Oh boy. £120 to just unlock the base characters or "dozens and dozens" of hours of grind for each of them.
We'll see how this goes, but I see this going the way of Suicide Squad. I wonder when, if ever, Warner Bros. Is going to learn that players are actively pushing back against corporate greed and live service games are already way past the limit of microtransactions that players deem acceptable.
Zaslov's plan is everything has to actively make money and all the free space on screen should be making money. Fuck the creators who make the things he sells, he wants the creations to always make money. Things that don't make money aren't culturally valuable and are thrown away. So that's the directive WB seems to be following and Multiversus is the latest casualty to Zaslov's Plan.
WB already fucked things up before he arrived, and Zaslov has just made things worse.
This is the guy that's largely responsible for reality TV taking over all channels Discovery owns, so yeah. This was sadly to be expected.
I wonder when, if ever, Warner Bros. Is going to learn that players are actively pushing back against corporate greed and live service games are already way past the limit of microtransactions that players deem acceptable.
Some time after that actually happens.
Yes, there are a lot of players in various social networks loudly complaining about the phenomenon (although I suspect many of those are not even in the target audience to begin with), and there are even some actively boycotting these games, but so long as there are enough of them left willing to play ball, and especially some with an exploitable addiction-prone personality that can be hooked on loot boxes and microtransactions until they spend more than they have, there just isn't anything for these companies here to "learn". Other than "hey, this is insanely profitable".
They may get insulted on Xitter for it, but who cares, everybody gets insulted on Shitter…
Well, they've already lost £200M on Suicide Squad alone, so here's to hoping they can continue losing money thanks to their greed.
I will be voting with my wallet/attention. Don't play games with unacceptable monetization. It's not enough to play it and not spend money.
I just don't like that Multiversus matches you against bots disguised as human players. Instant deal breaker for me.
Any game that does that is an instant uninstall
PUBG was one of my favorite games… uninstalled the day they implemented bots.
Very common in mobile games too.
Call of Duty Mobile does that, and I hate it.
What a waste. Eliminate even did a launch event for the game.
All of this talent poured into this thing, just to get fucked by the monetization model.
That's the story for 99% of non-indie games (and some indie games, but they somewhat less likely to monetize the shit out of it)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Eliminate even did a launch event for the game.
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It's easy to blame the monetization model, but the devs did decide to pour their effort into a project, knowing that they would likely be cucked by their publisher. There was an way to easily avoid this, even if it meant the game wouldn't have gotten as much attention. The fewer people use publishers, the less they dominate the front page of retailers.
Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
If we allow this to continue there will be nothing else.
Only legislation will fix this.
I think nothing inside a full priced video game should cost real money.
There's plenty of examples of F2P games that have reasonable monetization in the form of mtx.
Manipulating players into paying unbounded quantities of real money for essentially nothing is an abuse, whether or not that casino has a cover charge. If you can grind something for free or pay one dollar, the entire product exists to harass you into paying that dollar, as often as you will tolerate.
There is no ethical form of this. Games make you value arbitrary nonsense - that is what makes them games. $600 scimitar bundles inside a full-price game are not different from whatever hamburger-priced hat you're eager to defend; they're just smaller. The problem is identical. Any successful example is optimized for addiction and frustration. They are deliberately unsatisfying, after a period coaxing you into habits and expectations, so they can dangle the button that costs a dollar to press, and make you feel good again every time you press it. That's why the product is "free." That's why the product exists. All that art and gameplay shit is bait on the hook.
Any successful example is optimized for addiction and frustration.
That is just plain wrong.
Addiction I guess but frustration definitely not necessarily.
There are countless examples of highly successful games that do not monetize like that.
You can happily play PoE for thousands of hours without paying a penny; if you want to get into trading drop like 20 bucks for some stash tabs and you are ready to go again for absolutely any content the game has to offer.
CS or LoL also work just fine for f2p players.
And I say that as a player that fucking hates the new generation of soulless live service games.
Manufactured discontent is the only reason these games make money. They're not a charity. They goad you into wanting whatever costs money. You can say no, but they try their absolute damnedest to squeeze out a yes.
Success here is inseparable from wringing money out of players using any means necessary. Acting polite and gentle is just another tactic. You are still being manipulated.
