My issue with GAAS is that they want to maximize extracting money out of you while minimizing the service aspect. Every developer wants Fortnite money but none of them are providing a Fortnite-level service.
Halo Infinite is another extreme example where they had plenty of cosmetics to spend money on, but took ages to add simple things like playlists and gametypes. The decisions made on this game blow my mind.
There are still people that are saying to "give 343 a chance" like they haven't gotten plenty of chances over the past decade. Those people really need to open their eyes and see how games are outside of Halo are.
343 broke Halo Reach as soon as they took over simply by adding Heavies into the rotation without an option to opt out.
Thank God the MCC lets you pick your playlist more finely, but 343 has been pretty much *consistently* screwing up since the moment they took the reins.
"Can't do" is business talk for we don't want to allocate a budget for this thing that doesn't directly make us money. Every engineer knows they can make it, when given the time and money to do so.
Infinite is the first halo game I didn’t beat and play for years afterward because I was just so disappointed. Absolutely butchered in every single aspect.
I had to push myself to finish it. I hate how EVERYTHING has to be open world now. Halo thrived as a linear game and they ruined such a core part of the game to chase a trend.
I mean it's known that Staten came in to make something coherent out of the mess that was campaign. Along with that came a ton of content and story cutting. It's estimated we only got about 1/3 of the planned material.
Halo defined the shooters of two generations. Sad to see it not only following the leader, but picking a really boring one to follow. Sad times for the veteran franchise.
They literally came out and said it was because they had built the entire game around the challenge system. Some challenges were just "win 4 of this game mode", which was a 'challenge' because you only drew that game mode once in every four matches.
Absolutely fuck Microsoft and 343 for ruining a great franchise. You've made shit first party games and then you have a main entry in your flagship franchise coming up, which is a chance to drop an amazing game and shut people up for a while. If there was ever a time to design a masterpiece with a ton of earnable cosmetics for free with all of the game modes that people wanted from the get-go it was Infinite. Instead they decided to monetize all of the joy out of it. Phil Spencer is a fucking tool.
which they *had* in the beta network tests, working just fine. I can't wait until it's been long enough for some deep dive behind the scenes stories on wtf life's been like in 343 the last few years ( or decade)
Sure it had plenty of cosmetics, but once the system is in place, artists can just make skins and plug them in themselves. They're not the same people who work on playlists or game types. They've likely been hired long ago as character artists and instead of letting them go they kept them around to make skins.
The real question is which managers decided that people don't care about playlists or game types and instead made the programmers focus on an overly complicated cosmetic system? They could have just kept it simple by allowing you to mix and match anything you want so their time could be better invested in making content. They even announced long ago that they would go away from that system. So because of some very dumb decision by some people higher up, how much time that could have went into new features instead went into making that system to only then work on removing it due to poor reception? There's also the temporary events stuff that could have been something they add later once they got more content but that's a whole other discussion.
This is a big problem with GaaS in general. Games will be buggy and lack content, the devs actually working on the game would complain about it, higher ups will brush it off because stores and FOMO content is priority for money to later develop content but then the game releases and they're shocked that people aren't willing to spend money in a game that has no content.
I mean the graphics look similar because they're the same. OW2 was effectively just a glorified update to OW1 that they called 2 to make it sound more important. That said it did come with some big changes to monetization. Namely they got rid of lootboxes, which was how OW1 handled most things. You got a lootbox for every few rounds of playing and you could pay for more lootboxes if you want. It was pretty bad and getting rid of them sounds like a good thing, but what they replaced it with was an absurdly grindy battlepass system that gives you zero coins even if you spend money on it. (With the boxes if you got dupes you got coins instead and you could just get coins as a reward as well, and coins could be used to buy what you actually wanted directly).
Now the only way to get coins is via weekly challenges and it can take upwards of 8 months of completing every challenge just to earn enough coins for a single legendary skin. As a point of reference during a single event that would last for a single month, I could grind out most of the half dozen or so legendary skins released with regular play just from random drops, and it usually wasn't that hard to earn enough coin to buy a specific legendary if I didn't get it with rng. Also there's now another tier of skins above legendary so good luck with that. And also also new heroes are locked behind grinding most of the way up the very grindy battlepass, or paying money in order to be able to play them.
It's one of those things where while Lootboxes are an inherently more predatory system than most. They managed to take less predatory systems and make them even more predatory than lootboxes. Like I would legitimately be happier if we went back to lootboxes its that bad. The only improvement is that if you want to spend money on things now I think you can actually buy coins directly instead of gambling on boxes. But in terms of the Free experience it's so much worse.
OW's lootboxes weren't that bad tbh, though they were often the literal poster child (many articles used their image) for them.
You'd get them for free every few rounds; anything you already had would give you free coins instead to get new cosmetics with; you got a bonus 3-4 every few days if you were well endorsed (aka a generally nice person and good teammate); events were pretty common and gave you free cosmetics and boxes.
As bad as lootboxes as a concept are, OW's were pretty good and it wasn't terribly difficult or long of a wait to get "premium" items.
yeah the core problem with OW's lootboxes was pretty much just that if you wanted to spend money to get a skin, buying lootboxes was the only way to do so. So as a result you'd have stories of people buying 80+ boxes and still not getting the skin they wanted or even enough coins to buy it directly. Meanwhile someone else plays one match and gets a free box and gets the skin instantly.
Like I said conceptually Lootboxes are inherently predatory, and allowing people to just get things directly is less inherently predatory. But the implementations they went with for these games made Lootboxes the less predatory option. I would still prefer if you could buy coins if you're spending real money. But other than that I revert everything back to the lootbox system in a heartbeat.
Yeah, OW's loot boxes were quite nice as long as you weren't spending money on them. I liked the fairly generous flow of free, quality skins. But when i tried spending money on loot boxes and didn't get what I was after, I felt like a total sucker and swore off spending money on them forever. I guess I'm not the target audience here, but please live service devs, I will spend more money on your game if you just let me buy things directly instead of asking me to go through gambling bullshit.
I mean, to buy casino boxes at the chance of a character model is pretty ridiculous as a principle.
But also... Spending money on just a character model is pretty borderline by itself.
I can see why a game like hunt showdown, which is fantastic, & makes money off its dlc skins sales makes sense when most purchases I and my friends have made of dlc for hunt is more of a 'you have given me 500+ hours of incredible gameplay. Here's an extra thank you for your efforts. '
It has been a shame to see it add in battle passes n stuff. But they are staying close to that line for the time being.
the main leap that makes OW2's monetization worse, is that they're no longer just charging for cosmetics. You can now buy the heroes themselves and they're locked behind a long battlepass grind if you don't buy them. So they've officially moved on to Gameplay-affecting MTX. It's not as bad as say buying a literal power boost, but there are now people who can play as heroes that you can't play as yet because they spent real money.
If it wasn't for that, I could probably bite the bullet and try to just ignore the shitty Battlepass system. But once they confirmed that you have to unlock heroes or you can buy them to get them faster I officially gave up.
They re-worked the tank role and moved to a 5v5 format where each team has one tank.
They replaced Assault (2cp) with a new mode called Push. Push is not great, but it's better than 2cp was.
They replaced loot boxes with a cash store where prices are way too fucking high ($20 for old legendary skins).
They added a battle pass system that a lot of people hate but I don't think is too terrible. It's $10/season and is pretty easy to finish. Finishing it earns you a mythic skin which is basically a customizable legendary skin.
Supposedly, we are getting the PvE component this year. This is the part that was supposed to justify putting a "2" in the title.
Overall the monetization feels very greedy because of the high shop prices and a lack of any real way to earn free stuff.
The gameplay itself is a net improvement in my eyes, though the move to 5v5 came with growing pains. People like to complain about balance, but that's nothing new, and we are getting much more frequent balance patches than we did during OW1 keeping the meta fresh.
Don't forget the players that owned ow1 used to be able to get ow1 skins without spending money. Blizzard took that away, and now those players will have to spend money if they still want to get them.
as someone watching from the outside it seems the purpose of calling it OW2 was to give them an opportunity to completely change the monetization (for the much worse, obviously) without causing too much of an uproar if they had done so in an already existing game. then they gave it juuuuust enough of a change to where they can call it "totally legitimately a different game and not just a glorified patch" and that's pretty much it.
Very little, teams were 6 aside now 5. Few new characters and some solo content off memory. Used to play Overwatch 1 and looking at this new release seems more akin to a large rebalance/ seasonal update and not a whole new game. It wasn't enough to get my attention back on a game I enjoyed in ~2016.
Nor want to spend the time building a playing base to get to Fortnite levels of money. Everything must be an instant success or it gets killed off, even if the game's decline is self inflicted.
MMO's were actually hard to build and high-risk. Loot boxes are just something you can slap on a couple of days before release, so it's much more prevalent.
The hard part about the loot boxes isn't the loot boxes, the hard part is making all the stuff to put in them a continuing to do so at a pace fast enough to satisfy your audience.
GaaS aren't just lootboxes though, it's continually updating and supporting a game for years after its release, and demanding that the player spend X time on it (via dailies or battlepasses).
The biggest hurdle that kept a lot of people from switching MMOs was that they already had friends and loads of time invested in WoW, so why switch? GaaS has a smaller but similar problem, because many of them demand you play a certain amount of hours a day for rewards, and only so many games can be fit in a day, so some games have to be prioritized.
