Underseer
Contributor
[YOUTUBE]s9RGDHSg5kk[/YOUTUBE]
I thought this guy raised some good points.
Personally, I went through a mobile gaming phase. PC games were starting to feel a bit stale and mobile games were the shiny new thing, so I almost entirely stopped playing games on my PC and enjoyed exploring this strange new world of mobile games. You could play really cool casual games that had been around on the PC for a long time, traditional board games, and sometimes someone would port a long elaborate adventure game or RPG from an older PC game to the mobile platform. On top of that, there seemed to be a bunch of interesting indie game developers trying every manner of bizarre new game mechanic.
Then the aggressive monetization started to kick in.
Now it's too annoying to try and find any decent games on a mobile platform that aren't either based on sleazy and aggressive monetization, or utilizing sleazy Skinner box design elements intended to keep you addicted. Then we started getting both together.
And so I had enough.
I hardly ever play mobile games anymore. It's just not worth it.
While microtransactions and various sleazy monetization strategies have been around on the PC platform for as long as they've been on mobile, since most of the new games have an asking price of $60 (much more than the cost of a mobile game), it took longer for the monetization to get truly sleazy.
We're starting to hit that point anyway.
As the guy in the above video mentions, if you're going to do monetization in a game, then cosmetics-only is the least obtrusive and least horrible way to do it, but it still has problems.
First, it's usually based on loot boxes, which are still based on Skinner box design (the same mechanics that make people addicted to gambling), so if you do find yourself indulging, you could end up addicted and spending far more money than you intended to. Second, if you want a specific cosmetic element, you end up paying a random amount of money over a random period of time to get it, which can get very expensive.
Consequently, some governments have started banning loot boxes due to their predatory nature, and they are predatory.
As the video essayist also mentions, when you intend to monetize with loot boxes, this does affect the design of the game. Loot boxes have the potential to make far more money than the original purchase price of the game, and so developers put a lot more effort into making lots of optional cosmetics and less effort into making the actual game any fun.
So even if Overwatch's cosmetics-only loot boxes are probably the least bad way to do monetization, it can still have a negative impact on the gaming experience. If the entire industry gets carried away with it, they can drive large numbers of people away from entire platforms or even away from gaming in general. While this might be good to help certain people overcome game addiction, it's really not good for the medium if they want to be taken seriously as a form of artistic expression (and oh yeah, if they want the industry to remain healthy in the future and not just some forgotten fad from the past).
Anyway, I assume we have plenty of people around here with strong feelings about loot boxes, microtransactions, and monetization in general. What's your take on it?
I thought this guy raised some good points.
Personally, I went through a mobile gaming phase. PC games were starting to feel a bit stale and mobile games were the shiny new thing, so I almost entirely stopped playing games on my PC and enjoyed exploring this strange new world of mobile games. You could play really cool casual games that had been around on the PC for a long time, traditional board games, and sometimes someone would port a long elaborate adventure game or RPG from an older PC game to the mobile platform. On top of that, there seemed to be a bunch of interesting indie game developers trying every manner of bizarre new game mechanic.
Then the aggressive monetization started to kick in.
Now it's too annoying to try and find any decent games on a mobile platform that aren't either based on sleazy and aggressive monetization, or utilizing sleazy Skinner box design elements intended to keep you addicted. Then we started getting both together.
And so I had enough.
I hardly ever play mobile games anymore. It's just not worth it.
While microtransactions and various sleazy monetization strategies have been around on the PC platform for as long as they've been on mobile, since most of the new games have an asking price of $60 (much more than the cost of a mobile game), it took longer for the monetization to get truly sleazy.
We're starting to hit that point anyway.
As the guy in the above video mentions, if you're going to do monetization in a game, then cosmetics-only is the least obtrusive and least horrible way to do it, but it still has problems.
First, it's usually based on loot boxes, which are still based on Skinner box design (the same mechanics that make people addicted to gambling), so if you do find yourself indulging, you could end up addicted and spending far more money than you intended to. Second, if you want a specific cosmetic element, you end up paying a random amount of money over a random period of time to get it, which can get very expensive.
Consequently, some governments have started banning loot boxes due to their predatory nature, and they are predatory.
As the video essayist also mentions, when you intend to monetize with loot boxes, this does affect the design of the game. Loot boxes have the potential to make far more money than the original purchase price of the game, and so developers put a lot more effort into making lots of optional cosmetics and less effort into making the actual game any fun.
So even if Overwatch's cosmetics-only loot boxes are probably the least bad way to do monetization, it can still have a negative impact on the gaming experience. If the entire industry gets carried away with it, they can drive large numbers of people away from entire platforms or even away from gaming in general. While this might be good to help certain people overcome game addiction, it's really not good for the medium if they want to be taken seriously as a form of artistic expression (and oh yeah, if they want the industry to remain healthy in the future and not just some forgotten fad from the past).
Anyway, I assume we have plenty of people around here with strong feelings about loot boxes, microtransactions, and monetization in general. What's your take on it?