Dev Tracker - Discussion

Indeed, those games cater to a very small percentage of their player base, which is responsible for 99% of revenue.

Whale fracking at its finest. Some games do not even launch beyond a broken pre-release state and still rake in hundreds of millions of dollars thanks to their small percentage of big spenders.

See Star Citizen.

Exactly. I'm sure if the engine would have allowed it, they would have embedded an in-app store a long time ago. That's sort of why I don't want to see a remake, why I don't want to see the game ported.

As soon as it comes to a better engine, we'll have to pay $19.99 for enough currency to buy 4/5ths of an item that raises our chances of getting a drop from 0.1% to 10.0%.

Let FFXI live its best life and pray that Upper Management keeps ignoring it until they're replaced by better people. And if that day never happens, let FFXI fizzle out in peace. I want my memories of FFXI to be of a game I enjoyed, not one so rife with microtransactions and ads that I didn't even get to play it.

I'm not mad at all about paying extra for more in-game storage, but I am annoyed at how little you get for the price. It's frustrating as hell to be paying double the basic sub cost and still have even odds you'll need to hit up the porter moogle every time you change jobs.

The game could really use a job-specific wardrobe; A fresh 80 slots that changed depending on your main job.

the game is old, things wont change. And we all will be playing till they pull the plug cos we have too much fun and friends in there :)

That's fair.

If they had tried, they probably could have figured out a way to make gear with more combined stats. Make it so that players who spent more time grinding the late-game weren't necessarily stronger than their peers, but simply had more inventory space.

Step 1 would be to get to end-game for the content. Step 2 would be to get gradually better gear as you do gradually tougher end-game. Step 3 would be to take your endless gear sets into extremely challenging content but be rewarded with gear that allowed you fewer and fewer sets.

Like how in the old days the main purpose for the Gjallarhorn (to my understanding at least) was to make it so you only needed one instrument instead of a different instrument for every song. Its stats essentially reading: "Inventory +20"

If you're filling up all 8 wardrobes, you are a god damn hoarder and need to get a handle on that. (not just in a game, I'd hate to see your room/house/fridge/garage/etc)

Job specific inventory that only loads while on that job was what I wanted too.

I don't care how you rationalize it, you're a hoarder.

I too, wanted JSE Wardrobes. It just makes sense for how the game and armor-acquisition is structured. But, there's a fine-line between completionist and hoarder. (All REMA, +2 Necks, JSE earrings, Ambu capes, etc. are just not storable, for example).

There is no correlation between a digital hoarder and a real-life hoarder. (Speaking as a fellow digital hoarder).

I Marie Kondo my wardrobes every few months, but XI as a game is all about situational gear. Ambuscade capes are probably the worst example of this, since they're situational, job-specific, and can't be stored or even mog-mailed.

Even if you go with the bare minimum of non-shared gear for each job you'll start feeling the crunch around #9 or so. Probably sooner if one of those is RDM or a tank. >.>

How do people need 8 wardrobes and still not have enough? Like are you min-maxing every possible stat for every potential situation for all 22 jobs? Do you have 5-6 copies of each piece of herc/val/ody/chiro/merlinic just to have a maxed out QA/WSD/refresh/phalanx/FC/something else available?

why?

Let's see....
In this thread there are gamers who find paying $20 or even $8 for a video game per month too costly and not worth the price.

On the same time gamers complained about f2p making big money off whales/dolphins.....

This is ironic lol. F2p models exist precisely because average gamers like to play video games, but they don't like to pay. So the game company has to make money off the super rich 3% whales who don't mind paying big money.

Just FYI, ff7 in 1997 cost 45m to make, cyberpunk 2077 cost 316m total(development cost+marketing). In other words big budget game development cost increased by 700% since 1997, but price and the console game market didn't increase that much, because nobody like the idea of paying $350 for their console games.

Especially in China, which has a long history of video game piracy. Try to release games with one-off price for the whole game in China, I promise you many people will play them for free anyways. The idea of "paying for video game" just isn't popular there.

Of course game developers will release games under f2p models so the freebie lovers(most people) get their free games, and let the few whales pay for it instead. It just works.

Calling them Whales and not Addicts is exactly what the f2p market wants us all to think- that the people dropping thousands in a cash shop are just wealthier than us, so its not that big of a deal.

Its not much different than anyone peddling addiction for profit.

i mean, "whale" is a term derived from casino gambling/sports betting. it's not a term intrinsic to gaming designed to hide the nefariousness of predatory f2p practices.

it's just someone who spends lots of money on gambling. a high roller.

i'm not going to deny that the proliferation of DLC/IAP/microtransactions are a blight that has actively ruined game design -- they very much are just another shade of deregulated gambling that somehow is promoted to children -- but let's also not pretend that word is some witty idea marketing came up with

It's marketing that convinced said whales that being a whale is a thing to be proud of, and not the insult that it actually is.

Having money is what a whale thinks it means.

Instead of being an (insecure) dumbass that overspends easily (to compensate).

Cyberpunk 2077 was an outlier. Most AAA titles average around $80M, which is less than 200%, not 700%. And games being more accessible and mainstream now means they're also selling a lot more copies than they had a quarter century ago.

