Do you ever feel like most companies want your money now?

[Caligari87]

I think everyone's missing a key point here. Companies have always been greedy, money-grubbing bastards out for your wallet (with a few shining exceptions that occasionally have done it for the art).

The difference today is that they've perfected their money-making schemes, and have the technology to make them work. Case in point: DRM, DLC, and F2P/P2W.

DRM: Twenty-five years ago, it just wasn't feasible to have any sort of copy protection that wasn't "enter the fifth word from page ten of the manual" or somelike. Now, companies can basically ensure you pay exactly what they want, can't send a copy to a friend, can't play with any kind of shared or generated key, killed the secondhand market with digital delivery instead of physical media, and they've largely nixed things like demos, shareware, and refunds so you have to pay full price and get locked into owning it forever (some exceptions exist due to customer backlash).

DLC: This has technically existed for decades as "expansion packs", "episodes", etc. The difference here is perfection of the scheme. Games are often only partial games that you pay full price for, then additional costs to get the rest of the content. Imagine paying $60 for Knee-Deep in the Dead, then $15 each for Shores of Hell, Inferno, and Thy Flesh Consumed, to say nothing of the $10 "season pass" to temporarily unlock the plasma rifle and BFG in multiplayer. Unfortunately the modern gaming market willingly sustains this, and so companies keep doing it.

F2P/P2W: This is one of the most insidious. There's too much to go into detail (read articles like this or this to get detailed insights), but the TL;DR is that companies such as Zynga (Xville, X with Friends, etc) and PopCap (PvZ, Bejeweled, etc) actually employ more psychologists than actual developers. Their goal? To press every single addiction/reward button in your brain until you can't not buy stuff from them. Even worse, they often obliquely target children for this, because their brains are more malleable.

The reason the late 80's/ early 90's often feel like the "golden age" of developers "doing it for the art" is simply because they couldn't make it work. Nowadays, they have all the tools and knowledge to put you at their mercy without repercussions, and so they've stopped trying to hide it.

[Arctangent]

DLC: This has technically existed for decades as "expansion packs", "episodes", etc. The difference here is perfection of the scheme. Games are often only partial games that you pay full price for, then additional costs to get the rest of the content. Imagine paying $60 for Knee-Deep in the Dead, then $15 each for Shores of Hell, Inferno, and Thy Flesh Consumed, to say nothing of the $10 "season pass" to temporarily unlock the plasma rifle and BFG in multiplayer. Unfortunately the modern gaming market willingly sustains this, and so companies keep doing it.

This is a pretty big miss in terms of how this stuff works. At most, you'd get both KDitD and Shores of Hell as the main game, with Inferno and Thy Flesh Consumed as individual level packs; that said, that's still little content in the main game, so you'd likely get Inferno still and only have TFC as DLC.

The season pass example also makes absolutely no sense, given how Doom's deathmatch works. If it was actually loadout based akin the D16, sure, but more likely you'd just be paying for more levels even with loadouts. And without loadouts, paying for more weapons ( unless they're actually just skins that change how the weapons look when you're using them ) just flat-out can't be added into such an environment. I guess you could say that the plasma rifle and BFG aren't in the base game's deathmatch levels so you can only use them in deathmatch if you're playing the DLC levels, but that's still entirely different ( and, considering how warping the BFG is, could probably be actually a smart idea in that you have the "core" DM levels far more competitive, and then release a "power pack" of levels for far more unbalanced fun ).

There's various other ways they could work DLC into a game, but Doom just doesn't have the architecture for it. You can't exactly add DLC side quests and their loot, nor "homes" that the player can customize, nor can they sell you horse armor ... unless one of the multiplayer skins is a horse and that unlocks an armored version of that skin. And besides, triple A devs are greedy, not suicidal; they want to get the most of out their games, sure, but they're not going to waste millions of dollars on something that'll turn off their audience from allowing them to make a profit.

[Scripten]

@Cali: You make salient points, for sure, but I really have to disagree with the assertion that modern gaming is bunk. (Not that anyone is exactly saying that.)

