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NSFW Best Thread Ever [No SJW-related posts allowed]

Cadmus

Arcane
Joined
Dec 28, 2013
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4,264
Amateur hour. This is how you make dirty console peasants pay for a demo:
baO9oox.jpg


Meanwhile, PC Master Race is so certain its beloved devs would never pull such dirty tricks that it pays 80 dollars for games that don't even exist yet :obviously:
:bro:
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Fascinating:

Free-To-Frag: QuakeWorld’s Once-Planned Business Model

quakeworlddm2.jpg


When John Carmack started tinkering with Quake’s multiplayer code in 1996, his plans for the QuakeWorld client went deeper than TCP and UDP. Its new netcode made playing an FPS online over dialup not total garbage, sparking the multiplayer FPS explosion, but Carmack had also once intended for QW to be what we’d now consider free-to-play. Though the plans changed and this never happened, I can be endlessly fascinated by scraps of video game history like the time John Carmack thought about selling the right to have a name.


Quake had started building a multiplayer community even before release, with Qtest, and QuakeWorld was to encourage that competition and bragging something fierce. “All frags on the entire Internet will be logged,” Carmack schemed in a .plan file update (an awkward precursor to weblogs, using the hilariously-named ‘Finger protocol’) in 1996:

“You should be able to say, ‘I am one of the ten best QuakeWorld players in existence’, and have the record to back it up. There are all sorts of other cool stats that we could mine out of the data: greatest frags/minute, longest uninterrupted Quake game, cruellest to newbies, etc, etc.”

Quake became a game with big personalities (“Who names their child KillCreek?” I wondered, reading PC Gamer) and plenty of trash-talking. It also connected people to form communities and friendships and all those soft things. That’s why Carmack’s monetisation idea fascinates me:

“My halfway thought out proposal for a biz plan is that we let anyone play the game as an anonymous newbie to see if they like it, but to get their name registered and get on the ranking list, they need to pay $10 or so. Newbies would be automatically kicked from servers if a paying customer wants to get on. Sound reasonable?”

id did shareware. They made large chunks of their games free to prove the full thing was worth buying. Carmack’s idea would give away the pure game side but limit access to what made multiplayer any fun at all: people. Connecting and competing with people across the world, exploring that weird frontier, and expressing ourselves as whoever we wanted to be was so exciting then, and vital to multiplayer. It’d be a mite more difficult without a name.

quakeworlddm6.jpg


I’ve been idly imagining an alternate timeline where free-to-play grew out of weird ideas like this. Popular F2P models focus on the game side, selling boosters, items, and so on. Carmack’s idea would have monetised human interaction. Which sounds a bit monstrous when I say it like that. (And stats, sure, all those stats, and the not-getting-kicked-from-servers, but I’m not particularly interested in those.)

In a way, Dota 2‘s take on free-to-play feels close to this. Valve let everyone play then charge for instant unlocks of cosmetic items. These don’t affect the core game, so buying (or not buying) never feels unfair or cheaty, but they do let us express ourselves through our wizard’s outfits. As hero looks can range from blind mystic to Cyndi Lauper, it feels unusually personal.

Video games are very different now. Pre-Steam, pre-Counter-Strike, pre-PayPal, Carmack wrote:

“If it looks feasible, I would like to see internet focused gaming become a justifiable biz direction for us. Its definitely cool, but it is uncertain if people can actually make money at it.”