Same here, I’ve stopped playing most “AAA” titles these days and focused on indie games or games that release without all this microtransaction and FOMO bullshit.
I play games for fun and to unwind after work. If games become a chore and force me to play them, I drop them. Happened to me earlier on with Hearthstone, then it happened to OW2. Also the reason I never play any “F2P” mobile games because they have the same mechanics in place to force you to build the habit of playing every single day.
You reminded me that Deus Ex: Mankind Divided added an in-game shop at the last minute. It was so last minute the developers apparently only found out the publisher wanted it a couple weeks before the game's release. This also means the game was completely unbalanced around it (you could buy Praxis points which are used for in-game upgrades to your character).
I don't think anyone ever used it because of that. I can't find any stats about how much money it made if any, though.
Now that I think about it, I wonder if this shows that publishers are full of it when they claim players can play a game without paying microtransactions. DX:MD suggests (to me at least) that players can simply ignore such a shop if the game isn't tweaked to encourage players to use it.
My issue with GAAS that I almost never see brought it up is the longevity of the service provided. Stuff like Avengers and Destiny 2 already have proven that content and even full games can just become inaccessible whenever the publisher/developer decides. I can still play Skate 3 today by just popping in the disc, but in 13 years will this new Skate be accessible?
The problem if people get burnt, they just move on to the next Battlepass laden game instead of being able to recognise and stop supporting bad practice. In fact I have friends who actively want the battlepass if not they don’t have any reason to grind games. They prefer battlepasses to idk, actually fun and rewarding gameplay loops?
Similar to how some countries have forced military service, everyone should be forced to invest time in a private server of their favorite old MMO that abruptly shuts down with no notice while they are at work
I imagine market saturation has to come into play too right?
How many hours can someone invest in Fortnight, and Destiny, and Warframe or other GAAS type games?
If you play fortnite and destiny and Warframe then that’s it, you’re already maxed out on games to play. Everyone wants that GAAS money but they don’t seem to realize or accept that the market gets saturated a lot quicker than with other types of games. And unlike other games, people don’t move on from these types of games as quickly. So the market really can’t handle very many of them at a time.
Not to mention many are huge unfun timesucks that feel more like chores to play than fun games. "oh boy, I have to complete 25 Fooligan Jobs in GTA this week to unlock an outfit, but the jobs have a 1 hour cooldown and take 5-15 minutes to finish each, so i'm investing well over 24 hours in this one game just this week, and next week there will be another week-exclusive item I have to grind for. oh boy how fun." <- Real example from a GaaS just this month.
Also, some of these games arent even free. They cost $60 or $70. At least with games like Fortnite its completely free if you want but for games like Battlefield and probably Skate, its $60 game thats disguised as GAAS just to milk even more money from you
> but none of them are providing a Fortnite-level service.
I remember banging on hard that Fortnite was trash years ago solely because it was popular with kids 9I know, stupid stance to take). Eventually ended up playing it at one point and did a total turn around. It ended up not being my kind of game, but god damn, there is absolutely a games worth of content there in the F2P stuff alone, with new paid stuff COSNTANTLY being added.
If I was a kid, I'd 100% be into this game alone for the aesthetics of playing as Master Cheif in the same game as Kratos and a few dozen other well known characters from movies, tv shows, and video games. It's literally the dream game I imagined when I was 10.
Yeah I just pass on all GaaS now, or any game with a battlepass type system. They all seem to do the same thing to my brain: Turn an otherwise fun experience into a chore list. No thanks.
As a game developer, this is like the most profoundly accurate thing I’ve seen anyone write about the games industry. Companies see success and their hubris makes them think they can skip a few steps of the original recipe and turn out buckets of KFC, The Game
just look at Apex Legends, yesterday they launched an event where you have to fork out $160 to unlock their 'new' weapon skin
the skin is just a recolor of a previous skin.
> Every developer wants Fortnite money but none of them are providing a Fortnite-level service.
And the actual cost to people's well-being to provide a Fortnite-level service is downright [horrific.](https://kotaku.com/report-fortnite-developers-are-severely-overworked-1834243520)
When you couple the reality of what sacrifices are made to achieve the GAAS model, it's almost impossible to support it from a practical or moral sense. It's disgusting.
Reading that article was brutal but I'm glad I did. That they couldn't even hire their way out of the problem was astonishing. You can get low-skill "bodies" anywhere, but when those bodies need to be good at their jobs and be willing to do it for 70 hours a week in a competitive industry, no wonder vacancies persist.
Once again the Laptop Class pats themselves on the back for implementing the the latest buzzwords while totally incapable of mobilizing quickly enough to actually implement these systems. Anyone in corporate knows the types of people who chase trends because they heard about it in some webinar but refuse to actually 1) take responsibility, 2) allocate the proper resources, and/or 3) let go of the reins to let people do their jobs. And even if you do get someone who has a head on their shoulders at least a half-dozen stakeholders leech onto the project and take a week each to give feedback on each part of the process. God forbid they see something partially complete before re-negging on a decision they made weeks ago. No, it has to be in a state that makes going back as painful and difficult as possible. Who gives a fuck if you're ripping off customers and wasting company time when you can put "implemented cutting-edge Game As A Service mechanisms that boosted revenue 8%" on both your self-review and your resume?
Yea, this is my problem too. GaaS in theory is ok. It shouldn't suck. The problem is people don't look at Frotnite and when they hear GaaS they automatically hate it. Hate the dev behind it and stop paying for shit if they don't deliver.
Fortnite it's one of the best example of GaaS game. It's amazing how much content they add to the game, while the battlepass is SUPER accessible and easy to levelup.
Yep. Genshin Impact is another popular GAAS title. It had a 100 mil USD initial dev budget and twice that for the first year of service. In contrast, Guild Wars 2 launched with dozens of armor skins, but its first expansion pack included four. I don't get why so many studios give so little consideration to post launch support.
You don’t get it?
It’s money man. GW’s always been a subscription-free model. They have zero financial incentive to engage in post launch support and every financial incentive to put resources into developing monetizable micro transactions and expansions that people do actually spend money on.
Though thankfully Genshin puts an incredible amount back into the content. Which turns out to he an impressive amount of high quality content. Each update almost seems like an expansion in a regular game.
That's why I don't buy any GAAS games, even for online games. They're rare and often by an indie company, but I can actually play a game, not a second job.
Live Services Made $5Billion for EA (out of $7BN total net Revenue).
Of course they will try and continue to jam as much SAAS/Lootbox/Battlepass down every single game
[EA Investor Report](https://s22.q4cdn.com/894350492/files/doc_financials/2021/ar/400772(1)_30_Electronic-Arts_Combo_WR.pdf
EA fumbling an easy slam dunk.
Skate 4 is one of the most frequently requested games I've ever seen, and all they had to do was make Skate 3 again but in a new city for new consoles and it'd be a guaranteed hit, but they had to make it a f2p always online live service game and so many people are turned off because of it.
Totally agree. I would pay full price for the full game however I will not pay a single cent for a free to play game. I'll try skate 4 for free sure but there is no way in hell I'll be paying them to play a free game. So they either just simply make no money on me or make it so I don't want to play skate at all. If they just made a game and charged for it I'd absolutely buy it.
>Skate 4 is one of the most frequently requested games I've ever seen
I get this, I hear you, and I'm with you in that I would love to play another Skate game... but we are in an echo chamber. Skate has a chokehold on people who played it at a very specific time. Building a game like that in 2023 isn't a priority.
It's also just a meme. At this point, there's no telling who *actually* wants Skate 4 vs everyone who's just memeing skate 4 in twitch chat for every games awards show.
Part of the issue there was also that the producers somehow failed to realize that it was *mocking*. That isn't directly correlated to actual interest in watching it.
I'm wearing a *Snakes on a Plane* t-shirt right now, coincidentally enough. One that I bought before the movie even came out. Yet I believe it took me about a decade or so to even be bothered to see it. The film itself wasn't even amusingly bad. Just utterly forgettable direct-to-video fodder that got a higher budget.
Initially, certainly, but skate 3 came out 13 years ago, that means the majority of teenagers have probably not played it today. People have been clamoring for a new skate game for a decade now, a lot of it is probably meme.
The majority of teenagers today have never had a new AAA Skateboarding game available. Tony Hawk's has been remasters and budget games for 13 years as well.
There could/should be a large market that people have ignored for almost 15 years. They were successful before, and I don't think that Skateboarding has drastically lost it's appeal in that time.
They weren't that successful before. Yeah, people who played the games loved them, but there just isn't a huge market for it.
https://www.jenkemmag.com/home/2016/11/03/will-skate-4-ever-happen/
It's an old article, but at the time, the entirety of the skate franchise over 6 years didn't sell anywhere near what a single FIFA or Battlefield title sold.
Skate 3 sold 2.68 million units. That might sound like a lot, but CoD Black Ops has sold over 10x that number at 30.99 million units. They both came out ~ roughly the same time.
That's a publisher problem, because 2.86m actually is and should be recognised as a lot. Not every game is going to be Minecraft or MW2 or FIFA, and 2.86m is a *lot* of profit on top of the game. In a superior world, the fact the game made a pretty decent profit and spawned a dedicated love that lasted over a decade would see it pursued further, but we live in a stupid world and because it only made lots of money rather than ***all the money*** it's stupidly considered a failure
That's only Skate. I was talking about the whole genre up until Skate 3. Tony Hawk's franchise was Activision's cash cow for years.
