Yeah no shit.
Of course they were to go the low effort; high payout capitalist way.
This really show their lack of creative vision, compared to Cygames for example that made bank with a low maintenance gacha RPG that runs on chrome, but just released an entire fighting game and action rpg based on Granblue with a great presentation and gameplay. They didn’t need to do it, they already have all the money from their gacha games, these premium games are just for fun.
Seems silly to me. Just cuz online made money doesn’t mean your hard work on story dlc wouldn’t also make money. Plenty of people like me never play online and would have happily paid for more story
Making content for online is way less work and makes more money in the longrun. You don’t get whales spending thousands of dollars on a single player DLC.
Sure, but there’s only so much you can release for online. You don’t want big content dumps, you want a steady stream, so you could surely have some devs working on a story DLC or two while pumping out that steam of stuff for online.
Hire an online content team to complement your creative SP team, and then you get the best of both.
With a simple NPV calc it’s obvious why the dlc is a complete waste of time. I mean we could easily afford to hire another team that will quickly provide positive cashflow, but then the producers are going to wonder if consumers are spending less on x because of y, and x is what we used to project future revenue numbers to our board. If we don’t reach the x projection and I get canned then I’ll always regret having tried y. I mean sure y superceded all expectations, and made millions, but it also had like 800k in overhead. We should probably just lay of 300 developers who are willing to work 60 hour weeks for 40 hours of pay and decrease the level of qa/QC time on x so we can get started on x2 and push into prod, nevermind the bugs. Also I’ll need you to work Sat because the system keeps throwing exception errors
Do you remember the time you were supposed to buy mobile apps, by paying a one time fee. How many apps are you able to buy now? Most switched to SaaS service because they realised this is a cash cow. I don’t want to be a bad prophet but I think the game industry as a whole is also going slowly that direction.
:O
This is frustrating to me because I love GTAVs story but couldn’t care less about online.
If you’re careful enough like myself to cheat billions of dollars and XP in to skip the pay to win grind without getting detected it can be a fun time killer. The Map is much more developed than the story mode, and the buisnesses/ heists are a blast.
People hate on GTA online, but it’s really because it’s all grindy to experience it all without feeling forced to buy shark cards. If you have infinite money then it essentially is another GTAs worth of impressive content. The vehicles alone have hours worth of customization.
Really? I thought the story was incredibly bland, and I had to force myself to finish it just to stop the nagging feeling that I’m missing something.
- Michael - just a terrible, controlling person; I don’t want him to get rich, I want him to get killed by the people I’m forced to get him to escape from
- Trevor - kind of interesting, but without getting more into his backstory (e.g. how did he become like that), he’s just a sociopath
- Franklin - most interesting since he has that entrepreneur drive, but once you get the house, he just kinda hangs out in his swimming pool/mansion, and doesn’t do anything proactive; basically, he just kinda gives up on his dreams once he makes it big
For plot, it’s basically the same as other GTAs:
- Do small time illegal stuff
- Try something bigger - get busted (usually someone betrays you)
- Work for FIB to out mutual opponents
- Do the big thing and fight it out with the FIB
There are lots of opportunities to make the story truly interesting, but they didn’t do it. For example:
- Trevor - would’ve loved to see something like SA’s turf warfare as he breaks into the SA drug scene; also would’ve looked to see some backstory and how he became so crazy
- Franklin - should’ve started a dealership reselling stolen cars; maybe use it as a front for Lamar’s gang desires - I’d love an option to do turf warfare between Trevor and Franklin
- Michael - not that interesting, he should have been a supporting character
But no, the story left me disappointed.
I guess you have some points. FWIW, main characters are thugs, of course you’re not supposed to like them. The only character that is sorta likeable is Franklin, Trevor is too odd for me and Michael and his family are annoying AF. But I do like the way it was written and the humorous / epic moments. It could have been better yeah but I’ve played through it a few times now and it’s always been enjoyable.
Compared to 4 which I replayed recently and was pretty bored halfway through.
A character doesn’t have to be likeable for me to like the character, they just need to be interesting. I like Trevor as a character because he has some complexity in his backstory (especially if you get the epilogue ending), and I think he could be a very compelling character if given the chance. I would never want to meet him in real life, but he has the potential to be interesting.
A lot of protagonists are likeable, Trevor was the opposite and really had the chance to be interesting without being likeable. But Rockstar refused to give him a decent backstory, and we only get glimpses into something that could be truly interesting.
This was not exactly subtle anyway - oh, they just happened to stop making DLCs just as they discovered their horrible online platform could print cash with close to zero effort.