You are doomed unless the developer sells directly.
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" unfair practices (like increasing game price by 15 percent then putting a 15 percent discount to be dodgy)"
Really? I think that is forbidden by law, at least in Germany.
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It definitively is illegal in my country as well, which makes me sad to see it happens on something such as steam quite easily. I've noticed it a few times usually during the sales period.
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Are you talking about what Rockstar did with GTAV the last sale? If so they didn't increase the price they just gave you online game currency with it at a discounted price. Still a crappy way to try and say a game is on sale specially if you don't care for the online.
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Haha, I was debating whether to just pirate a game, and then stalk the dev until I get a home address and send a letter with cash to the devs house instead TROLOL, got a feeling its probably not the best option.
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Some developers have supported players doing this sort of thing in the past.
https://torrentfreak.com/games-developer-gives-customer-support-to-pirate-bay-downloaders-121026/
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130212/10325521952/game-developer-connects-with-pirates-sees-massive-support-deletion-torrents.shtml
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I love developers that do things like this, I really do. A similar thing happened with Hotline Miami 2 in Australia, where the devs told us to just pirate it since you can't legally obtain it here. But that just makes me want to support them more!! Might buy a copy on GMG or something with a VPN, just to put the money across.
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Jokes aside you should think this way: without a publisher that game you really like prob wouldn't exist because they couldn't make a AAA budget so no matter how RICH a publisher is they do need to get some money and if you like the game you have to support both the devs AND the publishers.
There are rare case where you have kojima team with konami and metal gear solid v... while everybody call out konami for being D1cks most people overlook the fact that Kojima went over board with the money for produce the game money that konami never gonna see again... so there is too much behind a game developer and a publisher while you may think some "dlc" games are over priced and then is where you have to think what YOU want to buy and how much you want to support both publisher and developers and the franchise you like.
if a game of a franchise doesn't sell "well enough" this one could die right there no matter how many copies sell if they can't get a "target" money out of the dlc after game release.
Finally you gotta think that a AAA developers get paid before hand, worst case scenario the franchise would never show up again or even worst the devs studio getting shut down completely.
So don't worry too much and if you want to support AAA devs just buy the game and as many dlcs you want and when it comes to indie just either buy from steam store or drm free (at gog you can do that) for give 100% support to that dev.
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Interesting comment here, part of me feels here and there, since its not all publishers I dislike, and I do feel that if some publishers can be sort of fair with business practices why can't the others.
In saying that though, I find a lot of things you said as interesting, I didn't know thats what specifically happened with the Kojima konami thing, and I didn't know developers get paid before hand on triple A games.
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Publishing is a risk. Most of the times devs won't accept the old contracts, when they get paid only after a certain amount of copies were sold, which was a common practise even in the early 2000s. Now it's more like about bonuses, but the real money for them is still there.
But paying for the distribution (you wouldn't believe how much Sony and MS charge in all kinds of fees, this is why peasant games are always so expensive even on "sale") and especially the marketing comes from the publisher's pocket, and it is a risky endeavour.
Remember Titanfall? I know, nobody does. It was made by a bunch of ex-Activision people signing up with EA, who gave them a wad of cash (real amount not known, but usually put in eight digits in USD) and let them do the game they wanted. EA spent another few million on marketing, buying off people at rather respectable online media, and after the game was released… it was such a flop that in three months, nobody played it. Oh, and it was MP only, so with empty servers the game was considered dead and buried. And guess who had to swallow all the cost? The publisher.
(I would have used Daikatana as an example, but I can never be sure if people are old enough to actually remember the biggest downfall in video game history, when Romero hit a brick wall at full speed and never managed to get back up from it.)
Activision nearly ran into the same thing with Destiny, but after spending 100 million on it, they invested another year and a few dozen millions more and managed to turn it around to at least something that was not a forgotten failure but something that is still alive. I would imagine they still lost a lot of money on it and will need a loooooooot of time to see any profit from Bungie's franchise. Again, this was the result of trusting in the good brand of the dev, Bungie, that they can make another Halo.
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http://www.larshaendler.com/2015/02/19/titanfall-pc-player-base-random-thursday-february-2015/
2000 players in the planet. Two thousand. A random Quake server is more populated.
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now you're being dramatic, full matches mean NOT DEAD, players that consistently stay means NOT DEAD, that post is also a month before the seaon pass became free so players arent fragmented anymore
there are 4 quakes + q3 team arena + qlive + mods, which one? servers dont even go past 64 players do they?
here is a group reviving steam games that actually need it (zero players outside of events) http://steamcommunity.com/gid/103582791436167622
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Okay, let's see the player count later then:
https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/3d5zso/8664_players_online_on_titanfall_right_this/
8600!
Out of ten million owners!
If less than 0.1% of player base being active is not dead, I really have no idea what is dead then.
