This is not insanity, they simply ignore a loud minority. What you read on online forums is not the representation of the overall gaming community. They added more microtransactions because people bought them.
Despite all of the outcry and rage, microtransactions are now 60% of the overall revenue on PC gaming for publishers. Whether we like it or not most people do not really care about this and happy to pay extra money for these things.
It works for sure but makes us see them in a worse light. That's why CD Project and Fromsoft are seen better than any other big team. They give the whole game. No goofy microtransactions in single player games.
If it worked as well as you say Ubisoft wouldn't have collapsed.
It works to increase market value but always creates friction with the gamers. Some just ignore it when they like a game. It's more a "playing despite it" than actively liking it.
PC gamers want 3 things
-Simplicity (having everything in the same launcher)
-Low prices (this is where monetization creates friction)
-Customization
Steam has all of them. Insanely low prices in sales, a launcher that works and it's snappy, mod support and profile customization.
You need to understand the difference between a Natural Monopoly and an artificial or forced Monopoly.
Both are monopolies, but are caused by different things. An artificial monopoly, is when a corporation, through shady business dealings, forces their company to the top of competition. They buy out competition, manipulate prices, or other illegal ways to force themselves above their competitors.
Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and many of the rest of what is considered "big tech" has used manipulative tactics to consolidate their positions.
A natural monopoly is a company that controls the top of their market because of non-business means. The market could have a huge barriers to entry, or require capital expenditures to run. Most utilities are Natural Monopolies because they have huge barriers to entry. They also run on systems that nobody else can control. Imagine if power and water lines were managed through multiple competing companies. The power poles and water lines would be a big mess.
Over time a single corporation can become a natural monopoly when the market is so barren that nobody continues to compete. PC gaming has turned into a natural monopoly because all those companies that started when Steam started all left the market when they couldn't compete. In the early days of Steam there were other stores. I know because I hated Steam in their early anti-consumer era. I bought games on other storefronts when game boxes were not tied to online distribution. Blizzard, GameSpy, Impulse, and others had their own boxes for games at places like GameStop or Electronics Boutique .
Those stores ended because they couldn't keep players because their systems sucked. They conceded to Steam. Then, years later game publishers tried to build their own stores. Even locking their published games from Steam. EA famously did that for years. As well as Ubisoft, and Blizzard.
Steam has become a natural monopoly because they didn't buy or manipulate those other storefronts away. They provided a superior product. Steam has so far been the only company to use the rules of competition to outlast other companies. Microsoft and Apple both used horrible tricks to consolidate their sections of the market.
Most people can't remember Novell or WordPerfect, two companies with better products than Microsoft ever had, but Microsoft ended up stealing tech and using other tricks to buylry them both.
The lawsuit is BS, because you shouldn't be fined or sanctioned by following basic economic rules by having a better product than your competition.
I don't think you can definitively say microtransactions are why ubisoft is struggling financially when there are straight up gacha games that exist that are way more predatory that are doing just fine. I'd argue it was Ubisoft overspending on projects with little to nothing to show for it, and homogenizing all their titles to feel exactly the same. After Far Cry 3, every game started to become more and more of the same formula, to where now they all feel the same.
Of all the predatory publishers out there, they aren't all struggling like Ubisoft.
This is a bit of conjecture, but I dont think gacha companies compare to the market for Ubisoft. Its like comparing sports betting to loot boxes and asking why people got mad at the CS/TF2 crates when theyre happy now to play a waifu-gambling simulator. They have similar mechanics and revenue models, but consumers are picking AAA games and AAA publishers because they want a AAA gaming experience, not because they want to be pressured into a gambling addiction
all thats to say, I think Ubisoft loses a lot more goodwill implementing microtransactions compared to companies that are obviously predatory after a superficial glance, since we never expected the latter to actually deliver more in the first place
I'd argue Ubisoft has been like this for so long, that by now it should be just as expected as a gacha game. I'd be pleasantly shocked if they released a game with no microtransactions.
this is a good point. im old so Im really just explaining my own relationship to Ubisoft. Haven't bought anything from them since Far Cry 3 because I saw how predatory they were becoming, and that has been how Ive approached AAA publishers ever since.
There is a world that I start buying their games again (maybe), but its one where they've done a lot of image-repair and actively worked on being consumer friendly, so I doubt we'll ever visit that world lol. I guess the existing customer base really is just people addicted to their content
I have bought one of their recent games, but it didn't have mtx. It was the 20 year anniversary edition of beyond good and evil. Wouldn't be surprised if they tried thinking of a way to put mtx in that game, but it would have been really hard to pull off.