At the time, id didn’t believe they could. These plans were dropped. QuakeWorld didn’t turn out like this. In the end, it was simply (hah!) an updated Quake client for people who’d bought it. QW did launch with basic player rankings, but stopped them after a few months. The first multiplayer-focused id game was Quake 3, three years later in 1999. In 2010, Q3 became the free-to-playQuake Live. Its business model isn’t nearly as interesting to coo and poke at.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-07-03-gamer-resistance-to-digital-decreasing-ubisoft

Gamer resistance to digital decreasing - Ubisoft
By Brendan Sinclair

360x200


Whether it's full-game downloads or microtransactions, Chris Early says consumers are increasingly interested in intangible goods

Last year, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag launched alongside a handful of "Time Saver" downloadable content packs. For $1 or $2, players could stock up on in-game resources, or reveal the locations of the game's many collectibles and activities without the need for actual exploration. That sort of perk would have been freely accessible through cheat codes in previous generations, and it's not hard to imagine the uproar charging for them would have caused in the early days of the last generation of systems. Speaking with GamesIndustry Internationalat E3 last month, Ubisoft VP of digital publishing Chris Early recalled the reaction--or lack thereof-- to those time-saver packs.

"There was no resistance," Early said. "Maybe there were 12 guys somewhere who said something, but whatever. As a whole, there wasn't a problem."

It goes to show how much the industry has changed in recent years. Early acknowledged the change in player attitudes of late, and chalked it up (in part) to the increasing amount of communication on and discussion of monetization in the industry. The industry has seen approaches to digital monetization that don't work for players (some offenders in the social gaming bubble) and ones that do (World of Tanks, Skyrim DLC), and is getting smarter about producing less of the former and more of the latter. With each one that gets it right, gamers are growing increasingly comfortable with the variety of monetization in the marketplace.

"I think there are some models that are accepted now. DLC is pretty much accepted," Early said. "Season pass is pretty much accepted. Now it's interesting when you start to think of Season Pass as a Service Pass. For our Season Pass holders, I know we hold events for them specifically, so it's little bit more than just DLC content. So there's an evolution going on there."

The key, Early said, is to make sure it's perceived positively by the players. They should feel like their purchases enhance the game rather than fill in the gaps for an incomplete experience.

"Where it hurts is when you feel like you're forced, or you're at a disadvantage or can't do it unless you [pay money]. That's kind of a remorseful feeling, and nobody likes that."

That's not to say games can't offer a competitive advantage in exchange for money. Early points to the golden ammo in World of Tanks and his regular matches with his college-aged son as an example. The more damaging ammo can be obtained either by grinding away at the game, or by purchasing it outright. Early doesn't have enough free time to earn the ammo, but he does have the discretionary income to buy it. His son is in the opposite situation. As he sees it, the game is just giving its players the option to pay for the ammo through whichever resources they can most afford. It complicates the design process, he said, but when done well, it can provide significant revenue without creating ill will among players.

"I know people who've spent five digits or more of money in Clash of Clans, spending in the tens of thousands of dollars," Early said. "Who would think of that? But nobody's really angry about that. That's how that guy chooses to play, and he's playing against other people of the same calibre, whether they got there through spending hundreds of hours playing the game or tens of thousands of dollars. Good design, that's what it comes down to."

DLC and add-ons aren't the only booming aspects of the digital industry. With the launch of the new generation of consoles, Ubisoft has also seen a significant uptick in the number of people downloading full games instead of buying boxed retail copies.

"I don't know whether it wasn't as easy before or wasn't as clearly messaged on previous generations, but there is definitely a lot more digital [demand], to the order of two to five times as much digital activity on some titles than there was on the same title on old-gen machines," Early said. "It's not just that they might have made it easier. To me, that means that people want it. I probably wouldn't have guessed there was that much pent-up digital demand."

Early's even noticed his own habits shifting more toward the digital end of the spectrum. As much as he thought he was "a digital guy" before, Early joked that it's gotten to the point now where he specifically asks for download codes from industry contacts instead of complimentary boxed copies of games, because "free" just isn't quite convenient enough.

"I'm either super lazy and I don't want to get up and change that disc, or that's a much better experience now that I can jump in and out and between games without having to change all that," he said.

It's not just the people who own the new consoles are early adopters and thus more willing to try something new. Early agrees that audience is more inclined to go digital, but Ubisoft has been seeing its download numbers growing even on the old-gen systems.