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um, concurrent players have never been close to total owners in any game, concurrent steam users peak at that amount of titanfall owners, a game that isnt even cod or gta
fallout4 didnt even break 500k on steam, counterstrike has almost identical numbers, i cant believe how dead it is!
not being able to join matches at random times of day with players in your region is what DEAD is obviously, how are percentages relevant? (if some indie 32 player battlefield type game has 20 owners on launch day with 15 trying to start a match... that's 75% player base that cant even start a normal match)
as for the publisher's risk, if the game cost $100 million, then those 10 million owners merely need to have paid at least $10 for it to be a success
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CS? CS is dead, yes. Has been for several years. So is CS:S.
CS:GO on the other hand: https://steamdb.info/app/730/graphs/
660,000. That is 76× Titanfall player base with 1.7× ownership amount. And 7m+ individual players logging in at least 1 hour of play time in the past two weeks.
So, again, thanks for providing numbers to state that Titanfall is, indeed, dead.
By the way, Fallout 4's Steam played ratio is currently over 93% with a 14.6 hour average.
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(like increasing game price by 15 percent then putting a 15 percent discount to be dodgy) etc;
That's something that's far more common among indies. Most big companies realize that breaking laws is a bad idea (it's illegal in most (western) countries, including the US, UK, Sweden & Germany).
How much you'll support the developer and how much you'll support the publisher depends on the agreement that the developer have with the publisher. If you're supporting a developer that's fully owned by a publisher, then you're directly supporting the publisher. If you're buying a game from a developer that just has a publishing deal, then how much you support either part will vary a lot (did the publisher pay for the game? Then the publisher will take a large cut. Did the publisher just do the marketing and handling the release? Then the publisher won't get as much).
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they didn't increase the price of the game. They added currency for the online portion in a bundle and then marked it down. Game wasn't actually cheaper just the currency was. It is a cheap way to try and say your game is on sale though specially for those who don't like online portions of games
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But you actually just got the same thing that the people that pre ordered did. So basicly you bought a "pre order version" of the game. In my opinion that's just raising the price of the game and is a really bad way to promote a game. I really like Rockstar (free dlc etc), but after that it went a bit more to the negative side.
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The thing is though those that preorder get that stuff for free because they threw their money down on product because of loyalty, fanbase, etc. If you bought it after it launched you didn't get that extra bonus. They also should never be required to give that to people because you bought the game.
It does suck they didn't put the actual game on sale but some games are going to sale no matter what so why not make all the money you can. It is business.
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It really depends on the game/developer/publisher. If its an independent developer, there's usually a way to purchase a copy of a game directly from them, DRM-free. A lot of developers are owned by publishers, so there's really no way to support a developer (say DiCE) without the publisher benefiting (EA).
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Honestly, if you feel very strongly against a publisher, then you should avoid the game still. The developer you want to support chose to work with the publisher, so in many ways they are like minded. If the developer also disagrees with its publisher's practices, then they would move on (as has happened many times in the past).
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I agree on your proposed action (do not buy from the publisher you deem unfair), but disagree with your reasoning. The devs are mere mortals, they have to feed their families, they fear to lose their job and they have to make a compromise with their conscience. I can't blame them, we all (well, most of us) are forced to sell our labour and the finished result of our work doesn't belong to us.
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Voting with your wallet means buying the games that are not broken and not buying the ones which are. Voting with your wallet doesn't mean not paying money, it means paying money for the good service and denying payment for the bad one, so the company realises that only good service serves its interest (= earns them their living).
So if you found a good game, buy it, and don't buy he bad stuff.
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Your reasoning is correct, but you shouldn't stop on videogames, because the exploitation of hired workers is the basis of the capitalistic formation. We are alienated from the product of our labour, from the process of work and then from the life itself.
You should start by uniting with people who think similar and promoting your ideas to general public. We cannot change the society until people understand that something is wrong with it's current state.
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In most cases there's no real difference between the developers and publishers. That is, the development house is a subsidiary of the publisher. It's therefore rather hard to separate them.
"Vote with your wallet" on its own is usually a bad practice, as it provides very little feedback to the company, which can't tell why you're not buying. You therefore end up denying yourself something without making a point. Telling the company (via e-mail, Facebook, forum, etc.) that you're not buying and why would be more effective. This way you're actually saying that (a) you like the game, (b) you don't like a certain practice. There's of course no guarantee that anyone will give a fuck, but at least they'll know there's something to give a fuck about.
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I find this comment really interesting, as I hear a lot of people say "vote with your wallet" and yet I feel it does little in terms of changing the business practice itself as well. In fact I further feel that a publisher is more likely to let a game go as being unpopular and stop supporting what could be a great game, without attributing the problem with the publisher practices itself.
Its increasingly looking like as you say, being more vocal about problems is the only real thing you can do, and supporting good devs, without supporting bad publishers more or less just a dream as of now :(.
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I could care less who the publisher it. If I want to play a game I'll buy it. You can get PC games so cheap on the internet it's not really that big of a deal to me.
Take the new Arkham Knight, WB farmed out the PC version to a crappy dev and they got tons of Backlash but the game still sold like hot cakes because people want to play it despite it's problems. I just started it and it has some hiccups and has crashed on me twice but the game is a blast to play I can overlook that stuff. I wasn't happy with what WB did but I did only pay $17 for the game like 6 months before it came out.
