| Veknoid_Outcast said: Well, yeah, but those are all terrible things. The rise of gaming as a service, DLC, online subscriptions, DRM, etc. Increased brand loyalty and consumer entrenchment is a bad thing, as is the erection of a wall separating the video game faithful from "casuals," who are so quickly dismissed as feckless and disloyal. I don't mean any offense Intrinsic, but this essay reads like something dreamed up in a corporate boardroom on how best to manipulate consumers, make them loyal to a brand name, and bleed them of their money one microtransaction at a time. If the console market is indeed the behemoth you describe we should all be fighting back against it, not celebrating it. |
New business models are not inherently terrible and there have been a lot of improvements in gaming over the years.
DLC, in my opinion, has been a net positive. I've enjoyed some pieces immensely. Outside Capcom and a few others, DLC now is almost always original content that would not exist at all under the previous model. DRM has been around since the NES, as Nintendo always had measures to combat bootleggers. SNES games used to check hardware before playing. Gaming as a service has, so far, been simply a concurrent approach and options are never bad.
I'm not even going to complain much about subscriptions for multi-player, considering that gaming is now cheaper than ever, even though games themselves generally have far more content than previously.
I'd also argue that brand loyalty is no worse than the Sega vs. Nintendo days, or when Playstation first entered the market.
I've been gaming for a long time and I feel pretty good about where things are at relative to the past.
