Paying for content

Holla Forums, please enlighten an old fart who's become a casual because life.

My heydays were in the mid to late 90s, where I played Quake2, Half-life, UT, Q3 etc,
A time where both official and community made skins, mods, expansions etc were released for free.

How did developers succeed in making gamers accept paid content?

But to me the most incomprehensible shit ever:
What the actual fuck.
I recently started playing CS:GO with a friend who I used to play the original CS with late 90s early 2000s and started getting these cases.
When I tried opening one it said I need a key and I had to purchase it.
I started laughing. "Who the fuck would pay for a skin for their gun?!"
Then I went reading up on it and found out there's actually a whole fucking market, with people spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on fucking digital skins.

I can't comprehend it.
Someone explain this shit to me.
I can sort of understand people who collect 'rare' baseball cards or toy cars or whatever, but digital collectibles?

Also curious to read what you guys have spent your money on, and who here buys skins.
Are there other examples like these CSGO skins?

Other urls found in this thread:

archive.is/p0F6f
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door-in-the-face_technique
hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/User-made_Ships)
gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-10-09-digital-rights-are-exhausting-is-it-legal-to-sell-second-hand-digital-games
positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2015/12/13/hi-im-from-the-games-industry-governments-please-stop-us/
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

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It's a slippery slope made from casualization and greed.

On one end companies started catering to the lowest common denominator. You gotta get those sales numbers if you wanna secure a bigger publisher deal, and a bigger deal means bigger games, which means more sales! It's no surprise that every big company tries to chase down this shit instead of being content with where they are.

On the other side, we also have the free to play market. Despite what you may believe, the free to play market is not a recent thing, it just got really big recently. Around the 2000's is when Runescape, Maplestory and so on started popping up trying to make money off of micro transactions and optional subscriptions, and it kind of worked.
Back then, I think pretty much everyone in the gaming community recognized that free to play games presented a case where the quality of the game is highly dependant on how the game's payment model interacts with the gameplay, which is why there was heavy pushback for anything more than Runescape's subscription model. (Which, for clarity's sake: Went out of its way to avoid pay2win bullshit. Although the extra spots to collect certain materials in the subscription area's was an advantage, certainly, it was also the case that many of the items you could obtain were unusable in free2play servers. You cannot pay for a subscription, get a high level weapon and then go dunk scrubs on the free2play server. This is why people did not mind as much.)


Problem, though, is when the gaming market started becoming more casual.
The more casual a market is, the less people actually care about being screwed because "I'm having fun so it doesn't affect me".
Then you can slowly introduce slightly more jewish bullshit into the game. Every time something new comes in, some of the old core playerbase leaves, but the sales made by some of the casuals then take their place. First its stuff like double XP and drops, then we get cosmetics that look wacky and completely out of place, then eventually people introduce exclusive content. Exclusive content gets followed by season passes because then "you're getting a better deal!", and so on and so forth.


The newest cancer that's seeping in is paid mods. First volvo tries to push paid mods into an EXISTING modding community, even going as far as to say it's okay to repackage other people's free mods into your own mod and sell it, and a backlash happened. Great, they stopped being retarded, but that was only briefly. Paid mods are ALREADY BACK, and without a backlash to stop it now it's slowly seeping into dota 2 arcade and fucking everything up. It is already the case that there's popular dota 2 custom maps where you can pay for an advantage. Nobody's complaining loudly enough, so it's just gonna stay, and it's gonna get worse because money.

As for your case:
I think that's because you haven't played free to play games at all. If you played those you would understand that cosmetics aren't that big of a deal if you at least got something back (a free game!) for it. Unfortunately we can't have free2play games without jew2win mechanics anymore.

With Jews, you always lose

Short answer. Jews
Long answer: It's a mixture between videogames becoming a big market and big enterpeneurs; power leads to greed and greed leads to more greed.

When it comes to free to play games, I generally don't spend money on them unless I have a lot of hours (think 300+) in them and I think the game deserves some money. This is more of a decency kind of thing where I feel like the game deserves at least a little bit of reward.
Keep in mind that when you're doing this: Servers for free to play games usually run on a potato. With five bucks you probably paid for yourself and a hundred other players. Only consider forking over money if you actually have hundreds of hours in the game and the gameplay is actually good.
Unfortunately free to play games that are decent are far and few in between, and often turn into pay2win casualized bullshit over a longer period of time. The two examples I'll state here are Vindictus and Star Conflict. Both had pretty decent gameplay, but then new content got introduced (vindictus potion limit 16 -> 400, star conflicts introduces new OP ship classes) that completely destroyed the gameplay and made all old content irrelevant. It's sad to see developers destroying their own game.

As for skins: Generally I don't care for them, but this mostly lies in the fact that most skins are fucking shit. 9/10 times it's the case that the skins don't capture the style of the character properly, let alone look better than the default skin. And this is aside from the fact that skins have outrageous pricing. A skin is not fucking worth 5$ if you already have to pay 50$ for a game that has hundreds of models in it.


I think most of these things wouldn't be nearly as big of a deal if they weren't outrageously priced and didn't mean the game would get butchered in terms of modability. The lack of mods in modern games is very sad to see, and the insane prices for only a tiny bit of content is very sad. The season pass model shows the business now explicitly plan their games around DLC, often having lower quality release and high quality DLC in the process. The entirety is just going full on corporate capitalism cancer that nobody wants to be part of, and with the indie scene having to deal with the godawful gaming press it's no surprise that competing is difficult.


polite sage since this is kind of a continuation of another post I just made.

