Take your money and spend it somewhere else. That’s the only sound corporations can hear.
spends money in call of duty
I honestly don’t understand people. Just don’t buy the fucking game then.
You’re taking about wow. That’s like telling a junkie not to buy their next fix.
Tell me about it. This was a long time ago but I remember one of my friends couldn’t even go a day without doing his dailies. He wasn’t even interested in WoW anymore, he was playing a bunch of other games. But he absolutely had to login every day just to do his dailies then log out and play the game he actually wanted to play.
This went on for months. When we asked him why, he would just say he didn’t want to miss out and fall behind. Bro, you aren’t even interested in the game anymore…
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I just wanted to show some appreciation for sharing your experience. Speaking candidly about difficult subjects really can help people.
I don’t game much either there’s days.
I want to though. Nothing holds my interest like it used to. When a fromsoft game or a deep crpg comes out that isn’t made by Larian I love every minute of getting sucked in but it’s all over too quick and I’d rather play checkers with the wall than pull the lever on another digital skinner box. It doesn’t appeal. It never did. Fuck off.
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Hey, I finally kicked my WoW habit.
I mean I started FFXIV right after, but it’s a start!
Just keep it to one character. FFXIV gates your reward endgame. You can’t just farm as much as you want. So you don’t have to spend too much time keeping up.
But if you start running multiple high level characters you have a problem.
We need a rehab MMO for them that gets them the same high but is easy to unhook from.
https://piped.video/watch?v=YersIyzsOpc
Idk, can’t load piped…
I didnt fall for it with diablo 4 this time, all my friends that blasted through it in a week are no longer playing and I can buy it when its $20 if at all.
Tired of anything from Activision blizzard at this point.
do that with most games. life is bettee that way
I had such hopium for diablo 4, but they just made the game worse with every patch. It was decently fun when it launched, but they introduced more tedium into everything each patch. Plus when the new season started and you had to do everything over again, it killed my enjoyment of the game
early??? you fucks are a decade late
2 decades, this game is about 20 years old
Poor Blizzard, they must be failing on hard times, after being bought for 69 billion dollars
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That’s a nice amount of money right there.
That’s for Activision Blizzard, not just Blizzard.
Don’t forget King, the actual lion’s share of the value.
69 billion? Nice.
And yet people will pay it and the cycle continues.
If they didn’t stop from abusive micro transactions, half-ass launches, mocking players about mobile phones, overworked devs, a sexist frat boy culture, women leaving over sexual abuse, or a employee who committed suicide (!)… then nothing will.
The average player doesnt know about any of this. The average player doesnt think about these things. The average player is not you or me.
wow doesn’t have MT
WoW has micro transactions, including: level boost, several exclusive cosmetics (mounts, armors, weapons), exclusive pets.
You can also buy game time with cash and resell it for gold, so an indirect and limited cash for power, too. I know these have been around at least since BfA, dunno if Legion already had them
Not only that, this is by design. They want their early testers to be a small group of people who are heavily invested in the game, both mentally and financially.
Sure, a lot of people are going to be mad about being “excluded”, but how many of them are going to actually boycott the expansion when it releases because of it? The ones are maddest are the ones who most want to play it and are unlikely to walk away.
There was always going to be a small group of players that got to play it before the majority of the playerbase. The only difference is the $90, and that price is well worth it to a lot of the big fans.
What I don’t get is what made 2023 the year of the cut brakes? Seems like every corporation has decided to just go full fucking tilt on pushing their consumers to the edge of what they’re willing to put up with and they have ZERO shame about any of it.
High consumer spending keeping the economy afloat against the predicted recession that never materialized. Companies figured they could start charging more and get away with it.
Won’t that risk to actually start the recession though?
I agree with regards to other studios but, activision blizzard has had no shame for a while, not a new thing at all.
Higher interest rates put pressure on tech companies to actually not only become profitable but also compete with those returns considering the risk.
As entire guilds pay up and see it as a matter of clout.
Can’t wait for them do do it anyways and all the fans cave in because ‘muh social escapism’ gamers have some of the weakest spines, the most important point of boycotting g isn’t being loud and whiney its to NOT BUY THE PRODUCT FOR FUCKS SAKE.
I’m not defending it, or blizzard, and reading the title sounded yucky
But my quick understanding:
Expansion costs $50
Next level is $70 which comes with digital stuff, mounts, etc
Top tier expansion is $90, which comes with even more stuff
So a $40 difference from base or $20 from mid tier
It also comes with 30 days of game time, so that’s $15
Now we’re looking at $25 difference between base game. Or $5 difference between mid and top tier.
So it’s really like $5 for more digital stuff and early access, right?
It would have been better to just make two tiers. Charge $75 for everything including early access and don’t include game time. Cause subscribers are going to pay for that anyway. I guess because a month of access is hardly worth $15 operationally, it’s a nice way to up charge
I haven’t bought anything wow related in like 8 years. So I don’t have a horse in this fight. The title is just a little click bait (I don’t think anyone thought it’s $90 for only early access, and assume it’s part of a $90 game cost)
It’s not early access. It’s late access if you don’t pony up the extra.
Release date is whatever. It’s irrelevant what the date is. It’s set by the company.
If you can play on X date and everyone else on y. Then you’re playing earlier than the rest
Arguing otherwise is pointless
Essentially it’s $5 for early access over the mid tier. Or $15 more over the base tier. Plus a ton of other stuff included with that up charge.
