Diablo 2 resurrected was the most infuriating experience I have had. I bought it in the Switch store against my better judgment, partly because in their support forum they said that offline mode would of course always be offline.
For the first few days people could hardly even start the game, I tried to return it right away, because it's basically a bricked game at this point, but Nintendo doesn't want to refund switch games unless you're in North America.
I had already forgotten about it, but I get angry just reminded of that. Yeah, it's just 50 bucks, but when you got cheated on those 50 bucks that leaves a bad taste in ones mouth.
Consumers need to demand better refund systems from the big console makers.
On Steam if you don't like a game, or if it doesn't work for you, you can get a full refund no questions asked as long as it's within 14 days and with less than 2 hours playtime. In certain circumstances they even give refunds after 2 hours playtime (e.g. you spend 2+ hours debugging the game and trying to get it to run)
This should be standard in games, including console games. It benefits the user AND the developer, as I've taken way more risks on games on Steam knowing if I don't like the game I can always return it, which leads to more devs getting my money and me playing games I otherwise wouldn't have.
Notably it benefits good faith developers. I.e., the developers we actually want making games. The developers that lose under this model are the ones that make poor quality games.
Though I admit it does not solve every dark pattern.
Kinda, but it also incentivizes bad-faith gamers, which in turn disincentivises good-faith developers. There are a lot of games out there with a <2hr play time that are perfectly fine games priced very reasonably, and a 2hr no-questions-asked policy is unfortunately often abused to return the games after completing them. The effect this has is that developers are incentivized to add filler content or just not produce a game at all.
Perhaps such a system could work if it were based on a percentage of time-to-complete, but I have no idea how one would objectively determine that, especially before sale.
Yeah short vignette games were a concern when this was first announced. I don't know which solution Steam has for those (if any).
Maybe they could not offer refunds after a significant percentage of the game has been played, regardless of time spent playing. Would be hard to determine how much of the game has been played though. The only way I could think of is to check achievements, but not all games have achievements.
Or maybe expected length could be part of the store metadata. If the developer estimates 1.5hr playtime Steam could use that when processing refunds.
Either way I'd consider this a corner case. To be solved sure, but not problem enough to disallow refund functionality for other games.
There is very little evidence for this. A number of developers have complained about refunds, but when looking into any of their actual cases, you see no real evidence of refund abuse, normal 2-5% refund rates, etc. In most of the cases I've seen developers complain there's been no evidence of refunds, but the games have sold poorly to begin with, and the attention from complaining in public about how mean all the refunders are seems to be a marketing technique more than anything. Meanwhile, there are enormous numbers of success stories amongst short games. And there's not really any incentive to add filler content, because adding filler content takes real development time, driving up the budget.
Probably the most famous overtly fraudulent example seems to be "Summer of '58", a game developed by a Russian developer who claimed 30-50% of their players refunded. Here's an in-depth investigation of this claim that finds absolutely no evidence to support it: https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/steam-refund-worries-ki... -- it doesn't positively prove that there's no refund abuse, but it makes refund abuse incredibly unlikely. Basically, it's possible to tell if someone who reviews the game refunded the game or not. So for there to be systematic refund abuse, it needs to be people who play the game to completion, then refund the game, but don't leave a review: but this pattern is not seen in any other games where developers report far lower refund rates.
Gamediscover has also had a number of developers share refund data directly for this article and other articles, including developers of short games (some as short as 20 minutes long), and none have had anything in the ballpark of the studios who have made press cause celebre pushes claiming incredibly high refund rates.
One thing to consider about this entire claim: if someone intends to proxy-pirate the video game by buying it, playing it, refunding, and cackling off into the sunset... why wouldn't they just pirate the game, something that is absolutely trivial to do? It's not really coherent to say a huge swath of gamers are manipulative enough to refund, have no moral compunction about doing so, but are too technically stupid to pull it off.
Finally, think about this from Valve's side -- if a huge % of <2 hour games were being refunded, why wouldn't Valve adopt the apparently easy proposal of allowing short game developers to set a flag that alters their refund %age? Doesn't Valve's choice not to do this suggest that they don't really view it as a common thing?
> And there's not really any incentive to add filler content, because adding filler content takes real development time, driving up the budget.
There are plenty of ways to pad game length with minimal additional development. Grind is very much a thing for games that benefit from longer time to completion or where a certain length is expected.
> a 2hr no-questions-asked policy is unfortunately often abused to return the games after completing them.
Is that really a big problem? Do you have actual numbers to that, and not just a hunch? I would actually guess that most people who can actually afford a game would pay for it. In my experience, most people who cheat in this way would not have bought the game anyway, so it’s not a lost sale.
Developers are responsible for all card fees related to refunds, fraud, and scams. Some indie devs are seeing Steam cuts of 46% due to fraud purchases and refunds. The Steam store is also set up so that “the customer wins” so heavily that most devs are afraid of clawing back fraud keys (since they’re going to turn into negative reviews, or the key fraudsters get revenge by targeting their game more heavily).
I don't have the numbers of course, but with the right design of the refund process, which Steam does have, I don't think enough people abuse the system to warrant that.
> a 2hr no-questions-asked policy is unfortunately often abused to return the games after completing them.
How often does it happen, though? I mean if you refund a game after finishing it, it's the same as saying 'I'd rather have pirated that game', not a good sign it's 'good-faith' game either
A worse issue is that this incentivizes DRM : because you can just run the game for any duration by not using Steam after installation, or just using Steam in offline mode, since (IIRC that way game time is not counted).