Valve's system is pretty much gambling, and gambling is addictive.
Remember when John Raviolli of EA said that there are moments when the player will shell out cash instead of waiting? As a result, most preorder bonuses have the "xb boost" or some op items included, so the player can feel superiour.
The execs just found a way to capitalise on narcissism and elitism and they are abusing it, nothing new here.

I wonder if in Yuroppe we will see legislation against this kind of thing. It is very much gambling, it's just that the reward is slightly different.

The whole chest craze is crazy to see. That shit is clearly gambling, and I'm surprised I'm not hearing more people raise complaints about it. I think it's partially because most parents don't understand how 90% of the rewards of the chests are essentially complete garbage since all the drops are game items from a game they don't play themselves.

They TEACH this sort of shit in game design schools, that's why it's so prevalent.

So it's intentionally malicious?

Even south park had an episode on it.

Of course it is.
Watch the recordings of game design conferences, gives you a lot of insight on what's going on.
Did you know that developer's slang term for a customer that is willing to pay for more than the base game is "whale" and most mobile game conferences are on how to make whaling better?
You know that one platinum conference recording going around, where they explain how to make a game enjoyable? Most conferences are about making the customer pay more money.

It's bizarre if you imagine comparing it to taking a course in something else.

Capitalizing on basic human behaviours is good business. If it makes money, companies will do it.

Greedy motherfuckers milking greedy motherfuckers who think they got ahead of someone else because they chanced something and essentially payed money to gamble for something that isn't even real.

Videogames really can be bad for you.

Mate, I'm taking a marketing course right now and we had two dedicated lectures on how to stop the client from not paying you for the work. I suspect that shit is common in every field.
It is surprisingly easy to understand when you rememeber that even though their crowd is pushing the whole "games are art" fad they see games as nothing more than business.

And what's worse, it's gambling directly targeted at minors. I'm kind of amazed nobody has raised a stink about it yet because if something is deserving of getting legislated the fuck out of existence it's this kind of exploitative shit.

I wouldn't say that.

I think it's simply a lack of understanding of others.

When you're in business, it becomes very easy to think that a higher income equates to doing a better job. Gaben pretty much shows this with his "money is how the community steers work" comment in the paid mods drama. ( archive.is/p0F6f which currently sits at roughly -5000 votes.)

You have to understand that, in some way, the thrills of possibly getting something amazing at a low cost is part of the product. Webm related.


It's just that when a developer starts to see "more money being spent" as "customers are happier", it becomes a case where they start to implement all this retarded gambling shit into the game since it earns them money. And whilst the idea of a millionaire throwing a couple thousand dollarydoos at some garbage in the game doesn't seem so bad, the reality is unfortunately the entire game suffers whilst at the same time giving children a gambling addiction.

Yeah, that's very fucking true. That's why it enraged me when indie devs bitch about their vanity project not making bank.

In my head I'm thinking "motherfucker, your shits done" what more do you want.

You make them sign a contract and have a lawyer on retainer. 99% of freelancers getting fucked over are because they never make anyone sign anything, like idiots.

The system is fuckin weird.
For example, steam cards. This is a fucking retarded idea on the surface, but I bet it has brought them millions. On the other hand I have no reason to complain since cards can be sold for steambux.
I once got a game that was nearly free during a sale, played it for two hours, dound it alright, sold the cards and had enough money to buy all of the Tomb Raider games, including the reboot. But that just means that some poor idiot who bought the cards essentially bought the games for me and even went overboard. Valve still wins, the idiot loses his money.

I must not be the only guy that remembers the "pussy smells and pussy noises" user from ages ago.

those bitches are going for like 2 cents a card. I don't think anyone is making money off that.

This is the best thread in the catalog right now, than you all gor this.
Also a reminder that most of these business practises popularity can be attributed to Microsoft 2007 and onwards.

Are casinos not intentionally malicious?

Organized gambling on a scale such as this is purposely engineered to suck as much money out of consumers as possible, not by being fun and letting people reward the developers for making a fun product, but by abusing scientific knowledge about the human psyche and behavior to rape your wallet.

Because all produced content is paid.
They are companies, not hobbyist. Their paycheck depends on selling stuff.
Most modders have another source of income (or live in their parents basement).

Besides, don't tell me content shouldn't be paid for. It totally should if the makers doesn't want to give it away for free. No one has ANY obligation to give you ANYTHING for free, nor do you have any "right" to get stuff just because you want it.
Of course, you're totally free to say "no thanks" and not give them your shekels. I'd personally never pay for stupid shit like that - the prices are incomprehensibly idiotic - but, if there's a moron out there who is willing to pay 100$ for a skin, why stop him? His money to burn.

It never ceases to amaze me how jews accuse jews of jewing. Everyone loves their shekels and wants to hold on to them.

Much like mobile games exclusively focusing on sucking "whales" dry, the card system is designed with autistic, OCD suffering retards that feel a compulsion to collect all the cards.

It's not meant for people like you and me that could give less of a shit about not having all the cards and that view them as a source of steambux.

It's just the world we live in now OP, ever since 2006. It's all about showing and not actually doing.
You're a "Gamer" because of the graphic t-shits that you wear, the junk food you consume, the banded gaming products that you own, the posters on your wall and the loyalty that you show to a company… rather than just playing games and having fun.
I think they call it Virtue/Social Signaling.

