Hey Chkilroy, I'd love to hear your views on the idea micropayments incorporated into most games nowadays as it is becoming a pretty big thing even with some mostly respectable studios. Hearing your view on Star Citizen specifically would be great and its ridiculous pay-schemes.
There's nothing wrong with micropayments. Sometimes I wish more things were 'pay what you use' micropayments instead of lump sums. The issue is overly nickle and diming people, or blatantly dishonest things like what Forza did, where you got less if you bought more.
Take mobile data plans: Networks give you a 5GB limit, but make it fast. Because it's fast, enjoyable, easy to use, whatever, you end up actually using it, and eventually you go over your limit. Depending on your data plan, you're then speed limited for the rest of your subscription period or charged extra.
If you get charged extra, the network then has more money to improve and expand with, allowing them to increase network carrying capacity and sign up more people.
Network gluttons, the ones using the most data and putting the most stress on the network, are forced to slow down or pay more for their usage to keep the network afloat.
That's how American mobile networks were able to go from mixed EDGE and 3G coverage to pervasive LTE in four years. That's how, aside from the last couple hundred feet, most Americans living in cities are now on fibre optic Internet connections from their ISPs, not just when on the backbone.
And those last couple hundred feet are now being worked on by most urban providers. I should be able to subscribe to gigabit Internet now or in the next month or two from mine, if I want to.
Games are less expensive today than at any other point. In 1996 I bought Diablo. I don't remember what the price was, but let's assume it was $40–50, common for big games at the time. That's more expensive than the $60 common today.
And while games are retailing for less, they're costing more and more to produce, because consumers demand each year's offerings be bigger, better, larger, shinier, and more able to catch their attention and distract them from life than last year’s now-stale offerings.
The only two things keeping publishers from needing to increase retail prices are fewer people being interested in owning physical copies of their media, opting instead to buy or rent access through services like Steam, Netflix, or iTunes, and that the average American today makes and has less money to spend than Americans twenty years ago did, so they can’t charge more.
Something I've noticed is a lack of understanding costs. Most prices are fair. That's why they're priced as they are. Many things are even priced below their true cost, letting more people afford it and hopefully like it enough to buy add-ons to make up the difference.Game consoles, for example, are typically sold at a loss (no profit) in the hopes that people will buy a couple video games for them, or in the case of the previous console generation, video games and HDDVDs and Blu-rays.
Things don’t just go on sale because nobody’s buying them. Things can be flying off shelves and still go down in price. It’s cheaper to keep a factory online, pumping out more and more of the same, than it is to take it offline and retool it to produce something else, which in the case of physical goods, requires buying and building new machines, if not whole factories.
Yes, profits are made along the way. Should businesses straddle bankruptcy? Businesses can't grow without profits to reinvest. Businesses can't weather droughts without stocking up.
The image of the rich, laughing, CEO smoking cigars lit with $100 bills is real, but not necessarily because companies charge everyone $30 for something whose true cost is $3. It's because they charge $3.05 for that $3 item and millions of people buy it.
And it's so cheap because it's low quality, so you're fine with buying another when it eventually breaks. You don't expect quality for $3.05 anyway.
And it's low quality because it's probably made by literal or figurative slave labor, because it turns out when an expensive piece of automation breaks, you need to pay an expensive specialist to come out and fix it with an expensive custom-made part made by an even more expensive machine. And during that repair, the whole system is offline, delaying production, reducing that nickel of profit to nothing.
But when a human being breaks, you just replace them with another. You don't even have to find them. They'll come to you looking for work. All they ask is that you pay them the lowest amount you legally can.
And because everyone makes minimum wage, the system reinforces itself, those minimum wage laborers only able or willing to buy that $3.05 item instead of the $4.55 one that lasts twice as long.
And when those minimum wage laborers hear how people in another town are working to increase their pay, instead of asking their own employers to do better and pay them more too, they'll attack those people in the other town.Wouldn’t it be unfair if a highschooler with no bills to pay made more money than you doing the same work? Don’t you want to feel superior over at least one person, or inferior under at least one less person?
And popular mass media businesses willfully reinforce that image despite knowing full well the average minimum wage worker is in their thirties, not a highschooler, because people keep listening if you tell them what they want. And those media workers are themselves paid by how many people keep listening, so why wouldn’t they pander to their audience’s irrationality? It’s a mutually beneficial relationship — they get paid and you feel good about at least one thing.
Perhaps the bad news is you can't change this system yourself. You can only make it less profitable, and you can only do that by paying attention and changing yourself.
And unfortunately some people don't have the luxury to navelgaze. Maybe it would be wise to provide them with help if you can spare what they need.
And revolutions are just another form of oppression, comrade. The system we have today was built by the people too, assembled piece by piece, one logical and communally agreed-upon step at a time.
I know very little about Star Citizen, sorry. But I do know how to ramble.
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