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Star Wars Battlefront II

Discussion in 'Gaming and PC Discussion' started by Johnnyseattle, Apr 12, 2017.

  1. Agayek

    Agayek Dimensional Trunk DLP Supporter

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    Not really. All they'd have to do is <drumroll> not have cosmetic bullshit for the heroes, if Disney went that route. Just make it cosmetics for the actual soldiers and the heroes have fixed appearances.

    Me too. I'd be totally fine with it. Just don't put it in a fucking box and randomize it. Put up a store and tell people "Hey, give us $3 and you can have this badge, or $10 for this skin, etc etc". At no point is taking advantage of customers and behaving like scum in the equation.

    Leaving aside the fact that if you cannot produce a good with a relatively stable and high demand at a profit you fail business forever and don't deserve to be in business in the first place, that's still wrong.

    If it really does cost too much to make games, then raise the goddamn price on the game. Don't deliberately manipulate and psychologically batter people into giving an infinite amount of money with no possible cap.

    Fuck no. They're just going to stop making single player games, as evidenced by the fact that Visceral got shut down and even standard single-player games are having this lootbox shit shoved down their throat. AAA publishers have a hard-on for "games as a service", precisely because there's no cap to what they can earn from it. It's no longer "each copy makes sixty bucks", it's "each copy makes sixty bucks plus some more and some more and some more and some more and some more and some more and some more..." and repeat that until your eyes bleed.

    Every AAA publisher wants an Overwatch or DOTA or whatever, a reliable revenue stream for literally zero work. That's the exact reason we've seen so many attempts at exactly that.

    And the problems with that are many and varied. It ranges from such things as audience fatigue (remember Guitar Hero and how that shit died practically overnight? It's not gonna take much more of this to see the same for AAA games in general) to becoming more and more egregious and anti-consumer.

    Like, I get that you enjoy lootboxes, and there's nothing wrong with that, but to deny that they're excessive, predatory, and anti-consumer is just being willfully blind.
     
    Last edited: Nov 28, 2017
  2. Sey

    Sey Not Worth the Notice DLP Supporter

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    I vehemently disagree. Going off what TheWiseTomato said, there are also statistics behind it. First, let's assume all games are bought from the publishers at wholesale (which in today's times isn't even that common since companies like EA have Origin where they get to keep all their money). Statistics say that a game, at wholesale, costs $50-52. Let's use $51 for simplicity's sake. Or, in other words, they get the game at 85% of its actual worth.

    GTAV cost $265 million to develop and market.

    They sold 29 million copies in the first month, all probably at full price. 29 m * 60 * .85. That's about 1.5 billion in the first month. As of today, they've sold 85 million. So now, let's assume they've sold the remaining 56 million copies for an average price of $25 -- it most probably is higher. Anyway, 56 m * 25 * .85 = 1,190,000,000. This is, together, about $2.7 billion. So, yeah, they made money.

    Let's take another game. Modern Warfare 2 was also another expensive game.

    Its total development cost was $250 million.

    By Jan 18, about 3 months after the release, they'd made $1 billion.

    So, in conclusion, yeah. video games make money. You just have to know your market and budget them properly.
     
  3. Gengar

    Gengar Degenerate Shrimp –§ Prestigious §– DLP Supporter

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    Right. You chose two games there. One is one of the highest selling games of all time which makes a magnitude more of its money from the online side, and the other is a multiplayer shooter.

    This is exactly why you're getting loot boxes in every game. The mere mention of paying more for your games sends most into a fit.

    Next time you finish a AAA game, sit around and watch the credits and realise that every single one of those people needs a salary (or the companies they outsource to need to get paid). Then realise that publishers aren't charities, they're public companies that have a fiduciary duty to make as much money as possible.

    I, too, would rather games cost more (obviously easy to say, I'm already paying around $100 a game in Australia). Sony isn't too fussed about making huge profits on games, but hypothetically if Naughty Dog decided to sell TLoU2 for $80 instead of $60, I'd be okay with that.

    Look how much we used to pay for consoles and cartridges, when the teams were only a dozen or so people maximum, rarely more, often less.

    Given that, how are we paying less for games now?!

    As an aside, can we cut with the bullshit of taking snippets of what I say and twisting it around? I said from the beginning that loot boxes are predatory by nature, that I also don't have a problem with them in general, that kids should be protected from them and that they're not gambling.

    I'm not going to speak more on that because the crux of our disagreement is y'all think it is and thus should be regulated by the government. I don't.

    Not with the games I play, anyway. I'm not entirely familiar with the csgo lotto stuff and other Steam systems in general.
     
  4. Sey

    Sey Not Worth the Notice DLP Supporter

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    I choose those games because they are the ones that have published dev costs as well as large budgets which would be most similar to SW: BF2
    --- Post automerged ---
    Also, more people buy more games. If a company spends $300 m to make a game and only sell $250 m it is their fault. They should be able to budget a game and market it correctly to an audience.
     
  5. Gengar

    Gengar Degenerate Shrimp –§ Prestigious §– DLP Supporter

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    Or they've tried and can't make it profitable, so they won't make them anymore.

    It's pretty easy to say 'they should do better', but I'm erring on the side of 'it's probably pretty hard and they know much more about running a business than I do'.
     
  6. Sey

    Sey Not Worth the Notice DLP Supporter

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    Or maybe the companies see an area where they can make more money and decide to try to maximize that. If you think a corporation isn't trying to find a way to always increase its profits that is foolish.
     
  7. Gengar

    Gengar Degenerate Shrimp –§ Prestigious §– DLP Supporter

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    That's what I just said? What exactly do you disagree with me on?

