Heya, so I've been hearing a lot of frustration, whether associated with Maro's posts, Reddit, or on this site that people are feeling pretty discontent about Double Master's price range and the growing expense of this normally enjoyable game.
One particular discussion I saw on a Reddit post caught my attention; it all centered around a 2016 "Game Player's Manifesto" by Richard Garfield on facebook. I've copied the article but will include links to the Reddit article and Garfield's supposed post.
What can we do about a game that is consistently growing to be beyond the range of affordablity for mot players? Sure we can choose not to buy these kinds of products but they weren't made with the expectation that we'd purchase them anyway. WotC does their market research, so while COVID-19 might influence the ability of some 'whales' to now afford the product,all indications point to this being a pretty financially rewarding set for the company.
I accept that "whales" are an important part of the game and the community, but I can't help but think that many of the pushed, even broken cards in recent standard play indicates that the company has begun to propritize 'chasing whales' over the game and player base's overall health. As for Arena, I don't have enough experience with it or other similar games to describe its system as problematic or otherwise.
Manifesto:
The following represents my opinion, based on my observations and personal research. I am open to feedback, critique, and correction from those so inclined. I welcome readers to do their own research and draw their own conclusions.
Manifesto: a written statement that describes the policies, goals, and opinions of a person or group
A Game Player’s Manifesto
I believe that in recent years, while looking for revenue models that work for electronic games, game designers and publishers have stumbled upon some formulae that work only because they abuse segments of their player population. Games can have addictive properties – and these abusive games are created – intentionally or not – to exploit players who are subject to certain addictive behavior.
One reason it has been possible for this to happen is that the resulting product is inexpensive, or free for most players, since most of the burden of cost has been put upon the players who become addicted to the game.
I am going to refer to these games as skinnerware. Skinnerware has a large overlap with freemium games, but not all freemium games are skinnerware, and skinnerware exists that isn’t freemium.
The distinguishing feature of skinnerware is that purchases are set up to trigger an addictive response in vulnerable players, and they are open ended in nature – the players can pay an essentially unlimited amount to get the reward they are after. Not all people are vulnerable to skinnerware, though they will probably be more susceptible at difficult times in their lives. This describes slot machines as well – but outside gambling games, companies being able to set up a direct conduit from an addict’s bank account are pretty rare before this era.
There are two key elements to a payment system that will make me suspicious that a game is skinnerware:
1) The payments are skewed to an extremely small portion of the player population. This is often hard to determine because the way the game is making its money isn’t always accessible.
2) The payment is open ended – there is essentially no limit to the amount of money that can be drawn from it.
This is not a hypothetical problem. It is well known in the industry how most of the money from successful freemium games is generated by ‘whales’. Without naming anyone – I have talked to employees who tracked down some of these whales for their company. Who were the players that were spending tens of thousands of dollars because they couldn’t wait for their energy bar to recharge – or they needed more power ups? It was people who couldn’t afford to be spending that sort of money, often people on fixed income. My understanding is that – to the company’s credit – they understood this was not right and looked into ways to mitigate it. Fixing it is a daunting task, however, because without these players the games would generally be considered failures – and shifting the burden to non-addicted players is tough since they can more easily switch games than an addicted player.
Some people I have shared this story with have wondered how many players are unable to afford the games they are hooked on – as if this were a measure of how bad the situation is. This is not only about those players who can’t afford it – that is just the easiest place to see a problem. A gambling addict doesn’t suddenly acquire the problem when they run out of money. Skinnerware can generally be played for free if one has patience, or is willing to switch to a different, nearly identical game. I believe that nearly every whale is being abused regardless of whether or not they can afford what they are paying.
There are two reasons I can think of that we, as game players, should be concerned about this:
It is wrong. Imagine a world where bars don’t charge for the first two drinks a day but charge crazy fees for subsequent drinks. This would be using a sickness, alcoholism, to subsidize moderate drinking for everyone else. Distributing the cost more equitably doesn’t cure alcoholism, but it does probably reduce it since less people would put themselves in a position to be exploited. Also, if they are afflicted, they are not also immediately financially crippled.
It will lead to worse games. Ultimately games are designed for the people who are paying for them. Design decisions that make the game reach more addictive players, or exploit existing players a little more will be considered even if they make the game play a little worse. When they are used successfully they will encourage more such changes. Will this lead to a world where all games are like slot machines – Skinner boxes designed to maximize addictive behavior? Probably not entirely – though I think games are looking more and more like that. Games rely too much on a social network of players to entirely drive out all the non-addictive players. But the design certainly won’t be optimal for those remaining non-addictive players – we can expect the design to only be ‘good enough’.
If you are playing a game for next to nothing – or free – and you find out people are spending thousands, or tens of thousands, or in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars – there may be a problem. When talking to people in the industry who accept this practice I often hear something along the lines of “People spend what it is worth to them”. The more I think about this tautological definition of value the less I am satisfied with it. I invite you to do the unpopular thing of trying to judge the value of something without leaning on this tautology. If you hear someone has spent $10,000 on a Match-3 game, for example, is that really the value to them or is something else going on? Personally, I believe in almost every case it is a publisher that has created an addict and then managed to stand between them and their addiction in an ongoing manner.
I want to emphasize:
Paying for games is OK: Games cost money to make and if they are worth playing the community of players should be paying for them.
Free play is OK: There have always been players who play for free. This is deeply entrenched in the paper industry – for example – where generally only one of your friends has to have a particular game. Some portion of the free players go on to promote, purchase, or just provide community for the paying player.
A publisher can and should be able to charge whatever they like: If a publisher wants to charge $1000 for the game they can go right ahead – it just shouldn’t be structured to prey only on people with compulsive disorders or who are at a vulnerable time in their life.
