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this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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Only legislation will fix this.
You were never going to shop your way out of it.
holy shit legislating video game prices?
Business model. Legislating the fucking business model.
Jesus fuck, what is it about this industry that makes people flip out about any sort of consumer protection? You know this is fucked up. You know "just don't buy it!" will never help. What other possible solution do you imagine, besides telling companies to just sell a product, without any exorbitant double-dipping?
I don't see the issue to be honest. It's three days... How is it substantially different from somebody waiting 3 months for the price to go down even more? What are you protecting against?
I think it's fine too, for the general case of video games. If someone wants to pay some premium, several times a game's price to get access a couple days or a week early, I mean, I sure as hell am not going to pay it, but if some people do and are willing to bear a larger portion of the development costs, fine. It's not like I would have noticed or cared if a game's release date was a week later. Besides, I'm going to wait for reviews to come out anyway.
I'll also add that I'm not gonna get "premium" editions with some plastic doodads or artbooks or whatever, but there are clearly people who are willing to do that. If a game publisher wants to make the offer and someone else is willing to accept, I mean, okay, whatever makes them happy.
That being said, WoW is an MMO, and that does introduce different dynamics. I don't play it, so I don't know the specifics there. Like, a guild cannot play together if all of its members aren't together at the same time, and maybe that puts pressure on all the members to buy early. It also sounds like there are some self-imposed challenges to try to be the first person to do various things, and I guess that there could be a pay-to-win element in that sense. Frankly, I don't find doing that sort of thing to be much fun, but I suppose for people who do, maybe it'd be an issue. Maybe there's something specific to WoW that makes it matter more than a typical video game there.
I think that in general, a lot of video game players would be a lot happier if they obsessed less about getting things exactly on release dates. I mean, the patientgamers crowd waits for at least a year before they look at a game. I wouldn't go quite that far myself, but they still have fun playing games.
WoW has historically worked on a daily limit to progression model for the endgame, so the 3 day early access is potentially a 3 day permanent boost for the people who buy it. I would imagine competitive raiders going for world first and "clearing hard difficulty versions of raids while they're current content" achievements and their related rewards will be essentially mandated to buy it.
As for gamers obsessing over things at launch, I wish it were different, but I think of it like movies or TV shows. If you go and watch a movie a year after it came out, nobody is gonna be talking about it anymore. And for some people, that social buzz around a new piece of media is half the fun. Playing a game and talking about it with your friends, the sense of discovery finding things out before you can just look it up on some wiki site, etc.
'How is an order of magnitude substantially different?' is not a question I know how to answer without vulgarity.
We need to also legislate in game transactions so you can't get scammed in RuneScape anymore
Runescape's real-money transactions should absolutely be illegal.
The fact they had to limit people to spending thousands of dollars per week - for fucking Runescape - is a giant flashing red light. In no universe is any public MMO worth ten thousand dollars per year. But that's the kind of spending all games with real-money charges actively pursue.
If we allow this to continue there will be nothing else.
I dont get your point about "Just don't buy it" not working.
If consumers didnt think it was a fair price, then they wouldn't buy it. People can live without a videogame, it's not like this is a big pharma company raising prices on a life-saving drug.
Profit means ethical, says newborn babe, innocent and fresh.
the business model of...charging too much money? No, I dont have any issue with this. I have a lot of issues with Blizzard, but this ain't on the list. It sounds like a smart way to alleviate expansion launch server burden, giving both a much better experience for some, and an improved launch for the rest.
... it's a subscription service! They already get a shitload of money, every single month. Don't bemoan their server costs. That's what you're already paying for!
I didnt say server costs, I said server burden. Long queue times on launch day, server crashes, very unevenly distributed server load when everyone is in the same area at the start. I remember FF14's latest expansion was so bad, they completely halted sales of it. Forget too expensive, there was no price, you could not buy it if you were late.
You dont have to pay $90, because you dont have to buy this early access. you dont have to buy the regular access. You are not entitled to this game as a human right, the developers didnt have to make this game, and they dont have to let you play it for whatever price you want. They get to decide the price.
Hair-splitting. They have your money already. Services breaking down is not a problem solved by charging more - as you point out, for FF14. Charging more than the price of an entire new game, for three fucking days of opt-in beta testing, is completely absurd.
Any form of taking your money for bullshit is reducing how much you can spend on things that matter. This ultracapitalist zeal for equating price and value only makes a lick of sense if it's rational people making informed decisions - and there's a thousand other ways we identify and forbid irrational uses of money.
Outright confidence scams have seen victims come back with more money, thinking it'll work out this time. Revenue alone absolves nothing.
Yeah, charging more is a very common way to alleviate service congestion, like amusement parks. They have the same sort of early access for more money deals. or very popular dine in restaurants, concerts, anything where capacity is a concern really.
They are not taking anything, they do not have access to your wallet or your bank account. You can choose to give them your money. No one is making you, you have all of your money to spend on things that matter. If this doesnt matter to you? Dont have to spend a cent on it. Make your own MMO and charge less for it.
Try this on for size. Split them up, make them worker owned, or strip their IP and open source it. Send a message that anti consumer behavior is dangerous - that your investments could go to zero.
Blizzard and Activision stood up there at the ftc and promised their merger would lead to better products at better prices for customers. Their customers overwhelmingly disagree. Microsoft and Activision/Blizzard said the same. It's all worse and more expensive.
