Noita, Hades, Factorio. Three insanely good games without ads or ingame purchases with very high replayability. Just don’t give EA more money, please.
Electronic Arts started out so differently. The best, highest quality games, sold in album cases like vinyl records. They wanted to make their devs into rock stars. M.U.L.E., Seven Cities of Gold, Archon. Every game was innovative in every way.
Much later they’d changed, shifted toward the dark side, slipping way. But they still managed to bring us two of my favorite MMOs of all time: Motor City Online and Earth and Beyond.
MCO was online multiplayer Need For Speed with real classic American cars with real hot rod parts, the real engines, everything. I’ve not seen anything like it since. Hardly no one wants to pay to license real world cars any more. And you certainly don’t get the real engines with the real hot rod parts.
EAB was a crappy FPS but somehow 2D space game, but it had the best crafting and leveling system. You take things apart eventually learning how to build things. Player built stuff could possibly go was high as 200% quality so other players would want to buy your wares. The leveling system had three distinct lines: exploration, combat, and trade. Play the game how you wanted to having fun your way not how they think you should.
Anyway, EA killed them both, turned off the servers, refused to release the server code so player servers or single player modes were impossible. They sent me a coupon for their new Sims game, though.
So fuck EA. Haven’t bought a single one of their games since.
BG3
Buying games online was supposed to be cheaper, too. Cuz no money spent on packaging and retail space…
Honestly, I can’t even remember the last time I bought an EA game. What do they even make these days besides sports games?
Yes, but also the star wars and sims franchise
Only ea games I can think of that I’ve bought are jedi: fallen order and jedi: survivor. And I only bought them because they’re actually good games that aren’t monetized like a casino.
They been doing that since forever ago
They’re also using YOUR bandwidth to download these ads.
Yeah seriously; I’ve been seeing ads like this in games since at least the 6th generation of consoles (PS2/GameCube/XBOX). I distinctly remember seeing Napster and Cingular Wireless ads in Tony Hawk’s Underground 2, for example.
Hell, in the 90s we had entire games that were basically ads, like Chex Quest, Cool Spot (7-Up), and M.C. Kids (McDonald’s).
its almost like the rate of profit is falling, forcing capitalists to find new ways to exploit everything and everyone around them…
fuck that, if it has ads and/or microtransactions it better be free
Can’t wait for nobody to understand ads in old video games when they’re being played years later.
It also always reminds me of this: https://piped.video/watch?v=XPGgTy5YJ-g
Bold of you to assume the games will even be available to play years later.
There is literally no reason to hardcode the ads in the game. They need a placeholder that will show ads fetched from an API, like Google ads. The ads will always be up to date and targeted
There is literally no reason to hardcode the ads in the game. They need a placeholder that will show ads fetched from an API, like Google ads. The ads will always be up to date and targeted
There is literally no reason to hardcode the ads in the game. They need a placeholder that will show ads fetched from an API, like Google ads. The ads will always be up to date and targeted
Billboard ads? Shitty but ehh not that bad overall. In game ads over radio or video? Nah miss me on that.
Indie games, FromSoft, and larian ftw.
Great games are cheaper than ever. If you buy into those only trying to extract as much money from you as possible, that’s on you
hear hear. best games i play are significantly cheaper than 60 bucks, and are compete packages.
Their games should be free at this point
I’m so glad I haven’t bought an EA game since Battlefield 1942.
I’m not at all defending advertisements because, like every single person on earth, I hate them. However, the constant complaint that ~games are expensive~ is more and more becoming absolutely out of touch. Considering how complex modern games are from a software standpoint, they are fucking cheap as hell. $60 for (generally speaking) 40+ hours of entertainment is a goddamn bargain, not to mention they’ve mostly been priced the same for the better part of two decades. Y’all realize actual people make these things right? People who need to be paid for the work they do? Of all the absolute shit that happens behind the scenes and in plain daylight in the gaming industry, I think we can find better things to bitch about than the price of games.
You realize that it’s much easier now to make a game than it was two decades ago (see other comment)? That digital platforms make it more accessible for buyers to get your game? That the overall trend in the industry has been to get a game out as fast as possible then try to patch it after the fact, when that wasn’t even an option two decades ago (internet existed, sure, but not everyone had good internet)? Sure, the quality of graphics may have gone up, but everything else has been left behind.
Also, saying that people complaining about price is out-of-touch, is itself out-of-touch. Most people have even less purchasing power now than they did two decades ago and you want us to pay even more for a product inferior to what we would’ve gotten years ago?
Considering that most titles are cross platform I’d say it’s actually much more difficult to produce games these days than it was in the past (see Cyberpunk’s shaky release due to it trying to run on everything under the sun at launch—and being forced out too early due to investor demand). It’s not like game engines and other development tools make it so people press a button that says “make game” and the game pops into existence.
My main point is that games have not actually gone up in price for over two decades. And, as you have pointed out as well, there are an awful lot of actual things to complain about with the gaming industry. The out of pocket cost we pay to play the games is really not one of them.
I guess some thing about it, like a game costs less than a big budget Hollywood movie to make, and Hollywood movie tickets don’t cost $80
but audience for movies like 100x times bigger, yk
Sounds like they’re screwing the loyal fans to make up the cash. Imagine if an independent movie or snap budget film charged $80 a ticket because they have a smaller audience?
that would be fair if these companies weren’t incredibly profitable, only increasing that profit, and only using that profit to pay the executive and shareholders.
it’s just greed. they don’t need the money.
I think we can find better things to bitch about than the price of games.
I’m sure you’re right about that. But this topic isn’t about games being too expensive. It’s about ads being forced on people with no compensation. (Many people don’t want ads under any circumstances, while some people say they would accept ads if they get financially compensated.)
Ok but hear me out, devil’s advocate, gaming is and has been one of the cheapest forms of entertainment for a long time, and production costs have increased significantly.
Have production costs increased or has marketing/publishing costs gone up dramatically as gaming attempts to get a greater demographic and introduce predatory monetisation methods? Tools and techniques for game development surely improve over time making development easier and more cost effective.
