Hellatze wrote:I just play warframe. At least they keep adding stuff that intresting.
You do realize that Digital Extremes (the company behind Warframe) is in the business since the 90s and behind several bigger titles including various Unreal Tournament incarnations?
They have a lot more money, experience and man power (like 300+ people working on one title) in the game industry compared to an indie developer like Wube with Factorio being their first title ever.
I used to play Warframe myself (and I have several friends who still play it) when the Open Beta first started. While the gameplay was fun and can be quite addicting because of its easy Press-4-to-win-attitude (insiders will know what I mean)... I soon realized that it suffers severely from the all too typical Korean-Grindfest-syndrom. They have been effectively using shroud marketing tactics that are in disfavor of the player like a lot of other MMOs or MMO-like games do, like key-gating content, rapid item-devaluation, making new content unbalanced on purpose in relation to existing content so players have an increased incentive to grind for them, also rigging the drop chances beyond ridiculousness when a new item comes out so it takes people longer to get them, and all kinds of other nasty tricks. All of which has an effect on trade economics for their Platinum Premium Currency.
And when complaints of people about all these things eventually get out of control Digital Extremes always came up with the cheap
"It's Open Beta, so things are meant to be buggy / unbalanced"-excuse (with White Knights defending them) and magically fixed their obvious marketing tactics in the next update (as if they were expecting it already and just wanted to see with how much they can get away) just to do it all over again with the next big update. They are professionals in causing constant hypetrain-crashes. It's just ugly but the way a lot of these companies work nowadays. I really wonder how long they want to keep the Open Beta title as a defensive shield to hold off justified criticism, which a lot of people expressed on their forums already but got either ignored, silenced or outright banned. It grows old and tired very fast and I lost my faith in Digitial Extremes (as well as several other companies relying on the same tactics) because of all that. I really liked them better back when they worked together with Epic Games on Unreal Tournament and they weren't such a shroudy and slimy semi-scam factory.
To get to the point where the shit really hits the fan is... Warframe is built upon using above described tactics because it heavily relies on Microtransactions which I absolutely despise as a monetarization scheme because it exploits people's weaknesses to the point they lose control. All the above described tactics have a huge influence on how much money people are willing to dump into the game even though they shouldn't spend a fucking Cent on it since technically and spiritually it is marketed as Free-to-Play.
"Ninjas play free" my ass. Warframe and other games alike it are true masterpieces (or more likely disasterpieces) of working psychological consumer manipulation. That kind of monetarization scheme is the reason why Warframe can keep on going/expanding in the first place because they rely on addicted people, hardcore fans, whales and even casual players to spend thousands of Dollars/Euros on the game to speed up progression in the neverending grind (so you don't fall behind in the arms race) or on cosmetics and one-time-deals etc, that way making more money out of the game than they would do if they would ask an initial 50 bucks from every player and an additional subscription fee of 10 bucks per month (because that would initially scare off potential new customers). A lot of people say they don't and won't spend anything on the game but a lot of them eventually end up guilty as charged because eventually you need some Platinum to progress in a timely fashion which acts as an initial barrier and once broken doesn't hold people off anymore to continue spending more on the game. Usually people don't want to talk about it because talking about an addiction is unpleasant and no one really likes to admit their shame.
I do feel guilty, because I helped funding that shitheap of a game in the naive belief that since they did a good job on helping create the Unreal Tournament Series and tried to do Warframe independently from a publisher they'd eventually snap out of this madness once they established the brand... and not get deeper into the shit, especially after they sold themselves out to some Chinese Conglomerate. It's the main reason why I have a deep, everlasting grudge against the Digital Extremes and Warframe, because I stopped playing about 3 years ago after it almost ruined my life and after I lost several friends to the game... and yet sometimes I can still feel the damn urge to return and play again because I really liked the gameplay, lore and mysticism about it. That's a true abyss of my soul right there I rarely talk about... Restraining oneself from returning to something that you know is utterly self-destructive. It's like trying to get out of an abusive and manipulative relationship which slowly drains your soul drop by drop. I'm glad that I'm out of it... and it changed my perspective on the video game industry as a whole as I would never ever again buy/fund or play games that have such marketing and monetarization schemes. On the contrary... I think people should be made more aware about the possible consequences and my deepest sympathies go to people who are still into some kind of video game addiction (or serious/existence-threatening addiction in general).
That said there are more ridiculous games out there like Star Citizen where there isn't even a game yet living solely on the neverending hypetrain and individual people are spending tenthousands of Dollars on it... let me just say that it's a trend in the video game market I really don't like and where I'd rather wish for a second video game market crash (
similar to the one from 1983) than seeing that becoming a standard. Vaporware shit like that should be forbidden by law... because if the project gets canceled no one will see their money again and investors got nothing in return... There are literally no guarantees Roberts and his team won't just call it a day due to technical difficulties rendering the project a deadend and then run off while scamming everyone who invested into the project out of their money. Who's going to judge them if they did? They would just say they ran out of money and then live on an island somewhere in the middle of nowhere for the rest of their days... and even if they were to be caught they'd have the best lawyers they could get for people's money.
There's just too much trust put into non-existent / non-finished products lately... and people are often too blinded by promises to listen to their own common sense and be realistic about expectations.
That's why I think that Wube is among the few companies who are at least honest about their development limitations and marketing/monetarization when it comes to Factorio. I'd rather have them admit that certain things are out of their current capabilities (like they did when they cut the plans for the space platform) than overextend themselves or having to resort on ugly monetarization schemes to push through at all means necessary and end up with a bad reputation and bitter aftertaste in the mouth of the playerbase.
Also we are talking about an one-time 20 bucks here which is like 4 packs of cigarettes where I live... Can't say I got as much fun out of my last 80 cigarettes as I got out of Factorio. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So it is a large difference in what other games like the two mentioned above (Warframe, Star Citizen) charge(d) for certain content. When directly compared it is just ridiculous... like for example 45-125 bucks at Warframe for their current Prime Access stuff which they will rotate out at some point, or 50-300 bucks for some ships at Star Citizen people can only look at in a hangar.
People should probably be glad that Factorio costs only 20 bucks and provides the amount of content and playtime it does, because looking at other games in comparison it's almost a deal too good to be true in nowadays video game market.
