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General discussionThe reason behind Gog´s recent awful decisions(85 posts)(85 posts)
(85 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted September 27, 2021
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Yeshu: Dude, you are spining a narative now. Here is the FULL quote:

": And the third one – Adam Kiciński again – well, we’re never aggressive towards our fans!
We treat them fairly and we’re friendly. So of course not – we won’t be aggressive – but you
can expect great things to be bought. The goal is to design monetization in a way that makes
people happy to spend money. I’m not trying to be cynical or hide something; it’s about
creating a feeling of value. Same as with our single-player games: we want gamers to be happy
while spending money on our products. The same is true for microtransactions: you can
expect them, of course, and CP is a great setting for selling things, but it won’t be aggressive;
it won’t upset gamers but it’ll make them happy – that’s our goal at least."

You cut out you little quote from the middle of this long sentence, thus twisting what Adam was actually saying.

You clearly have a hate boner for GOG and CDPR but stop fabricating "evidence" against them and actually critique stuff they did. They are not saints but you are acting like like a smear journalist.
Perhaps you could explain how the full paragraph quote changes the interpretation of what was said? I cut out the relevant part, where he makes it very clear that CDPR is intending to introduce microtransactions into Cyberpunk in the future. The rest of the paragraph is pretty much just greasy corporate waffle, that wasn't really worth quoting. To paraphrase: "Yes, naturally we are going to milk our customers to the hilt, but we'll do it with a smile on our faces!"
Post edited September 27, 2021 by Time4Tea
Posted September 27, 2021
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Timboli: […] That said, maybe the original owners are not as altruistic as many had come to believe, and they saw DRM-Free as an avenue to get great profits, and in reality we have been hoodwinked for the most part. […]
I think its just an exhausted market. Single purchase software of old games couldn't sustain a company forever. How would they pay for these servers? Just as Gog had to start selling new games, their parent company, CDProjekt, inevitably has to start to create an online revenue stream, lest those companies that have this revenue grow large enough to buy them out.

Either way, the hard truth is the only way for DRM-free to survive is as an adjunct to online gaming.


edit: not Gog, CDProjekt
Post edited September 27, 2021 by scientiae
Posted September 27, 2021
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scientiae: I think its just an exhausted market. Single purchase software of old games couldn't sustain a company forever. How would they pay for these servers? Just as Gog had to start selling new games, their parent company, CDProjekt, inevitably has to start to create an online revenue stream, lest those companies that have this revenue grow large enough to buy them out.

Either way, the hard truth is the only way for DRM-free to survive is as an adjunct to online gaming.
I don't think is works like that or is as simple as that.

The owners or conditions dictate whether GOG would ever be sold, not whether some other company is rich enough ... so long as the owners have the controlling share, and investors cannot dictate.

CDProjekt have reportedly made a lot of money through their game development division (department). The GOG store is another division, reputedly backed up by those same profits at times.

I imagine it is true though, that they continually need to grow the pie to survive. Not enough old games become available often enough and are a limited commodity anyway, and generally make small profits I am guessing. Though of course, what was new last year or last decade, is old this one. So in some ways, they have an endless stream of games available ... not just the really old ones, classics etc. Where the difficulty lies, as always, is convincing providers to provide their game to GOG under DRM-Free conditions.

And lets not forget that other stores, like Steam especially, may do exclusivity deals. I suspect that is the reason why we still don't have WWII GI at GOG, despite having NAM here.
Post edited September 27, 2021 by Timboli
Posted September 27, 2021
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Timboli: I don't think is works like that or is as simple as that.

The owners or conditions dictate whether GOG would ever be sold, not whether some other company is rich enough ... so long as the owners have the controlling share, and investors cannot dictate.

CDProjekt have reportedly made a lot of money through their game development division (department). The GOG store is another division, reputedly backed up by those same profits at times.

I imagine it is true though, that they continually need to grow the pie to survive. Not enough old games become available often enough and are a limited commodity anyway, and generally make small profits I am guessing. Though of course, what was new last year or last decade, is old this one. So in some ways, they have an endless stream of games available. Where the difficulty lies, as always, is convincing providers to provide their game to GOG under DRM-Free conditions. […]
I am projecting to future events. It may not happen for a decade, but there is only a limited number of old games and fewer and fewer new games are being made without online components, so the economics are headed in a particular direction. The numbers are HUGE, already the Australian market is worth billions.

