Please don’t be rude to people.
You didn’t see what I was responding to. It was completely warranted. There’s a reason that post and its user aren’t there anymore.
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My current theory is that they’re all-in on the whole “dark patterns” thing – Deliberately making it all confusing to buy, and offer editions on sale and at similar costs to make one look better than the other.
Using psychological tricks to sell games is a part of business, that’s why sales have the power they do come summertime. However, this is just shameless, short-term profiteering by IO that benefits nobody, not even IO long-term, and certainly not the customer.
I wonder how long the silence will continue on for…
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Forever, probably. I hope not.
They were trying to justify it on stream. The only reason is basically - “it’ a cheap option” which is a bad excuse. Why is it more expensive even on sale than part one was on sale then?
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Here’s the relevant part of the stream:
combatglue literally said “its fun” to make these twisted bundles.
Meanwhile:
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This makes me feel so fustrated watching it again.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/HiTMAN/comments/1idom38/io_streaming_live_on_twitch_right_now_1430_gmt/ My thoughts on the matter:
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Remains an inexcusable decision that they are still trying to excuse. My goodwill towards IOI is gone. Good luck with hitting their Project 007 sales targets, with a target audience who resents them.
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@Combatglue
I don’t know if you check your mentions, but I think all of us would like some sort of response about this - like what you are going to change e.c.t, and not defending this again.
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Unfortunately, he’s being hamstrung by IO themselves to defend the practice. We’re not going to get a straight answer unless the legal team says it’s okay to do so, or if he goes rogue. It’s boilerplate responses from here on out folks!
I like the enthusiasm Samir has for the game, that certainly comes through, but I greatly dislike the rationale given in the stream.
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They’ve addressed it and we have our answer. Now we know that IOI does not give a hoot about how they’re being perceived.
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Or they do and they know that we here are just a vocal minority, and that the casual gamer - their true target audience now that they’re trying to expand - are not gonna care about nuance in game purchases like this. So like any business, they’re less concerned about a few people being upset over their practices, so long as it can be offset by the larger consumer base being happy just having their product.
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Except even the subreddit isn’t exactly okay with it either. They made memes about it for a reason (and it’s how I found out about it at first).
This isn’t a vocal minority issue, this is very much IO ignoring their userbase, and there are plenty of comments to back that up, some that have been screenshotted and posted by others in this very thread.
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See, I disagree with this. If anything, casual gamers dislike this confusing piecemeal sales model more than the ‘core’ longer-standing Hitman fans.
But until they’ve waded through the intentionally confusing packages that IOI have vomited out willy nilly, they don’t even realise exactly what they’ve bought until their money is already down, and then when they find that they’ll be paying proportionately more money if they want to play the rest of the game than they would have if they only had a single/limited easily understandable options to choose from, only then does the backlash really begin. And it’s far worse in the long run because of it.
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The forum, subreddit, any online venue at all, is a minority. The majority of average people of any group do not have a regular online presence, and this extends to gamers as well. The average, casual gamer, who is just impulse buying games that look interesting, are not going to be concerned (at first) with the approach IOI is taking on this, due first and foremost to lack of familiarity with the brand and company, and are not as likely to be upset about this without doing some digging on what their purchase options are and the resulting confusion. Those who just see Sapienza up, have casually heard of Hitman, and decide to give it a shot and buy it without looking further into it, are not going to be so concerned as those of us who have history with the company. @scat1620 hits on it as well above.
Unless there are hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of similar comments like this all over the web, all the comments you speak of totaled together are a minority. And as for them ignoring their user base, as I said, their current user base is not their priority at the moment.
So, interesting bit of news; the Hitman WOA upgrade pack is currently delisted; the link to go to the page leads nowhere.
Are they…doing damage control? Are the company listening to us? Is Steam just messing up the Depot’s? Who knows at this point, but I really hope it’s the former.
Per a discord conversation I happened to stuble into:
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Last time they tried to appeal to a casual more mainstream market HITMAN Absolution happened and we all know how well that went.
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Pretty well, actually. Fun game, decent sales, and we only had to wait 4 years for a follow up as opposed to 6. It provided the framework for how WoA became so replayable. Absolution made Hitman what it is today.
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Well is putting it lightly.
Fun game, but not a great Hitman game. It took the formula from the series and diluted it. I won’t beat a dead horse, but Absolution isn’t a good HITMAN game.
While 3.6 million is descent sales, HITMAN Absolution failed to meet sales expectations and in the eyes of Square Enix it failed. This failure led to the cancellation of its sequel that we know very little about outside of some concept art. Which in turn led to them rebooting with Hitman 2016.
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