Comment on AAA Dominance Is Eroding: 56% of PC Gaming Revenue Now Goes to Games Outside the Top 20

tal@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Nearly every every on that list is also a live service game that has been released for years. It’s almost like supporting your product post-launch builds a dedicated userbase or something.

  (And yeah, I know it’s actually because of the profitability of addictive design patterns combined with microtransactions. Let me dream, please.)

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  • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    This is also survivorship bias. Plenty of companies would love to support their game post launch and make this much money, but they go under trying to follow the same playbook; even the ones that were successful doing so before.

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    • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      True. I know Dean Hall (DayZ, Stationeers, Kitten Space Agency) destroyed any hope of his survival game Icarus becoming a major success by releasing hundreds of dollars of expensive DLC during Early Access, then later revealed it was because the money from his previous projects had slowed to a trickle and splitting his current project into a bunch of paid packs was the only way he could stay solvent. Even the megahits of the past all die out at some point.

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      • SincerityIsCool@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Doesn’t help that Icarus is such a technical mess. Certainly limits the player base when you shoot for a graphically demanding game and then don’t bother with working on performance.

        Maybe I’m just grumpy that I can’t play it anymore since switching to Linux despite upgrading my gpu.

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  • tal@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I should totally put release date on there too. Just a sec, will add on a column with that.

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    • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Wow z most of them were even older than I’d thought. And even some of the new ones like Tarkov were in Early Access for years before their official release date.

      (You flipped the date and country for 16 and 17, btw)

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      • tal@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Yeah, but thanks for the heads-up!

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• paraphrand@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Free to play, and “ever games” or whatever you want to call them. Solid classics that are easy to return to for years. Left 4 Dead 2 is a great example.

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• fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Shouldn’t the sims 4 be considered free to play? The base game is free, only the dlc is paid.

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• brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Or effectively F2P/MTX based ones.

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  • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    F2P games are subsidized by a small minority who will throw a hundred dollars a month into the game to obtain and max out whatever FOMO event or item/character is on rotation, and by an even smaller group of obscenely wealthy (or mentally ill) players who will spend tens of thousands of dollars just to say they own everything.

    I’d honestly be fine with this model if the ones funding it were treated like patrons of the arts or something, but instead the industry hired a bunch of psychologists to run incredibly unethical experiments to create literally addictive design patterns encouraging the weak-willed or mentally ill to spend more.

    Modern F2P game design is predatory and downright evil in the way it’s carefully cultivated to be just fun enough to continue playing, while constantly dangling the promise of more enjoyment if you’d only spend a tiny bit more (with that ‘bit more’ often only granting a small chance at getting what you want, with ‘pity’ systems only guaranteeing the desired drop if you spend the equivalent of around a hundred bucks in premium currency). But since it’s obscenely profitable, I don’t foresee it going away without legislation banning those practices.

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    • MousePotatoDoesStuff@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Yeah, that’s what I hate about Genshin Impact most - the predatory gacha and FOMO-exploiting business model ruining what would otherwise be a peak game I could recommend to basically anyone.

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    • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Regardless, they still draw absolutely massive amounts of players.

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    • Korhaka@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      It depends, it’s certainly inaccurate to describe all F2P games as doing this. Runescape, at least back in the 2000s, was F2P or a monthly sub. That was it.

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      • mika_mika@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Runescape also was a free game at a time when those weren’t really common. I honestly can’t think of any others with the scope of RS.

        Not only was it free, it ran entirely in a browser window.

        That’s how it managed to build its player base, and it coasts on that nostalgia to this day.

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• NotSteve_@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Way too many American games in there :(

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