EVE General Discussion

This video doesn't tell anything new except that someone wants governments to stop game companies from literally abusing all the morons who are being slaved into throwing money at them ...

But what's the outcome of such? I'll tell you ... governments will abuse it for their own gain.
People are literally too dumb to realize what's going on in their minds anyway.

Consumers, aka slaves to marketing and neuroscience, will eventually be the majority.


This game will either die or follow suit eventually ...
... simply because at some point the mindless slaves will be the only ones left to play.

Partly that, but for me, it's more about gaming developers knowing they can get away with it, and creating predatory F2P systems as a result instead of focusing development time on actual quality games. It's like watching reality TV take the spotlight from quality drama television, and seeing real creativity suffer as a result.

They did that because that's what the research shows. Then they provided citations for the research in the description.

If we're being honest, is it really that far fetched? Denial is a common human trait. Very common.

It
*******
Is
!!!!!!!!!

Stop believing in a free will you do not have!
Marketing makes you "make" decisions that are none!

Do you know how gambling works?

The old sales pitch of making someone feel good about whatever they have bought, even if you sold a fridge to an eskimo.

So people don't actually enjoy going to casinos?

The unfortunate downside of capitalism is it requires regulation to maintain the system by allowing assets to occasionally shift. The trouble with this is regulation is inherently flawed in that defining a rule allows for legal use of something outside of the bounds of that rule.

No system is perfect sadly and yes our children are being sculpted by consumerism to act a certain way. We've spent billions ensuring we know exactly what buttons to push to get the correct response. Look at movies and video games. The majority of them are formulamatic and all have their token "social norm" characters to ensure they reach the maximum amount of people to increase revenue.

Is this evil? No. Its market science. It was happening when we were children decades ago and it was happening in the Roman period. What is evil is when we as parents fail to translate to our children that the phrase "vote with your wallet" still exists and is still extremely powerful. If people suddenly said "nah the Iphone 6 is ****.. I'm keeping my Iphone5 until something better comes along" apple would suddenly have to shift to respond to its consumers demands. Yes this does happen but the trouble(back to the regulation comment) is that its very hard for "Joe the Phone Maker Guy" to get a loan and buy into that sector to create competition considering apple has nearly 1T bucks in the bank for just that purpose.

No one is talking about you. We're talking about the lowest common denominator. The reason we have laws to begin with is the lowest common denominator. Always has been. That's the society we live in, and essentially, the social contract we agree to when we accept the responsibilities of citizenship. Because there are idiots out there that need to be protected from themselves. But, I won't argue the finer points of that particular topic. I will say that, as Sol pointed out (however aggressively), these games are attracting a lot of people that might have been more interested in, say, EVE, if they didn't exist. EVE is pretty cheap. Compared to a 'AAA' selling for $60 then adding a +$20 premium pre-order and a +$100 limited edition, and then paid DLC and on top of that, microtransactions that amount to little more than pay-to-win, while failing to deliver on quality content (Battlefront anyone?), EVE has them beat hands down.

The only time EVE gets expensive is when you add up the totals of what you've spent over time, which I can see how one could also argue makes a subscription model also exploitative. However, there are two things that debunk that argument right off the bat: the first is, you don't pay more than one sub to get a month worth of gameplay. IE, you can't pay twice as much money, and get two months worth of gameplay in only one, if you understand my meaning. In an f2p, you might be building a castle and collect, let's say, 6 units of stone every hour (1 per ten minutes). Pay $10, and suddenly, you're getting 12 units per hour. You get two hours worth of gameplay crammed into one by paying money. If it were competitive, that would make it pay to win. I'm sure you understand this though.

The other reason, of course, is that we are paying for both a good and a service, the good being the actual game itself, and the service being the servers that they're played on, the maintenance they and the game need, and of course, the salaries of the staff that perform that maintenance and manage the game and its community.

I know I went off on a bit of a tangent there but I wanted to cover my bases here because I have actually heard someone argue that subscriptions are exploitative in the same way F2P is. It's easily not, of course, but some people will never get a real grasp of that. However, the main paper cited in that video highlights a lot of what makes F2P exploitative, and it's not just stuff that affects people who are easily addicted.

And of course, they are pulling in huge crowds that, once again, makes developers think they should focus their efforts on this sort of game, and as I already noted, quality gaming suffers as a result. Creativity suffers as a result. At E3 last year, I can remember a grand total of zero new IPs. There may have been some I missed, but the games that got the most attention, the most headlines in "games journalism" and even mainstream news, were basically remakes, sequels, and prequels of existing IPs. Tell me you're not seeing a dwindling of fresh creativity in the gaming industry.

Some real creativity is out there, of course, and there are some great indi devs hitting the scene creating some amazing content. They've been out there for a while. But they're getting beat by Angry Birds and Candy Crush. Why?

Well, because the lowest common denominator isn't just stupid, but it's vast. And easily taken advantage of.

All of them.

It's worse than that even. You're somebody's alt in real life.

I understand your point Remiel, but you make the assumption that these F2P games are drawing audiences away from traditional games, which I don't believe is true. Recent studies have suggested that female gamers now outnumber male gamers (or at least reaching an equilibrium) and the reason seems to be that smartphones are bringing gaming to audiences that were not previously interested. I'm guessing this is the audience F2P games are mainly drawing.