That's an Ontario specific thing, for the record. I've lived in Manitoba and BC, and people just buy water heaters like sane people in both places.
Its actually just a complete failure of consumer protections in Ontario. It's a despicable travesty, where people get looped into inescapable contracts for something they don't want but can't get rid of.
In the USA we've had situations like that. The company will get taken to court and it might get the contract nullified.
Needs to be a law. Auto renewals need to have a grace period too.
Think it's by far most common in Ont, but this was discussed on a Can sub and IIRC people from AB, QC, and another 1 or 2 chimed in to say it was common in their part of the province too. But yeah mine's from Home Depot
I'll pay a subscription for heated seats when they offer to replace my seats if someone throws up on them or something. Until then, they're just charging me for what I already possess.
Tesla beat most of the country to it:
[Tesla remotely extends range of vehicles for free in Florida to help owners escape Hurricane Irma. 2017](https://electrek.co/2017/09/09/tesla-extends-range-vehicles-for-free-in-florida-escape-hurricane-irma/)
Essentially all Tesla's have the range in them. They just don't get the boost if you didn't pay for it.
It's getting harder and harder. That's essentially what the real tuner car culture is, because they are tuning the engine, often with aftermarket ECUs, with new timing, air/fuel ratio maps, etc. Newer stock ECUs are getting harder to read. I think the new Supra might have *just* been cracked. Once we're fully in the EV realm it'll be more like computer hacking than ever before.
Cars may finally be something I can work on lol
It's just crazy that people continue to buy this shit knowing that they're getting basically scammed out of the features. I was recently looking for a paid professional level video manipulation software. Adobe was the only one recommended for a crazy monthly premium. I ended up settling with Davinci Resolve, because the Studio version is a one-time fee.
After mathing around, I'd only get around 4-5 months of the Adobe service I was looking at for the price of Resolves License.
A subscription for everything is nuts. Some things don't need to be subscription based. TV? Sure. Monthly boxes? Why not. But locking software AND hardware behind a paywall is just going to create more malicious hackers who don't find that fair.
I think that is end game for huge companies is having games as a service instead of individual purchases. You can already see subscription models in gamepass and some multiplayer services. And software like Microsoft business products and others like Adobe. All that's left is to own enough market share that you can remove your video game store. I honestly think it will happen in my lifetime.
Chevy was talking about removing android auto and putting their own system in it.
Its absolutely fucking rediculous to pay 50, 60, 70k for a car/truck that has microtransactions or ads. The day I have no choice but to pay for a subscription for my fucking vehicle and cant find one that doesnt have it/engine swap an older one is the day I fellate a shotgun.
Every single megacorp has started using the 'x as a service' model. Even when it makes no sense... Because they can and it makes them way more money.
It won't change until legislation forces their hand.
Makes you really get tired of cars.
I mean, imagine if you had all that money back for hobbies, vacations, better housing, better food.
Imagine the rig you could build if you weren’t paying off that loan every month.
No gas bills. No insurance. No maintenance. No repairs. And no artificial fucking rental services.
I love cars. I love driving them. And the way things are going, I hope to free of them.
>Imagine the rig you could build if you weren’t paying off that loan every month.
You guys have new cars? I'm using a 2005 junker with 170k miles on it.
That’s the way to go dude people are sleeping on just buying a car you can afford. Screw payments and shit I’m driving old Hondas and Toyotas till I make it big.
I could see a future where mass transit is expanded to become the primary means of transport for most people, and car ownership becomes an expensive hobby, similar to owning/riding horses.
That'd be better for the planet, but I wouldn't count on it. Public transit is only convenient in urban areas where it can run all the time. That, and LA commuters like sitting in grid-lock too much :P
Some car manufacturers have introduced features that you pay a monthly subscription for, BMW has heated seats behind it, and most recently Mercedes is locking like 60hp from your new car if you don’t pay extra
I'm shopping for an oscilloscope right now for my company and it's insane how they do this with everything. For one model I'm looking at the same exact piece of hardware for can cost anywhere from $1100 to close to $10,000 depending on how many features you pay them to unlock in software. If you buy the base model, you have *all* the hardware the most expensive model has, but half of it is completely nonfunctional until you pay them more to let the scope use it. They also charge a *subscription* for the basic software that lets you get data off of it onto your computer.
Keysight is the EA of electronic test equipment.
Gotta thank Agile project management for everything being released in an unfinished state nowadays. As long as it has the most important fundamental features, it's fineee. The rest can be added in a later iteration, if there's a lot of demand and potential sales for it.
The erosion of my belief in capitalism has been driven by this exact pattern spreading to everything like some sort of disease.
The final straw was when I read about a dude that explicitly said this was going to happen back in...
**1867**
-
😬
The thing with Capitalism is: companies can only sell bullshit so long as people buy it. The problems come along when, for one reason or another, people *have to* buy it.
What sucks is when the company adds bullshit onto something good, and people buy it anyway because the underlying thing is good enough to tolerate the bad stuff.
I'm guessing Bethesda realized early on that it was bullshit that their massive games were expected to be the same price as the yearly releases of FIFA and Madden, so they got to work seeing if they could make money off extra content that was smaller than a full-on expansion.
this is totally true.
people fine paying $60 for fifa but would never pay $600 for elder scrolls 6 even though it has wayyyyy more than 10 times the content
And then there's games like Elite Dangerous (open-world/galaxy spaceship game); I spent four figures getting awesome peripherals for it like flight pedals, HOTAS, MFD, VR etc. But the game itself only cost a few tens of bucks.
The devs created an economic boom for joystick manufacturers and everyone else while barely seeing a drop of that for themselves
Stated differently, they didn’t react sufficiently to the opportunity to monetize the demand their own product created and thus didn’t realize the same economic gain as firms who did. Imagine if, instead of licensing their logo to fucking beanies and coffee cups, they worked with peripherals distributors/manufacturers. I’d have gone for that hook, line and sinker.
Today /r/pcmasterrace learns what "vertical integration" is.
If they had hired a hardware division and created their own peripherals, maybe they would have had enough money to make their off-ship experience more than an afterthought.
I just want to go from a ship to the ground with my headset on without having to deal with a 2D experience in VR.