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You don't support developers by buying games. The publisher pays a dev studio a fee, then they own the game and collect all profits off it. The dev studio already earned their salary for the contract work.
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That depends entirely on the deal that the studio has with the publisher. The most common way of handling it is, to my knowledge, giving the studio money for making the game, and then giving a bonus if the game does well (does well can mean different things, it can mean that it gets great review scores (Fallout: New Vegas followed this system), or it can be based on sales (if it sells over a certain number of units in the first year, the developer gets a chunk of money).
This does of course only hold true for the cases where the publisher is funding most of the game. In some cases, like say Pillars of eternity, sales will directly impact how much the developer gets, and the publisher gets a comparatively small portion of the money. This is due to the publisher not funding the game itself, but just handling the surrounding things (marketing, distribution and so on).
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Who cares about price, it's all about how do you like that game and want to play. If you want it, just buy it once and enjoy it forever, if you're greedy and/or can't pay 15% more or less, then forget about it and don't complain.
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The problem isn't paying 15 percent, money isn't the issue, its that shocking business practices are being used, and whether I should still support a game which may be great, when at the same time I'm conflicted in not wanting to support dodgy business practices themselves (which I assumed comes from the publisher).
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Well... that's what reality is, people are greedy, trying to pull out more and more money... You can't do anything about it, neither us, or anyone else, only options are, make that game yourself if you don't wanna buy it, or swallow "not wanting" and buy it.
Anyways, I'd recommend you to ignore "Not wanting to support dodgy business" and go for games which you love and want to play.
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https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dghFX4mq3aaJk4m1fms1k-ofO40BvNEcl2cl7_ysy7I/edit?pli=1#gid=0 This list is from the last summer sale...
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I try not to buy from EA but that's about it
EA is a very specific case where i don't like neither the publisher or its developers.
So im ok not supporting at all, there is also nothing that has caught my eye since visceral's dead space, so nothing lost there.
The good news is that some of the better developers are now starting projects of their one through kickstarter
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No, the reason those games where even made is because the publishers gave their developers a budget. Publishers pretty much handle the business side of gaming. Unless those developers are willing pay out of pocket and know about financing and marketing, it would just close down your favorite developer.
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I don't think you can fully decouple the work that a publisher puts into a game from the work that a developer does, particularly with AAA titles. If you have enough interest that you want to spend $60+ on a game when it is released, a lot of that has to do with marketing and hype, and the publisher deserves a lot of credit for creating both the budget to allow for such a game to be exist in the first place as well as the actual excitement surrounding it.
Also, piracy in this case is NOT justified in my opinion. Either pay for the game and realize that whatever the publishing house is doing is distasteful but not distasteful enough for you to not buy the game, or don't buy the game, don't pirate it, don't play it because it was also the developer who made a conscious decision to sign a contract with the publisher in the first place.
If you'd truly like to encourage a developer and show them that they perhaps need not be tied to a short leash by a megabucks corporate publishing house, you could try to rally support for them independently by basically giving them donations via something like Patreon or encouraging them to try to Kickstart a project. If they don't yet have a Patreon page or Kickstarter project, you could write them and encourage them to set one up, perhaps with rallying support from your friends that might promise pledges.
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You could technically figure out the dev studio's adress (not so hard) or a personal dev (harder and stalkerish) to make sure money goes there.
Then again: the publishers are making sure a game can get made at all. So bypassing them would make sure less of those games get made.
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the easiest way would be to pirate the game, then make good reviews and spread word that X dev is awesome.
no money involved sadly unless the publisher gets a cut. you would be supporting it by making others aware that it exists (someone probably will buy it).
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If you want to legally own the game the closest you can really get is buy from a trader. Ultimately the publisher is getting a cut of every sale, but that way they aren't getting your money and depending on the traders source the cut they get is absolutely minimal. The only other option is wait for it to be in a Humble Bundle as I think they be the obnly sites that allows complete control over how you split the money
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You could be active at forums, help other users and do creative stuff with the game's content. Of course, the developers will still stay under the control of the publisher, but yet you will bring a smile on their lips I guess. I did it with THE CREW for example.
Go play The Crew btw.
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So I see many games come out that I really would love to play, but at the same time I also have a large dislike for the publisher themselves, (notably EA, Ubisoft etc). For many different things such as always online DRM, massively overpriced DLC, Unfinished games in which the rest of the content needs to be bought, unfair practices (like increasing game price by 15 percent then putting a 15 percent discount to be dodgy) etc;
Now I commonly hear the typical "Well if you don't like what their doing, vote with your wallet" and I get that, I really do. But at the same time, I also feel I do want to support the developers themselves, I do want more of a particular game to be made, I am happy to put my money in for the game itself and the developer but just not the publisher or even the business model used by them.
So the question is, is there a way that I can support a game or support the developer, without supporting the publisher. Or am I just doomed to either, pay the price (figuratively) to play what could be a great game, even if it means supporting evil practices which won't change while us the gamers keep putting money in.
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