It’s a Scottish work of genius – but it’s no wonder gamers are gunning for greedy developers behind Red Dead Redemption 2
COMEDIAN Chris Rock once said he loved hip hop, but couldn’t defend the genre’s somewhat abrasive lyrical content. As a stone cold gangsta hip to the hustle myself, I can’t agree with Chris condemning an art form that will always speak to me on the authentic street level to which I’m familiar. Hip hop, doncha stop. Indeed.
Modern video gaming, however, offends me more than any salacious suggestion of intimacy between mother and son or arrogant boast professing financial solvency through gold acquisition. Greed is never good, but a relatively new gaming business model – innocuously referred to as “micro-transactions” – is not good at all. As good as Ant McPartlin’s chances of ever seeing the Australian jungle again.
For those who haven’t played a game since Mario had bumfluff, microtransactions are small “real-world” payments for in-game goodies like guns, armour and extravagant hats. Over the past decade, putting price tags on pixels has contributed greatly to gaming’s ascension to the entertainment industry’s top table.
Sales now easily eclipse movies and music combined. And Netflix is Azad Video compared to industry giant TakeTwo – producer of the twin phenomena Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption. It also owns Rockstar North, the powerhouse Edinburgh studio which helped create both titles.
Despite the staggering artistic and technical achievements being trailblazed by game companies like Take-Two, all is not well in the gaming community. In every dusty online cubbyhole, you’ll find an aggrieved gamer condemning microtransactions – holding them up as the cynical fleecing of loyal customers who have already paid £50 for what is now the “base” experience of a game.
Another grievance some players have is many major new titles arriving in broken, buggy states, quite clearly rush-released to meet the whims of shareholders within the frame of a financial year. You wouldn’t release The Sixth
Sense without the bit at the end revealing Bruce Willis is a ghost – so why release an unfinished game? Apologies to those who haven’t seen The Sixth Sense.
Yet, for the gaming community – about a billion or so folk at last count – it’s micro-transactions that are the final straw, turning what was once a relatively cheap and cheerful pastime into an all-encompassing addiction that leaves you as skint as Jordan. And not the country. MICRO-TRANSACTIONS are unfathomably lucrative for the games industry – providing milk and honey on tap for the extent of a game’s lifespan. This can last years – six in the case of the legendary Grand Theft Auto 5, which is still going strong having spent longer at the top of the charts than Wet Wet Wet. OR P**h P**h P**h, as Billy Connolly once, actually rather diplomatically, branded them.
It must be said that micro-transactions are not always bad for players – indeed, free-to-play games exist only because of them. This “free” business model mostly applies to basic mobile and social media gaming such as Candy Crush or Farmville, which harbour their very own darkly rewarding and addictive elements – and eventually hook your old mum into forking out for in-game bonuses to keep her dopamine levels buoyant. Psychologists call the process “variable rate reinforcement”. “The player works for reward making a series of responses, but these are delivered unpredictably,” says Dr Luke Clark of the Gambling Research Centre. “Dopamine cells are most active when there is maximum uncertainty, and respond more to an uncertain reward than one delivered predictably.” Beyond the wildly addictive quick fix of casual mobile gaming that has left grannies over the nation living on Whoops! sticker sandwiches, the microtransaction problem takes new flight, with the black feathered wings of a demon, on consoles and PCs.
The issue mostly lies with what are known as “AAA” titles, such as the recent planet-straddling colossus Red Dead Redemption 2. In the few weeks since its release, “RDR2” – less a game, more a Western reality simulator – has become the world’s second fastest-selling entertainment product of all time. And the actual best-selling product of all time? That’d be the aforementioned GTA5, made by the same studio. A deal at the crossroads has obviously been made at one point – and it looks like the devil may now be demanding payment.
Much talk around RDR2 has focused on horse testicles adapting to in-game weather conditions and players having the option to shoot suffragettes, but these are simply smokescreens diverting from the real controversy-in-waiting – Red Dead Redemption Online.
This launched in a trial state this month and is, essentially, an old-school arcade machine in the home – solely designed to keep you feeding it a continual supply of cash to win. And defenders of the business model who cite those initial “free” gold bars players get as in-game currency? Comparable to the “free” £20 you get to join any online bookies. There’s certainly no difference when it comes to the chemicals being released in your brain. And the need to keep them flowing.
The world at war
THE lucrative online element of AAA titles is a ubiquitous presence these days. Keeping players terminally locked in a prison of competitiveness is clearly the new modus operandi of major developers.
That the most recent Call Of Duty game was “online only” speaks volumes about the direction of travel gamers are being forcibly pushed towards. And there’s good reason developers favour online – it’s difficult monetising single player experiences. There’s only so many fancy hats a person can buy.
The competitive online experience, however, is clearly a piñata ripe for prolonged rattling. Little more than an online coliseum, such competitive kettling quite understandably brings out the very worst in gamers.
Anyone who has taken out another online player with a perfect headshot has likely been accused, in a rather crude manner, of crossing a line of intimacy with their own mother or suchlike over a headset. Yet, developers now know that as well as bringing out inner ugliness, it also brings out gamers’ wallets too. Right now, millions of pounds are being spent by folk making themselves digital gods, with impenetrable armour, monstrous guns and lovely hats – all bought with the sole aim of humiliating strangers, killing them and then looting their body for supplies.
The existential void gifted by a generational absence of global war seems to have been subconsciously remedied by gaming’s evolution. Online, players are afforded meaning. And also getting in some good practice for a no-deal Brexit.