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Game monetisation
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Thing is, the people who provide most of the game's revenue and therefore the people the video is talking about aren't the ones that keep up with things like that. They just keep buying the various lootboxes, the devs/publishers become vindicated in their business decisions, and the rest of us are left wondering why nothing's been changed.
Let's see how deep the rabbit hole goes...
That doesn't seem to be the case, given, on this forum, people are more than happy to suggest buying P2W slot machines to others trying to progress the purposefully prolonged grind just so they can enjoy a game.
Might be worth reading section 3 in this report by UK. US seems to also be trying to pass a similar bill, with the addition of no P2W macrotransactions, but it, unfortunately, probably won't be any time soon.
On another note
That's what I mean. Many of us on the forums know how insidious EME's monetization has become over the years - I myself have a hypothesis that the absurd prices on some direct-buy items were made as such specifically to induce sticker shock and thus drive people further toward their associated lootboxes (such as here and here). But the people who would have the most success of enforcing change are not reading about this on the forums, on news sites, or watching video by Jim f**king Sterling, son, Yong Yea, Upper Echeleon Gamers, and so on.
Of course, part of this is on the game itself, as parts of it are deliberately designed to be as user _un_friendly as possible (i.e. upgrading and enchanting). A sizable chunk of us simply don't have the time nor patience to do the necessary grinding to get the appropriate materials, and the few that do can have all their progress rendered null simply because the game's internal logic rolled a 1 instead of a 2 (my guildmaster is one such player).
Unfortunately, the plan is working. If you go into the game proper you'll see scores of people getting jackpots from the talent and gem crates. You even brought up (indirectly) the one thread about whether or not its OP should just throw caution to the wind and buy those crates themselves. While what a person does with their money is their own business, it also shows EME that people will just buy their way to success if the option is there, which will only encourage EME to get even more outrageous with their offerings and the prices therein (hell, some of us have already seen it with the phasing-out of account-bound items).
The people who would have the most success of enforcing change are the players, though. Dissuade people from gambling their money away, spread the knowledge of how predatory some practices actually are, bring up the issue to local government officials, even if you aren't in US, etc. The more people are aware, the less publishers and developers making casinos disguised as games would be able to get away with. Maybe then they will have the incentive to fix the issues that has plagued the game since release.
Of course they are aware that most players don't have the will or time to grind out enough materials to constantly fail on the current gear "progression". They want the macrotransactions to appear more appealing than playing the game.
Obviously their plan is working. There is a reason the bigger publishers like EA, Activision, Ubisoft and 2K, probably, have entire departments dedicated just to research how else they can squeeze more money out their mentally vulnerable players, disregarding how it might actually affect them or their families long term. I agree, it is none of my business how others wish to spend their money, but it does become a problem when they are spending more money than they actually have, or using their parents' money.
If TERA was a well made game - polished, bugs fixed, actual progression without relying on several dozen layers of RNG and most importantly no macrotransactions (maybe with an exception of a couple expansion DLCs that bring many hours of actual original content) I might be more than willing to pay $20-40 and I am sure I would not be alone. But as it stands, I would rather spend whatever they are asking for their direct-buy items on a dozen actually good games that would be more fun and have hundreds of hours of amazing content.
I think the pressure you're talking about is already happening, but let's be realistic about a game like TERA. The amount of money it would cost for them to completely rework all the game to apply the level of "polish" you're talking about is not realistic for the age of the game and the size of its niche audience. If you forced them to abandon their business model entirely in North America/Europe, most likely the game would just close in those markets. They already tried the P2P route in 2012 and it nearly bankrupt them; they won't take a risk like that again for this game. So if you were really successful in your campaign to convince people to not spend money on TERA entirely until they "change their ways" and "fix the game", it will die here.
Obviously that doesn't mean we should just blindly accept the predatory aspects of lootboxes as acceptable. It's not acceptable. I think we have to continue to push for transparency and integrity from the gaming industry (including EME) so that everything is done "in the open" and everyone knows exactly what they're buying. That's a sensible and reasonable first step that shifts business models in more a positive and consumer-friendly direction without completely upending the monetization strategy entirely.
I can see both sides of this one, honestly. It's true that we don't want video games to be a gateway drug to more serious addictions like actual gambling. But even if you take money out of the direct equation, games are already designed to be additive -- sometimes what makes them addictive is also part of what makes them fun. There's no shortage of stories of people who flunked out of college or lost their job/marriage by becoming addicted to an MMO. (And there's a decent-sized group of people who could probably be objectively considered addicted to TERA as well.) It's very hard to legislate/force the concept of "moderation" or "self-control" on grown adults. I think a more comprehensive approach at dealing with this issue would need to include a combination of regulation, taxation, education, and rehabilitation. Otherwise, it's like you're using addicted people only as a tool in your argument and being somewhat patronizing by saying "since you can't make good decisions yourself, we have to make the decisions for you." It's one thing when children are involved, but TERA is a game rated M targeted at adults, so it's a bit harder to justify this sort of patronizing take if that's your entire answer to dealing with the issue.
