Warner Bros, famous for such hits as Multiversus, Suicide Squad, and that harry potter quidditch game has decided that 99% of gamblers quit before they hit big.
You mean “Warner Bros. Games is working on another tax write off.”
dear warner brothers games,
what is the end of life plan for this game?
sincerely, everyone
Thinking of picking it up a month after release?
They haven’t had successful plans for the life of games.
The statistical possibility of hypothetical profit is worth hemorrhaging millions of dollars and ruining thousands of lives.
Because “capitalism is the most efficient economic model” or some shit.
Everything needs to be “Always Online” in order to feed the beast that is Big Data.
You’d think with all that data on gamers they would have learned how to make good games 🤷
The problem with “good games” is that you can only make them a few times before people stop getting excited.
Mario was a good game. A cloned, reskinned Mario knock off is derivative and hack.
At some point, you need to incorporate new technology, new art, and new game mechanics in order to draw in the crowds. Otherwise, why would I feel the urge to put down money for Starcraft 35 when I’ve got Starcraft 1 & 2 back home?
In order to be efficient, it assumes people will act at least mostly rationally. It’s one of those things where it’s both true and false at the same time, somehow.
it assumes people will act at least mostly rationally
People generally do act rationally, just not optimally. The difference is rooted in availability of information and accumulation of priors.
“The Marshmallow Test” is a great example. People who are predisposed to distrust authority figures and experience chronic hunger will “fail” the test, because they rationally assume they better take the marshmallow now rather than put their trust in a second marshmallow later. This same group happens to underperform long term, not because they are short-sighted or dim-witted, but because they continue to experience the same psychological reinforcements - unreliable social services, inconsistent access to basic necessities, predation by private industry and law enforcement, notably higher rates of social murder - that lead them to take what’s in front of them rather than waiting patiently for a bigger reward.
The next big market crash will produce this kind of person in spades, just like 2008 and 2001 and 1987 did. As people experience retirement accounts as a scam and schools as a prison pipeline and professional careers as economic dead ends and police as occupying invaders, they stop engaging with these institutions innocently and start dealing with them adversarially.
These rational responses result in a vicious deteriorating cycle of distrust and division. Any individual action rationally follows from the prior experiences. But the system isn’t optimal - people suffer disproportionately the longer these rational actions continue.
Another thing I’d like to add, not that your comment wasnt very well argued but just to expand, the rationality of a decision to each individual is still coherent even when talking about sadistic and selfish decisions like those made by the oligarchs and corporate executives. Those actors are not irrational, they are rationally motivated by a completely different structure of stimuli, like you explained.
Capitalism is rational, the issue arises from the fact that a rational decision for someone with billions of dollars is universally irrational to anyone else. You cant expect a system of individualized economic success to allow rationality to be egalitarian.
That’s how we end up in these situations where millions must suffer the failures of a system they never benefitted from while the beneficiaries actively pursue the further dismantling of the system to increase their personal benefits from it.
You cant map the needs of millions and the needs of billionaires onto the same resource pool. The rational actions required to be taken in that environment is what leads to the inconceivable outcomes that make us question actors as irrational. They are personally acting in a rational, self preserving way, which just happens to be the most oppressive and dangerous to the masses.
I think you covered the mindstate of the masses pretty well in your comment, so I wanted to give some exposition towards the other side of the coin. In equal proportion, “Any individual action rationally follows from the prior experiences” applies both to those exploited by the system and those benefitting from it.
Yet they constantly create products that require consumers to be irrational enough to fail to see through their greedy ploys. Almost like it’s all BS lies the greedy fucks tell themselves…
No, they tell a lot of those same lies to their consumers, too, so the market is acting somewhat rationally related to what they’re told. It’s why you still have a “buy” button on store pages instead of “purchase temporary license” or “rent”.
Yea, like I said: greedy ploys. As long as people remain dumb enough to fail to see it for what it is, it’ll work.
At this point, I’m convinced that most developers have forgotten how to make a multiplayer game that isn’t live service. Larian still remembers, but you’d think some people who make action games would remember too.
I don’t think the developers have forgotten, they just can’t get permission from management to make one because management demands MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) as part of the business model because that is valued at 7x EBITDA.
No, that’s not it. Single player games still get made. You can monetize multiplayer much the same way, but basically no one makes a multiplayer game that you just sell once, maybe with an expansion or two, like they do single player games. Naughty Dog threw their hands in the air and said, “These are the only two options, and we choose single player!” instead of just selling a Last of Us multiplayer game for a single purchase.
What, you mean like a game you only buy once and just play online for free after that? Why would anyone want that?
Idk… I just played Phasmophobia yesterday with friends and had a lot of fun. 🤷🏻♂️ So its only about people decision for what they want to spend their money.
Good luck!
who is actually buying these? I thought having disposable income would preclude someone from thinking a live service grind that’s dead in a couple of months is a good use of time
Still needing an excuse to fire more people?
