That’s probably because you don’t understand it. (yeah… we can all play the condescending game).
AAA games come out at a set price. If it comes out at less than that price then it’s not a AAA game. That’s marketing psychology (and coincidentally placebo psychology). They may immediately discount it by 10% but RRP will be £40 for console games and £30 for PC games.
Played a bit again. And I have to say that there are some balance problems. The gun that I currently use, The deep freezer, is a bit overpowered. It’s also the first time that I had green bars as ping instead of red/orange. The game is playable but it’s absolutely not fair, which kinda destroys the fun.
[QUOTE=Nail;392986]I find it remarkable that people will put up with a piece of crap for $15 and say things like matchmaking is “wonky” (ie: non-existent) when for Brink, every little fault was “FAIL”
They both have major faults, but Brink is FAR more developed, and being published by "Meh"thesda, it has it’s obvious flaws and inherent price tag[/QUOTE]
This is a bit disjointed so bear with me…
If you want an answer as to why SD/Brink gets way more flak, take a second to compare the studios and development of these 2 games. SD had everything going for them on paper while Monolith basically had jack in comparison. SD had more development time, more money, bigger backers in the video game industry (beth vs. WB), more advertisement, etc. This list could probably get quite long.
Specifically addressing “wonky matchmaking,” Brink at launch didn’t have any matchmaking tools on console at all. I would have to find an empty game and invite in all my friends. There were no tweaks made to this system and to this day it’s still as fail as when I purchased it.
GCI has a party/lobby system that makes getting into matches with friends easy. They actually have some system in place that can/could be fixed where as Brink had NONE. Therefore, I can have hope that GCI will eventually get tweaks and fixes in this area that Brink never even had a chance for.
If you played Brink at launch please take yourself back there and remember the game was basically unplayable day 1 due to lag, network, etc. issues. The game was basically unplayable MP for a week or more, but still asked me to pay 4x the price upfront. It’s just my opinion, but even with all it’s faults GCI still launched head and shoulders above Brink. Heck, I was playing games with my friends the day it came out and I can’t say that for Brink.
Regardless though, if GCI was as broken as Brink I still wouldn’t be railing on it as hard as people did on Brink. Even if it comes down to only the price tag paying $15 to get kicked in the nuts is a lot more reasonable and easier to part with than $60 for the same kick.
Since Brink’s launch we now have an Arcade game that has launched with the exact same amount of content as their AAA title. That means SD/Beth literally sold us a title equivilant to an Arcade game for 4x the price*. In case you don’t remember many of us were saying this at launch too.
*I’m not suggesting they did this on purpose, were out to steal our money, purposefully misled us, etc.
[QUOTE=zenstar;392997]That’s probably because you don’t understand it. (yeah… we can all play the condescending game).
AAA games come out at a set price. If it comes out at less than that price then it’s not a AAA game. That’s marketing psychology (and coincidentally placebo psychology). They may immediately discount it by 10% but RRP will be £40 for console games and £30 for PC games.[/QUOTE]
Neato burrito. I completely disagree with everything you said. The idea that a game is not a AAA title because the price doesn’t reflect a premium is simply absurd to me. I may be in the minority here, but by my estimation, any game that is highly polished, of high production and quality is a AAA title. I can understand how that may usually translate to a bigger budgets and thus a higher price point, but to say that a game isn’t a AAA because it’s not priced at 60 bucks is, again, absurd.
Whether it was successful or not, Brink just seems like it has a lot more to it than GCI. It feels like a game that people spent years making rather than a quick downloadable title. You don’t measure content by the number of customization options. Brink had a lot more abilities originally, which were cut because they didn’t impact the game in a meaningful way. They tried to make a good game that people would play for years, rather than something with a huge amount of content. The fact that they didn’t succeed doesn’t change the fact that a lot more work went into Brink.
There is a huge difference between a rambo game that basically has deathmatch, domincation and ctf…and a teamplay game with the kind of maps and objectives that Brink has.
Plenty of people said that Starsiege Tribes and Tribes 2 should not have full price games when they came out. And yet, people still play that game today. People said that Shadowrun should not have been a full price game, and people have put thousands of hours into it. People will always say that multiplayer only games should not be full priced…but when it comes to the people who like the games, we don’t care if its 15 dollars or 60 dollars or 150 dollars if it has longevity.
The goal is longevity, and content doesn’t matter… Good, unique design matters. I play Natural Selection 2, which really only has 3 maps at the moment, because nothing else feels like it. I still play Killzone 2 because nothing else feels like it. The fact that Brink was not successful does not put it on the level of a deathmatch/domination/ctf game.
We complain about things like random bullet spread, and lack of modding…but then most of the people who left Brink went back to playing older games, like Quake Live, or ETQW, or TF2, or Killzone 2, or maybe Halo… Because despite the issues, Brink was still better than 95% of multiplayer shooters that released last year.
Fair enough. Difference of opinion I suppose. Didn’t mean to be quite so aggressive in my response but the “asenine” thing kinda annoyed me.
AAA in the video game industry is a very nebulous concept. Basically it boils down to the following: If a studio claims it’s a AAA game then it is a AAA game.
As for the pricing thing: it’s a psychology thing.
For example, a similar reaction with placebos (I’m not going to go find the research. it’s out there and you should look it up if you’re interested). Studies have discovered that when giving placebos to a person the effect of the placebo varies with the price.
If you give someone a sugar pill for free and tell them it’s medicine they get a small placebo effect.
If you charge soemone a nominal fee then they have a slightly greater placebo effect.
Charge them a lot of money and, generally, they get a large placebo effect.
