It doesn't feel good to be real life cheated, nickeled, and dimed in your virtual fantasy worlds.

It's 2024 and we're all used to constantly being cheated, manipulated, scammed, and nickeled and dimed in our real lives. It's just part of living in modern society, especially in the U.S. Whether it's grocery store shrinkage labeled as "new and improved," printers that have chips to avoid you using after market ink replacements AND that refuse to print in black and white after emptying their own magenta cartridges while "cleaning" themselves, or the constant barrage of robocalls for various scams even on cellphones, modern life just involves a bunch of predatory companies and people trying to take advantage of us.

It was always this way to some extent but the Internet has made it worse, as has consolidation of companies. When Amazon has driven most of its competitors out of business and damaged local retail in a lot of places it can afford to ship you the wrong products (or clearly used products sold as 'new' for 'new' prices) and what are you going to do about it? Go to the local department store that closed in 2012? Get mad about the cheap print on demand books and order your books from ebay, only to end up with a print on demand cheap copy?

When you can set up a new company with a few clicks of a mouse and be exposed to tens of millions of new suckers customers there's just no reason not to cheat people, besides morality and scruples but who cares about those? And conversely when you're a huge monolith and the only game in town there's also no reason not to cheat and steal. What are your customers going to do? Go to a fly by night Internet only operation that will cheat them even worse?

Health insurance denies valid claims. Telecomm companies tack on hidden fees. Online ticket sellers charge more than the cost of the ticket for "convenience" fees. It's a non-stop barrage of bullshit that insults your intelligence and plunders your wallets.

And it's in games too and only getting worse.

I think that this is behind a lot of the outrage over seemingly smaller issues when it comes to live service games. People play games to escape the bullshit of life. They play games to go into a fantasy world where they're a wizard or the First Baseman for the Yankees or a Race Car Driver or a college senior with a bunch of hot suitors or whatever fantasy a particular game is selling. It's escapism because we all need to escape sometimes.

But now when you escape to a fantasy world the bullshit follows you. When you bought a copy of Final Fantasy VII in 1997 you got to go to Midgar and be ex-SOLDIER Cloud fighting to free the people and the planet. And for some games, including the FF VII Remake games, this is still mostly true (though those games do have DLC.) But when you buy a copy of Suicide Squad you do not get to be King Shark bounding over the rooftops of Metropolis fighting Superman with a gun (for some reason.) I mean you do, but you also get a virtual used car salesman trying to get you to buy cosmetics that 25 years ago would have been unlocked through in game achievements or cheat codes. And when you buy a copy of The Crew Motorfest you get a virtual used car salesman trying to sell you virtual cars for real money.

And it sucks. It's one of the worst things about modern life transported into games in a REAL WAY. It's as if Gran Turismo found a way to really injure you when you crashed your car. Or if Spider-Man's subway based fast travel system forced you into 30 minute delays like the real subway does. Or if you could marry a girl in Fable only to have her cheat on you with the milkman and take your house in the divorce.

We don't play games to experience the shitty parts of life unless they're very specific games and those shitty parts are presented in very specific, generally, cathartic, ways. We play games to experience some kind of curated, enjoyable, experience. If I wanted to experience sunburn from going outside I could just go outside without sunscreen. Games don't make you worry about high UV index days because that stuff' not fun.

And neither is the hard sell. But games DO make you experience that. And they reshape their worlds to make it more appealing. Whether it's lowering XP curves to make the booster more appealing or making the free costumes boring to inspire you to spend real cash on the "premium" ones, games make your fantasy worse so they can upcharge you. Like a car company intentionally nerfing its software so you'll buy a more expensive package. More nickel and diming, more manipulation, and even more scams.

Helldivers II recently added a PSN login requirement for PC players. And people will say it's free, it's just to get you into the PSN eco system and to be able to spy on you a little. It's just to sell your information to data brokers and track you and that kind of thing. No biggie. We all deal with it constantly. But that's for now. Who's to say what the future will hold. And this is a game people already bought and paid for and were playing. They were already in the fantasy world of Super Earth spreading Managed Democracy and here comes real world Sony wanting to pry into their data and maybe their wallets in the future having already gotten $40 plus microtransactions for their game. Here comes the greedy real world business guy sneering with his hand out wanting more and more and more.

It's not fun. And it ruins a lot of what IS fun in games. Because it adds predatory bullshit to a fantasy world that you already paid for.

This is one of the big reasons modern gaming feels less fun. It isn't every game, of course. If you buy Penny's Big Breakaway you just get a fun little platformer adventure. And Tears of the Kingdom just sent you off to save Hyrule the same way the original game did, just with more bells and whistles. Super Mario Bros. Wonder partially helped keep its wonder by NOT turning the Mushroom Kingdom into a big scammy mess where you log in to see advertising and a bunch of bullshit currencies with "best value" plastered all over. It's not every game.

But it's more and more games, and it goes against what makes gaming valuable and fun. It goes against the spirit of escapism. It's like a reverse version of The Ring, where the horrors of the real world crawl through the TV into the virtual world to stalk you and take your money. And it sucks.