In the case of CSGO.
It's more Impressive to other people to have rare skins than a good K;D Ratio or Rank on a ladder.
You're now "ranked" on how much digital worth you have obtained from the game.

But THEY are not doing it because they think people will be happier, in most cases they actually DESIGN the game to bore you out so you will spend cash instead of waiting/grinding.

Paying for mods is the death of modding.

Why would anyone bother working his ass off to release that meticulously researched combat rebalanced mod? Why would anyone bother making a mod that adds in a new gameplay mechanic? Why should anyone waste time on a complete overhaul mod that turns the game into something radically different?

Just release a shitty skin or palette swap on Steam and roll in the cash of all the autistic little shits with access to their parent's credit card.

Paid mods means no more community spirit, let alone teamworks. Nobody is going to allow others to use and include their own mods in their creations, nobody is going to be willing to cooperate with each other and dedicate hundreds of hours of free time to make something innovative and great when they can spend a fraction of that time on shitty skins.

There's just one problem with that logic: the fact that there's a moron out there willing to pay $100 for a skin means companies will stop at nothing to find every other moron who's willing to spend money on things that used to be free or at least much more reasonably priced. Think of it like going to a restaurant and finding out that they no longer serve complementary bread and water before your meal because they found out some asshat was willing to spend $20 for that bread and water. As you said, the restaurant is free to do that, and you're free to keep your money, but the simple fact is that your experience is now reduced because of other people's stupidity and other people's greed.

They even call the games "experiences". All those shitty indie games are there to give you an "experience", not to have good gameplay.

You could even argue that it is a byproduct of Western education that has been brainwashing children for decades into only thinking and saying what is not considered wrongthink. People will lie that they are for mass immigration even though they are not just because it's the CURRENT YEAR and that's what they are expected to say if they want to stay a member of the cool kids' clubhouse.

You have to go full jew like Pay2winday 2, or World of Grind, War Grinder and Grindframe.

These are not casino's, these are videogames.
You do not gamble hundreds of dollars, you only gamble about two fiddy. You cannot actually win money, and you actually get something in return 100% of the time. It's just that 99% of the time it's fucking garbage, but good luck legislating around that!

My point is that with games, it's more-so the case that the industry ended up here because of idiocy. Not because they are actively trying to find new ways to get your wallet.
Valve introduced it at some point, and people hated it. But it didn't get a huge enough backlash to stop people from doing it, so it stayed. Other companies see valve is successful, so they copy their business model.
Valve has done many talks in the past about how to make an actually enjoyable marketplace and microtransaction monetization scheme. The worst part isn't that they were right about most things they said, it's that they've slowly progressed from a decent market into complete cancer, eventually doing the complete opposite of what made the market work.
They didn't end up here because they wanted to. They ended up here because at first they put a lot of research into it making sure they didn't fuck up, and then they simply had random folks at the company introduce updates, without any regard for the original system in place. As long as the decisions from random folks made money, Volvo didn't really care. And thus began the slow progress from decent model into complete fucking cancer.

They only look at how much money the game is making, purely from a corporate perspective.
If they can make the game progress 25% slower, and doing so nets 5% more income, then they believe that the game is enjoyed slightly more and thus gives them more income.
Corporations are idiots, not intelligent individuals working together.

We life in a different age, where the technology and progress gave us quality for lesser cost.
Its logical, you want to spend less and get more, this concept works everywhere:
- In employment (i.e. 1 worker = multiple scopes of specializations)
- In production and manufacturing
- In shipping and logistics
- In products and video games

Its easier to make template product and gain huge income, than to risk your companys money and hope that the product will pay off.
No one gives a shit about culture weight. The story is the same - money.

Because gamers are not the developers, they can't make games they only play them and if gamers won't accept new policies in games…they won't play them. They won't be in the social loop, they will miss possible happy emotions, they will lose.

Oh I fully understand why developpers and distributers wanted to go there.
It's the acceptance of the consumer I don't get.
It's not even having to pay for extra content, like maps, it's wanting to pay for cosmetic shit like skins.


I could still understand people spending money for pay2win mechanics.
But the CS:Go skins are a prime example of something that has nothing to do witn pay2win.

And 1 in 4 women are raped on college campuses every day.
Really…
Get a reality check.

The core of modding resides in passion. There will ALWAYS be free mods to find and people who won't care about a few bucks they could earn that way.

The whole idea that modding will collapse in itself is preposterous. In fact, it's just as likely it will bring more people into modding. The fear/panic mongering is uncalled for.
Sure, some modders might start charging for their mods. So what? It's their right. And as long as it's reasonably priced, all is well.

That just life. Hell is other people.
Find another restoraunt and deal with it.
And trust me, there will always be other restoraunts.

All that is quickly proven bullshit when you take into account these people are hiring psychologists to boost the addiction rate of their games.

While I fully understand the hate against seasonal passes, special events, expendable item cash market and DLCs , I don't get why would you hate skins/hats/taunts/killcounters/whatever else Valve is selling in MMOs/competitive games.
Not having them does not hinder your game experience, you can still rock the server while butt naked, and if it's a game you like you can support it and get a chance to look cool while rocking the server in the future.
It's literally the perfect solution. Developers get cash, rich fucks get their ego boost and cheap fucks don't lose a thing.