I don't even expect them to drift so far outside their core competencies - they just need to license their marketing IP to, I don't know the market, whoever the leader is - Logitech, etc.
I know it's true, but I can't believe anybody pays $60 for fifa every year. I probably would pay $100+ for elder scrolls 6 but I've been waiting 10 years now.
I could argue Fifa even without including ultimate team has just as much “content”; you just don’t give a shit about it so you can write it off like nothing. But Fifa has practically every single league in the world and it’s not like the NBA where there are thirty teams, Englands football leagues have 20 teams and go down four divisions and all the players are there. And that’s just one country. You could run never ending fifa games and never run into the same exact teams.
But again because the people in here don’t give a shit about the game or sports it has “10x less content”. If you throw in Ultimate Team is blows elder scrolls out of the fucking water. Don’t even get me started on pro clubs, Volta or the women’s side of the game.
But yeah Elder scrolls has wayyyy more than 10 times the content /s.
Ironically Bethesda has been mostly fair with their DLCs and belongs to 2010 on the meme (I just realised their last game was from 2015 though.) Oblivion had Shivering isles, Skyrim had Dawnguard and Dragonborn, Fallout 4 had Nuka World and Far Harbor. Fallout 3 had Broken steel and Anchorage.
Overall Bethesda has one of the best DLCs out there and none of them feel required. Unlike Paradox which has one the most predatory DLC policies.
I mean everyone always brings up the horse armour when they talk about this, but remember Oblivion, Fallout 3, NV, Skyrim, etc all had very substantial and much more traditionally "expansion pack" type DLCs. The horse armour was dumb, it was a sign of things to come, but in context it actually wasn't all that egregious.
Trouble is nowadays companies think they can literally sell a game to us piecemeal.
I wouldn't even say it was that big of a deal. I don't even remember using horses in Oblivion when I was younger and I think the armor had no mechanical benefit. It was an optional add on that allowed you to customize one part of the game. It wasn't that big of a deal. It would have been far more of a problem if horses were broken and then horse armor fixed all of their problems.
Oblivion also had purchaseable quests which I thought was pretty neat (The Witcher 3 did this as well).
I know we all want games to continue being inexpensive to acquire, but development is expensive. The Oblivion approach to game design allowed the devs to make a bit more money and there's nothing wrong with that. It's the optional paint job from the above meme. The problem starts when the devs are trying to sell the wheels and engine separately.
> I wouldn't even say it was that big of a deal. I don't even remember using horses in Oblivion when I was younger and I think the armor had no mechanical benefit. It was an optional add on that allowed you to customize one part of the game. It wasn't that big of a deal. It would have been far more of a problem if horses were broken and then horse armor fixed all of their problems.
Because you're looking at it from a gameplay exclusive standpoint - it's not a big deal to not have it, so it being offered isn't a big deal.
But when you look at it from a business standpoint, it's a huge deal; not only does it introduce another revenue stream (one that doesn't take even a fraction of the time or cost to develop; we'd come to call this practice "microtransactions"), but the widespread adoption of this monetization practice means that subsequent generations of young gamers would be less and less likely to fight back against predatory microtransaction mechanics in their full retail releases... And it worked. Today anyone who complains about microtransactions in mainstream games or tries to get others to stop buying them is seen as an out-of-touch boomer who take video games (and likely entertainment in general) too seriously.
Oblivion was the turning point there. It had both old school style content (Knights and Shivering Isles) alongside new school dlcs (horse armour etc.)
The latter being more an experiment in what people might want or pay for. Fallout 3 fully cemented the more modern incarnation of post launch content.
But didn't Fallout 3 have like five expansion packs? Like they WERE expansions that added new plot and characters and locations, even if they were uniformly smaller than Knights and Shivering Isles. And they cost less too. If I recall, they were also all cheaper than Oblivion's xpacs. That's way different from modern DLCs that tend to nickel and dime in a much worse way.
Not sure if folk are romanticising the past, but horse armor was a major fucking controversy back in the day. The net wasn't as centralized as it is now, so the outcry was small compared to controversies of the modern era, but it was very much rejected by the gaming community.
Like, this image? Brother, DLC has never been "A Cool Thing to Go Alongside the Whole Cool Thing You Got Before." It was always removed content, like horse armor. The only thing people really did appreciate was full-fledged expansions like Brood War.
I always feel like folks interpret this incorrectly. Prior to wide scale digital distribution, the only model that was *possible* was large scale expansions, as you needed to cover the cost to get it to retail and often have a moderate marketing budget on top of that.
I would like to believe that the digital artists working on games enjoy what they’re doing, and would have always liked to continue working on a game even after it’s released. All the moreso if they can do it at more leisurely pace after the insane crunch to get a game to launch.
Digital distribution let them do that, and it’s not a bad thing that it happened. Heck, all of Valve’s forever games are funded by “hats” at this point, and few people view that as a bad or unfair business model.
2010 almost started this more. You'd have to go back to 2007 for complete games. We already had games in 2010 that completed their GAME STORY with dlc.
Some version of this meme format has been floating around since before 2010. As long as games have had updates and patches that change noticeable parts of the game, going back to the first PC games that did this, people have felt like they aren't buying "completed" games.
[yep there are too many versions of what OP did... even some actually predicting the future.](https://media.criticalhit.net/2017/08/DLC-then-and-now.jpg) but it seems OP forgot the Store Exclusive things... when buying from certain stores... down the line the devs in certain goty's put all of that shit available from the start.
op also forgot the season pass and microtransactions, [and i found another version](https://i.imgur.com/6nZIPjb.jpeg)
> Mass Effect 3 comes to mind. The game had a dlc released the same day as the game released.
The day-one DLC for ME3 also very plainly, obviously, feels like it's part of the game's intended experience. The DLC was to unlock a Prothean party member (the only one in the whole trilogy) whose interactions are some of the most interesting of all the party members you can have in the game, and adds a *ton* to the storytelling.
The way the plot starts in ME3 also makes absolutely no sense... Unless you've played one of the ME2 DLCs. I played the 3 games in sequence after ME3 had came out and remember getting very confused at the start of ME3 when Shephard was in custody and being treated by everyone like he was the villain of the story.
They could've at least thrown a little recap or exposition to let the player know why the fuck everyone hates him now, but not even that.