I will say this blog is very uplifting, and I think that's what I like about it. I mean, what could be depressing about every billion dollar company trying to squeeze an extra dollar out of the poorer people that use its services.

In reality I think game companies are in for a reckoning real soon and I think the industry is going to go through some low times in the next 5 to 10 years. Companies, share holders, and ceos will soon learn that every game can't have a billion dollar budget and make back its money in this industry.

It's also what makes me ever more nostalgic for older games.. nothing like firing up a game and knowing it's complete and there isn't a missing patch or dlc that makes the game complete.

This was fun to read, comes off as a little unhinged, but in a good way, if that makes sense. And yes, of course all this stuff sucks, the only thing we can do is vote with our wallets and hope other people will vote similarly so that the nickel-and-diming becomes less profitable. Doesn't seem likely, but eh.

The only obvious counter-argument I can think of that deserves to be mentioned is that some of this can be laid at the feet of people not wanting to pay a higher base price for an AAA title, even though inflation means that this cost has actually gone down significantly. Don't get me wrong, you're preaching to the choir, I'd prefer to pay more up front and not be nickel-and-dimed subsequently, but it seems like raising that base price more was just not something that most consumers were going to accept, and so publishers looked for other avenues to generate revenue.

Good image, I like it.

I take your point, but also that sounds hilarious, I would buy that game.

@imunbeatable80: Uplifting is what I do, just like ranking is YOUR game.

I think gaming companies are going through the reckoning right now, but what they're learning from it is not that the old ways are better but rather that they need to triple down on nickel and diming and extracting as much money as possible. Warner Brothers released a Harry Potter game without microtransactions that sold over a billion dollars worth and then a Suicide Squad packed with them that flopped so hard it was half off within a few weeks and the lesson they took away was that they should have had microtransactions in the Harry Potter game so they'd be rolling in dough!

The psychological warfare of games feeling "incomplete" is very much intentional. They have entire departments of big publishers stocked with Psychology PhDs who use their years of training to manipulate you into feeling like you're not getting the whole experience but if you spend a little more you could. It's insidious and it damages the feel of the game. It's not fun to play something while someone in an office somewhere carefully calibrates psychological manipulation to try and get you to give them money, down to where the ads appear in the loading screen and the exact curve of XP gain that makes a game addictive but not satisfying.

Ubisoft is doing a new thing now where they release a complete seeming version of a game, wait until it's relatively fairly priced so people buy it, and THEN release new DLC with a very high price. They did it with Assassin's Creed Valhalla and with Rider's Republic. That's in ADDITION to their new thing where every game is online only so they can take it down whenever they want, and they DO want to take it down.

So now not only are games incomplete for a LONG time but they can take them away after they're complete. A perfect system!

I will say that some games DO launch complete even today. Did you hear about this game everyone loves? It's called Super Mario Bros. 3D World and it comes WITH another complete game, Bowser's Fury. All on one cartridge, two complete games. What a deal! You should look into it.

@atheistpreacher:

I'm unhinged?

I'M UNHINGED?

WHAT'S UNHINGED IS JERRY UBISOFT OUT THERE WITH A ROOM FULL OF PSYCH PHDS TRYING TO GET ME TO BUY THE SKATEBOARD DLC FOR RIDER'S REPUBLIC FOR $40! THAT'S WHAT'S UNHINGED! I AM PERFECTLY HINGED!

I don't really buy into the "people don't want to pay more up front argument" for a number of reasons.

First of all...of course the manipulation tactics work to get more money, at least short term. Nobody would use them if they didn't work. Nobody argued against loot boxes on the basis that they weren't profitable.

Secondly, it's never actually "pay more and get the whole thing" vs "pay less and then get nickel and dimed" except with free to play games. Instead it's "pay more and get nickel and dimed." Ubisoft is the king of selling very expensive deluxe all inclusive packages and then introducing more stuff later. But other companies do it too. Paying more up front just makes you a sucker. The only company that doesn't do this is Nintendo, who also doesn't really discount their games much, and Nintendo makes a huge amount of money with the pay once model. They have a little DLC here and there, sure, but mostly they just charge more up front for the game, keep the price high, and it keeps selling.

There's no evidence that consumers reject a higher base price in all circumstances, but they justifiably do not trust current companies not to jack up the price up front and then ALSO do their manipulation tactics on the back end, and most gaming companies would absolutely do that. Those companies that they DO trust tend to make big money. From Software tends to be pretty good about not manipulating (they do release DLC but it's substantial and generally there's a lot of fan demand for it; nobody thinks the coming Elden Ring DLC was cut from the main game to be sold back as a manipulation tactic, it's just an expansion they made to sell two years later and they've announced it will be the only one) and it has a lot of huge hits. I've mentioned Nintendo previously.

The market was also very different in 1985. We're talking physical media that's expensive to press, games were often sold in small numbers, and there was a HUGE rental market, which gets left out of the argument. Most people only bought a few games and rented the rest. It was the same with VHS tapes, and you should see what THEIR prices were. There was also a big used game scene that publishers have demolished via digital sales. So yes games were nominally more expensive but it was a completely different market and you can't directly compare.

