• @[email protected]
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    -117 hours ago

    I don’t see these as a problem with what I’d said for two reasons:

    • The people making cosmetic elements are generally different from the people coding actual features
    • If an expansion pack is successful, what’s the harm in putting future development hours towards more expansion packs?
    • @[email protected]
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      27 hours ago

      Regarding the first point, if they can hire someone to make a feature happen, and maybe get an unpredictable increase in revenue, or hire someone to crank out cosmetics, which are much easier to make, and for which they often have metrics to show how much they expect to get, which do you think they’ll pick?

      As for the second, I’m not sure if I’m understanding you.

      • @[email protected]
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        16 hours ago

        If game companies are firing their developers upon launching a game and not doing the same to their design team, there are probably bigger problems.

        My point about expansion packs was related to my original comment – I gave an example besides cosmetics of DLC I thought was ok

        • @[email protected]
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          15 hours ago

          I’m not talking about firings, or even other specific examples. The talk of hiring A vs B is just an example, not the whole concept. I’m talking about the inputs that influence internal decisions. Microtransactions incentivise decisions that put the focus on generating microtransactions, often to the detriment of other objectives.

          And, okay, I get you now. DLC is kind of a case by case thing, but still not great to me. Some devs put out incredible DLCs that actually add something to an already complete game. However, some companies put things into DLC that should just be in the base game. (playable characters, etc.) The practice of having paid DLCs incentivises that approach, so I’m not a huge fan, even if some of them are good. It’s kind of like political donations. I can like the effect some of them have, but I recognize the problems that come from a system that uses them.