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S3 Ep235: FOOM
83 Plays3 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they talk about Sundays, TGIF, the Fear of Missing Out, and more in this week's episode! Editor's note: Title spelling intentional.
Intro:
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Intro:
- Team Fortress 2 - Red Bread
- The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask - Clock Town, Third Day (69% speed)
- Team Fortress 2 - RED Triumphs!
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Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
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Transcript
Introduction and Weekend Plans
00:00:39
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host is always Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave? It's going. Today's better than yesterday. Today's still a little, little odd. That's an upward slope.
00:00:56
Speaker
Yeah. And then tomorrow is Friday and then
The Dread of Sundays
00:01:01
Speaker
Saturday. Oh boy. Is Sunday a, would you put Sunday on the upward slope or the downward slope? Oh, immediately downward. Yeah. Um, people worship God on that day. So like a lot of people wasting their time and then B.
00:01:22
Speaker
I think it's the dread of like, oh, tomorrow's Monday. You know the fun's coming to an end. With Saturday or Friday night, you're like, tomorrow? I ain't got to do shit tomorrow. And there's that feeling through both days. And then Sunday, it's like, ha ha.
00:01:40
Speaker
There's an interviewer who's interviewing a small child about summer break. It's like, how are you enjoying some break? Are you excited to go back to school? The kid's laughing and immediately goes into tears. I couldn't remember what they were talking about, but I know the clip you're talking about.
00:01:59
Speaker
I guess that's, that's true, right? Cause we have TGIF, which isn't like, because you're like, man,
Excitement vs. Blues
00:02:06
Speaker
I'm glad that this is another day that I get to work. It's because you're looking forward to Saturday. Um, it's the same thing, like with happy hour being at like 5 PM or whatever, it's like you're looking towards the start of no responsibility. Yeah.
00:02:25
Speaker
No, that's fair. I guess it was kind of a softball question because I think most people probably would empathize there. Like Saturday, Saturday or not Saturday, Sunday for me has a bit of the Majora's Mask day three music going on where it's like, and then there's like the horns in the background. It's like, and you're like, something's deeply unsettling happening, but there's still the
00:02:53
Speaker
There's the facade on top of it of like, I can still play
Living in the Moment
00:02:57
Speaker
games. I can do all this stuff, whatever. And then it's just the music slowly getting quieter in the back as as the moon crashes onto onto your plane. Yeah, I wish we were better as I want to say society, but like as humans to appreciate stuff in the moment. But myself and literally every other person I've ever talked to,
00:03:21
Speaker
Like if you have something coming up like, oh, it's a Dodge appointment tomorrow. You just get so fixated on like the, this thing's coming up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I feel that like a hundred percent for like an actual event or an appointment or something like that. It's just, yeah, it tends to dominate.
00:03:42
Speaker
your mindset there. Admittedly, I don't get super, super anxious about literally going back to
Anticipation and Experience
00:03:47
Speaker
work. Like that's something that's been going on for years. But I do like the, I don't know if you get this probably, the momentary euphoria where you're kind of just sitting there doing something and you're like,
00:04:01
Speaker
Like tomorrow's free or something like that. I don't have any thing to do, or maybe you have something to do that you actually care about, right? Or you enjoy doing, um, as opposed to something that you have to do. And you're just like, yeah, yeah, that's great. Like I, like right now I know that there's going to be more of this and that, that seems excellent. Oh yeah. I I've had like really shitty work days.
00:04:26
Speaker
where like afterwards I had plans with friends or something else or just something over the weekend. You know, it was maybe like a rough week and I'm like, but once that comes around, oh, uh-huh. So it really allows you to kind of power through in a nice way. Yeah. But then the opposite of what we were kind of talking about earlier is the, you want to do something, be productive, be happy, but you have this looming fear of, I shouldn't say fear, but like,
00:04:58
Speaker
Something you don't want to happen, whether the extremeness of how bad it is, uh, just kind of sits over you like, yeah, at least a little bit of anxiety. Revulsion is too strong a word, probably.
00:05:12
Speaker
Yeah, it's definitely too strong. And I have weak arms. But like perfect example, I knew I had to take meds today. And meds for me in the specific context is like self injection with an actual needle. And I've never been a huge fan of that as I don't think most people are. But I know the medicine is good for me to a degree. But there's that like, I want to push it off as much as possible and not think
Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)
00:05:38
Speaker
about it. I have to do it.
00:05:40
Speaker
But then when I do it and it's done, it's like, okay, it wasn't actually that bad. It just deep, the dread coming up to it. Yeah, you're through it. Yeah. That does apply to work, I think, too, unless it's a particularly bad day. Some days it's like this is worse than I anticipated, but most of the time it's like- It's just one of those days.
00:05:59
Speaker
it's just like I'm gonna wake up but I'm not gonna play video games and then you like get into it and you're like okay well this is fine then you're done you're like great now I have some balance in my life and I'll appreciate recreation more not everybody's lucky like that sometimes people have days that's significantly worse but
00:06:20
Speaker
I think, what is it? Momentum versus inertia, right? Where it's like once you've started in on something, it's a lot easier to see it through normally. Yeah, just getting over the initial hump. Yeah. If you've been driving down a little cul-de-sac type thing, and then as soon as you hit over that speed bump, you just gun it. Finally, that's out of the way.
00:06:51
Speaker
I have no way to like actually take this topic and transform it into the topic we were going to talk about for the episode. Oh no, I never try to explicitly set you up for that. Yeah. I feel that that would be cheating. I was thinking about it and I was like, hmm.
00:07:07
Speaker
Well, I mean, if you were ever forced to work through the weekend, I think that would suck because you would have a fear of not interacting with your friends when they're doing things. And that could be missing out topic.