> On Steam if you don't like a game, or if it doesn't work for you, you can get a full refund no questions asked as long as it's within 14 days and with less than 2 hours playtime.
There's a hole here: that 14 days is from time of _purchase_ not _access_.
I preordered _Humankind_ a month or two before launch, because it was listed as supporting MacOS. At launch, it didn't. It didn't get Mac support until 3 weeks later, even though that functionality was barely alpha quality with huge graphics and playability bugs. (Even today, months later, Mac support is barely at beta quality. And if you're on M1 you've got to manually configure the app for being run on Rosetta.)
I waited 12 days after launch before giving up and requesting a refund. That refund was denied, because they had taken my money months before. Steam support was unmoved by my assertion that the developer was flat out lying about Mac playability, and that I literally had no way of playing the game as advertised.
That doesn't sound right. I've pre-ordered a game via Steam and gotten it refunded after launch many months later. For pre-orders, the refund clock starts ticking at launch...unless the game includes early access.
It's been a few months, so I went back and checked my story. I definitely never did get the refund, but maybe I was misremembering things. There's one extra piece I had forgotten: the split "release" of the Mac version.
tl;dr: Steam didn't know anything about the devs releasing the Mac version late, so the "14 days from release" didn't line up with my expectation of "14 days from access".
Details for posterity:
The game was set to launch on Aug 17. On Aug 3, the team included a footnote at the bottom of a news announcement which said Mac would be delayed by "about a month":
(There was also a pinned discussion topic about this at the time, which has since been de-pinned. It didn't have any more details than "see the announcement".)
A month later, on Sep 15, a beta for Mac was announced:
I asked for a refund on Sept 11, some 4 days before the beta announcement, and was denied the same day. I followed up via email for details, but was basically told the same "nope, it's been out too long" story in longer form. (At the time, there had been _zero_ word from the devs about Mac support, despite the initial "about a month" estimate, so I lost hope it would happen in anything like a timely manner.)
It looks like people were able to get refunds later that month specifically due to the lack of M1 support:
I guess I happened to fall right into that dead zone between everyone wanting to believe the devs were running just a little behind, and people at Steam realizing there was a legitimate problem. I was cranky about it at the time, but months later I get that there was probably not going to be any other outcome. I certainly don't ascribe any malice, nefarious plotting, or ill intent on the part of Steam or the devs ... but nor would I say that I think either responded in the interests of the customers.
If I could get Steam to improve from this I'd love for them to track platform-specific release dates, and be more strict about developers claiming support for platforms which don't actually run the game ... but I'm not going to hold my breath.
As for myself ... as much as I believe in the idea that preorders can be used to help fund games, and help keep devs employed by not reinforcing the cycle of crunch-then-layoff, I admit this experience (and other preorders-go-sideways experiences like Homeworld 3, FF7R) has kindof soured me on it. It's fine as an abstract concept, but it's at odds with the reality of date-driven releases (as opposed to quality-driven). These days I'm more likely to just add something to my wishlist and check back some time after release day to see if there are any dumpster fires.
>When you pre-purchase a title on Steam (and have paid for the title in advance), you can request a refund at any time prior to release of that title. The standard 14-day/two-hour refund period also applies, starting on the game’s release date.[1]
I'm not going to debate you on the importance of being careful with preorders, especially outside of Steam, but this is the case as it stands right now.
I do however remember reading something like your scenario a long while ago, perhaps even so far back as to the beginning of Steam Refunds.
> Consumers need to demand better refund systems from the big console makers.
Nope. Don't let them self-regulate. They had their chance, free market blah blah blah.
We need to demand legislators update consumer protection laws for all this "you don't own, you rent" crap, because it's become way more pervasive than just video games and movies.
Heated seats in BMWs are now a "service"; I wish I were joking. And Tesla full self driving and supercharging, even though they are purchased features, do not pass to a new owner if the car is sold.
The only problem is that—ironically for a thread about the problems of DRM—this forces stores to implement some type of DRM scheme. GOG can't reasonably offer as generous a refund policy as Steam, because once you've downloaded a game, there's no way to give it back.
I would expect that there is a problem on your end if you have to refund everything you buy. I can't remember the last time I bought something refund worthy, thought I was tempted the last time I bought a game on steam that required uplay.
I suppose it depends on what the purpose of the refunds are. For example, many online clothing retailers will encourage you to buy more clothing than you need so you can try it on at home, and return whatever you don't like.
A lot of people definitely treat Steam's refund system this way, and Steam's automated refund process seems built to encourage it. You could also make a strong case that this is better for everyone, since consumers are more likely to take a chance on a game they're not sure about. On the other hand, it's a problem for games that are designed to be less than two hours—and it does basically require a DRM implementation.
When Rocket League, a game I never played, ditched support for macOS I asked for a refund. I described how I disliked that they removed support for macOS. I wouldn't play Rocket League on my MBP, mind you, but I do have Steam installed on it. I got a refund, no questions asked (though I did buy it on sale, judging by the amount I got refunded). Steam doesn't need DRM to figure out how long a game is being played, btw. Steam tracks that without DRM, too.
Yes and no. They can track play time when you launch a game through the Steam client, and they can use DRM to enforce launching games through the Steam client. If you launch one of the few DRM-Free Steam games without using Steam, your play time won’t increase.
GOG also tracks play time if you launch a game via GOG Galaxy. The difference is, every single-player game in their catalog can also be played without GOG Galaxy (and indeed, this is explicitly why I buy games from GOG—I don’t like clients, I just want an executable).
