Reddit refugee…wasting my time at kbin.social now.
They had BUCKETS of funding from wizards of the Coast for this. They also had a massive studio with more than 400 people working on it.
They had the IP; they did not receive a single cent from WotC. They funded the game with money from their previous games, and in fact, they paid WotC for the IP.
They’re not. Most of the videos and articles I’ve read specifically mention Elden Ring and TotK as other examples.
Destiny went through the same phase as well. Remember how well The Dark Below was received? Granted, Bungie turned it around with The Taken King, and subsequently Rise of Iron, but the seeds of monetization were sown with Destiny.
In Destiny 2 they just double downed on the microtransaction and monetization creep, which has only grown worse since they left Activision. All of those that thought the monetization was an Activision thing were pretty much wrong…when FTP came along it made sense that monetization was necessary, however the creep over the past few years has been abysmal.
I play, but it always seems to be to diminishing returns. It’s not really fun or rewarding any longer; Bungie can’t decide who to cater to (casuals or hard-core gamers). They’ve pretty much abandoned new PvP content (no new crucible maps for two years and counting, no new Gambit maps with only four available for play). I paid for this year’s content and admittedly, I’m just thinking about sitting it out entirely and just be done with the game.
You can now buy to max out your seasonal level at the beginning of the season for $100.00, so you can immediately gain the XP boosts and other stat bonuses. It costs 100 silver per level, and it’s available day one of the season, not halfway through or at the beginning of the seasonal content drought as it has been in the past.
I’m in agreement with you, however I’m going to also add that the creep to a “pay-to-win” game has pretty much been crossed. Not to forget that Bungie decided to drip feed expansion content laced throughout seasonal content this year…that has not been received well.
Destiny players are a salty bunch, but I have to say the current level of furor towards Bungie is pretty legitimate right now. They do overreact; I just feel that this in this current state of the game there is justification behind it.
Regardless, “I hate Destiny; I play every day.”
Nothing ever replaced Google+, which was really popular in my own tech circle.
Except Slack and LinkedIn already kind of fed that niche.
Regardless…the article is pretty much spot on. It’s fairly obvious that social networks are going to come and go; we’ve seen that over the past few decades. Every iteration of social media will revolve around the tech of the hour. I like ActivityPub and Federation because it brings additional options to the user base. It’s an exciting shift.
There was a way for everyone to win here, given some concessions. Yet no. Huffman decides to go nuclear with the API pricing to try to maximize profitability. This seems to tell me that the way Reddit was sold to investors it was way over valued.
YET, I still firmly believe that Reddit does not know what to do with its user data, or has not figured a way to conveniently, and concisely package it in any usable manner. As is, Reddit should be profitable based on the data users provide. Facebook does it with user data and remains free to use. This might explain some of the weird development choices Reddit has made over the years with new Reddit and the mobile app. They’re trying to shoehorn users into a system that allows their data to be usable, yet a large portion of the user base hasn’t followed along. They’ve utilized RES. old Reddit, and 3rd party apps instead of the official app which tries to compile user data into something that can be more easily packaged into something that can be sold to advertisers.
Now they’re on their 3rd year trying to go public, and they haven’t made measurable progress. Investors are waiting for their return, and Huffman is under the gun to produce some measured result…hence the API pricing and this nuclear option.
Sony didn’t have both versions readily available in the Playstation Store. While I did eventually purchase the DLC (which is the deluxe version, not a typical DLC), I’ll be damned that Sony didn’t make it easy to find the OG version in the store.
And I put that on Sony, not the game publisher. Regardless, BG3 has been a breath of fresh air to gaming this year. About time a studio put out a full game without divvying it up into expansions and DLCs.