00:07:28
Speaker
All I'm saying is if we ever do have aliens land and we have to decide who's going to meet them first, who's going to interact with them. I want it to be fucking Jake. I want it to be Jake. You don't want it to be me. I want him to try and roll into the transition of like, hey, so you're not going to kill us, right?
00:07:48
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think you want it to be me because I think I think you know, we had this, the discussion on like, the finality of human existence and all this stuff. So if aliens showed up and they're like, hey,
00:08:01
Speaker
What should we do? But just wipe everybody out. It's fine. Don't worry about it. We're insignificant. Just end it. Give me a day to burn my hard drive just in case and then nuke the rest of it, honestly. No, you've got to have a backup. I've spent some time online. We don't need it. You
Gaming and FOMO Strategies
00:08:24
Speaker
don't need it. Save yourselves. In short, save yourselves.
00:08:27
Speaker
catalog the podcast before you go though, please make sure others civilizations get that. That would be the greatest injustice of mankind that like the only piece of our culture of our civilization that carries on is soapstone podcast. Yeah, that's like that's wake up in the night cold sweat fears for people who historians and things like that.
00:08:55
Speaker
long line of a long lineage of human accomplishment and like terrible deeds done in history. All this stuff over like so much time.
00:09:08
Speaker
I left it vague for the religious people. And then it's just us talking about video games in a vague sense for 250 episodes or something. Yeah, it's like, I don't really get humans, but they really like something called Dark Souls and that's all we know about them. Imagine the aliens talking about like,
00:09:30
Speaker
I'm trying to think something that aliens would do that doesn't have like a correlation to, oh, that would be like the equivalent for humans, like they're farming. Right. They like.
00:09:41
Speaker
eat sons or something. Who knows? Yeah. It's like, oh, you're trying to grow space beats. The, oh, I hear that's the dark souls of space vegetables. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And they're like, stop saying that it wasn't funny millennia ago. It's, it's never been funny. Um, but yeah, this topic's FOMO or the fear of missing out as it's defined by Webster's dictionary.
00:10:08
Speaker
Oh, I thought it was foam and. Yeah, it's just a it's a misspell of foam. Which now, as of now, should be the title of the episode. Just because people will listen to it and be like, well, it's been it's been like 10 minutes and they haven't even talked about what the episode's about. And then like the first thing they jump into is foam, but
00:10:37
Speaker
Yeah. FOMO. How would you describe FOMO? Have you ever experienced FOMO in game, out of game? That's what I keep saying FOMO. So people forget the actual definition. Yeah. No FOMO. Um, yeah, a little bit of FOMO, just a little bit. So in like a human socialization context, the fear of missing out is.
00:11:00
Speaker
Like you want to be a part of something. So like if you get invited to plans, you're like, I should go because if I don't go, I'll be like, oh, well, I could have missed out on something else. It's like the super salad thing. Like you feel like you're missing out on something and you don't want to waste your precious time and you want to be involved in everything that you can and not miss out on those opportunities. So in a gaming sense,
00:11:24
Speaker
Um, usually this is used as a way to target a given demographic to encourage them to spend more time in a game. Maybe it's ordering a game early to like lock into those cash dollars. Maybe it's like a specific event where if you, if you participate in the event, you can get like a cool cosmetic thing and you can't get outside of that unless you pay real money and other things like that.
Evolution of Gaming Monetization
00:11:51
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:53
Speaker
Yeah, it's in gaming. It's definitely been something that's on the rise recently because I don't know. You could have probably an episode on just like the rise and fall of different monetization schemes in gaming because like you go back far enough and you had like literally shareware. You're like, hey, literally copy this, put it on a floppy disk because that's the only media that exists.
00:12:18
Speaker
Have your friend. That was a great fucking rhyme. Oh, I didn't mean to, um, and put it on a floppy distance. The problem is, the problem is it's very close to, um, don't copy that floppy, which is certified banger. Yeah. So I, I most get like 25% credit. There's like depreciating street cred. Um, but yeah, like in,
00:12:48
Speaker
The method of distribution then was a lot more basic. And then we went through this period of like, Hey, buy a game, which has extended for, you know, a long time as well. Um, and then when you bought the game, you're good. And we had an MMO craze where it was all subscription based. And now we've kind of wrapped back around to this is free, but like free with a whole bunch of quotes.
00:13:17
Speaker
And not everything's free, but it does seem to be the prevalent system for games that are coming out. Overwatch 2, things like that. Yeah, most things aren't free. First off, freedom. Yeah. Bucko 5. Is that all? Pulls exactly $1.05 out of my wallet.
00:13:42
Speaker
Yeah, I think in general, the goal is always, I mean, it's always money because it is the name of the game. But the way you get more money outside of the initial purchase. Money. It's a little more straightforward than Monopoly. So obviously, there's the initial purchase of a game, right? That is a flat fixed cost.
00:14:09
Speaker
So you pay that to either a retailer or an online provider and you will have the game.
00:14:15
Speaker
Now, beyond this point, there's really no reason for you to spend more money. You can spend more time because you own it as much as you want, but they don't get any benefit from that, right? So the other ways to monetize that is to offer an online service. So if you have an ongoing subscription, like you mentioned with MMOs, that's one way to do it. Another way is to have people opt in with things like, oh, there's cosmetics or DLC.
00:14:43
Speaker
I'm going to point a big two fingers at Payday 2 for being notorious for having a new DLC pack a week. 300 DLC children. Downloadable children. It's not that it's mother games, but out of games that I've played, I think it's the most notorious. It's a lot. I think Overwatch probably like Sims.
