Laughs as I remember pumping endless quarters to continue in old cabinet arcade games.
OK, but did you pay $600 to have that cabinet in your house and still pumo endless quarters into it?
A better argument would have been “they still were creative unlike the soulless carbon copy mega games of today.”
Not quite, this has happened before
Nah, the Lion King was famously made so hard that it would force you to put more coins to try again.
Nothing has changed, we just had a brief intermezzo of games not being intentionally fucked to extract more money.
But just imagine how much more money they would have got out of you if you could also add a couple of extra quarters to change your character’s outfit
I think there’s also a “Netflix effect” where old games are incresingly accessible as an alternative to newer crap, kinda like (from my personal observations) how a lot of young people seem to be really fluent in old movies and TV due to streaming and YT.
Its going to bite these publishers in the bum.
Indies I think helped younger gamers and old gamers become less impressed by graphics compared to the past. Gamers expect more and there’s many indies and old games people haven’t played.
There is also just tiny graphic improvements now, so for most people, 5 years old games look similar to what we have now
You can sort of tell by the whole 4k (or even 8k), 144Hz stuff that opportunities for real improvements have been running out for a while.
And that the requirements for those minimal improvements are vast. If you need to pull down 200GB for a minor graphical upgrade, that’s just not really worth it compared to an older game that is a bit graphically worse, but is both smaller, and runs better on newer hardware.
Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
It’s an abuse of how games work and what games are.
Only legislation will fix this. If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.
Exactly, the moment things cost real money in the game, the design of the game changes to increase likelihood of spending. Guild Wars 2 e.g. sells increased inventory space…and it fills your inventory with so many crap items that you’ll constantly be managing your inventory without the extra space.
At least you can improve inventory in-game (eg: do normal gameplay quest and crafting stuff to get bigger bags). Some monetization is cash or nothing.
Still bad when they make something annoying and then charge to fix it.
Guild wars 2 specifically has a surprising amount of quality of life stuff for free, but you can see places where “we can make money here” won out occasionally.
Ya think?