(Both of these quotes are from the same 4Corners programme.)

Globally, the industry is worth an estimated $US175 billion, which is more than Hollywood and the music industry combined. […]In 2019 Australians spent close to 3.2 billion dollars on gaming. […] Microtransactions started appearing in games in the mid 2000's and now make up three-quarters of all gaming revenue. Last year, gamers around the world spent about 117-billion U.S dollars on microtransactions. Of the highest selling 20 console and computer games in Australia last year, 18 included some type of microtransaction. […] Lootboxes earned games companies an estimated 15-billion dollars last year. This slice of the global gaming market is projected to grow to 20 billion by 2025. […]
This was the introduction summary by the journalist, so I assume the figures are accurate. Now think of the economies of scale:

The game developer knows much more about the player than the player knows about the game, and we call that an information asymmetry.
In the early days, players would go through them and learn more about the game and the system and become more practiced, they could apply skill and strategy to effectively get better and master the game.
These sorts of games, mobile games, games that use predatory monetisation, have kind of flipped the equation.
[…]
Psychologist, Dr Daniel King (who led a recent review of 53 global studies which found 2% of all players had a gaming disorder).

You're correct that there is no immediate danger, but what is being described here represents a power law. Only King Canute would try to fight against it forever.
Posted September 27, 2021
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scientiae: I am projecting to future events. It may not happen for a decade, but there is only a limited number of old games and fewer and fewer new games are being made without online components, so the economics are headed in a particular direction. The numbers are HUGE, already the Australian market is worth billions.

This was the introduction summary by the journalist, so I assume the figures are accurate. Now think of the economies of scale:

Psychologist, Dr Daniel King (who led a recent review of 53 global studies which found 2% of all players had a gaming disorder).

You're correct that there is no immediate danger, but what is being described here represents a power law. Only King Canute would try to fight against it forever.
Well I personally believe you are both right and wrong.

Yes you are right about the way things are heading gaming wise. But one needs to consider how many games are already out there, and how new people regularly become gamers and want access to the old.

So I predict there will always be a big market for old games, if eventually limited in number of games ... a huge amount though, and as Indie games improve, they will also keep new elements in the mix for the foreseeable future.

Perhaps old games, up to 2021(?) will become a niche one day ... many years away I suspect.
Posted September 27, 2021
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scientiae: Practically, this means that, the developer who wants to concentrate on the single-player narrative game will find it more and more difficult to compete without microtransactions. The rationale is that this cash is necessary to pay for the talent needed to build the games, because of the scarcity of skilled and experienced developers.
I think you are talking more about the AAA games market.

There are various niches in gaming and not all of them are in direct competition.

A lot of people will play online games and get off the virtualized social element, but not everyone will.

Go tell the creators of Terraria or Factorio that you can't monetize games properly without micro-transactions.

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scientiae: As a developer, then, your choice is limited to how and when —— not if —— you will implement them. (See comment by @AB2012 here for evidence of this.)

Seriously, any developer relying on the revenue generated by sales to me will be out of business pretty quickly, since I spend very little.
You do, but some people will still spend a lot to own good games.

I'm not contradicting that you'll probably coax even greater revenue from a minority of addicts, but to go from that to claiming that everyone will see the sheer greatness of the pseudo-social new online era and will want to spend tons of money just to posture themselves against strangers they don't know halfway across the globe, making the local single-player (or intimate multiplayer with a small number of live people playing right beside each other) paradigm completely obselete... that's a bold statement to make.

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scientiae: This is not a new idea. Look at how George Lucas surprised Hollywood when he took control of merchandizing rather than fight for a large portion of the movie proceeds with Star Wars. His fortune was made on all those action figures.
And yet, other people are still deriving their revenue primarily from selling movies.

George Lucas didn't end that trend and make everyone go "Just give us the movie for free and we'll buy the toys ok?"

One does not exclude the other.

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scientiae: People are gregarious. They want to imitate, participate and display their allegiance to a particular trend (look at all the repetition on TikTok, where everyone does their own version of a particular dance move, or whatever the current trend is) and purchasing a part of the game they love to play is a natural progression.
And some people like me do not care about that.

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scientiae: The hardest part is convincing people who might never do this to take the first step.
Or you know, just stop trying to drive something they don't want down their throat and provide to them what they want.