Pay Cap
One possible solution for publishers who claim their games don’t rely on exposing addictive personalities to open ended spending, or who wish to end it, is to put a cap on player expenditure – after which a player “gets everything.” This could be a one-time cap or a monthly cap – and it could be set wherever the publisher wants provided it is visible to the player.
With this in place we as players could more easily see what is going on. We would know that a Match-3 game with a cap of $30 was likely less abusive than one that set a cap at $3000 a month.
A company like Apple enforcing a visible cap could really limit exploitation of addiction.
Recognizing Skinnerware by Payment Method
There are many things these days which players might find themselves in a position to pay for within a game. It is often easy by their nature to determine which are likely to be abusive.
Power Ups in a Single Player Game: There is no reason for the sale of power ups in a single player game except for its effectiveness in exploiting addictive personalities. Players get a rush when they complete levels of a game, and then the levels become more difficult and to recreate that hit the player must spend money, or wait a very long time. For non-addictive players buying power ups doesn’t even make sense, in general it would be undermining the very reason they are playing – for a challenge or to get into a meditative state.
Energy Bar: One should always be wary when a game says you can’t play for a little while. Saying you can’t play until you pay – perhaps by watching an ad – makes sense. To just wait is breaking the usual pact between a game publisher and its free players – who are helping the game in ways other than just spending money. No one profits from the player being forced to stop playing for a little while. It is structured this way only to set up an addictive cycle for players susceptible to that behavior. Some developers have claimed that their energy bar is there because the game is intended to be played in short bursts. If this is true why do they allow players to pay to get more play time? Shouldn’t the people paying get the intended experience?
Speed Ups: Many games will charge money to make something happen faster – like completing the construction of a building. This can be considered similar to an energy bar – it is structured to delay gratification for players and if the player has the correct addictive personality and has been primed in the correct way – they will pay again and again for that hit.
Cosmetics: Cosmetic items are items that are not a part of the underlying game. These in some ways fall out of my regular metrics for identifying abuse. I think it is possible to have a game that has ‘fashion’ which is fairly open ended and not abusive. Usually I use my own sense of what the value of the game element is to guide what my understanding of the level of abuse – but cosmetics are different. Some game players are going to value the cosmetics more than others, while all game players share at least rudimentary idea of the value of something like a power up. For that reason you can have a pricey cosmetic system in a game which has a high value to some percentage of a game playing population and no value to another without necessarily being an abuse. Of course, the way cosmetic items are delivered can itself be a separate game which is exploitive of addictive behavior. A slot machine a player pays for which gives random cosmetics has more of a chance of being abusive than random prizes while playing or a simple store.
Advantage in Multiplayer Games: Paying for things that give an advantage in a competitive game is something that I believe can be done in a way that is not abusive – but one has to be careful. At its worst – it clearly has the potential to fall into a cycle that is abusive to the addictive player. If a player gets a positive feeling from “growing in power” and can pay for that experience with no endpoint in sight they can fall into a bad addictive cycle.
Incidentally – it is the multiplayer games with power purchase that reach the $100K+ player payments I mentioned above, so I would classify this as the most dangerous revenue model to the vulnerable player.
Power Ups: It is hard to imagine a competitive game selling disposable power ups not being abusive to an addictive player.
Leveling: Many games allow the players to level their characters or their tools. Technically I believe this could be done in a non-exploitive way, if the cost to level weren’t open ended (or progressively more expensive making them effectively open ended). For example, if free players had a 10% disadvantage to paying players and a player could only pay one time to level – that would be a capped and probably well distributed cost to the community. In practice, leveling in a multiplayer game appears to be almost always effectively open ended and positioned to exploit addictive players.
Access to Tools: Paying for cards or characters feels like it is the opposite of leveling – in the sense that technically it can be exploitive but in practice often has an effective cap which is reached when a player gets all the cards or characters they feel they need to compete. If one wanted to create an exploitive game in this area one could make an essentially endless string of cards with bigger numbers – but – games like Hearthstone, or League of Legends, have a limited number of cards and characters that are kept in some semblance of balance. As best as I can tell in these games competitive players generally spend hundreds of dollars on a regular basis – which might be pricey to some but it is not open ended and seems to be pretty well understood by the players. Payment beyond this point serves no in game function – you can only buy so much power and then you are in a fair game.
In general, if players can always pay to give themselves an advantage over other players there is an abusive open ended loop being created. If there is a fixed expenditure beyond which another player can’t out-buy you – that is more like a buy-in to the top level game.
Manifesto
I believe it is time to send a message to game designers and publishers. As a game player I will not play or promote games that I believe are subsidizing free or inexpensive play with exploitation of addictive players. As a game designer I will no longer work with publishers that are trying to make my designs into skinnerware.
If other people joined me what could we accomplish? Unfortunately – that is not clear. Since most of us are not the target of skinnerware, we provide little if any money to the companies that produce it, and boycotting a service you don’t pay for has no clear purpose. Where we might be able to make a difference is the social acceptance of these games. The more friends casually recommend them to each other, the more parents allow their children to be programmed by these manipulative tools, the easier time the publishers will have finding their ‘whales’. Our condemnation could also lend strength to the voices within the industry that want to see things done differently.
Ultimately I don’t think skinnerware as a business can be killed but perhaps it can be limited. We may not be the victims of this disease but we don’t have to be a vector.
I am considering printing Garfield's Manifesto and sending it as a letter to the Company; maybe Mark Rosewater though I don't think he deserves to be the lightning rod for all of this. He's one of the major faces of the game but only has so much influence. I'm kind of glad his recent accidental PR controversy has caused some discontent. He was being frank and conciliatory and I prefer that over any ignoring of the subject and it is past time we face some facts. The company totally uses the Secondary Market as reference to sell packs.
I'm kind of glad his recent accidental PR controversy has caused some discontent. He was being frank and conciliatory and I prefer that over any ignoring of the subject and it is past time we face some facts.