I do think it's likely that many game developers will begin moving away from current-style lootboxes mostly to avoid the "bad press" that is associated with it, and that's not a bad thing. But, I don't think they're going to turn their back on decades of research and evidence on what makes games addictive to play or stop using that as a way to try to get more money from people, anymore than a company like Walmart is going to stop using their extensive research on pricing and product placement to get you to spend more in their stores. It's mostly a sign that video games have matured into a "real business" now, with all the benefits and drawbacks that entails.
There was no reason to release the game in unpolished state it was in. Look at Code Vein, which was mentioned in one of the videos I linked, and a lot of indie titles that only ask for about $15-30 one time price and have no slot machines inside. You are correct about one thing, though. I should not expect BHS to fix TERA given how old it is now, and I probably won't. But saying that they don't have funds to do so, is false. PUBG gave them enough to fix whatever they wanted, but they didn't. Not even PUBG itself.
If EME and BHS have to rely on slot machines to keep the game afloat then it already means the game is failing. If EME can't sustain the game with any morally ethical monetization, then this game shouldn't have lived as long as it did so far.
Not speaking out when the publisher introduces a new slot machine into the game, could be considered as accepting the fact. Currently, EME and other publishers can do whatever they want with their slot machines and no one can stop them. 0.0000001% chance to get that shiny new thing? Nothing to stop them and nobody to regulate what they are doing. Casinos appear much more consumer friendly than the slot machines made by the publishers, given they are actually regulated as they should.
Anything can be addictive. Games aren't excluded. However, publishers are psychologically manipulating the players into spending in their slot machines. You could even say they are just like drug dealers. Firstly, they give you a taster for free - events, freebie given either once at the start or every so often (like once a day), etc. Then, once you have had the taste of it, they prompt you with the real deal but for a price. It may be too high for you to want to buy it but given time and that sweet sweet sale deal that may only come around once in a year, you decide to go for it a buy it. Of course you don't get what you wanted, so you buy more, more and more. Then you think you already spent so much on it when it was on sale, you decide why not just buy it for a full price, its not much more, after all. Making it artificially scarce doesn't help it either.
Legislating moderation and self-control may indeed be difficult, however nothing is stopping EME to make a limit on how much a single person can spend in a week, a month, etc (ignoring the obvious limit to prevent people from maxing out stolen cards or whatnot). Also, why is it that EME is using a made up currency, EMP, as an intermediate for the cash shop? Is it perhaps they are trying to obscure the real price of how much people are spending on those slot machines?
You mention the game rating being mature for TERA, however I don't see anything that mentions the simulated gambling (Bamarama for example) or real gambling (slot machines sold in the cash shop) on the ESRP website. This rating doesn't actually do anything, though. Nothing is stopping from a 12 year old from going on steam or EME website and hitting that download button. This is for TERA that is. ESRP is lobbied by the same executives that own those big publishers, or have significant stakes in - EA, Activision, 2K, Ubisoft, etc. Just look at FIFA and NBA2K. Rated E for everyone in US and 3+ in Europe, but are actually just copy pasted rehashes of their previous year's version with minor tweaks and filled with even more slot machines and other gambling mechanics. Just look at the NBA2k 20 trailer. A glorified casino with a basketball mini game. EME may not be targeting children, but they sure would be happy to target those already addicted gambling and who may be easily addicted to it.
Nothing is going to stop the big publishers from putting slot machine macrotransactions in their game without regulation/legislation. They don't care about that "bad press" as they will still make ton of profit from their games. Just look at EA. In 2016/2017 they made over a $1billion, around half of which was from their macrotransactions, of which about 2/3 was from FIFA alone. They aren't going to stop if they can. The executives and investors don't care either, if they can get enough extra money to cover the cost of a house that year.
Just to clarify this point, it's not about whether their company has money in the bank, it's about the Return on Investment. Dumping millions or tens of millions of dollars on TERA to remake/remaster it just in the hopes that "if we fix it, they will come" is a massive risk that few companies would take. Every project has to justify the investment in itself. At this point in TERA's life, they are continuing to invest in adding new content to keep the game alive at the pace they can, but it's a much lower pace given the game's more niche audience now.
