confirming the developers will take a look at it
I can tell you with 99.9% certainty the developers did and do not give a duck about this or might even be opposed to the pricing model.
Why would you rope them in? It’s not like Ben from level design personally specified the price of the missions. Why even involve them? If that’s PR that makes it so much worse for me if they are trying to blame different departments internally. What a clusterfuck, I’m sorry for the humble low level employee who are being mangled in this mess. You are not the reason this is shit, but your bosses bosses made you part of this clown fiesta.
fwiw the quote is singular developer. They mean the developer of the game, Bethesda, will take a look and reevaluate. Nowhere are they suggesting Bethesda will involve literal software engineers in a dispute about $7 content. That would be insane, as you suggest.
Maybe I got that wrong then…
the term developer is highly overloaded. in the games industry it can either mean “the company producing the game” or “an individual software developer working on a game.” i think more often it is used in the first sense, especially in reporting.
Blah blah blah. The paid dlc is staying. Bethesda started this with that horse armor bullshit in elder scrolls 4 but all you players that paid for it only kept showing them there was a market
Absolutely. The ROI on most DLC is more than enough incentive to keep doing it. The problem is when they have lost the plot and horse armor had no script, so the goalpost is over the horizon.
Tod looked at the backlash and the revenue gained, he gave lip service because horse armor disillusioned his understanding of a delusional market demand.
People really don’t understand how many players there are who just don’t care about this stuff. They get none of the gamer rage, they don’t check reddit or lemmy, they’re not watching Twitter to see what the game journos are pissed about. DLC and MTX make buckets of money, even when compared to the profits from most full games, and they’re magnitudes cheaper and easier to develop. They’re not going away as long as they’re bought and they’re going to be bought, I guarantee it. It’s not even a bad thing, per se, as long as the player feels they’ve gotten their money’s worth.
If anyone is looking to return gaming to a pre-“horse armor” state where big DLCs were the only option, you are looking for a fantasy that will never, ever happen. I’ve seen the numbers for some of the orgs I’ve worked for and it’s hilariously skewed toward that stuff. The real answer is to pivot to different games. Embrace indies and games that don’t have MTX. You’re never gonna get the AAAs back in the bottle.
This is the true reality. We can all bitch and moan, stomp our feet and proclaim we’ll never buy another game published by whatever company.
There are still literally millions of people ready and more than willing to buy the brand new game from that company. People on Reddit, and especially Lemmy, are insignificant drops in a massive ocean of consumers.
“How much could a single questline cost, Todd? $10?”
It’s insane that anyone even bought starfield to begin with. Did people not play the last 5 Bethesda games? The absolute best among them barely gets to mid without a full day of installing mods. The last one was such a shameless scam that it might literally be unprecedented in the mainstream industry.
What were the last 5 Bethesda games? I haven’t played one since DOOM and Eternal, which I thought were both pretty rad. Come to think of it, I think the next one I play is going to be the new DOOM.
fallout 76, fallout 4, Skyrim (only counting it once), fallout 3, and oblivion. Bethesda game studios had nothing to do with doom, Bethesda softworks merely published it.
All of them are generally bad in their own special way, but special mentions go to oblivion for inventing shitty micro transactions (horse armor) and 76 for being the single biggest trainwreck in the industry since E.T.
I took a good look at Skyrim’s Creation Club content after getting the latest release on Steam. I will, in an extremely polite manner, just say that it was underwhelming. I could accept paid mods if it was passion projects of people making DLC-sized content, such as Beyond Reach or Enderal. But that’s obviously not what this is all about. It’s just about further privatizing and exploiting whatever spaces of free community efforts do exist in an increasingly commodified world.