00:15:04
Speaker
is one of the biggest offenders. Yeah. Sims is ridiculous. The other one that I don't engage with, but I know is crazy, is like a railroad tycoon and like some other simulation games where every single train or plane or something like that that they add to the game is like a little DLC. And I only know that because there was one simulator like that. I think it was trains. And I looked at the full purchase price when it wasn't on sale and it was literally
Daily Challenges as Pressure
00:15:32
Speaker
like two thousand dollars.
00:15:34
Speaker
Holy fuck. I'm like, yeah, people like their simulators. So, I mean, in general, DLC is not bad in and of itself. Again, Dark Souls DLC, choice. Order of destruction.
00:15:51
Speaker
Yeah, I guess that actually was DLC. I mean, they were called expansion packs back then, but it was just big. I mean, it was, well, maybe not downloadable. It was physical DLC. Yes, physical DLC. Yeah, like they have actual content, a lot of them, not necessarily for all of them, but most. Because like it says, it's downloadable content.
00:16:16
Speaker
Yeah. So at that point, it's like, hey, come back, play the game. We've added some other stuff. Cool. But a lot of what you see more so nowadays are tied to more cosmetic based things or having a battle pass, which allows you to unlock cosmetics or some other things that are just kind of nebulous to just within the game universe. But again, they want to encourage you to spend more time or money there.
00:16:43
Speaker
Right. The service card. Hey, if you play three missions and win, you get a little prize. And you're like, I want the prize. Okay, well, you can do that daily if you want. Otherwise, you will miss out.
00:16:59
Speaker
Yeah, so a lot of games have daily challenges like today and the day before the day before I played Magic the Gathering Arena before work because if I do a specific challenge I get a I get some in-game currency that can use to buy packs, right? I did the same with our stone Yeah, and at a point it's gonna it's gonna go away because you didn't do your daily quest. I
00:17:20
Speaker
You might be able to stock up to like three, but then it's gone. And then you have that, Oh, I'm missing out on this free thing because I was, you know, doing something else, giving my time to another game or another activity. Yeah.
00:17:35
Speaker
I want to like elaborate on that because I didn't even think about like dailies. They're such a big part of like modern FOMO and video games. Like there are some systems I think Warframe is one of them where they have like a daily tracker and you're only making progress down the tracker if you sign in that day. Some games actually will give you a bonus or you'll only make progress if you're part of like a consecutive login.
00:18:04
Speaker
This is descending into evil at this point, basically. But a lot of games are just, oh, you didn't sign in today. You're just not making any progress today. And I don't hate dailies, but I mean, it does push up against the natural drive to do something that's fun, which should probably be the reason you play games.
00:18:34
Speaker
And I have quit, I think exactly one game because it was just dailies and weeklies. And that was like, it was just too much. And that was never winter online. Like all they had was just like daily dungeon, daily quest, daily, this daily, that weekly, this weekly, that. And like, I realized I was just consuming like this treadmill, basically of content that I had to run each day as opposed to actually having fun.
00:19:04
Speaker
Yeah. I think like the positive side of it could be if let's say a vampire survivors had dailies and it didn't necessarily have unlockables with it. Like I can see the, Hey, I just want to like play a game or something. I guess we do vampire survivors. What type of run do I even want to do? I don't know. But they're like, Hey,
00:19:25
Speaker
You can only use things that circle around you and you're like, okay, so you can maybe have a little challenge thing. But I guess that would be more of a challenge run, similar to what they have for Slay the Spire than something that would be a daily specifically.
00:19:43
Speaker
Yeah, I'd probably separate that into a daily action provide you something like a rewarding game, which is the incentive versus a challenge, which is just, hey, I'm looking to do something, but I don't know what. Oh, this game is providing a specific challenge for me. Right. Like Prey has achievements for beating the game with only Typhon mods or no Typhon mods or no mods whatsoever.
Pre-orders and Consumer Pressure
00:20:07
Speaker
Right. Like that last one might not be true, but I think it's related to something.
00:20:12
Speaker
um and those can be fun because it's just like you opt in or you opt out it's always going to be there i could choose not to try for the achievement and if you don't want to play the game don't even bother right um but it's very much different than a daily i feel like a daily is
00:20:30
Speaker
usually in a game where they want you to play. I mean, we've been describing some like single player games or I've been describing single player games to compare against, but a daily wants you to keep you in the ecosystem, to keep you in the community so that you can be content for other players that potentially would spend money a lot of the times, right? Yeah, like they have some incentive. Arcane doesn't care if I go back and I play Prey for an 11th time.
00:20:58
Speaker
But if I were to start playing magic, then yeah, Wizards wants to keep me in the ecosystem so that noobs can just grind levels off me. Someone's got to win and feel good. Yeah, it's part of that. And also if you look at it, again, from a real life perspective, malls, they want to keep you in there as long as possible because
00:21:21
Speaker
If you're there for longer, you can check out more stores. You're going to stop at the Auntie Anne's maybe two or three times because you're hungry and you're like, we've been here so fucking long. But yeah, the more time you spend there, it's just an inevitability at a point.
00:21:37
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. The, um, the other thing I think you touched on a little bit, um, but I, I wanted to also mention is there's no proof of that. Yeah. We'll see if the audio record saved successfully after the episode or not. Um, but, uh, the, uh, pre-order situation
00:21:58
Speaker
And I think it might have been Mass Effect or something like that, where oftentimes games will make collector's editions afterwards, after all this time has passed. And it has all of the pre-order content baked into it. And it's been multiple games that played. I know Fallout's one of them, but other games that have DLC and things like that.