DRM: Twenty-five years ago, it just wasn't feasible to have any sort of copy protection that wasn't "enter the fifth word from page ten of the manual" or somelike. Now, companies can basically ensure you pay exactly what they want, can't send a copy to a friend, can't play with any kind of shared or generated key, killed the secondhand market with digital delivery instead of physical media, and they've largely nixed things like demos, shareware, and refunds so you have to pay full price and get locked into owning it forever (some exceptions exist due to customer backlash).

You can still often get refunds for software at brick-n-mortar stores and Steam's refund system is actually pretty lenient, considering. There are a number of games where you could feasibly complete the main storyline in under two hours and return them. (I'm looking at you, the half of Dear Esther that I managed to slog through...) I don't disagree with the secondhand market point, but on the other hand, the average price for a new game is significantly lower in general, even if you discount the bundle packs and deals you can find online. I've also found myself with enough doubles from buying packs that I have been able to gift friends and family without spending anything extra. It's a big see-saw of trade-offs.

DLC: This has technically existed for decades as "expansion packs", "episodes", etc. The difference here is perfection of the scheme. Games are often only partial games that you pay full price for, then additional costs to get the rest of the content. Imagine paying $60 for Knee-Deep in the Dead, then $15 each for Shores of Hell, Inferno, and Thy Flesh Consumed, to say nothing of the $10 "season pass" to temporarily unlock the plasma rifle and BFG in multiplayer. Unfortunately the modern gaming market willingly sustains this, and so companies keep doing it.

There's no need to talk hypotheticals. We do have an example of a modern Doom game. I've played something near 30 hours without having to buy anything extra. I would argue that for most of the games I own, that's the case. At best, I would say that the multiplayer was handled poorly in comparison.

And for sure, there are companies that take advantage of DLC, but I don't feel like they have so much clout. Likely the worst would be 4X devs like Paradox or sim devs, and they've always kind of been out there doing their own thing. Maybe I'm just lucky or easily satisfied, but I haven't really seen many cases of the main base game being cut down to sell DLC. (Those that do happen are egregious, I agree! Dragon Age: Origins pissed me right off when they sold DLC IN-GAME, totally ruining the atmosphere.)

F2P/P2W: This is one of the most insidious. There's too much to go into detail (read articles like this or this to get detailed insights), but the TL;DR is that companies such as Zynga (Xville, X with Friends, etc) and PopCap (PvZ, Bejeweled, etc) actually employ more psychologists than actual developers. Their goal? To press every single addiction/reward button in your brain until you can't not buy stuff from them. Even worse, they often obliquely target children for this, because their brains are more malleable.

Pretty much no disagreement here, other than to note that these aren't much different from arcades, as has been mentioned. Zynga are a special case and are made of actual evil, but they seem to me to be more like leeches of the industry, not major players. They take advantage of people, yes, but not in ways that are much different from phone or tv scams.

[Zanieon]

Everything changed after the 7th Gen of consoles...

[InsanityBringer]

Comparing arcade games to f2p games is a bit iffy in my eyes. 1ccing an arcade game is a matter of skill. F2P games like p&d simply cannot be cleared with just pure skill, you have to gamble at their gacha machine in order to get the highest power characters in order to beat the high level dungeons. Capable farmable monsters do exist, but they sit at the end of these difficult dungeons.

I guess technically something like Love Live gives no actual major gameplay bonuses to people who pay a lot, outside of some helpful random skills, but the leaderboards are score based, and your score is dependent highly on your character rarity

[Freaklore1]

I'll have to go with Caligari and Zanieon on this one,i too fell like the gaming industries of today seem a bit more greedy than back when i was young during the 90's.

True,there was also greedyness back in the past and certain games did looked poorly made like most of you guys said,but like Caligari said it seem that industries have become even more strategic in their marketing plans nowadays.

I've been playing games since the 90's and over the years i felt the gradual change of tactics when it came to selling games.

Tough while some companies does poorly or wicked attempts at making you waste money,others are more fair.

