Hunter Hellman

No. You are. You think the impetus of the creation of a game is to make art. The impetus of the creation of the game is to use artistic skill to make money. They do that by making something interesting, entertaining and/or aesthetically pleasing, but the purpose at the outset was to make money. It’s why you claim microtransactions ruin the art. You don’t like them because they break your delusion. Books and paintings and sculptures can be art for art’s sake. They require minimal money and can be produced primarily with effort. Games are movies. They require money to make. They need to make money back to balance the ledger. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is by early commentary a good film. Universal didn’t find it because The Odyssey needed to be told again. It was made to make money. That they are selling plastic horses stuffed with popcorn doesn’t ruin that. Horse armor is the same as horse popcorn buckets. They do not ruin the art. They improve the finances.

@hunter_hellman @MADkurious You're missing the point entirely, as your friend here did as well. And you are also the problem with the game industry.

I grew up when there were no microtransactions in games, and they made money just fine.

PS2 was launched in 2000. At the time games were priced at $50, which was 1.2% of the median household income. If you charged the same today you’d have to charge $100 for a AAA game. In the same period AAA game budgets have 10x’d after inflation adjustment, so recoupment of costs requires either higher prices at same sales or higher volume of sales. Full game sales since PS2 have not increased to PS5, so why are AAA game prices 70% cheaper with higher budgets? DLC and microtransactions. What microtransactions do is concentrate the cost of the game on the people that have the highest capacity to pay, and the highest perceived value. A progressive system of expense. That allows game publishers to charge lower prices to people with less capacity to pay while still generating net earnings. If games that have microtransactions removed the microtransactions they would not become Elden Ring level sellers. If you added microtransactions to Elden Ring it would not materially diminish sales. When you say don’t have microtransactions, for most games with them, you’re saying don’t make the game at all. I see someone buying additional content to a game, skins or DLC, I say thanks for making my experience cheaper. I have never perused a skin store and never returned to a game for DLC. You see them and think “stop exploiting the consumer.” The consumer being the top 1% of consumers buying 50-90% of the sales of what you hate. Overwhelmingly a rich person with money to burn. And then you call people morons. Sell the damn horse armor.

Anecdote is the plural of data. See my Elden Ring example. You can also use Hollow Knight, Silksong, or a number of other single player video games that have made money without using microtransactions. You're exactly the problem with gaming. Art is allowing the gamer to unlock cosmetics or abilities through clever gameplay. Buying them with a credit card is not art, it's predatory. You think you're smart, but you're actually dumb as a sack of rocks, and you fling around literary terms like fallacy to make it seem like you're an authority on the subject. Do you like art? Or do you just pretend to like it? I believe its the latter.

If physical discs cause competition and discounting then why do games that never received a physical release still discount the price of their game? Because the presence of discs does not increase competition with digital storefronts. The only competition exists between retailers selling discs. It is also a very, very small amount. Competition in game pricing is not storefront vs storefront. It’s game vs game. Platforms don’t set pricing. The publishers do. Meaning every digital price was set on every digital storefront by the same company. Ubisoft has zero interest in competing with Ubisoft. That is true even for physical games. Publishers delay frequent discounting on digital platforms until physical inventory has been largely depleted. They do this, because if they compete on price with retailers there’s no reason why they can’t persistently charge for the game below retailer cost, forcing retailers to lose money on every game they previously purchased from the publisher. That ends up with them never buying games again, and bulk buys are good business for publishers so they want to keep them happy and making profit (again, they don’t compete on price). The worse a game sells, the faster the discs get discounted, the less discs get produced, the faster retailers expend inventory of discs, and the faster the game gets discounted on digital platforms routinely. Better selling games take longer to go through that cycle, but every single game does. Regardless of how many ways it’s sold. A lack of physical games does not change this. One of two things is going to happen with the end of discs. Either publishers sell retailers CIB games at wholesale prices, retailers progressively discount them until they expend their inventory and then publishers discount on digital platforms more frequently. Or They operate on a gift card model where the publisher sets pricing at retail stores and the retailer receives a small fixed percentage (3%) for facilitating the transaction. In the former scenario retailers will set pricing and provide digital discounts earlier than had occurred in the past. In the latter scenario brick and mortar will likely only get allocation at fixed prices ($69.99 or discounted to $49.99) while online retail will get adjusted pricing based upon order flow. Either way it is not only NOT bad for digital gamers it actually results in a person who ONLY buys digital games to get discounts earlier than they had in the past, because there’s no concern about undercutting their retail partners in the latter scenario. Does that mean that digital games will be cheaper persistently like disc games get priced? No. On digital storefronts they’re targeting both price sensitive and price insensitive customers. They will price games most of the time at $69.99 and then quarterly, and then monthly they’ll drop the price to the actual price threshold to boost sales. Disc buyers lose ready access to discounted games (in the gift card scenario), digital buyers lose nothing and gain earlier discounts.

