38 minutes ago, Zido_Z said:

Hodgman and Nova saying that cosmetic microtransactions are "fairer" than mechanical ones is unfair to say considering it's not only a very opinionated viewpoint, but the profiting of cosmetic microtransactions undermines such an opinion.

Again... you are calling our views "opinionated" as if that means something. This entire statement of yours is "opinionated". If you are just going to dumb down everything Hodgman said to it being "an opinionated view" then perhaps you are forgetting the purpose of debates. 

46 minutes ago, Zido_Z said:

The debate was quite simple. "That is... not a very common opinion", happens to be a very common one based on profits alone.

How exactly did you showing a company making profits from cosmetic microtransactions prove that cosmetic microtransactions "affect gameplay as much as purchasing guns or characters, if not more." ? Just because many people buy them doesn't mean they are equally/more important than the rest.

That's like saying that "Purina Dog Chow" is the best dog food because many more people buy it than people buy "Orijen". (Purina Dog Chow is god-awful for your dog by the way).

38 minutes ago, Zido_Z said:

Another is what you pinpointed on with colors altering people's perception of the game, which is a very good one, and a point I was going to bring up if the conversation didn't devolve into me having to deflect assumptions. It's something I never hear anyone actually speak out against. When you do ask that to someone in an argument about cosmetics, they almost seem to shrug it off in a way. It's very strange

I believe, but have no proof, that the reason people shrug off that argument is because cosmetics giving other teams advantages to the point where they are Pay-to-win is very very rare. The only one I can think of isn't even a microtransaction. Bungie had to change the team colors in their Halo tournaments because red players were easier to spot than blue players.

On 11/27/2017 at 5:29 AM, Zido_Z said:

happens to be a very common one based on profits alone.

The problem with statistics is that they are based on profit and that most games only have one form of micro transactions, there is no way we can compare them for real.

Personally I think the reason cosmetic items do well is because they are not needed by the players to play the game.

You don't need the silly hat or cloths to win but if your less skilled you do need a better gun to win. The problem with that is that not everyone who needs the better gun can get the better gun.

Money is strange. We don't mind games where people with better reflexes win, we don't mind games where people with intelligence wins but for some reason we hate games where people with more money wins.

On 11/26/2017 at 10:06 PM, jbadams said:

You're misinterpreting again. Everyone knows very well that whales are the minority of paying players, but that they usually account for the majority of revenue; that's what defines them as whales. You're pointing that out as if it counters some point he made, but it simply does not.

His main point was that the majority of players do not care about cosmetic purchases, and the statistics support that: League of Legends has an estimated conversion rate of less than 4%. Noone is saying it isn't extremely profitable, but it's a tiny fraction of the player base that's making it that way. This compares poorly to other successful games which typically have conversion rates closer to 10-15% - still a relatively small portion of total players.

The statistics simply don't show what you seem to be arguing that they show, and are in fact in line with what everyone else has been telling you.

You yourself introduced yourself to this topic by saying you believed you would have a minority viewpoint as the very first thing you said; it's therefore somewhat perplexing that you're now going to such lengths to disagree with the suggestion that your views are uncommon.

1 million players minimum of the playerbase are making it that way. They've also expanded their markets into China and Japan, which has only grew their fanbase. Which makes sense considering Tencent owns them now. And since last year, Riot introduced a lootbox system into their game to make gambling one of the consumer money sinks, which has proved successful with people buying 50 to 100s of chests and keys (it's like Counterstrike or Team Fortress where you need a key to unlock a chest in order to get the random item inside). 

The one blurring line that is on this issue is that Hodgman is taking into account the whale problem, while I am saying having at least 1 million of players (which is likely more than that), purchasing microtransactions is a very high amount for people who consider them important to the game. 

I agree that my views are uncommon consciously to the rest of the consumerbase. Unconsciously, they agree with me due by the fact they cannot stop buying them. Aka, returning to the immersion angle I spoke about earlier. "Cosmetic microtransactions are fairer to me," they say. That is because a player is not a game designer nor a businessman. To them, they consume the game by what is in their hands. And then someone somewhere started this rumor that cosmetic microtransactions are fairer than mechanical ones. One of the industry's biggest lies, and yet not much of a secret with how much money is made out in the open. 

