The Spreading Seasons/Battle Pass Cancer in Games -

[AcidityLiquidity]

Lately every 'live service' game is crowbaring in various forms of 'seasons' or 'passes' where you need to pay another fee on top of the $60 you spent on it and in spite of the cash shop and loot boxes already in the game. They reward various cosmetics usally, or you need them to stay competitive in other cases.

They always start of mostly benign, but it almost every case the warp into more and more bloated messes to wipe your wallet clean.
I've heard rumors the AAAs got some casino people involved to best hook dumb gamers even further and drain their loyal sheep dry.

There is also the slippery slope; seeing what kinds of players are dumb enough to buy said passes, and releasing more of said content to keep the cash rolling in. (ie PvE players buy more passes so you see the devs stopping PvP content updates).
Some notable examples of these passes recently are Hearthstone and Sea of Thieves.

Wanted to get the input of the farms on these, and find some insight on what you all think. Are they cancer, more ways to part dumb people from money, or totally ok?

 

[yeah poster]

Yeah.

 

[Toolbox]

Even when these seasons aren't a subscription they're annoying. Not every game needs to have awful, gaudy cosmetics. The re-release of the halo series on PC and console has this problem - they wanted something more to draw normies who don't really care about the series in so they added a bunch of unlockable junk, but it's even more pointless in this case because "seasons" just stay in the game after they're done, continuing to be unlockable. Recently they added stuff that completely clashes with the artstyle of one of the Halo games (343 shifted the art style that Bungie had developed over the years into a generic mess of scifi nonsense).

 

[Zeta Reticulan]

Video games are just money sponges companies squeeze every quarter to get more shekels out of your average dopey consoomer. That's been the MO for years and it isn't going to change anytime soon because it makes them billions.

 

[Dom Cruise]

I hate the way games as a service type things can evolve so much that the game you remember playing becomes a thing of the past.

Back in 2018 I tried the game For Honor and liked it quite a bit, then I came back to it over a year or so later and found it had changed so much that it almost felt like a completely different game, I just felt lost since I hadn't been keeping up with it update to update.

Sometimes this allows for a bad game to be improved, which is good, but sometimes it just mucks up what was once better, what I would give to be able to play a vanilla version of Team Fortress 2 without all the hats and other crap.

 

[Rusty Crab]

Games are getting too expensive to develop with just the classic one time purchase. I don't think that's a controversial statement. You can say it's cancer and you can say they should be scaled back. You're probably right on both counts. At the end of the day they're just trying to get more profit margin without raising the base price, which would cause piracy to explode even more than it has.

Nickel and diming you over time 'feels less bad' to normies who don't think about it. They'll wince at paying $10 more for the purchase but completely shrug off paying $200 over the course of the year they got it.

But my personal opinion is that game devs are invariably awful people and you should screw them out of profits whatever way you can.

 

[The Last Stand]

I believe the "battle pass" method of monetization started with Fortnite.

It's a way to increase player engagement and revelance of an online game without outright "nickel and diming" players.

 

[Reverend]

This started by EA back on the Xbox days for Call of Duty games. This shit is old as time and it's how companies can ship games that aren't complete for the same price they have been for nearly 20 years and yet charge you to play that 'additional content'.

AKA 80/20 development rule.

 

[Fek]

This shit is old as time

Remember when digital distribution first started and people were paranoid about shit like this happening to their games? The lack of actually owning the game you purchased, getting nickel and dimed to death buying basic shit (lol horse armor), etc? I remember..

Hooray for having a hobby full of impulsive people, I guess.

 

[Reverend]

Remember when digital distribution first started and people were paranoid about shit like this happening to their games? The lack of actually owning the game you purchased, getting nickel and dimed to death buying basic shit (lol horse armor), etc? I remember..

Hooray for having a hobby full of impulsive people, I guess.

I don't buy any physical disc copies of the games anymore, if i can't download it I don't want it.

I for one WELCOMED the xbox's plan to go full digital and let you buy/sell your shitty digital games on the market place. That way when I'm done with whatever POS timewaster i just finished I can resell it on the market place. Of course this would've led to the collapse of Gamestop even faster so that was killed sadly.

 

[Sperghetti]

The concept of a season passes has officially pushed me into “old person who doesn’t understand technology” territory.

I can’t even figure out how to buy a full goddamn video game anymore.

 

[Fek]

I don't buy any physical disc copies of the games anymore, if i can't download it I don't want it.

I for one WELCOMED the xbox's plan to go full digital and let you buy/sell your shitty digital games on the market place. That way when I'm done with whatever POS timewaster i just finished I can resell it on the market place. Of course this would've led to the collapse of Gamestop even faster so that was killed sadly.