Having a spouse divorce you and take your shit in Fable would be funny as long as it wasn't your +5 sword of Dragonslaying you spent 5 hours crafting. You wouldn't find it so funny then!

My brain screaming every other sentence in the OP with a prayer of, "MAKE IT STOP, DEAR LORD PLEASE MAKE IT STOP!"

@dochaus: I'm sorry you didn't enjoy this blog. I am willing to offer a full refund on the price of the blog and I'm also going to throw in a refund for my hot take about Shadow of Mordor being overrated.

@atheistpreacher: The other issue with this is that it doesn't take into account that while worker pay has stagnated, executive pay has skyrocketed, so the notion that games "should cost more" becomes slightly harder to swallow when lay-offs happen during record-shattering profits, and now games ARE $70, and are STILL crammed full of live service BS.

If execs wanted to drive the prices down, they very easily could with minor pay cuts but that's about as likely as any one power-hungry giving up said power because they promised they would.

@undeadpool: No argument here, you're preaching to the choir. Was just pointing out that the base price for an AAA game used to be well over $100 when adjusted for inflation, and even with the recent increase to $70 for gen 9, it's still well under that. That doesn't mean I condone all the microtransactions we get now, or CEO pay skyrocketing, etc.

Of course all of this isn't exclusively a video game problem. There's a reason that Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" only a few years ago and it already feels like a term that's been around forever.

EDIT: Incidentally, I also just read Doctorow's (relatively) new article, "‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything." It's a good read!

@bigsocrates: I meant as more of a prayer to the Gods from what you were describing in your blog, the blog itself was good.

@dochaus: Oh, well, thanks then. I'm going to revoke the refund then. Hope you're not over your limit!

@atheistpreacher: The graph provided without context, lacking a name and proper explanation of where the axes derive their meaning is hilarious. Can you share the source for this please? I need to understand what point it's meant to make.

NB I'm not being obtuse.

@broshmosh: I don't know where it's from but it's comparing the price in US dollars inflation adjusted vs nominal of presumably the modal physical game (I will admit that 'mode' is an assumption here because it doesn't say) during the launch year of certain consoles that represent their "generations." The graph is subpar but the point it's making is that game prices have fallen in real terms and stayed relatively flat in nominal terms for a long time.

@atheistpreacher: Yeah, I figured, it's just always good to point out the whole executive pay thing since people (not you) like to hide behind the whole "skyrocketing dev costs" talking-point. Which, of course, is SORTA true but also mostly due to keeping graphics bleeding-edge when most consumers couldn't care less about graphics looking .5% better.

I mean considering people keep voting with their dollars in that way too (the Switch still doing gangbusters despite the 'dated' graphics I can't stop hearing about) doesn't seem to stop the graphics arms race.

I just did a Google search and grabbed it from a Reddit thread. I don't know where they themselves got it, but I have no reason to think someone would make these numbers up. And I think it's pretty self-explanatory, not sure what you found confusing about it?

It was really a pretty small point I was making, TBH. @bigsocrates summarized it nicely.

IDK why exactly, but for some reason my mind immediately jumped to the Dynasty Warriors games, which I've been known to buy and enjoy at times, though haven't bought one recently. Anyway, the earliest ones always had ridiculously crappy draw distance so that you'd be in a battle and soldiers would pop in just a few meters in front of you. I remember that we were entering a new generation and I was excited that I'd get to play one of these games where the draw distance should be significantly better, what with all the extra power. Instead they increased the model/texture fidelity and the draw distance was just as bad. I remember being annoyed and thinking they really had the wrong priorities. And of course the resurgence of intentionally older and more primitive-looking graphical styles in some games (e.g., Vampire Survivors, and many others), shows that you don't need hyper-realistic graphics to make a compelling game. Which, duh. But I guess some people really do care about that stuff, and/or these AAA devs sure think they do...

@atheistpreacher: Thanks, I appreciate that. It's less confusion, more trying to understand the value of the metric itself. Statistics can be viewed to mean a lot of things. I'm not trying to catch anybody out, moreso seeking original context to the graph. Seeing that the source didn't really provide much context either it seems to just be a discussion point, which is fine.

That said I'm not totally sure on the accuracy of its proposed game costs for the time. Chrono Trigger was $80, after all, and I don't think it was the only costly cart of the era.

@broshmosh: Chrono Trigger didn't charge $20 for New Game Plus, unlike another Japanese RPG that released this year.

It wasn't. Phantasy Star IV for the Genesis/Mega Drive was $100, because the game used a lot of megabits and it showed. The same thing with Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo. Most 16-bit games had between 8-16 megabits in them for data storage, which allowed developers more creativity. Anything higher usually made the game cost more than standard price, because carts were expensive to make. And of course there was the Neo-Geo and their games costing between $100 - $300, because those games had between 100 and 300 megabits in them.

If I told 1997 me how many free games I'd get for being part of a service or having a free account, he'd think the future was amazing.

So there's that.

@shindig: You're not wrong. Also Humble Bundles etc. It ain't all bad.