What a novel idea... not popular in the modern marketing era I know, where creating artificial wants is all the craze.
Post edited September 27, 2021 by Magnitus
Posted September 27, 2021
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Timboli: Well I personally believe you are both right and wrong.
:D Aren't we all? (All generalizations are wrong.)
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Timboli: Yes you are right about the way things are heading gaming wise. But one needs to consider how many games are already out there, and how new people regularly become gamers and want access to the old.

So I predict there will always be a big market for old games, if eventually limited in number of games ... a huge amount though, and as Indie games improve, they will also keep new elements in the mix for the foreseeable future.

Perhaps old games, up to 2021(?) will become a niche one day ... many years away I suspect.
What will inevitably happen is, even if Gog dies, the hard core will continue filesharing games: like an old toasternet, (It might not be permissible on the new, improved web, but the demimonde Dark Web will never die.)
Posted September 27, 2021
low rated
avatar
Yeshu: Dude, you are spining a narative now. Here is the FULL quote:

": And the third one – Adam Kiciński again – well, we’re never aggressive towards our fans!
We treat them fairly and we’re friendly. So of course not – we won’t be aggressive – but you
can expect great things to be bought. The goal is to design monetization in a way that makes
people happy to spend money. I’m not trying to be cynical or hide something; it’s about
creating a feeling of value. Same as with our single-player games: we want gamers to be happy
while spending money on our products. The same is true for microtransactions: you can
expect them, of course, and CP is a great setting for selling things, but it won’t be aggressive;
it won’t upset gamers but it’ll make them happy – that’s our goal at least."

You cut out you little quote from the middle of this long sentence, thus twisting what Adam was actually saying.

You clearly have a hate boner for GOG and CDPR but stop fabricating "evidence" against them and actually critique stuff they did. They are not saints but you are acting like like a smear journalist.
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Time4Tea: Perhaps you could explain how the full paragraph quote changes the interpretation of what was said? I cut out the relevant part, where he makes it very clear that CDPR is intending to introduce microtransactions into Cyberpunk in the future. The rest of the paragraph is pretty much just greasy corporate waffle, that wasn't really worth quoting. To paraphrase: "Yes, naturally we are going to milk our customers to the hilt, but we'll do it with a smile on our faces!"
It changes the nature of the quote from your malicious: "hue hue, we gonna milk people for there money" to a more reasonable "We plan on having monetisation but we want to make it non aggressive and actually provide value for the customer". Again, you should calm down your hate boner and try to look at the whole picture instead of pushing a narrative.
Posted September 27, 2021
low rated
avatar
Time4Tea: Perhaps you could explain how the full paragraph quote changes the interpretation of what was said? I cut out the relevant part, where he makes it very clear that CDPR is intending to introduce microtransactions into Cyberpunk in the future. The rest of the paragraph is pretty much just greasy corporate waffle, that wasn't really worth quoting. To paraphrase: "Yes, naturally we are going to milk our customers to the hilt, but we'll do it with a smile on our faces!"
avatar
Yeshu: It changes the nature of the quote from your malicious: "hue hue, we gonna milk people for there money" to a more reasonable "We plan on having monetisation but we want to make it non aggressive and actually provide value for the customer". Again, you should calm down your hate boner and try to look at the whole picture instead of pushing a narrative.
Him and his ilk can't calm down. They only know how to go 100% into hysteria and fear mongering, because it's easier for them than to actually understand nuance and reality.
Posted September 27, 2021
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scientiae: I have been trying to find an old current affairs show about an Australian game developer without success (so far) that explains the stark choice every developer faces. From memory (and sparse notes) I will summarize, here.

95% of revenue now comes from online transactions. (Yes, us old gamers who buy our entertainment, are analogous to an epic fail for the new business model. :) This is generated from those millions of people (typically on public transport) playing a game that prompts them with "Pay to continue?" and they spend $1 or some small amount to keep their game going (until they reach their egress point). All those $1 add up.
If those 95% are not referring to microtransactions: What exactly does 'online transaction' mean?
If those 95% are referring to microtransactions: Do you have a proper source for those 95%? It doesnt fit with my quick web search and it also doesnt fit with your own post https://www.gog.com/forum/general/the_reason_behind_gogs_recent_awful_decisions/post65

--

There also have been legislative efforts to counter the microtransactions / loot box thing. So far probably without much effect from a global perspective though.
Here it mentions China: https://www.thebusinessresearchcompany.com/report/online-microtransaction-global-market-report-2020-30-covid-19-implications-and-growth
Netherlands: https://www.thegamer.com/netherlands-loot-box-ban/
Posted September 27, 2021
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scientiae: What will inevitably happen is, even if Gog dies, the hard core will continue filesharing games: like an old toasternet, (It might not be permissible on the new, improved web, but the demimonde Dark Web will never die.)
I don't think I know of anyone who has dealings with the Dark Web, hardcore gamer or not.