> the difference is, every single-player game in their catalog can also be played without GOG Galaxy
From my (admittedly limited) experience with GOG games and Galaxy, only games downloaded via the GOG website (with 'offline backup game installers') can be launched without Galaxy; games installed with Galaxy will force Galaxy to be running alongside it
You're right (and the parent too); I was using the game shortcuts in my start menu, but I checked and those shortcuts point toward the Galaxy launcher (with additional information on which game to launch), so I was launching Galaxy at the same time as the game. When I used directly, the game executables don't start Galaxy.
I believe Rocket League was a special case, in that they offered refunds for everybody who bought it to play on Linux/Mac, no matter how many hours of it they have played.
Some games sold via Steam don't integrate with the Steam APIs, so once it's installed, if launched directly with the executable, it won't force Steam to be running alongside it. So in _some_ cases, Steam isn't the DRM.
I would hope so. It's easy to finish a game in 30 days, so the system is ripe for abuse.
Assuming that the games have progression achievements, GOG can easily see (a) how much time you spent in game, and (b) how far you got. If you choose to abuse the system, you're going to lose the privilege.
if you play using one of their offline game installer and not via their Galaxy launched, GOG won't see the achievements and so can't track the game time. But I'd think GOG would be tracking abuse of their system (though if one really want to get GOG games for free, since they don't have any DRMs a lot of them are available for free on the web).
I think that's reasonable. If you abuse the refund system you should get banned.
But I don't think that it will happen a lot because piracy is already incredibly easy with GOG. If you want a free game why bother with buying it at all?
Except not for software or digital content once you've started downloading it. From the FAQ on the site you linked:
"If you purchase digital content - such as music or a video online - you cannot withdraw once downloading or streaming has started, if you previously agreed that you would lose your right of withdrawal by starting the performance."
That's how Nintendo of EU gets away with not refunding. You started downloading it so no returns.
You can't return it "no questions asked", but if the product doesn't work you can request them to make it work or refund if they're unable to.
If they don't want there is small claims court which is cheap and simple. I have used it in cases where some manufacturers would void warranty due to "water damage" after the product stopped working. In the end they paid: cost of purchase, cost to file, cost of my legal consultation, cost of expertise showing that there was no sign of water damage. Country - Poland.
Annoyingly, they were also unwilling to refund me when I wasn’t able to even start to download a game I’d bought for over a week, due to a faulty console update patch. After over a week of back and forth emails (pointing out that I hadn’t yet lost my right of refund), they fixed the issue.
Ah thanks, I forgot that it was the bare legal minimum...
(Which they only first did after being threatened being kicked off the Australian market, I guess that the extension to 14 days happened later for the same reason for the EU market ?)
Do you think that Steam is even failing that, with the extra requirement of maximum 2 hours of online play ?
(Compare with GoG, where there are no online play requirements, since you can just play and even install all games offline.)
That's great to hear. From their website[0] it seems they have a very similar policy to Steam, except their playtime criteria is a bit more vague. But still good to see.
Sony on the other hand void any refund once you _begin downloading the game_[1], which is ridiculous.
On the other end of the spectrum is Sony. Of the several times I've called in seeking a refund due to a game's (lack of) performance, only twice have I reached a live person within the 60-minutes I allotted to wait in the phone queue. Their chat support is also terrible, responding with generic "We don't offer refunds"-type messages regardless of the issue.
While that is only one datapoint, this only reinforces my absolute motivation to not give Sony another €, ever, again...
They've done themselves in, imho starting with their CD rootkit fiasco and, since then, they've time and again proven that Sony is a company that is not sincere, to say the least.
Sony TV? nope..
Sony camera? not for me...
Sony whatever? yeah, no...
Stop giving these hacks money, it's fucking easy. I love Diablo 2, but the current Actiblizzard can go bankrupt before I enable their shitty practices and my purchase figures on some MBA's slide as a positive signal that customers are happy, let's keep doing what we're doing. Yes, that's what your $50 you've written off are doing.
It's not rocket science, especially in the current golden age of gaming, where there's plenty of excellent choice on indie, AA and some AAA publishers portfolio.
Yet people keep complaining and then lining up to buy the latest Battlefield and CoD and shitty remaster.
It had severe launch issues that was long ongoing even for 1-2 months. It's much better now though and they are still optimizing it with the latest row currently in testing, which I think may solve these issues for good.
The problem as I understand it was an architectural decision to remove the realms (regional groups of servers like USEast/West/EU/Asia) of Diablo 2 "Classic" so that everyone can play with each other. More fun that way, right? However, Diablo 2 has pretty lousy netcode (consider it's two decades old!) and turns out that one does not simply rewrite it to sync your heroes regularly to a centralized location as you played, turning out to cause a terrible bottleneck. Many such sync requests seem to have just straight out failed at peak hours, with characters losing hours of gameplay or even losing the characters altogether!
This is, again, much better now thanks to more or less emergency mitigations. But it took them a few months and it's of course a major goof up to not think this through better. By the time it was fixed, many had started losing interest in the game.
It's hard to extrapolate networking from testing to massive scales, I understand that, but these are network architects with years if not decades in the business of launching games and MMORPG's. _Someone_ should have been waving a little red flag here and told "hey, you do realize we're centralizing a core part of the game that was never planned to be centralized, and if these sync requests fail it's going to ruin their gameplay. So we're taking a risk and with very real fallout as well."