There actually is a spending limit on TERA, though I don't remember what exactly the number is. They also have a lot of anti-fraud systems in place to try to stop people from using or maxing out stolen credit cards. Anything they can do to reduce the risk of chargebacks, they are doing from what I understand.
For a lot of reasons, honestly; some reasons are more "insidious" and some of them aren't. For example, having people buy their currency in one batch reduces credit card processing fees by lumping them all together (since with cards there's a per-transaction fee in addition to a percent fee). It simplifies all the in-game store systems so all currency exchange can be handled at one point (outside the in-game UI) rather than quoting all items in various currencies. It also allows people buying EMP to spend it over multiple EME games, creating more of an "ecosystem." It also allows them to offer bulk purchase discounts (for example 20% bonus when you buy $100 worth). And obviously, doing it this way means they typically will have some extra in their account to encourage them to buy something else later on.
I wouldn't say it's either "entirely pure" or "entirely sinister" in its intention or implementation; as usual, it's somewhere in the middle. Given that EMP is basically $1 = 100 EMP (minus bulk purchase discounts that make it cheaper) I wouldn't say it's particularly deceptive. There are other games I've played where they made the ratio between real currency and in-game currency some really odd ratio so it really was hard to imagine what you were spending, but that isn't really the case here.
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Anyway, I don't disagree with the need for regulation about lootboxes, as I made clear. But at the same time, I think your argument is a bit too absolutist. If you're going to continue to have games as online services that have huge on-going costs, relying on only purchase + expansion DLC like 20 years ago isn't feasible if you expect AAA or even AA production values. Clearly, though, we don't want game developers making casinos to lure in children either. So again, this is why I support honesty and transparency in the systems a game includes, including posted odds and failure caps on all lootboxes and third-party auditing to ensure the posted odds are accurate to real results (plus, regulatory prohibition on adjusting the odds in real-time in an invisible way, as is the law for casinos). I also think that that there needs to be a tie between the age restrictions applied to the game itself and the sorts of monetization systems that can be included in the game, and games aimed at children and teenagers need to have more stringent restrictions on monetization methods. I think these are reasonable requests that the industry should agree to voluntarily without even needing governments to step in, and I'm still hopeful that companies like EME will eventually take a step ahead of the pack rather than waiting for others to lead. But I think we will get there one way or another, eventually.
That's why I don't believe the executives of the publishers and developers and the investors care if the game is even playable as long as they get their infinite growth every year. If TERA needed millions or tens of millions of dollars for a remake in the 5 or so years it was out, then they shouldn't have released the alpha as if it was a complete game. The reason few companies take the risk of fixing their games is most likely because they are either able to just hire a couple celebrities to promote their game, like NBA2K or FIFA, or can simply milk their conditioned players with their various monetizations without fixing anything.
If they are trying to keep the game alive as long as they can, why are game breaking fixes like ping tax on skills not out yet? Why do bosses, namely Lachelith and Imperator, randomly decide to aggro the wall for no reason whatsoever? Why does my framerate suffer despite having hardware several times better than what was the best during the game's release? I shouldn't need to lower my settings to the minimum just so my eyes don't bleed during each fight because the game has no optimization. Why did it take about half a year to actually fix the memeslash, yet if something were to hurt their wallets they would fix it in record time?
If they were in risk of going bankrupt during the initial launch, maybe they should look on why and not how can we make more money out of whoever still plays the game.
How big is that limit? $1,000 a day? A week? $10,000 in a day? A week? Is there a warning prompt of overspending or confirming that the person is fully understanding of how much they are spending? A spending limit for anti-fraud reasons is pointless to keep people from overspending if people normally wouldn't reach it on consistent basis.
Agreed. EME may not be the worst in this regard, but they are not the best either. If you look at the prices of various items, they aren't a nice round number, leaving usually with 5 EMP off of the nearest 100. That leaves with a fair amount after you buy several slot machine spins from the shop, making you want to top up some more to spend that remaining EMP and the cycle would continue.
Speaking of getting EMP, why can't I buy what I want directly, in any amount I wish? If something costs $15 in EMP, I would have to buy $20 worth of EMP, not $10 and $5 or $5. Minimum is $10, while a lot of items in the shop cost below that, leaving no option but to either buy that $10 worth in EMP or not buy the thing you wanted. That doesn't seem pro-consumer to me. I don't want to spend more than the item costs if I wish to buy something.
Additionally, EME doesn't need EMP. Look at Steam. Each account has its own wallet that you can top up (yes, it is also split into multiple levels, but at least it doesn't start at $10 minimum). Alternatively, Steam allows you to buy any game directly, without having top up enough to cover the price of the game you are buying. Conversion can still be done at this point, it tells exactly how much you would be spending and you could simply spend the exact amount you wish to spend.