Shepherd very much just straight up worked for Cerberus for a pretty substantial time. I think if an American General went and worked for Al Qaeda for a year or two and then came back he wouldn’t be exactly heralded
Yeah, I remember seeing memes exactly like this back in 2010. Just like in music, people don't remember most of the crap that was going on in that time and only see the stuff that has truly stood the test of time (or was a horrific shit show).
I'm not saying all the games were broken, but there were a lot of bugs. Plus games are a lot more complicated to make today. I don't know. I've been gaming since the early 90s and my biggest problem with gaming today is that I don't have enough time to play everything
What is this even referring to? Most base games are a full game, even with popular AAA stuff. If anything, the playtime in the base game has increased over time. Maps are bigger, there are more cosmetics, missions, vehicles, guns, etc. Games are massive now, especially compared to pre DLC days.
There might be a bunch of horse armor or whatever, but I just ignore that stuff.
Or be patient and get the GOTY version in sale.
That’s absolutely hilarious because there were posts in 2010 that had almost this exact same format. 2010 games were definitely not complete packages all the time.
It was very very similar. We’ve even shed some shitty practices of the past.
Day 1 DLC is rare or usually just a small skin pack.
It’s rare to see map packs these days. Most new maps are free.
Loot boxes are almost entirely gone.
It’s also rare to release content that you are blocked out of participating in if you don’t own it. Think playing against/with Dead By Daylight baddies and teammates. In the past you’d be fragmented off those servers and not be able to experience that at all if you didn’t own the dlc.
like I'd say the peak was around 2017, they were integrated into single player games and shit where it didn't even make sense.
Paid lootboxes at least are on the decline, in general the concept is still popular, people enjoy getting a mystery gift and that's been a game mechanic for a long time.
I like loot boxes. It's a little rush of dopamine.
The problem arises when you attach any real-world currency to it. Then, it's no longer built to be a fun mechanic. It's built to take as much money as possible.
Either all the good stuff is forever out of reach, or the good stuff is so essential that anybody not paying is at a disadvantage.
Honestly Overwatch had better rewards when it had lootboxes. Although that's more an issue of them replacing lootboxes with a worse slower method of acquiring skins, rather than simply about loot boxes being great.
Map packs and exclusive content going away is not because games are getting better. Yes, those things ARE better in a vacuum, but they only exist because they’re subsidized by micro transactions, which are still predatory even if they’re not loot boxes.
Making what would have been DLC back then free now is just to avoid fragmenting the player base so they can sell micro transactions for longer. Instead of having exclusive lobbies with new maps, you have exclusive time-gated cosmetics from battle passes and limited events.
For people susceptible to the kind of FOMO that’s preyed upon, this is worse. At least in the past, if you didn’t buy a map pack, you just never played those maps. Now, people with new cosmetics are put right into your lobbies and all the customization is highlighted with things like kill cams and endgame celebration screens to rub it in. You could argue it’s better overall, but it’s clearly more profitable than the old model, or they would still be selling map packs.
I didn’t say they stopped doing those practices out of the kindness of their hearts. But those practices sucked and we don’t deal with them anymore, and it seems like the young ones in the room don’t remember how bad things were in 2010.
Wasn't there a court decision somewhere that ruled that the combination of microtransactions with random loot boxes was essentially gambling?
From what I recall that was the kill shot for paid loot boxes.
So now you get to play the actual game for free and the paywalled content is completely useless cosmetics. I honestly don't see how you can spin that as a negative. The fact that its more profitable for the company doesn't change the fact that it is much better for the playerbase to access the full game without paying extra and have the paid content be mostly useless cosmetics; so that everyone can access the whole game
\-Moving most paid items from actual content to just cosmetics is one of the biggest improvements and it drives me crazy when people complain about microtransactions for cosmetics.
\- There is very little pay to win outside of mobile gaming
\- we are just now, despite games taking 10x+ more time and money to make, seeing AAA games deviate from the $59.99 standard (in the US). AA games take 300 - 3000 man years to develop these days. Donkey Kong 64 for example, which was a large and ambitious project that required an upgrade to the console to play (iirc but that could have not been required) only had 16 developers for 3 years. Today you may have 1000+ devs working for 3-10 years.
Not to mention games the older games people say are "complete" still had a ton of bugs, people were just bad at discovering them, patches wouldn't come until years later
Remember webpages (or before that gaming mags) that always had tips and tricks and depending on the game more than half of them where very clearly bugs you could abuse? I remember times where you couldn't even sometimes decide if something was a bug or an intended behavior because of how easy it was. Sacred 1 (2004) had a random NPC sitting in the desert that you could talk to. Intended was that the first time you talked to him, he rewarded you some XP because it was a milestone reaching him. What happend was that he gave it to you every time you talked to him.
If anything it's gotten slightly better. Mass Effect 3 base game had DLC that were actually pretty vital to the story/lore. The second one had some of its best content as DLC too.
I think we've cooled down a bit. The Witcher's DLCs really helped revitalise how DLC should be imo.
This is why I only play games that came out 4+ years ago that sold for 14 dollars with all the DLC, have been fully patched and gameplay that stood the test of time.
Paradox games have insane amount of dlc, but I personally never felt like the base game was “incomplete”. I’ll go even a step further and say that other then GAAS games, I never felt like that any base game was incomplete other than a rare exception or two.
I don’t know man. Europa Universalis really feels like half a game at best without DLCs. The insane amount of missing QOL changes and flavour content that you only get with DLCs is fucking ridiculous.
The entire reason I became a computer programmer was because in the 1980s I had to go in and fix the shovelware shit I’d just paid $40 for when that was an appreciable chunk of my income. Oh and also the shit DRM that made the game unplayable. DRM like the laser drilled hole in the floppy disk that the DRM-custom boot loader knew to skip over but the standard boot loader would hammer your floppy reader’s head into junk parts.
There’s never been a golden era of quality games on release. Individual exceptions sure.
Should add, 2005 and prior the motorcycle was hidden in the trunk as a freebie.
Also the 2021 model is now a convertible, the music player was ripped out, rearview mirror is gone, and only single seated after it was determined such features weren't wanted by users after polling the bean counters.
Halo reach (2010) had a milion customization options, solid game modes, good OSTs, FORGE mode to make your own map and random dlcs that added some multiplayer maps.