But maybe someone did... Maybe many in fact did. Such warnings may not be the end of the story unfortunately.
Blizzard is long dead. Such a shame. I’ll never pay for another of their games until… actually I’m not sure when, or what they could do to bring me back. They’ve poisoned their brand so completely, and their latest releases have been either somewhat mediocre or mismanaged into the ground over time.
Their IP and player base just got bought for 70b.
They will make new 'blizzard' games,
the way Disney makes StarWars movies.
But I actually welcome it. Kotick has run blizzard into the ground,
on the formula 'maximize profits instead of player satisfaction',
which is the opposite of the formula that made the blizzard name.
At least MS will, presumably, milk the IP long-term-responsibly.
I rather be dissapointed of the new stuff than seeing the franchice dying. Maybe they make some cool spin-offs for the true fans, like Disney did to Star Wars.
> I rather be dissapointed of the new stuff than seeing the franchice dying. Maybe they make some cool spin-offs for the true fans, like Disney did to Star Wars.
That's how franchises die, in my opinion. They leave a bad taste in the mouth of existing fans, and repel new fans. They can only get by on previously generated inertia for so long. (Star Wars is an outlier here, I suspect.)
I'd much, much rather see new IP be created than a bunch of underfunded, financially-motivated people try to recreate magic they didn't create and don't understand in the first place.
What often happens is these franchises end up in a sort-of zombie-like state like the faux Dune novels being pumped out by those two hacks who I can't even bother to name anymore.
Gaming companies are incredible. Anyone who loves games tend to hate the large gaming companies. Yet they print money and will continue to put out shit products year after year. So people can say X company is dead while they get aquired for 70 billion dollars.
i'm still in somewhat of a denial since i really like their IPs. and diablo 4 is still very much on my radar. if that one tanks then I hope something changes as their IPs are just too good...
They botched the Warcraft III remaster hard, and I can't forgive them for that. It doesn't matter that they farmed it out. They chose to farm it out, and they chose to ship it in the state we got.
Take all that along side all this sexual harassment and anti-worker BS they've been pulling for decades, and I just don't care enough anymore. I don't need anything Blizzard wants to sell any more. I don't need to buy something to tarnish my memories of fun games. I don't need to replay those games if they're made under atrocious conditions. I'm no longer willing to give my money to a company that is emblematic of everything wrong with video games.
Now with other companies pulling that same BS, and now some are coming out in favor of NFTs?
Fuck 'em. I don't need AAA games. Indie titles are just as good, and I've got a hundred other things vying for my free time.
Most of their IP is dead at this point; Warcraft is a dead horse they’ve been beating for the last decade, StarCraft is effectively abandoned, and Diablo 3 was a blatant cash grab from day 1 with a mediocre game behind it. Hearthstone and Overwatch are doing ok as esports but those aren’t the Blizzard IP I actually like.
To think that any future games will be better than what we’ve gotten over the last decade is just being in denial that they’re Activision now. They have continued to mine the nostalgia of the player base with mediocre remakes and retread content and, combined with the fact that it’s now public knowledge how toxic Blizzard culture was during the “golden era”, it has destroyed most of the cultural value that IP had.
Overwatch league is kind of hosed right now because of the weird shenanigans around OW2. Last I heard, they were planning on dropping team sizes by 1 (so a bunch of pros are getting fired) and they also planned to have next years league play the unreleased OW2 beta (??). It’s in a weird place.
You are correct. OW2 is going to 5v5 (removing a tank role) and yes league will be on the OW2 client but it will still be 6v6 as OW2 won't be out yet. The change to 5v5 is requiring major character reworks and don't affect that league.
I’d love nothing more than to see a glorious turnaround that sees OW2 become very popular, so I’m rooting for you, Microsoft/Blizzard/Activision. I’m not optimistic, but I’m hopeful.
AAA development slog like what is apparently happening with D4 rarely bodes well for fun. Dev work apparently began in 2014 and it's not likely to be released until 2023 at the earliest.
If you have access to wikipedia you could learn that neither of those statements are accurate. It has 6x more players than the first few months of 2016.
It has 60 million people who have played it since the open beta.
Activision does not release active player counts, but every secondary metric (OWL viewership, Twitch, subreddit participation, other sites that track this) show that it’s active player count has gone down. Likely by a lot.
The OW2 debacle has made it worse; no new content updates for fans who stuck it out? And for what, a PvE mode?
This reminded me of a recent experience on WeChat. I hadn't used it for a few years and recently tried to log in.
I was told, that my account had been deactivate due to inactivity and that it was against my agreement with Tencent not to use WeChat regularly. After that I had to check a checkbox promising to log in regularly.
Luckily I haven't paid for WeChat, and I don't need it anymore to keep in contact with friends, so I was far enough removed from the situation to laugh at it.
To be fair, there is a known problem of social media / messaging accounts being hacked and reanimated by botters / scammers long after the actual account owners have stopped using them.
I recently setup pihole, which subsequently went down while playing PS5, Effectively taking out my internet. My PS5 basically refused to play the most recent Star Wars after about 30 minutes. Next time I’ll just pirate the bloody thing.
A game should work in single player mode no matter the network quality or censorship by any of the layers in-between.
It's one thing (and annoying enough) if multiplayer servers are shut down after a couple years without opening the source of the server or at least distributing VMware images. But single-player functionality should always work, because why should I otherwise buy a game for 50+ €?!