Source containing proof:user's ass

ayy lmao

It's funny right? I swear people weren't all corporate whores before the 2000s rolled in.

It's basically what "gaming" has become, all superficial and all about the window dressing. People who are into modern vidya care very much about appearances and graphics, since most games that come out nowadays are so shallow, that those superficial things are all they have.
Don't bother trying to understand it, this is just what the new kids are like and this site is filled with them.

Yet there's people that will waste thousands of dollars on pay2win shit.

So? That makes it somehow better?

Ever tried shit Love Live or KanColle? How can you say that is not the equivalent of a slot machine spewing out cards with shit gameplay bolted on top so you don't recognize it as a virtual slot machine?

Bravo at being dumb enough to buy that shit. These are companies that pay good money to experts that tell them how to maximize monetization of their products.

They are neither stupid nor ignorant, just greedy and apathetic.

No, of course not, it's just a coincidence they are slowly introducing more and more ways to suck out money out of their consumer base as they keep solidifying their quasi monopoly of the market. Nothing planned about that, Valve dindu nuffin, they a good goy.

To be fair Valve wasn't the first jumping in into the microtransaction train like that user is implying, but they are clearly pushing this shit harder and harder one step at a time.

I miss when they would actually just make games.

Monkeywheels needs to implement a feature where posting ">>>>>>>>/tumblr/" actually sets a permanent tumblr.com redirection flag for the IP of the post that you responded to.

Where is your proof? Where are your numbers?

You're implying that because just CAN sell mods, that EVERYONE will and it will destroy modding.
Just like..you know…everyone can sell art/drawings, so there is no free art on the internet anymore….. oh, wait!!!

Stop being a retard. I know plenty of modders that won't bother with mod sales. I'm one of them too.
So stop with the "DOOOOOMED!" bullshit.
The End of the World called, you got the wrong millenium.

Don't get me wrong.
I fully understand the companies.
I much preferred the times of the free 'Bonus packs', but I understand we were never 'entitled' to them.

I'm just curious for those 'morons' you refer to.
The idea of paying a couple of hundreds or thousands of dollars to have ONE skin for a gun in CS:GO just makes me giggle.
Why do people actually do it?!

Addiction?
Recognition?
Is it like wanting to have the coolest backpack in primary school?

Digital 'collectibles' are the ultimate scam, because something that is digital is infinitely replicable at the drop of a hat.

A rare baseball card will stay rare, and the baseball card community knows that, because the company that makes them has stopped making them/has gone bust/etc.

A skin, on the other hand, hold its value for the same reasons, but because it isn't a physical object, there is no guarantee that its rarity will be preserved. Valve has complete control over what is rare and what is not on a day-to-day basis that no other company which makes collectibles has.

I find the idea of collectibles - trading and valuing something simply because it's rare, rather than because of any intrinsic value it has - completely retarded in the first place, but these dense fuckers take it to another level.

Are they actually going to be able to look back on their life in ten years' time and say 'Yep - those thousands of dollars I spent on digital hats weren't wasted at all.'

You should just delete your post now. You're embarrassing yourself.

That's kinda sad.
You impress me by clutching.
A cool skin just kinda makes me think you're a douche with too much money. idk

Exactly that. Nothing more to it.

If I were to hazzard a guess - lack of common sense.
Or maybe they just got that much money to burn.

Most people have that gatherer instinct where they want to hoard money and not give it away, which is where the cost/benefit analysis comes in.
My guess is that since there's no natural selection anymore, we got plenty of retards running around.

Pic related

Paid mods were a complete disaster even in the short time during which they existed. It was a matter of hours before we were dealing with advertising pop-ups inside mods, stolen mod content, etc. Nobody wanted them and they wouldn't have lasted even if Valve hadn't removed them.

The fact that you would actually defend paid mods just shows how much you don't belong here. Now get out.

Except there aren't restaurants worth eating at that serve complementary bread and water anymore.

Again, I don't 'hate' it.
I much rather see the optional paid skins, than the obligated paid map packs.or pay2win scenarios.

I'm not hating on the concept, I'm baffled at how it's actually working.

They're already back.

In Dota 2, you can sell a subscription for the custom maps you've made to give bonuses. In some maps this translates to a literal advantage, like bonus XP and gold.

Are you really trying to say that games used to have less content back then?

How does having some orange stripes on your gun add hours of content?

Well, we all saw it coming I suppose.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door-in-the-face_technique

What about this part, guys

'Fess up. What's the most you guys have spent on 'cosmetic'* digital content?


* let's consider expansions and map packs as actual extra content. With cosmetic digital content I mean stuff like CSGO skins or those steam collectible cards

Arcade games did have little content with ramped up difficulty and cheap as fuck moments to suck out all the quarters you had on you.

Didn't you ever buy a shirt, or a mug, or a wallpaper not because it's perfectly practical, but rather just because it looks nice?

I probably spent ~50-100$ over the course of about 5 years on various game cosmetics.
I don't really remember what they were, save for a TF2 pirate hat & pirate beard for Demoman, that I wore in set with various other pirate-themed items.
Never paid more than 10$ for a single item

Does you dad work at Nintendo?

Oh, so you freely admit you are not unbiased in this debate and are one of the people that would financially benefit with the Jew.

Why not point us toward your modding output so we can just how "passionate" you happen to be?