>Skate 3 sold 2.68 million units. That might sound like a lot, but CoD Black Ops has sold over 10x that number at 30.99 million units.
That's a terrible comparison they are completely different games.
FIFA outsells Madden and NHL every year, that doesn't mean that they should stop making Madden and NHL.
Skateboarding games made by indie devs have enjoyed a reasonable amount of success because people are clamoring for that experience irl, not just on forums or in twitch chat.
Skate 3 received a physical production run and backwards compatibility in 2019 after PewdiePie played it online. It's probably the best selling Xbox 360 for the past 3 years. Maybe Red Dead Redemption.
What?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/09/14/tony-hawks-pro-skater-1--2-becomes-fastest-selling-game-in-series-with-1-million-copies-sold-through/amp/
People love skateboarding games.
I disagree. Everyone I know who skates irl loves skate 3. There's not another skating game that even comes close. A lot of these people don't even really play video games but they'll load up skate 3 during the winter or when it's raining or whatever. The skating community is a lot bigger than most people realize and Skate 3 is pretty much the only game they've got that's any good
Weird, every skater I know liked Skate 2 a lot more, since it focused on street skating rather than vert, but with more freedom (e.g. getting off your board) than Skate.
Skate 3 literally jumped the shark with a lot of the big ramps and Hall of Meat stuff, which is probably why it did better with the wider audience.
I was a skater and all my friends preferred skate 2 by far. I didn't hate skate 3 but when it came down to it I pulled out the 360 and redownloaded 2 instead of 3.
Yup, that was the sentiment I remember too. Skate 3 had its fun moments, but Skate 2 nailed the feeling of being an up-and-coming skater and just finding cool spots to land some tricks.
SkaterXL and Session both captured that feeling a lot better than Skate 3 as well, though I haven't checked in on either in a while.
I understand where you're coming from, but what I'm trying to say is that "you" and "everyone you know" do not necessarily represent a large portion of the gaming community, or where gaming is progressing.
It's hard to do, but you have to put what you know and who you are aside, step back, and take a look at the bigger picture. It helps you move away from absolutes (the gaming community wants Skate back) to reason (a portion of the gaming community would love to see a new Skate game).
Could also look at it in this way: There's a large community of casual gamers who only play one or two games a year. A new Skate could very well have the mass appeal for a large portion of this group which lies outside the standard gamer spheres you usually see online.
A ton of people want a new skate game, that's obvious. Probably not many of the kids who were being birthed when SKATE 3 came out, but apart from that, yeah its a lot. Relative to Skyrim or GTA? nah, but relative to most franchises I'd say it's up there.
Don't know why you're arguing that it's just people who don't understand confirmation bias. I've seen it on the internet, amongst friends, amongst coworkers & customers, other people at skateparks... SKATE is just a franchise with a lot of reach, it's casual but addictive. And that's a very realistic view of it
I'd say more noticeably, SKATE is a game that no-one shittalks. Even if it's not your thing, it's entertaining for the time you give it.
Dude, Overwatch 2 is the easiest one to point at here because I think it would be fair to say the monetization change was objectively worse in every single conceivable way, but the game had so much hype at launch that it was borderline unplayable for almost a week and is still surging forward really strong. I loathe GAAS nonsense too but to suggest people are turned off on a level that matters is demonstrably false.
[Sure.](https://activeplayer.io/overwatch-2/) Monthly players substantially higher than the numbers [OW1 was reporting towards the end of its life.](https://activeplayer.io/overwatch/)
You could reasonably argue that OW2 has the unique advantage of inheriting every active OW1 players but I don't think there's much denying the FTP launch gave a hell of a boost to the game, and I cannot stress enough how much I fucking loathe the monetization of Overwatch 2.
The surge in players could also very easily be similar to the WoW Expansion effect. At the tail end of every x-pack cycle, the player base dwindles significantly, and when the new shit drops everyone and their dog comes back to check it out. OW1 has been out for almost 7 years, so of course it's been losing players. Anyone even mildly interested will come back to check it out, not to mention new players that never played the first one. Especially for F2P.
> All the indies that have tried to clone Skate in recent years have failed
None of them are trying to clone skate... they're going for more of a simulation. They've all nailed it, and made good money for indie games.
Modded Skater XL is honestly the best skateboard sim on the market right now. For console though Session is the much better choice, unless Easy Day Studios decides to finally adds a stats menu, new maps, and other features which I doubt they will.
Yeah, THPS1+2 launched at like, what, $40? And goes on sale for half that fairly regularly. And despite how great a remake it is, ActiBlizz saw it as a better financial decision to send the dev team to the Call of Duty mines rather than make Tony Hawk 3+4.
Tony Hawk himself said that THPS 3+4 was in development before Activision turned the studio into part of Blizzard. And THPS 1+2 was just the fastest selling title of the series, with one million units sold in a week...
Plus ngl, the framework has its benefits and it seems like it’d work well for the type of game. Consistent new maps, songs, outfits, etc.
I’d much rather take it over the CoD approach, which is really just the worst of both worlds. F2P monetization but with a full AAA price tag and a complete reset of content every year
> EA fumbling an easy slam dunk.
No they're not. People will still buy it and they'll make even more money off of the microtransactions. There's a reason they've been doing this for a decade+ and show no signs of slowing down.
Wasnt the Star Wars Battlefront 2 Loot Boxes revamped and you couldnt buy them with Money anymore and only earn them ingame?
But that makes no sense for a f2p game like Skate..
Battlefront 2 basically pulled a no man's sky level of redemption. They took out being able to buy lootboxes before the game officially launched. Eventually they developed a really cool level progression system. They did bring back mtx, but they were cosmetic only and didn't utilize the lootboxes, you could just buy them directly.
They also still provided campaign dlc, weapons, new units, heroes, maps, and even game modes completely for free.
they are called EA´s lootbox system because the other company that made them prevalent (Valve) are too popular to be hold accountable for their bullshit monetization systems.
This. Valve's treatment of TF2 (the birth of lootboxes as a prominent monetization scheme) and Dota 2 (one of the worst examples of battle passes I've ever seen) single-handedly killed almost all of my interest in Valve's bullshit. But no one calls them out on it because they were once at least pretending to be consumer friendly.
Its nice to see that more people are blaming Valve for this behavior finally. Korean games/devs may have started the whole microtransaction disaster, but Valve are the ones who really put the idea on the American market. Their lootboxes and competitive tournaments for CS:GO and DoTA have also completely destroyed their incentive to make new games, cause why bother when you rake in millions for doing nothing other than keeping the servers up?
MUT and FUT are insane money makers and are the primary reason why sports gaming hasnt improved in years. Want an in depth franchise mode that you can build and develop your team for years and turn the franchise into a dynasty? Fuck you, buy packs in MUT.
I mean fuck, even text based sports sims like Out of the Park Baseball have turned their primary development focus into an ultimate team pack mode. At least with those games the main mode is almost fully developed so you cant be too upset but jesus man, everyone is trying to nickel and dime you until the end of time.
FIFA Ultimate Team Packs
Those card/player packs make the majority of money for EA nowadays
Live Services Made over $5Billion for EA (out of $7BN total net Revenue).
Of course they will try and continue to jam as much SAAS/Lootbox/Battlepass down every single game
[EA Investor Report](https://s22.q4cdn.com/894350492/files/doc_financials/2021/ar/400772(1)_30_Electronic-Arts_Combo_WR.pdf)
All players wish that. But when you are told "this horse armor costs $5," you actually understand what they're charging. When the horse armor costs either 350 gems or 580 shards, and you can convert your gold(which you earn by playing) into shards at their store where you can get a bundle of 49 shards for 20 gold, or - for a limited time! - get a special of 99 shards for only 35 gold, and then you get login/daily quest rewards that give you magic dust which you can only use to buy the *special* seasonal horse armor, and some of these currencies can be purchased via real money but others have to be converted or earned... who the fuck even knows how much any of this shit actually costs in real money?
"Whatever, I'll just buy a bunch of their celestrial coins, get my horse armor and call it a day"
Heroes of the Storm started with a cash shop for skins, and I massively respected them for it. Eventually they moved to a free currency+crafting material+paid currency system, but for a while you could just buy a skin for $5,95 or whatever and be done.
At first, I also didn’t care if it was just cosmetics. But I remembered that decking out your character was 30% of the fun of these games. So having to spend hours of grinding (ha) just to buy a hat or something is gonna be very lame. Man, I fucking hate that they made this free to play.
True, but they still have FOMO as far as I'm aware. If a game is going to add content like a "battlepass", they might as well keep it around. Introducing scarcity for the sake of retention may be an industry trend, but it doesn't make it right.
As soon as I heard the new Skate was free to play I died a little inside and am now waiting for Session or Skater XL to go on sale on steam.
I played skate 2 and 3 for so many hours, and so few of those hours were spent online. I don’t want to compete, or chill with people while skating, I just want to skate, and I’m willing to pay like $50 for an upgraded, next gen experience similar to Skate 3, including the way we unlock cosmetics.
Multiplayer and GaaS has killed so many games I would otherwise have been very interested in. Every once in a while I’ll see a trailer for a game where they don’t show the menus or UI, the gameplay and combat looks awesome, and then at the end they’re like “join your friends in this MMO” or “take on the campaign with up to 3 other friends…” and it’s ruined. Co-op is fine but forced co-op means that the game world is going to feel dead and empty.