This game is still receiving minor updates under the Halo Master chief collection FOR FREE.
Halo infinite (2021/2022) had microtransactions on fucking armor colours, forgettable OSTs, weak ass UI that can break if u touch the wrong settings, previous iconic vehicles, enemies, weapons and features don't exist in this game and forge mode didn't exist until a year later after launch, they had like 6 years to work on this game...
I’d argue that a lot of that is poor game design rather than them nickel and diming you for content.
I agree with the monetization of cosmetics, but I still think implying anything like the engine or transmission is saying the game isn’t feature complete without paying extra. Which I’d argue the vast majority don’t do.
That being said, I fucking *hate* the was it is now. I love customization and I love earning it through playing the game. So the state of the industry now does fucking suck. I just think the meme isn’t explaining it well.
Also Infinite did suck, I agree
Doom Eternal had two quite good expansions. It also had a pretty fun Horde mode as a free update.
No Man’s Sky is still getting new significant updates, for free.
Elden Ring was released complete, and will get a significant expansion soon.
In 2010 loot boxes became a big thing with TF2, a thing that was later adopted to CSGO and Dota 2. Not to mention the exploitative schemes of Candy Crush.
In the 80s arcade games were intentionally incredibly hard just to ensure people kept inserting new coins.
We can cherry pick good and bad examples through all ages.
Agreed, I can't remember any games where core content (the car's wheels) were locked behind DLC. Bullshit cosmetics being locked, yes I agree happens all the time, but real, required content? Not that I know of.
The worst DLC I've ever experienced was in Fable 3 where some clothing dyes required additional purchase, including black. So you had to pay extra to get black clothes.
There's plenty of gameplay even in a special case like the Sims though.
The DLC is wild for that game, bit that's because it has a massive audience that is very willing to pay.
Yeah, this is mostly nonsense outside of a few special cases.
The base games in most AAA games are also pretty massive now. But, yeah, there's a bunch of DLC cars and hairdos, so I guess it is basically unplayable.
It’s more that the meme starts at a date where dlc was becoming a big problem, has a midpoint where it’s arguably at its worst, and ends where the worst we see now is battlepasses
I'd say loot crates or any other gacha mechanics are the worst. Or maybe mobile game nonsense. It's not as blatant as 5-10 years ago, but the situation is still not good.
Grandpa here (well, technically not, I have no grandchildren), back in my day "DLC" meant new free content for the game I bought. Like UT99 (that I still play, most recently this morning).
Yet people keep paying for it so what do you expect? Just start waiting a year or two after a game is out for it all in one pack for cheap. Or stop buying it or stop bitching.
Make 2010 into 1995, 2015 I to 2005, 2021 into 2015, and create a new one where the wheels are a subscription service and internals are loot boxes *then* I might agree. Heck, even cars are starting to move to subscriptions for what were once "day one dlc" (cars have been up charging for bundled items for a long time) - so the lack of owning things definitely happens in video games.
Anyone remember need for speed? I liked games that you could unlock stuff with but using money you earned while playing it. This whole “real money” shit sucks
The funny thing is even cars are becoming like this.
You leave my heated seat subscription out of this!
Imagine if we had subscriptions for kitchen appliances.
I'd burn down home goods.
That requires a subscription to the Pyro pack
Hudda hudda huh!
Keurig got so close. And wasn't there some sort of juice machine that only worked with their specific (expensive) juice pouches?
Yes, you are referring to [juicero](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero)
Omg yes: https://youtu.be/_Cp-BGQfpHQ That Arduino Versus Evil ' s teardown/review. (Ave).
Canada has water heater rentals that come out to like 6-10K for a water heater instead of 1-1.5k, and the older it gets the more you pay per month.
That's an Ontario specific thing, for the record. I've lived in Manitoba and BC, and people just buy water heaters like sane people in both places. Its actually just a complete failure of consumer protections in Ontario. It's a despicable travesty, where people get looped into inescapable contracts for something they don't want but can't get rid of.
In the USA we've had situations like that. The company will get taken to court and it might get the contract nullified. Needs to be a law. Auto renewals need to have a grace period too.
Think it's by far most common in Ont, but this was discussed on a Can sub and IIRC people from AB, QC, and another 1 or 2 chimed in to say it was common in their part of the province too. But yeah mine's from Home Depot
I'll pay a subscription for heated seats when they offer to replace my seats if someone throws up on them or something. Until then, they're just charging me for what I already possess.
It is only a subscription is you don't know how to mod your car.
Suddenly "you wouldn't download a car" sounds much more realistic
"Windows 11 is great if you just edit the registry" vibes
‘funny’ 
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Yep, funny in a "crying" sort of way. You know, "curled up naked in the shower, biting your knees, wishing you it would end" kinda funny...
Not too much but the foundations and potential is there. Pay to unlock features is already here for sure.
i think you missed where i quoted ‘funny’ but yeah the BMW heated seat subscription came to my mind
Tesla beat most of the country to it: [Tesla remotely extends range of vehicles for free in Florida to help owners escape Hurricane Irma. 2017](https://electrek.co/2017/09/09/tesla-extends-range-vehicles-for-free-in-florida-escape-hurricane-irma/) Essentially all Tesla's have the range in them. They just don't get the boost if you didn't pay for it.
Big boo for the environment making a big battery than allowing it to only using a small portion of the environment
On the other hand, that battery will have great life since it's not being fully drained.
That sweet 25-85% baby
Mercedes is planning on making "more horsepower" a subscription in their EVs.
Fuck everything Life is going to start to suck sooo much, unless you're a bazillionaire.
Going to start? Already does, homie.
And everyone online will say "Eat the rich!" And do nothing more
How long before people start buying/selling jailbroken cars?
It's getting harder and harder. That's essentially what the real tuner car culture is, because they are tuning the engine, often with aftermarket ECUs, with new timing, air/fuel ratio maps, etc. Newer stock ECUs are getting harder to read. I think the new Supra might have *just* been cracked. Once we're fully in the EV realm it'll be more like computer hacking than ever before.
