Outside of politics, none are more certain that a substandard or overpriced product is a moral failing than gamers. You’d think EA were guilty of war crimes with the way people treat them for charging for DLC or whatever.
I’m very familiar with this issue; e.g. I regularly see Steam devs get hounded in forums and reviews whenever they dare increase their prices.
I wonder to which extent this frustration about prices comes from gamers being relatively young and international, and thus having much lower purchasing power? Though I suppose it could also be a subset of the more general issue that people hate paying for software.
I do not watch this topic closely, and have never played a game with a DLC. Speaking as an old gamer, it reminds me of the “shareware” concept, where companies e.g. released the first 10 levels of their game for free, and you could buy a full version that contained those 10 levels + 50 more levels. (In modern speech, that would make the remaining 50 levels a “DLC”, kind of.)
I also see some differences:
First, the original game is not free. So you kinda pay for a product, only to be told afterwards that to enjoy the full experience, you need to pay again. Do we have this kind of “you only figure out the full price gradually, after you have already paid a part” in other businesses, and how do their customers tolerate it?
Second, somehow the entire setup works differently; I can’t pinpoint it, but it feels obvious. In the days of shareware, the authors tried to make the experience of the free levels as great as possible, so that the customers would be motivated to pay for more of it. These days (but now I am speaking mostly about mobile games, that’s the only kind I play recently—so maybe it feels different there), the mechanism is more like: “the first three levels are nice, then the game gets shitty on purpose, and offers you to pay to make it playable again”. For the customer, this feels like extortion, rather than “it’s so great that I want more of it”. Also, the usual problems with extortion: by paying once you send a strong signal that you are the kind of a person who pays when extorted, so obviously the game will soon require you to pay again, even more this time. (So unlike “get 10 levels for free, then get an offer of 50 more levels for $20”, the dynamics is more like “get 20 levels, after level 10 get a surprise message that you need to pay $1 to play further, after level 13 get asked to pay $10, after level 16 get asked to pay $100, and after level 19 get asked to pay $1000 for the final level”.)
The situation with desktop games is not as bad as with mobile games, as far as I know, but I can imagine gamers overreacting in order to prevent a slippery slope that would get them into the same situation.
Outside of politics, none are more certain that a substandard or overpriced product is a moral failing than gamers. You’d think EA were guilty of war crimes with the way people treat them for charging for DLC or whatever.
I’m very familiar with this issue; e.g. I regularly see Steam devs get hounded in forums and reviews whenever they dare increase their prices.
I wonder to which extent this frustration about prices comes from gamers being relatively young and international, and thus having much lower purchasing power? Though I suppose it could also be a subset of the more general issue that people hate paying for software.
I do not watch this topic closely, and have never played a game with a DLC. Speaking as an old gamer, it reminds me of the “shareware” concept, where companies e.g. released the first 10 levels of their game for free, and you could buy a full version that contained those 10 levels + 50 more levels. (In modern speech, that would make the remaining 50 levels a “DLC”, kind of.)
I also see some differences:
First, the original game is not free. So you kinda pay for a product, only to be told afterwards that to enjoy the full experience, you need to pay again. Do we have this kind of “you only figure out the full price gradually, after you have already paid a part” in other businesses, and how do their customers tolerate it?
Second, somehow the entire setup works differently; I can’t pinpoint it, but it feels obvious. In the days of shareware, the authors tried to make the experience of the free levels as great as possible, so that the customers would be motivated to pay for more of it. These days (but now I am speaking mostly about mobile games, that’s the only kind I play recently—so maybe it feels different there), the mechanism is more like: “the first three levels are nice, then the game gets shitty on purpose, and offers you to pay to make it playable again”. For the customer, this feels like extortion, rather than “it’s so great that I want more of it”. Also, the usual problems with extortion: by paying once you send a strong signal that you are the kind of a person who pays when extorted, so obviously the game will soon require you to pay again, even more this time. (So unlike “get 10 levels for free, then get an offer of 50 more levels for $20”, the dynamics is more like “get 20 levels, after level 10 get a surprise message that you need to pay $1 to play further, after level 13 get asked to pay $10, after level 16 get asked to pay $100, and after level 19 get asked to pay $1000 for the final level”.)
The situation with desktop games is not as bad as with mobile games, as far as I know, but I can imagine gamers overreacting in order to prevent a slippery slope that would get them into the same situation.