The discussion in this thread seems to be going round in circles.
People voice their concerns & criticisms based on the information we have been provided with so far.
@David_Spafford says we don’t have enough information yet to know whether this DLC is going to be substandard. In any case, he adds, IOI is a profit making company. The free market dictates that IOI will produce content as cheaply as possible and sell it for as much money as people are willing to pay.
Repeat, ad infinitum.
Now I could take issue with David’s free market interpretation by pointing out that IOI are not just capitalists but also artists, and the artistic integrity of their work is relevant to this conversation. But that’s a side issue.
Taking David’s free market interpretation at face value, his continued engagement in this thread actually becomes even more pointless. This negative community reaction to the Seven Deadly Sins announcement is just the free market in action, baby. We’re using free speech to voice our concerns. IOI can either choose to adapt to appease these concerns or just ignore them, depending on their calculations. That’s fine.
It is stating the obvious to say ‘IOI is a business’. This adds nothing to the conversation and does not diminish the concerns people have expressed. Criticism is part of the free market, businesses should expect it.
That’s not necessarily true. Niche games like Hitman have a narrower ‘audience profile,’ and each new audience member is not equal in all respects to the previous ones. It’s entirely possible that the growth of audiences means that certain niche games are falling out of favour, since the audience grows, the games’ old audience ages out of ‘buying stuff’ cohort, AAA makes crowd-pleasing games that could even steal the niche audience thanks to higher production values, and so on. Games are a tough business.
Thing is, IOI has already established their core fan-base. A group of people who will always buy their content because of the rapport and sentimentiality they’ve established. This means that they can demand up-front payment after offering only 14% of the product. These people will buy it anyway becuase of not only brand loyalty, but also faith that IOI has good intentions and will deliver something good. I believe the Deluxe Pack was IOI testing the waters with this.
They couldn’t have gotten away with this back in Hitman 1 (and to a lesser extent Hitman 2) becuase this core base hadn’t really been established yet. They need to start off with generous business practices (free content, detailed bonus missions, quality of life updates, etc) to develop a sense of trust; a trust they can later exploit by charging the same price for a much lesser product. It’s exactly what CDPR did with Cyberpunk. It’s unlikely this was planned from the beginning, but it’s where we’re at.
A good product is no longer required now that the base has been established. Now it’s all about milking their trust by delivering low effort content for maximum profit. What is that if not exploitation?
Each user is 1:1 and aren’t restricted to a single choice of 1 game, people can buy into mainstream and niche products. But each person has their own mind to pay or not, and that’s one hurdle for the seller to the profit. It’s down to the company to provide a sustainable product to prove to their consumer to purchase them. And if the product is great, it should bring in more and more audience. These products are digital and don’t have a shelf life. (other than servers). This means that providing the servers are up, people can still go buy the game and its inflated content in the future with zero resources to recreate them.
The reason AAA mainstreams are getting it easier, it due to the quantity of playerbase and overall mindset. The more people you have, the higher chance you can get the target amount to pay for the inflated stuff. Hence why games like Fortnite, CoD and GTA are getting massive margins but also one more thing. The mindset also plays a role - understanding value is key. Take a look at the types of playerbases that reside within the games that you would deem as “impressionable”. The younger audience, follows trends etc. And then look at games where it failed - Ghost Recon and possibly Hitman. What types of playerbases do they hold for the most part?
Video game companies are essentially composed of many artists who care about what they are producing, and many would do what they would do for free. But they are also running a business about making profits. It is both art and a business and there isn’t anything shameful in it.
It is not wrong to criticize as a consumer, but one should separate out the reality that they are running a business to make profits off of you (which is OK), and at the same time are working to support their fanbase because they care (which is OK too).
I understand where you’re coming from here - it’s true that once a game is made, you can keep selling it unlike, say, milk – but looking at it as a product that requires no resources to keep up is wishful thinking. Servers cost a surprising amount of money to keep running, and the game itself needs to be updated as operating systems and hardware specs change. Many games from the 90s and 00s were unavailable or unplayable on modern systems until GOG updated them, like Blade Runner, or until source ports were released. Our current games will suffer the same fate unless the studios spend money to update them. The WoA trilogy is not a golden goose.
Correct me if I’m wrong – I think your argument here is that Fortnite, CoD, and GTA are successful because young people are dumb, or easily misled by fads? Call me optimistic, but I don’t think that’s true. They all enjoy a broad, diverse playerbase, because they are well-designed and broad-appeal franchise games that people play with their friends, and don’t require that much dedication to play “well enough,” so players don’t get frustrated. In other words, those games are made with a lot of attention to detail and craft, using huge amounts of money and dev time.
They may not be for you, and that’s fine, but they are a success because of careful design and knowing how to appeal to a casual & social market share, not because of an “impressionable playerbase”.
That’s because they didn’t make an accident. Part of pushing the boundaries. That extra pence adds up. Not until I and others called out their “mistake” it gets a U-turn, how history repeats itself
Although it nice to know Travis is reading the criticisms.
