Greedy Activi$ion strikes again: Acti starts charging for RETICLES in CoD BO4

[Bofferbrauer2]

flashfire926 said:

KManX89 said:

With the way things are going, I can definitely see it getting to that point sadly. The corporate sheep's response: "It's optional! I don't care because I'm not poor! Companies need to make money! Entitlement!"

Its almost like you're being obtuse on purpose. 

How do you not understand the difference between:

a) reticles, that are purely cosmetic items that wont serve any purpose in combat. The game plays fairly as there is no way to get a competive advantage by buying purely cosmetic reticles.

b) starting with your fists and having to buy guns. This would be pay to win and will unfairly favour the person who paid for gun, having a better chance to win against the people will bare hands.

Though nice try trying to move goalposts. The two arent nearly the same thing.

Okay, then let's remove all reticle for all non-paying players. See if you can hit your expected target without any reticle.

I do agree you won't get any competitive advantage from having another reticle than the standard one - but this stuff used to be free! I just played some Serious Sam: TFE the other day again and it comes with over 2 dozen different reticles. It's not pay to win, but it's pure greed! Keep in mind that you shell out 110$ (Game + Season Pass) already, that should be more than enough to finance this game, especially without the singleplayer campaign and it's expensive voice actors.

This is why I barely buy new games from those big publishers anymore. They just got way too greedy.

About both graphs konnichiva posted:

Yes, development costs are stagnating. The publishers are producing less games than in the past, that's also true. But the correlation between the 2 is wrong.

Publishers needed to produce at least one game or expansion pack every quarter to not have a huge gap in their revenue charts. With DLC though, that need vanished, as the spendings from those are not mostly limited to the release quarter, but are spread out throughout the year, thus providing a nice baseline without the need for those niche offerings, hence why they cut them out. They didn't get cut to reduce development costs, they got cut just because they weren't necessary anymore, since with DLC whey got the same income from much less effort.

And that's where it took a turn for the worse. Things that were in games in the past got cut out to be sold as DLC. Unlockables got grindier and grindier for you shell out the money instead. And then came the lootboxes and other Gatcha schemes where you don't even know what you'll get for your money - and most of the time what you get is trash you already have or don't need. Hence why on the second graph the income keeps growing and growing - pretty much exclusively from DLC. The publishers have mostly consolidated onto their core series, with sometimes a new IP to catch a market their core IP are not covering. But since they only cut out smaller games and their new IP are almost always something big, it's telling that their development budgets are not increasing: they don't spend much on their core IP anymore; just look at all the recycling in CoD or Fifa. And no, that's ot necessary for them to break even, it's just cheaper for them and thus even more profitable.

Like I said in an earlier post here, Dragon Age: Origins was the last game from EA that I bought, and it had the writings on the wall. I bought the steelbook edition with the Stone prisoner DLC and Blood Dragon Armor. But during gameplay iy got very obvious that both Shale and the infamous Warden's Keep (infamous due to the questgiver is with you in camp and wants you to accept his mission. If you do, you get sent to the shop to buy said mission, something unthinkable at the time but sadly not today anymore) were just cut out of the finished game to sell them separately and make an extra buck out of them.

But DA:O also had the right kind of DLC, the kind I can agree with: Prequel missions for several characters, a perspective flip where you play as the Blight instead of trying to stop it, a mission specially for experienced players with high difficulty and an entire Expansion pack with a new storyline. Those all can give a game more value - but how often do we see those kinds nowadays?