I mean… the first part is pretty accurate and sad. The second part…. Half points. This seems to forget, or not know, what the video game scene was like in the 1980’s.
Micro transactions were king through most of the 1980’s. The “Nintendo revolution” didn’t make consoles a fixture of almost every home until the mid 80’s- but even then the arcade was king. Console games started largely as arcade ports because arcade games had brand recognition and the work was already done. The model for the most part was to release the game as a dual release or prioritize arcade and port to console at launch or later on. Arcades tended to be where games were tested and home systems were both a way to have a mini arcade experience at home- but also to practice your arcade skills.
Because….. the north of modern games as we know it WERE micro transactions. A quarter (more or less depending on the tule and place and game) at a time. Many staples of gaming exist predominantly because of arcades and the business model. Lives to limit chances before you needed to drop more quarters, timed stages which add a sense of fun and tension but were created to prevent players from loitering or the best players from playing forever on one coin. Scrolling levels are in part technical limitation and in part another way to force players to cough up more coins by finding ways to make them die without feeling cheated. Many secrets, alternates like secret characters and alternate costumes and stages etc. find footing or got their big boost from the arcade. Various ways to engage players and provide quarter wasting distractions or reasons for replays. The concept of co-op and vs play and spilt screen trace their roots to the arcade where more players meant more quarters and more ways
to engage players. The modern game experience and the concept of the “good old days” are linked to micro transactions and the same spirit of psychological trickery used in modern games. Create a fun and rewarding- even addicting- game play loop, build into the rules conventions that force players into situations where they must or are incentivized to pay you more money, use various cues and triggers to keep players investing. Some may point out that you don’t have to buy an arcade game to play so that doesn’t count- but many app/pc/console games are free and use micro transactions. My point isn’t that older games and profit models are exactly the same thing- they obviously are not. It is that the concept of micro transactions and social engineering in game design aren’t new.
In the “golden 80’s” most game designers didn’t want you to have “fun” in the way most people think. There were largely two circles in a ven diagram with some in the center being both of designers that designed games to be engaging- fun being part of that- but the over arching design goal was to get you to feed quarters to a machine; and designers that hated you. They just hated you for playing and wanted to punish you. There are still some who practice the old ways, but in technology- especially programming and design, it was once almost a requirement that you hate everyone and just enjoying causing grief. Perhaps you had some respect for those who proved themselves to you.
So the custom was to design levels or entire games to make the player want to rage quit. To make things punishing hard or unforgiving, to create ramping difficulty that eventually you needed to be super human or even memorize entire levels to have a chance, to perhaps include some crazy and cool stuff but put it behind a barrier that requires either extremely specialized (and difficult to come by pre net days) knowledge or feats of insane skill or dedication to get. And sometimes you’d punish players for that too- a gag item for lots of work, debuffs, literally taunts about how much of a loser you are to have achieved that feat.
Now some of this is condensed or conflated and there is some hyperbole- but it wasn’t JUST arcades. The game and console rental markets were big for a long time and had many similarities. Both were pay to play. Both generally had incentive to certain things. Until branching and alternate endings and such became a common thing, there wasn’t a lot of reason to replay a game you best vs. find a new game unless you really loved that game. Games like Pac-Man and space invaders are examples of games that really weren’t made to end. You eventually die/run out of quarters or you go for the highest score. For a long time the business didn’t really believe in beating games. The concept of an ending didn’t even occur to many early game designers if the period- they assumed you’d play until you got sick of the repeating mechanics.
Space invaders is credited as introducing the increasing difficulty curve because the hardware couldn’t display that many things in screen without slowing down- so to get the invaders to move at all the default speed was set it a very fast pace. As you destroyed enemies, there were less things on screen and the ones left moved faster and faster as the system was able to make them move the programmed speed. Early games using the concept tended to increase to a certain difficulty and then either stop changing or recycle back through what was previously played. So they kept advancing the concept- because even if you don’t die more people can only find the same repetitive thing fun for so long or physically will tire out at the controls. Game designers needed ways to shake up game play a bit and add variety.