The reason why: people see something intrinsically wrong with something that is not priced at what they see is the incorrect value. Price it too low and they are suspicious of it.
Marketing psychology is fairly similar. If RRP of a game is $15 then it doesn’t matter how classy it is people will not call it a AAA title. They will say that it’s “as polished as a AAA title” or “has the same quality you’d expect from a AAA title” but won’t actually mentally pigeonhole it as a AAA game.
Believe it or not. People are weird.
How many people outside of gaming news sites and publisher/dev press releases actually refer to games as AAA or otherwise? I don’t think I’ve heard anyone mention the term.
From the reviews I’ve read, the reason for the difference in price seems obvious: GCI is a free-to-play game (with half the maps?) for which you have to pay £12 up front. (As an added bonus you get GFWL thrown in for free!)
The useless ‘AAA’ tag seems to be principally determined by the amount of marketing money spent. I’m not sure how much the placebo effect has to do with it*. Brink had a boat-load of advertising in the UK. Fancy cinema ads with the promise of grand story arcs raise expectations.
*Placebos are pretty cool though. Have a read of Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science book. Big sugar pills better than little ones. Red sugar pills better than green. Two better than one and expensive sugar pills better than the cheap ones.
[QUOTE=MoonOnAStick;393284]From the reviews I’ve read, the reason for the difference in price seems obvious: GCI is a free-to-play game (with half the maps?) for which you have to pay £12 up front. (As an added bonus you get GFWL thrown in for free!)
[/QUOTE]
So I’m paying 4x the price for 2x the maps? Meh…Based on all the talk in this thread it seems like Brink might have been better off launching as a F2P or reduced ($15) priced title with built in DLC through customization options. Certainly not the first time that’s been suggested here.
Not everything is peachy and perfect with F2P. There are hidden costs and other inconveniences. I still have zero regrets about paying full price out of Brink. I got my money’s worth. F2P is not something I’d ever be interested in, to be honest.
GCI isn’t a true F2P as there’s an upfront cost albeit a smaller one of $15. I’m suggesting Brink would operate along those lines. I’m not talking APB style with zero upfront cost and the need to rent guns on a weekly to monthly basis or something. If at the end of the day all essential purchases from a Brink cash shop did not total more than $60, while you also had the option to earn some of that stuff without spending money and just playing thereby lowering your expenditures, what’s the harm?
For me personally, despite the horrors of the original F2P titles out there, when F2P is done right it’s my favorite model. Good examples off the top of my head: LoL, SMNC, Tribes, GA (this one has gotten a bit iffier since it went true F2P), etc. I’m sure there’s more, but I’m only exposed to so much. None of these titles feature the ability to buy “power” and nothing purchasable trumps player skill. Generally speaking purchases exist to speed up or shortcut around the normal advancement process. In all of these games everything needed for actual game play can be earned by just playing the game and never spending a dime.
Even better are F2P games that feature an option to purchase the entire package. This provides an option for your average gamer that wants to just pay for the product and be done with it. While not my favorite game Bloodline Champions offers an option like this. LoL also features Champion packs that allow you to spend $40-$50 and have 40+ champs unlocked. Many bigger budget F2P MMOs (LotRO, DDO, Champions, STO, etc.) also continue to have a sub option for those players that want the full package.
Keep in mind that in some respects F2P games remove the need for DRM and that whole fiasco by removing the purchase of the title itself. Not so relevant I suppose to console, but for PC (see Ubisoft news over the last couple weeks) I’ll give anything a shot that will help circumvent this issue.
At the same time the barrier to entry becomes: does this look like fun? And, can I install this game? Rather than a question of having the money to purchase and that entire thought process. This also leads to more people populating and playing your game which is usually a good thing.
I guess what I’m really getting at, in an extremely long-winded fashion, is that there are tons of variants on F2P models some of which are absolutely abhorrent while others are quite pleasing.
F2P is not a bad model…I think its great in Tribes: Ascend, but just because some good games are F2P, or 15 dollars with F2P aspects, doesn’t mean that all multiplayer-only games must sell for 15 dollars.
F2P puts restrictions on what kind of class/loadout system you can provide anyway. You usually earn unlocks much slower in F2P, even after purchasing XP boosts. Tribes: Ascend currently takes something like 280 hours to unlock everything, or 150 dollars to buy all classes and weapons… and in a year, it will probably take a thousand hours to unlock everything and 500 dollars to buy. Brink has more stuff to unlock than Tribes has… at 60 dollars and about 10-15 hours of play? One of the benefits of a fully buy-to-play game is that it cuts down on the grind.
[QUOTE=MoonOnAStick;393284]From the reviews I’ve read, the reason for the difference in price seems obvious: GCI is a free-to-play game (with half the maps?) for which you have to pay £12 up front. (As an added bonus you get GFWL thrown in for free!)
The useless ‘AAA’ tag seems to be principally determined by the amount of marketing money spent. I’m not sure how much the placebo effect has to do with it*. Brink had a boat-load of advertising in the UK. Fancy cinema ads with the promise of grand story arcs raise expectations.
*Placebos are pretty cool though. Have a read of Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science book. Big sugar pills better than little ones. Red sugar pills better than green. Two better than one and expensive sugar pills better than the cheap ones.[/QUOTE]
For that £12 upfront payment you can unlock -everything- in the game without spending another penny though. All the “dlc” for GCI is simply to unlock stuff early. If you don’t buy it you have to earn it through normal play. There’s nothing you can buy that you can’t unlock.
And yeah 
Ben Goldacre is cool and placebo science is weird (and awesome).
GCI should not even be compared to Brink. Switch it to TF2. That would make more sense.