I think, regulating the slot machine in games would simply drive the publishers to other unregulated and equally insidious monetisations. No one is forcing developers to make games as online services, they are purposely making them as such to get more money out of them. Then they move on to the next one.
It is still feasible to have AAA production value games without having more ways to spend money than there is actual content. AAA games are AAA because they have high budget, not because they are good. I can probably name plenty of games that have less issues, more fun and almost no additional monatization besides the initial price tag than some of the recent AAA games. If publishers and developers want people to spend money on their games, then they should make the games as good as they can be and not add more and more macrotransactions in hopes that the whatever remains of the player base is spending more money.
I don't believe EME will be the one to take the step on their own. Slot machines are making them so much money right now. EME is also not well known, so it would be hard for them to raise any massive public discourse like Bethesda or EA. EME even managed to get away in raising the prices of their slow machines at some point, why should they stop exploiting those addicted to their slot machines unless they absolutely have to?
Sooner or later you have to ship so that you can start making some money back on the investment you've already made and understand whether it's worth spending even more money on it. Again, this isn't like an EA or an Activision or some massive billion-dollar mega-corp shipping the nth iteration in a known franchise for infinite profits, but for TERA it was a new Korean developer creating a new game franchise and founding their own overseas publishing division to try to sell it. The situation is really different.
They did look at why, and then they did a cost/benefit analysis for various ways to address it. Their approach was to leverage the investment they already made in the game first to see if they could salvage it with a new business model. Then, invest whatever revenue they get from that to a) try to pay back the initial investment and b) keep the game alive for as long as it makes sense.
Put yourself in their shoes for a second; do you really think they, as an unproven development team whose first product didn't sell as expected, could go back to their investors and ask them to invest tons more money in the game just based on some sort of a hope or assurance that this time it'll work and it'll sell? It's not realistic. Investors aren't just bottomless moneybags; they want to see believable hope of RoI.
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Basically, like I said, there's a grain of truth in what you're saying, but you're too dogmatic. Reality requires a more pragmatic approach.
Yes, the situation is indeed different to EA or Activision. BHS didn't have masses that would buy their game regardless how much they exploit their consumers. First impressions are important, if they decide to make slot machines then they will be known for making slot machines, not well thought out and balanced games that people would gladly pay money for. Some indie developers bend their backs for the little amount of people that do care about their games, why can't a corporation with sufficient initial funding do that? If they are starting out, building good will with their player base is the most important thing, in my opinion, if they are trying to succeed long-term. Just look at DARQ if you want a good recent example. If you want more examples: Rise to Ruins and Colony Survival.
Investors aren't bottomless money bags indeed, but they aren't forced to invest in anything either. They take the risk knowing that they might not see any return whatsoever. Look at AMD, they were are in debt, yet for the most part are pro-consumer and still managed to compete or not fall behind with their competition. Those investors are usually looking for the quick ways to make a buck, regardless how much it will effect long-term.
When they did the cost/benefit analysis, they probably forgot the 3rd option - make the game appealing to the audience. If you can't keep whatever players playing the game then how do you expect to get more players to spend money?
If you bring up this thread to EME as feedback, I got a question. If they were not monetarily associated to the game in any way, would they, with good conscience, play this game long term and spend money on the slot machines offered in the cash shop? I would be interested in their responses.
Honestly, this is so patronizing. There are plenty of people who -- in perfectly good conscience -- play this game long term and spend money on it right now (including on the "slot machines" -- the reason they stick with this strategy is because it works). Of course no one thinks this game is perfect and there are lots of ways they'd like it to improve. Why would the opinion of EME staff in this regard be more important than that of any other player? You're either implying that they're building this game for "plebs" and that it's somehow beneath them -- which is pretentious elitism -- or that the reason decisions are made is because the people who make them don't play the very games they're selling -- which is a massive over-simplification of the corporate decision-making process. Everyone working on this game actually does want it to succeed, but how to accomplish that is extremely complicated.
Again, you act like it's so simple to just remake the game and "fix" all its problems and that somehow by magic if you "fix it" millions of players are just going to shower you with money. You completely hand-waved the RoI question by implying that investors should "take the risk knowing they might not see any return whatsoever" and that's not actually a usable answer.
Anyway, this thread is just you preaching from your soapbox, which isn't actually useful as feedback, so I think it's gone on long enough. If you want to offer specific, practical suggestions on how to improve TERA that aren't "completely fix the game and throw out your whole global business model, and people will shower you with money for it" -- then feel free to try again later.