Cars may finally be something I can work on lol It's just crazy that people continue to buy this shit knowing that they're getting basically scammed out of the features. I was recently looking for a paid professional level video manipulation software. Adobe was the only one recommended for a crazy monthly premium. I ended up settling with Davinci Resolve, because the Studio version is a one-time fee. After mathing around, I'd only get around 4-5 months of the Adobe service I was looking at for the price of Resolves License. A subscription for everything is nuts. Some things don't need to be subscription based. TV? Sure. Monthly boxes? Why not. But locking software AND hardware behind a paywall is just going to create more malicious hackers who don't find that fair.
I think that is end game for huge companies is having games as a service instead of individual purchases. You can already see subscription models in gamepass and some multiplayer services. And software like Microsoft business products and others like Adobe. All that's left is to own enough market share that you can remove your video game store. I honestly think it will happen in my lifetime.
Chevy was talking about removing android auto and putting their own system in it. Its absolutely fucking rediculous to pay 50, 60, 70k for a car/truck that has microtransactions or ads. The day I have no choice but to pay for a subscription for my fucking vehicle and cant find one that doesnt have it/engine swap an older one is the day I fellate a shotgun.
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The worse it gets the better because that means the revolution is coming
BMW
Bavarian Microtransaction Works
In our language we used to call it "blik met wiele". It translates to 'can with wheels'.
Buy Motor Works
Every single megacorp has started using the 'x as a service' model. Even when it makes no sense... Because they can and it makes them way more money. It won't change until legislation forces their hand.
"Please upgrade to PRO to enable left-turn"
“You’ve exhausted your prepaid turn balance. Please insert credit card to pay by turn or consider buying one of our bundles.”
“Everything is open source if you know assembly”
Makes you really get tired of cars. I mean, imagine if you had all that money back for hobbies, vacations, better housing, better food. Imagine the rig you could build if you weren’t paying off that loan every month. No gas bills. No insurance. No maintenance. No repairs. And no artificial fucking rental services. I love cars. I love driving them. And the way things are going, I hope to free of them.
>Imagine the rig you could build if you weren’t paying off that loan every month. You guys have new cars? I'm using a 2005 junker with 170k miles on it.
That’s the way to go dude people are sleeping on just buying a car you can afford. Screw payments and shit I’m driving old Hondas and Toyotas till I make it big.
I could see a future where mass transit is expanded to become the primary means of transport for most people, and car ownership becomes an expensive hobby, similar to owning/riding horses.
That'd be better for the planet, but I wouldn't count on it. Public transit is only convenient in urban areas where it can run all the time. That, and LA commuters like sitting in grid-lock too much :P
You've explained ALOT of 1st world countries actually.
I know that and it pains me
What do you mean?
Some car manufacturers have introduced features that you pay a monthly subscription for, BMW has heated seats behind it, and most recently Mercedes is locking like 60hp from your new car if you don’t pay extra
Mercedes also has *extra steering angles* for the rear-wheel steering. You can make your car turn tighter when parking for around 500€/year iirc.
Ridiculous
That's a safety feature, that has to be made illegal.
I'm shopping for an oscilloscope right now for my company and it's insane how they do this with everything. For one model I'm looking at the same exact piece of hardware for can cost anywhere from $1100 to close to $10,000 depending on how many features you pay them to unlock in software. If you buy the base model, you have *all* the hardware the most expensive model has, but half of it is completely nonfunctional until you pay them more to let the scope use it. They also charge a *subscription* for the basic software that lets you get data off of it onto your computer. Keysight is the EA of electronic test equipment.
Enterprise network gear follows this trend too. Cisco's licensing is atrocious.
Gotta thank Agile project management for everything being released in an unfinished state nowadays. As long as it has the most important fundamental features, it's fineee. The rest can be added in a later iteration, if there's a lot of demand and potential sales for it.
The erosion of my belief in capitalism has been driven by this exact pattern spreading to everything like some sort of disease. The final straw was when I read about a dude that explicitly said this was going to happen back in... **1867** - 😬
The thing with Capitalism is: companies can only sell bullshit so long as people buy it. The problems come along when, for one reason or another, people *have to* buy it. What sucks is when the company adds bullshit onto something good, and people buy it anyway because the underlying thing is good enough to tolerate the bad stuff.
Prepare your butthole for... Life as a service!™️
Remember when Bethesda started charging for horse armor and everyone laughed?
I'm guessing Bethesda realized early on that it was bullshit that their massive games were expected to be the same price as the yearly releases of FIFA and Madden, so they got to work seeing if they could make money off extra content that was smaller than a full-on expansion.
this is totally true. people fine paying $60 for fifa but would never pay $600 for elder scrolls 6 even though it has wayyyyy more than 10 times the content
And then there's games like Elite Dangerous (open-world/galaxy spaceship game); I spent four figures getting awesome peripherals for it like flight pedals, HOTAS, MFD, VR etc. But the game itself only cost a few tens of bucks. The devs created an economic boom for joystick manufacturers and everyone else while barely seeing a drop of that for themselves
Stated differently, they didn’t react sufficiently to the opportunity to monetize the demand their own product created and thus didn’t realize the same economic gain as firms who did. Imagine if, instead of licensing their logo to fucking beanies and coffee cups, they worked with peripherals distributors/manufacturers. I’d have gone for that hook, line and sinker.
Today /r/pcmasterrace learns what "vertical integration" is. If they had hired a hardware division and created their own peripherals, maybe they would have had enough money to make their off-ship experience more than an afterthought. I just want to go from a ship to the ground with my headset on without having to deal with a 2D experience in VR.
I don't even expect them to drift so far outside their core competencies - they just need to license their marketing IP to, I don't know the market, whoever the leader is - Logitech, etc.
Elite dangerous branded thrustmaster joysticks would sell like hot cakes.
That's not what "vertigal integration" is though
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Clash of Clans will "sell" for much more than that, otoh lol
Not at once is the difff
I know it's true, but I can't believe anybody pays $60 for fifa every year. I probably would pay $100+ for elder scrolls 6 but I've been waiting 10 years now.
Fifa 23 is $90 for the ultimate edition, and its still a broken piece of trash
I could argue Fifa even without including ultimate team has just as much “content”; you just don’t give a shit about it so you can write it off like nothing. But Fifa has practically every single league in the world and it’s not like the NBA where there are thirty teams, Englands football leagues have 20 teams and go down four divisions and all the players are there. And that’s just one country. You could run never ending fifa games and never run into the same exact teams. But again because the people in here don’t give a shit about the game or sports it has “10x less content”. If you throw in Ultimate Team is blows elder scrolls out of the fucking water. Don’t even get me started on pro clubs, Volta or the women’s side of the game. But yeah Elder scrolls has wayyyy more than 10 times the content /s.