I am curious. What was this controversy? I must have missed it.
I am considering printing Garfield's Manifesto and sending it as a letter to the Company; maybe Mark Rosewater though I don't think he deserves to be the lightning rod for all of this. He's one of the major faces of the game but only has so much influence.
He is the head of game design. I highly doubt he has any direct say in the company's financial strategy beyond being consulted when it comes to potential new products.
I'm kind of glad his recent accidental PR controversy has caused some discontent. He was being frank and conciliatory and I prefer that over any ignoring of the subject and it is past time we face some facts.
I am curious. What was this controversy? I must have missed it.
I am considering printing Garfield's Manifesto and sending it as a letter to the Company; maybe Mark Rosewater though I don't think he deserves to be the lightning rod for all of this. He's one of the major faces of the game but only has so much influence.
He is the head of game design. I highly doubt he has any direct say in the company's financial strategy beyond being consulted when it comes to potential new products.
The links to Blogatog should help with the former. I also found it referenced in a few mediums where MtG is discussed. Here, Tumblr and Reddit mostly. I agree with you you on Maro. He's a lead game designer. That's his function. period.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Wizards. listen. The Vorthos community will await the consequences of the Eldrazi Titans' deaths/sealing. We will keep the watch.
“The wind whispers, ‘come home,’ but I cannot.”
— Teferi
I accept that "whales" are an important part of the game and the community, but I can't help but think that many of the pushed, even broken cards in recent standard play indicates that the company has begun to propritize 'chasing whales' over the game and player base's overall health. As for Arena, I don't have enough experience with it or other similar games to describe its system as problematic or otherwise.
Why does it always have to be a conspiracy? They just got massively overconfident about their shiny new Play Design team. If the were deliberately throwing game balance to the wind in favor of short term profit, they wouldn't have wasted the money on restructuring their design teams to to add Play Design in the first place.
Please, mill me. Mill my important cards. Mill my lands. Mill it all. Because I will still deal 20 damage before you can mill 45 cards most every time.
Why does it always have to be a conspiracy? They just got massively overconfident about their shiny new Play Design team. If the were deliberately throwing game balance to the wind in favor of short term profit, they wouldn't have wasted the money on restructuring their design teams to to add Play Design in the first place.
Except. It isn't a conspiracy. There is no baselessness here. It's also not as though these potential processes are illegal or without any reasonable arguments as to why they are actually okay for the game. I believe that the set, in addition to other recent MtG products indicates a problem as to which MtG audiences the company seems to currently prioritize.
I welcome the mods to move my thread if they believe it belongs elsewhere.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Wizards. listen. The Vorthos community will await the consequences of the Eldrazi Titans' deaths/sealing. We will keep the watch.
“The wind whispers, ‘come home,’ but I cannot.”
— Teferi
Why does it always have to be a conspiracy? They just got massively overconfident about their shiny new Play Design team. If the were deliberately throwing game balance to the wind in favor of short term profit, they wouldn't have wasted the money on restructuring their design teams to to add Play Design in the first place.
Except. It isn't a conspiracy. There is no baselessness here. It's also not as though these potential processes are illegal or without any reasonable arguments as to why they are actually okay for the game. I believe that the set, in addition to other recent MtG products indicates a problem as to which MtG audiences the company seems to currently prioritize.
I welcome the mods to move my thread if they believe it belongs elsewhere.
Specifically, the "printing broken cards to cater to whales" is a baseless conspiracy and not a very good one. The rest of it is a well reasoned concern.
Given that Richard Garfield has come back to designing Magic for the Dominaria set in 2018, I highly doubt he was thinking of Magic when making this article so I don't really get why this manifesto is making a comeback recently?
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Sorry for my possible english mistakes, I'm not a native speaker.
Specifically, the "printing broken cards to cater to whales" is a baseless conspiracy and not a very good one. The rest of it is a well reasoned concern.
It's not exactly a conspiracy, it's a way to sell packs to people so that way they can have the best. Sure it's not targeted at whales specifically, but they would be the ones to buy the most. So conspiracy? Not really. Sales strategy? Definitely.
And to be fair we have seen the highest allotment of bannable/strong cards we have seen in a while and only in the last couple of years. Starting with M19 we haven't had this many bannings in a long while and considering they are going to be changing an entire mechanic because of how strong it is that really does lend some credence to the whale selling comment.
Ignoring the manifesto. The simple answer is yes magic is addictive gambling for some people where they have a problem. Magic is additive to most people for it's gambling and money making aspect. That's the basis of the game today. Probably 100x more than it was years ago. You have to go back far in time to find a point where the money aspect was not as big as it is now. There is literally nothing you can do about it. Or you can not play magic the gathering.
Chronicles and the player reaction back then forever set how they handle today's game. I don't even know what the last all reprint core set was ? 8th edition maybe. I looked it up it was Tenth Edition 2007-07. So wizards has not given a crap about making the game affordable for new players since 2007!
Today there are a billion products. Each new one increasing the gambling aspect such as expeditions. They aren't going to stop printing secret lairs either. Mythics where a gambling increase. You have to know what you're getting into. $4 for a pack of paper is nuts. If there wasn't Game+gambling+money cards+winning prizes+surprise factor of opening a pack+status of having some cards +etc. There wouldn't be a game. It would have died a long time ago. There are a lot of defunct card games out there. Some of them are just as fun to play as magic.
Throwing your hands up in the air because problems have always existed is not a good response. Yes, Magic has long used certain ethically questionable means of driving sales. That doesn't mean nothing can be done. According to your own assessment the game was once aimed at being affordable. I don't expect WotC is going to throw away their chance to make lots of easy money any time soon, especially not with a megacorp like Hasbro looking over their shoulder. But that doesn't mean we should not bother. The game industry at large has been under increasing pressure to limit its varied predatory monetisation strategies, and with any and all headway that is made on that front, we should demand for WotC to meet those standards. I think WotC has shown itself to be a company with some willingness to listen to players on issues like this, so I don't think it's a waste of time to push for some kind of changes.
