because if you have 10k dollars worth of garbage in your store someone will end up buying it (whales, amiright?) yet everyone will still play the game on occassion if its F2P, whereas if the game is $60 not only will very few people actually bother buying it, it will not make a fraction of the money it would’ve made with microtransactions.
Does this mean that the old model is dead? No. I think that certain games (RPG’s/Single-player) can still work just fine in this system, but MP its insanely hard to survive because there are a half a dozen games now (Fortnite, Apex, CS;GO, RB:6S, Heck Halo now) that are all F2P and so your game simply cannot compete with them realistically. I would argue even CoD games aren’t close to as popular as they once were because Warzone is just rendering the MP kind of obsolete.
In some ways this system is awesome, because it means that games can be supporting (via DLC/Expansions/patches/etc.) for YEARS past launch, so towards the end games are effing huge compared to what they once were (Sea of Thieves is one such example) but it also comes with games that are predatory and intentionally devoid of content at release (you think this is all they’ve done in 6 years? No. They probably already finished months/maybe first year of content release for this game, just saying.)
No rebuttal here. If I make the time to prepare a more in depth response, I’ll tag you in it. But at the moment, I don’t have the time to dedicate more than these short, unthoughtful, posts. Although you disagree on my terminology, I feel our stance on the subject is similar.
Yup. It’s a model. Release a bare bones (hopefully functional) game and drip in content that would have normally been in the game at launch 10 years ago and then act like you’re a hero and “listening to the community” when you add it lol
No doubt the team worked hard to put this game together, but what they have implemented makes no sense. No slayer only playlist? Seriously? This is what Halo is all about. Sorry, but that is a major stuff up. No excuses on this one.
I feel for him and he can say what he likes, but this game was built soley around the battlepass and monetization.
I don’t have an issue with paying, though it needs to be reasonable and worthwhile.
There isn’t even any clean and “shiny” colours for our spartans. We have to pay for a battlepass to obtain old faded colours. That’s ridiculous. I’m not paying for that. At least put in a clean new looking colour scheme. Even the ultimate challenge reward last week was an old faded colour. Garbage. Prices in the shop. Give me a break. The spartan model is the worst type so far. Then gameplay. No collision?
Sorry to sound so harsh, but we can see how this game was designed. It’s blatantly obvious.
Well, as I quoted above, there seems to be internal conflict over exactly these things. Connect the dots and the story is that management forced 343 into these systems for monetization. Maybe not in the “buy challenge swaps” way that he denies, but still in some form of forcing people to “remain engaged” or some other metric that I’m sure the marketing bean counters have all sorts of charts and graphs for.
I’m of the belief that a lot of this stuff was hashed out when they were working remotely. Separate teams working to complete a singular product. With working remotely comes miscommunications or lack of communication at all. And when everything went back to some semblance of normal, everyone’s projects just got mashed together to ship out.
I mean, some parts of the game work flawlessly, others not so much, and even others not at all. It’s clear they weren’t all done by the same group of people.
Call me a tinfoil hat theorist, but I can’t fathom a company intentionally being this disingenuous. There had to be a misstep or miscommunication along some part of the development. Why would any company attempting to make a profit intentionally alienate its consumers and scare away revenue? It just doesn’t make sense.
I’m not much younger than you, and I don’t put stock in anything community managers say in response to outrage.
I do, however, find it amusing that 343 isn’t even able to muster the humility to say “we’re sorry” when their whole community is in the middle of one its biggest PR fires in a long time. I’ve never seen them make a real apology. Ever. They didn’t ever admit that they royally screwed the pooch with basically all their game design decisions concerning Halo 4. They never acknowledged that they goofed big time with the launch of the MCC. And now they are unable to apologize that they made mistakes and launched this game before it was actually ready with a monetization model that is way too greedy.
It’s easy for me to say as I’m a huge fan of quickplay in this game and think this quickplay is way better than Halo 5’s quickplay for example. I love the mixture of both modes.
Seems to me like he doesn’t take responsibility because he seems to be blaming management or MS for these decisions when he says that he is “advocating for players”.
I mean, would you rather have a game be labelled as planned obsolescence with regular release cycles, or a game you could play “forever?” I’d rather have the latter if it means I don’t have to pay $50+ for a reskin or worse version of the game.
To be fair lots of games release as train wrecks nowadays, most infamous example was Cyberpunk 2077… Infinite looks angelic compared to the standards of a lot of other titles frankly, and many of them are full $60 experiences.
Another possibility is that 343i could still be planning stuff out (how exactly to release content) as they could have all sorts of things that are conflicting or have odd uses (there are a ton of gametypes in Infinite btw, they just haven’t released/showed much of it off)
This company has never accepted responsibility for any of their mistakes or bad decisions. I’m not laying that blame at the feet of someone like Sketch. That blame goes towards upper management, who could easily ask their community managers to put out a statement saying "we’re sorry, we’ll fix it"
For all I know, someone like Sketch or Unysheck wants to say that, but has no actual confidence in management that it will happen, so they don’t.
Well I guess this is just a difference in what kind of response we want. I want an explanation of the philosophical and commercial strategy they are using. You, and no offense, seem like you want them to grovel? I’m not interested in groveling from adults. This is a commercial industry, our relationship with them is transactional. We’re not friends. This is why I never liked such cosy verbage creeping into playerbases.
Glad there is a response, but this doesnt feel at all like a good one.
I feel if anything fans are owed some info as to why this game is what it is, this idea we have to shoot into the dark forever about 343i’s choices is kinda stupid, the community has no one to be mad at so the blame goes kinda everywhere.
Besides that, this feels like many excuses trying very hard to masquerade as an apology but at least its something from someone at 343
And this right here is the issue. You screw over a loyal community for what, more money, to grow the community to gain more money? There is no excuse for this whole section, especially when you know it’s a staple of the franchise.
I will say this again, there is a right and wrong way to do a battlepass… and even more so monetization for cosmetics. You make sure that you have enough cosmetics for people to earn in game, then because that is enjoyable you focus on more themes in the battlepass and don’t put things in the store that are under a “free event”. A lesson that it seems every studio has to learn for some ridiculous reason.
Earned ‘free’ cosmetics will make people want to buy the bp, and maybe buy things from the store. As then you have things to show off that other don’t.
I’m a loyal Halo player and I much prefer this way of doing things. I can buy what I want, when I want, if I want and customise it to my own tastes for a fraction of the price. Think it’s definitely hitting people different.
Some people really, REALLY hate free to play, but I sincerely think it’s the best thing to ever happen to gaming.
It’s all about “engagement” and chasing whales. They have metrics they have to hit. They need to have high player counts and have them frequently logging in. That’s why XP systems give bonuses for each day you log in. I have another post all about how chasing whales works if you search this forum for it.
If MS or 343 execs or whoever tasked with the exact same job - it would not look like this. I’d still have a store, I’d still have challenges, I’d still charge all of you for the color green. I have no problems with the reality of modern money making in games.
My issue is how on earth did things like core exclusive coatings happen. That’s not a ‘nickel and dime’ issue for me, it just doesn’t make sense.