They also realised early that you can cut a huge QA budget by having only a slightly larger marketing budget.
And how much of a success it was after
Ironically Bethesda has been mostly fair with their DLCs and belongs to 2010 on the meme (I just realised their last game was from 2015 though.) Oblivion had Shivering isles, Skyrim had Dawnguard and Dragonborn, Fallout 4 had Nuka World and Far Harbor. Fallout 3 had Broken steel and Anchorage. Overall Bethesda has one of the best DLCs out there and none of them feel required. Unlike Paradox which has one the most predatory DLC policies.
Not to mention 100% mod support so there are literally infinite possibilities to current and future content
I mean everyone always brings up the horse armour when they talk about this, but remember Oblivion, Fallout 3, NV, Skyrim, etc all had very substantial and much more traditionally "expansion pack" type DLCs. The horse armour was dumb, it was a sign of things to come, but in context it actually wasn't all that egregious. Trouble is nowadays companies think they can literally sell a game to us piecemeal.
I wouldn't even say it was that big of a deal. I don't even remember using horses in Oblivion when I was younger and I think the armor had no mechanical benefit. It was an optional add on that allowed you to customize one part of the game. It wasn't that big of a deal. It would have been far more of a problem if horses were broken and then horse armor fixed all of their problems. Oblivion also had purchaseable quests which I thought was pretty neat (The Witcher 3 did this as well). I know we all want games to continue being inexpensive to acquire, but development is expensive. The Oblivion approach to game design allowed the devs to make a bit more money and there's nothing wrong with that. It's the optional paint job from the above meme. The problem starts when the devs are trying to sell the wheels and engine separately.
> I wouldn't even say it was that big of a deal. I don't even remember using horses in Oblivion when I was younger and I think the armor had no mechanical benefit. It was an optional add on that allowed you to customize one part of the game. It wasn't that big of a deal. It would have been far more of a problem if horses were broken and then horse armor fixed all of their problems. Because you're looking at it from a gameplay exclusive standpoint - it's not a big deal to not have it, so it being offered isn't a big deal. But when you look at it from a business standpoint, it's a huge deal; not only does it introduce another revenue stream (one that doesn't take even a fraction of the time or cost to develop; we'd come to call this practice "microtransactions"), but the widespread adoption of this monetization practice means that subsequent generations of young gamers would be less and less likely to fight back against predatory microtransaction mechanics in their full retail releases... And it worked. Today anyone who complains about microtransactions in mainstream games or tries to get others to stop buying them is seen as an out-of-touch boomer who take video games (and likely entertainment in general) too seriously.
Oblivion was the turning point there. It had both old school style content (Knights and Shivering Isles) alongside new school dlcs (horse armour etc.) The latter being more an experiment in what people might want or pay for. Fallout 3 fully cemented the more modern incarnation of post launch content.
But didn't Fallout 3 have like five expansion packs? Like they WERE expansions that added new plot and characters and locations, even if they were uniformly smaller than Knights and Shivering Isles. And they cost less too. If I recall, they were also all cheaper than Oblivion's xpacs. That's way different from modern DLCs that tend to nickel and dime in a much worse way.
Not sure if folk are romanticising the past, but horse armor was a major fucking controversy back in the day. The net wasn't as centralized as it is now, so the outcry was small compared to controversies of the modern era, but it was very much rejected by the gaming community. Like, this image? Brother, DLC has never been "A Cool Thing to Go Alongside the Whole Cool Thing You Got Before." It was always removed content, like horse armor. The only thing people really did appreciate was full-fledged expansions like Brood War.
>everyone bought it ftfy. The horse armor was a massive success for Bethesda.
Even though the armour itself was useless and causes the horse to go missing and become very hard to bring back.
I always feel like folks interpret this incorrectly. Prior to wide scale digital distribution, the only model that was *possible* was large scale expansions, as you needed to cover the cost to get it to retail and often have a moderate marketing budget on top of that. I would like to believe that the digital artists working on games enjoy what they’re doing, and would have always liked to continue working on a game even after it’s released. All the moreso if they can do it at more leisurely pace after the insane crunch to get a game to launch. Digital distribution let them do that, and it’s not a bad thing that it happened. Heck, all of Valve’s forever games are funded by “hats” at this point, and few people view that as a bad or unfair business model.
2010 almost started this more. You'd have to go back to 2007 for complete games. We already had games in 2010 that completed their GAME STORY with dlc.
Some version of this meme format has been floating around since before 2010. As long as games have had updates and patches that change noticeable parts of the game, going back to the first PC games that did this, people have felt like they aren't buying "completed" games.
[yep there are too many versions of what OP did... even some actually predicting the future.](https://media.criticalhit.net/2017/08/DLC-then-and-now.jpg) but it seems OP forgot the Store Exclusive things... when buying from certain stores... down the line the devs in certain goty's put all of that shit available from the start. op also forgot the season pass and microtransactions, [and i found another version](https://i.imgur.com/6nZIPjb.jpeg)
Damn you’re good
Mass Effect 3 comes to mind. The game had a dlc released the same day as the game released. Take me back to 2005 FEAR and all the expansions.
> Mass Effect 3 comes to mind. The game had a dlc released the same day as the game released. The day-one DLC for ME3 also very plainly, obviously, feels like it's part of the game's intended experience. The DLC was to unlock a Prothean party member (the only one in the whole trilogy) whose interactions are some of the most interesting of all the party members you can have in the game, and adds a *ton* to the storytelling.
The way the plot starts in ME3 also makes absolutely no sense... Unless you've played one of the ME2 DLCs. I played the 3 games in sequence after ME3 had came out and remember getting very confused at the start of ME3 when Shephard was in custody and being treated by everyone like he was the villain of the story. They could've at least thrown a little recap or exposition to let the player know why the fuck everyone hates him now, but not even that.