Plus, any chance of making a difference is dependant on people taking some kind of action. An obvious thing we can do is limit our spending on MtG and particularly on those products which most represent the issues of affordability and predatory gambling.
On another note, I find it interesting how much better the monetization is for Arena than the paper game. It's much easier to spend a rather affordable amount of money on the game and still keep up with the meta. I hope WotC is paying attention to the success of Arena due not just to the fact you can easily play on your computer whenever, but also because of this affordability.
Specifically, the "printing broken cards to cater to whales" is a baseless conspiracy and not a very good one. The rest of it is a well reasoned concern.
It's not exactly a conspiracy, it's a way to sell packs to people so that way they can have the best. Sure it's not targeted at whales specifically, but they would be the ones to buy the most. So conspiracy? Not really. Sales strategy? Definitely.
And to be fair we have seen the highest allotment of bannable/strong cards we have seen in a while and only in the last couple of years. Starting with M19 we haven't had this many bannings in a long while and considering they are going to be changing an entire mechanic because of how strong it is that really does lend some credence to the whale selling comment.
A high amount of banned cards doesn't really provide any evidence for a deliberate strategy of overpushing chase cards. These banning have not been very good for business. They lead to negativity and they sink the demand for those chase cards. WotC is only whale hunting with these cards as much as they've always done with high rarity chase cards. The banning are just a failure of play/set design. Happened before, will happen again.
[quote from="SpeedGrapher »" url="/forums/magic-fundamentals/the-rumor-mill/817529-ive-been-hearing-murmings-everywhere-online-about?comment=9"]
Plus, any chance of making a difference is dependant on people taking some kind of action. An obvious thing we can do is limit our spending on MtG and particularly on those products which most represent the issues of affordability and predatory gambling.
On another note, I find it interesting how much better the monetization is for Arena than the paper game. It's much easier to spend a rather affordable amount of money on the game and still keep up with the meta. I hope WotC is paying attention to the success of Arena due not just to the fact you can easily play on your computer whenever, but also because of this affordability.
Arena/modo is the future of the game. Paper is collectible only. Playing with physical cards will become a privilege/status. That will attract more rich. Decreased sales on premium would make them print less boxes and increase the price even more.
when mark asks, how they can give whales cards / products without upsetting the "normal" player i was wondering "what was wrong with lottery cards or box toppers" ?
whales either buy more displays to chase them (which makes set cards on the single market more affordable) or they buy the cards from normal people which than can purchase more product
either way, whales get their bling bling and normal players "can" get them too if they want or sell them if they want.
collectors booster for normal sets are also a fine solution in my opinion, normal people might not buy a display, but maybe 1 or 2 boosters. but adding premium collectors booster to a premium set... man, even when i can afford those cards, i feel scammed paying that much for cardboard.
This design philosophy has a lot to do with the current divide in the consumer based business market in the world right now. Most major consumer based businesses are beginning to cater more towards the very wealthy. This is a prudent business decision as more and more of the worlds wealth is going to the top 1% each year. Businesses, who are in the business of making money for the shareholders or just for their bottom line, are forced to utilize this strategy until something changes. Most products used to be geared towards the masses or what was referred to as the "middle class" for a long period of time. Over the prior 10-20 years the "middle class" has dwindled as people have either joined the wealthy class or more likely joined the more "average" income class for lack of a better word. As the wealth gap increased exponentially over the prior decade the business models had to adjust accordingly.
We see this in the gaming community in general in many areas. It is often now referred to as "pay to win". This isn't a new phenomenon, but it does seem more extreme at this point in gaming. Businesses are almost forced to do this to maximize profits. This is a very complicated topic and has so many variables and tangential topics that cause the overall disparity. I won't share my personal beliefs on the topic and what I think should be done because discussing the wealth inequality topic in detail in this forum would derail the original topic and wouldn't be the correct forum to discuss this topic. There are plenty of places to go to discuss wealth inequality. I just wanted to include the topic to show how this current phenomenon affects the game we love.
Arena/modo is the future of the game. Paper is collectible only. Playing with physical cards will become a privilege/status. That will attract more rich. Decreased sales on premium would make them print less boxes and increase the price even more.
Totally disagree. Paper magic is a social game, where people meet and interact in person. Digital is the stereotypical loner in a basement with no social life. There are a lot of people who play paper for the social aspect and who would quit if it became digital only - let's face it, there are far more interesting digital options for spending time and money.
Am I correct to say that playing Magic for "fun" with friends does NOT require any of the demanded high price cards?
My perspective is skewed because I've been playing for 24 years and competitive or tournaments haven't been on my radar besides some Draft releases. I've played with the same group of people or even new groups popping in and out the whole time. None of us were obsessed with "maxing" out the deck with the top tier cards, actually it's quite the opposite because we would basically razz those people for just netdecking the best stuff. We like to build interesting personal Free Form decks with cards ranging from Alpha to Ikoria in the same deck. It's really fun because you don't know whats coming. We all have lots of very expensive reserved list and blinged out cards that we have collected or pulled from packs ourselves (yeah we crack packs for fun too) and again we pretty much never play them because it almost seems like cheating in a way. I accept this is a group mentality among life long friends though.
So I guess my question is that when so many people complain about the reprints or price of cards not reprinted, that is coming from a Tournament competitive player right?
It seems strange to hear from people if they are just playing for fun competition among friends or groups.
I just don't understand the "I have to have these cards in my decks" mentality.