Hidden in plain sight.

I can understand if we're still not reaching agreement here, but my thoughts are purely based on how consumers view video games versus how a businessman looking to make money will.

Consumers: "Cosmetics don't affect the game, so they're fairer."  The ignorant consumer says, realizing that he really meant "it doesn't make me win or lose more."

Businessman: "Cosmetics are the number one reason people play games." The suited CEO grins cheek to cheek as he wields a pocky between his fingers, exported from the great land of the rising sun. "These fools believe cosmetics are fair. In reality, they don't realize we've monetized the visual experience that comes with video games. Back then, we freely provided them with in game skins and customization choices. Now we lock them off from them unless they pay for it. All we have to do now is push the pay-to-win narrative, and it'll be smooth sailing." The CEO bites down on the chocolate cookie stick. Another million dollars ticks into his account.

On 11/26/2017 at 10:08 PM, Novadude987 said:

Again... you are calling our views "opinionated" as if that means something. This entire statement of yours is "opinionated". If you are just going to dumb down everything Hodgman said to it being "an opinionated view" then perhaps you are forgetting the purpose of debates. 

 

How exactly did you showing a company making profits from cosmetic microtransactions prove that cosmetic microtransactions "affect gameplay as much as purchasing guns or characters, if not more." ? Just because many people buy them doesn't mean they are equally/more important than the rest.

That's like saying that "Purina Dog Chow" is the best dog food because many more people buy it than people buy "Orijen". (Purina Dog Chow is god-awful for your dog by the way).

I believe, but have no proof, that the reason people shrug off that argument is because cosmetics giving other teams advantages to the point where they are Pay-to-win is very very rare. The only one I can think of isn't even a microtransaction. Bungie had to change the team colors in their Halo tournaments because red players were easier to spot than blue players.

Not one company. Several companies. Mobile companies. Freemium companies. Even Blizzard themselves. I am consolidating that the profit of the cosmetic microtransaction market is proof that consumers want and need customization features that were once not locked away behind a paywall. Because the greatest lie of the game industry right now is that video games were never about the player expressing themselves by choosing their own playstyles, skin colors, and other options. In effect, developers have cut away an important part of the game and monetized it. And the public are unaware of what should have been the greatest sin of them all by these devs fabricating tales of "pay to win", which was really a blessing in disguise to cover up the more offensive powerplay. The lost of shaping your in-game identity.

1 hour ago, Scouting Ninja said:

The problem with statistics is that they are based on profit and that most games only have one form of micro transactions, there is no way we can compare them for real.

Personally I think the reason cosmetic items do well is because they are not needed by the players to play the game.

You don't need the silly hat or cloths to win but if your less skilled you do need a better gun to win. The problem with that is that not everyone who needs the better gun can get the better gun.

 

Money is strange. We don't mind games where people with better reflexes win, we don't mind games where people with intelligence wins but for some reason we hate games where people with more money wins.

 

 

There's two kinds of microtransactions to me: pay-to-win, and pay-to-look-good. They are equal to me because they are part of the same whole. And as said above, developers shaved the latter from the base game. There's a reason why they are very popular in multiplayer games. In a world of over millions of users, identity is the most valuable thing of them all.

The main point of all this is: cosmetics is just as fun as the game's mechanics. And sometimes, it's more important than the game's mechanics (Second Life).

To add to this, the only instance I found with someone in search that even faintly agreed with my viewpoint is some random user on a Steam thread about cosmetic microtransactions, who said it simpler than I ever could.

On 24.11.2017 at 6:29 PM, Novadude987 said:

My thoughts exactly man.  No matter what people are going to get pissed off. AAA's most practiced PR stunt seems to have to be damage control. All a company can do is minimize the anger as much as possible.