I think the point they are making is a game like wow, if you start days later then everyone else then you are behind them. It’s not like a single player game, if you’re friends are doing end game and your stuck leveling, it sucks. Therefore everyone feels foreced to get early access.
Who pre purchases this early? The release date is “on or before December 31, 2024. Lol
That’s right around the corner compared to Star Citizen.
People love to be scammed.
Tools. Tools pre-order this early. Also, tools play Blizzard games, in general.
Oh who cares anymore. Blizzard is going to do it, the players are going to lap it up with a smile. Just let it be and move on if it’s not for you
Yup. Stop playing Blizzard shit, you assholes. They don’t care about you, in fact, they don’t care about anything but money.
I 100% understand the need to charge for these services, but how much profit this IP has generated should have secured all funding for future expansions and more economical pricing.
Subs should drop to $5mo with expansions starting off at $20ea. Hell make the “Classic” servers F2P.
I’m gonna make my own mmo, with a TCG and Furries.
I’m almost disgusted by the people insisting ‘it’s expensive, they need the money.’
They’ve made ten bucks a month, per player, for twenty straight years. Plus the price of a whole new game for every incremental expansion. How much more money does another expansion need?
It’s not about reinvesting into the quality of future games, it’s about getting a good financial quarter to please the shareholders. Welcome to infinite growth.
Why do mmo’s always have the best trailers but the shittiest graphics?
So it’s more accessible. You don’t need to upgrade your PC regularly to play an MMO.
Beyond that, WoW is very stylized, and it’s far from ugly. No, it’s not realistic looking, but it is nice looking.
You know what age is beautiful stylized and can run on anything? The greatest game every made Deus Ex
I’m not sure if you have checked out WoW lately, but it’s actually a pretty beautiful game. I think generally they want the tech specs to be a low barrier to entry for a game where they want millions of players playing concurrently. It also cannot be super heavy or things like raids and battlegrounds would chug.
One thing that Blizzard has always been good about it making games that can run on a potato. It’ll look like crap and your view distance will be obnoxiously short, but you can run WoW on a potato of a laptop and still participate in the core gameplay. Obviously, there’s lots of options to crank up the graphics to 11/10 if you have a powerful computer, but I really appreciate that they lower the hardware barrier to entry where they can.
Not always. D2 necromancers used to be shunned if they summoned in full games
EvE Online used to win Best Graphics of the year frequently. I dunno if they still do. They’re also the only MMO that I know of to use in game footage for their trailers. It would be nice if the gameplay was decent.
I played Eve for a long time until I finally admitted to myself that it’s very boring.
Isn’t EVE also played in excel?
Only if you want to be hyper efficient. If you want to roleplay a lowly jobber space captain, it’s unnecessary.
You can roleplay something other than an excel jockey in EVE? Mind blown!
For hype, obviously. WoW has literally done that since day 1, blizzard has done it for decades now.
So they can run on toasters AND spend the least on making the game?
“It’s win-win” -shareholders
Only legislation will fix this.
You were never going to shop your way out of it.
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.
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?
You know this is fucked up.
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?
‘How is an order of magnitude substantially different?’ is not a question I know how to answer without vulgarity.
Yes, but presumably the order of magnitude (waiting substantially longer) would be worse but you’re arguing the opposite… Why is waiting longer for a price cut better?
Ohhh, that’s a completely different angle than I thought you were going for.
It’s still ridiculous, though.
Price drops exist to encourage new people to pay. People who would not otherwise buy the thing, buy the thing. But - anyone who pays an exorbitant amount up-front, for a game with a monthly subscription, three days early, was fucking obviously going to buy the thing, full-price, day-of. This is just gouging. This is seeing how little they can offer, in exchange for completely arbitrary quantities of money.
If they offered a sliding scale where the price doubles for every extra day of early access - some addict with more money than sense may well drop tens thousand dollars, for an extra week. Which is obviously fucking nonsense. Please tell me you understand price and value are different concepts, and they can align, or they can not. Ten thousand dollars for one week of a game that costs ten dollars a month is complete absurdity, rivaled only by games charging more than the price of the entire full-price game for some stupid item inside that game.
That exploitation of irrational decision-making doesn’t begin at ten thousand dollars. Smaller-scale abuses of it are not better… just lesser.
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 don’t think we need laws to stop a few oil barons from risking it all in the wildy, you’re proposing such stupid overregulation lol. these are literally non issues
A few–?!
This is becoming EVERY GAME. Silent Hill has a battle pass! Silent Hill does not have battles! All of that shit is just lootboxes plus excuses. People finally recognize lootboxes are abusive nonsense. But all that’s changed is how they’re presented, so people can go, well, that was bad, but this is completely different slightly!
And all it takes to stop that from infecting the entire industry, is - stop charging real money, inside video games. A thing that was barely conceivable, fifteen years ago, when the industry was neither small nor broke. This grift takes in billions of dollars per year. Largely from children. And if you care as little about kids as I do - it’s also fucking up the entire medium of video games. Again: this is becoming every game. Nothing modern is safe. You can’t even reliably stay away, because it gets shoved into games, after people bought them.
If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else. Only legislation will fix this.
Word salad.
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.
Any form of taking your money
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Consumers should simply not buy the product if they dont consider it a fair value.
Does that work?
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.