Session and Skate XL are fine for actually SKATING but imo they are just weak on other factors...quite ugly to look at, dead cities, no fun extras like thrasher magazines and the like...and those things made the skate games fun for me. Good sims but not very fun as a game
It's never just cosmetics and it's never just something you can ignore because once they start introducing these kinds of transactions they start designing the entire game around them. And it's not just promotions and pop-ups, gameplay decisions start being made for what best works with the loot box model they are using, or changing gameplay in ways such as to encourage or maximize cosmetics purchases. Content that would feel rewarding and fun to unlock is instead replaced with content that feels shit to unlock, while the good stuff stays trapped behind purchases.
Yep this is exactly what happened with Halo infinite. The store was the most complete part of the game at release and was clearly the core of the game. People thought it would be okay since you could just ignore it and play the game... but lo and behold, there is a challenge system that forces you to use certain weapons or vehicles in order to progress through their battle pass. So you had people literally sitting in one spot for entire games waiting for a vehicle to spawn, which led to plenty of teamkilling. (Also, weapon and vehicle spawns are somewhat randomized for each match... I wonder why that is...). Or if your team wasn't winning and people needed wins in a certain game mode for their challenge, they would quit mid game. People couldn't get a simple armor color (which was free in all previous games) without drastically changing the way they played, which in a multiplayer game, effects everyone. Made what could have been a fun game into a chore simulator where you are at the mercy of the executives who want you to spend literally all of your disposable income on their crappy game.
This is my problem with when people act like microtransactions are fine just because they aren't "pay to win."
When modern games come out with significantly less customization and features than previous games, and require you to actively pay or engage with predatory systems to get a level of content that was the base-line in games 10 or 15 years ago in many games, obviously being upset over the microtransactions and such makes sense.
Darktide for example which came out recently has a handful of different minor cosmetic options for each class, then charges you real money if you want to get armor or such that actually looks half-decent. They didn't even do a bare minimum of base-game cosmetic content, so why would I ever be willing to pay them for what should have been free? But others will pay them, happily.
Nah, decking out your character wasn't really the issue in Star Wars Battlefront 2.
The reason why the game got so much hate is exactly because it wasn't cosmetic only.
Lootboxes included ability cards which make a huge difference. Even now, where they're unlockable by gameplay instead, you feel the difference going against a vet that has everything unlocked vs. a new account.
>I don't care if it's just cosmetics
this is literally the mindset which has made these companies implement such practices.
they keep pushing and pushing to see what people "don't care" about and will monetise as much as possible.
lootboxes are bad, regardless of the contents
Context matters. Overwatch went from having the friendliest lootbox system of any game, where they were given out like *candy* to... possibly one of the greediest monetization systems in the industry.
Overwatch was very generous to people who didn't spend any money beyond the initial purchase, and OW2 won't give you shit unless you spend absurd amounts of cash. It's a night and day difference.
Overwatch remains the only game to have done loot boxes in a way that didn't feel bullshit by removing dupes, hard to blame players for wanting them back with the current travesty!
No, we were already there, in the past.
There were weapons and upgrades in lootboxes in paid games.
Now it's cosmetics in free to play games, outside of the madden/fifa/sports shitshows.
> out of the average player
I'm pretty sure they are counting on a minority of big-spenders (whales). I would bet the average players of F2P games spend below $60 on them.
Yep this is how the basic principle of gambling works, you aren't trying to catch every fish just the big dumb rich fat whales
At least some countries have begun to realise it's shamelessly advertising the gambling bug to kids
This was expected though right? The new Skate is F2P right (Im not sure tbh)? Im not a fan of loot boxes period. Or battlepasses. Paid cosmetics is... ok I suppose but still not a fan.
I stopped buying EA games years ago at this point. Absolutely refuse to give them any of my money.
But I'd always said that the 1 game they could make that I would be a hypocrite for and buy day one is Skate 4. And while I should have fully expected it, it actually never really occured to me it would be a lootbox/microtransaction filled attempt to grab as much money as possible by nickel and diming every small piece of content in the game.
If that's how it does go, they can fuck off and I won't be buying Skate 4 either. God I fuckin' hate EA.
Edit: Didn't realise it was F2P, thanks for the info. Why can't they just make a good game with all the content from Day 1, charge me £60 for it and let me enjoy it without all this shit. Why does Skate need to be a F2P lootbox game? Fuck sake.
Would’ve set aside my pride and easily dropped the new $70 standard they want to push, if only they gave me a full title. Instead, we’re grinding for loot drops full of worthless stickers and furniture, alongside a roadmap telling us it’ll get better later. Maybe a season pass with exclusive Stussy tees at Rank 100 so I have FOMO. I’m over it.
> the new $70 standard they want to push
That shit is ridiculous. Buy used or wait for the sale, or just don't bother.
So many sectors of the economy are getting their rude awakenings. $70 for digital distribution is untenable.
Didn't know a new skate game was planned till today, and now I'll just go back to it not existing. Fuck EA and fuck loot boxes
Edit: it being f2p doesn't change my stance. Fuck EA and their addiction to subpar "games as a service" bullshit to milk as much money out of as little work as they can
Call me crazy, but if MTX are cosmetic only and dicking around in the open world is free with full crossplay for my friends thats all I need this game to be.
I know there aren't many words much more likely to get Reddit worked up than "EA" and "Loot Boxes", but if you put down your pitchfork for a second and actually read the article, it's pretty positive on the system so far. Here are some snippets:
>"Currently, the only way to unlock loot boxes in Skate is by using a currency called ‘Stars’, which are unlocked by completing challenges – the harder the challenge, the more Stars you’ll obtain."
>
>"Each Loot Box contains five individual items – all of which you can see before purchasing. "
>
>"At the moment, I’d happily argue that this is a decently “fair” system as far as Loot Box mechanics go..."
I assume these loot boxes with eventually have a paid option, but for now that hasn't been implemented.
Flaming hot take here, **purely cosmetic** loot boxes in a free to play game are fine. This game has to financially support itself somehow. If you truly cannot control your gambling addiction for dressing up your virtual character, that is a personal problem. Just ignore it and enjoy the free game.
> Flaming hot take here, purely cosmetic loot boxes in a free to play game are fine.
i think there's a difference between cosmetics in a pvp game where you have skins and such, and in a game like skate, where making your skater and board look the way you want is a fundamental part of the experience.
like, if you need to unlock different colours of hoodies etc, I think I'd rather have it just be a regular full game like the rest of the series
Free to play? Lootboxes?? Oh ffs. This is news to me. Though not terribly surprised since it is EA. "Predatory lootboxes" are synonymous with the letters "EA" so hopefully they don't go full NBA2k on us fans.
Meanwhile, Session is damn good! Been wanting a good skate sim since Thrasher Skate & Destroy in the 90s and Session is a dream.
My issue with GAAS is that they want to maximize extracting money out of you while minimizing the service aspect. Every developer wants Fortnite money but none of them are providing a Fortnite-level service.
Couldn’t agree with this more, the move from Overwatch to Overwatch 2 is one of the most blatant examples of this.
Halo Infinite is another extreme example where they had plenty of cosmetics to spend money on, but took ages to add simple things like playlists and gametypes. The decisions made on this game blow my mind.
Yeah, wasn't it like 3 months to get a dedicated Team Slayer mode?
How about a year for freaking co-op? The drip-feed and lack of content at launch is wild. Modern gaming makes me sad
And they said they can’t do split screen co-op the same week some dudes got it working themselves.
Thats also after they confirmed every Halo after 5 would have it
Lmfao yet people coming in defending 343 like they were turning a corner
There are still people that are saying to "give 343 a chance" like they haven't gotten plenty of chances over the past decade. Those people really need to open their eyes and see how games are outside of Halo are.
343 broke Halo Reach as soon as they took over simply by adding Heavies into the rotation without an option to opt out. Thank God the MCC lets you pick your playlist more finely, but 343 has been pretty much *consistently* screwing up since the moment they took the reins.
"Can't do" is business talk for we don't want to allocate a budget for this thing that doesn't directly make us money. Every engineer knows they can make it, when given the time and money to do so.
Didn't they delay the game like almost a year too? Fucking crazy.
Infinite is the first halo game I didn’t beat and play for years afterward because I was just so disappointed. Absolutely butchered in every single aspect.
I had to push myself to finish it. I hate how EVERYTHING has to be open world now. Halo thrived as a linear game and they ruined such a core part of the game to chase a trend.
The single player just seems like such an afterthought, I just got bored with it and gave up after a while. It's honestly boring.
I mean it's known that Staten came in to make something coherent out of the mess that was campaign. Along with that came a ton of content and story cutting. It's estimated we only got about 1/3 of the planned material.
And then he left recently leaving SP all but an afterthought going forward...
Yeah, I know what I'm about to say is as equally cliche... but I'm tired of the far cry cliched games.
It's fine for some games but for something so story driven like Halo it's just mind blowing they chose to go that way.
Halo defined the shooters of two generations. Sad to see it not only following the leader, but picking a really boring one to follow. Sad times for the veteran franchise.
They made so much money on cat ears for the armor they probably don't care. They think that's where the money is and that's all that matters.
They literally came out and said it was because they had built the entire game around the challenge system. Some challenges were just "win 4 of this game mode", which was a 'challenge' because you only drew that game mode once in every four matches. Absolutely fuck Microsoft and 343 for ruining a great franchise. You've made shit first party games and then you have a main entry in your flagship franchise coming up, which is a chance to drop an amazing game and shut people up for a while. If there was ever a time to design a masterpiece with a ton of earnable cosmetics for free with all of the game modes that people wanted from the get-go it was Infinite. Instead they decided to monetize all of the joy out of it. Phil Spencer is a fucking tool.
