this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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Personally "as a service" is OK if it's actually sold that way. If I pay a fee per month or in some other way per use and that gives me access to the whole game as long as I play then I'm a happy camper and it gives the developer a steady stream to use towards improvements and keeping the servers online.
When you start double dipping or even triple dipping is when I start getting peeved. You can't do a monthly fee and also lock stuff behind microtransactions, it might be somewhat OK if what you lock away is purely cosmetic and if you can still get them via say an in-game auction house a la SWTOR.
But some games have all of these:
And then it just feel like a money milking machine.
Generally if you do one of those you're most likely OK, two can potentially work if you're really careful. But all three is a no-go.
The Division did two and felt OK to me, the microtransactions on top were only cosmetics but it felt kinda shitty when you had already bought the game and paid for a season pass/expansions.
Destiny also did two and felt OK as well but after I quit I heard they made some really unpopular changes to the cosmetic system and their microtransactions?
League of Legends did one, the last one, and still felt OK from a monetization stand point. Same with Valorant.
Diablo 3 did all three and was brutalized for it to the point of changing it, but that's the only example from the top of my head of someone triple dipping.
Destiny was doing fine until clearly expansion/content gear was put into the mtx store. Then the whole content vaulting happened and everything went down hill.
The content vault was done to reduce storage space requirements by removing the main story and multiple planets. The story put in to replace the base story made little sense and was just badly designed. In effect this meant the base game (previously paid content) and paid expansion content was removed. No refunds or anything as the policy you sign to play says they can remove content at will.
I commented elsewhere recently that Im of an age when Fast and Furious was awesome and wasnt cringe yet, Im a massive car guy so NFS games are my "happy place" I wouldnt pay for a subscription shooter or RPG, I dont like MMOs... but you give me a massive open world online mmo racer with a city that changes on the regular (roadworks, bridges closed, flooded roads, etc) new storylines that change by the month (theres a new police cheif who is tough on racers, a crime boss who steals cars, blizards drastically changing the driving dynamics... you get the idea) and so on and on. I would pay for what would make ME happy. I dont care if you dont want that, I dont see why people buy the new FIFA every year but they do.
I dont think people hate subscriptions, we hate having to subscribe to mediocrity. We hate cash grab bullshit instead of paying for quality, and we REALLY hate this sense that we are being milked for every dollar they can get instead of being asked to pay a fair price for a great experience.
I tend to wonder if subscriptions force a FOMO cycle. To keep you playing and paying, they have to bullet-train players to max level and keep you in a carousel of the latest content at all times. That leaves the rest of the game a hollow shell.
I've been getting back into Guild Wars 2 recently, and one of the draws is the tolerable monetization: a new expansion every few years, that you can buy on your own schedule (i. e. when they go on sale), and the level cap is effectively frozen, so you can go idle between releases without a meaningful loss of place. The game has to service even the non-expansion users, and the game design explicitly benefits this: the difficulty and rewards scale so that almost all areas of the game are still worth exploring once you've hit level cap, and they can put activities across the map rather than cramming it all in the latest zone.
Yeah its a tightrope walk for sure, no progression and people will leave because its boring, too much progression and a month off will put you so far behind the curve you're fucked and wont keep playing.