EA Alters the Deal

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
A comment on Reddit from game publisher e A broke
all the records for most down votes with more than
half a million responses. But how did gamers really fee
I'm Jonathan Strickland and this is tex Stuff Daily. There's
a lot going on with this story, so I'll take
it piece by piece. Reddit, an online community where people

(00:26):
share stories, tell jokes, ask questions, and linked to things
they find interesting, has a simple system that allows users
to up vote or down vote comments. It's a way
for the community to express approval or disapproval. A recent
post by games publisher e A smashed the record for
most down votes. At the time of this recording, there
are more than six hundred seventy seven thousand down votes.

(00:49):
Previously the record was about twenty four thousand. Now a
lot of those may come from bots and not real people,
but still an astounding number. Gamers were angry about, well,
a lot of stuff. Gamers are always angry, but in particular,
they were angry in the way e A had structured
rewards in the new game Battlefront two, which is set

(01:11):
in the Star Wars universe. A critical point was that
when you first launched the game, you cannot just jump
into any of the iconic characters from the series. You
have to earn that ability, either by grinding away in
the game for forty hours or more just to play
as your favorite character, or by coughing up some cash
to purchase the privilege of playing those characters. And this

(01:33):
is on top of paying the full price for the
game itself. Many players felt that this is unfair. It's
as if e A had published a game, charged sixty
dollars for it, and then locked away the most fun
aspects of that game until you pay them more money
to access it. And if you take a look at
the economics behind the modern approach to video game publishing,
you realize that's pretty much what's going on. There are

(01:55):
different terms for it in the industry. The company Woulbisoft
calls it player recurring investment or p r I. Publisher
Take Two calls it recurrent consumer spending or r c S.
But whatever you call it, it's all about creating an
environment in which players will continue to spend money playing
your game after the initial purchase. That might include micro transactions,

(02:18):
supplemental downloadable content that adds more gameplay elements such as
additional story or levels, cosmetic changes, to an existing game,
or various types of player awards that may or may
not affect gameplay, and it's a big business. Let's take Ubisoft,
for example. During the company's midyear shareholder call, the company
revealed that player recurring investment contributed fifty one of all

(02:41):
digital revenue in the first half of That means the
company made more from these ongoing purchases than from selling
digital copies of the games themselves. With that sort of
financial performance, you can expect to see a lot more
games include some form of incentive to encourage players to
continue pouring money into a title after it launches. Depending

(03:03):
upon the implementation, players may not care so much with
downloadable content or DLC. You might get new chapters of
a game's story or new levels to play. If you
really enjoyed playing a game, you may feel that another
purchase is perfectly fine to get more of what you like.
Many players are also fine with the concept of cosmetic purchases,
either buying specific assets outright or through what are called lootboxes,

(03:28):
which represent a random assortment of digital items. Many players
aren't so crazy about games that allow you to purchase
items that actually affect gameplay. The dismissive term among gamers
for such practice is pay to win, meaning a player
doesn't need to develop any skill or expertise with a game,
but instead pay extra to get access to high powered

(03:48):
items that give him or her an advantage within the
game itself. Typically, these games allow you to earn rewards
through actual gameplay, but at a very deliberate pace. There's
a delicate science to this. A game developer wants to
make a game that's compelling enough to convince people to play,
but reserve just enough interesting content to convince a percentage

(04:08):
of that game's audience to shell out some bucks to
get that content early. However, if you reserve too much,
players may feel like the base game isn't worth playing,
or that you're extorting them for cash, or that you're
sending the message that the game is only fun if
you're willing to keep paying for it, and if the
stuff you reserve has a big effect on how the
game plays, players will resent either having to pay extra

(04:30):
to avoid being left behind by less skilled players with
more disposable income, or dealing with a game where they're
constantly at a distinct disadvantage because they refuse to engage
in this economy. Meanwhile, as this drama unfolds between game
companies and their customers, other concerns are popping up. In Belgium,

(04:50):
a gaming commission is investigating whether lootboxes are a form
of gambling. If the commission decides that loot boxes count
as gambling, then companies that incorporate that mechanic in their
games would first have to pay a fine for any
existing games being sold in Belgium that have that mechanic,
and then secure a permit for any future implementations. The
crux of the matter is this, in these games, players

(05:12):
can earn or purchase a chance to get some supplemental
materials for a video game. Typically it might be a
new costume or prop that has little to no effect
on gameplay, but some games will also include new items
or weapons that have in game advantages. Game developers will
frequently compare this feature to trading card games like Magic.
The Gathering Magic players are used to buying booster packs

(05:33):
of cards to supplement their decks. You aren't guaranteed to
find anything particularly useful or rare in any given booster pack.
You might look out, or you might draw a bunch
of Dud's lootboxes, argue video game developers are pretty much
the same thing, and if you don't designate trading card
games as gambling, why would a video game version be
any different. Whether the Belgian Gaming Commission feels the same

(05:56):
way remains to be seen, but one thing really isn't
a gamble unless gamers stopped buying supplemental content entirely, we
can expect these practices to be the norm moving forward.
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