The growth of the downloadable market has also given Ubisoft the leeway to introduce games at price points that wouldn't fly at retailers. Creating titles like Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, Child of Light, and Valiant Hearts offer a number of benefits for the publisher, Early added.

"I'm sure you've read or even written tons of stories about people who leave a studio to go do their own passion thing because they don't have freedom of expression within," Early said. "This lets us keep our people and make them happy being able to be creative. It lets us go and experiment with treating war a different way with Valiant Hearts than the way the majority of industry treats war. I don't know if that's the right experiment to make a $100 million game. But as a game we're going to sell for $10 to $20 and costs in the single digits of millions to make? Now we can afford to do more things.

"We can bring a bigger breadth of games to players, a creative breath of fresh air to our designers, and we approach all of it the same way. We look at all of these as opportunities to bring entertainment and at the same time provide a good return to our shareholders."

Despite the clear shift toward digital of late, Early doesn't think the industry will ever shift completely away from physical media. He stressed the continued value of brick-and-mortar retailers like GameStop, and said moving to a digital-only game industry just isn't possible at the moment.

"It's not just our challenge, but the biggest worldwide challenge is the even deployment of infrastructure where people can get their games and participate digitally in a free environment," Early said. "I have relatives in parts of the US even where it will take them several days to download a game. That's not just going to stop us; that's going to stop the industry."

And he's not talking about just the game industry. Early said it's a digital entertainment problem, one that affects downloading or streaming any kind of media, not just games.

"You see the difference of how it happens when you look at countries that have engaged in high-bandwidth infrastructure projects," Early said. "Korea's a great example. When you look at what people do with bandwidth there compared to what people do with bandwidth in some of the flyover states, it's a radical difference."
 

PlanHex

Arcane
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Copenhagen, Denmark
There's nothing wrong with digital distribution.
However, charging money for what's basically cheat-codes is fucking despicable and I wanna punch anyone who sells/buys any of that shit in their stupid faces.
 

DalekFlay

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-Forcing digital distribution down people's throat all the time.
-"Wow there's no resistance".

Indeed. People act like there's no incentive for these companies to push you into going digital. There is a TON of incentive. I like how movies now get a month or so of digital exclusivity before coming to disc. It's all about trying to force you.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Keep in mind that the article is primarily about console gamers. From his perspective, PC gamers fully accepted digital looong ago.
 

warpig

Incel Resistance Leader
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lmaoing @ your life
Despite the "retro" style Wings Of Saint Nazaire looks more impressive than most modern space combat games. The arcade combat is fun, the enemies are maybe a bit too sluggish for my taste, they should maneuver more. I just hope they will go for a more complex missions like in X-Wing instead of aping Wing Commander in that aspect.
 

Dexter

Arcane
Joined
Mar 31, 2011
Messages
15,655
I think this may be untrue.
I think you might be wrong: http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight/faq/
If my game is accepted through Steam Greenlight, can I give my previous customers keys for the Steam version?
Once your game is accepted for distribution on Steam, we will give you as many keys for your game as you want at no cost.
http://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/
It’s free: There’s no charge for bandwidth, updating, or activation of copies at retail or from third-party digital distributors.

Steam doesn't take money from third-party unlocks (Retail or other Digital stores) afaik and developers get an unlimited amount of keys for their games. They are of the opinion that using this way will likely get more people into the Steam ecosystem (and get them spending more there).

The only reason why a dev wouldn't give out Steam keys for their game (especially if promised) is because they're dicks and want to double their money by double dipping.
 

DalekFlay

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Yeah, many devs have said repeatedly they get as many keys as they want. When other devs say they have "limited supply" or whatever else I assume that's code for "we don't want to give away too many copies of our game please buy it."
 

sexbad?

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Codex USB, 2014
space thing
My only experience that I can remember with space sims is FreeSpace 2. Do other games that this is inspired by use that awful deadzone shit for turning, or is it just this?
 

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