00:22:22
Speaker
where you're like, okay, you finished character creation, here's 50 dialogues that you're gonna click through one at a time where it's just like we gave you a cloak, we gave you some boots, like we gave you a 50% experience bonus, we gave you a special gun, something like that, and you're like,
00:22:39
Speaker
I kind of was just here to play the game, but whatever, I guess. But that was the consequence of them really trying to get people to buy the game before it came out on PlayStation and PC and Xbox and all these things.
00:22:55
Speaker
And they're like, Hey, if you don't buy it now, you won't have one orange gun that will be completely useless by the end of the prologue. Right? Like they advertise it a little bit better than Jake did. Yes. They always try and make it seem like any game or, I mean the game itself, let it alone, like why you should pre-order it is always like,
00:23:22
Speaker
After years of studying all the games ever made, we've made the best game. It will blow your tits off. It will suck your dick for you. Because honestly, I've had troubles with my neck and my back. They make it seem like the second coming of God just to make you get the pre-order or maybe order a more extensive one where you get some bonus with it. It's $10 or $20 more.
00:23:48
Speaker
It's just like within the game. The only reason you should ever pay more for a fucking game is if you're buying the soundtrack with it. Yeah. Because you're like, I like the game and the soundtrack and I want to own both. Cool. My only answer to that. Or they give you a statue. That's the other case. Oh yeah. If you're getting more tangible things with it, as I look at Jake's giant statue behind him, it makes more sense. Listen, you paid what you paid.
00:24:18
Speaker
But if you're getting something tangible out of it, it's something that you can actually have and share with people versus if it's just within the game, that's really just for you. So again, if that's really your bag and you just want to have the coolest cosmetics of everything and you get joy from that, you're actually getting something out of it, okay. But know that overall, from a financial standpoint, it's not the best decision for you.
00:24:46
Speaker
No. But I've definitely bought into some things because I'm like, I'm a consumer. We've talked about Dota. We talked about Dota, like I'm as guilty of, you know, the fear of missing out for seasonal events, things like that. Obviously, the Enigma bracers in Dota was the high point slash low point, high point of my Enigma loadout, low point of my wallet.
00:25:17
Speaker
And Jake hasn't even logged in to get the free Arcana, and that's shameful. Shameful display. I'm reformed. The thing is, if I were to log in and get the Arcana, it would only show up, like, on the bots that I play with, because it'll probably be on a character I don't play. It was Razor, right?
00:25:38
Speaker
No, the free arcana is you get to pick any existing arcana because of how things went with last TI as like an apology,
Personal FOMO Spending Experiences
00:25:48
Speaker
I guess. You're like, everybody gets free arcana. Everybody gets 10 battle pass levels. Or if you don't have the battle pass, we'll just give you the battle pass. Gotcha.
00:25:56
Speaker
So they did all this stuff and I'm like, Oh, okay. I watched like three games. I didn't get it. They listened. They listened to our episode is probably what happened. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They went back. We talked about it. I mean, if that's still running, I'm probably will log in and get Rubik then. But I think, but I'm not sure. All right.
00:26:16
Speaker
That's fair. So FOMO right there. I actually like I don't have a previous to literally this discussion. I had no intent to get the Rubik Arcana. But if I could get it and it's time limited, I would sign in tonight and pick it up because like why? Right. Like I might never play Rubik again in my entire life, but
00:26:42
Speaker
What if I do? Yeah. Cause then you would have it and you could go back versus I didn't want to log in for 30 seconds and now that's, that's gone.
00:26:51
Speaker
That's a great live action example you've set up for the topic we're talking about. All planned. Thanks, Gabe. And my favorite class is the spy. Speaking of Gabe Newell, one of my examples I have here is the difference in launch for Left 4 Dead and Warhammer Darktide.
00:27:17
Speaker
I'm not going to talk a whole bunch about Darktide. Nobody cares. But when Left 4 Dead launched, it was a fully complete experience, right? It's like grab four friends, play through the campaign. There's a story. There's difficulty. There's some randomness to it. There's a circle around this whole experience. Like it received patches and things like that, but the game was complete when it launched.
00:27:44
Speaker
As a minor aside, Darktide literally has had the community recommend the early access tag so much that it shows up on their store page as early access tag. And the game is not technically in early access, but yeah, they are very saucy. But that game has
00:28:06
Speaker
Not a lot of those features. It's fun to play, but it launched with a real money shop for cosmetics.
00:28:19
Speaker
they have these timers on the bottom. And it's like this deal will only be active this long. And if you're going to pay currency for something, then you can never spend just enough money to get that. It's always going to be a little bit of extra currency. So you'll be incentivized to keep spending money. So you can kind of like use the currency you have or else it's wasted, right? You fear wasting the premium currency you already have.
00:28:43
Speaker
because it's not enough to buy something, but it's just sitting there unusable unless you spend more money to get more currency. I think that's one of the bigger evils. It's terrible. I freaking hate it.
00:28:57
Speaker
Oh, how much do you want to have this cost? Do you want to have it be an even thing so somebody could, you know, get pay for that and then be done? Or do you want to like leave a little thing that they can't a little bit little thing in their wallet that they can't, you know, transferred anything else and just like you can only use it here. You don't have enough to buy anything.
00:29:17
Speaker
You should add more. You should make me bigger so I can buy more things. It's only, you only need to spend five bucks to get enough currency to buy the next thing. Cause look at you thought ahead. You already have a little bit of currency in your wallet. It's terrible. Um, legitimately evil.
00:29:34
Speaker
Like, so whenever I have, you know how you'd get like gift cards over Christmas? As I'm about to like bash family members. Yeah. You can take it. It's like, let's say a $25 gift card, you get like a shirt or something, like you spent, let's say like $23, there's $2 on it, right? Mm-hmm.