Well, sure, but I mainly referenced mid to late '90s, so I wasn't really talking about arcade games.


That's the thing though, those are physical objects.
I can understand buying a shirt that looks nice for you to wear. But byuing a digital shirt for your digital character to wear? I don't get it.

I remember when 'second life' came out and I read about people actually spending money to buy ingame clothes, cars and houses.
Back then I just waved it off as a marginal group of weirdo's. But those practices have become mainstream.

Come to think of it, second life was the first game I knew about where this phenomenon really took place.
Were there similar games before that, where people spent money like that?

Don't forget all the mentally ill freaks that spent upwards of $10,000 on ship jpegs for a game that isn't out yet.

How people can look at this shit and not see how blatantly evil it is is beyond me.

Perhaps hats and beards are even more difficult for me to understand, because at least you still see the skin on the gun you're holding.
You don't see your own beard.

What do you think makes you happy with having that 'outfit'? It has to be about what other people think of you, right?
not trying to be condescending here, I'm genuinely trying to get an idea of the psychology behind this. So far my 'cool backpack in primary school' seems to be the best comparison

Yeah, how dare I not trot the party line! Such heresy.

While I may not like the Paid Mods in principle, I'm not a histeric mongoloid like you. People went apeshit over nothing, treating an unpopular decision like some great moral crime.
Cry me a river, faggot.
Boo, hooo. You might have to pay a buck or two for a mod every now an then. How horrible it must be to be you. What tragedy. The heavens themselves weep for you.

...

But the actual resource price of those objects is much lower.
Most of the time, the gold making up a 300$ ring is worth about 10$. Cotton making up an 80$ shirt is about 2$. Plastic making up a nevelty bobblehead is less than a cent.
The entire price lies in the design and customer bragging rights. Same thing with virtual goods.

Nothing heretical about having shit opinions, it just means you are a fuckwit.

Yet user already posted examples of what happened mere hours after paid mods became a thing.

And as we've already established you are not even remotely unbiased. Why would a "modder" such as yourself be against paid mods?

You speak of passion and such, but all I can smell is a kike.

You're not getting our shekels hebe.

Difference being those are actually physical objects you can hold in your hand and actually own.

Hats and shit are just pixels and lines of code, you don't really own them, and the moment Valve shuts down their serves they are gone for good. Hell, the moment they deem you did something wrong they can take them all away from you unilaterally.

I used to run around in full pirate getup, taunting a lot, trying to be a comedy relief player of sorts.
Enemy players would sometimes gang up against "that fucking pirate", even though I wasn't nearly the best player.
Yeah, it was mostly the satisfaction from "looking cool" and getting noticed.

Define ownership.
If police suspects me of drug trafficking, they can barge into my house and break/take away my mug without giving it a second thought. Or a common burglar can do the same. Or my spiteful ex wife. Or I can accidentally break it.
Physical objects are just as ephemeral as virtual ones.

Point is, you still own that mug and they are bound by law to give it back to you if they deem you innocent.

Hell, even if you are guilty they still have to establish you acquired the mug with dirty money to take it away from you.

Now you're just being obtuse. Stealing your possessions is a crime, you breaking it is an accident. Valve can legally take away "your" Steam items and games.

And now you've gone full retarded.

Stop being a retard. You paid for it, and the law respects your interest in it - therefore anyone who violates that interest can potentially be prosecuted.

Most physical products also have some degree of independence from their manufacturer. Once they've made it and you've bought it - they can't take it back from you, or modify it without your consent.

The rise of software and the internet have changed these things. Valve has power over their digital products which no manufacturer of physical goods has over their tangible goods.

Only if you break their terms of service.
They are bound by law too.

Sounds awfully lewd. Story?

jej

...

Examples of what?

I don't monetize my mods and I never will. I always released everything for full use by anyone as soon as I finished it.
You're barking up the wrong tree.

That's funny, coming from someone who so loves his shekels that he denies other people the right to sell what they make, just so he doesn't have to spend them.

Are you implying you're not biased? Because you would benefit from the opposite.

Not to mention, I would only benefit if I actually sold anything.

SOTS Phoenix mod
Freespace 2 - TONS of ships and 2 campaigns (see: TrashMan under hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/User-made_Ships)
Fallen Encahntress - Vaynar Kingdom
Baldurs Gate 2 - Holy Avenger Kit and balance mods
StarPoint Gemini - 2 ships
EV:Nova (a new faction, can't remember what I called it)
Battle for Wesnoth - COTS
Rimworld - Space Marine stuff
Space Marine - balance/art changes
Chapter Master - contributed stuff
StarDrive 1 and 2 - minor items/leaders/balance mods
UFO: AI - donanted a bunch of models
Starpoint Gemeni 2 - modeled 2 turrets (freelancing for the devs actually… FOR FREE. I just felt like doing it.)

Tons of minor mods for Star Wolves, Jagged Alliance 2, Freelancer, Might and Magic games, X3, etc, etc, etc, etc..

I mod almost every single game I play, although a lot are for personal use and I never bothered spreading them around. I can't even remember the mall.

But that user is right, mods became shit instantly the second STEAM started putting a price on them.
Suddenly every mod maker that jumped unto that ship turned into a mega jew making shit "chair and katanas" and putting prices on them.

Diversity is our strength, guy. Intellectual diversity is no different. Smart people, average people, and stupid people, all united by being gentiles.

