You do realize that’s the case for every form of IP, right?
“Man, I want to read the new Brandon Sanderson book, and eat food this month. But the publisher is asking $4,000 for a copy!! What theft!! I’m going to have to subsist on chewing dirt for the next few months!”
Or, sane response:
“Well, that price is ludicrous. I guess I’ll read other books” (and in this case, play other football games)
The argument that people „vote with their wallet“ is not new. But the fundamental problem is that you can’t make them. They have jobs, kids and might not be the most intelligent people. So if the kids ask for this game, they might get overwhelmed by life and make bad decisions. Welcome to being human.
The issue is that corporations are not subject to „life“ so they are able to shape the market as they pleased unless stopped. It has happened countless times. Mergers being stopped because it gave them too much power, predatory business practices leading to lawsuits because they keep competition away.
It’s all about power balance. They can employ psychologists to study our behavior, we can’t and the government can’t and is too slow.
So yes, the „game difficulty“ for large corporations needs to be upped significantly.
You voting with your wallet does not mean that your vote wins every time. Madden might still exist even if you don't buy it. But at least you can direct the money you would have spent on it elsewhere, to someone who needs it more.
I know and I didn’t say otherwise. But this only focuses on you and does not solve the underlying issue. I‘m not saying buy the game. I‘m saying the corporations have too much power.
You take that power away by voting with your wallet though. EA just had its ass handed to them via BattleBit, delivering the game that fans actually wanted, not to mention Baldur's Gate 3 outdoing the last number of efforts from EA's own BioWare. Voting with your wallet isn't an overnight process, and often enough, it brings corporations down.
I‘m not disagreeing that not buying stuff is good. I am saying that we are not bringing corporations down and we are not discouraging them from finding new ways to fuck with us.
Madden 22 raked in 4.4 billion usd. Apparently, typical AAA games take about 60 mil usd to make. That is a 6.666% margin.
Now make something and sell it on ebay, amazon or anywhere for that margin and people will cancel you in a heartbeat. In the country I live in, if you sell something for more than twice the original price, you can get sued.
But nobody has all the stuff required to make a competitor to madden. So you control the market. Pretty easy to grasp in my opinion. And games also are getting more and more convoluted with trash paid dlc, crypto, nfts. You can look at minecraft bedrock for example. Nobody is telling bill gates to stop because people have no choice but to miss out on the game, have their kid not participate in school buddies chit chat and so on. It’s an impossible situation to solve on a „vote with your wallet“ basis.
Apparently, typical AAA games take about 60 mil usd to make.
I don't know where you got that figure, but it sounds very outdated. I expect each iteration of Madden to cost several times that to produce. Video games are also a very scalable product to sell, so your margin comparison to a product sold on Amazon is not apt. Avengers and Forspoken had negative profit margins, for instance, because the economics of selling those things is very different than a product on Amazon.
And games also are getting more and more convoluted with trash paid dlc, crypto, nfts.
The business model has always affected the game design at every step in the medium's history. We used to have quarter-guzzling arcade games as the primary way games were made. Crypto and NFTs aren't taking; it was a bubble that burst just like tulip bulbs and beanie babies. Other business models have come and gone in games before, like subscription MMOs and "project $10" online passes.
Nobody is telling bill gates to stop because people have no choice but to miss out on the game, have their kid not participate in school buddies chit chat and so on.
I‘m tired of talking about this stuff today. It’s like going to a different planet and having to explain that there are other planets with life on them, what experience we made on them and still being „corrected“ at every step.
For the video game Marvel’s Avengers, that budget was more than $178 million. Though the film was a hit, remaining the 10th highest-grossing movie ever, this game was far less successful. It never became profitable, losing the developer and publisher tens of millions of dollars in all.
It’s very boring to have people „know“ everything. I‘ll just leave. You believe whatever you like.
You’re missing the point. This is not about the Madden. This is about the Not-Madden.
Voting with your wallet is not “Refusing to buy a media for several months until its publisher relents and cuts its price in half, meanwhile depositing your $60 in a jar for when the day the price falls”. Instead, it is “When you have money for entertainment, you use it for properties OTHER than the one you used to go for”.