00:29:54
Speaker
cards done. I'm not going to go back to the store where I was using that for and be like, oh, $2 off my next purchase or I'll buy a bottle of water. No, it's taken up space on a wallet. We're fucking done. Call it a day.
00:30:10
Speaker
This isn't a side, but something I started doing, because for the most part, like I haven't really gotten gift cards to specific locations anymore. It's just like a Visa gift card or something was last time. And it's been years, but like the last type I got, you can just go to like Amazon and just like drain it into a virtual gift card and then just use it whenever you check out.
00:30:34
Speaker
You're just like, oh, it's like 20 bucks on here, whatever. Drain it into a virtual gift card and use it when you check out. On a one-to-one conversion ratio. That was nice, because I don't like dealing with your gift cards. It's technically better than, it technically has a little bit more thought to it, kind of, than just giving you cash, but it's so much worse than just receiving cash.
00:31:03
Speaker
Yeah. Hot take. Cash is... I mean, I don't like paper money so much, but I'd never be like, Venmo me for Christmas.
00:31:17
Speaker
So you get five friends together and you all decide that you're only gonna spend $50 on each other. And then each person sends every other person $50. Yeah. That's why I like tangible things where it's like, hey, I'll take you out for food.
Monetization in Old vs New Games
00:31:34
Speaker
I'm like, okay. Because I don't have to deal with any of the payment. I get the benefit of the food. I get the benefit of the friendship and the time. And then you're done. There's nothing else you gotta think about.
00:31:45
Speaker
Sorry, I want money is a poor man's Christmas gift. Give me money. What are you poor? Yeah.
00:32:00
Speaker
Um, so I wanted to ask more about dark tides. You said that they had a real cash money shop for cosmetics. Yeah. And the community, uh, forcibly made it seem early access by putting the tag on there. Yeah. Yeah. They, they tagged it up a bunch. Um, what's funny is the real money shop was disabled in the beta, which makes sense. A lot of people do it, but as soon as the game launched immediately enabled, um, and
00:32:30
Speaker
All of this to take a step back, I'm cynical of it. I also get that they want to make money, right? And Wells will will float this game and make sure those developers stay in jobs and things like that. And they need to make make money back. Tencent bought them out. I don't know if they really need to make money. Tencent doesn't use money, but like still.
00:32:59
Speaker
That all being said, like at the end of the day, I don't want to see consumers taking advantage of. And if Left 4 Dead, if we time traveled back to when Left 4 Dead launched and you were like, hey, you can buy different hats for Bill at the start of the game, like when Left 4 Dead launched, I don't know how people would have taken it, right? Like it's a completely different time.
00:33:27
Speaker
Actually, I do know how people would have taken it. They would have torn it apart. They're like, what are you doing? Why do you need more money on top of this?
00:33:36
Speaker
I think from like a consumer or gamer perspective, they would look at it to more so be behind. Oh, I've done an achievement with this character. I've maybe done a hundred games or gotten enough headshots killed enough specials. Yeah. I get rewarded for playing that character or that weapon type thing. That's how that's within the game. Right. Yeah.
00:33:59
Speaker
And I understand that there's not really a, a monetary model for Left 4 Dead to keep getting money from people. But like the game was just wildly fucking popular. But again, that now puts it on the developer and publisher to make more games saying like, Hey, we made this thing that you loved before. Check out this thing.
00:34:23
Speaker
Right. But it's less sustainable because you have to put time and money into developing another title.
Impact of Monetization on Game Design
00:34:33
Speaker
Mm hmm. Yeah, that's what it that's what a lot of this comes down to. I guess the intent is the discussion to mostly be around FOMO, but it's like impossible to separate it from games as a service.
00:34:46
Speaker
and like this need to continue a revenue stream because it's so risky to create a new game. Like you mentioned Payday. The reason Payday has so many DLC is because Overkill
00:34:59
Speaker
doesn't have to say to say it nicely would say be the resources to create the next payday like just divert all effort to that to say it not nicely would be they don't have the competency to create the next payday in a reasonable time um i don't know that's that's speculation on my part but what the player base really wants
00:35:24
Speaker
I'm going to speak for the entire player base. I don't need facts is like more interesting novel content, not little cash grabs and deals and things like that that don't appreciably change the game. I love hotline Miami.
00:35:41
Speaker
The Hotline Miami mission in Payday is not good. Game does not have good driving mechanics. And you have to drive cars at the end of it. If you screw up, well, you did the whole mission and it's all over, so whatever. The music slaps, though. It's so good. I use that mission music for every single mission because you can choose your own music. I was like, this one, please. It was delightful. I think that's Hawksud that lets you do that. Yeah, it was very nice, though.
00:36:11
Speaker
Yeah, I think as a member of the player base, which you spoke from earlier, I do agree that players want more novel things. A lot of my examples are going to be like solid single player games, like God of War, for example.
00:36:32
Speaker
played that recently, beat it, enjoyed it, and they don't, as far as I am aware, they don't have any type of monetization scheme outside of just the game. They have optional stuff you can get in the game, like different armor sets that is usually behind like achievements or like hunting out some collectibles, stuff like that. But yeah, there's nothing else that's trying to like grab at my money. So again, as a consumer, I appreciate that.
00:37:03
Speaker
because everything is confined within the game. There's nothing they're dangling outside saying like, wouldn't you like to have this? Wouldn't you like to change the color of Kratos's weapons and be like, be kind of cool. If they added like a little. Yeah. That'd be so awesome. Yeah, it is.