Most would be too afraid to venture there, so I imagine it would require a certain level of desperation, mostly from a dying breed of old gamers, who cannot accept new ways.
Posted September 28, 2021
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Timboli: I don't think I know of anyone who has dealings with the Dark Web, hardcore gamer or not.

Most would be too afraid to venture there, so I imagine it would require a certain level of desperation, mostly from a dying breed of old gamers, who cannot accept new ways.
The future web will be unrecognizable to the current population. I would expect it to be all walled garden —— think AOL before Ted Turner. "Dark Web" will then have expanded to be whatever is outside that garden.
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scientiae: I have been trying to find an old current affairs show about an Australian game developer without success (so far) that explains the stark choice every developer faces. From memory (and sparse notes) I will summarize, here.

95% of revenue now comes from online transactions. (Yes, us old gamers who buy our entertainment, are analogous to an epic fail for the new business model. :) This is generated from those millions of people (typically on public transport) playing a game that prompts them with "Pay to continue?" and they spend $1 or some small amount to keep their game going (until they reach their egress point). All those $1 add up.
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Zrevnur: If those 95% are not referring to microtransactions: What exactly does 'online transaction' mean?
If those 95% are referring to microtransactions: Do you have a proper source for those 95%? It doesnt fit with my quick web search and it also doesnt fit with your own post https://www.gog.com/forum/general/the_reason_behind_gogs_recent_awful_decisions/post65

--

There also have been legislative efforts to counter the microtransactions / loot box thing. So far probably without much effect from a global perspective though.
Here it mentions China: https://www.thebusinessresearchcompany.com/report/online-microtransaction-global-market-report-2020-30-covid-19-implications-and-growth
Netherlands: https://www.thegamer.com/netherlands-loot-box-ban/
Yeah, it's a big claim and requires some strong evidence. Unfortunately, I have had little success finding the current affairs show. :(
Looking at the statement, I think it means 95% of online transactions are microtransactions. (This is one reason I was reluctant to publish the figure, since I can't remember the context. Also, I don't use Google, which doesn't help. If you use Google, you might have better luck. If you do, please let me know because I hate losing information more than pretty much anything else.:)

I do have this nice summary on Kotaku, too.

I saw it broadcast immediately after the one quoted in my previous posts, though it was made in 2014, or thereabouts. I thought it was another 4Corners production, but I have checked their library and it wasn't. This doesn't preclude it being packaged as such, rebranded from e.g., BBC Panorama or one of the US networks (PBS, maybe?) which they regularly indulge in.

Edit: I found the company! Halfbrick Studios.
http://halfbrick.com/

The show was a fly-on-the-wall documentary and case study of Australian developer Halfbrick, which had a big surprise hit with a mobile game, Fruit Ninja. At the end of the show, the passionate developers who were dead-set against microtransactions —— who just wanted to make good single-player games —— eventually quit the company, after tolerating the management decision to concentrate on the free-to-play microtransaction claw-back strategy.

My back-of-the-envelope notes just have what I gave you. My apologies for the poor evidence.

edit: supplemental
Post edited September 28, 2021 by scientiae
Posted September 28, 2021
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Yeshu: It changes the nature of the quote from your malicious: "hue hue, we gonna milk people for there money" to a more reasonable "We plan on having monetisation but we want to make it non aggressive and actually provide value for the customer". Again, you should calm down your hate boner and try to look at the whole picture instead of pushing a narrative.
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Krogan32: Him and his ilk can't calm down. They only know how to go 100% into hysteria and fear mongering, because it's easier for them than to actually understand nuance and reality.
"Him and his ilk" ... "hysteria" ... "fear mongering" ... are those the only words you know? Perhaps come back when you actually have something constructive to say.

