Darmalus wrote:Actually my analogy, which admittedly could have been better phrased, is that cheap junk made widely available and convenient and priced low enough for good-enough quality will prosper. That is the niche of EA, McDonalds, Blizzard and many others.
Fair enough. Sorry for misreading your analogy. My problem is that everyone "knows" what McDonald's is and what it offers. I'm sure these people exist, but I've never met anyone who would claim it's generally of a high-quality. With video games, the exact opposite holds true. Holy shit, the amount of people who will get angry (even though gaming is just a bullshit hobby for them and they claim it's not worth getting worked up about) when you point out they're basically paying money to not even play a game. It's like paying a Grandmaster to beat your drinking buddies at Chess.
But those guys (and gals) spend a fuckton of money. More than stupid assholes like me ever would. So, what we're left with is a group of business men who don't exactly respect gaming. Why would they: people will drop thousands of dollars on Facebook games.
I can't come up with a good analogy for my feelings, so I'll use a bad one: Music. Late in my "everything I care about must be awesome" days, this band called "Nickelback" came out and was exceedingly popular. It's because it's pretty fucking bland music but it doesn't offend you. I remember one weekend we were on my buddy's boat, he had one of their CDs on repeat and I didn't even notice. It was like listening to white noise: it's just there. I love Queen, have for years. But there are some Queen songs I cannot stand (Bicycle for just one). But that's the thing about stuff you love, you probably revile certain aspects of it.
But lately, video games is like Nickelback to me: white noise. Gaming is dead.
But that also doesn't kill off the separate niche of various good restaurants and game making companies. They may charge more, or be less famous, or have their own weird quirks and aggravations but they are very much not dead.
To be fair, I've also done a poor job explaining what I mean by "gaming is dead." It's not that the business is dieing or that different/fun games don't exist, it's that we've been in a continual push over the past... 15 years or so to distill video games into "max profit > everything else." And we, at least in my experience, as a matter of course in entertainment just continue to do this for everything. Jesus, is there one movie genre that doesn't have a set blueprint? Romantic Comedies have to be the worst and they still rake in millions. Anything mildly original was either a book or comic book. But man, imagine you could choose what actors wear or, even worse, unlock the real ending by paying a few extra bucks.
When Blizzard, who was basically a bunch of guys who really liked Warhammer and 40k and ripped it off wholesale, are now more worried about offering more content by releasing expansion quicker, it's easy to see the bullshit lines. They really want to release less content at a quicker rate with a $60 upcharge on top of your sub. You wait around for months doing just about nothing because they can count on a subscriber jump for an expansion release, rather than relying on consistent sub numbers. That huge jump also looks good in a quarterly report because that's what's really important in this day. WoW is so fucking dead.
I honestly have no idea what games EA makes anymore because I dismissed them from any consideration a long time ago. If it has an EA logo I just ignore it, same with McDonalds. If a game demands extra money to do basic functions, I just shrug my shoulders and walk away. I wouldn't even be playing WoW right now if it hadn't gone "F2P" with the game time token.
Your last part is my main point: if Blizzard (and Activision) didn't have so much else to fall back on, they couldn't afford to have you say that. Instead, they found a way to keep money coming in without offering any actual content. It's the same thing with transfers and paid mounts. I include mounts because they would have originally been gated behind grinds or gold. They can afford for you to leave, you don't matter, so "fuck off, you'll be back for Legion."
The only real difference now is that Twitter has really lead to Blizzard being a lot more upfront about their bullshit, since anyone can post to Twitter at any time.