better games with a bigger playerbase.

But I'm not naive : I know that forcing the industry to change its course would be impossible without regulation at this point. Unless we framed that practice under "Gambling" regulations, there won't be any brake to this jewiness. And by the time boomers in the law-making institutions die and are replaced by the new generation, every one will have gotten used to see kids spend 50€ in a mobile game.

Weekend as fuck.