But in general there was still an attitude that if a game had an end- that’s where people would stop, and like movies, they were thought more likely to go to a new one than keep at the old one once it ended. You have to remember that home movies were a newer technology and not something in every house too so rewatching your favorite film usually involved a trip to the theater or catching it on TV by luck. Cable wasn’t really a thing either yet so much.
On the rental market, being able to beat a game in one rental meant less money for the renter and thusly less demand by rental companies for your game since it doesn’t make them money. So lives and game overs and timers tended to carry to home games too for that and other reasons.
Games were also expensive and not only were there far fewer than the modern day but it wasn’t really common for people to own as many games as today on average. Hard to beat games were often thought to appear as a better value to consumers in the home market. An early form of padding. Today we have fetch quests and such but back then, they just made sections or entire games brutally difficult to the point you couldn’t even beat the first level sometimes. This way a game that could easily have a 30 minute play through at best could last hundreds of hours at a time that graphic games were too large to really make “honest” games of that scope.
Of course the RPG and JRPG came along and brought sprawl and lots of filler and fetch quests while still using punishing difficulty, obscure puzzles and other padding tricks as well as the grind. They didn’t create grinding, earlier games were basically a score grind. Not even an in game reason or notable story. Just you doing repetitive things to try and going higher numbers. Instead of XP you were going for a high score. That’s it. Very easily games didn’t even have leased boards- added later largely to incentivize repetitive play that keeping a top score tends to take.
Estoy games tended to crib mechanics and conventions, often almost being a switch of overlays or even sometimes literally being the same game with some different art and maybe code tweaks. Instead of misleading trailers and demos like today you got box and cabinet art that often had nothing to do with the game and more often didn’t accurately represent what to expect. It’s all been seen and done with a slightly different flavor.
So I’m saying newer games are fine with their DLC micro transactions or that people should stop complaining? No. This crap sucks man. A big part of the problem is that the generations of gamers who game was synonymous with grind- they grew up and represent a major part of the gaming profits- but they generally don’t have the time to grind through back to back 200 hours games every month or other week or whatever. Mass audiences tend to be casual players and former hard core players tend to grow into casuals, or semi casuals who want games they can walk away from or go weeks without playing and not be lost. But you can’t just repackage the old stuff really. I mean- yes- “nostalgia gaming” and “retro” are popular- but…
When Nintendo or Namco or Capcom lock away classic titles for $60+ or big money mega anthologies etc. most people scoff. Who will pay $60 for space invaders in 2023? A few but not enough to pay all the staff and share holders and keep the multi billions in advertising and marketing and everything else going. You don’t need a $1000+ console to play those games either- so how do you sell newer more advanced hardware? On the one hand there is a hustle there. New games, new hardware, profits. But- it’s also to the benefit of gamers because if they just kept making super Mario world SNES sequels, even if they didn’t feel stale after awhile, they’d never have made games like all the legend of Zelda games, the modern FPS, all the sprawling open world titles and breathtaking and complex games that modern and more advanced tech brings.
So It’s not all greed and hustle. Genres also need refreshed and often newer tech and newer games help. Younger players and even vets used to the newer games- going back to play a game like Street Fighter 2- it’s a legend and still fun- but few people main those games. Lack of combos, characters. Cancels and parry’s and diverse move sets and customizations and all sorts of things modern fighting games have. Of course many were possible- alpha and Men vs SF etc. had cancels and delectable specials. The older KOF games had some features found in modern fighters- but 3D fighting games offer extra dimensions of game play and while they can be fun- 2D games just can’t do that as effectively if at all in a true sense.
So there are certain balancing factors. And as advanced as modern tech is, there are limitations too. Gamers are more demanding than ever and have decades of history and familiarity. Creating games that are truly fun and truly novel is a big challenge. That said there is a complacent laziness in the industry today. Entire games sold as cash grabs on the name alone, as this meme mentions- intentionally delivering a partial play experience to charge the rest later. Cookie cutter games in the same engine and re release after re release games with a central mechanic hinged on pay to play or pay to win.
