this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Battle passes and most microtransactions in games. Day one patches, and GaaS games, always online games and expiring media licenses. VAC bans on Steam.
Wait, why VAC bans? You need to earn those by cheating in a multiplayer game. Ultimately, the game company is responsible for combating cheating and moderating the game, otherwise its value is plummetting. Also, you get warnings first / time bans till you get caught too many times doing the same thing.
Because they're automatic and irreversible, and mistakes happen. I once worked for a different game company that auto banned people from games too, but I know at least some of them didn't, it ability to detect wasn't perfect and we absolutely banned people from time to time incorrectly. We just left people with no recourse and pretended that just wasn't possible. We never reversed our bans either.
Sounds like the problem is in the execution, not the idea in itself
That's an astute way to conceptualize the issue! If perfect and fair moderation were possible, I guess I wouldn't have issue with it.
I don't play many modern games (I'm currently replaying Watch Dogs 1). I bought a game a few years ago (can't remember which one) and there was barely anything on the disc! My xbox copied maybe 100MB of data from the disc, and had to download the remaining 30+ GB. The disc was essentially just a giant license key and a small 128MB USB stick probably could have taken its place.
It made me think of this revolutionary idea: Why not finish the game before the deadline, and put the game on the disc? Wow.
Oh, yeah, that's the new normal, I'm a bit surprised they gave you a whole 100MB to call your own.
The modern Dad pro-move for giving the kids a game console for Christmas is to sneak the box open, set it up, do all the ridiculous downloads and patches then sneak it all back into the box nice and tidy so that the kids can just open it and go on Christmas morning.
...and then you realize that they will eventually shut the online service down for that console and you won't be able to play the game you bought anymore at all, despite buying a physical copy.
I think that expecting no day 1 patches is kind of unreasonable. More specifically for PC games at least. It's really not the end of the world if they have to fix a few bugs in the first couple of days. It's the companies that don't fix broken content for weeks or even months+ that are problematic. It's not like back in the day where they could ship a game out and know exactly what equipment people are gonna have. People are playing Skyrim on toasters ffs no company is gonna get it exactly right for everyone at launch. I'm pretty forgiving for the most part as long as they communicate and make it up to the players when appropriate. I have considerably less patience for bigger companies that release dumpster fires or incomplete games on purpose. They can rot.
How are day one patches a "scam" exactly? Maybe they're inconvenient, but calling it a "scam" is a bit of a stretch. There's really nothing malicious about the idea at all. Also VAC bans, really?
I know people who used to work in game QA work, the key term is used to, the work isn't there anymore. Yes those jobs literally still exist, but it's not like it used to be, they're almost always contractors and where they used to hire in droves, the cycles are shorter and more last minute, with less people.
The dirty truth is that day one patches are a result of trading a release date for money - they budget for releasing, getting money from the sales, and using that to pay the last part of development. They're borrowing against the future, and they collect so much data from games that they get to effectively test games they know are not finished on consumers.
It's so much worse than you can imagine.
My guess would be the studios that left out parts of the game to get favorable reviews before release. Then say patching in the microtransaction store. I believe it's happen more than once where reviewers got one copy and then unrelease a store was put in. I remember TotalBuscuit talking about it