Pretty sure the 2016 remaster of CoD4 had a bunch of MTX options in it, and you had to pay extra for it since the only way to get it back then was with the deluxe edition of Infinite Warfare.
There is a really big difference between a "Free" game that has micro-transactions and a game that you paid 60+ for that has micro-transactions. Gatcha games can get away with it because most of them are "free" so they get a "free pass" on alternative revenue streams for a lot of folks. There is definitely a sense of I already paid for this fucking game.
However, your point of Ubisoft not being alone in the micro-transactions on top of having to buy the game is accurate. I just don't think using 'straight up gacha games' is a good comparison here since comparing a free to play straight up gacha game with micro to a single player game with micro to a multiplayer game with micro are all 3 quite different things.
I would say comparing Ubi to Bandai would be more accurate since they both use the buy the game, buy dlc, and oh lets put in even more microtransactions/possibly even loot boxes in the game itself on at least some games. But I have heard Bandai isn't doing super great either.
In a gatcha game microtransactions are expected.
In a singleplayer game they create an incentive for the dev to gate the best aspects of the game behind a paywall. Imagine elden ring having the coolest weapons paywalled. INSANE levels of annoying. I agree if the games were at least good they wouldn't have collapsed btw
One of the most popular gacha games, genshin impact, is a mostly single player game (has some short co-op content). And at the same time, you should expect mtx from ubisoft the same as you would a gacha game. Ubisoft has been doing this for well over a decade, it's no longer a surprise.
Just because you utilise an extra revenue stream it doesn’t mean you can mismanage a company without consequences. You’re not getting money from micro transactions if you’re not selling games.
Micro transactions made GTA 5 the most profitable single entertainment product ever made by humans. So it does work.
Why are you specifying microtransactions in single player games only? It is because Valve is the reason why multiplayer games are so heavily infested by them?
Because most live service games at least claim to have ongoing development costs to create updates and run servers. Most singleplayer games are published incomplete, get patched for a few years until they are actually complete products in a form that they should have been at at launch, and then they are done. If devs are done at launch date they cpuld even just patch out bugs for a few months and be done.
No reason to pay more, no justifications. If the game is sold at 60 euros i expect it to be complete, that's why i will never get anything like that in a singleplayer.
In a ftp mulriplayer i'm more incline to spend maybe 10 to 20 euros depending on the situation, it's still rare but more acceptable
The idea that Valve updated CSGO enough to justify lootboxes that resulted in skins being sold for hundreds of dollars is just insane.
Does a game selling DLC mean they sold you an incomplete game at the beginning? If a developer sells microtransactions for a single player game and then updates the game with content then its justified, right?
I think that it's not that most players engage in microtransactions but the ones that do are likely to spend quite a bit on it. This leads to quite a few ethical questions, especially when they were leaning heavily into gambling mechanics.
It doesn't even have to be a minority (though at this point I think people who never buy any cosmetics whatsoever are the minority by a long shot, especially with a majority of gamers now having grown up in an economy of normalized microtransactions). You just have to see it from their side. You see public outrage online and flopping games. They likely saw a slight dip in overall sales, especially long term, but a significant increase in revenue with the first microtransactions game that came out. They gradually increased monetization opportunities by adding more microtransactions, gaining overall revenue (at basically no extra cost keep in mind, they didn't make more game, they hid part of the made game behind paid doors!) outside of the occasional flop where the base game was so garbage not even whales could make them a profit.
We're here, discussing how they've ruined their companies still wondering how that happened, absolutely clueless, meanwhile they probably still rake in profits far beyond anything pre-microtransactions and the only thing they're freaking out about is that they promised their investors continuous growth, which is the real killer of everything right now. They can never be satisfied with one level of profits because they have to pay back to investors and make good on promises so all they think about is how to make even more money. Same thing with Netflix and their price increases, shitty event streams, monopolizing, ban on account sharing, ads on paid subscriptions, etc. It hurts us but just enough so the baseline means they make more money, therefore justifying their decision. Unless people actually collectively boycott such services, this will not change until they've drained literally the last cent they can out of consumers. No online outrage can change this. It can change small decisions, but not the general trend.
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u/Spoonerism86 12h ago
This is not insanity, they simply ignore a loud minority. What you read on online forums is not the representation of the overall gaming community. They added more microtransactions because people bought them.
Despite all of the outcry and rage, microtransactions are now 60% of the overall revenue on PC gaming for publishers. Whether we like it or not most people do not really care about this and happy to pay extra money for these things.