I do understand the "I wish some of these cards were more affordable so I could put them in my decks"
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Resigned up after getting lost in the Twitch/MTGS whatever crossover
Been on this forum for 10++ years
Playing since '94
Arena/modo is the future of the game. Paper is collectible only. Playing with physical cards will become a privilege/status. That will attract more rich. Decreased sales on premium would make them print less boxes and increase the price even more.
Totally disagree. Paper magic is a social game, where people meet and interact in person. Digital is the stereotypical loner in a basement with no social life. There are a lot of people who play paper for the social aspect and who would quit if it became digital only - let's face it, there are far more interesting digital options for spending time and money.
They dont really matter if theyre poor. Also they could just print cards or use webcams
Am I correct to say that playing Magic for "fun" with friends does NOT require any of the demanded high price cards?
My perspective is skewed because I've been playing for 24 years and competitive or tournaments haven't been on my radar besides some Draft releases. I've played with the same group of people or even new groups popping in and out the whole time. None of us were obsessed with "maxing" out the deck with the top tier cards, actually it's quite the opposite because we would basically razz those people for just netdecking the best stuff. We like to build interesting personal Free Form decks with cards ranging from Alpha to Ikoria in the same deck. It's really fun because you don't know whats coming. We all have lots of very expensive reserved list and blinged out cards that we have collected or pulled from packs ourselves (yeah we crack packs for fun too) and again we pretty much never play them because it almost seems like cheating in a way. I accept this is a group mentality among life long friends though.
So I guess my question is that when so many people complain about the reprints or price of cards not reprinted, that is coming from a Tournament competitive player right?
It seems strange to hear from people if they are just playing for fun competition among friends or groups.
I just don't understand the "I have to have these cards in my decks" mentality.
I do understand the "I wish some of these cards were more affordable so I could put them in my decks"
I only play commander and limited. For the former, I find that the store environments I've been in can get competitive and it can be frustrating dealing with decks that are overly optimized. It really depends on the local meta and how players respond to these kind of players. Do they penalize them socially or try to compete at thier level? Furthermore, it has been my experience watching and knowing players that play Modern and Pioneer at local gamestores, that these environments do in fact require game pieces such as fetches to play and that if you don't have the cards, tough.
In these formats, unlike Commander, people are even less willing to adapt so as to encourage a more flexible atmosphere.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Wizards. listen. The Vorthos community will await the consequences of the Eldrazi Titans' deaths/sealing. We will keep the watch.
“The wind whispers, ‘come home,’ but I cannot.”
— Teferi
If you guys want to donate $5 a month to cockatrice. You can play magic for $60 a year. Totally online. Right now. Then you never have to care about paper magic or Double Masters or Masters Gold Edition Deluxe version 15x again. You can keep complaining about the price if you want to but it won't do anything. It's a luxury paper product made for people with large amounts of disposable income.
There are many examples of this in life. Deck of playing cards $5. vs Magic booster case of a new set $600. In one you get everything you need the other you don't.
Acqua di Cristallo Tributo a Modigliani – $60,000 Per 750ml OR Tap water for .03 a gallon.
Koenigsegg CCXR Trevita ($4.8M) OR Chevrolet Spark $14,095
$60 board game you can play for forever until you get bored of it OR Lots of Money on Magic.
Due to Corona Virus I'm buying no magic cards at all. I can get another hobby if magic goes under.
I think I'm spent on this topic after that.
Quite.
For someone so easily annoyed by 'rainbow communist opinions' I'm confused why you thought folks interested in problematizing WotC's predatory business practices and rising product costs would be receptive to your argumentation.
As i said ppl have no perspective. Ive seen ppl refer to themselves as whales when they spend 3k a month. Make that 30k and we can talk.
Long story short. Magic is still too cheap
If you're saying a NET outlay of $30,000 per month, I think there are zero people doing that. Anyone putting up that much on Magic is trying to turn a buck.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
One particular discussion I saw on a Reddit post caught my attention; it all centered around a 2016 "Game Player's Manifesto" by Richard Garfield on facebook. I've copied the article but will include links to the Reddit article and Garfield's supposed post.
What can we do about a game that is consistently growing to be beyond the range of affordablity for mot players? Sure we can choose not to buy these kinds of products but they weren't made with the expectation that we'd purchase them anyway. WotC does their market research, so while COVID-19 might influence the ability of some 'whales' to now afford the product,all indications point to this being a pretty financially rewarding set for the company.
I accept that "whales" are an important part of the game and the community, but I can't help but think that many of the pushed, even broken cards in recent standard play indicates that the company has begun to propritize 'chasing whales' over the game and player base's overall health. As for Arena, I don't have enough experience with it or other similar games to describe its system as problematic or otherwise.
Manifesto:
The following represents my opinion, based on my observations and personal research. I am open to feedback, critique, and correction from those so inclined. I welcome readers to do their own research and draw their own conclusions.
Manifesto: a written statement that describes the policies, goals, and opinions of a person or group
A Game Player’s Manifesto
I believe that in recent years, while looking for revenue models that work for electronic games, game designers and publishers have stumbled upon some formulae that work only because they abuse segments of their player population. Games can have addictive properties – and these abusive games are created – intentionally or not – to exploit players who are subject to certain addictive behavior.
One reason it has been possible for this to happen is that the resulting product is inexpensive, or free for most players, since most of the burden of cost has been put upon the players who become addicted to the game.
I am going to refer to these games as skinnerware. Skinnerware has a large overlap with freemium games, but not all freemium games are skinnerware, and skinnerware exists that isn’t freemium.
The distinguishing feature of skinnerware is that purchases are set up to trigger an addictive response in vulnerable players, and they are open ended in nature – the players can pay an essentially unlimited amount to get the reward they are after. Not all people are vulnerable to skinnerware, though they will probably be more susceptible at difficult times in their lives. This describes slot machines as well – but outside gambling games, companies being able to set up a direct conduit from an addict’s bank account are pretty rare before this era.