So, to further my example; “Me/my kid really wants the new Brandon Sanderson book, but instead of chewing dirt to pay for it, we decided to vote with our wallets! …But, because Sanderson is a crazy eccentric billioinaire with a patience greater than 5 years, he just INCREASED the price in retaliation to $8 million! What are we to do? …Read OTHER books? HERESY!”
Blaming the subject on corporate psychology is a complete cop-out. They do not grab your wrist and force you to click the Buy button. I’ll make some allowances for instances of gambling addiction (and I would not try to apply this pricing logic to the housing market due to collusion and other factors) but otherwise, price acknowledgment is a very human thing people need to get used to considering, even when it comes to beloved IPs.
I can see your train of thought and it makes sense up to the last part.
As someone who has studied sales and marketing actively for nearly two decades, built rather large companies and happens to be very good at pattern recognition, I know that people don’t understand what is being done to them.
Psychology has been used for a long time to study how to make someone act against their best self interest. Putting this on people with addiction problems is both selling them short and underestimating the problem.
Sales people in certain companies (that I have been to) learn how to use body language, speech patterns, behavioral patterns and other things to manipulate people into buying a particular thing at a particular time. Keep in mind that there is a human in control in this situation and unless they have psychopathic tendencies, they will try to work with the customer instead of against them.
But this is also done in marketing. Best example is the facebook/instagram/youtube algorithm, where the goal is to keep you on the site. It is done (very simplified) with showing you everything that will or might interest, aggravate or otherwise trigger you to keep watching. I‘m not saying it is impossible to leave but especially the not so strong characters will comply. Again, this is the majority of people, not the minority.
From there it is only a small step to actually selling you stuff your don’t actually want/need by showing you price increases (urgency), many different products (availability), fitting videos on other sites (cross site tracking).
These are only the ones I have crossed in my career. It shows that the mentally vulnerable (especially kids) get blasted with this stuff and manipulated into thinking certain thoughts and wanting certain things.
So, while your extreme boom example does play out as you say, the overarching problem has a lot less remarkable features and is therefore harder to spot and harder to fight.
Combine that with giant companies that own 60% of popular sports games for example and you absolutely have a problem.
„Vote with your wallet“ only serves these corporations because nobody cares about 3 less sales if you can manipulate everyone to buying more of these.
This is why the only solution that will put an end to this is outlawing what we call „dark patterns“ (google it) and break up large corporations.
The thing is, by paying for food we should be paying the employees - that’s how salaries work. But in an effort to out-compete each other in the razor-thin margin business that is most restaurants, they don’t want their menu prices to go up, because that discourages customer spending. So many restaurants use underhanded tactics to screw customers instead. Hidden menu prices, sneaky service fees, and begging for point-of-sale tips at places where they’re not getting paid shitty server salaries (like fast food).
But for some reason, those menu prices still are higher than for example in Germany, where service charge isn’t a thing and tips are “round up so I don’t get small change back”.
Probably because in our atmosphere we more readily criticize bosses taking 90%+ off the top, while in the US it’s entirely normal that any increase in prices goes entirely into the manager pockets and the servers continue to be paid just enough to physically survive so they can show up for work again.
And sure, it happens a lot over here, too. But to a lesser degree, and not as readily. The base climate is different.
I disagree. Those prices are pretty typical for most (proper) german restaurants and i would even say some of it is on the more affordable side. Also, while tipping culture isn’t what it is in the US, giving less than 10% will make the waiter almost certainly hate you.
That’s no excuse for that outrageous “service fee”, of course.
There better be a big noticeable sign at the entrance telling you this. Otherwise, this is a bait and switch scam. Advertising one price, giving the service, and then changing the price. You can’t advertise a price and then charge more for it without ensuring that the customer is informed about it. The only exception is tax, since it is something the average person should already expect. Even mandatory gratuity for large parties has to be communicated ahead of time. And this specifically says it’s not gratuity, it’s a charge for the service.
As soon as a customer is served something, it’s too late. You can’t just put it on the bill. Doesn’t matter what they say it’s for either. It’s not your responsibility to pay the servers anymore than it’s your responsibility to separately pay for the ingredients of the food. Unless they want to detail it all out up front. But then you’d see the huge profit margin.
That one is annoying but also makes perfect sense when everyone is competing with everyone. The business with honest prices suffers when their nearby competitor doesn’t include it and looks cheaper. The states lose out on revenue if they force businesses to display full prices but the state next door doesn’t, or has better tax rates. They all benefit from confusion.
