I work in the gaming industry. If you’re not pirating your games you’re directly contributing to this rot. Companies (even indie ones) don’t see players through anything but spreadsheets, and none of my peers (other companies included) seriously believe the games they’re working on are fun.
We need serious competition in the gaming space, because until then we’re all milking the cow.
The only serious competition to this status quo was CDPR, and they’re currently burning to the ground.
And if the indie creators aren’t in it for the passion, is it art or manufacturing? And is manufactured games, as opposed to artistically created games, even worthy of being called games? Not an indie-title but illustrates what I mean; I’d argue that Metal Gear Survive is a prime example of a manufactured product that can’t be called a game.
But piracy isn’t the answer, it’s just a reaction.
What games need to do is organize in consumer groups and start boycotting. Does the game have anti-consumer elements as a core part of the game? Boycott. Is it a pay2win online game? Boycott.
But is such a thing even possible when the gaming culture is mostly children of all ages, that aren’t able to understand that they’re hurting themselves when prepurchasing microtransaction hellgames?
I don’t see a way out of this beyond open source culture to be honest.
Correlation is not causation.
That’s true. It could all be a coincidence that a for-profit company focuses on profit over art for all we know.
Same with The Elder Scrolls. Though I’m not sure if it’s microtransactions there (on a second thought maybe because of TESO and FO76?)
I don’t know, Bethesda tried with monetization of mods in a microtransaction fashion but really failed, to the point they mostly rolled it back. At least on PC. The modding eco-system on Nexusmods is really thriving, I installed “Skyrim Together” just the other day to play Skyrim in COOP! 😁 Of course the console folks is probably locked in to the microtransaction hell, but in whole it’s quite different from the way GTA have monetized.
TESO was outsourced, beyond sharing name, some aesthetics and universe - it’s a completely different thing. They went the reasonable route and created a Bethesda MMO NOT USING THEIR BUGGY AND OUTDATED SINGLE PLAYER ENGINE unlike FO76 lmao. FO76 was made as a bid to pump up stock value before trying to get Bethesda’s parent company bought up by Microsoft. They failed.
GTA, and particularly GTA:O quickly slid into a perverse cash grab as soon as they had the microtransactions sorted, and there was no looking back. They have one thing going that most Bethesda games don’t - Multiplayer. That puts Rockstar in a completely different position when it comes to demands from the consumer. Don’t like the way we do it? Try modding your way to an online experience. Oh, you’re making open source servers? The courts will shut it down.