Profiting is definitely not the issue, we all want IO to be successful. Widening margins through paywalling free content and over inflating is. The “evil” part is instead of putting effort into making a quality product and getting a profit, they’ve opted the quick rich scheme to prey on their player base for less effort. I’d pay £30 right now for the same additional stuff H2 gave. Let’s say for arguments sake, it wasn’t profitable, I’d pay a little bit more. Because you’re getting a chunk of fresh content as opposed to reskins, with one of the worse modes on old maps.
Yes, then that is what they needed to factor into account when designing the game. They designed Hitman around servers. The whole WoA pitch wasn’t to make an dynamic world - it was to turn Hitman into GaaS lite game. The whole foundation of the latest 3 Hitman games revolve around a platform and map packs/content packs. They showed it in H2106 - Episodic was the aim. It’s also why Hitman 1 and 2 works flawlessly on 3, they’re all content packs that click onto the platform. Think about Hitman 2 or 3. Are they significantly different? I must point out IO updated the UI, the AI and tweaked weapons but the core game is it not the same but a different environment? Hitman 2 and 3 are 6 environmental DLC packs. You do not need servers to make Hitman dynamic, it can equally be achieved through game updates as many other games do.
Updates can be physical too. GTA Vice City has like 3 different versions with bug patches printed. So there are ways to circumvent this if ever in the future servers die. And where we can copy from disc to our systems, we could also pick up a disc version of the DLC to copy to the system. It’s just the norm to have that at out digital fingertips.
Not the sale of the game, only the MTX part. People may like just one skin, or want to support their favourite game. And there’s kids get bullied at school if they don’t have the latest skins. Those games have a higher younger audience who may not value money as much. And when you factor in all the tricks of the trade the scheme is doing, the inflation only requires a select few to buy in.
For CoD, only 30% of the playerbase needs to pay 2400CP to pay for everyone’s DLC drop at the minimum. And any more transactions from the same 30%, decreases that. So basically CoD needs to find 30% of people to pay for 1 skin. Or 15% for 2 skins etc. Due to the fake inflation.
Those games have a larger audience with a wider age range which increases the chances to find that amount of impressionable people as opposed to Hitman or Ghost Recon.
Hakan has a gold Uzi, dances in his pants with a hooker and gets caught by his father confirmed.
CoD’s content that’s free was the Season Pass content back in the day. That did cost $50 a year, but is free now. By this we can establish the value of each drop is $12.50. A single skin at 2400CP equals $18-20 which is roughly 1.7x the amount of the whole drop already. What did I “make up”?
If there’s 100 people on CoD, each person is getting $12.50 for $0.00. A total of - $1250.
Therefore they need 63 people at this ratio. And the more people, the more wider the margin.
That’s pretty rude to dismiss my reply and claim I’m lying to get out of the discussion against figures and facts.
I see a lot of people saying stuff like “IOI isn’t broke, Hitman 3 sold well, they don’t need more money” and such. I just want to say that’s not how a business works. Just because you’re currently in the green doesn’t mean you can survive infinitely, or upgrade your tech, or hire more staff when needed, or even just have a secure savings in case something happens. That’s why so many devs go out of business after one failure, they were doing the equivalent of “living paycheck to paycheck.”
IOI making content people want to pay for and leveraging their popular franchise to do it so they can have more business security and stability is exactly what a responsible business does.
We are not saying that, of course IO-I have to earn money, but with this DLC it looks like it is overpriced compared to the content we are getting, a bit greedy if you will.
Nobody is wanting IO to go bust. There’s a huge difference in making decent DLC for a decent profit and using the latest predatory scheme by selling escalations at the same value as huge expansions.
We don’t really know what all this contains yet, or how special the escalations might be. The video implies a lot of changes to the level, and there will be 6 more. I get that Hitman 2 Gold was a heck of a value compared to the Deluxe Edition, but this is a new barrel of fish and I think people should be in wait and see mode.
Also “this is overpriced” means wait for a sale, it doesn’t have to mean the company is doing something wrong.
I’m not saying you’re lying - I’m saying you’re doing back-of-the-envelope math to support your point. That’s your right. And it does make some sense to divide the cost of a season pass by the amount of content drops, so I can see how you arrived at those figures. But they’re far from the full story, because that division leaves a lot of factors out. It’s not like Activision made that content free because it had been paid for. Seasonal content needs to be new in order to create interest, so a new season starting is probably the reason for making old seasonal content free, rather than paying the costs off. (There’s a lot more that goes into it, and I’d be up for having a longer conversation about that some other time.)
Also, to be honest, I had a really hard time following your reply to me, and I don’t think it really responded to the points I made, and that frustrated me.
After reflecting on it, you’re right that I was rude, and I’m sorry for being rude to you - you didn’t deserve that. I let my frustration get the better of me.
It’s all good Getting frustrated is just part of talking about stuff online, really. Thanks for being chill about it.
I have to admit, I don’t know that much about CoD’s content model. I tried out Modern Warfare but didn’t stick around. Usually that kind of model is set up to “let people who want to spend, spend” - the collectors and hardcore types, and the people to whom $1540 is not that much money, and so they spend it easily. So if you play the game a lot, you have the Battle Pass to get much of it for free. If you have kids or not that much time, you can pay to get it faster.