Bottom line is that overpaying for shit that is either:
-cut from the original game to be resold as DLC
-only a slight touch-up/not worth the money
-not an expansion
is fundamentally fucked up. DLC on paper sounds great, but you know as well as I do that it is abused like a 12-year-old stepdaughter and is definetly not used as intended. That extra money is not going to go towards improving games, but towards marketing research on how to make more money. If you want proof, just look at any game which charges for DLC. Only game that was worth the money was Fallout: NV, and even then I waited for GOTY.

Paying for mods, DLC, skins, season passes or whatever is fucked in the head no matter how much you try and justify it, because it is never worth the money. Some other casuals and morons may not care, but I will never buy into this crap, ever. Either make DLC worth buying or don't make it at all.

You don't seem to understand how everything fucking imploded when paid mods were introduced. That it was shitcanned almost immediately tells you how unpopular it was and how much it was abused.

Have you got all the marketing information you needed now, Mr. Shill? Then GTFO.

Nowhere, because that's not something you can fucking create a statistic for in the first place. The falsified rape statistics can be disproved with real statistics because that's what they are, falsified statistics. You can't do that with the fact that paid mods will fuck over modding. You can, however, understand it through simple reasoning if you aren't utterly retarded. A lot of people are greedy. If you set the precedence of selling mods, pretty much every greedy person is going to do that instead of releasing them for free.


Just like paying more for video games has improved the quality of those, right? Capitalism doesn't lead to improvement, it just leads to greedy people trying to lower the standards of everyone. If they get away with consumer-unfriendly practices, those practices will get more widespread and the next day someone will try something even more jewish until they get away with lowering the standards again.

You're a goddamn moron for acting like this needs exact, specific proof, or that it can even be produced in the first place. It's like saying that muslims aren't trying to take over Europe because you can't prove it because it hasn't happened yet.

EVERY mod maker?
Or just some?

Or are you pretending that the nexus wasn't flooded with chairs, dresses, katanas and shit even before that?
Cosmetic mods have always been numerous.

How come the same thing that always existed and was present, and you never had trouble with before, suddenly becomes cancer?

Yes, every mod, mods that are actually good take too long to make and if you entice people with money they'd just make chairs instead.
Same thing that is happening with mobile games and even big companies are leaving the market to make pay2win garbage now.

case in point, look at valve itself

Opinions are not facts

If you give people freedoms and options, some will abuse them?
WELL NO SHIT, SHRERLOCK!!!
So fucking what? That's no reason to forbid something.

Oh? Who said that? If you're gonna fight strawmen, then go ahead, but keep me out of your dellusions.


There are not enough facepalms in the world.
Even if you were right about everything (and you're not), you'd STILL have no right to stop people from selling or buying what they like.

Subjective to a large point.
I agree that so much of overpriced and not worth it, but that in itself is not a crime.
You and I think it's "not worth buying", but it's obvious plenty of people disagree.
Worth is inherenlty a deeply subjective complex, although not compeltely.

DLC or paid mods is not in any way, shape of form "fucked in the head". You just don't like it. And that's fine and dandy - I don't like it much either. But if you can't stop the "I hate it, therefore it's evil/stupid" mental process, then that speaks poorly of you.


Shill. How original. You used a bogus buzzword. I'm so convinced now.
Really, it's like the new "racist" or "sexist"

I knew if that if the thread would be derailed it would be by faggots like you.

A lot of people think letting illegals suck up welfare and stay in our country is ok and stating that's objectively wrong and against the law is racist now.

Point is, "lots of people" are brainwashed idiots with no knowledge of the subject they are speaking about and completely unaware of the consequences of their actions, see how XBOX LIVE fucked over consoles by setting a precedent and how it scaled from there.

Oy vey

really? why would they bother?

they could probably get away with writing their tos/eula to give them unlimited power and people would still click accept to get their precious, precious vidya gaems

People just accept that times change. I played cs:go with other people who just like me started back then with 1.6 and I am the only one who hated those skins.

I don't hate them, although the majority of them are ugly as fuck I just don't understand why people would spend money on them, or at least higher amounts.

Mate, back in early WoW days some guy got scammed out of his expensive item here in Germany. He sued the scammer and the court was discussing for ages if a digital product can even be worth any money at all.

And now everybody just accepted it as normal.

EULA isnt above the law though and are only a means to protect a company just in case someone tries to exploit and sue the company, usually it turns out the way around thought.

gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-10-09-digital-rights-are-exhausting-is-it-legal-to-sell-second-hand-digital-games

Most would.
The moment someone would go to court though, Valve would have to back down.
If an EULA violatesd state law, it loses it's legitemacy.

This is some real high-effort bait here.

Wrong. They don't "disagree" any more than they simply don't know what they're buying. DLC's rarely have any previews, only some vague promise of a weapon or cosmetics. Of course people buy it in the vague hopes it will be good, but then they get burned. They don't know any better, because they are lead to believe that this is what counts for "quality." Who cares, it's just a couple of dollars, right?

The majority don't care/have money to burn/buy it for their kids, but that doesn't mean that this strategy is making games better, quite the opposite. I know there's no real institution to gauge how good a game is, but anyone with any taste will tell you that they prefer quality over quantity when it comes to games.

Video games SHOULD be about quality over quantity. Best bang for my buck was RE4. Extras, unlockables, game modes, you name it, it had replay value out the ass. Bought it at a thriftstore for under 5 bucks. You ask me, it was a steal. I would've gladly payed more.