    EA is a public company. The head honchos have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders. It's their job to make as much money as possible.

    It could be argued that they failed in that duty by hurting EA's brand with the BF2 fiasco though.
     
  8. Chengar Qordath

    Chengar Qordath The Final Pony ~ Prestige ~

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    Nobody objects to EA trying to make a profit. They object to how EA tries to do that in the most shallow, transparently greedy way possible, and a lot of their profit-chasing measures end up ruining the products they're making and destroying the good studios/IPs they absorb.
     
  9. Anarchy

    Anarchy Half-Blood Prince DLP Supporter

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    Kinda relevant:
     
  10. ScottPress

    ScottPress The Horny Sovereign –§ Prestigious §– DLP Supporter

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    Whether or not lootboxes are legally gambling is missing the point. We raised a stink about this because AAA publishers, EA and Activision chief among them, are being fucking shitheads and milking gamers for all they can, while at the same time giving us shit.

    How the fuck is it okay for publishers to monetize every fucking last thing to maximize profit because it's not good enough to have a quarter as good as the last one, you always have to climb, climb, climb the money ladder, while calling us entitled and saying that games cost too much while selling them at the same price, to expect us to loyally buy every product while they deflect consumer complaints by calling it trolling? They just take and take and take and want us to sit quietly when they fuck us in the ass.

    The gaming press broke the last straw and it kicked off GamerGate. Lo and behold, the Jim Sterlings are doing well while the Anitas are pretty much irrelevant. EA tried to fuck us one too many times and they're getting fucked back. Lootbox=gambling is a convenient avenue of attack on a company that deserves to be attacked.

    Search and destroy motherfucker. This is war.
    --- Post automerged ---
    I mean, the EA CFO has to be right, yeah? A pink Vader skin would break canon irreparably. Almost like Rey dueling Darth Maul or somethi-- oh wait.

    It's just insulting. No other word for it. It's insulting that they think they can say this and we won't go WTF.
     
  11. Chengar Qordath

    Chengar Qordath The Final Pony ~ Prestige ~

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  12. Anarchy

    Anarchy Half-Blood Prince DLP Supporter

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  13. Gengar

    Gengar Degenerate Shrimp –§ Prestigious §– DLP Supporter

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    I read a conflicting report (I think from venturebeat) saying Disney wouldn't allow cosmetic skins and the like, but was beffled as to why.

    Take that with a truckload of salt. The article also mentioned the head Disney games guy saying canon wouldn't be an issue with regards to what goes in loot boxes.

    It's baffling. As stupid as EA/Dice's moves with BF2 are, there's no way the current model was first choice, which is kinda why I believed the venture beat article.

    I can't even imagine the 'why' though.
     
  14. Chengar Qordath

    Chengar Qordath The Final Pony ~ Prestige ~

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    Not to mention that EA managed to put plenty of cosmetics into their first Battlefront game without any of it being canon-breaking. Storm and Clone troopers have plenty of variant armor sets, and the rebels/Republic can have skins for any alien race that's roughly humanoid and popular/cool enough to sell well.
     
  15. Erotic Adventures of S

    Erotic Adventures of S Denarii Host

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    Its not just the fact the stock has gone down a bit, even though its up on last year, its the fact it didnt go up, as it really should for a realise like this, projections were from 6-11% up.

    So it is a double whammy. This was their super hit of the year, it will likely break even over the next 12 months, but that isnt what they needed. If Disney starts talking about pulling the IP that will be another hit.
     
  16. Anarchy

    Anarchy Half-Blood Prince DLP Supporter

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    They can't just pull the IP. EA has an exclusive contract to use it for another 6 years. Obviously I don't know the wording of the contract, but it is a contract. The game is likely going to make money, so going to court to try and absolve the contract if there's no easy out is going to cost a ton of money. The worst case scenario is that EA desperate holds onto the IP for the 6 years they have left on the 10 year contract and then run it into the ground and milk the star wars fanbase for every penny they have. Well, assuming they have any pennies left over after SWBF2.
     
  17. Chengar Qordath

    Chengar Qordath The Final Pony ~ Prestige ~

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    Obviously I've never seen the contract either, but I would imagine it's a lot more complicated than "EA gets the exclusive Star Wars video games license for 10 years, with absolutely no conditions on said license." There are almost certainly things like provisions for Disney terminating the deal, or EA voiding its right to the license.

    Now, whether Disney thinks it's worth going to the trouble of doing all that and burning bridges with EA is a completely different matter. Right now they seem content with the public perception that the fuckup is entirely on EA, while the public believes (with good reason) that they're the ones who stepped and told EA to deactivate the microtransaction lootboxes. At the moment there's no pressing need for Disney to do anything more to protect their IP or public image.
    --- Post automerged ---
    Apologies for the double-post, but it's EA getting caught in a lie again so it's worth posting about.

    Anyway, someone poked around in the Battlefront II files and found tons of skins and cosmetics in the data that was probably being saved for future on-disk DLC.
     
  18. Agayek

    Agayek Dimensional Trunk DLP Supporter

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    I saw that and just about died laughing. It's so goddamn typical. It's truly glorious how many times EA has put their foot in their collective mouths since this game's beta.

    I haven't seen as much coverage of this as of the other shenanigans though, and I'm mildly afeared that we're hitting the point where people are gonna be shrugging and moving on.
     
  19. Chengar Qordath

    Chengar Qordath The Final Pony ~ Prestige ~

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  20. Innomine

    Innomine Alchemist ~ Prestige ~ DLP Supporter

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