@ProSportsGuru93 You have too much faith in corporations that don't care about you. it's wiser to be skeptical. With the physical disc market all but got, including second hand, they won't have many good reasons to give competitive pricing and sales on their own games.

Prepare yourself for these sales to be less and less generous as Sony ends disc production. No discs means no competition. This hurts everyone.

PlayStation is going to end up being far and away the best ecosystem to buy games on and you’re throwing a temper tantrum directed at a red herring rather than directing it at what you should be demanding. PlayStation, Steam, Nintendo, Apple, Google and Microsoft are tickled pink that the focus is on discs rather than digital rights.

I'm thinking of selling my PS5. Just kind of disgusted with Sony and modern gaming in general. My daughter and I love our Switch 2 and she barely plays anything on PlayStation. Anyone else feeling the same way?

@GameJoker_ People wanted more moving grass and hair. They demanded it!

Video game graphics 10 years ago:

@blazersJJ @ManaByte They dropped the price to $49, because they were being greedy.

@ManaByte I didn't say Nintendo did it? Obviously retailers did. The greed to not lower prices on Switch 1 consoles and games is abnormal. I'm not sure what you are arguing?

Reminder that this photo was taken in 2006 (five years after the console launched) when retailers were having a fire sale with their GameCube stock because the Wii was completely backwards compatible with it (people forget that the Wii even had GameCube controller ports) and no one would buy a GameCube when they could get a Wii that would play all the new games and their entire GameCube library.

@Yogification_ @ymnis_v1 @hawkdeltaX30 Two of those are more expensive after shipping, the other is $1 cheaper. Think of all the things you can buy!

@ymnis_v1 @hawkdeltaX30 Yeah it was now what? Doesn’t matter if it’s eBay it still debunks your point

remember: “physical is always cheaper” isn’t an argument. it’s a slogan.

@tmccau01 @js02 @eMTBrides Cutting onions is so traumatic that it causes people to cry. Show some empathy.

@js02 @eMTBrides Im not a vet or pretend to know better. But unless im mistaken she said she was a cook? Are they exposed to ptsd type events frequently?

She makes $8000 per month from this? For all of you confused. No one is receiveing $8,000 solely from disability. The maximum you can receive is $4,000 or around that. The other $4,000 I’m assuming is the amount she’s receiving from school. It’s an E-5 Basic Allowance for Housing. You get paid to go to school for 36 months 🤔 #calebhammer #financialaudit

@wholemars Easiest way to indoctrinate kids into a worldview is to give their teachers an propaganda machine and call it free.

Teacher: Good news class, Dario has decided to extend our usage limits another week! We can get back to work know Kids: *All Groan* Teacher: Also Billy, someone from the FBI is here to see you. Claude called the police on you after one of your recents chats Billy: Fuuuck

The entire point is to appoint someone that will vote the way he would’ve voted. The way the people of South Carolina elected Lindsey Graham to vote. Because he didn’t have a wife or kids she is the most likely person to do that. That she’s not an existing politician, and presumably won’t run in the primary in August it prevents giving additional weight/name recognition to a person that would run. That allows the people of South Carolina to select their next Republican candidate without disproportional top down influence compared to normal elections. They then have an election in November. The new person takes the seat in January and through the whole process the will of the people is preserved.

