Do you really care about video games?

[Original_Name]

I seem to have reached an impasse when it comes to my personal position as a consumer of modern games. My heart swells when I see recent output by companies such as Sega, Platinum Games, Treasure, Q, Atlus, Team ICO, and XSeed, but I simply don't want to support any of the first-party companies in order to do so. I frankly want Sony, Microsoft, and Apple out of the goddamned industry, and while they're clearly here to stay, I'm not going to have that on me as a consumer.

While Nintendo's much closer to what I'd like a first-party to be, their creative direction has never really captured my interest much -- if I had a Wii, I'd buy Sin & Punishment 2, Sonic Colors, Rodea the Sky Soldier, and Metroid: Other M then be done. Anyway, games like Child of Eden, Valkyria Chronicles, Yakuza 3, The King of Fighters XIII, Journey, The Last Guardian, Virtua Fighter 5, DoDonPachi DOJ, Project Draco, Rise of Nightmares, Aquanaut's Holiday, Heavy Rain, Sonic Generations, Metal Gear Solid 4, and Vanquish have me frothing at the mouth, but I won't buy them because fuck paying anyone but the developers and producers in today's system.

I still love video games, and there are several titles which reflect my tastes in gaming on Sony and Microsoft's platforms, but I have a dilemma because in supporting the developers that maintain the creative spirit, I'm also having to support the regressive business practices of first-parties whom I frankly have a vendetta against.

So, I relate with many of the sentiments here, but I feel like it's been made impossible for a gamer like myself to really be a progressive consumer in this industry. I have fringe tastes in video games, but the conduit I have to support in order to support the creation of them contributes to one of the big machines that will continue to do so much to stifle the industry's creativity.

[Original_Name]

Also, I have to say that JT's post was absolutely amazing on every level. Great job, man -- I enjoyed the read.

[MrPopo]

What a businessman's wet dream it is, when gamer plays in social virtual environment and wants to improve their status by buying virtual items, that take minimal funds to create and can be copied infinitely. Diablo III will probably be prime example of this. Some people support the in-game virtual item Ebay idea by the reasoning, that they don't have time to play the game so they pay to get through the game, that makes whole lot of sense.

Why do you care if someone wants to spend money for something you can get without spending money? The Diablo III money market is Blizzard saying "Yes, we realize that people have been selling items for cash throughout the entirety of Diablo II's existance, so we're going to make it safer for people who want to engage in this practice. (and get a cut ourselves)" That sounds very reasonable to me, and if you don't want to spend real money on virtual items you can just farm the items up yourself.

I can understand being pissed if you are required to spend extra money to get the best stuff. That's selling power and I think it's a bad thing. But giving people the option of either spending time or money to pimp themselves out? I don't see the harm there.

[Inazuma]

Why do you care if someone wants to spend money for something you can get without spending money? The Diablo III money market is Blizzard saying "Yes, we realize that people have been selling items for cash throughout the entirety of Diablo II's existance, so we're going to make it safer for people who want to engage in this practice. (and get a cut ourselves)" That sounds very reasonable to me, and if you don't want to spend real money on virtual items you can just farm the items up yourself.

I can understand being pissed if you are required to spend extra money to get the best stuff. That's selling power and I think it's a bad thing. But giving people the option of either spending time or money to pimp themselves out? I don't see the harm there.

This is called pay to win. The most important thing in games like Diablo III is how much money you have in real life. Player skill or the amount of time you play the game is not as important as spending real money.

This completely destroys the game. If you want to make progress on the game, you would be better off working overtime at your job than actually playing the fucking game. The strongest players in Diablo III will be people who spend thousands of dollars on the auction house. It is complete fucking bullshit.

Games like this are designed in a way to encourage players to keep spending real money. The real money auction house does not improve the game at all. Blizzard is only doing it because they want more money. They don't care about affecting the quality of the game. They put a positive spin on it, and people fell for it. It's disgusting. Why are gamers so fucking stupid?

[AppleQueso]

Why do you care if someone wants to spend money for something you can get without spending money? The Diablo III money market is Blizzard saying "Yes, we realize that people have been selling items for cash throughout the entirety of Diablo II's existance, so we're going to make it safer for people who want to engage in this practice. (and get a cut ourselves)" That sounds very reasonable to me, and if you don't want to spend real money on virtual items you can just farm the items up yourself.

I can understand being pissed if you are required to spend extra money to get the best stuff. That's selling power and I think it's a bad thing. But giving people the option of either spending time or money to pimp themselves out? I don't see the harm there.

This is called pay to win. The most important thing in games like Diablo III is how much money you have in real life. Player skill or the amount of time you play the game is not as important as spending real money.

This completely destroys the game. If you want to make progress on the game, you would be better off working overtime at your job than actually playing the fucking game. The strongest players in Diablo III will be people who spend thousands of dollars on the auction house. It is complete fucking bullshit.

Games like this are designed in a way to encourage players to keep spending real money. The real money auction house does not improve the game at all. Blizzard is only doing it because they want more money. They don't care about affecting the quality of the game. They put a positive spin on it, and people fell for it. It's disgusting. Why are gamers so fucking stupid?

This shit goes on on MMOs anyhow. Doesn't matter if its specifically endorsed by the company or not.

I don't bother with MMOs at all for all kinds of reasons, this being one of them.

[Inazuma]

This shit goes on on MMOs anyhow. Doesn't matter if its specifically endorsed by the company or not.

I don't bother with MMOs at all for all kinds of reasons, this being one of them.

I'm pretty much done with MMOs too. I'm not playing any right now and I can't find a new one to play because they are all based on real money nowadays.

Yeah, some people would do RMT back in the day when that stuff was against the game rules and shunned by gamers, but it really wasn't that bad or widespread. You could still trade items using in-game currency with most players. It didn't ruin the game.

