Has everyone forgotten coin-ops? Or maybe I’m just old.
This started a long, long time ago, pretty much at the birth of popular casual gaming. It’s not part of the evolution, it was part of the blueprint.
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bassomitron@lemmy.world 1 year agoI agree with all your major points, well said. I will only add that back in the late 90s, MMOs started to become more popular among PC gamers, and that those were definitely designed for mild addiction (to keep players paying a monthly fee).
After WoW took MMOs mainstream (by around 2010-2012 when its playerbase peaked), I feel that lines up perfectly when your observation that developers began incorporating more and more positive feedback loops into games. I only bring this up since I wonder if there’s an actual correlation there (along with the other elements you pointed out regarding accessibility, etc.) or if it’s just coincidental timing.
killeronthecorner@lemmy.world 1 year ago
hellothere@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
The thing with coin-ops, and arcades in general, is that you still had to physically go somewhere, and have the coins to keep playing. If you walked away, someone would take the machine. Worst case scenario, the machine stopped working when it ran out of coin/token space.
I’m not denying that there are similarities, and that ultimately every game ever has been built on a fundamental mechanic of risk/reward, but it was rudimentary and broadly speaking deterministic and visible to the user (you knew how to get a free ball in most pinball games, for example).
The combination of easy payments, of very high amounts, and online competitive play where the high rollers can be multi-millionaires from anywhere in the world, and a pay-to-win mechanic makes certain modern games not just addictive, but financially crippling, if played by someone susceptible to addiction.
killeronthecorner@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I agree, but I was responding specifically to the claim that the use of psychology to tweak the design of a game in favour of profitability happened in 2010 / 1990 / etc.
The fact that it’s now orders of magnitude worse is, of course, true, but it didn’t start there by any definition.
d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz 1 year ago
It had nothing to do with WoW, smartphones were basically to blame. 2007 was when the iPhone came out, Android followed next year, and by the early 2010s, smartphones became ubiquitous. Both the App Store and Google Market exploded exponentially in the number of apps, and mobile game makers eventually figured out that microtransactions brought in more money than upfront payments - all the popular games started exploiting this model, such as Angry Birds, Temple Run and of course the infamous Candy Crush.
King, the company behind Candy Crush, generated over a billion dollars of revenue within just an year - their turnover exceeding that of several traditional PC/console game makers. They had a staggering 1000% growth in just an year. And that was the trigger. That was when everyone looked at them going, “tf, why the hell are we wasting so much time and money developing AAA games, and making way less money than some cheap mobile game?”
And the rest as they say, is history.
hellothere@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
WoW is a stepping stone, it’s used as a frequent example in Reality is Broken, which is good place to start if you want to understand where all this comes from, as well as the rather utopian hope psychologists had at the time.
d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz 1 year ago
I was there, and it didn’t “come from” WoW. Mtx were already popular in South Korea and China, with games like “MapleStory” (2003) and “ZT Online” (2006) being early examples, which predates mtx in WoW. Farmville also had them back in 2009, around the same time WoW started selling pets. And back then Zynga were making like a $1mil a day from Farmville mtx, and this was before WoW pet sales really took off.
Yes, WoW did play a role, but it wasn’t as big as you think - after all, it had a very niche audience, whereas games like Farmville, Candy Crush, Angry Birds etc had a much wider appeal. WoW appealed to the hardcore MMO gamers who were already used to paying a subscription fee, whereas games like Farmville normalized mtx across for the general public, and then Candy Crush tweaked the formula even further. In comparison to some of the shady psychological designs games like Candy Crush implemented, WoW was nothing.
hellothere@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I absolutely agree that Farmville had a bigger impact, especially as it was geared towards a more casual market. Showing that people who would not describe themselves as gamers would spend a lot of money on games was a huge thing that a lot of people set out to copy.
Sineljora@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Yes! There’s a reason Microsoft bought Activision-Blizzard-King