Take Duke Nukem Forever for exemple,the game originaly was supposed to have terminator like robots but those were taken out of the main game and have been put in the Dr.Proton DLC instead,the game is a perfect exemple of one heck of a mess,lots of cut contents,so the final release was an incomplete game.

On the other hand, Grand Theft Auto 5 Online and Tekken Tag tournament 2 did the right thing.You get free additional contents as updates for GTA5 Online,sure some of the stuffs cost a lot of in-game moneys,hence some peoples tend to buy those with real life moneys,but it is not neccesary since you can get enough in-game moneys eventually without the need of spending real-life money,it's basically taking the longer path yes but it's possible to reach the end of it eventually.

As for Tekken Tag Tournament 2,the devs decided to give us all characters for free,even those that werent in the final release of the game that you needed to download,even Snoop Dogg arena was free if i remember.Only some costumes packs and downloadable songs from previous games costed money but one can do without them.

[Kinsie]

Comparing arcade games to f2p games is a bit iffy in my eyes.

The US version of Double Dragon 3 literally demanded that you spend quarters on extra characters, moves and weapons.



This also ignores all the often-dirty little tricks developers would pull to ensure that a single credit rarely lasts longer than two and a half minutes - giving bosses unfair abilities (to the point of being invisibly invulnerable for time periods after spawning, like the final boss of Battletoads Arcade), poor/frustrating level design to stop the player in their tracks unless they pour in more credits, or sometimes just flat-out throwing an unavoidable instant-kill meteor at the player if they stay alive too long - due to rose-tinted goggles bought on by MAME and its unlimited credits.

Ultimately, the only thing that's really changed is that the games got better, more numerous, and easier to find.

[InsanityBringer]

Huh, I didn't know about the double dragon 3 thing, though honestly I am not too surprised. I am not into some modern business practices but overall I don't entirely have a rose tinted view of businesses in the past.

[wildweasel]

The US version of Double Dragon 3 literally demanded that you spend quarters on extra characters, moves and weapons.

This is true of a lot of other US-developed arcade games of the time, too - look at most stuff made by Leland Corporation, and the handful of games put out by MicroProse's arcade division. They have in-game bonuses you can purchase with earned points, but often times you won't earn enough of those to afford anything. The game is fast to point out, though, that you can insert more coins to get more missiles or extra lives...

[Oberron]

In the Xbox 360/PS3 to Xbox One/PS4 generation (now), you'll get:
Original game
Downloadable content
Pre-order bonuses
and lastly exclusives on shops like Best Buy and GameStop.

In the PS1/N64/Dreamcast era, it was like this:
Original game
Standalone demos (like if you bought one in Electronics Bontique for example)

PCs back in the day were:
Original game
Expansion pack
or "limited" versions (sometimes they could be as demo, or as Microsoft mentioned, "trial")

[Arctangent]

stuff

y'know if you just present this information as it is, it just looks like you're pointing that nowadays we have more content for our games, even if some of it are small bonuses from a pre-order or certain retailer

[Kinsie]

stuff

y'know if you just present this information as it is, it just looks like you're pointing that nowadays we have more content for our games, even if some of it are small bonuses from a pre-order or certain retailer

Shhh, you'll poke a hole in his argument, and then he won't get to the bit where he complains about games needing patches! (disregarding that many old games very much needed them - see Space Station Silicon Valley where an item that was needed to achieve 100% completion couldn't be picked up, or Turok Rage Wars which underwent an expensive cartridge recall/replacement program to fix one annoying glitch which, again, made 100% completion impossible)

[Gez]

Remember how Gametek lost a ton of money because of all the bugs in Frontier: First Encounters? It was so bad they sued David Braben over it, and then declared bankruptcy.

[Oberron]

Then Gametek was discontinued by Take Two.

[shotfan]

Partly a reason why I only care about Doom now. Doom or nothing for me.
I am still conflicted if to purchase Doom 4, but my rig is a fossil, and I am not liking how much I would have to spend to be able to play it. At least id gives free DLC, from what I read (correct me if I am wrong). They deserve some praise for that.