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Comic for Wednesday 12/28 (Early High Res)
🕑 Added 2022-12-28 02:18:03 +0000 UTCGenerally, I am completely fine with cosmetic microtransactions in support of a game's ongoing development. I'm happy to chip in to a live service game once I feel like the amount of hours I'm getting out of it has exceeded the value of my initial purchase price. That's an entirely subjective threshold that will be different for everyone, but as a general practice I'm free to opt in or opt out of, I find cosmetic MTX pretty benign (that's not to say it can't be sketchy/abused, but that's more on the proprietor, and not the concept itself).
However even if I feel like MTX are generally acceptable, launching a buggy, barebones product with a fully stocked, fully functioning cash shop is simply not a good look. And no one should be surprised that it doesn't sit well with gamers.
Now let's be absolutely clear here: the people who write game code, and the people who design and model cosmetic gear are not the same people on a development team. There is often a misconception that having a ton of cosmetic items to sell at launch is somehow responsible for a lack of updates or content for said games. The programmers did not stop coding to texture a new hat any more than the graphics guys can stop modeling to help fix bugs. The shiny new chest armor in the store is not the reason you're still disconnecting from matches.
But from an optics standpoint, seeing a big shiny cash shop built on top of a shaky, still-needs-lots-of-love game just doesn't inspire a lot of confidence or goodwill regarding motives. Don't try to upsell me on leather seats while the car's engine is leaking oil. In this day and age, developers need to be at least a little more cognizant of how things look, and so even though programming and art are two separate departments, maybe just don't push the microtransactions until you're on more solid footing with the important stuff?
Comments
Shawn Spencer
I feel like this describes pretty much every EA game.
Kaedys
It's true, but speaking as someone in software engineering (though not game development), budgets are a thing. From square one all the way through launch, the company makes decisions on how much to budget to each department, how much manpower to have in this area versus that. You can't just *swap* them if one area is ahead and the other behind, both because programmers are not graphics artists and because of Brook's Law, but the cash shop being fully polished and ready *can* be responsible for the rest of the game sucking, as that is *usually* because the company made the very intentional choice of prioritizing staffing towards the cash shop features and items over the actual game. And it's worth noting that while individual items in the cash shop almost never need direct coding, the cash shop itself, both the interface and the underlying mechanisms, do need coding. And often, the internal *tools* needed to make the items in then shop needed developing, and potentially the feature plugins above and beyond the ones in the game. For example, if an item in the shop has an additional animation effect that goes off when you deal damage a certain way, well, that tie-in needed coding, and *that* coding does *directly* come at the expense of coding on the game itself.
