http://kotaku.com/5977118/the-slow-excruciating-death-of-final-fantasyQuoteCivilization creator Sid Meier once famously said that a game is "a series of interesting decisions."
Final Fantasy All The Bravest, a new game that came out for iOS on Thursday, has one interesting decision: How much money would you like to give Square Enix?
All The Bravest, a series of micro-transactions disguised as a video game, tasks you with swiping your finger up and down a screen as Final Fantasy characters jump and attack Final Fantasy villains on Final Fantasy backgrounds while listening to Final Fantasy music. It's kind of fun, in that "I don't know why I'm doing this but it's kind of compelling for some reason" sort of way.
It's also less of a video game and more of a massive middle finger to fans. It should really be called "Final Fantasy Fuck You Give Us Money." I can forgive the premium purchases: you can buy new maps for $3.99 each, which is fine, and you can buy 16-bit Final Fantasy characters for $0.99 each, except they're totally random and you don't know which one you're going to get, which is weird, but also generally an okay form of downloadable content.
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This actually seemed to have a bit of relevance to us, so I thought I'd share.
For the most part, I actually agree with many parts of the article. It seems to me as if every game that big corporate game companies are making any more are being treated as cash cows. In one respect, that is just fine, as they are a game company that needs money to stay in business. There is another side of the coin that I think is coming up far too often, and that is the entire concept of micro-transactions. Micro-transactions in and of themselves are neither good, or bad. What determines if they are good or bad is purely dependant on the individual. But I think most would agree that if you went to the Cinema, and instead of paying full price to see a full length movie, your movie would be stopped every five minutes and request that you put in your credit card number (like all of us even have a credit card), pay twenty-five cents, then watch the next five minutes of that movie, only to be promted again for another micro transaction again, and every sequential five minutes, we'd conclude that the movie was a waste of time as twice as much time would be spent making micro transactions as we would spend actually watching the movie. For me, an experience like that would be like hearing an advertiser say "were gonna lower your price for the movie by interrupting constantly to make your movie suck."
Maybe its just me. When I buy a game, I expect to pay full price for it, at one time. MMO's are different, but I wont get into that, as they are a very different type of game. I'm talking about the single player RPG game. Now, the price I expect to pay depends on when I buy the game in relation to the games release date. The game is five years old, I expect that "full price" will be a pittance of its original cost, and its usually used. Unfortunately, used games dont make the original author any money. I still expect that I pay full price, what ever that totals up to, and to not be nickel and dimed to death in order to play a game.
This idea of micro transactions I think is just killing the game market, because it is being done wrong so frequently. It would be like any of us making an RM game, and charging our players a buck every time they want to level up. We would immediately alienate anyone interested in playing a game we made, and would permanetly put a black mark on our reputation. Less people would be inclined to play any games we made. I'd much rather charge full price for a game I made up front, then let them enjoy it. If you read a book, and got charged a dime every time you wanted to turn the page, you'd probably be less inclined to ever finish that book. As if any of us actually read books any more, even e-books.
Dont get me wrong, I dont mind going on Xbox Live and getting a new map or an expansion pack every once in a while, but what it seems to me that they are doing is going after every little possible thing that you are doing. Oh, you want to press the Down arrow? That only costs you one penny. Well, in any traditional RPG, there is going to be plenty of wandering around, and that is a lot of keypresses. They arent trying to do micro transactions for "Chapter 2" at the price of a buck, they would rather do it more frequently because it appears to have a lower cost to us. But this apparent cost isnt so hidden. We can all see that more frequent transactions, even at an apparently lower cost, just flat out get annoying, to the point where you just dont want to play any more. I dont have nearly as much time to play games as I used to, so my highest cost is now time. Here is a book. But instead of just charging you a dime for each page, Im gonna make you drive down to the store, buy your new page there, then go home to read it, then have to go back to the store for the next page and get charged yet again. There is a good hour there spent doing nothing more than acquiring the content, that would be much easier to get all at once. And you cant just buy all the pages at the same time. It would take 10 hours to read a 20 page book. People would just stop reading period. In games, people just stop playing them, period.
I dont know. Maybe its just me that is getting completely insulted by this concept of death by micro transactions. I swear its like they have a cash cow, but instead of hooking up the cows tits to a milk machine, theyve decided to milk the cow by using giant syringes that get stabbed directly into the tit, suck a bit of milk out, then going back for more and more, one stab at a time, and were the cow. Yeah, companies need money to stay afloat, but at what expense? It seems to me that they'd rater do as close to nothing as they possibly can while taking a giant shit on our chests and pilfering more money from us than to actually come up with a quality product that everyone raves so much about that they all go out and buy it.
Alright, I'll just end my rant here. As if any of you would actually read this far, even though Im not charging you a penny per letter. DLC for new content, awesomesauce! Death by micro transaction penny for every key press needs to die a horrible horrible death.
/rant