Companies exist for people, not the other way around. They don't have rights, they don't have feelings, and if we do nothing everything we love will turn to shit.
We're in the endgame. Companies are cannibalizing themselves and each other to desperately extend their profit growth for one more quarter. Not to mention, they do that by squeezing their customers just a little harder from all sides
We need rules and boundaries to the game, or this becomes the only workable playstyle for the board of every publicly traded corporation. We're going to crash - we've colonized the whole world (or at least every place with resources highly profitable to extract). The rate of growth can't increase - new markets and technologies will open up areas for growth now and then, but certainly not quarterly. Cannibalizing existing industries is going pretty damn fast, and either we stop it now or we stop it once everything is terrible and our technology sucks.
Either way, we're going to have to tackle climate change and inequality...
You seem to be ranting about something else entirely, we're talking about an announced price for a game
I'm all for legislation to fix scummy practices in areas where something is essential, i.e. transport, connectivity, food, etc. Or to counter predatory practices like gambling or lootboxes that prey on addicts or children. But in this case I feel like it'd be a bit too much. Nobody needs WoW, nor is it really (in my opinion) preying on addicts in the same way as gambling or lootboxes. If enough people are willing to pay such a ridiculous amount of money, then apparently this is really the value.
'Exploiting people over nothing important is better, actually' is a weird take.
'If it sells it can't be wrong' is just fucking awful.
that is one of the worst ideas I've heard
Yeah god forbid we have laws about money. Can you imagine?
Governments shouldn't tell companies what value their products have. Consumers should simply not buy the product if they dont consider it a fair value.
Does that work?
Think long and hard about your answer. Does that, in fact, have the effect you insist it must? Or are there abundant counterexamples, where greedy horseshit makes bank for negligible value?
Yes, it works. Source: Me, I don't consider WoW's costs to be a fair value for my time and interests, and have not bought their products or services.
It was really tough, though. I had to really fight my credit card who was just begging to be spent on WoW. But I pulled through.
Oh good, the protagonist of reality didn't fall for it, so systemic issues aren't real.
What a load... off my mind.
This isn't a law about money, you're proposing a law because a game is charging for early access lol. That is beyond stupid.
Consumer protection laws are entirely about your money.
This isn't about money... this is about you not wanting a product to exist.
Stop lying to me about my own comments, god dammit.
I am talking about how this product is sold. At no point did I propose not selling it. That's just the absurd extreme you lot always make up, whenever someone suggests a specific and recent business model is exploitative greedy horseshit.
I want games sold.
What's happening instead - the status quo you're sloppily defending - is having games treated as bottomless pits where you can throw all your money, for asymptotically smaller fractions of content that's already in the game. Or being a subscription service that also demands too much fucking money up-front, as if it was a concrete product being sold anew - and offering a bottomless pit where you can throw all your money.
That shit is what's happening to every game. Every genre has this. Every platform has this. Single-player games have this. It is the dominant strategy. Everyone scoffing 'just don't buy it!' has seen their glib advice accomplish precisely dick. If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else. Only legislation will fix this.
Early access is a product. Your comment is asking for laws to prevent this product from existing. You are asking for early access products to be illegal. Your comment is literally that stupid. Not a single part of any of my comment has to do with the ethics of this practice, so stop lying to me about my own comments.
WoW is a service. You could almost call this expansion a product. Charging extra for three lousy days of early access is not a fucking product and not really a service either. It's gouging. It's charging extra just because you can get away with it. And market forces let companies get away with that, in a game that already takes fifteen dollars per month, so saying 'just don't encourage it' would obviously accomplish zilch.
I'm accusing you of lying because you want to make it sound like I said "ban WoW" and not "just charge the normal amount the day of like any other product for fuck's sake."
You're accusing me of lying because apparently you don't know what discussing ethics means. I mean this as literally as possible: what the fuck do you think you're doing? What activity are you engaged in, here and now? Do you just hit the keys because you like to hear them go clickity-clack?
What would this sort of legislation look like to you?
No recurring costs for products and no up-front costs for services. Not for fucking video games.
So wait, are developers supposed to labor for free then? I'm not sure how that's even close to being feasible in any scenario.
"Subscription or price, not both."
"So nothing?!?"
Stop talking.
You literally said "no recurring costs" (subscription) and "no up-front costs" (price). I'm not sure what other takeaway I was supposed to have from that comment.
Either way, it still sounds like you're expecting developers to work for free, so that you can play video games without paying for them. That's a really weird sense of entitlement, imo.
No recurring costs FOR PRODUCTS.
No up-front fees FOR SERVICES.
Jesus! This subject invites the most aggressively poor reading comprehension of any topic on the internet.
My entire fucking argument is JUST SELL GAMES, and people will bend over inside-out to find some way to scoff 'you want it for free.' Because apparently that's the only position you're prepared to deal with, y'might as well pretend that's what's happening.
I really don't understand what difference "products" or "services" is supposed to make in this argument, though. Many games these days are a service, a fact which is inherently true for an MMO like WoW. MMOs require active and ongoing development and support in order to function. That's just the nature of that type of game.
If you want single-player, offline games that only require a one-time purchase, those still exist. But WoW is not that game, and has no intention to ever be, nor do the players have any expectation that it would operate in such a manner.
Maybe instead of getting defensive, you could just clarify wtf you're talking about, or at least take into consideration the context of live-service games, which is what this discussion is specifically about.