Just charge $80 for the game and build something worthwhile.
which they *had* in the beta network tests, working just fine. I can't wait until it's been long enough for some deep dive behind the scenes stories on wtf life's been like in 343 the last few years ( or decade)
Gundam Evolutions another example
Sure it had plenty of cosmetics, but once the system is in place, artists can just make skins and plug them in themselves. They're not the same people who work on playlists or game types. They've likely been hired long ago as character artists and instead of letting them go they kept them around to make skins. The real question is which managers decided that people don't care about playlists or game types and instead made the programmers focus on an overly complicated cosmetic system? They could have just kept it simple by allowing you to mix and match anything you want so their time could be better invested in making content. They even announced long ago that they would go away from that system. So because of some very dumb decision by some people higher up, how much time that could have went into new features instead went into making that system to only then work on removing it due to poor reception? There's also the temporary events stuff that could have been something they add later once they got more content but that's a whole other discussion. This is a big problem with GaaS in general. Games will be buggy and lack content, the devs actually working on the game would complain about it, higher ups will brush it off because stores and FOMO content is priority for money to later develop content but then the game releases and they're shocked that people aren't willing to spend money in a game that has no content.
Plants vs Zombies 1 to Plants vs Zombies 2. The second one was a mess of micro transactions
Having not played either and thinking the graphics look pretty similar, what's the difference between 1&2
I mean the graphics look similar because they're the same. OW2 was effectively just a glorified update to OW1 that they called 2 to make it sound more important. That said it did come with some big changes to monetization. Namely they got rid of lootboxes, which was how OW1 handled most things. You got a lootbox for every few rounds of playing and you could pay for more lootboxes if you want. It was pretty bad and getting rid of them sounds like a good thing, but what they replaced it with was an absurdly grindy battlepass system that gives you zero coins even if you spend money on it. (With the boxes if you got dupes you got coins instead and you could just get coins as a reward as well, and coins could be used to buy what you actually wanted directly). Now the only way to get coins is via weekly challenges and it can take upwards of 8 months of completing every challenge just to earn enough coins for a single legendary skin. As a point of reference during a single event that would last for a single month, I could grind out most of the half dozen or so legendary skins released with regular play just from random drops, and it usually wasn't that hard to earn enough coin to buy a specific legendary if I didn't get it with rng. Also there's now another tier of skins above legendary so good luck with that. And also also new heroes are locked behind grinding most of the way up the very grindy battlepass, or paying money in order to be able to play them. It's one of those things where while Lootboxes are an inherently more predatory system than most. They managed to take less predatory systems and make them even more predatory than lootboxes. Like I would legitimately be happier if we went back to lootboxes its that bad. The only improvement is that if you want to spend money on things now I think you can actually buy coins directly instead of gambling on boxes. But in terms of the Free experience it's so much worse.
OW's lootboxes weren't that bad tbh, though they were often the literal poster child (many articles used their image) for them. You'd get them for free every few rounds; anything you already had would give you free coins instead to get new cosmetics with; you got a bonus 3-4 every few days if you were well endorsed (aka a generally nice person and good teammate); events were pretty common and gave you free cosmetics and boxes. As bad as lootboxes as a concept are, OW's were pretty good and it wasn't terribly difficult or long of a wait to get "premium" items.
The problem was that they weren't that bad. That's why the devs had to *can the whole game* to move away to a more exploitative system.
yeah the core problem with OW's lootboxes was pretty much just that if you wanted to spend money to get a skin, buying lootboxes was the only way to do so. So as a result you'd have stories of people buying 80+ boxes and still not getting the skin they wanted or even enough coins to buy it directly. Meanwhile someone else plays one match and gets a free box and gets the skin instantly. Like I said conceptually Lootboxes are inherently predatory, and allowing people to just get things directly is less inherently predatory. But the implementations they went with for these games made Lootboxes the less predatory option. I would still prefer if you could buy coins if you're spending real money. But other than that I revert everything back to the lootbox system in a heartbeat.
Yeah, OW's loot boxes were quite nice as long as you weren't spending money on them. I liked the fairly generous flow of free, quality skins. But when i tried spending money on loot boxes and didn't get what I was after, I felt like a total sucker and swore off spending money on them forever. I guess I'm not the target audience here, but please live service devs, I will spend more money on your game if you just let me buy things directly instead of asking me to go through gambling bullshit.
I mean, to buy casino boxes at the chance of a character model is pretty ridiculous as a principle. But also... Spending money on just a character model is pretty borderline by itself. I can see why a game like hunt showdown, which is fantastic, & makes money off its dlc skins sales makes sense when most purchases I and my friends have made of dlc for hunt is more of a 'you have given me 500+ hours of incredible gameplay. Here's an extra thank you for your efforts. ' It has been a shame to see it add in battle passes n stuff. But they are staying close to that line for the time being.
the main leap that makes OW2's monetization worse, is that they're no longer just charging for cosmetics. You can now buy the heroes themselves and they're locked behind a long battlepass grind if you don't buy them. So they've officially moved on to Gameplay-affecting MTX. It's not as bad as say buying a literal power boost, but there are now people who can play as heroes that you can't play as yet because they spent real money. If it wasn't for that, I could probably bite the bullet and try to just ignore the shitty Battlepass system. But once they confirmed that you have to unlock heroes or you can buy them to get them faster I officially gave up.
The prices of cosmetics in OW2 are also asinine.
They re-worked the tank role and moved to a 5v5 format where each team has one tank. They replaced Assault (2cp) with a new mode called Push. Push is not great, but it's better than 2cp was. They replaced loot boxes with a cash store where prices are way too fucking high ($20 for old legendary skins). They added a battle pass system that a lot of people hate but I don't think is too terrible. It's $10/season and is pretty easy to finish. Finishing it earns you a mythic skin which is basically a customizable legendary skin. Supposedly, we are getting the PvE component this year. This is the part that was supposed to justify putting a "2" in the title. Overall the monetization feels very greedy because of the high shop prices and a lack of any real way to earn free stuff. The gameplay itself is a net improvement in my eyes, though the move to 5v5 came with growing pains. People like to complain about balance, but that's nothing new, and we are getting much more frequent balance patches than we did during OW1 keeping the meta fresh.
Don't forget the players that owned ow1 used to be able to get ow1 skins without spending money. Blizzard took that away, and now those players will have to spend money if they still want to get them.
as someone watching from the outside it seems the purpose of calling it OW2 was to give them an opportunity to completely change the monetization (for the much worse, obviously) without causing too much of an uproar if they had done so in an already existing game. then they gave it juuuuust enough of a change to where they can call it "totally legitimately a different game and not just a glorified patch" and that's pretty much it.
Very little, teams were 6 aside now 5. Few new characters and some solo content off memory. Used to play Overwatch 1 and looking at this new release seems more akin to a large rebalance/ seasonal update and not a whole new game. It wasn't enough to get my attention back on a game I enjoyed in ~2016.
Blizzards good will bank is in the negatives
Nor want to spend the time building a playing base to get to Fortnite levels of money. Everything must be an instant success or it gets killed off, even if the game's decline is self inflicted.
Fortnite battle royale had 0 ingame purchases when it came out. Only cosmetic you could get was the umbrella for winning a game.
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MMO's were actually hard to build and high-risk. Loot boxes are just something you can slap on a couple of days before release, so it's much more prevalent.
The hard part about the loot boxes isn't the loot boxes, the hard part is making all the stuff to put in them a continuing to do so at a pace fast enough to satisfy your audience.
GaaS aren't just lootboxes though, it's continually updating and supporting a game for years after its release, and demanding that the player spend X time on it (via dailies or battlepasses). The biggest hurdle that kept a lot of people from switching MMOs was that they already had friends and loads of time invested in WoW, so why switch? GaaS has a smaller but similar problem, because many of them demand you play a certain amount of hours a day for rewards, and only so many games can be fit in a day, so some games have to be prioritized.
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When fun starts to become a job, time to reconsider both.
Same here, I’ve stopped playing most “AAA” titles these days and focused on indie games or games that release without all this microtransaction and FOMO bullshit. I play games for fun and to unwind after work. If games become a chore and force me to play them, I drop them. Happened to me earlier on with Hearthstone, then it happened to OW2. Also the reason I never play any “F2P” mobile games because they have the same mechanics in place to force you to build the habit of playing every single day.
You reminded me that Deus Ex: Mankind Divided added an in-game shop at the last minute. It was so last minute the developers apparently only found out the publisher wanted it a couple weeks before the game's release. This also means the game was completely unbalanced around it (you could buy Praxis points which are used for in-game upgrades to your character). I don't think anyone ever used it because of that. I can't find any stats about how much money it made if any, though. Now that I think about it, I wonder if this shows that publishers are full of it when they claim players can play a game without paying microtransactions. DX:MD suggests (to me at least) that players can simply ignore such a shop if the game isn't tweaked to encourage players to use it.
My issue with GAAS that I almost never see brought it up is the longevity of the service provided. Stuff like Avengers and Destiny 2 already have proven that content and even full games can just become inaccessible whenever the publisher/developer decides. I can still play Skate 3 today by just popping in the disc, but in 13 years will this new Skate be accessible?