There are two key elements to a payment system that will make me suspicious that a game is skinnerware:
1) The payments are skewed to an extremely small portion of the player population. This is often hard to determine because the way the game is making its money isn’t always accessible.
2) The payment is open ended – there is essentially no limit to the amount of money that can be drawn from it.
This is not a hypothetical problem. It is well known in the industry how most of the money from successful freemium games is generated by ‘whales’. Without naming anyone – I have talked to employees who tracked down some of these whales for their company. Who were the players that were spending tens of thousands of dollars because they couldn’t wait for their energy bar to recharge – or they needed more power ups? It was people who couldn’t afford to be spending that sort of money, often people on fixed income. My understanding is that – to the company’s credit – they understood this was not right and looked into ways to mitigate it. Fixing it is a daunting task, however, because without these players the games would generally be considered failures – and shifting the burden to non-addicted players is tough since they can more easily switch games than an addicted player.
Some people I have shared this story with have wondered how many players are unable to afford the games they are hooked on – as if this were a measure of how bad the situation is. This is not only about those players who can’t afford it – that is just the easiest place to see a problem. A gambling addict doesn’t suddenly acquire the problem when they run out of money. Skinnerware can generally be played for free if one has patience, or is willing to switch to a different, nearly identical game. I believe that nearly every whale is being abused regardless of whether or not they can afford what they are paying.
There are two reasons I can think of that we, as game players, should be concerned about this:
It is wrong. Imagine a world where bars don’t charge for the first two drinks a day but charge crazy fees for subsequent drinks. This would be using a sickness, alcoholism, to subsidize moderate drinking for everyone else. Distributing the cost more equitably doesn’t cure alcoholism, but it does probably reduce it since less people would put themselves in a position to be exploited. Also, if they are afflicted, they are not also immediately financially crippled.
It will lead to worse games. Ultimately games are designed for the people who are paying for them. Design decisions that make the game reach more addictive players, or exploit existing players a little more will be considered even if they make the game play a little worse. When they are used successfully they will encourage more such changes. Will this lead to a world where all games are like slot machines – Skinner boxes designed to maximize addictive behavior? Probably not entirely – though I think games are looking more and more like that. Games rely too much on a social network of players to entirely drive out all the non-addictive players. But the design certainly won’t be optimal for those remaining non-addictive players – we can expect the design to only be ‘good enough’.
If you are playing a game for next to nothing – or free – and you find out people are spending thousands, or tens of thousands, or in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars – there may be a problem. When talking to people in the industry who accept this practice I often hear something along the lines of “People spend what it is worth to them”. The more I think about this tautological definition of value the less I am satisfied with it. I invite you to do the unpopular thing of trying to judge the value of something without leaning on this tautology. If you hear someone has spent $10,000 on a Match-3 game, for example, is that really the value to them or is something else going on? Personally, I believe in almost every case it is a publisher that has created an addict and then managed to stand between them and their addiction in an ongoing manner.
I want to emphasize:
Paying for games is OK: Games cost money to make and if they are worth playing the community of players should be paying for them.
Free play is OK: There have always been players who play for free. This is deeply entrenched in the paper industry – for example – where generally only one of your friends has to have a particular game. Some portion of the free players go on to promote, purchase, or just provide community for the paying player.
A publisher can and should be able to charge whatever they like: If a publisher wants to charge $1000 for the game they can go right ahead – it just shouldn’t be structured to prey only on people with compulsive disorders or who are at a vulnerable time in their life.
Pay Cap
One possible solution for publishers who claim their games don’t rely on exposing addictive personalities to open ended spending, or who wish to end it, is to put a cap on player expenditure – after which a player “gets everything.” This could be a one-time cap or a monthly cap – and it could be set wherever the publisher wants provided it is visible to the player.
With this in place we as players could more easily see what is going on. We would know that a Match-3 game with a cap of $30 was likely less abusive than one that set a cap at $3000 a month.
A company like Apple enforcing a visible cap could really limit exploitation of addiction.
Recognizing Skinnerware by Payment Method
There are many things these days which players might find themselves in a position to pay for within a game. It is often easy by their nature to determine which are likely to be abusive.
Power Ups in a Single Player Game: There is no reason for the sale of power ups in a single player game except for its effectiveness in exploiting addictive personalities. Players get a rush when they complete levels of a game, and then the levels become more difficult and to recreate that hit the player must spend money, or wait a very long time. For non-addictive players buying power ups doesn’t even make sense, in general it would be undermining the very reason they are playing – for a challenge or to get into a meditative state.
Energy Bar: One should always be wary when a game says you can’t play for a little while. Saying you can’t play until you pay – perhaps by watching an ad – makes sense. To just wait is breaking the usual pact between a game publisher and its free players – who are helping the game in ways other than just spending money. No one profits from the player being forced to stop playing for a little while. It is structured this way only to set up an addictive cycle for players susceptible to that behavior. Some developers have claimed that their energy bar is there because the game is intended to be played in short bursts. If this is true why do they allow players to pay to get more play time? Shouldn’t the people paying get the intended experience?
Speed Ups: Many games will charge money to make something happen faster – like completing the construction of a building. This can be considered similar to an energy bar – it is structured to delay gratification for players and if the player has the correct addictive personality and has been primed in the correct way – they will pay again and again for that hit.
Cosmetics: Cosmetic items are items that are not a part of the underlying game. These in some ways fall out of my regular metrics for identifying abuse. I think it is possible to have a game that has ‘fashion’ which is fairly open ended and not abusive. Usually I use my own sense of what the value of the game element is to guide what my understanding of the level of abuse – but cosmetics are different. Some game players are going to value the cosmetics more than others, while all game players share at least rudimentary idea of the value of something like a power up. For that reason you can have a pricey cosmetic system in a game which has a high value to some percentage of a game playing population and no value to another without necessarily being an abuse. Of course, the way cosmetic items are delivered can itself be a separate game which is exploitive of addictive behavior. A slot machine a player pays for which gives random cosmetics has more of a chance of being abusive than random prizes while playing or a simple store.