I don't know..to me, that sounds like one more step on the road to "you'll get nothing and like it." This generation, you have fully digital games while retaining the right to sell them (albeit strictly through their marketplace)..but what about next generation? Or the one after? It seems like a great way to setup just taking away your rights to any sort of ownership over your games period. Why even have a marketplace after a generation or two of getting people hooked on purely digital games? At that point, who's going to stop them from going "lol no reselling get rekt" and you just being stuck with a whole bunch of shit you don't need or want anymore?

 

[whatever I feel like]

Thank God I stick to single player/solo campaigns.

 

[Toolbox]

Thank God I stick to single player/solo campaigns.

This is going to be slowly pushed into single player content, too. Remember Shadow of War?

 

[M3xus]

I still remember back when Castle SuperBeast wasn't utter cancer Woolie's reaction of "Get behind me, Satan" when this was first described. Having dealt with a few games with this system, I find myself echoing the sentiment.

Phantasy Star Online 2's system at least lets them bring in more cosmetics without having to cycle literally every ARKS Cash scratch to get Global to parity with the Japanese client, but that's the one good use I've seen for the system. It's basically turned me off any form of live service game for the foreseeable future.

 

[Coffee Shits]

I hate the way games as a service type things can evolve so much that the game you remember playing becomes a thing of the past.

Back in 2018 I tried the game For Honor and liked it quite a bit, then I came back to it over a year or so later and found it had changed so much that it almost felt like a completely different game, I just felt lost since I hadn't been keeping up with it update to update.

Sometimes this allows for a bad game to be improved, which is good, but sometimes it just mucks up what was once better, what I would give to be able to play a vanilla version of Team Fortress 2 without all the hats and other crap.

A little off topic, but since we're there: I don't care for when games do this either. Off the top of my head, Stardew Valley came out with a new update (that Steam insists upon putting on that un-removeable "What's New" shelf that no one asked for) that adds a whole bunch of stuff.

You know how that makes me feel? It makes me feel like I wasted my time. Yeah video games are a time-waster, but somehow it managed to devalue that time even more because the game I played doesn't exist any more. It's been "updated". Season Passes and other such schlock is like that, but it's an extra slap in the face because you get to pay for the privilege.

What would help would be proper sequels. Where the dev and his team sits down and applies all that R&D they gathered from the last game and forms fully-fledged new ideas in the same vein to improve on what people like and tone down what they don't, and make it into a new game instead of killing the existing one piece by piece. An actual process with planning and design documents and lots of cocaine, like they did in the old days. Then you can have a game that's done, a game you can revisit. Not one that you come back to five years later and discover you missed twelve point releases with everything you like removed. Sorry, "updated".

 

[Marissa Moira]

This is going to be slowly pushed into single player content, too. Remember Shadow of War?

Those really didn't pan out, Shadow of The Tomb Raider did the same thing and now you can buy the Definitive Edition which contains all content on the actual disc itself for like 25 bucks. Ni no Kuni 2 also had one and it was the last thing the company released on a console before being forced to reduce their operations because there was no cashflow.

Seasonal passes tend to fail way more often for single player games.

 

[Merried Senior Comic]

This is why I don't play modern games. Most anything after 2007 is shit.

 

[Aaa0aaa0]

A little off topic, but since we're there: I don't care for when games do this either.

This blows my mind since I went back to play stardew without even realizing there was going to be an update, and lo and behold, the third major update with free ass shit for a game I adore and go back to once a year, tested to be compatible with popular mods, all for free. Like what the fuck, I can't thank ConcernedApe and the team enough for actually giving not just one but many shits about the product. The same tender goodwill Running With Scissors (the Postal guys funny enough) do. Hell, if you already had all the trophies in Stardew nothing would change them, so the game is still complete for you, just there with a bit more if you want to go back again.

You're not wrong for your opinion, most creators should move on from their first product eventually onto different frontiers for both their growth and the growth of the medium, I just really am psyched that the game developers give enough of a shit that they update one of my favorite autistic time wasters. Its so refreshing to just feel like a kid again when you help your mom bake cookies, and then she gives you the bowl to lick and the spoon. The little extra for being so invested, just because. The extreme above and beyond, something I would have paid for had he put it out for 1-3$ but holy shit its free. Meanwhile, other companies piss on our shoes and call it rain.

 

[Toolbox]

Those really didn't pan out, Shadow of The Tomb Raider did the same thing and now you can buy the Definitive Edition which contains all content on the actual disc itself for like 25 bucks. Ni no Kuni 2 also had one and it was the last thing the company released on a console before being forced to reduce their operations because there was no cashflow.

Seasonal passes tend to fail way more often for single player games.

It took a bit for dlc and microtransactions to really hit their peak, too. Greedy devs will keep trying.