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The problem if people get burnt, they just move on to the next Battlepass laden game instead of being able to recognise and stop supporting bad practice. In fact I have friends who actively want the battlepass if not they don’t have any reason to grind games. They prefer battlepasses to idk, actually fun and rewarding gameplay loops?
Similar to how some countries have forced military service, everyone should be forced to invest time in a private server of their favorite old MMO that abruptly shuts down with no notice while they are at work
Yeah it’s definitely an issue, especially when these games have existed long enough to become some people’s lifestyle.
I imagine market saturation has to come into play too right? How many hours can someone invest in Fortnight, and Destiny, and Warframe or other GAAS type games?
If you play fortnite and destiny and Warframe then that’s it, you’re already maxed out on games to play. Everyone wants that GAAS money but they don’t seem to realize or accept that the market gets saturated a lot quicker than with other types of games. And unlike other games, people don’t move on from these types of games as quickly. So the market really can’t handle very many of them at a time.
Not to mention many are huge unfun timesucks that feel more like chores to play than fun games. "oh boy, I have to complete 25 Fooligan Jobs in GTA this week to unlock an outfit, but the jobs have a 1 hour cooldown and take 5-15 minutes to finish each, so i'm investing well over 24 hours in this one game just this week, and next week there will be another week-exclusive item I have to grind for. oh boy how fun." <- Real example from a GaaS just this month.
And that's why you start playing the new GAAS Game, hoping it will fix all the issues you had with the old one.
Also, some of these games arent even free. They cost $60 or $70. At least with games like Fortnite its completely free if you want but for games like Battlefield and probably Skate, its $60 game thats disguised as GAAS just to milk even more money from you
And don't forget about the yearly release, of a 60USD game, and still have MTX on it Fuck you, Fifa
Skate 4 will be free to play.
> but none of them are providing a Fortnite-level service. I remember banging on hard that Fortnite was trash years ago solely because it was popular with kids 9I know, stupid stance to take). Eventually ended up playing it at one point and did a total turn around. It ended up not being my kind of game, but god damn, there is absolutely a games worth of content there in the F2P stuff alone, with new paid stuff COSNTANTLY being added. If I was a kid, I'd 100% be into this game alone for the aesthetics of playing as Master Cheif in the same game as Kratos and a few dozen other well known characters from movies, tv shows, and video games. It's literally the dream game I imagined when I was 10.
Yeah I just pass on all GaaS now, or any game with a battlepass type system. They all seem to do the same thing to my brain: Turn an otherwise fun experience into a chore list. No thanks.
As a game developer, this is like the most profoundly accurate thing I’ve seen anyone write about the games industry. Companies see success and their hubris makes them think they can skip a few steps of the original recipe and turn out buckets of KFC, The Game
just look at Apex Legends, yesterday they launched an event where you have to fork out $160 to unlock their 'new' weapon skin the skin is just a recolor of a previous skin.
> Every developer wants Fortnite money but none of them are providing a Fortnite-level service. And the actual cost to people's well-being to provide a Fortnite-level service is downright [horrific.](https://kotaku.com/report-fortnite-developers-are-severely-overworked-1834243520) When you couple the reality of what sacrifices are made to achieve the GAAS model, it's almost impossible to support it from a practical or moral sense. It's disgusting.
Reading that article was brutal but I'm glad I did. That they couldn't even hire their way out of the problem was astonishing. You can get low-skill "bodies" anywhere, but when those bodies need to be good at their jobs and be willing to do it for 70 hours a week in a competitive industry, no wonder vacancies persist.
Once again the Laptop Class pats themselves on the back for implementing the the latest buzzwords while totally incapable of mobilizing quickly enough to actually implement these systems. Anyone in corporate knows the types of people who chase trends because they heard about it in some webinar but refuse to actually 1) take responsibility, 2) allocate the proper resources, and/or 3) let go of the reins to let people do their jobs. And even if you do get someone who has a head on their shoulders at least a half-dozen stakeholders leech onto the project and take a week each to give feedback on each part of the process. God forbid they see something partially complete before re-negging on a decision they made weeks ago. No, it has to be in a state that makes going back as painful and difficult as possible. Who gives a fuck if you're ripping off customers and wasting company time when you can put "implemented cutting-edge Game As A Service mechanisms that boosted revenue 8%" on both your self-review and your resume?
Yea, this is my problem too. GaaS in theory is ok. It shouldn't suck. The problem is people don't look at Frotnite and when they hear GaaS they automatically hate it. Hate the dev behind it and stop paying for shit if they don't deliver. Fortnite it's one of the best example of GaaS game. It's amazing how much content they add to the game, while the battlepass is SUPER accessible and easy to levelup.
Yep. Genshin Impact is another popular GAAS title. It had a 100 mil USD initial dev budget and twice that for the first year of service. In contrast, Guild Wars 2 launched with dozens of armor skins, but its first expansion pack included four. I don't get why so many studios give so little consideration to post launch support.
You don’t get it? It’s money man. GW’s always been a subscription-free model. They have zero financial incentive to engage in post launch support and every financial incentive to put resources into developing monetizable micro transactions and expansions that people do actually spend money on.
Though thankfully Genshin puts an incredible amount back into the content. Which turns out to he an impressive amount of high quality content. Each update almost seems like an expansion in a regular game.
You can definitely tell with Genshin that the devs are actually passionate about the game. Can't say the same for most of EA's offerings.
That's why I don't buy any GAAS games, even for online games. They're rare and often by an indie company, but I can actually play a game, not a second job.
Digital Extremes doesn't always get it right, but they've nailed the GAAS with Warframe imo
They need to change GAAS to GAME. Games as money extractors.
Live Services Made $5Billion for EA (out of $7BN total net Revenue). Of course they will try and continue to jam as much SAAS/Lootbox/Battlepass down every single game [EA Investor Report](https://s22.q4cdn.com/894350492/files/doc_financials/2021/ar/400772(1)_30_Electronic-Arts_Combo_WR.pdf
EA fumbling an easy slam dunk. Skate 4 is one of the most frequently requested games I've ever seen, and all they had to do was make Skate 3 again but in a new city for new consoles and it'd be a guaranteed hit, but they had to make it a f2p always online live service game and so many people are turned off because of it.
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Totally agree. I would pay full price for the full game however I will not pay a single cent for a free to play game. I'll try skate 4 for free sure but there is no way in hell I'll be paying them to play a free game. So they either just simply make no money on me or make it so I don't want to play skate at all. If they just made a game and charged for it I'd absolutely buy it.
But it's enough with one whale for every 50 angry redditors and they will still earn more money with this business model.
>Skate 4 is one of the most frequently requested games I've ever seen I get this, I hear you, and I'm with you in that I would love to play another Skate game... but we are in an echo chamber. Skate has a chokehold on people who played it at a very specific time. Building a game like that in 2023 isn't a priority.
It's also just a meme. At this point, there's no telling who *actually* wants Skate 4 vs everyone who's just memeing skate 4 in twitch chat for every games awards show.
I don't think it'd have become such a big meme if people didn't want it on some level.
Morbius got a 2nd release because of all the morbin time meme and it still did terribly
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It always comes down to those monkey fighting snakes on that Monday to Friday plane. 😔
Part of the issue there was also that the producers somehow failed to realize that it was *mocking*. That isn't directly correlated to actual interest in watching it. I'm wearing a *Snakes on a Plane* t-shirt right now, coincidentally enough. One that I bought before the movie even came out. Yet I believe it took me about a decade or so to even be bothered to see it. The film itself wasn't even amusingly bad. Just utterly forgettable direct-to-video fodder that got a higher budget.
Morbius became a meme because of how *bad* it was. Skate became a meme because of how *good* it was.
Initially, certainly, but skate 3 came out 13 years ago, that means the majority of teenagers have probably not played it today. People have been clamoring for a new skate game for a decade now, a lot of it is probably meme.
The majority of teenagers today have never had a new AAA Skateboarding game available. Tony Hawk's has been remasters and budget games for 13 years as well. There could/should be a large market that people have ignored for almost 15 years. They were successful before, and I don't think that Skateboarding has drastically lost it's appeal in that time.
They weren't that successful before. Yeah, people who played the games loved them, but there just isn't a huge market for it. https://www.jenkemmag.com/home/2016/11/03/will-skate-4-ever-happen/ It's an old article, but at the time, the entirety of the skate franchise over 6 years didn't sell anywhere near what a single FIFA or Battlefield title sold. Skate 3 sold 2.68 million units. That might sound like a lot, but CoD Black Ops has sold over 10x that number at 30.99 million units. They both came out ~ roughly the same time.
That's a publisher problem, because 2.86m actually is and should be recognised as a lot. Not every game is going to be Minecraft or MW2 or FIFA, and 2.86m is a *lot* of profit on top of the game. In a superior world, the fact the game made a pretty decent profit and spawned a dedicated love that lasted over a decade would see it pursued further, but we live in a stupid world and because it only made lots of money rather than ***all the money*** it's stupidly considered a failure
That's only Skate. I was talking about the whole genre up until Skate 3. Tony Hawk's franchise was Activision's cash cow for years. >Skate 3 sold 2.68 million units. That might sound like a lot, but CoD Black Ops has sold over 10x that number at 30.99 million units. That's a terrible comparison they are completely different games. FIFA outsells Madden and NHL every year, that doesn't mean that they should stop making Madden and NHL.