Advantage in Multiplayer Games: Paying for things that give an advantage in a competitive game is something that I believe can be done in a way that is not abusive – but one has to be careful. At its worst – it clearly has the potential to fall into a cycle that is abusive to the addictive player. If a player gets a positive feeling from “growing in power” and can pay for that experience with no endpoint in sight they can fall into a bad addictive cycle.
Incidentally – it is the multiplayer games with power purchase that reach the $100K+ player payments I mentioned above, so I would classify this as the most dangerous revenue model to the vulnerable player.
Power Ups: It is hard to imagine a competitive game selling disposable power ups not being abusive to an addictive player.
Leveling: Many games allow the players to level their characters or their tools. Technically I believe this could be done in a non-exploitive way, if the cost to level weren’t open ended (or progressively more expensive making them effectively open ended). For example, if free players had a 10% disadvantage to paying players and a player could only pay one time to level – that would be a capped and probably well distributed cost to the community. In practice, leveling in a multiplayer game appears to be almost always effectively open ended and positioned to exploit addictive players.
Access to Tools: Paying for cards or characters feels like it is the opposite of leveling – in the sense that technically it can be exploitive but in practice often has an effective cap which is reached when a player gets all the cards or characters they feel they need to compete. If one wanted to create an exploitive game in this area one could make an essentially endless string of cards with bigger numbers – but – games like Hearthstone, or League of Legends, have a limited number of cards and characters that are kept in some semblance of balance. As best as I can tell in these games competitive players generally spend hundreds of dollars on a regular basis – which might be pricey to some but it is not open ended and seems to be pretty well understood by the players. Payment beyond this point serves no in game function – you can only buy so much power and then you are in a fair game.
In general, if players can always pay to give themselves an advantage over other players there is an abusive open ended loop being created. If there is a fixed expenditure beyond which another player can’t out-buy you – that is more like a buy-in to the top level game.
Manifesto
I believe it is time to send a message to game designers and publishers. As a game player I will not play or promote games that I believe are subsidizing free or inexpensive play with exploitation of addictive players. As a game designer I will no longer work with publishers that are trying to make my designs into skinnerware.
If other people joined me what could we accomplish? Unfortunately – that is not clear. Since most of us are not the target of skinnerware, we provide little if any money to the companies that produce it, and boycotting a service you don’t pay for has no clear purpose. Where we might be able to make a difference is the social acceptance of these games. The more friends casually recommend them to each other, the more parents allow their children to be programmed by these manipulative tools, the easier time the publishers will have finding their ‘whales’. Our condemnation could also lend strength to the voices within the industry that want to see things done differently.
Ultimately I don’t think skinnerware as a business can be killed but perhaps it can be limited. We may not be the victims of this disease but we don’t have to be a vector.
I am considering printing Garfield's Manifesto and sending it as a letter to the Company; maybe Mark Rosewater though I don't think he deserves to be the lightning rod for all of this. He's one of the major faces of the game but only has so much influence. I'm kind of glad his recent accidental PR controversy has caused some discontent. He was being frank and conciliatory and I prefer that over any ignoring of the subject and it is past time we face some facts. The company totally uses the Secondary Market as reference to sell packs.
Manifesto Link:
https://www.facebook.com/notes/richard-garfield/a-game-players-manifesto/1049168888532667
Reddit Link:
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/gsbcoq/its_a_great_time_to_revisit_this_facebook_post_by/
Video on Double Masters by Tolarian Community College:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNPNXl8tH30
Blogatog:
https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/619208593991991296/hey-marc-i-know-that-you-probably-wont-answer
https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/619290198740697088/i-really-appreciate-your-answers-and-community
The Vorthos community will await the consequences of the Eldrazi Titans' deaths/sealing. We will keep the watch.
“The wind whispers, ‘come home,’ but I cannot.”
— Teferi
powpercube Johnny https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/37t
I am curious. What was this controversy? I must have missed it.
He is the head of game design. I highly doubt he has any direct say in the company's financial strategy beyond being consulted when it comes to potential new products.
The links to Blogatog should help with the former. I also found it referenced in a few mediums where MtG is discussed. Here, Tumblr and Reddit mostly. I agree with you you on Maro. He's a lead game designer. That's his function. period.
The Vorthos community will await the consequences of the Eldrazi Titans' deaths/sealing. We will keep the watch.
“The wind whispers, ‘come home,’ but I cannot.”
— Teferi
Why does it always have to be a conspiracy? They just got massively overconfident about their shiny new Play Design team. If the were deliberately throwing game balance to the wind in favor of short term profit, they wouldn't have wasted the money on restructuring their design teams to to add Play Design in the first place.
Except. It isn't a conspiracy. There is no baselessness here. It's also not as though these potential processes are illegal or without any reasonable arguments as to why they are actually okay for the game. I believe that the set, in addition to other recent MtG products indicates a problem as to which MtG audiences the company seems to currently prioritize.
I welcome the mods to move my thread if they believe it belongs elsewhere.
The Vorthos community will await the consequences of the Eldrazi Titans' deaths/sealing. We will keep the watch.
“The wind whispers, ‘come home,’ but I cannot.”
— Teferi
It's not exactly a conspiracy, it's a way to sell packs to people so that way they can have the best. Sure it's not targeted at whales specifically, but they would be the ones to buy the most. So conspiracy? Not really. Sales strategy? Definitely.
And to be fair we have seen the highest allotment of bannable/strong cards we have seen in a while and only in the last couple of years. Starting with M19 we haven't had this many bannings in a long while and considering they are going to be changing an entire mechanic because of how strong it is that really does lend some credence to the whale selling comment.