The Senate is a dynastic monarchy I guess.

@esaagar Great way to cause financial burden for people that had it and then turned 36.

I have the courage to say what no politician will: If we're going to have property tax relief for any cohort by age it should be for those under age 35 All incentives should be explicitly age gated to EXCLUDE seniors

@SSPsGoku @Carpanfan96 @TTomcat98632 Tingsa be mora expensa me tinksa yah yah. Expensa go uppah meansah not betta yah yah. Disca be betta thansah digital yah yah.

@hunter_hellman @Carpanfan96 @TTomcat98632 It's backups, propagation, maintenance, server upgrades, etc that I'm talking about as the exponential costs. In recent years due to the AI boom this cost has grown significantly and will continue to grow in cost. Even if the game is dead, it's adding to this cost.

Why can't #Sony #Playstation use these discs for their games. They can hold a MASSIVE 1 Terrabytes (1000GB) of data each. You could fit #GTA6 on one disc 3x over. Oh l know, because Sony #RockstarGames are anti consumer fucks and don't like Physical Media

@GoopLloyd @infrikinfix @katrosenfield Nah, kid should’ve shown a little respect.

@infrikinfix @katrosenfield Yeah he’s a dick to kids cause he doesn’t like them and then he has to protect two of them for the whole movie and then he likes them.

this seems like a good time to confess that for an embarrassingly long time, I profoundly misunderstood the character of Dr. Grant in Jurassic Park owing to the mistaken belief that he was reading the riot act in this scene to a small, weird-looking adult woman

@DVADigital323 The fuck is Ben 10?

Millennials be like: Gen Z doesn’t understand and it’s like watching Ben 10 or Teen Titans

@MzLadeeSuga Lawsuits will fail and you’re boosting the reach of their game promotions.

Sony/PlayStation is getting backlash from their consumers AND getting fucked by all these lawsuits, against them. Lmaooooo, cooked and I'm here for it. 😂

The game is already stored in a data centers goober. The incremental cost is bandwidth. The conversion from physical to digital is way higher than you think it will be, because the primary reason people buy physical is for price concerns. What physical games do is delay discounting and reduces the depth of discounting so retailers can clear inventory. A $5 additional reduction on digital games in an environment devoid of physical sales will induce incremental sales at a net-net greater margin. You don’t understand what you’re talking about.

@Carpanfan96 @hunter_hellman @TTomcat98632 That response was to the other guy suggesting a 100% conversion rate from physical to digital I saw you're in IT so I wouldn't think you'd need the technical breakdown. I'm not sure how much you work in datacenters but that space has been exponentially growing in upkeep costs.

@GhostFrom3S @gr33dy_phantom @progamer999x Physical games not only don’t cause digital discounts (they don’t, ever) they reduce their frequency and depth.

@gr33dy_phantom @progamer999x What makes Sony the worst of the bunch is, at least as of right now, they made the move to kill physical media. I don't care for Nintendo, but, at the very least, you can choose to not buy games through eshop.

Max perfectly explains why Sony going full digital with Playstation really sucks for the consumer, regardless if you mainly indulge in Digital or Physical.

@progamer999x @GhostFrom3S It is in fact a digital vs physical issue and the conclusion you should arrive at is physical game restrict digital discounts. If you are a digital game buyer the existence of physical games delays digital discounts and reduces the depth of discounts.

@GhostFrom3S steam is all digital and has better sales than any physical retailer. this isnt a digital vs physical issue, its a sony issue.

@micsolana I remembering thinking some sense of accepting that it happened, that it was unfortunate that it was necessary, and a disturbance that people celebrated.

I didn’t even feel this way when osama bin laden died. I remember thinking, nothing has changed. they’re all still dead, and the world’s still changed forever. I was just sad.

@itsoksmit My idea doesn’t suck. It’s just misunderstood. Ahead of its time. Prick!

vibe coding allows "ideas guys" to bring their ideas to reality, revealing that their idea kinda sucked