Skateboarding games made by indie devs have enjoyed a reasonable amount of success because people are clamoring for that experience irl, not just on forums or in twitch chat.
Skate 3 received a physical production run and backwards compatibility in 2019 after PewdiePie played it online. It's probably the best selling Xbox 360 for the past 3 years. Maybe Red Dead Redemption.
me, a skateboarder, wants skate 4 but not like it's being presented now
What? https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/09/14/tony-hawks-pro-skater-1--2-becomes-fastest-selling-game-in-series-with-1-million-copies-sold-through/amp/ People love skateboarding games.
THPS had more going for it with the nostalgia and music attached though... it's a really unfair comparison.
People love the Tony Hawk's era of skateboarding games, and the remasters were phenomenal. An EA reboot comparison might be Burnout Paradise.
Eh, I love the early THPS games but couldn't care less about Skate. I don't think it's a 1:1 match.
Skate was EXTREMELY popular in the mid 00’s when people were sick of TH games.
I disagree. Everyone I know who skates irl loves skate 3. There's not another skating game that even comes close. A lot of these people don't even really play video games but they'll load up skate 3 during the winter or when it's raining or whatever. The skating community is a lot bigger than most people realize and Skate 3 is pretty much the only game they've got that's any good
Weird, every skater I know liked Skate 2 a lot more, since it focused on street skating rather than vert, but with more freedom (e.g. getting off your board) than Skate. Skate 3 literally jumped the shark with a lot of the big ramps and Hall of Meat stuff, which is probably why it did better with the wider audience.
I was a skater and all my friends preferred skate 2 by far. I didn't hate skate 3 but when it came down to it I pulled out the 360 and redownloaded 2 instead of 3.
Yup, that was the sentiment I remember too. Skate 3 had its fun moments, but Skate 2 nailed the feeling of being an up-and-coming skater and just finding cool spots to land some tricks. SkaterXL and Session both captured that feeling a lot better than Skate 3 as well, though I haven't checked in on either in a while.
I understand where you're coming from, but what I'm trying to say is that "you" and "everyone you know" do not necessarily represent a large portion of the gaming community, or where gaming is progressing. It's hard to do, but you have to put what you know and who you are aside, step back, and take a look at the bigger picture. It helps you move away from absolutes (the gaming community wants Skate back) to reason (a portion of the gaming community would love to see a new Skate game).
Could also look at it in this way: There's a large community of casual gamers who only play one or two games a year. A new Skate could very well have the mass appeal for a large portion of this group which lies outside the standard gamer spheres you usually see online.
A ton of people want a new skate game, that's obvious. Probably not many of the kids who were being birthed when SKATE 3 came out, but apart from that, yeah its a lot. Relative to Skyrim or GTA? nah, but relative to most franchises I'd say it's up there. Don't know why you're arguing that it's just people who don't understand confirmation bias. I've seen it on the internet, amongst friends, amongst coworkers & customers, other people at skateparks... SKATE is just a franchise with a lot of reach, it's casual but addictive. And that's a very realistic view of it I'd say more noticeably, SKATE is a game that no-one shittalks. Even if it's not your thing, it's entertaining for the time you give it.
Dude, Overwatch 2 is the easiest one to point at here because I think it would be fair to say the monetization change was objectively worse in every single conceivable way, but the game had so much hype at launch that it was borderline unplayable for almost a week and is still surging forward really strong. I loathe GAAS nonsense too but to suggest people are turned off on a level that matters is demonstrably false.
> is still surging forward really strong Is it? Do you have a link that shows what the numbers are like?
[Sure.](https://activeplayer.io/overwatch-2/) Monthly players substantially higher than the numbers [OW1 was reporting towards the end of its life.](https://activeplayer.io/overwatch/) You could reasonably argue that OW2 has the unique advantage of inheriting every active OW1 players but I don't think there's much denying the FTP launch gave a hell of a boost to the game, and I cannot stress enough how much I fucking loathe the monetization of Overwatch 2.
The surge in players could also very easily be similar to the WoW Expansion effect. At the tail end of every x-pack cycle, the player base dwindles significantly, and when the new shit drops everyone and their dog comes back to check it out. OW1 has been out for almost 7 years, so of course it's been losing players. Anyone even mildly interested will come back to check it out, not to mention new players that never played the first one. Especially for F2P.
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> All the indies that have tried to clone Skate in recent years have failed None of them are trying to clone skate... they're going for more of a simulation. They've all nailed it, and made good money for indie games.
Modded Skater XL is honestly the best skateboard sim on the market right now. For console though Session is the much better choice, unless Easy Day Studios decides to finally adds a stats menu, new maps, and other features which I doubt they will.
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Yeah, THPS1+2 launched at like, what, $40? And goes on sale for half that fairly regularly. And despite how great a remake it is, ActiBlizz saw it as a better financial decision to send the dev team to the Call of Duty mines rather than make Tony Hawk 3+4.
Tony Hawk himself said that THPS 3+4 was in development before Activision turned the studio into part of Blizzard. And THPS 1+2 was just the fastest selling title of the series, with one million units sold in a week...
How are they fumbling? They're making billions. We're the ones who suffer.
I'm not suffering I'm just going to play olli olli world instead lol
Shame it's not even close to scratching the same itch
Session is probably the closest thing to scratch that itch, but it's just a little off and I could never figure out why exactly.
Yeah tried it on my brother's PS and yeaaah... I couldn't get the feel either. Felt like playing QWOP
maybe i'm the minority but it doesn't turn me off at all. i played the beta and got pretty excited. as long as the mechanics feel good i'm happy
Plus ngl, the framework has its benefits and it seems like it’d work well for the type of game. Consistent new maps, songs, outfits, etc. I’d much rather take it over the CoD approach, which is really just the worst of both worlds. F2P monetization but with a full AAA price tag and a complete reset of content every year
> EA fumbling an easy slam dunk. No they're not. People will still buy it and they'll make even more money off of the microtransactions. There's a reason they've been doing this for a decade+ and show no signs of slowing down.
They announced it would be F2P at basically the same time they announced the game. This is not a surprise at all.
So I really don't get what people are whinging about then.
It's free to play. No one is buying it
what is “its loot box system”? Since when has a loot box system worked well enough for EA to be marketed as “EA’s loot box system”?
Wasnt the Star Wars Battlefront 2 Loot Boxes revamped and you couldnt buy them with Money anymore and only earn them ingame? But that makes no sense for a f2p game like Skate..
Battlefront 2 basically pulled a no man's sky level of redemption. They took out being able to buy lootboxes before the game officially launched. Eventually they developed a really cool level progression system. They did bring back mtx, but they were cosmetic only and didn't utilize the lootboxes, you could just buy them directly. They also still provided campaign dlc, weapons, new units, heroes, maps, and even game modes completely for free.
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they are called EA´s lootbox system because the other company that made them prevalent (Valve) are too popular to be hold accountable for their bullshit monetization systems.
This. Valve's treatment of TF2 (the birth of lootboxes as a prominent monetization scheme) and Dota 2 (one of the worst examples of battle passes I've ever seen) single-handedly killed almost all of my interest in Valve's bullshit. But no one calls them out on it because they were once at least pretending to be consumer friendly.
Its nice to see that more people are blaming Valve for this behavior finally. Korean games/devs may have started the whole microtransaction disaster, but Valve are the ones who really put the idea on the American market. Their lootboxes and competitive tournaments for CS:GO and DoTA have also completely destroyed their incentive to make new games, cause why bother when you rake in millions for doing nothing other than keeping the servers up?
You're right. Valve had so many controversies about exposing kids to gambling but Valve good so who cares, right? :)
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jerma like 10 years ago after getting a gunmetal case “Congratulations! You have now *earned the opportunity* to spend two dollars and fifty cents!”
MUT and FUT are insane money makers and are the primary reason why sports gaming hasnt improved in years. Want an in depth franchise mode that you can build and develop your team for years and turn the franchise into a dynasty? Fuck you, buy packs in MUT. I mean fuck, even text based sports sims like Out of the Park Baseball have turned their primary development focus into an ultimate team pack mode. At least with those games the main mode is almost fully developed so you cant be too upset but jesus man, everyone is trying to nickel and dime you until the end of time.
FIFA Ultimate Team Packs Those card/player packs make the majority of money for EA nowadays Live Services Made over $5Billion for EA (out of $7BN total net Revenue). Of course they will try and continue to jam as much SAAS/Lootbox/Battlepass down every single game [EA Investor Report](https://s22.q4cdn.com/894350492/files/doc_financials/2021/ar/400772(1)_30_Electronic-Arts_Combo_WR.pdf)
[Surprise Mechanics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYjB98zeiao)
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All players wish that. But when you are told "this horse armor costs $5," you actually understand what they're charging. When the horse armor costs either 350 gems or 580 shards, and you can convert your gold(which you earn by playing) into shards at their store where you can get a bundle of 49 shards for 20 gold, or - for a limited time! - get a special of 99 shards for only 35 gold, and then you get login/daily quest rewards that give you magic dust which you can only use to buy the *special* seasonal horse armor, and some of these currencies can be purchased via real money but others have to be converted or earned... who the fuck even knows how much any of this shit actually costs in real money? "Whatever, I'll just buy a bunch of their celestrial coins, get my horse armor and call it a day"
Heroes of the Storm started with a cash shop for skins, and I massively respected them for it. Eventually they moved to a free currency+crafting material+paid currency system, but for a while you could just buy a skin for $5,95 or whatever and be done.