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Yeshu: It changes the nature of the quote from your malicious: "hue hue, we gonna milk people for there money" to a more reasonable "We plan on having monetisation but we want to make it non aggressive and actually provide value for the customer". Again, you should calm down your hate boner and try to look at the whole picture instead of pushing a narrative.
And of course, we're all going to believe our benevolent neighborhood corporation when they say they are going to implement monetization in their games 'non-aggresively' and 'provide value to the customer'. Precisely as I said: greasy corporate waffle. Have you noticed that CDPR sounds more and more like EA every year? Although, I suppose you're probably a fan of theirs too?

Let me clue you up mate: Monetization of any kind in a video game requires DRM, by definition.
Post edited September 28, 2021 by Time4Tea
Posted September 28, 2021
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scientiae: The future web will be unrecognizable to the current population. I would expect it to be all walled garden —— think AOL before Ted Turner. "Dark Web" will then have expanded to be whatever is outside that garden.
If all countries were authoritarian, yes. However, there are too many at least moderately liberal countries world-wide (ie, the entire Western world, plus many countries in Asia, Africa and South America) that agree on many of the general principles, but not the specifics.

And building all that world-wide networking infrastructures is a major international endeavor that requires cooperation from a lot of international players.

Maybe a very few countries would be happy to just hand the internet over on a silver plater to a few corporations (though I suspect that would test the limits of neo-corporatism in North America however well established that it is, they've already had a fair amount of resistance with privatizing and fully controlling the operations of internal networks across the US), but most countries wouldn't.

No, nation states are not going anywhere for the foreseeable future. However hungry some groups are for world control, the world is just too big to be owned by a single or very few players.
Post edited September 28, 2021 by Magnitus
Posted September 28, 2021
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Magnitus: I think you are talking more about the AAA games market.
There are various niches in gaming and not all of them are in direct competition.
A lot of people will play online games and get off the virtualized social element, but not everyone will. […]
Agreed.
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Magnitus: I'm not contradicting that you'll probably coax even greater revenue from a minority of addicts, but to go from that to claiming that everyone will see the sheer greatness of the pseudo-social new online era and will want to spend tons of money just to posture themselves against strangers they don't know halfway across the globe, making the local single-player (or intimate multiplayer with a small number of live people playing right beside each other) paradigm completely obsolete... that's a bold statement to make.
It’s a trend.

Millennials are already inured in social media (consider a meta-analysis like teenage suicide, which quadrupled in the decade after the iPhone came out, because so many of the Zoomer Generation live online and Instagram is fake —— photoshopping has become a verb —— but people are hardwired to unconsciously accept it as reality: their mantra “pix or it’s not real” doesn’t control for photoshopped pictures).
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scientiae: This is not a new idea. Look at how George Lucas surprised Hollywood when he took control of merchandizing rather than fight for a large portion of the movie proceeds with Star Wars. His fortune was made on all those action figures.
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Magnitus: George Lucas didn't end that trend and make everyone go "Just give us the movie for free and we'll buy the toys ok?"

One does not exclude the other.
I don't disagree. Again, you’re categorizing the argument as a (strawman) binary. Online gaming will not end single-player gaming (though developers will need to be financing their development with online microtransactions more and more) just as gaming didn’t kill movies, but there are more profits in movie tie-in games. (It's all about branding, which is why we get non-sequitur sequels to popular games.) It will just eclipse them in revenue. Using your analogy, there are still people making movies in Mongolian, but not many people watch them, even with subtitles, and even if they are free.

I never said, implied, nor wished to suggest that online gaming will eliminate all other gaming. Big companies will swallow the smaller ones and add their online componentry to whatever products they have. What do you think Microsoft will do with Bethesda? Windoze 11 will probably not let a computer boot without an online log-in. (We'll see.)

And people have demonstrated their desire for convenience over all else: Apple has built a trillion dollar company giving people what they could get elsewhere, cheaper, but not as easily. (I don’t stream anything, I still watch broadcast television and buy my movies and music; can you say the same?)
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scientiae: People are gregarious. They want to imitate, participate and display their allegiance to a particular trend (look at all the repetition on TikTok, where everyone does their own version of a particular dance move, or whatever the current trend is) and purchasing a part of the game they love to play is a natural progression.
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Magnitus: And some people like me do not care about that.
And me. :)
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionThe reason behind Gog´s recent awful decisions(85 posts)(85 posts)
(85 posts)