Who again is pissed off by paying 60 bucks for an AAA game? The people who expect more game for their money than the classic 60$ premium game model without additional monetization can pay for, assuming you have to expect a moderate number of sales and cannot hope for making the game of the year before putting your game on the market and finding out how it does in said market?

I am not going to try to deny that yes, there are players out there that expect more and more content and graphics and everything from their games every year, and are contributing to the budgets spiralling out of control, and these people will belittle every game not meeting their standarts... but really, I would expect that given a) a mechanically sound game with b) an at least mildly interesting story and c) a bare minimum of content, added with at least d) some small innovations in some places, you would see enough player interest to make your money back without having to increase prices.

At least if you have the marketing reach of some of the wellknown studios and publishers.

Because lets face it, some of the games that seem to fall into the escalating content and graphics threshold trap seem to be games which fail to meet minimum standarts in story and content (SW Battlefront 1 comes to mind), are mechanically repetetive and flat or just bring little innovation to the table (SOME of the yearly repeated games like FIFA come to mind)...

If you got nothing to offer to sell people your new game over all the competition, for example last years FIFA game... well, you gotta crank up those graphics to show people WHY the FIFA game they already posses is inferior to the new one.

As you said yourself before, and I guess many in this industry see it... games are an industrial product for the games industry. They probably have to be. And there is nothing wrong with that.

But should the question not rather be "How can the games industry continue to create expieriences players want, charge a fair price for it without resorting to exploitative tactics in the worst case, and still make a profit of it?". 

And "do budgets really need to escalate like this, or do we need to pivot away from every AAA title needing to take part in this arms race?"...

Because at the end of the day, I don't think the problem is one game having microtransactions with p2w elements. Or one publisher being notorious with their monetization growing ever more overbearing. Its not that players cannot for the life of them understand that a big, really big openworld AAA game with cutting edge graphics need to make big bucks from a lot of people or risk not turning a profit.

The problem is when ALL the big publishers start showing the same trends, when ALL the AAA games coming out are monetized with additional microtransaction, its when ALL AAA games coming out try to be the next GTA5 and whatever-is-the-moneymaking-big-hitter-of-the-day game on the market irrespective of what people really want and expect from the series (Dead Space 3 comes to mind), when even games that do not SEEM to be all that expensive compared to games that did well some years ago on a 60$ premium game model contain all these additional monetization models (while developers explain them with rising cost), then players will get wipped into these huge fits of outrage.

And yeah, when I say ALL here, I mean all from a certain slice of the AAA publishers. Because there are still the ones who seem to not partake in this whole microtransaction frenzy, or at least only with a lot of restraint. Sadly, it looks like a lot of the western AAA studios are getting more an more monopolized by publishers which do engage in these trends... and while CD Project Red is, at the moment, a shining beacon of light in this regard, a lot of the other AAA publishers who showed more restraint are located in Japan, and their games are not as big in the west as they once were. Thus for many gamers, especially on PC, EA, Ubisoft and Activision IS the AAA industry by now, because all the games they know and play are by now under the umbrella of these publishers.

Players are sometimes entitled creatures... we all know that. A lot of player outrage comes from a vocal minority, and will fade away quickly. Normally. I do think this year, we might see a bigger wave of outrage triggered by BF2 BECAUSE of the groundwork laid by almost all the other big AAA games from the likes of EA, Ubi and Activision.

I don't even think people would mind some of those as much as an isolated incident. I really think too much of this bad PR has happened in a too short amount of time.

Sure, the AAA publishers can continue to concentrate on damage control. Has worked most of the time in the past. I am just not sure that with the current frequency of events that need to be damage controlled, this really is a viable strategy.

7 hours ago, Zido_Z said:

The main point of all this is: cosmetics is just as fun as the game's mechanics. And sometimes, it's more important than the game's mechanics (Second Life).

This I can agree with, but your posts don't come off as being about this. It seems more like you are trying to say that cosmetic microtransactions are more detrimental to the game industry than weapons, armor, etc. 

13 minutes ago, Gian-Reto said:

Who again is pissed off by paying 60 bucks for an AAA game?

