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NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2024 15:00:19 +0000
From: Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Subject: Re: Two Random PC Business Facts
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2024 11:00:20 -0400
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On Thu, 13 Jun 2024 13:10:17 -0700, Dimensional Traveler
<dtravel@sonic.net> wrote:

>On 6/13/2024 10:22 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

>> The truly sad thing is how so many gamers have become acclimatized to
>> this sort of thing. There's an entire generation of gamers who no
>> longer expect to receive full and complete games for their purchase;
>> who are shocked when they learned we used to get things like cheat
>> codes or fun extras like 'big head modes' and extra characters for
>> free, included in the base game. Which isn't to say publishers weren't
>> money-grubbers back in the 80s and 90s either (you just have to look
>> at arcade game design to disprove that theory!) but even they never
>> took it as far as modern publishers.
>> 
>They also didn't have an internet ecosystem with things like PayPal to 
>make MTX feasible at current tech.

Yeah. If Arcade manufacturers of the 80s could have socked players for
more, they certainly would have.

(but maybe I'm still just sore at the $1USD in quarters I shoved into
"Dragon Lair" back when that game was the new hotness only to die
thirteen seconds later. ;-)

Not that Paypal itself is required these days. All the modern MTX
happily accept payments from (slightly) less skeevy payment vendors,
including credit cards and banks. I'm pretty sure that if Steam could,
they'd put a box in everybody's house to take cash if they could.

Still, there was an era -mid 90s to early 2000s- when publishers
seemed to be competing on the quality of their product.  That isn't to
say there weren't some bad games back then but the way to financial
success was to invest in your development teams and let them crank out
games people wanted to play. Now it seems to be "crank out any old
shit, you'll find some suckers who'll play it and then monetize the
hell out of them".

Still... gotta give mobile games at least THIS much credit; they do
give you more bang for your buck than 13 seconds of gameplay. ;-)