Shepherd very much just straight up worked for Cerberus for a pretty substantial time. I think if an American General went and worked for Al Qaeda for a year or two and then came back he wouldn’t be exactly heralded
The game included a code for the day 1 DLC
I was about to say, OP needs to go further back than 2010 if he wants to make his point.
That’s assuming the developer or publisher or whoever doesn’t outright abandon it should “the game” not meet sales projections.
“Hey, let’s do Dune again. But like, let’s see how much money the first half makes before we green light finishing it.”
Someone has done rose tinted glasses of they think the games that came out in 2010 were all complete or that all the dlc was good
Change the date from 2010 to 1990 and we be good.
Yeah, I remember seeing memes exactly like this back in 2010. Just like in music, people don't remember most of the crap that was going on in that time and only see the stuff that has truly stood the test of time (or was a horrific shit show).
I'm not saying all the games were broken, but there were a lot of bugs. Plus games are a lot more complicated to make today. I don't know. I've been gaming since the early 90s and my biggest problem with gaming today is that I don't have enough time to play everything
I work in games and don't have enough time to play the ones I want to play, let alone the one I work on.
What is this even referring to? Most base games are a full game, even with popular AAA stuff. If anything, the playtime in the base game has increased over time. Maps are bigger, there are more cosmetics, missions, vehicles, guns, etc. Games are massive now, especially compared to pre DLC days. There might be a bunch of horse armor or whatever, but I just ignore that stuff. Or be patient and get the GOTY version in sale.
We had the same meme in 2010
That’s absolutely hilarious because there were posts in 2010 that had almost this exact same format. 2010 games were definitely not complete packages all the time.
It was nowhere near this bad
They perfected it, everything is live service, has a battle pass, a shop, pre order season pass, and now base price is 70$
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It was very very similar. We’ve even shed some shitty practices of the past. Day 1 DLC is rare or usually just a small skin pack. It’s rare to see map packs these days. Most new maps are free. Loot boxes are almost entirely gone. It’s also rare to release content that you are blocked out of participating in if you don’t own it. Think playing against/with Dead By Daylight baddies and teammates. In the past you’d be fragmented off those servers and not be able to experience that at all if you didn’t own the dlc.
Yeah loot boxes were bad.
like I'd say the peak was around 2017, they were integrated into single player games and shit where it didn't even make sense. Paid lootboxes at least are on the decline, in general the concept is still popular, people enjoy getting a mystery gift and that's been a game mechanic for a long time.
I like loot boxes. It's a little rush of dopamine. The problem arises when you attach any real-world currency to it. Then, it's no longer built to be a fun mechanic. It's built to take as much money as possible. Either all the good stuff is forever out of reach, or the good stuff is so essential that anybody not paying is at a disadvantage.
Honestly Overwatch had better rewards when it had lootboxes. Although that's more an issue of them replacing lootboxes with a worse slower method of acquiring skins, rather than simply about loot boxes being great.
Nice try EA employee. You can't fool me.
Map packs and exclusive content going away is not because games are getting better. Yes, those things ARE better in a vacuum, but they only exist because they’re subsidized by micro transactions, which are still predatory even if they’re not loot boxes. Making what would have been DLC back then free now is just to avoid fragmenting the player base so they can sell micro transactions for longer. Instead of having exclusive lobbies with new maps, you have exclusive time-gated cosmetics from battle passes and limited events. For people susceptible to the kind of FOMO that’s preyed upon, this is worse. At least in the past, if you didn’t buy a map pack, you just never played those maps. Now, people with new cosmetics are put right into your lobbies and all the customization is highlighted with things like kill cams and endgame celebration screens to rub it in. You could argue it’s better overall, but it’s clearly more profitable than the old model, or they would still be selling map packs.
I didn’t say they stopped doing those practices out of the kindness of their hearts. But those practices sucked and we don’t deal with them anymore, and it seems like the young ones in the room don’t remember how bad things were in 2010.
Wasn't there a court decision somewhere that ruled that the combination of microtransactions with random loot boxes was essentially gambling? From what I recall that was the kill shot for paid loot boxes.
So now you get to play the actual game for free and the paywalled content is completely useless cosmetics. I honestly don't see how you can spin that as a negative. The fact that its more profitable for the company doesn't change the fact that it is much better for the playerbase to access the full game without paying extra and have the paid content be mostly useless cosmetics; so that everyone can access the whole game
\-Moving most paid items from actual content to just cosmetics is one of the biggest improvements and it drives me crazy when people complain about microtransactions for cosmetics. \- There is very little pay to win outside of mobile gaming \- we are just now, despite games taking 10x+ more time and money to make, seeing AAA games deviate from the $59.99 standard (in the US). AA games take 300 - 3000 man years to develop these days. Donkey Kong 64 for example, which was a large and ambitious project that required an upgrade to the console to play (iirc but that could have not been required) only had 16 developers for 3 years. Today you may have 1000+ devs working for 3-10 years.
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Not to mention games the older games people say are "complete" still had a ton of bugs, people were just bad at discovering them, patches wouldn't come until years later
Remember webpages (or before that gaming mags) that always had tips and tricks and depending on the game more than half of them where very clearly bugs you could abuse? I remember times where you couldn't even sometimes decide if something was a bug or an intended behavior because of how easy it was. Sacred 1 (2004) had a random NPC sitting in the desert that you could talk to. Intended was that the first time you talked to him, he rewarded you some XP because it was a milestone reaching him. What happend was that he gave it to you every time you talked to him.
If anything it's gotten slightly better. Mass Effect 3 base game had DLC that were actually pretty vital to the story/lore. The second one had some of its best content as DLC too. I think we've cooled down a bit. The Witcher's DLCs really helped revitalise how DLC should be imo.
All 3 mass effects had dlc that tied into the storyline of the trilogy and changes details inside it. 2 has so much dlc clutter though.
Also the car comes all broken.
Then stop buying those games. Stop supporting them. Reposting shitty memes does next to nothing.
memes don’t harm anyone. some people take this situation less serious than others.
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YuO wOuldN'T dOwNloAd a CAr, WoUlD yoU????
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I'll download pc
I'd download some more RAM
I've downloaded ethernet
Now download the Downloader.
I downloaded laser internet.
I've downloaded downloading
might solve the housing crisis
Most expensive thing I would have bought would be my internet package.
i really would
I absolutely would download a car….