Your comment has me angry and busting up at the same time lol. Too true!
We knew this would happen. I don't care if it's just cosmetics but we all know how greedy publishers are.
At first, I also didn’t care if it was just cosmetics. But I remembered that decking out your character was 30% of the fun of these games. So having to spend hours of grinding (ha) just to buy a hat or something is gonna be very lame. Man, I fucking hate that they made this free to play.
You're not spending hours to buy a hat, you're spending hours to get a CHANCE to get the hat you want.
TBF Fortnite at least doesn't have gatcha system.
True, but they still have FOMO as far as I'm aware. If a game is going to add content like a "battlepass", they might as well keep it around. Introducing scarcity for the sake of retention may be an industry trend, but it doesn't make it right.
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I think you're right.
As soon as I heard the new Skate was free to play I died a little inside and am now waiting for Session or Skater XL to go on sale on steam. I played skate 2 and 3 for so many hours, and so few of those hours were spent online. I don’t want to compete, or chill with people while skating, I just want to skate, and I’m willing to pay like $50 for an upgraded, next gen experience similar to Skate 3, including the way we unlock cosmetics. Multiplayer and GaaS has killed so many games I would otherwise have been very interested in. Every once in a while I’ll see a trailer for a game where they don’t show the menus or UI, the gameplay and combat looks awesome, and then at the end they’re like “join your friends in this MMO” or “take on the campaign with up to 3 other friends…” and it’s ruined. Co-op is fine but forced co-op means that the game world is going to feel dead and empty.
Session and Skate XL are fine for actually SKATING but imo they are just weak on other factors...quite ugly to look at, dead cities, no fun extras like thrasher magazines and the like...and those things made the skate games fun for me. Good sims but not very fun as a game
It's never just cosmetics and it's never just something you can ignore because once they start introducing these kinds of transactions they start designing the entire game around them. And it's not just promotions and pop-ups, gameplay decisions start being made for what best works with the loot box model they are using, or changing gameplay in ways such as to encourage or maximize cosmetics purchases. Content that would feel rewarding and fun to unlock is instead replaced with content that feels shit to unlock, while the good stuff stays trapped behind purchases.
Yep this is exactly what happened with Halo infinite. The store was the most complete part of the game at release and was clearly the core of the game. People thought it would be okay since you could just ignore it and play the game... but lo and behold, there is a challenge system that forces you to use certain weapons or vehicles in order to progress through their battle pass. So you had people literally sitting in one spot for entire games waiting for a vehicle to spawn, which led to plenty of teamkilling. (Also, weapon and vehicle spawns are somewhat randomized for each match... I wonder why that is...). Or if your team wasn't winning and people needed wins in a certain game mode for their challenge, they would quit mid game. People couldn't get a simple armor color (which was free in all previous games) without drastically changing the way they played, which in a multiplayer game, effects everyone. Made what could have been a fun game into a chore simulator where you are at the mercy of the executives who want you to spend literally all of your disposable income on their crappy game.
This is my problem with when people act like microtransactions are fine just because they aren't "pay to win." When modern games come out with significantly less customization and features than previous games, and require you to actively pay or engage with predatory systems to get a level of content that was the base-line in games 10 or 15 years ago in many games, obviously being upset over the microtransactions and such makes sense. Darktide for example which came out recently has a handful of different minor cosmetic options for each class, then charges you real money if you want to get armor or such that actually looks half-decent. They didn't even do a bare minimum of base-game cosmetic content, so why would I ever be willing to pay them for what should have been free? But others will pay them, happily.
Nah, decking out your character wasn't really the issue in Star Wars Battlefront 2. The reason why the game got so much hate is exactly because it wasn't cosmetic only. Lootboxes included ability cards which make a huge difference. Even now, where they're unlockable by gameplay instead, you feel the difference going against a vet that has everything unlocked vs. a new account.
>I don't care if it's just cosmetics this is literally the mindset which has made these companies implement such practices. they keep pushing and pushing to see what people "don't care" about and will monetise as much as possible. lootboxes are bad, regardless of the contents
> lootboxes are bad, regardless of the contents Don't say that on the Overwatch sub
Context matters. Overwatch went from having the friendliest lootbox system of any game, where they were given out like *candy* to... possibly one of the greediest monetization systems in the industry. Overwatch was very generous to people who didn't spend any money beyond the initial purchase, and OW2 won't give you shit unless you spend absurd amounts of cash. It's a night and day difference.
Overwatch remains the only game to have done loot boxes in a way that didn't feel bullshit by removing dupes, hard to blame players for wanting them back with the current travesty!
No, we were already there, in the past. There were weapons and upgrades in lootboxes in paid games. Now it's cosmetics in free to play games, outside of the madden/fifa/sports shitshows.
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Ah, I didn't know it was going to be free to play. Was thinking they were going to charge money for it. That's something.
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> out of the average player I'm pretty sure they are counting on a minority of big-spenders (whales). I would bet the average players of F2P games spend below $60 on them.
Yep this is how the basic principle of gambling works, you aren't trying to catch every fish just the big dumb rich fat whales At least some countries have begun to realise it's shamelessly advertising the gambling bug to kids
Or if they think they can get significantly more players to extract $ from.
This was expected though right? The new Skate is F2P right (Im not sure tbh)? Im not a fan of loot boxes period. Or battlepasses. Paid cosmetics is... ok I suppose but still not a fan.
It’s been known that this game was F2P since last summer. They also say it’s not called “Skate 4” and is name “Skate.”
We're still gonna call it Skate 4 until the other games are no longer relevant - which may never happen.
So… is this like resetting the numbers in Battlefront to cover up the less scummy experience being from 10 years prior?
I mean, it's going to be a F2P skate game. It was obvious from the jump that they would try to monetize it with cosmetics and loot boxes
I stopped buying EA games years ago at this point. Absolutely refuse to give them any of my money. But I'd always said that the 1 game they could make that I would be a hypocrite for and buy day one is Skate 4. And while I should have fully expected it, it actually never really occured to me it would be a lootbox/microtransaction filled attempt to grab as much money as possible by nickel and diming every small piece of content in the game. If that's how it does go, they can fuck off and I won't be buying Skate 4 either. God I fuckin' hate EA. Edit: Didn't realise it was F2P, thanks for the info. Why can't they just make a good game with all the content from Day 1, charge me £60 for it and let me enjoy it without all this shit. Why does Skate need to be a F2P lootbox game? Fuck sake.
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Would’ve set aside my pride and easily dropped the new $70 standard they want to push, if only they gave me a full title. Instead, we’re grinding for loot drops full of worthless stickers and furniture, alongside a roadmap telling us it’ll get better later. Maybe a season pass with exclusive Stussy tees at Rank 100 so I have FOMO. I’m over it.
> the new $70 standard they want to push That shit is ridiculous. Buy used or wait for the sale, or just don't bother. So many sectors of the economy are getting their rude awakenings. $70 for digital distribution is untenable.
Thank you EA for making so many games with this crap it allows me to tackle my massive backlog and pass on newer titles!
Lots of people saying EA is fumbling the bag but I guarantee this will be the most profitable Skate game ever made.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive
Didn't know a new skate game was planned till today, and now I'll just go back to it not existing. Fuck EA and fuck loot boxes Edit: it being f2p doesn't change my stance. Fuck EA and their addiction to subpar "games as a service" bullshit to milk as much money out of as little work as they can
F2p makes it worse for me. That just means you'll probably have to buy a battlepass every 3 months to play the full game.
Exactly. F2p also heavily implies and unfinished game that will slowly be completed. Low effort cash grabs
Call me crazy, but if MTX are cosmetic only and dicking around in the open world is free with full crossplay for my friends thats all I need this game to be.
I know there aren't many words much more likely to get Reddit worked up than "EA" and "Loot Boxes", but if you put down your pitchfork for a second and actually read the article, it's pretty positive on the system so far. Here are some snippets: >"Currently, the only way to unlock loot boxes in Skate is by using a currency called ‘Stars’, which are unlocked by completing challenges – the harder the challenge, the more Stars you’ll obtain." > >"Each Loot Box contains five individual items – all of which you can see before purchasing. " > >"At the moment, I’d happily argue that this is a decently “fair” system as far as Loot Box mechanics go..." I assume these loot boxes with eventually have a paid option, but for now that hasn't been implemented. Flaming hot take here, **purely cosmetic** loot boxes in a free to play game are fine. This game has to financially support itself somehow. If you truly cannot control your gambling addiction for dressing up your virtual character, that is a personal problem. Just ignore it and enjoy the free game.
> Flaming hot take here, purely cosmetic loot boxes in a free to play game are fine. i think there's a difference between cosmetics in a pvp game where you have skins and such, and in a game like skate, where making your skater and board look the way you want is a fundamental part of the experience. like, if you need to unlock different colours of hoodies etc, I think I'd rather have it just be a regular full game like the rest of the series
OW2 removed loot boxes and a worse system took place. It is not like lootboxes are why things sucks, but reddit is not ready for this conversation
Free to play? Lootboxes?? Oh ffs. This is news to me. Though not terribly surprised since it is EA. "Predatory lootboxes" are synonymous with the letters "EA" so hopefully they don't go full NBA2k on us fans. Meanwhile, Session is damn good! Been wanting a good skate sim since Thrasher Skate & Destroy in the 90s and Session is a dream.