I only just recently heard about this phenomenon called "loot boxes." I never played a game with them except CS:GO but I saw them really demonstrated in vid related. It seems to me that good game design really is becoming a bit of a lost art and the only thing to be certain is that there will be a new god-awful gimmick that's even worse than loot boxes that will take the industry by storm. But I have to ask what could possibly be worse than loot boxes because I can't possibly imagine any answer to that question.
Maybe the next Call of Duty will tweak its progression system to make it kind of like Dark Souls by giving hard stats to the weapons that you raise by collecting titanite shards in deathmatches which will prove to be impossible because the majority of players you will face will already have fully upgraded bullet damage and reload speed stats on the only three decent weapons in the game while you may as well be armed with a checkout counter water pistol. So, the only way to get those shards is to fork over 10 lbs. for half a dozen of them.
So, what ideas have you guys got for revolutionizing the industry?
(Please note that I am not employed by any company and I am not here to do research on its behalf: I am a normal poster on this board)
That's regular pay to win, it's already been done.
Owen Miller
Activision has patented a system where the matchmaking puts you with people objectively better than you so that you'll lose, then advertises guns to you at the end of the match and tries to convince you to buy them. Then if you buy them, they match you with noob babies so you'll win and make you think your money was well-spent.
Andrew Richardson
Right, I wasn't kidding when I said I couldn't imagine an answer.
Nathaniel Phillips
nice try shill
Grayson Taylor
Hello fellow imageboarder, how's it going? Need my anonymous comment on this subject?
I think you mean to ask how to make the industry keep profiting without resorting to paywalls but i don't have an answer to that, the industry needs to go back to make it's profit on the sale of good games, you might as well spent the extra millions on making sure you ve got a good game rather than overspending on marketing and developing ways to trick people into spending money on microtransactions and then hoping the public eats your scam and opens their wallet because then you are playing the odds and you might make big losses that you might want to recover by being even more Jewish and thus perpetuating a cancerous cycle .
Eli Parker
Pay4Ammo Screencap this post, you know it's coming
Mason Rivera
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Lucas Parker
I suspect games will become even more "granular", meaning that you won't have to pay 15 bucks for a DLC or 5 bucks for an item but fiddy cents for access to a map or 99 cents for new abilities. Lessen the individual financial impact to make the investment appear more favorable.
Jack Hill
Hey, at least you can now buy the special ammo for (ridicolous) amounts of ingame currency, before that you were either a wallet warrior or part of the cancerous muh esports scene.
Ayden Wilson
I mean, IcarusLives is pretty ok in my book so I don't care.
Austin Hughes
The weird thing about modern multiplayer games is that big companies want to have you play them in the same way you would play singleplayer games. More effort is put into automating processes such as finding other players to play with and preventing griefing than encouraging meeting others and encouraging socializing, all in favor of maximizing player comfort and time/effort optimization. There is no clearer case here than in the 'sandbox vs. themepark' MMO debate where the game will find party members for you, where trading is done through a robotic interface, and quests do not involve the dynamics between players at all.
Player communication is discouraged or eliminated in order to enforce safe spaces (see Hearthstone and only being able to say a few canned messages to your opponent) or efficiency (less time is spent trading items in the Grand Exchange than directly between players). Discouraging the social element and communication, where other players become strangers and might as well be bots, then changes the focus of the game to winning and being as efficient as possible rather than having fun times together.
The current real-life meta in multiplayer games favors perfectionistic autists and shies away of any possibility of griefing. Modern multiplayer games for big companies might as well be singleplayer games with persistent worlds where the AI is replaced by humans, because it breeds a weaker community which can be controlled more easily, it doesn't break the comfort zone of the majority of gamers who want to grind without paying mind to anyone else, and because such a game is easier to make.
Basically, expect multiplayer games to resemble singleplayer more and more.
Jack Martinez
I never understood the socializing aspect. No, I'm not literally autistic either. 99% of the people you meet online are mouthbreathing retards who can't string a sentence together, why interact with them voluntarily?
Aiden Gutierrez
Griefing, scamming. It's fun. On the rare occasion that you do find someone who isn't a complete idiot it means that you've found a friend.