FFVII launched with only about 40,000 sales, while CP2077 launched with about 13,000,000 sales. Don't pity modern AAA publishers because costs are higher. They are making far more than enough money to not need to nickel and dime us with MTX to cover their costs.

But they can, because gamers vote for it with their wallets. Little by little, the industry gets worse. It won't be long before every game copies the model set in Diablo Immortal because that game is grossing its budget back once a week.

Addicts, sure. Even if f2p don't exist gambling addicts will gamble with sports lottery, stocks, cryptos and casinos anyways. Are we going to shut down stock and crypto market and casino for them too?

At least gambling addicts spend money on games = game industry makes money and the rest of freebie gamers who don't have money get to play for free. Better than letting gambling addicts throw money away on stocks or crypto imo!

If somebody's gambling addiction is so bad that puts them on financial crisis then it's social worker's job to help them. If they have too much money and want to have fun spending money it's their choice. At least that means tens of thousands of game developers get a job and able to feed their family. I would rather see game industry grow than dying.

The difference is the number of people that video games reach. Everyone has at least one platform they can play a video game on, be it a console, a computer, or even their phones. And there are regulations such as a minimum age at casinos. A gambling addict might feel ashamed for walking into a casino, knowing people might judge them. But gaming can be done at home and by children. It's not considered socially irresponsible to play a video game.

But it's not the game industry that makes money, it's the company. Developers make their salaries during the development stage, regardless of if a game sells 20 copies or 20,000,000 copies. If a game does well, rarely does it mean anything beneficial to the people who worked on it. It just lines the pockets of idiots like Matsuda and his shareholders.

You are so much better off taking the money you're giving to a AAA publisher and giving it instead to a smaller company.

I used cyberpunk to demonstrate how the development cost for highest tier increase greatly over the years. It is obviously the ceiling or close, not average.

A quick estimate, after all the cut a 80m budget game that sold for $50 will need about 3.2m sales to break even. (50*3.5/2)

But nobody will want to invest in a project that makes zero profit. So expect to sell more than that to convince the publishers and the investors to put money on it.

Further more about 1/3 of budget goes into marketing, so that 80m quickly turns into 100m.

Realistic speaking even a 80m project probably isn't going to be considered successful without 3-5m sales at least. And this development cost is still increasing every single year because of the inflation.

Even if you argue that it works now, what about after 10 years or 20 years? Do you think people who were okay with paying $50 per game in 1997 are okay with paying $100 in 2023 and $150 or $200 in 2033? I think not.

No matter how I see it this model just isn't sustainable. Dlc and microtransactions exist because of this.

These lines also seem to ignore the fact that addiction isn't some sort of black-and-white rule. As these AAA companies put more R&D into figuring out better psychological tricks, it's going to envelop more and more people, and one day it'll be you.

It's all fun and games until you're accidentally suckered into spending $120 on a game that's barely worth $10. And it will continue to get worse as these things are normalized and added to a greater variety of games.

Every business exists to make profit. When a company realizes that it can get away with making a half-assed game but still make money, it's going to do that. Especially when that game is making far more money than anything it could have with a quality game.

But that's what's happening anyway. You're either paying $80 for a game that has light microtransactions or you're paying nothing up front but then wind up spending upwards of hundreds if not thousands of dollars.

Does the company's name rhyme with Befesda? lol

What are you talking about =.=

Money doesn't grow on trees.......if a game company lose money selling games, that means game developers lose jobs. Because no one will hire developers to work on a project that doesn't make money.

Do you really expect to keep a job if a company sell 20 copies after release? Lol. No, this studio will be gone. So that means everyone lose job.

Also....an employee's salary often directly ties to how profitable this industry is. For example a programmer in video game industry often has lower salary than other industry such as IT, precisely because video game industry isn't that profitable at all.

Just fyi, Genshin Impact's developer Mihoyo has like 700 people working on one mobile project. That means 700 people get jobs thanks to the gamblers paying. If Mihoyo only makes AA console titles like Falcom and somehow survived, they'll be a 50 people studio as the remaining 650 people lose jobs because AA console games are generally less profitable.

That's the reality, sadly.

Quite aware of the origin of the term, and Afania specifies these are

Which for some reason is supposed to make us feel better because "they don't need the money". Truth is most aren't whales at all, they're addicts, and dressing it up with as Eiryl points out

Some industries are bloated and deserve to be downsized beyond their current size. If you're going to use Capitalism to defend predatory practices because "it creates jobs", you gotta be ok with the ramifications of Capitalism saying that an industry grew too large and beyond its demand, and is subject to the whims of the market.

Aerix's data from the last lage doesn't support this claim. The truth is, majority of f2p players will never pay or pay very little. The whales are in the minority.

But there IS a demand for f2p model. It's not like if all the f2p games disappeared then Chinese players will happily spend money on expensive console games.

If there is one bloated industry that needs to be downsized, it's probably AAA industry anyways. The idea of spending hundred millions to make one game that cost $80 per copy, aiming for 10m sales only kills creativity imo.

Now there's something we can agree on <3

there's a demand for Heroin. It creates jobs.

These are not good justifications.