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by jmyeet
1568 days ago
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Yeah this was obvious 10 years ago with the rise of mobile gaming. The only difference between mobile gaming and other forms is that the payment infrastructure was so easily accessible and seamless integrated. But 10+ years ago we had Farmville and then on mobile we had thing slike Candy Crush, Clash of Clans and so on. These aren't games. They're A/B tested addiction loops optimized to extract as much money from you as possible. You can see the impact of this on World of Warcraft, which is >17 years old at this point. In its original form it had traditional RPG game loops. Over the years it has become increasingly dominatded by "micro-transactions". These includes services like character transfers, boosts, racce changes and name changes. It also includes a bunch of cosmetics. Some people are most OK with cosmetics for monetization but this still has a problem. It creates an incentive for the game designers to make paid cosmetics better than in-game cosmetics to encourage you to buy them. You see this in WoW where in-game mounts sometimes look like they're made of 7 triangles while store mounts are rendered in semi-translucent 3D with particle effects, modern textures, large triangle counts and special moves. More importantly though cosmetics matter. The ability to flex through cosmetics is a huge motivator to players. The fact that someone can swipe a credit card and devalue in-game accomplishments really destroys any incentives to work towards in-game goals. Outside of FPS games there are depressingly few actual games out there (as opposed to addiction pay-to-win treadmills). I like computer adaptations of board games for this reason because at least these games tend to stay true to being "games". |
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WoW still has some of the best raid encounter design out right now.
I’m not disagreeing about the effect of performance marketing/aggressive growth strategies on the industry but this idea that there are “true” games and then everything else is like playing mindless slot machines doesn’t really make sense to me