I don't believe that I said that people are pissed paying $60 for a AAA game. I merely said that no game is TRULY perfect and there will always be that group of people who are angry about the flaws. For example, let's use Resident Evil 6. I enjoyed RE6. Liked the story, gameplay, characters, etc. I thought that it was completely worth the $60 I paid for it. However, soon after playing it, many people started going on forums about how terrible the game was, and even stating that Resident Evil is dead. I enjoyed it, and didn't see any problems with it, but there was that group of people that did.

I mean hell, people are still ripping on RE7 for the overhaul of Chris Redfield's face.

Ok so to add on to the original debate question, I have another question for you guys. 

  -Can companies like EA redeem themselves after a fallout like Battlefront 2's microtransactions?

16 minutes ago, Novadude987 said:

-Can companies like EA redeem themselves after a fallout like Battlefront 2's microtransactions?

The question is do they have too? We will have to wait till the end of the year to see if they really need to makeup for the micro-transactions.

True millions of players are complaining right now, but these could all be players who knew they didn't have money for the micro-transactions. It could also be people jumping on the bandwagon only to later purchase the game.

Personally I am thinking of buying it.

47 minutes ago, Novadude987 said:

I don't believe that I said that people are pissed paying $60 for a AAA game. I merely said that no game is TRULY perfect and there will always be that group of people who are angry about the flaws. For example, let's use Resident Evil 6. I enjoyed RE6. Liked the story, gameplay, characters, etc. I thought that it was completely worth the $60 I paid for it. However, soon after playing it, many people started going on forums about how terrible the game was, and even stating that Resident Evil is dead. I enjoyed it, and didn't see any problems with it, but there was that group of people that did.

I mean hell, people are still ripping on RE7 for the overhaul of Chris Redfield's face.

Sure, as said, I am not implying that all the outrage is ever justified... nor that it matters that much, most of the time.

I am just saying that for premium games, there is a very simple way to minimize backlash. Which is to go back to a 60$ flat price and deliver a game that can be made on this price point. If that is possible in the current market, if the games that do manage it are outliers, or if constant damage control PR is good or bad are different questions again.

But I feel like I need to touch on one subject in your response: conflating people outraged about some "nerd rage" topic like the guy from DMC no longer having white hair (which made me giggle a little bit, even though I did had to question why the change was needed) with people actually calling out real p2w issues, or exploitative tactics that will trigger gambling addictions in weak people is comparing apples to oranges.

I do think a lot of the people not happy with the latest resident evil games are "nerd raging". Hell, in case of the resident evil games after RE4, I kind of understand it. I didn't play them, BECAUSE they looked more like action games. I don't get exactly the rage about RE7 which does look interesting and for the love of god, gives us a break from the constant Zombies-in-disugise enemies from the earlier titles (as far as I can tell, haven't played it yet)... is the change to FPS perspective really worth "nerd raging" over? IDK...

But this is a completly different subject to people getting outraged about the star cards in BF2. No matter how much EA tones down the system, it reeks of P2W until they take all star cards out of the paid lootboxes. It will even out in the end given a player puts in the hours and gets all of it through normal play... but that just means grinding through a p2w infested expierience as the underdog until you have randomly been given enough stuff to catch up to the whales dominating (given their skills match up) the scene.

I don't think anyone wants to discuss why p2w is bad in a meritocratic system like a first person shooter...

And then the gambling addicts... yeah sure, most people raising the issue probably are not affected themselves. It doesn't make it less of a problem. And its nowhere near on the same level as some people disliking mechanical or graphical changes in their beloved game series.

... probably I have made the same mistake in the thread before, so I have to remind myself too to not place all the outrage in the same category. Some of it can and should be dismissed (unless you fear loosing your fans over)... some of it should be really looked into (because p2w is the community killer no.1 in online gaming, so if a dev wants to keep a game alive, p2w should be kept out of it outside of the mobile market)... some of it should be top priority (because gambling is treated pretty seriously by many countries, and could damage the whole industry if it gets out of hand).