No, no excuses for no real online multiplayer either : even on PC Diablo 2 Resurrected sucks, because (AFAIK ?) they added always online DRM requirement (via Battle.net launcher), but especially removed real online multiplayer (leaving only their walled garden Battle.net) play, and finally removed (most) modding potential.
Which were the main reasons why Diablo 2 classic was still played in the first place !
The problem with multi-player is that there is an immense amount of cheaters and trolls. It already was a problem fifteen years ago, nowadays game providers don't have another (realistic) choice.
The original Diablo 2 had a simple solution for this: Open Battle.Net and Closed Battle.Net.
On Open Battle.Net you could use your offline characters in online play, meaning you would run into a lot of hackers, but you could also play together with your friends online (there was also a LAN option). Closed Battle.Net meant your character was stored on Blizzard's servers, which prevented the most blatant cheating.
But starting with Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 (and arguably WoW) Blizzard decided they could make more money by shitting their games up with always online DRM.
This is patently false since plenty of games (including (modded, "classic") Diablo 2) still have real online multiplayer, with multiple anti-cheater/troll solutions : passwords, (unofficial) game admins, (potentially official DRM-backed) player whitelists & blacklists (potentially shared across hosts), not advertising your game-hosting IP on popular matchmaker servers...
Please don't buy the "invasive DRM is good for you" corporate advertising - when (not if) the official servers shut down, these games will be crippled ! (We already had a taste of that with GameSpy, and it was only matchmaking servers !)
For what it's worth I agree with you that there should be a legal mandate for game companies to make their online servers available for public download once the official servers get shut down.
For the time in-between though... self-hosted servers are a niche market, and that is why companies don't care any more. Not enough players care to justify the expense, and ever since Hot Coffee and school shooters game companies have gotten pretty paranoid about moderation and fighting modders or bad press from raging cheaters. Again, there is no hope for the industry to fix that on their own, this is something that must be done by law.
You also still have games that don't even have any official game servers : Factorio for instance, and I guess "classic" modded Diablo 2 could be kind of considered to be it too since mods were never allowed on ("closed") Battle.net, only on "open" (not-)Battle.net ... (which IIRC only does matchmaking, while it's the player hosting the game that acts as the game server ?)
And Factorio has people setting up (usually renting in data centers ?) dedicated servers too (which then are at least accessible to everyone, unlike non-dedicated server games hosted on home networks where people not even bother to properly set up port forwarding any more, forgetting that not everyone relies on Steam to do the job for them...)
I assume it's sensationalized, and that the truth is that "You cannot play Diablo 2 resurrected after 30 days of being offline (until you go online again to re-affirm your ownership of the game)".
I still very much do not like this, given that someday the server which affirms your ownership of the game will be taken offline.
Neither, but the game refuses to run until it can call home. (Edit: after which you can enjoy it for another 30 days without Internet access if you want to)
This is the kind of question that should be the top comment on HN. I'm surprised to see so much jumping on the bandwagon for an obviously exaggerated claim. note: I am not defending what blizzard is doing.
You are getting down voted but that is what most players care about it. It's the reason COD and every 2K or sports game gets worse every year. It's the reason Pokemon somehow continues to become more and more souless. It's the reason companies can put out shit and still print money.
Doom cost $30 in 1993 ($60 today) and only had a handful of developers. By all rights, games should be costing $150-200 given the complexity and amount of human effort required. Instead, they've cut costs everywhere.
When you pay your devs 50k per year while requiring 60-80hr work weeks, experienced devs aren't going to apply. Young, inexperienced devs fill the roles instead and make junior dev mistakes all over the place.
Once you move to subscription models, you can update games rather than constantly hype the next version. You have more consistent revenue streams and can give incentives to your devs to stick around. Valve doesn't quite have a subscription model (they make their money from their store), but does show how long-term devs working on the same game for many years gives excellent results.
As much as I dislike the idea of not owning games, I suspect it is the future, but the overall quality will go up as a result.
>Doom cost $30 in 1993 ($60 today) and only had a handful of developers. By all rights, games should be costing $150-200 given the complexity and amount of human effort required. Instead, they've cut costs everywhere.
Except the number of people with the skills to make games has increased (which depresses gamedev salaries), the tooling to make and publish games has become cheaper (or outright free with tools and engines like Blender, Krita, and Godot), and the overhead costs of physically publishing and distributing a game have been largely eliminated by digital publishing. To top it all off, the amount of competition in gaming has increased, which drives down prices. If anything, games should be even cheaper. And in the indie scene they usually are
Look at modern games. They are almost all bug-ridden until the second DLC (if ever) which is probably just base content they moved out to pad the cost. By that point, you've spent $120 on the game anyway.
As they say: Cheap, fast, and good -- pick two.
With a larger talent pool and all the hard problems already solved, you'd expect games to INCREASE in quality with fewer bugs and issues. If they threw cheap out the window and were charging $200, they could hire and retain experienced talent who would make far fewer mistakes and the quality would increase dramatically.
EDIT: To address number of people further, lets say there are 100x more talent now than in 1993. If 5 people developed Doom and 500 people are needed for a modern AAA title, then the effective supply to demand ratio hasn't changed.
You are making a case for why games have gotten worse based on money? Video game comapnies make far more money now than they ever have in the future. The market is also larger than its ever been.
If we’re comparing apples to apples, you’d expect a 2.5D platform from an indie developer with only a handful of people to cost $60.
Speaking of markets, doom 1 sold 4M copies. The best selling hardcore gamer game is grand theft auto V with 155M copies sold.