Throwing your hands up in the air because problems have always existed is not a good response. Yes, Magic has long used certain ethically questionable means of driving sales. That doesn't mean nothing can be done. According to your own assessment the game was once aimed at being affordable. I don't expect WotC is going to throw away their chance to make lots of easy money any time soon, especially not with a megacorp like Hasbro looking over their shoulder. But that doesn't mean we should not bother. The game industry at large has been under increasing pressure to limit its varied predatory monetisation strategies, and with any and all headway that is made on that front, we should demand for WotC to meet those standards. I think WotC has shown itself to be a company with some willingness to listen to players on issues like this, so I don't think it's a waste of time to push for some kind of changes.
Plus, any chance of making a difference is dependant on people taking some kind of action. An obvious thing we can do is limit our spending on MtG and particularly on those products which most represent the issues of affordability and predatory gambling.
On another note, I find it interesting how much better the monetization is for Arena than the paper game. It's much easier to spend a rather affordable amount of money on the game and still keep up with the meta. I hope WotC is paying attention to the success of Arena due not just to the fact you can easily play on your computer whenever, but also because of this affordability.
RUNIN: Norse mythology set (awaiting further playtesting)
FATE of ALARA: Multicolour factions (currently on hiatus)
Contibutor to the Pyrulea community set
I'm here to tell you that all your set mechanics are bad
#Defundthepolice
A high amount of banned cards doesn't really provide any evidence for a deliberate strategy of overpushing chase cards. These banning have not been very good for business. They lead to negativity and they sink the demand for those chase cards. WotC is only whale hunting with these cards as much as they've always done with high rarity chase cards. The banning are just a failure of play/set design. Happened before, will happen again.
RUNIN: Norse mythology set (awaiting further playtesting)
FATE of ALARA: Multicolour factions (currently on hiatus)
Contibutor to the Pyrulea community set
I'm here to tell you that all your set mechanics are bad
#Defundthepolice
Arena/modo is the future of the game. Paper is collectible only. Playing with physical cards will become a privilege/status. That will attract more rich. Decreased sales on premium would make them print less boxes and increase the price even more.
powpercube Johnny https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/37t
whales either buy more displays to chase them (which makes set cards on the single market more affordable) or they buy the cards from normal people which than can purchase more product
either way, whales get their bling bling and normal players "can" get them too if they want or sell them if they want.
collectors booster for normal sets are also a fine solution in my opinion, normal people might not buy a display, but maybe 1 or 2 boosters. but adding premium collectors booster to a premium set... man, even when i can afford those cards, i feel scammed paying that much for cardboard.
powpercube Johnny https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/37t
We see this in the gaming community in general in many areas. It is often now referred to as "pay to win". This isn't a new phenomenon, but it does seem more extreme at this point in gaming. Businesses are almost forced to do this to maximize profits. This is a very complicated topic and has so many variables and tangential topics that cause the overall disparity. I won't share my personal beliefs on the topic and what I think should be done because discussing the wealth inequality topic in detail in this forum would derail the original topic and wouldn't be the correct forum to discuss this topic. There are plenty of places to go to discuss wealth inequality. I just wanted to include the topic to show how this current phenomenon affects the game we love.
Long story short. Magic is still too cheap
powpercube Johnny https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/37t
2023 Average Peasant Cube|and Discussion
Because I have more decks than fit in a signature
Useful Resources:
MTGSalvation tags
EDHREC
ManabaseCrafter
My perspective is skewed because I've been playing for 24 years and competitive or tournaments haven't been on my radar besides some Draft releases. I've played with the same group of people or even new groups popping in and out the whole time. None of us were obsessed with "maxing" out the deck with the top tier cards, actually it's quite the opposite because we would basically razz those people for just netdecking the best stuff. We like to build interesting personal Free Form decks with cards ranging from Alpha to Ikoria in the same deck. It's really fun because you don't know whats coming. We all have lots of very expensive reserved list and blinged out cards that we have collected or pulled from packs ourselves (yeah we crack packs for fun too) and again we pretty much never play them because it almost seems like cheating in a way. I accept this is a group mentality among life long friends though.
So I guess my question is that when so many people complain about the reprints or price of cards not reprinted, that is coming from a Tournament competitive player right?
It seems strange to hear from people if they are just playing for fun competition among friends or groups.
I just don't understand the "I have to have these cards in my decks" mentality.
I do understand the "I wish some of these cards were more affordable so I could put them in my decks"
Been on this forum for 10++ years
Playing since '94
They dont really matter if theyre poor. Also they could just print cards or use webcams
powpercube Johnny https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/37t
I only play commander and limited. For the former, I find that the store environments I've been in can get competitive and it can be frustrating dealing with decks that are overly optimized. It really depends on the local meta and how players respond to these kind of players. Do they penalize them socially or try to compete at thier level? Furthermore, it has been my experience watching and knowing players that play Modern and Pioneer at local gamestores, that these environments do in fact require game pieces such as fetches to play and that if you don't have the cards, tough.
In these formats, unlike Commander, people are even less willing to adapt so as to encourage a more flexible atmosphere.
The Vorthos community will await the consequences of the Eldrazi Titans' deaths/sealing. We will keep the watch.
“The wind whispers, ‘come home,’ but I cannot.”
— Teferi
powpercube Johnny https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/37t
Quite.
For someone so easily annoyed by 'rainbow communist opinions' I'm confused why you thought folks interested in problematizing WotC's predatory business practices and rising product costs would be receptive to your argumentation.
The Vorthos community will await the consequences of the Eldrazi Titans' deaths/sealing. We will keep the watch.
“The wind whispers, ‘come home,’ but I cannot.”
— Teferi
powpercube Johnny https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/37t
If you're saying a NET outlay of $30,000 per month, I think there are zero people doing that. Anyone putting up that much on Magic is trying to turn a buck.