Joseph Cruz
Matchmaking was a mistake. It kills any kind of community-building with the focus on a server.
Christopher Young
And why did they invent matchmaking? The answer, as always, is consoles.
Grayson Sullivan
Socializing generally builds a longer term or dedicated playerbase and community. That and basic conversation ideally involves the transfer of knowledge or giving exposure to community content (this is just about anything from guides to help others get past skill plateaus, information so there's less people who don't know what they're talking about when discussing the game, etc).
If the game has modding support, you definitely need some form of community in order for new users get assistance in learning to use tools or make quality content.
Kevin Gutierrez
This is what was going to happen when you gave up the ability to host your own servers. In fact, a lot of the shittier parts of modern gaming can be explained by lack of user control. As bad as paid mods were the tools to make them and general ability to distribute them remained.
Leo Butler
Okay, so… we make it like arcades where you pay a quarter to play the game. But you have to pay 60 dollars to buy it first.
Eli Powell
Bullshit
Ian Diaz
Gee, Negrodomus, did that vision come to you in a moment of prophetic clarity, or did you just happen to stumble onto EA's old design documents from 2012?
Camden Sanders
I've been playing a lot of star trek online, because it's star trek and there's no alternative, it really would be shit if it wasn't. The way micro-transactions are so tightly weaved into the game is ridiculous. All ships are bought with micro-transactions. All decent gear is bought with a micro-transaction backed currency, which also requires grinding and grinding against a time wall. Most of these time walls can be sped up with more micro-transactions.
It's not as bad as it sounds. The game is perfectly playable and fun paying zero, i've never paid a dime. There's a ton of single player content and actual star trek characters with the real voiceovers. The amount of actual content that has been created over the years is massive. You can grind it all, or just wait as it's going to come anyway just from playing. Most people run multiple characters because you can only grind so much per day of the time backed/currency backed currency, which comes out to $0.30/day/character. Most people would run 10 characters on WoW though so w/e, there's different classes etc.
Now to the point of the lockbox. On top of all these microtransactions, you have the lockbox. The best of the best ships are only acquired via the lockbox, but they can also be traded on an exchange for an insane amount of the grindable currency, which isn't really grindable, the only way to get massive amounts of it is either to play that exchange, or buy keys to these lockboxes and sell them on the exchange for this currency for the massive amounts it trades for.
It breaks down roughly, 1 key = $1. 1 key = 4 million EC on the exchange. One of these lockbox ships could go for 1 billion EC. Hundreds and hundreds of real dollars.
These people are sick. This is pure gambling addiction. It's not even pay to win, because pvp while it exists is dead as fuck. It's all PVE.
Also the chinks that run this game now will auto-ban you if you even mention the name of a 3rd party gold seller in any in-game chat (like this goy in pic related, who actually used one), and they'll ban you if you play too long for botting. So it's perfectly possible to sink $10000 dollars into an account, and then get banned and loose it all with zero recourse. Their support is also non-existent, you can complain about your ban, or being ripped off when you bought something in game and it fucked up or you never got it after you dropped $100, and there's only a 10% chance support will even tell you to fuck off, 3 weeks later. There's something seriously wrong with this model and the people who support it. I hate government regulation but this needs to be regulated.
Grayson Thompson
he still refuses to do a MoonMan Doom review.
John Rivera
Man I don't blame him. With youtube bot being tested in production, it probably would shutdown his channel on the spot.
Shit would permaflag his channel for demonetization.
Josiah Taylor
I don't know you guys, but I feel like this: I don't particularly mind or care about lootboxes with skins or taunts or shit that I'll probably never use on online games, but I get seriously irate when I know it's p2w, freemium, gachashit or even worse, cosmetics et all with lootboxes in SINGLE PLAYER GAMES. I absolutely hate the latter, it's like, hey, you bought this game with all its content already installed on your shitbox, bam, you gotta pay more just to see a bit of skin, cmon boy don't be shy.
Ian Turner
Cool, thanks, I never heard of this website. Now I don't have to worry about making webms because this websites eats all of the ones I upload.