47 minutes ago, Novadude987 said:

Can companies like EA redeem themselves after a fallout like Battlefront 2's microtransactions?

My opinion here: yes, they can. But it will take time. Consumer trust is hard to loose... many consumers tend to give many chances over years, because they have no other choice (if you are a sucker for SW games, EA is the only shop in town that can give you what you want), because of what the publisher or dev has done or was in the past (I remember when Borderlands came out and I was excited what Gearbox would do in the future... now I am less so after all the scandals and mediocre games), because "it was just that single time", "they have learned their lesson", and all that.

But once lost, I would reckon consumer trust is hard to win back. And yeah, I do agree that this will only ever affect a % of the consumers. The informed ones. The ones ready to walk away and play something else.

But the current market is not exactly starved for alternatives. If anything, some upstart AAA devs and publishers will profit from it (until they become the big company doing the same thing as all the others).

Funny enough, after a lot of people were fairly disappointed with BF1, EA has launched one hell of a PR campaign to win customer trust back, and from what I have seen online and in vids, it did its job. And sure enough, it wasn't all faked BS, instead EA and Dice DID listen and delivered the content lacking in the first part from the get go. They did move away from the season pass scheme... they just didn't mention how they would monetize it else.

I reckon IF EA doesn't get the SW license pulled by Disney over its continued mishandling of the license (because no matter how you see the individual games as good or bad, every SW game EA has put out to date was either controversial, or just not that successfull), IF the next SW game takes ALL the critisism onboard, without new controversies, I think at least the SW fans among the players will forgive EA. Its SW after all... and the BF games, apart from being a little shallow contentwise or mechanical maybe, don't seem to be bad games. The graphics of BF1 made SW drool all over the planet.

But I guess this will not happen. I am unsure if Disney really will leave EA messing with their license now that EA messed up just in front of a big SW movie. If they do, I am sceptical if EA will ever do the right thing. Because it would mean baking smaller cookies for once, and EA isn't known for that lately.

If they manage to pull it off, call me amazed and happy at the same time. It is SW after all. And no matter what George Lucas' episode 1+2, and the Disney atrocity which was "the force awakens" have done to the legacy... I loved the original trilogy, I loved Darth Vaders origin story, and I would love to play a good story campaign in a game I want to support financially, with the beatiful graphics Dice has crafted.

I am not going to hold my breath though....

On the other hand, as @Scouting Ninja puts it, no matter how much I might think EA has to redeem themselves, the question is if this controversy can even do enough damage to EA to make them change their way even an inch.

I guess it will all come down to what Disney does over all this, and not really how consumers act... because there are always enough that buy games and not care about the controversy, or not even aware that much of the p2w elements....

12 hours ago, jbadams said:

1 million players who purchase and therefore care about microtransactions does seem like a lot, doesn't it?

It's not though, relative to the entire player base. It's less than 4% of the total player base. More than 96% of the players do not purchase.

Again, the statistics do not show what you seem to think they show. Don't be mislead by the big numbers.

I'm going to correct something since it seems there was an assumption made on what I said. I used League as an example of how profitable and valuable cosmetics are. For me, I'm pooling together all the consumer market that purchases cosmetic microtransactions in all video games. You might see this as me moving the goal posts, but that was my point in the first place, so I don't want us to stick to League specifically in explaining how many people are buying said micros. Just to fix that now before we lose the thesis of my side of the debate. But to at least top off the League debate, the number 4% is currently not known due to not have the data of 2016 of their current users versus that of 2014. But due to the increase in profits from 600 mill to 1.7 bil, that definitely shows more than 4% in some matter or another. I will give you that we don't know how much it currently is, but if there's 100 million players active in League, a good chunk of them are spending some amount of money.

5 hours ago, Novadude987 said:

 

This I can agree with, but your posts don't come off as being about this. It seems more like you are trying to say that cosmetic microtransactions are more detrimental to the game industry than weapons, armor, etc. 

 

They are. Cosmetic microtransactions are the soul of a visual media like video games. Removing them is removing the reason we admire video games to begin with.