But the devs have their money, so who cares if the customer got ripped off? By your logic, money = people are satisfied. Bullshit. They don't know or don't care, while the people who do care for games get shafted in the process. The game quality is driven down and things that should have been included in the original game are fed back to us piecemeal at 5 bucks a pop at best.

Maybe if you didn't come off as a sleazy pitchman, belittling people on how they "over-reacted" on paid mods, I would give you the benefit of the doubt. It is a real word found in the dictionaries and I found it's use appropriate. Anyone with half a brain can see where your DLC-positivism will take us, because that shit got us in this state in the first place. Just get out.

They didn't. Had to wait for a new generation coming into gaming, then they foisted the xbox 360 and all it's cancer upon them to blindly sustain the new model, whether gamers liked it or not.

"Tax" on the card, if you sell a card for 0.08€ the guy will pay 0.10€. Get 0.02 from me, him and you and gaben have enough for a coffee. Ain't aiming at small deal but the numbers

But how did you collect so much? The cars are just 5 per game and it get sold if lucky at 0.10€

Ahh, 40 minutes and no reply. Chalk up another one.

I know you're lurking, you fucks

This is the mentality that got us here.


Because that idiot spend 100€ on a skin, dev see that and next time will add two skins to sell, and the time after will add a new gun for 150€ and then you end up with DLC and money scams everywhere.


Look at 2K16 they had coins to upgrade your player that you got as checks for playing and playing good. then started to add micropayment to buy more coins. Now the game is shit if you don't spend

"Is money to lose" is the most retard mentality cause it will always affect everyone

I can hear your hands rubbing from here

I think features like these are a motivation for some smaller studios to try and survive. Especially with the stupid decisions they end up making. The sole reason that this happens is because devs always seem to pick open world games or multiplayer games with a lot of content. The idea isn't to make a pixelshit game but something in the middle. Companies like Frictional can make games within their budget without DLC or microtransactions so why can't developers take note? And because of these companies, the actual big ones can justify their kikeness.

The EA executive says.
The Bethesda executive says.
The man in the suit that you never hear from says.

It's not that giving more money to developers is bad, but they base mechanics and development time solely on how much can be milked from the average consumer. I use steam regularly. I've wasted time on trading cards and I know that I'm a part of the problem. But I've stopped looking at preorders and I'm interested in DLC that's at least worthwhile and for a game that I know wouldn't just cut the content to put it as DLC months before the game is even out.

You want to fix this? Then keep yelling at the idiots to stop preordering, to stop listening to hype and wait till the game is out, see the business practice and just ignore the game if it's only out there for your wallet.

There wasn't a way to keep the game to us permanently from steam?
I remember there was a way to keep the files on your own pc

Consolefags.
There are people our age who only played on consoles as kids. So when this "extra content" began to appear on the Xbox 360, they thought it was great and didn't realize they were being ripped off because they didn't know any better. Now we're older and not the main target demographic. So, the kids that play now also don't know any better because this is the way it always has been to them. There wasn't enough of a pushback when it first began.

Giant companies paved the way. Once small devs see the big companies take the heat and survive, they'll sell out until shitty half-baked
"games" are the industry standard.

It'll take at least 10 years before the public gets sick of their virtual slot machines, if they ever do.

By letting this genereation of modders do their thing and be shifty-eyed, jealous little shits. They're not satisfied with getting credited, they want constant patting on the back for their portion of the work and some kind of social currency and fame, which is basically just getting paid but without the convenience of money as a counter on how much everybody is getting paid. They're filthy communists, basically. And DLC is just employed modders who already proved their worth and got hired, because their work had value all this time even when shitty little kids used to get them for free because the platform was commercially untested in the fucking 90's.

If you're actually older than 12 you've wasted your life not figuring this shit out.

Same way you don't need to pay for rap music, if you live in a hood in the 70's. All the little niggers do it for free, until some suit figures out how to sell them and seizes the "manufacture", so to speak.

Literally the one and only way commerce has ever worked, and you ask why people stop being communists when they grow up.

In my own opinion, was when dedicated servers were being fazed out. Now the have control of servers and can ban people using skins that the customer didn't pay for and call it hacking. No pay, no play.

I've made a ton of mods myself. (The last mods I made were somewhere 2010 MW2)

I never cared for 'fame' or 'patting on the back', nor did most of the people in the modding community.
Most of us mod as a hobby, for the love of the game, and for our own pleasure.

When you were a kid you probably had that one boss you couldn't beat. You'd go in, try as hard as you could, and get your ass kicked. Then one day you managed to land the killing blow, and you felt fucking amazing. The only thing this costs is the time to git gud.
TF2 and CSGO have a system involving keys and boxes. You pay real life dosh for a key, then you pay a key for a chance to get something good. In this case you aren't paying time to git gud, but actual money. This is obfuscated by the key system, if you were entering your credit card details every time you wanted to open a box you'd realize it's a money sink and stop. It's gambling.
There's more though. You get an item out of that box, and you want to sell it. You put it on Steam's market, and someone buys it off you. Now you have a bit more money to work towards another key, and Valve takes a cut of the sales. They literally profit from doing nothing. The only way to take money out of the system is to trade for Paypal money or something.

