Nipah

I’m essentially re-listening to the campaigns during my lunch break so if they all start getting annoying ads going forward I’ll just go back to getting audio books from OverDrive I suppose.

The first campaign is still on their old Nerdist/Geek and Sundry listing (the newer ones look to be from stitcher.com), so I’m wondering if once I get through the ones there the newer stuff won’t all be like that going forward.

I tried AntennaPod because folks on lemmy/kbin/beehaw/wherever have been recommended it, but it was being a bit weird with the only ‘podcast’ I listen to: Critical Role campaigns.

With Google Podcasts, they’d load in with a “Welcome to the Critical Role podcast” intro by one of the players, then go into the fanfare and then into the game. With AntennaPod, it would load (from the same subscription) with at least one ad right off the bat for some reason. I tried it a few times (granted, with just one episode (campaign 1, session 115)) and even uninstalled and reinstalled, and still had ad(s) at the front… I didn’t bother to scrub through to see if it had more ads in the middle bits, because one ad was too many, ya know?

I then tried out Pocket Casts (another recommendation) and the podcast behaves exactly like the Google Podcasts one does… no ads.

Not sure why, but that is how it worked when I tried it at least so other folks may run into a similar situation based on the podcast(s) in question.

While I do understand where you’re coming from, someone being better at something shouldn’t stop a person from doing what they love.

There are millions of people who draw better, sing better, dance better, write better, play video games better, design websites better or just do anything I can do better than I can… and that’s fine.

The main problem is that its not enough to be competitive with Steam at this point… you need to put out something so good that it give people enough of a reason to leave the comfort of Steam… you need Steam and then another layer of goodness on top of Steam.

This is the same issue that a lot of MMOs had when trying to become a WoW killer. You not only needed to have pretty much everything Blizzard put into the game, but more on top because otherwise why would anyone bother to leave the comforts of Azeroth to play something that is maybe marginally better, or a possibly worse experience?

Microtransactions are ‘small’ purchases made in a game (or via some kind of store that allows you to buy stuff to be used inside of a game).

DLC is any additional downloadable content that is not included with the game (so something like a day 1 patch wouldn’t be considered DLC, I’d say).

All microtransations are DLC, but not all DLC are microtransactions, generally (before someone comes along with some kind of physical microtransaction or something I guess)

I personally just view microtransations as anything that isn’t ‘playable content’. So buying a mount from an in-game store would be a microtransaction, while buying an expansion wouldn’t be. Map packs kind of blur the line in this instance, because one could argue that they’re essentially ‘world cosmetics’, but its a hard and fast rule and not something I’d try to enforce as a law, ya know?

I see this take a lot, and while I don’t disagree… I think it downplays the number of people who DO make ‘sensible’ purchases in a lot of these games.

I personally don’t bother with in-game purchases (I also rarely buy DLC… but I also sub to FFXIV regularly, and have all the content for Destiny 2, so sometimes I can be got) for cosmetics or especially boosts. I’d rather earn the items in game, or a step down, earn in-game currency to purchase those items instead because I’m, at the end of the day, paying for a game to play it and while I want to look good in game while doing so, I’m not gonna drop $15 on digital t-shirts.

But there are plenty of people who don’t mind tossing down $60 additionally a year into a game like Destiny 2 for sparkly new transmog outfits from the Eververse store, and they’ll see it as any sort of reason to do so (‘because I have the money’, ‘because I want to support the developer’, ‘because I have to collect everything’, ‘because because because’), and we can’t just pretend like its a handful of dudes dropping thousands of dollars while everyone else nobly boycotts the practice.

The big problem is that a company will look at something like World of Warcraft/Destiny at the height of their popularity and think “We want that!”

Then they’ll put out a (we’re being optimistic here) serviceable, good game with a respectable amount of content… but it won’t be able to hold a candle to something that: already has that much content + more AND players who are already ‘stuck’ with the game (sunk cost, friends/family/community, etc).

So you put out a game, get a brief spurt of attention from people who are a bit bored of the same ol’ same ol’, but then once they breakneck through all the content you have in less than a month they turn around and head back to their comfort food game and never look back. Congratulations, you can now put out a master class on how to waste millions of dollars.

In order to make a game as a service now you need either an extremely good hook, or you need to not only be comparable to an existing game but also EXCEED what that game offers and continue to provide content at a staggering speed until you’ve coerced people to have invested enough in the game to then be their comfort food/sunk cost game of choice.