Now here I have mixed feelings. It is patently insulting and outrageous to see a handful of color pallet swaps for $100. Maybe $10 or more for a single alternate outfit. These things generally don’t have any impact beyond cosmetic though- you can easily live without them and they generally don’t impact gameplay. So on the one hand I can shrug and say that if developers can make some money that way and some people want to pay it- what’s the harm? On the other hand, especially for color swaps and such- it’s such a minimal effort thing that it feels like you should be given it or charged much less for many of these.
Likewise “pay to win” is a tough one. It does seem unfair tens or hundreds or more hours of work and practice can be equaled or surpassed in perhaps seconds by someone with money. Games where you can buy advantages that there is absolutely no way to get without paying are they worst IMHO, with games that allow you to get those things but at a slow rate lr through insane work are almost as bad.
It also is especially unfair to players without the money to spend even if they wanted to.
Of course by the same token- as someone who likes games but has a very full life and a career to demand my time, I don’t have weeks to spend staying up all night to grind gold and levels and to get that epic rare drop for the set I need. Given the choice to basically be eternally at noob levels or not play at all- I’d sooner not play. For many people and by design many games aren’t for casuals. The fun parts of the game are all about having the skills and levels to where things get exciting and playing
out your fantasy. Your fantasy problem isn’t to run around in rags with a mismatched skull cap and cast the three level one spells your mana can cover before you get smobbed to death again and lose the 100 gold to your name and spend the rest of your time available for playing waiting for you mana to regenerate or retrieving your corpse. That’s not fun. So “pay to win” does allow some form of equality between players who’s life circumstances grant them the freedom to grind and players who don’t have that. So I can’t say in entirely against the concept but I do have problems with it in practice like how it can make a game all but pay to play or how it is unfair to players who can’t pay and especially players who can’t pay but don’t have the time or skill to take either route. I don’t like the way it leads to whales in many games- players who literally have thousands or even tens of thousands or more dollars into a game and are often effectively untouchable by even the most skilled
Or next most paying players. That’s not fun either when one person can equal ten or a hundred other players. I’ve played games where a single pay to win player could take an others or bottom ranking guild and place them at the top of server or even global leader boards. It’s crazy. When rockstar releases GTAV a hundred times and keeps making you pay and finding new ways to milk more money or take what you already paid for.. when Skyrim is STILL being re released and Fallout 76 is holding up the pipeline on a new and better single player… well.. earlier when I said that advancement in technology is fine because we get newer better games? That wouldn’t work so well if namco stoped making games after Pac-Man and a decade or more later you could either play original Pac-Man or fuxk off. So that sort of stagnation is not admirable in newer gaming.
Micro transactions were king through most of the 1980’s. The “Nintendo revolution” didn’t make consoles a fixture of almost every home until the mid 80’s- but even then the arcade was king. Console games started largely as arcade ports because arcade games had brand recognition and the work was already done. The model for the most part was to release the game as a dual release or prioritize arcade and port to console at launch or later on. Arcades tended to be where games were tested and home systems were both a way to have a mini arcade experience at home- but also to practice your arcade skills.
Games were also expensive and not only were there far fewer than the modern day but it wasn’t really common for people to own as many games as today on average. Hard to beat games were often thought to appear as a better value to consumers in the home market. An early form of padding. Today we have fetch quests and such but back then, they just made sections or entire games brutally difficult to the point you couldn’t even beat the first level sometimes. This way a game that could easily have a 30 minute play through at best could last hundreds of hours at a time that graphic games were too large to really make “honest” games of that scope.
It also is especially unfair to players without the money to spend even if they wanted to.
Of course by the same token- as someone who likes games but has a very full life and a career to demand my time, I don’t have weeks to spend staying up all night to grind gold and levels and to get that epic rare drop for the set I need. Given the choice to basically be eternally at noob levels or not play at all- I’d sooner not play. For many people and by design many games aren’t for casuals. The fun parts of the game are all about having the skills and levels to where things get exciting and playing