00:37:27
Speaker
It really does. It does seem like we're getting a little further away from FOMO and more to like monetization schemes, but it's impossible to separate it. And I just, I dislike that single player games are corrupted by this crap. I already talked about Praxis and Deus Ex, but like, it's just, it's, it's frustrating to be excited to play a game and then have the game say like,
Value of Games and Spending
00:37:54
Speaker
Because a more tame implementation of this is something that is relatively non-obtrusive, but it's still going to reduce your excitement in the game if you don't make the purchase, right?
00:38:12
Speaker
going to Darktide. The reason that they can sell cosmetics is because the cosmetics look good, right? It's like, yeah, you can get a gold skull like face mask or something like that. And otherwise, you're just literally in like prisoner gear or like basic armor or something. And it looks really cool.
00:38:34
Speaker
I don't want to buy it, but I did see someone had it. I saw in the shop and now I know that my character by comparison is not as cool. Doesn't look as cool as this other character. I like to think I'm relatively mature. It doesn't bother me that much, but I'm missing it. Yeah. Right. I'm second class now.
00:38:59
Speaker
I feel like the most classic example of this is when you start out in an MMO or something and you're at a hub and then you see all this cool stuff and you're like, how long does it take me to get that shit?
00:39:12
Speaker
It's like I get it, like a lot of video games and the male power fantasy. It's like you want to level up your character to be endgame. You want to have the cool spells, the cool abilities, the cool gear that you've spent the time in and you've worked for. And then it can just be like, oh hey, again, this is tied to battle passes, where it's like, hey, you can get this eventually.
00:39:39
Speaker
Or wouldn't it be more convenient? I can just slide this to you under the table and you just got to slide something to me over the table. That's it. That's it. By Overwatch Battlepath levels, right? Exactly. And it cheapens the experience because A, you're throwing money at something you don't technically have to. But again, it's a matter of convenience. Anytime you dangle that in front of somebody,
00:40:05
Speaker
I did not get groceries today. I could have gotten groceries today. I went to my local Thai place because it was more convenient. Maybe I'll get groceries over the weekend, we'll see. The way you said that, I was like, is this part of the bit? Or did he just remember he hasn't gotten groceries? Oh no, I was well aware, but again, I opted for convenience because it was convenient.
00:40:28
Speaker
I can spend a little more extra money to spend less time, less overhead. And okay, I've now solved my problem of tasty food, done. I opted for convenience at the cost of money. And that's the same thing that battle passes do where they're like, hey, you can just buy these battle pass levels.
00:40:52
Speaker
or a higher level battle pass. You don't want to spend all that time grinding, do you? Oh, what? Are you still playing? What was the candy crush? Are you still only on level 100? You little baby. You're not buying power ups or whatever. Yeah. And they'd have like, hey, you can only use like one power up a day. Unless.
00:41:14
Speaker
Yeah. Slide us some money under the table. And that's the reason King is like the most profitable. The mobile games division is the most profitable part of Activision Blizzard, right? It's man.
00:41:29
Speaker
Ah, doesn't that make you sad? It makes me a little bit sad. Like I get why people do it, it's because corporations want to make money. But there's just some there's some good ones out there that just don't do all this crap, right? Like we played Divinity.
00:41:44
Speaker
And Divinity is a wholly contained experience. And I would buy DLC or expansions for Divinity because I know that they would be good pieces of content. The Undead Squirrel Knight. I think that was DLC.
00:42:01
Speaker
Is it? I believe so. It might've been free DLC though. I guess that wouldn't count for the point of the argument. Yeah, I think it's free LC. But like, because it's already this self contained experience and it's not trying to like nickel and dime me. The injustice is Larian is not going to make the kind of money, you know, Blizzard makes.
00:42:23
Speaker
But ultimately as the consumer, which is the person I want to advocate for more, like I would rather see business models where you're not trying to scare people into spending money so they don't lose out or like, yeah, put them in situations where they're spending more money than they wanted to even.
Ethics in Game Monetization
00:42:44
Speaker
Like I bought Dark Tide for retail price. I don't want to spend any more money on it. If the game was at a place where it was so good, it had to earn this sort of like, crap, I've only spent 50 bucks on this. Like, yeah, I guess I'll pick something up. I've played games like that, right? Vampire survivors.
00:43:04
Speaker
I've only spent 50 bucks on vampires. They're like, they need. How many copies did you buy? I think that's what, 10 copies. Wait, did you buy vampire survivors? Yeah. Yes. The way you said that makes it sound like a question. So I thought I bought it and then I was like talking about so much. I thought I also bought it for you and Jenny. I was like, you got to try those. You might have. I can't recall. No comment.
00:43:35
Speaker
Producer, producer, look into it. Our resident fact checker. We should start that. There's going to be like one person who's like, I'm going to do it. I'm going to listen to like four of us in a row and like tell them whether they fucked up.
00:43:54
Speaker
I just like the idea of having a fact checker that can only fact check us after we publish the episode, thereby completely negating any sort of advantage to actually fact checking.
00:44:09
Speaker
Um, we'll just have to put that on all of the, uh, the episodes on Spotify, like update some of these things were factually incorrect. Yeah. Dating back several years, but it's so much easier for me to want to give my money to somebody who has provided something of value to me and like, Oh, I feel like even when I gave you was not enough money for how much value I determined that to be. Right.
00:44:38
Speaker
So a classic example is a lot of smaller indie bands might have, hey, my music's online for free. Just go here, download it, don't give a shit. If you want to donate money, you can.
00:44:50
Speaker
Now, from a business standpoint on paper, you'd be like, my person's a fucking idiot. They're not going to get any money. On the contrary though, they actually make a decent amount of money because people are like, hey, it's cool that you're doing that for free. I did like the music. Thanks for putting it up. And they're like the possum type 10 bucks, right?