Since you still have the campaign, MP modes, Zombies, etc. then you still get the “product you paid for”, there’s just this additional layer that expands on the “monetization opportunities” so they can keep making money from customers. (That’s something that every dev wants to do, whether it’s through merch, DLC, side content like novelizations, etc. Indie devs generally don’t make enough to survive on game revenue alone.)
Now, I personally don’t like the model that CoD uses, and I don’t like playing games with those kinds of models. I prefer models like Hitman and R6:Siege, where I can buy seasonal content and support the devs that do something unique, and something that speaks to me. I really like surreal twists on action/strategy games, and I really haven’t seen many. For me, this Season of Sin stuff is worth paying for just based on the fresh approach.
But honestly, yeah, there are predatory practices out there. I get not wanting to give IOI the benefit of the doubt just based on this announcement. I don’t agree that their actions so far have been predatory, though, and I think that their strategy so far has shown a desire to be fair to the customers and their devoted fans, even if it isn’t perfect.
Yeah that’s totally acceptable. You took responsibility and I really respect that.
Without going too off topic, basically the model CoD has is the “main” content is now free, the maps. And all the skins, characters, calling cards, emblems are all paid. A few years ago it was reversed and the cosmetics were free while the maps were paid and costs $40.
Here’s the list I researched:
COD 4 - MW3 = $15 - $50 (passes)
BO2 - Ghosts = $50 + Cosmetic voice, camo and reticules packs. ($1 - $3 a piece)
AW - BO4 = $50 + Lootboxes (Horrible but still earnable), Cosmetic voice, camo and reticules packs. ($1 - $3 a piece)
MW2019 - CW = $5000 - $6000~ + $10 BP (I don’t mind BP FYI).
One 2400CP bundle is 1.6x more than a cost of 5 maps (1 DLC drop)
One 2400CP bundle is roughly 0.2% of the total games content. Paying 33% of a AAA game for 0.2% of a AAA game.
This new system secretly exploits those who are paying under the guise of “free content”. Everyone gets the maps free but are paywalled out of everything else now at inflated prices. So if you’re a person who specifically likes the maps then you’re winning, but if you buy a single skin, you’ve paid for the update anyways. Basically you go to a cinema and your friend pays for your ticket at a higher price.
I’d say I’m a semi hardcore player who likes to play and earn stuff. The Battle Pass stuff is a tiny portion of the overall content and nothing else is earnable. It takes 8 Battle Passes of extra currency to earn a single skin for free. This system denies your time as value now. I’m Master Prestige 11 with less content than my mate at Prestige 3 because he opens his wallet. There’s systems which I won’t derail onto but makes it impossible to gain everything in CoD without paying nearly $5000. Even if you wanted to just collect the emblems. And this is what I fear Hitman will turn into if it becomes too lucrative.
And that’s fine if it’s in line with value of their pricing but it never is. One skin bundle is 4x the inflation versus the base in game skins despite going through the same processes. Modelling, UV mapping and texturing. What warrants 4x the efforts on that skin over another? And we’re seeing similar things going on here with Hitman.
They’ve slowly gone down the margin route as you’re getting less content per update too.
It’s also based on their previous actions too, the whole episodic, Hitman as a platform, everything is components for a GaaS game but sold as a product which I feel was due to the backlash back in 2016. And now they’re taking another crack at it with no up front transparency of content and paywalling the content we know has been free from the past 5 years. I hope by the end of this I am super wrong. They do have the ability to change it since they’ve yet to announce the contents of the other packs but at those prices, I doubt to see anything substantial.
It’s nowhere near the value proposition of Hitman 2’s Gold Edition. Neither was the Deluxe Pack. I said that myself multiple times. I think they bit off more than they could chew with that DLC, and they hinted as much, and that’s likely why we’re seeing a different strategy now. I guess I kinda take things for what they are and don’t focus on the comparison, but for those who can’t I’m sure this pack will be $10 someday, and probably not incredibly long from now. Hitman 3 is already $44.99 on Epic.
Also if they dramatically change the maps like the video hints at with Dubai, then I do think 7 of them lumped together might feel more like a value than people think. We’ll have to see.
the problem is that if they dramatically change the maps then thats a total waste of effort. the halloween escalation dramatically changed hawkes bay and i played it a total of once. had the same map changes been used in a bonus mission instead i would have played it 10x as much. their priorities are all wrong
That’s how I feel about Escalations too. To be fair, I actually really enjoy Escalations and always look forward to them being released, but they are always One-And-Done content for me, whereas even minor Bonus Missions like Holiday Hoarders and Hokkaido Snow Festival are much, much more replayable than even the very best Escalations IMO.
That’s why I’m desperately hoping that the Sins DLC will feature at least 1-2 proper Bonus Missions at a minimum, and why I would think IOI were ripping people off IF this DLC only ends up being Escalations and Unlockables.
Getting frustrated is just part of talking about stuff online, really. Thanks for being chill about it.