Over time, the battle pass grew into a massive operation that sucked up nearly all the time, ideas, and resources of staff working on the game. In the early days of Dota 2, content updates were more varied and frequent. But over time the battle pass began to consume every idea or feature, leading to a situation where for most of the year Dota 2 had little to no new content until the next big battle pass update.
and
While work is still in progress on future updates, the first of these has shipped: ‘New Frontiers’ and patch 7.33 couldn’t have shipped as they did if we were focusing all our efforts on producing Battle Pass content. The community response to ‘New Frontiers’ has helped us build confidence that working less on cosmetic content for the Battle Pass and more on a variety of exciting updates is the right long-term path for Dota as both a game and a community
Pretty wild, as this seems to describe the issue with most live service games and high end titles in general.
Take Two bought Zynga and managed to add a battle pass to CSR Racing 2 which you can’t ignore as well… Every week ‘here are the new tasks’, every level ‘here is your reward’ and no way to keep on gaming and check it out later, you have to go to the pass… (which takes a minute)
I thought those lootboxes were the cancer of the gaming industry, but this is worse. I’m glad that some are killing the pass system off again.
Good. I’m tired of the absolute cancer that is paid content with an expiration date that you still have to play to actually unlock. Either let us play the game to unlock content (the way things should be) or sell us the content if you must, but don’t double dip and require both. Absolute madness that this shitty concept ever was greenlit but gaming companies are scum these days. Valve is the best of the bunch, but their hands aren’t clean of bad monetization tactics.
Weapon skins is nothing. There are games putting overpowered characters and weapons in the loot boxes/battlepasses. Some of them then allow you to trade them for real money on an auction house. Anything skins is harmless at this point.
And in those boxes I sometimes see < 1% chances on the main item to drop and close to 50% for useless junk…
All games have their methods to leach cash out of players, but some methods are just despicable. Galaxy of FIre: Alliances was a positive exception. Buy a point doubler for $1.99 that’s permanent… Those amounts are within the expendable income part for almost all players. (not > 100 for 1 item or thousand for gambling)
article mostly focuses on how they reallocated resources to focus on accessible content instead - curious what the dollar figures are on this as it's what would change other studio's approach
Being privately owned by a person who is a video game enthusiast really helps. Gabe already has 'fuck you' money and just wants to make video games and gadgets (and, apparently, deep sea submarines!).
If Valve is ever sold it'll go the route of every other publicly traded company.
“Spending habits”, exactly! They probably have other monetisation strategies lined up already. Hopefully it’s something also better for the users… (Can’t read the details right now, so I don’t know if that was mentioned)
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