Where there is not confusion is the border with a state with no sales tax, and all the good shopping is found on one side.
For a real fun US-ism, fuel in the US is charged at fractions of a penny (9/10s). As any Office Space fan can tell you, that adds up.
Fuel in the UK (and most of Europe I believe) is charged in tenths of a penny too.
Is there not a way to make it a nationwide requirement to advertise including tax? I know very little about US economics so there might be a very good reason, I never really thought much about it beyond “huh, that’s weird” to be honest.
I don’t think there is an easy way to make it nationwide, the powers of the federal government include interstate commerce but the sales taxes are at the state or local level.
Yeah, that seems mad. What’s the reason? Why can’t it be set at a national value like the rest of the world? Is it simply historical and too many powerful people’s pockets would get lighter if it were changed? I’m sure there’s a reason, I just can’t see it.
The primary reason is that taxing is done at state, country, and city levels and they all apply different amounts in different areas. The tax can vary just crossing out of a city and into an unincorporated area or between neighboring cities. So rather than having different prices when you provide services for customers in different locations, it’s easier to separate it out.
Like I used to do tech support for small home based businesses mostly, and so I didn’t have a “place of business”. I had three sets of customers, one lived in my city and county, another lived in my city but a different county, and another lived in that second county in a different city.
Originally, I was just charging a set hourly rate and eating the tax cost even though it was a pain to figure out the math. The problem came when with some of those rates, because of rounding, charging that amount for one hour might work ok, but charging that same amount for 2 hours or 3 hours would make it off by one cent and there was no way to reconcile it for the accounting software and tax forms and such. And I didn’t want to charge pennies. So I just made it easy and all new customers I charged tax separately.
This is just more of the same. Every time some company thinks they’ve thrown enough money at the problem to DRM their way to success, somebody inevitably finds a fix, workaround, or bypass. Sometimes within a single day.
The main issue is that no-one in past, be it movie, music, or gaming industry, had the control which Google has with the web.
Web is 90% Chromium, Email is 60+% Gmail, Android is 70+% mobile worldwide, and Google already provides a lot of things like Google login, oAuth, etc. for free.
This means for a web dev, making a website WEI compatible shouldn’t be much of a hassle, and if they protest, Google can totally twist their arms to get us way.
WEI is dangerous because who’s behind it, not because what it is.
Not to mention AdSense and YouTube with whatever percentages they control of their respective markets. Google holds a lot of separate monopolies for just one company
While on a side I agree with you, on the other I see everytime people complaining about subscription fatigue and they never, ever would pay a recurring amount for a game.
I figured savvy sports fans would find a good simulation game without the license and just mod in the updated rosters, but that never seemed to happen.
There are no other football games that are even respectable efforts, and despite the rhetoric, Madden is actually a very good football sim that continually gets developed from year to year.
I suppose I implied but didn't explicitly state that my expectation is that someone would develop that competent football game. There's an early access game now, arguably 15 years too late, called Football Simulator that could be that game. If it's well-made, hopefully it serves that audience. But I don't think it's just rhetoric. Madden review scores have been falling in later years, and that's to be expected when they have a monopoly on the NFL license.
Reviews are extremely lazily done and about game modes. The game modes have seen minimal development since the emergence of ultimate team, and people are justifiably unhappy with that.
Literally not one major outlet is evaluating the actual simulation of the sport, which very clearly has massive investment from year to year and sees serious improvements to complexity and fidelity in each instance, with stagnation only coming when it hits the wall of what console hardware can do.
I've seen football simulator. It might maybe be competitive on physics with decade ago Madden, but even that's generous. If you just want a vehicle for franchise mode it might work for you, but if you want to play football it's just not close. Madden isn't perfect as a football sim either, because the physics of football are insanely complex, but there's nothing out there that's better than "kind of close to a decade ago" technically. You're much more likely to make something tolerable leaning into the discrepancy and making an arcade-y NFL Street knockoff, and that isn't there either.
Value for money is a great thing to evaluate in a review, and the simulation of the sport has seen an increase in bugs in recent years, hence the lower scores.
the simulation of the sport has seen an increase in bugs in recent years,
This is a ridiculous lie. It's not even in the general vicinity of reality.