It's the perfect crime. Give gamers a system that randomly gives you stuff, because they're used to doing things again and again until they get it right. Once they get their knife or shiny hat or whatever, they'll have fun with it until they sell it again, and Valve takes a cut. If they get something shit they'll sell it, and Valve takes a cut. If they buy another key all they do is perpetuate the system.

What's his name again, /d/?

Games became more popular. The market opened up.
Everyone and their mother plays games now, so the average retard doesn't mind paying 50$ for a new bathtub in the Sims.

paid skins are arguably one of the least disgusting things that's come out of gaming in the past few years. At least, it's not terrible compared to shit like CoD that has annual game releases, or any EA game with half their game behind a paywall.
It allows games to be free to play, or in the case of cs:go, very cheap.
Unless the devs do it wrong you can essentially play the game 100% free, as long as there are retards buying cosmetic shit.
Of course it can be done wrong, and you're left with a pay2win piece of trash that can only be played by sinking a shitload of money into it. Most mobile games are like this.

Also, brace yourself for previously free, community made game mods to be 100% paywalled in the future, because that's the direction these fucking idiot devs are headed.

TES6 will most likely have paid mods, and people will eat that shit up anyway, because the average consumer doesn't care about how the devs treat them.

So you just admitted you didn't play video games before the era of the 360? That explains why you're such a retard that you blame consoles for a problem that is more on PC than anything. The consoles are trying to catch up in their jewry, but it's PC and chiefly Valve that paved the way for them.

Consoles can only be blamed for popularizing certain problems that started on PC, and that's only because PC gaming was relatively niche until less than a decade ago. inb4 butthurt PCfags denying that those games sold fewer copies. Except for Xbox Live. The idea of paying for that shit is one of the ultimate examples of jewry and came from consoles. But they obviously got the idea from MMOs and shit on PC.

Scarcity. If people want and there isn't a lot of them then prices go up.
Think of it this way, there are roms all around yet people still pay hundreds for original cartridges.

CSGO skins are like the crossover between the F2P model and the usual payment model; however Valve pulled off having both paid cosmetics and a paid game. The closest I've been to paying for skins is probably for the Path of Exile game, which is free to play, and yet the stuff you can pay for don't disrupt balance or give unfair advantages.

Overall, I've stuck by paying only for the game. The only time I've bought DLC is when it's on sale and bundled with the original game, but still I don't see that business practice going away. Same goes for the paid cosmetics.

If you want other games where you'd pay for stuff like skins, it's pretty much every F2P game since selling those is what the devs rely on for cash. E.g Warframe. Not that I like the payment model either, if you've kept up with the development and updates of that game, they're pretty focused on pushing out new (half assed) content and leaving their past half assed updates to remain as half assed.

Additionally, some of these are tied to addictiveness, gambling, or other psychological conditions.

positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2015/12/13/hi-im-from-the-games-industry-governments-please-stop-us/

When it comes to CSGO skins and TF2 hats, some people participate in buying/selling because they think they can resell for higher. Or that buying a key to a crate, will yield an item that can be sold for higher than the key. If you aren't already aware, game companies now hire behavioral psychologists.

Because kids are stupid, that's it. Oldfags don't care or can't do anything because children and faggots with the minds of children will pay for it.

This isn't anything new. There were a couple partial and total conversions for Doom that were sold commercially. There were those compilations, often including some dehacked files, some utilities, maybe a source port, etc. Mods have been getting sold for a while, and that's fine. What pissed me off about that whole debacle is that both Vulva and Bethsaida got more money than the modder themselves, and that the mods were all worse than the original game.

Fascinating.

And what makes you think you are not brainwashed and stupid?
Why should I trust your opinion?
How can you even demand that, and by what authority?


Pot. Kettle. Black.

That would be the fault of the people not reading, wouldn't it? Stupidity should be punished.
How else do you filter it out of the gene pool?

And maybe if you didn't act like the arrogant asshole that you are, and hounded people simply for having a different view on things, maybe I would actually have some smidgen of respect for you. But as it happens, I don't.
"Everyone can see"? No. But keep deluding yourself that you're the smartest person on the planet and the arbiter of reality. That will get you far in life.

Quality is to a large degree subjective. And while I do agree with you that the quality is dropping, that's because you and I are looking for different things from our games. Heck I'd say we are objectively more correct than the newer generation in our criteria, if such a thing as objectivity even exists. However, part of it is down to experience and exposure. It's not that games before weren't crap, we were just a lot more forgiving and simply didn't notice some things.But it's pointless.
You can't stop the process. Entropy. All things degrade with time. You will live to see everything you know and love turn to ruin. Just like the generation before you complained everything has gone to shit and generations after you will do. It's a fucking cycle.

And DLC is not directly related to quality anyway.

You're really not the brightest light in the room, you know.

Because you have no answers to those completely valid, factual examples on where that path leads

He's right though, you sound like a completely sleazy salesman.

>that one faggot is still posting

FYI someone paid 30k for a career in Dota 2.

Casuals and retards who think that digital accessories to their digital only goods are worth spending money on.
It's kind of like jewelry for your games. It looks nice supposedly and you might get someone's attention with it.
I spend my money on food, rent and bills. If I buy vidya not faggot accessories for vidya it's because it's something I want, obviously but I found it for stupid cheap at a garage sale or Goodwill or something.
Money's tight as fuck.

Wow you are one massive faggot. You think that's gonna work on a laotian cartoon imageboard, of all places?

Buying a pack of gum is more retarded.