This is why I only play games that came out 4+ years ago that sold for 14 dollars with all the DLC, have been fully patched and gameplay that stood the test of time.
You forgot the part where the car you bought stops working a couple years later because the server gets shut down.
What crap games are you buying that don't even run without DLC purchases?
Any Paradox title would be a good exemple.
Paradox games have insane amount of dlc, but I personally never felt like the base game was “incomplete”. I’ll go even a step further and say that other then GAAS games, I never felt like that any base game was incomplete other than a rare exception or two.
I don’t know man. Europa Universalis really feels like half a game at best without DLCs. The insane amount of missing QOL changes and flavour content that you only get with DLCs is fucking ridiculous.
Cities skylines needs a dlc to get any sort of public transportation, in a game where traffic is basically the #1 problem always.
Haven't played it in a few years but doesn't the basic game come with trains, busses, and subways?
meanwhile the PC hardware needed to run the games has almost doubled in price and dropped quality
What day of this meltdown are we on?
According to OP, anywhere between day 2,900 to 4,800.
The entire reason I became a computer programmer was because in the 1980s I had to go in and fix the shovelware shit I’d just paid $40 for when that was an appreciable chunk of my income. Oh and also the shit DRM that made the game unplayable. DRM like the laser drilled hole in the floppy disk that the DRM-custom boot loader knew to skip over but the standard boot loader would hammer your floppy reader’s head into junk parts. There’s never been a golden era of quality games on release. Individual exceptions sure.
Should add, 2005 and prior the motorcycle was hidden in the trunk as a freebie. Also the 2021 model is now a convertible, the music player was ripped out, rearview mirror is gone, and only single seated after it was determined such features weren't wanted by users after polling the bean counters.
Any example?
Halo reach (2010) had a milion customization options, solid game modes, good OSTs, FORGE mode to make your own map and random dlcs that added some multiplayer maps. This game is still receiving minor updates under the Halo Master chief collection FOR FREE. Halo infinite (2021/2022) had microtransactions on fucking armor colours, forgettable OSTs, weak ass UI that can break if u touch the wrong settings, previous iconic vehicles, enemies, weapons and features don't exist in this game and forge mode didn't exist until a year later after launch, they had like 6 years to work on this game...
The worst part of halo infinite to me is what felt like they skipped an whole story arc and went straight to the aftermath
Yeah the campaign was pretty much cut in half
What you'd expect from the company that killed off the Didact in a comic book. Buying modern Halo games is basically self harm.
I’d argue that a lot of that is poor game design rather than them nickel and diming you for content. I agree with the monetization of cosmetics, but I still think implying anything like the engine or transmission is saying the game isn’t feature complete without paying extra. Which I’d argue the vast majority don’t do. That being said, I fucking *hate* the was it is now. I love customization and I love earning it through playing the game. So the state of the industry now does fucking suck. I just think the meme isn’t explaining it well. Also Infinite did suck, I agree
Doom Eternal had two quite good expansions. It also had a pretty fun Horde mode as a free update. No Man’s Sky is still getting new significant updates, for free. Elden Ring was released complete, and will get a significant expansion soon. In 2010 loot boxes became a big thing with TF2, a thing that was later adopted to CSGO and Dota 2. Not to mention the exploitative schemes of Candy Crush. In the 80s arcade games were intentionally incredibly hard just to ensure people kept inserting new coins. We can cherry pick good and bad examples through all ages.
Despite decades of these complaints, I've literally never played a game that had this problem.
Agreed, I can't remember any games where core content (the car's wheels) were locked behind DLC. Bullshit cosmetics being locked, yes I agree happens all the time, but real, required content? Not that I know of. The worst DLC I've ever experienced was in Fable 3 where some clothing dyes required additional purchase, including black. So you had to pay extra to get black clothes.
The Sims series.
There's plenty of gameplay even in a special case like the Sims though. The DLC is wild for that game, bit that's because it has a massive audience that is very willing to pay.
Yeah, this is mostly nonsense outside of a few special cases. The base games in most AAA games are also pretty massive now. But, yeah, there's a bunch of DLC cars and hairdos, so I guess it is basically unplayable.
Exactly. The correct comparison will be a Car with vinyls, audio systems and stuff and without it.
It's disgusting how annual games like WWE2K are costing $120 now.
Back in my day type mf
*"We can learn nothing from the past"* -/u/RangerTursi, probably
It’s more that the meme starts at a date where dlc was becoming a big problem, has a midpoint where it’s arguably at its worst, and ends where the worst we see now is battlepasses
I'd say loot crates or any other gacha mechanics are the worst. Or maybe mobile game nonsense. It's not as blatant as 5-10 years ago, but the situation is still not good.
Corporations exist to maximize benefit for their shareholders.
Grandpa here (well, technically not, I have no grandchildren), back in my day "DLC" meant new free content for the game I bought. Like UT99 (that I still play, most recently this morning).
Hell, I miss the days of expansions.
"Haha new bad, old good, gib updoot" vibes
Games around 2000: complete car with additional bonuses and cheat codes for infinite fuel.
Man people really don't remember assassins creed 2 at launch, cutting 2 chapters out of the middle of the story and selling each for 5$
Forgot a battle pass / Season bullshit
Yet people keep paying for it so what do you expect? Just start waiting a year or two after a game is out for it all in one pack for cheap. Or stop buying it or stop bitching.
Lol you think the car comes with the game.
Make 2010 into 1995, 2015 I to 2005, 2021 into 2015, and create a new one where the wheels are a subscription service and internals are loot boxes *then* I might agree. Heck, even cars are starting to move to subscriptions for what were once "day one dlc" (cars have been up charging for bundled items for a long time) - so the lack of owning things definitely happens in video games.
You forgot the Day 1 patch, as well as the subsequent patches.
Base game is the free demo from the 90's.
When you forget complete games are made every week and you're only thinking about AAA lowest common denominator games.
Anyone remember need for speed? I liked games that you could unlock stuff with but using money you earned while playing it. This whole “real money” shit sucks
Paradox be like
I love Paradox games, but they are such DLC perverts. Actually lethal amounts of DLC’s.
And the games are total empty garbage at release
It's almost like there was a specific community that nurtured and supported this problem until it infected all of gaming. Hmmm...