It seems every Tuesday I’m bombarded with new releases and it’s becoming more common practice that they are all being released with DLC or are followed up by it in a week or two. Of course this adds a significant cost to your original purchase. It seems like a growing trend in our industry to leave parts out of games in order to sell add-ons.
Microsoft just posted the third quarter of its 2024 fiscal financial results. The software maker made $61.9 billion in revenue and a net income of $21.9 billion during Q3. Revenue is up 17 percent, and net income has increased by 20 percent.
Xbox content + services up 62% while hardware down 31%... seems about right with the way they tout you don't need the hardware to play. People can play on their phones or smart tv or other means. I don't hardly play on my consoles directly since getting devices like the logitech g-cloud and ps portal. Which is to also say I have been playing more digital than physical because of these devices.
Too expensive hardware when others offer the same or more for less? Good work, Green Team.
"Despite some early successes for Xbox games on rival platforms, Xbox hardware is down by a massive 31 percent this quarter."
"Without Activision Blizzard, Microsoft’s overall gaming revenue would have actually declined this quarter."
"Xbox content and services would have only been up a single percent without Activision Blizzard..."
"It looks like next quarter is going to be a similar story for gaming at Microsoft, too."
That is crazy... so A/B/K is carrying the whole Xbox gaming.
Oh and Microsoft will be fine. Windows, Office and Cloud are growing with each pc purchase.
As of right now, there are no monopolies in the games industry, and for the sake of the medium as a whole, they never should either.
And yet the biggest tech companies in America are essentially that. They buy up all the small comps only to kill them off and steal what they have, and if they can't buy em they bleed them to death.
They buy IPs not talent. That's why these buyouts never work and the IPs die. Right now it's too expensive to develop games - but I expect that to shift maybe as AI tools can make it easier. The best games have been indie games for awhile as big developers fuck their ips to death with "games as a service" -
INDIE Live Expo, Japan’s premiere online digital showcase series , will debut never-before-seen games & content updates across more than 100 titles on May 25th.
... it means I don't buy these games when they're released, so I'll have to wait longer before I can enjoy them.
That said, because I wait, I'll pick them up a year later, including all that extra content, for a fraction of the original price, and I can enjoy those games then.
For online games like Battlefield 3, I do feel it kinda ruins it, cause it's splitting up the online community between the 'haves and have nots', so suddenly half your friendlist can't or won't play the same maps anymore.
I think so, I miss the days when you bought a game and got the "whole" game. I'd rather you have to do stuff in-game to unlock extra content.
The problem is... there will not be, at least in the foreseeable future, a sufficient groundswell to actually punish game publishers from going this route. You're not going to get a large group of folks that will bond together and say, hey, we're not going to buy Call of Duty Black Ops 3 (or whatever the title may be) because it requires you to keep purchasing DLC to compete or to participate in multiplayer.
As with many things, it will probably eventually require a lawsuit by a consumer who finds they can't "finish" the game they were promised (or led to expect) for the price paid. It should be interesting to see where that goes.
Games with DLC are released and sold with 90% or less content accessible to the consumer. DLC was a good idea on paper, but when you have companies SELLING THE REAL ENDING TO A GAME (Asura's Wrath, FF13-2), then it's just sheer bullcrap.
DLC is made alongside the the whole game, so the extra costumes and guns you "download" are technically already on the disc. If it wasn't in the game's code in any way...other players wouldn't be able to see it. It's like a TF2 mod. If you mod TF2 to have a female scout/character, only you will see that female character. Everyone else in the room you're with will see the character as male or whatever mod they may have.
I personally hate DLC because most DLC are Disk locked content and things that should be UNLOCKABLE through hard work. Obtaining a trophy or Achievement should reward you with a costume or something... DLC is simply one of this gaming generation's major problems.
Yes!!.. The more DLC for it the more I don't wanna play.