If you want to be the best Diablo III player, be prepared to spend literally thousands of dollars on virtual items. And then be prepared to do it again every time they release slightly stronger items. Modern MMO gaming is such a pile of shit. What the hell happened?!

[isiolia]

Yeah, some people would do RMT back in the day when that stuff was against the game rules and shunned by gamers, but it really wasn't that bad or widespread. You could still trade items using in-game currency with most players. It didn't ruin the game.

If you want to be the best Diablo III player, be prepared to spend literally thousands of dollars on virtual items. And then be prepared to do it again every time they release slightly stronger items. Modern MMO gaming is such a pile of shit. What the hell happened?!

In some ways, Blizzard accommodating it like they are has the potential to keep it from ruining the game experience for people. The main problem with RMT are when they get in the way. Unless its affecting PvP, it makes little difference to your enjoyment of the game as to what shinies someone else has. If the RMT selling them the gold are monopolizing content you're trying to do, that's different.

With the game being designed from the ground up for people to be able to do this, content should be designed in such a way that monopolizing it isn't possible. Also supply and demand. The going price for a Helm of Awesomeness +3 will be less if 10,000 players have them up for sale than instead of 10 or 100 - could wind up being a lot less money in a dedicated RMT business as a result.


The general problem with MMOs as a genre is that they aren't necessarily designed to be the best game they could be. They're designed to keep you paying a subscription fee as long as possible, usually by requiring an inordinate amount of time to get things done. Present that to someone who actually makes decent money in real life, and there's a bit of logic to just paying for some things.
'course, you can also just remove the more tedious aspects of the game...but fewer companies seem apt to do that.

[MrPopo]

Why do you care if someone wants to spend money for something you can get without spending money? The Diablo III money market is Blizzard saying "Yes, we realize that people have been selling items for cash throughout the entirety of Diablo II's existance, so we're going to make it safer for people who want to engage in this practice. (and get a cut ourselves)" That sounds very reasonable to me, and if you don't want to spend real money on virtual items you can just farm the items up yourself.

I can understand being pissed if you are required to spend extra money to get the best stuff. That's selling power and I think it's a bad thing. But giving people the option of either spending time or money to pimp themselves out? I don't see the harm there.

This is called pay to win. The most important thing in games like Diablo III is how much money you have in real life. Player skill or the amount of time you play the game is not as important as spending real money.

This completely destroys the game. If you want to make progress on the game, you would be better off working overtime at your job than actually playing the fucking game. The strongest players in Diablo III will be people who spend thousands of dollars on the auction house. It is complete fucking bullshit.

Games like this are designed in a way to encourage players to keep spending real money. The real money auction house does not improve the game at all. Blizzard is only doing it because they want more money. They don't care about affecting the quality of the game. They put a positive spin on it, and people fell for it. It's disgusting. Why are gamers so fucking stupid?

I don't even know where to begin on this. Especially when you concede that people were already spending money for the best items.

Yeah, some people would do RMT back in the day when that stuff was against the game rules and shunned by gamers, but it really wasn't that bad or widespread.

I laugh, because it was massively widespread. You couldn't use any of the public chat channels because they were completely filled with people selling items for gold. And yet, as you said, people still traded items for other items. You know why? Because they didn't want to pay money for their items.

Now we have the Diablo III auction house, which doesn't replace trading items for items. It's just a different avenue for getting items. People will still trade items for items because there's still a ton of people who think spending real money for Diablo items is a complete waste. And thousands of dollars? Not even close. Hell, the most expensive tournmanet decks for Magic the Gathering only cost a couple hundred dollars to build, and it involves a lot more pieces than a Diablo character does.

Oh, and another thing. You purchasing item X means that item X was farmed by someone. You could be just as productive farming the item yourself. It's not like Blizzard is vending out items to anyone who gives them money; everything has to drop in the game world first.

I'm pretty much done with MMOs too. I'm not playing any right now and I can't find a new one to play because they are all based on real money nowadays.

Patently false. For example, in World of Warcraft all the best stuff is bind on pickup, which means the only way you can get to the top using money is by purchasing someone else's account who already farmed up all the pimp shit, which is not a trivial task.

Clearly you have no real experience with these sorts of games, and are just passing off your continuing objection to not paying money for a game past the initial point of sale. So you see any opportunity to spend money on a game after purchase as something evil and an attempt to fuck you over.

[Korpi]

MMORPG's are indeed totally suffering of this and all the veterans are very tired. I have no problem paying monthly fee for game, that gets constant updates, offers customer services, and maintains and improves servers. Currently MMORPG's are all about micro-transactions (in addition to the monthly fee, initial game fee and expansion packs), that affect the game world. If you think it's not much, then you just don't know MMORPG's. Even such thing as character name change affects social behavior within the game a lot. MMORPG's are supposed to be virtual worlds, independent of real world happenings and currency as much as possible. Diablo III is very comparable to a MMORPG in a way, but I do think it's quite different thing too.

I know that Diablo II had a lot of non-Blizzard supported real money trading, then the problem is more in the players. Then again, I haven't really blamed the companies for anything, just silly players for throwing their money away for all non-sense. I could see this coming for Diablo III long before it was announced, Activision Blizzard would have been stupid not to include it from business perspective. It's not like they are about anything else, than business, today.

They managed to sell those shiny ponys on WoW for few millions worth, so I can't do much else than clap in awe for their business masterminds like Bobby Kotick.

[MrPopo]

All these microtransactions you're talking about are for things that are completely optional. Name changes? Aesthetic pets/mounts? (you need to spend the in game currency to get the riding skill which is the real expense of having a mount) Changing a character's appearance? I say charge away. Those sorts of things might be meaningful to someone but they won't give them any advantage over me.