00:45:11
Speaker
And it's a much more flies with honey type thing than threatening them with vinegar in their eyes. Not my best analogy, but. We stuck the landing and then drowned in the vinegar. Honey. Oh no. Even if it was honey, it's kind of a bad situation, honestly. Yeah.
00:45:35
Speaker
But it's it's again, it's approaching it from a non fear perspective. Yeah, because again, it's the fear of missing out. So they're preying on the fear that you feel like you have to opt in. Right. Yeah. As opposed to an earnest interest in purchasing this from your own volition, you had to stack the odds in your favor a bit by
00:46:04
Speaker
by putting this leverage against them, right? Because going back to Darktide, if they were confident in that and their scheme and they didn't need to use underhanded tactics, you could just purchase the items for direct currency. There would be no middleman transactions that's going to
00:46:24
Speaker
you know, leave you in this, oh, you have some spare currency, you should use it type scenario, or you have to spend more real money than you actually want to. They wouldn't have rotating sales. Like Destiny does the same thing with their average. I thought you put a fucking timer on it.
00:46:41
Speaker
It's stressful because like with destiny as a great example, because you have to grind so much to get anything in that game. And it's such a pain in the dick. And occasionally something will come up in like the, the bright dust shop, which is a separate type of currency you can get in game. But it's I think only used for cosmetic type things ever.
00:47:01
Speaker
I believe so. I think I've only seen cosmetics there. But if you want like a cool exotic cosmetic for a ship or a sparrow or the orb, your ghost, I don't play the game that often apparently. His name is orb. It's fine. The orb. It might cost like 3000 bright dust and it's like, how do you get that much in that time unless you've like stocked up?
00:47:31
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, so it'd be really so much easier to just buy that shit because otherwise it goes away and there's not a convenient way to like, Oh, here's all the possible things I can buy for that bright dust. No, you have to wait for it to cycle back.
00:47:47
Speaker
Which goes back to like where we started with this was the dailies are for the free players or the people who aren't really spending money on the game to kind of keep them in the ecosystem so that the people who spend a lot of money will have other people to feel better against basically. Um, but yeah, I dunno, we've got another 13 minutes or so, but I think the majority of,
00:48:14
Speaker
my thoughts on the fear of missing out are kind of played out. And now it's just, it's just this, this, this angst and fear of where games are going. Um, and because of that, I just retreat into the games I'm more comfortable with that don't engage with any of these systems at all.
Games as a Lifelong Hobby
00:48:35
Speaker
Um, or if I'm going to play those games, just choose not to engage with the systems at all and pretend they aren't there.
00:48:46
Speaker
I mean, I feel that to a degree. I don't think I'd really play any games outside of Dota 2 that have like, uh, Hey, we would also like more of your money if you're, if that's, if that's cool with you, maybe.
00:48:59
Speaker
But for Dota, I mean, you we can file that one under a game that you it is your your in quotes forever game, right? It's the game you're spending all of your like not all your free time on. That's probably a little bit much. But if you were to sit down and play a game and have have fun with it, it's the game you would pick up so you could justify spending money on it. But if I went back and I was like, oh, man, there's a new battle pass. Well, I guess I got to hit level 100. Money, money, money, money, money, money would not make any sense. Right.
00:49:30
Speaker
I said a hundred, I meant a thousand. That's a very high level of math. I think we ran the math on it at some point. It was a lot of money. It was like 400 bucks or something.
00:49:43
Speaker
Another thing that bugged me about fall guys used to be, hey, you can play and it was the initial quote unquote battle pass thing of if you play this enough over time, you can access everything in the same way. Now they split it out into like, do you have like the shit in game currency, which is basically fucking worthless. It's like, hey, do you want to change your nickname? I think I'm currently like springy little bean or something like that.
00:50:11
Speaker
Uh-huh. But all like the cool cosmetics are specifically a separate currency you have to buy with cash money. Yeah. Like anything remotely notable. Whereas it used to be, oh, I've just been playing enough games. Oh, here's my in-game currency. Oh, I've got, I'm now 2B, right? Uh-huh. That felt cool for a while. And then, because I knew it was going to go that way at some point, it just went full tilt.
00:50:41
Speaker
See, I do feel some of your despondency with AAA games as a whole. But I feel like a lot of the AAA games that I've had strong opinions on, like this isn't for me and it's shit, has consistently been that way. I don't think it's really branched too much into my pride and joys. Like if FromSoft starts doing that shit, I'm going to have a standalone episode.
00:51:12
Speaker
I'm not even allowed Jake to comment on the subject. I'm just going to be that pissed.
Encouragement for Developers
00:51:16
Speaker
I'll just sit here and nod and they occasionally say, mm-hmm, and then that's going to be the episode. That was the whole thing. And you as a listener will think that he only said it once and we just kept splicing it in.
00:51:28
Speaker
I actually remember when Elden Ring came out, people were making fun of some other games and someone had the mock-up of the UI if it was like a different AAA game. And it was like, there was like a dialogue box that was like, pay money to revive here. And like, there's like consumables up in the corner and all this other stupid UI and stuff.
00:51:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's, it's weird how like video games is the medium where because it has that level of interaction, you can do that. Like in no book sale, have they ever been like, you gotta wait for the DLC. I guess that's just another book at that point. It's a, it's a much pure form for that because, um, I don't know. It keeps, it keeps people a little bit honest.
00:52:17
Speaker
Like some of this comes back to what is the job of game developers? And I don't wanna say people who work on games as a service are bad game developers, because it's probably not even there. They're say, right? And like, I kinda like the people who work on Final Fantasy XIV and that's a game as a service. But there's a big difference.