That’s a bit less than 40x the number of sales for doom (next best is red dead redemption 2 at 39M or 10x). 9 people in total developed doom. 1,000 people worked in GTA-V. They also worked many more years.
That’s over 100x more people and probably 500x the total development time for just 40x the sales. If you look into red dead’s numbers, I’m positive they look far worse than that.
GTA-V would need to cost $300+ to match the profit margins of doom if people were getting paid the same. Of course, they get paid peanuts for the “privilege” of working on some megacorp’s game.
You are comparing initial retail sale values and not accounting for major money makers for gaming comapanies, virtual currency and micro transactions. Doom does have whales. GTAV has people who have spent thousands+ on GTAV online.
This is the differance. This is why so many companies pump games full of microtransactions. They don't care about the average player spending 60 dollars on the game. They want the 1 in 100 or 1000 or 10000 whales who spend 2500 to 50K on the game.
Im not an expert in game development nor really a gamer but this still seems like a poor argument
> Doom cost $30 in 1993 ($60 today)
Again not my area. So these are observations:
> there is a way bigger market than 1993
> there are different business models now
> gaming engines are widely developed
> software tooling has vastly improved
Sure things like server/infrastructure cost now must be accounted for. I just dont think its that fair of a comparison. Doom was a packaged AAA title for $60. You can definitely produce a game for that price today and effectively the price is like $100 after online and dlc and all this other junk.
Firstly, I'm not concerned with being downvoted. Reminding people of the reality we actually live in isn't always popular. People enjoy being outraged and love to hate on big companies like Activision, yet they will and do continue to buy their products in massive numbers. There is a disconnect between what the public says and what they actually do.
Very certainly not. Some people are probably perverts as you indicate. Others are just outraged legitimately, making it a statement and acting accordingly.
So, no, some people will not accept being part of it.
> People ... yet they will and do continue to buy
You are fighting a strawman if you focus on those few or many that pollute the market. And you seem to be supporting both a polluted market and its supporters.
I think this is the problem with growing access to a global audience(market). It doesn't matter if the product sucks if the marketing spend and reach is enough that you get X% of that global pie and make good money.
And it's an easy sell for investors too: release in a couple more countries and 'hey, sales doubled, everyone loves it!!'
There's plenty of indie quality out there, but it's immensely drowned out by the top end in marketing, influencing and availability.
Pretty sure then as a tax paying citizen that I'm responsible for drone assassinations etc., so by comparison the entire Blizzard drama would be pretty low on the priority list by that logic.
It’s low, sure, but also much easier to do: you’re legally required to pay taxes and political change takes years, but you can simply choose to save money.
and according to your interpretation stealing a car seems "not a big deal" because it comes after a murder. (They are disconnected events, so to relate them is just a mental perspective - their gravity is independent. There is no «priority» forgiving your actions, it is no excuse).
I'm not even talking about the politics. Just the shit games with the crappy player-hostile business models.
Blizzard used to make awesome games that were fun to play. They came up with some of the most enduring game franchises, and their games are still classics. Now, not so much. Actually, not at all. It's all just repetitive shite based on the same old tired universes.
You could always just wait. I'm only now working my way through the PS3 library and I could look up which games were considered the best on that platform, each title was ~$10 on average, that price often included a bunch of DLC, and every game is as patched as it's ever going to be. I'm playing Uncharted 3 right now which I picked up for $4. The box says that it includes $45 worth of DLC and on install it downloaded over 500MB of patches (which the internet tells me were very badly needed). I get all the fun and none of the frustration at a tiny fraction of the price
Once I run out of PS3 games I'll pick up a PS5 and work through the PS4 games that were actually worth it.
Once upon a time we got things called 'demo discs' with our gaming mags that had a taste of the games coming out soon so we could inform ourselves.
It's nice to see lately that Steam is providing more demos, which should have been a thing all along, but the logic that demos is bad (and how they disappeared largely some time ago) is only a benefit for those wanting to shovel crap out.
This is why I'm glad I still have my old copy of D2 to play Median XL and the like. Blizzard can kiss my butt if I'm gonna pay for their DRM'd copy of the game I already own.
I know folks on this site don't like it, but in the wider gaming community, there is essentially no demand among legitimate buyers for an always offline gaming option. We have access to the internet almost no matter where we are, or can easily get it. Why should we care if a game needs to check in periodically? What harm is it likely to do to any given legitimate buyer?
It's almost certainly worth it to Blizzard to lose the tiny fraction of sales from people who care about this issue to prevent the buy-offline-return pattern that some folks might opt to use without this check in place. Yes, it won't prevent all piracy, but it's probably a net positive for revenue.
What happens when Activision decides its no longer worth keeping the server up? Or some other problem occurs keeping it from checking in, e.g. death of Nintendo Switch Online.
I can still play Gameboy games I bought 20+ years ago with no problems besides maybe replacing the save battery and the occasional contact clean. Will I be able to do the same with Switch games I bought? For some titles that already seems to be a no.
For the tiny tiny tiny fraction of users who will still be playing the game at that point, it will be a sad day. Most gamers do not make purchasing decisions based on something that might happen twenty years from now, since >99.9% of them will have moved on from the game by that point.
> I can still play ...
But do you? I mean, perhaps you do, but most folks don't. That's why I emphasized the question of harm a gamer is likely to suffer.
It's pretty rough for historians, archivists, and curators too. Can you imagine if books became unreadable twenty years after publication because >99.9% of readers will have moved on from the book by that point? Or if every painting, sculpture, photograph, or musical recording self-destructed in the same time period?