There's no game that's just so gosh-darn enoyable that people freely throw four billion dollars at it, out of the goodness of their hearts. They get roped in and ground down. They brag about how many thousands of hours they've spent not being addicted. They insist they chose to buy the stuff that's shoved in their face on every load screen and round summary. Obviously they feel no obligation whatsoever toward mere cosmetics, but oh wow look how fancy that is, it super sucks you don't have one of those.
Like, I don't know what a "stash tab" is, but I bet if I look it up, it's gonna be added functionality that's objectively missing from the default version of the game, and that it costs the company approximately nothing. (Ugh, I shouldn't have actually looked it up. That whole page is gross.) You obviously want that. It is withheld from you. Maybe not exclusively for real money - but gosh, what a lot of grinding it'd take, if you don't fork over real money. Maybe just this once... right?
right?
No, still wrong.
Obviously it is something that is not given to you for free.
It is a product and the developers/publishers are doing business after all.
And yes Sherlock, it is qol functionality that people playing the endgame might want and that is not included in the free version of the game.
But every functionality that any player ever needs is available for far less than what any other AAA title costs up front.
PoE is mainly financed by purely cosmetic supporter packs and whales.
Is that much more ethical than what you described? Maybe not.
But it sure as hell is not banking on frustrating the average user and thus a completely different form of monetization than the one that you just doubled down on insisting is the only one there is.
So again as I said, you are just plain wrong.
Oh and in CS I don't think you can buy any functionality at all.
Only cosmetics, that don't do anything for you in the game.
It's a charge. It's neither a product nor a service. The game is a product. Connectivity is a service. Charging an actual dollar for imaginary gems is a scam.
Stop using this industry-wide problem as an excuse for personal insults.
PoE is mainly financed by purely cosmetic supporter packs and whales.
And what? Oh right, the victims being taken for thousands of dollars, each, for a game that's allegedly free. Mostly over the thing people insist nobody is interested in, so it's fine if each thing costs as much as a whole-ass indie game, and there's ten thousand.
Withholding that is frustration. You are made to want it. Once upon a time, choosing how you looked in a video game was just part of the fucking game.
Withholding quality-of-life is obviously frustration. There is a better version of the game, dangled in front of you, constantly. The entire rest of the game exists to nudge you against that grindstone.
CS is a hilarious example because of how insane the market is for shit you helpfully point out has no gameplay value. It's almost like there's other levers for influencing player desires! Jealousy, fear of missing out, basic peacocking - all of these things are exploited to maximum effect. Tweaking people's brains is how games work, and this business model is slapping a price tag on that direct manipulation.
You comment and comment and explain and explain shit that everyone already knows.
It is like you just recently learned what marketing is and now you feel like you know some big secret.
Just to make it short.
Every product in the world is marketed in a way to motivate consumers to buy.
That is not inherently immoral.
You said every successful game monetizes by maximizing addiction and frustration.
I have proven you wrong by naming games that just DO NOT MAXIMIZE FRUSTRATION.
Yeah off course even those games dangle stuff in front of you that you are supposed to buy.
That's the whole business model of f2p games.
But there are different ways to get to the players money.
There are those that indeed trigger responses to frustration.
This is absolutely prevalent in mobile games or even those million deckbuilder games.
But there just are also games that use other ways to make players buy mtx.
Again, you can play PoE, LoL, CS and many other games for literal thousands of hours without ever getting coaxed into frustrating barriers like a Diablo Immortals would do to players.
You said there aren't. So you were wrong.
So have fun running around with a goalpost in your hand, I am done.
As if frustration can only mean getting big mad at gameplay. Not, I dunno, the constant dissatisfaction and denial I've consistently described at such length that you roll your eyes at how often I keep explaining what I fucking meant the entire time.
You might as well fixate on "addiction" by saying video games can't cause chemical withdrawal.
Your efforts in these games are ineffectual and discouraging toward the parts that cost money. Doesn't matter how the game plays - it only exists to keep you looking at those things you don't have. Yes - that is the whole business model of these games. That's why they need to die.
It's probably better than NASB2 (Nickelodeon All Star Brawl 2). I'm so glad I didn't pay full price for that game.
As someone that's put a lot of time into platform fighters and grew up on Nickelodeon, the character designs in that game are so void of personality and it makes me sad. Aang barely moves like the avatar, he just kind of generically slings around elemental attacks. It's really frustrating how much potential they let languish
Multiversus has that overproduction stank all over it, so it being this void of sauce as it were isn't surprising, but NASB is the one I feel actively kind of betrayed by
I knew the day it was announced that it would be trash. Glad I never bothered with it.
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