00:52:44
Speaker
between these people who are releasing these massive expansion packs and stuff and people who are kind of like keeping a game on life support and then there's drawing as much currency out of the player base as possible. And that last thing, I just I just don't want that to exist. It's like. I wish they would make a different game or if they can't make a different game, if they can't make a number two or a number three,
00:53:13
Speaker
don't do this to the one game you're going to release. Yeah.
00:53:22
Speaker
I always agree with what you're saying with that. That's why we have this podcast. So I can hear you agree with me. Yeah, yeah. And she goes, yeah, yeah. But I always implore. I don't use that word enough. I implore any type of consumer or gamer to treat video games like you would food. If you're going to go out for a nice meal, how much are you willing to pay for that quality of food?
00:53:51
Speaker
Right. It's one thing if you go to McDonald's and it's just the drive-thru versus if you go out to a nice place for a sit-down meal, always make sure you get your money's worth for whatever it is that, again, for your value. Yeah. The other part of that is
00:54:09
Speaker
Nope, it's gone. It was there. It was still a good part, but you made me think about it. I was like, crap, I spent like 30 bucks on Domino's. I could have gotten into camp. Yeah, maybe it's best not to treat those as a one to one relationship, given how expensive food is right now, but. No, that's good advice. Especially when you go into it, right? That's that's the key to that's the counterplay to FOMO.
00:54:39
Speaker
is know what your expectations are for something and have standards if something violates your expectations. If it's like, hey, here's more ways for you to spend money. Just be like, well, I'm not gonna engage with this. The other example I actually thought of when you were talking about unlockable content and things like that in games
00:55:08
Speaker
Um, and this has actually been around for a long time is, uh, the example of maps in like, uh, shooters. Those have been around since like, I think modern warfare probably introduced them. It could have also been battlefield. Um, but they had this concept where it was like, when you queued into a match, it would pick a map and you would be, um, fighting on that map or what have you.
00:55:37
Speaker
And these games actually like segmented the community into players that had access to this new map type and players that didn't have access to that map type. And so this is a very real fear of missing out because other people are literally playing new content that you don't even get to visit and have access to. I think that that is terrible, obviously, and thankfully,
00:56:06
Speaker
I think people started to realize that segregating your community that much is actually harmful to the player base in the same way that you want this premium and this free currency, right? For our listeners, Dave's actually stepped away and I'm just, I'm buying time until he comes back. A little bit experimental for me. We'll see how it goes. But it's, it was a bad idea then. It's obviously a bad idea here.
00:56:33
Speaker
Here, the stratification seems to be between the haves and the have nots. You have the oligarchy of the people who have all of these resources and cool gear in the game and maybe advantages, pay to win advantages. And then you've got everybody here at the bottom who is spending their time trying to catch up as opposed to their money. It's no fun.
00:56:58
Speaker
It all really comes back to having those standards and I'm not going to pretend I'm not on some, you know, I was going to say porcelain throne, but that's a toilet rather than some ivory throne. Um, like exempt from all of this, right? Like I'm playing dark tide right now. And maybe if something really cool showed up in the shop, I would be tempted to spend money on it because there's a timer and it wouldn't be there forever. But, um,
00:57:25
Speaker
But I think it is something that we can all work on to try to make sure that we're more resilient against it. Because I don't think there's a guarantee that the gaming market is going in a better direction, right? It might be going more the way of Red Dead Online and spending money and doing all of this stuff and further away from this kind of divinity model.
Conclusion and Listener Feedback
00:57:55
Speaker
Oh, Dave actually had his headphones on. All right, Dave's back. Did you come for me the whole time? The whole time. Yeah. Oh, my God. Well, whatever. I should have bullshit. I should have paused. I'm going to. Yeah, I actually didn't think about it till right now. I didn't remember my other thought, though. That's good. I think. Thank you guys for listening. What's the other thought?
00:58:26
Speaker
I actually do have to briefly remember it again because it just got jumbled. Okay. So it was, I had this thought initially before the podcast and then I keep forgetting it. But if you do a direct comparison to, again, that trying to like keep you in the ecosystem type thing and you approach it to an individual relationship, right? Okay.
00:58:54
Speaker
where someone's always trying to like keep you around, make you feel guilty for not doing something, you would describe that as an abusive relationship at a point, or at least a very toxic relationship. And at least the woke culture of today is pretty smart of realizing like, Hey, this is actually severely negatively impacting my life. So if you wouldn't do it there and you don't want to
00:59:24
Speaker
pay way too much for McDonald's food. Maybe, maybe don't, maybe don't. Maybe you deserve better. Yeah. I think that's a good takeaway. That's a good ending point. So naturally it won't let us to expand upon that just to cause Dave to cause a pain. Um, it feels like sometimes we talk about the talk to the game developers and we talk to the players and like, if you're a game developer out there,
00:59:54
Speaker
I know that's most of our listening base, actually. Have faith in your game, right? Make it the most fun game. It can be, make it the best game it could be. And if you have to add some of these monetization schemes, people will probably accept them if the rest of your game is really good. If it's what you're spending your time on, if it's what you're spending your effort on.
01:00:24
Speaker
I'll always appreciate the games that don't even need that additive bit, but I mean, you're out here to get bread. I get it. Um, so that's really just, that's it. You know, we've always said, I think we started saying on this podcast, don't hate the player, hate the game. Um, and we do. I hate bull. Um,
01:00:53
Speaker
That's the episode though, that's your life advice. Hopefully you guys are keeping well. Thank you guys for listening. If you have any ideas or topics perhaps for future episodes or games you would like us to cover, more likely games you'd like us to laugh at and then not cover, you could send those ideas in to soapstonepodcastatgmail.com or you could join the discussion on Facebook at facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast. And as always, we'll see you in the next one. Have a good night.