At this point I think it's fair to say that games are cultural artifacts. We should be at least a token amount of interested in making it possible to preserve them.
I suppose. I can't say that the interests of these groups are particularly close to my heart. Certainly if I was a game dev I wouldn't be willing to pass up a chance to substantially increase revenue to make life easier for an archivist.
To the extent that there is any value in the history of this game, I think most of it will be sufficiently captured in the large amount of video content being produced about it.
There is, perhaps, room to question the tradeoff here. How sure are we that it was substantially increased revenue vs archivability? What if this sort of every-30-days check only increases costs without boosting revenue and hurting archivability? As is spelled out in context, this DRM check is not required for the game to function, and the ease with which it has been bypassed raises significant questions about how useful it is for boosting revenue.
Indeed, DRM historically isn't noted for actually boosting revenue. Perhaps we are discussing a false belief here, similar to people who claim that end-to-end encryption enables drugs/guns/CSAM/money laundering. Both feel true and seem obviously true, but lots of truth-y and obvious things are false upon close examination. This does not diminish the sincerity of anyone's belief, only its factual basis.
It may also be worth considering that videos about games as a substitute for the actual artifacts might be like keeping reviews of plays instead of preserving the text. Useful and important cultural artifacts and context, but perhaps not the same as having the originals. Video game museums exist today, and I found it fascinating to be able to play games from decades past.
By all means, question the tradeoff. But unless you're in a position to decide policy I'm not sure what good it will do.
> Indeed, DRM historically isn't noted for actually boosting revenue.
By this are you referring to comments on sites like HN, by people who aren't in a position to know whether DRM is beneficial for the implementor? If you are I'd just encourage you to interrogate your sources a bit. It's entirely possible that game devs have been in the grips of a collective delusion for the last twenty-plus years that DRM is often profitable. But I would say that to me that doesn't seem to be the most likely explanation for why they keep using it.
> It may also be worth considering ...
Worth considering, perhaps. But, ultimately, not an idea that is all that compelling to me, and even less so (apparently) for the economic stakeholders in game development.
Do you increase revenue with hard DRM measures? I believe it depends. I did pass games because of their DRM requirements and that includes Blizzard for the last few years. They don't need my money as they were doing fine, but their obnoxious battle net certainly drove me away. Same is true with a lot of other developer specific platforms. I accept some because they provide added value, but the vast majority of DRM does not.
On the other hand other services have proven that piracy is most often a service issue. There will still be piracy, but it is questionable if those users were able or willing to spend anything in the first place.
Game devs believe that these measures benefit revenue enough that they keep on adding them, despite significant technical and reputational cost. So, absent evidence to the contrary, I suspect the answer is "yes."
well the Diablo 2 servers have been online continuously for over 20 years already, so I'm not exactly sure this is a valid concern for the vast majority of people.
> I'm not exactly sure this is a valid concern for the vast majority of people
If people do not note the reason for concern in being dependent from third party infrastructure for having a purchased good in working state, their societies have immense problems.
> valid concern ... vast majority of people
Absurd. The concern is valid irregardless of the individual.
The problem is OBVIOUSLY that it tethers you to servers or some such application somewhere that needs to validate your game. And it could (and will) be turned off at some point. So the game is CLEARLY not yours.
We can run games from the 90s and 2000s, because there is no need for servers.
What's important to me, and to most gamers, is whether I can play a game for the duration of time that I desire to do so. So when I'm looking at D2 resurrected, I'm thinking something like this:
"If I buy this game, the longest I'd probably play it for is about a year. In future years I may return to it for briefer and briefer windows, asymptotically decreasing toward zero minutes per year as time approaches infinity. I think it's likely that Blizzard will keep the servers running for at least 20 years based on past performance. What is the area under the curve outside of twenty years proportional to the total value I intend to extract from the game?"
For me, I estimate the area at around 0. Even if I thought that a tenth of my total playtime would occur outside the initial 20 year window (extremely unlikely and generous estimate -- probably nobody exists like this), what is the present value of that future enjoyment? At a 4% discount rate and a fifty dollar initial purchase, the present value is $3. There's just not enough there for most people to be bothered about.
I've recently started playing Morrowind again. I was pleasantly surprised to see a healthy modding community that's still adding lots of new content, fixing bugs, and improving graphics. The UI is still clunky, but better than it used to be (with these mods), and the story is still one of the best games ever. It came out in 2002.
I would argue that many gamers are wrong if they think they're never going to want to revisit one of their favorite games. In fact the primary market for D2: Resurrected seems to be gamers who want to revisit one of their favorite games from 20 years ago.
Probably it's an issue more with older people who remember when this kind of thing was unheard of. In the modern day people are online all the time anyways, it doesn't make a big practical difference, which makes the ethical issues seem overblown.
Regardless, I paid for my "license" to use the software on my personal machine, I shouldn't have to rely on someone else's machine to make that happen.
It’s just that people put up with a fact that offline-first games started requiring logging in with an account. Why do I have to do that for Doom Eternal? And this enabled publishers to push even more rediculous online handicaps. Their wet dream is to make every game “a service”.
> The problem is forcing people to be playing the game regularly or loose whatever they have "accomplished".
That problem isn't the one documented in the link we are discussing. Can you point me to some kind of citation that shows this is happening? I've not heard about it and a brief google search does not reveal anything.
That's the worst part of playing Diablo 2 "classic" over Battle.net (rather than open Internet) : after 6 months of inactivity, your character and all the items you had stored on them are deleted from Blizzard's servers ! (And you don't get to keep an open copy of them.)