The absolute best mainstream review of Madden in existence is a many times less competent version of that platformer review where the guy couldn't get through the tutorial. You unconditionally are not qualified to give any opinion in any context if you don't understand the mechanics and strategy of the sport.
Fine. I don't play Madden. But I know with the sources I follow on games news, this is what gets echoed back. Giant Bomb does a quick look for the game, say up front that they don't expect to get through it without encountering bugs, and then they encounter bugs. The kinds of bugs you'd recognize no matter how into football you are.
EDIT: Yup, bugs are mentioned in many reviews for the last several years of Madden. Seems to be the reality.
There will always be bugs. It's the nature of a complex simulation with emergent gameplay.
But anyone telling you that they're increasing doesn't know what they're talking about. They're increasingly small edge cases as the simulation gets very obviously more advanced and complex every iteration. It's not minor and it's not subtle. If you play ten hours a year with a middle school football level of understanding the improvements are impossible to miss.
Any review from someone who doesn't watch football every week all season is the exact same quality of someone who's never played an FPS reviewing a tactical shooter. it has literally zero value in any possible context and it's an embarrassment to your organization to publish it.
I can't speak for every reviewer, but a good number of them do watch football every week. Plenty of games have advanced simulations and don't have texture bugs and T posing. I'm glad you enjoy the games, but the reviews are what they are for a reason. I'm also not sure how you went from, "Anyone saying these games are buggy is lying" to "Of course it will have bugs!"
The reviews are what they are because there are literally zero gaming outlets who respect the existence of sports games or cover them the way they cover anything else.
I play hundreds of games a year and have literally never once seen a player t pose on the field. It's not a thing that's a normal or frequent occurrence, and anyone who tells you it is isn't just incompetent. They're deliberately and maliciously lying to you, and in and of itself it's incontrovertible proof that their entire review is fraud.
If you’re paying for a new version every year, is all that different than paying for a service? At the very least, with the yearly release model, you can simply decide not to pay for a year and keep playing the old one.
ROFL! Dude asks why people “still play that shit” without offering an argument for discussion and you’re telling me I’m aggressive and that I should offer reasons before posting??
Sure. I’ll play along-
How about…. People play it because they enjoy sports games. Is that’s a good reason? And for the record… if I wanted to be aggressive,I would have countered with “why do people play shit like Pokémon, or DBZ games? I didn’t do this because it’s not for me to decide what others play or why. Nor do I judge anyone for what they play regardless of my opinion.
Perhaps this is not a sentiment shared often in this community.
I make a difference between referring to an inanimate object as „shit“ and getting up in someones face about it.
This is why I say it’s aggressive. And yes, you would have been right to call them out and say „because people enjoy it.“ or something along those lines.
It’s not worth discussing this at length. Dude has a point that many people have a problem with the software for different reasons and you have a point that people enjoy that stuff. All I‘m saying is please be kind to eachother.
A lot of people are only passingly interested in video games. For people that just want to sit down and play something having to learn about the game and how it’s played is work, not entertainment. I can see how someone who only games maybe once a week could have some real fun playing a sports game. It’s very easy to pick up because they already know the rules. I don’t agree personally, for me games are the most fun when I’m interacting with a new mechanic, but I am also willing to grind for hours optimizing and learning to push the game to its limits. If you don’t have the time for all that, but you still want to game, sports games are a perfect entry point. Not even I can come up with a justification for the pricing though.
Yeah I have a version of Madden from 2015 that works perfectly fine and seems to be more or less the same game, have been very happy with it. I refuse to pay $70 for a game that I know is riddled with microtransactions for really… nothing else changing
I am curious as to why you say the game riddled with microtransactions? The only microtransactions I have ever seen is the card pack shit and that is incredibly easy to not pay for by just playing the other 95% of gameplay features they offer in the game that are completely free of microtransactions.
I usually merge because I like to see commit history as it happened and because rebasing multiple commits with conflicts is more time-consuming than fixing it in one merge commit.
I do rebase smaller changes though to reduce merge commit clutter and like interactive rebase to clean up my local commit mess before pushing.
I create a new branch locally with git switch --create, pull everything from main, sacrifice a small squirrel, and run the project to make sure everything still works.
If something doesn’t work or I can’t figure out how to resolve conflicts, I quietly switch back to my previous branch like nothing happened. That problem is for future me.
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