Hello everyone and welcome back to The Love of Gaming blog. I've had a relatively uneventful week, mainly due to the snowstorm rampaging through the UK, which has trapped me in my home. It's been a long, slightly boring experience, but has given me plenty of time to think and contemplate on many aspects of life and one of those thoughts was on the current marketing trends that the videogame industry is beginning to employ on-mass these days.
"All this beauty has a price"
Once upon time, game production was relatively cheap and returns on them very high. As time rolled on and computational power rapidly increased, developers entered in to a sort of arms race; who would make the most beautiful looking game? Who could exploit this new and expanding technology to provide their customer's with computer graphics that looked damn near photo-realistic.
We, as buyers, encouraged this arms race. We voted with our wallets, buying the prettiest looking games, mistakenly assuming that beauty, meant substance.
All this beauty has a price, a price that has been rocketing up since the arrival of the Xbox 360 and PS3. Gone, were the glory days of old, publishers could splurge money on all sorts of gaming ventures, safe in the knowledge that'd they may only need to sell twenty-thousand units to make their money back on a risky game. All the while, raking in massive profits on that one game that sells in the hundreds of thousands. Bankrupt publishers and shutdown developers were a rare occurrence during the heyday of the Playstation 2 era.
"Overpriced downloadable content came first"
It was very big news when Sega dropped out of the arms race, leaving Sony and Nintendo to duke it out. But Sega did not bow out because it's software didn't sell. It was their reliance on selling a console that was a glorified arcade system and pricey too. That tangent aside, Sega found a renewed success in becoming a sole publisher and went on to have a successful relationship with it's former rival Nintendo.
Nowadays, it's far too common an occurence to read online that another developer has been shutdown or another publisher has gone bankrupt or absorbed into some mega-publisher like Activision or Bethesda.
The cost of making a game these days has shrunk profit margins to a point where if they didn't do something, each failed game would be the proverbial final straw on the donkey's back. No longer could the profit's of their successes support a publisher on it's own, every product must be profitable on it's own.
So they did take measures and it garnered them an enormous amount of criticism and backlash. Overpriced downloadable content came first; I remember spending ten pounds on DLC for Dead Space 2, an expansion for the campaign. I had no qualms in doing so, thoroughly enjoying the expansion packs for games like Half Life and Rollercoaster Tycoon, hours and hours of fun! What my ten pounds bought me now however, was just over an hour of gameplay. Replaying shorter versions of pre-existing levels in their reverse order with one new enemy type, was not my idea of an expansion. It was so shallow an attempt at money grabbing that right there and then, I vowed to never again buy expansion packs. (Which only last year I broke, but then again, those FF14 expansions packs are worth every penny!)
"Loot boxes have become such a source of controversy"
It wasn't long after the DLC fiasco that publishers interjected a new model, micro-transactions, which were pretty much blamed for ruining many videogames altogether.
It was a necessary evil, these games were costing more and some genres just weren't bringing in the sales numbers. This forced publishers into taking fewer risks and at the time first-person-shooters were all the rage on the Xbox 360 console.
If you want an example of how the popularity of FPS games affected publishers decisions, look no further than Syndicate on Xbox 360 and PS3. Previous titles in the franchise were isometric strategy games. Slow paced, methodical, thinking man's games. The modern release was a first person shooter that lacked, as far as I could see, any attachment to the franchise it belonged to.
We still have micro-transactions today, but they've come to masquerade as "loot boxes". I would describe to what an in-game loot box is, but I think that would be like explaining to a classroom of students at Cambridge, how to suck an egg. Redundant. We know what they are.
Loot boxes have become such a source of controversy; people claim that they are as bad as gambling, that they break the balance of games, creating a "pay-to-win" model and that publishers use unique selling points akin to brain washing.
Either way, they are an increasingly, highly profitable revenue stream that can support a game's bulging development cost.
Loot boxes also have the great advantage of sustaining a game over a great deal of time, some games have been out for years, but still generate a positive revenue stream through the sales of their loot boxes and to a slightly lesser extent, their DLC.
People still want beautiful games, but that £50.00 price tag just doesn't cover the bill anymore. If you want beauty, then you must pay for it and people have been. There is no denying the sales revenue from microtransactions.
"I don't agree with the small, but growing consensus that loot boxes are a form of gambling"
I cannot, in any way, support insidious methods of selling loot boxes. Pay-to-win selling being the top offender. A game's micro-transactions should in no way create a discrepancy of advantage and disadvantage between it's players.
I also do not like highly aggressive selling or (especially as a parent) unrestricted selling to people under the age of 16.
There are definetly wrinkles to iron out, overall I believe most publishers have directed their developers to inject micro-transactions responsible. I'd like to commend Activision, whose loot crate system is completely non-invasive. Infinite Warfare's gun variants called them into question on pay-to-win (and as an avid player I can say it certainly wasn't the case). Their aesthetics only approach in WW2 is to be an example of a loot case system designed to be fun, more than anything else.
I don't agree with the small, but growing consensus that loot boxes are a form of gambling. I can understand that a person with an addictive personality could find themselves addicted to buying loot crates, but then said person could've become addicted to drugs, alcohol, cough mixture or actual gambling.
I've met people with gambling addiction, they all share the same fault, their addiction isn't to spend their money, or to accrue as much money as possible. Their addicted to the feeling of winning. A gambling addict could win a million pounds and spend it all, looking for that next big win high.
Loot crates offer no win. Each crate is a win in itself, you always get something. Just because you may find yourself desperate to get that one gun camo, and thus spend a hundred pounds to get it, doesn't share the same notion or euphoria that actual gambler's experience.
If your addicted to loot boxes, it's because you're a virtual hoarder. You may hoard in real life too, but regardless you require help for hoarding, not gambling. Two very different types of addictions.
I'm sure by now you've grown weary of my bleating, so I'd like to end on this note: loot boxes are a good thing for gaming. They support expensive game development and they make that support voluntary. It's making high end games accessible for everyone, which can only be a good thing.
I hope you enjoyed this blog and that my views and opinions haven't upset anyone. Furthermore, I thoroughly encourage anyone who knows someone addicted to loot crates, seek help from their general practitioner as a first step. Addiction in any way, shape or form needs to be treated and should not be left unattended.
Have a good weekend everybody, see you again next time.
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