this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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I don't see the issue to be honest. It's three days... How is it substantially different from somebody waiting 3 months for the price to go down even more? What are you protecting against?
I think it's fine too, for the general case of video games. If someone wants to pay some premium, several times a game's price to get access a couple days or a week early, I mean, I sure as hell am not going to pay it, but if some people do and are willing to bear a larger portion of the development costs, fine. It's not like I would have noticed or cared if a game's release date was a week later. Besides, I'm going to wait for reviews to come out anyway.
I'll also add that I'm not gonna get "premium" editions with some plastic doodads or artbooks or whatever, but there are clearly people who are willing to do that. If a game publisher wants to make the offer and someone else is willing to accept, I mean, okay, whatever makes them happy.
That being said, WoW is an MMO, and that does introduce different dynamics. I don't play it, so I don't know the specifics there. Like, a guild cannot play together if all of its members aren't together at the same time, and maybe that puts pressure on all the members to buy early. It also sounds like there are some self-imposed challenges to try to be the first person to do various things, and I guess that there could be a pay-to-win element in that sense. Frankly, I don't find doing that sort of thing to be much fun, but I suppose for people who do, maybe it'd be an issue. Maybe there's something specific to WoW that makes it matter more than a typical video game there.
I think that in general, a lot of video game players would be a lot happier if they obsessed less about getting things exactly on release dates. I mean, the patientgamers crowd waits for at least a year before they look at a game. I wouldn't go quite that far myself, but they still have fun playing games.
WoW has historically worked on a daily limit to progression model for the endgame, so the 3 day early access is potentially a 3 day permanent boost for the people who buy it. I would imagine competitive raiders going for world first and "clearing hard difficulty versions of raids while they're current content" achievements and their related rewards will be essentially mandated to buy it.
As for gamers obsessing over things at launch, I wish it were different, but I think of it like movies or TV shows. If you go and watch a movie a year after it came out, nobody is gonna be talking about it anymore. And for some people, that social buzz around a new piece of media is half the fun. Playing a game and talking about it with your friends, the sense of discovery finding things out before you can just look it up on some wiki site, etc.
'How is an order of magnitude substantially different?' is not a question I know how to answer without vulgarity.
Yes, but presumably the order of magnitude (waiting substantially longer) would be worse but you're arguing the opposite... Why is waiting longer for a price cut better?
Ohhh, that's a completely different angle than I thought you were going for.
It's still ridiculous, though.
Price drops exist to encourage new people to pay. People who would not otherwise buy the thing, buy the thing. But - anyone who pays an exorbitant amount up-front, for a game with a monthly subscription, three days early, was fucking obviously going to buy the thing, full-price, day-of. This is just gouging. This is seeing how little they can offer, in exchange for completely arbitrary quantities of money.
If they offered a sliding scale where the price doubles for every extra day of early access - some addict with more money than sense may well drop tens thousand dollars, for an extra week. Which is obviously fucking nonsense. Please tell me you understand price and value are different concepts, and they can align, or they can not. Ten thousand dollars for one week of a game that costs ten dollars a month is complete absurdity, rivaled only by games charging more than the price of the entire full-price game for some stupid item inside that game.
That exploitation of irrational decision-making doesn't begin at ten thousand dollars. Smaller-scale abuses of it are not better... just lesser.
We need to also legislate in game transactions so you can't get scammed in RuneScape anymore
Runescape's real-money transactions should absolutely be illegal.
The fact they had to limit people to spending thousands of dollars per week - for fucking Runescape - is a giant flashing red light. In no universe is any public MMO worth ten thousand dollars per year. But that's the kind of spending all games with real-money charges actively pursue.
If we allow this to continue there will be nothing else.
I don't think we need laws to stop a few oil barons from risking it all in the wildy, you're proposing such stupid overregulation lol. these are literally non issues
A few--?!
This is becoming EVERY GAME. Silent Hill has a battle pass! Silent Hill does not have battles! All of that shit is just lootboxes plus excuses. People finally recognize lootboxes are abusive nonsense. But all that's changed is how they're presented, so people can go, well, that was bad, but this is completely different slightly!
And all it takes to stop that from infecting the entire industry, is - stop charging real money, inside video games. A thing that was barely conceivable, fifteen years ago, when the industry was neither small nor broke. This grift takes in billions of dollars per year. Largely from children. And if you care as little about kids as I do - it's also fucking up the entire medium of video games. Again: this is becoming every game. Nothing modern is safe. You can't even reliably stay away, because it gets shoved into games, after people bought them.
If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else. Only legislation will fix this.
Word salad.
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