This reminds me of the 100 Rabbits folks having to ditch their standard creative software (Adobe) and Apple hardware during their Pacific Ocean traversal. After a month or two offline, every single token timed out and those apps and hardware stopped working.
D2R at launch was bad. Everyone, including Blizzard, admits that. But, after launch it's been pretty good. They are releasing the first balance/content patch in over 10 years and everyone is pretty hyped about it.
With regards to the whole "30 days offline" thing - this was well known way ahead of launch. This is how all Blizzard games have worked for many years now. When they cancelled TCP/IP local play support the community asked them about it and they put an questions and answers segment out that included information about how you would need to connect to servers every once in a while to unlock game files.
If that's not your thing then don't play or grab a crack. shrug
I also quite enjoyed D2R on the Switch. Controller mapping worked VERY well, and it was a great mindless addiction for a month or two after release.
Yes, there were some annoying server problems, but the game was great and still felt fresh even though it was a remake. I have stopped playing now (not trying to be on that eternal grind...) but overall thought it was pulled off MUCH better than the WC3 remaster.
I don't see any explanation about 30-day online requirements at your link. However, you may have provided the wrong link: the FAQ is about a technical alpha build rather than the full release.
> PLEASE NOTE: Although the Technical Alpha is single-player, an internet connection is still required to download the client and play the single-player in the test. The final game will permit off-line play in single-player mode, but you will be required to connect to the internet periodically to check for updates.
I also recommend FlareRPG [0] to try out. It has way more pleasant navigation than Diablos, reminds me a bit of the Divine Divinity [1], which is also awesome single-player game.
It's an entirely different game (more of a CRPG than action), but the more modern Divinity Original Sin games are excellent too. DOS2 is my favorite RPG, and it can be played by itself (its story has basically no links to DOS1)
It seems almost self evident the game would not have been greenlit without a form of DRM. Most of the comments here are lamenting the game having DRM, but they're comparing having the game with DRM vs having the game without DRM, not having the game with DRM vs not having the game at all.
I can believe the introduction of frustrating DRM. But I can’t believe they changed all the characters’ appearance to fit to their new woke sensibilities. There’s no reason these give these guys your money.
Ugh, wasn't aware of this and it's an issue because I now live on an RV and thus won't have Internet access all the time. Just opened a chargeback because of this.
What absurdity did the developers make? This is why I stopped supporting their games years ago. It's this rollercoaster of experience that I had, and it's not worth it.
Denuvo seems to stop piracy just fine. Even when it doesn't permanently protect a game, it usually does so for at least half a year before getting cracked. That is more than good enough, considering most of game sales happen early after launch. Some denuvo protected titles haven't been cracked for years now.
If anything I think denuvo is just paving the way for a pretty gloomy future of "almost perfect" DRM. It might still be crackable, but the effort needed would be immense (or just downright impossible if you take into account the incredible resource discrepancy between the two sides). Even the mood in parts of the scene seems to have shifted towards resignation w.r.t to denuvo.
> it usually does so for at least half a year before getting cracked.
but do games where the denuvo isn't cracked early do get increased sales? I mean that's the (purported) claim that the various DRM schemes were to fight piracy, with the justification that piracy resulted in lost sales
It really depends on how you define piracy. With movies and music it doesn't work at all because they don't evolve and change over time. Once that 4K BluRay content hits The Pirate Bay it's game over. But, with games, it's a very different story. Many games have intricate design with their servers that make ripping them apart and creating standalone pirated copies extremely difficult. Even some single player games, while pirated, don't get as much adoption from the pirate community because of the ongoing patch support they receive that is usually lacking in the pirated versions.
It doesn't do that either. Once a copy is out there, it's out there - there's no "scarcity" just because creating a pirated copy takes work. Only few individuals need go through the trouble.
In its current forms: to prevent secondary sales and lending, to increase primary sales.
Piracy is not the reason, at least not the main one, it is the excuse they give because people won't be happy with the actual reason. If stopping piracy is the goal then we can categorically call it an utterly failed experiment.
> If stopping piracy is the goal then we can categorically call it an utterly failed experiment.
Are you sure about that? From what I’ve read, the studios are less concerned about stopping piracy forever than for the first few weeks when they get most of their full price sales. I’m sure shutting down secondary sales is a big benefit, too, but that’s balanced against the the fairly sharp discounts they usually start offering.
Sure, but stuff like Call of Duty and Battlefield have hacks and cheats literally 2-3 days after release so not sure that part of the corp's intentions is realized either.
Yes, to placate clueless executives who actually believe they have any right whatsoever to colonize culture.
Moreover, DRM is literally designed to deny you the right to use your own property (i.e. the computer you bought and paid for), by extending the ludicrous concept of “intellectual” property, which is quite literally completely imagined “property”, to restricting your use of your actual property.
Why would anyone accept or agree to this kind of insane transitive ownership, where a corporation squatting on our culture can economically destroy the lives of ordinary citizens by suing them for engaging in culture?
No wonder the recording industry flocked to fascist Italy in the 1930s to establish their extremist anti-intellectual cartel.
For the first few days people could hardly even start the game, I tried to return it right away, because it's basically a bricked game at this point, but Nintendo doesn't want to refund switch games unless you're in North America.
I had already forgotten about it, but I get angry just reminded of that. Yeah, it's just 50 bucks, but when you got cheated on those 50 bucks that leaves a bad taste in ones mouth.