By now, everyone in the world knows that American tipping culture is getting out of hand. That doesn’t mean you can’t introduce another way of “supporting” creators. Mike Ybarra, the former president of Blizzard, shared his desire to tip developers of especially enjoyable games.
“When I beat a game, there are some that just leave me in awe of how amazing the experience was. At the end of the game, I’ve often thought ‘I wish I could give these folks another $10 or $20 because it was worth more than my initial $70 and they didn’t try to nickel and dime me every second.’”
Cool, give me some options like:
- art team
- programming team
- testing team
- game design team
Don’t let the publishers or upper management touch it, only the people who actually worked on the game itself. Pay it out in addition to any bonus/paycheck they’d normally get, as in the amount paid to these people wouldn’t be seen at all by the people in charge of payroll.
But no, that’s not what Mike Ybarra is talking about.
And the potential added problem is that once tipping becomes a large part of their salary they will just decrease their salary and say just to get tipped more. I don’t believe any outcome in this is a win for gamers or devs.
That’s why it’s so critical that the bosses never know how much they get tipped.
That’s essentially what buying the game’s soundtrack is lol
At least make it the gdd or concept art
If it actually went to the people working on the game, sure. I’ve done that with multiple small developers. Triple A though, that’s going to go right into management’s pockets.
I’ve felt that way that too, but I’ll cut my fingers off before I say I “tipped” Digital Extremes or Tactical Adventures or Eric Barone when I intentionally paid more than I needed to for their games to show support
I’ve paid DE a fair amount of money over the years, but I only ever buy plat when I get the 75% off coupons (which has happened bizarrely often to me) and when I was working. I have over 2k hours in Warframe, and I feel like I was also covering my friend that I play with for when they were unemployed and couldn’t buy anything. Most of my plat goes to gifts for my friends and the occasional shiny thing for myself.
I also really appreciate the fact that it is perfectly possible to get the premium currency without spending a penny yourself through the trading system. Not to mention the fact that there isn’t any content behind a paywall. You can skip some RNG grind or get cosmetics, but the premium currency won’t buy you anything you can’t get otherwise.
(I am probably going to pay for the Tennocon access pass though because the exhibitions and Baro at the relay are actually super awesome)
Yeah the 75% off coupon is a scam. You can be away for 2 weeks on holiday, and the game recognizes you are “back after a long time” and serves you one immediately. Each time I go back to Warframe, I have a 75% coupon waiting for me (I take breaks for like a year or two for them to drop more content).
Which part of that is a scam?
Stop giving Ybarra attention, news outlets. He’s fucking terrible.
“Because they sold me the full package and didn’t try to rip me off, I should give them more money, thus ripping myself off voluntarily”
Full price is often already a rip-off.
To be fair I’ve had a similar thought after finishing a couple of games. Both were indie games though and I thought they were underpriced relative to the value that I got out of them. I mostly felt that way because I really really want to encourage good behavior from studios rather than see it all go to microtransactions and subscriptions.
Yeah I agree with the idea of once I beat a really good game I want to support the creator more. Baldurs Gate 3 was so good, and there was nothing to buy, so I bought another copy for a friend. Who later bought his wife a copy.
The gift of another sale and sharing the game by word of mouth is the highest praise.
I feel like as I get older, books just seem more interesting and better value than games.
An average length novel costs about a fifth of what a game does at retail, takes roughly the same amount of time to finish and is probably gonna take way more creative chances.
Play indie games. They are way more fun, cheaper and most of the time don’t require powerful hardware.
But also read books, books are amazing. I recommend True Grit.
It was worth more than my initial 70$
What an absolute donkey. Maybe he doesn’t realize, but 70$ can be the difference between a healthy meal every day or not.
There’s games I would pay 60€ for (I can count them on one hand), and I can assure you that the rest is usually worth way less. Ain’t no way I’m leaving an additional tip. What the fuck.
If he likes tipping so much, maybe he can tip the game devs this money directly, considering he likes their game so much. He should start with his own.
Most of the games id be willing to pay $60 for are indie games that are <$20.
Hollow knight comes to mind. Diablo does not.
whata twat
Yea and pirating is a great option too.
None of the game he mentions deserve that. I like HZD, but this is the product of a studio owned by a massive company. People who made the game what it is got their work’s worth, and if not, Sony would be to blame.
“Tipping” video game creators already exists. Ask the Dwarf Fortress creators, who have been offering their game for free for decades, and are funded by donations and only since a year ago, the completely optional paid version.
On the one hand, the industry is well known for its poor wages and horrible working conditions. On the other hand, as you said, that’s on the companies and we shouldn’t be expected to pay their workers for them.
These guys rake in more money than Hollywood, and yet they think we should pay more because they don’t want to pay their workers a fair wage? How about we help them unionize instead. That sounds more worthwhile to me.
Well said. There is no way a “tipping” system set up by big publishers would end up in the creators’ pocket anyway.
Especially not if you include every small hand from programmer to artist to QA tester etc (and they should be included).
I thought I would do a quick search to see if I could find a “these studio do/don’t have a unionized workforce” tracker.
I couldn’t find anything so single issue but I did find this:
https://guide.ethical.org.au/company/?company=5451
Its a pretty dire list.
And that’s pretty standard for the video game industry. I can think of maybe 2 unionized studios in the US, and those have both happened within the past 5 years or so. One of those is actually a studio that was bought up by Blizzard and was so concerned that their work culture was going to be destroyed and replaced with Blizzard’s toxic culture that the entire studio formed a union in response.
Quality of life is so bad in the industry that not only is crunch a normal part of working, but you can expect to work 7 days a week for 3 or 4 months at a time, even eating and sleeping in the office. And pay is so bad that there are people working at Blizzard who can’t afford to buy lunch at the company cafeteria and are living out of their cars because they can’t afford rent within commuting distance of the office. I recently heard a dev talking about how he left Blizzard to go work for Amazon for better pay and benefits. When Amazon’s working conditions are better than yours, you know you’re in deep shit.
$70 for a game? Now that’s excessive; the most I’ve ever paid for a game is £25 and that was more than I would usually pay, which is around £15.
Same. It’s just never worth more to me than 30$. I can after all buy a book for 10$ and have simillar fun. Or watch tv show. Games are too expensive for what they are really.
One exception is when I am mentally unwell and purposefully get addicted to competitive online games as an elaborate self sabotage.
Why not giving player 10 to 20 bucks for playing through a half-baked, unfinished, repetitive hell of a mess? If’ve no problems of devs beeing proud of their work butt at least be honest with yourself. Your game is shit when everybody says so. Work on it and make it better instead of defending it how it is. FML sorry for the rant…
Let’s make it mandatory that 15-20% of gross sales be given directly to developers, once sales start. That would fix this. Customers can choose within that range. But let’s make it default to 20%.
