I’m not very optimistic that the right regulation will come out of this whole loot box controversy. For one thing, it’s very hard to write a law that prevents evil loot boxes while not preventing similar things that aren’t evil. But even if you solve that - loot boxes aren’t the real problem.

The real problem is the reliance on “whales” to monetize games. This causes games to be designed to be bottomless money pits to exploit vulnerable users. Loot boxes are just the current favorite way to build a money pit; there are many other strategies and if we block loot boxes designers will pivot to those other strategies.

If we wanted to actually solve this through regulation, we need to start from “How do we prevent whale hunting?” rather than “How do we prevent loot boxes?” I don’t know how to write either one of these laws, but even if we figure out a really great loot box law, we’re treating a single symptom rather than curing the disease.

I love how finding a new-to-me genre opens the door to a wealth of games featuring already-polished formulas.

Like, I didn’t check out Picross until Pokémon Picross and then I immediately dove into the Picross e series which I still haven’t run out of. I didn’t play any Musou games until Dynasty Warriors 8 and I don’t think I’m ever going to run out of those. And most recently, I tried Horizon Chase Turbo on PlayStation Plus, really liked it, and now have a trove of Out Run clones to explore (currently I am mostly hooked on Highway Runners on my phone).

Being late to the party is awesome.

Tetris 99 launched as a Nintendo Switch Online exclusive. Since it was an online-only battle royale, you needed the online subscription to play anyway, so this didn’t really hurt anyone - and making it free to subscribers was a win for Nintendo’s somewhat-maligned online service. It got even cooler when they started doing periodic tournaments that rewarded My Nintendo coins.

But then things got confusing. The game received a DLC expansion called the “Big Block DLC” which added two offline modes. Naturally it didn’t make sense for these to only be available to online subscribers, so the base Tetris 99 game download was no longer exclusive and could be downloaded by anyone for free - though if you didn’t have an online sub, it was useless to you unless you also shelled out ten bucks for the DLC. And if you did have the sub, this game that had initially been a special gift now had additions and improvements you wouldn’t get without spending more money.

This is a weird structure that damages the positioning of Tetris 99 as a nice bonus for getting an online sub, and Nintendo hasn’t really offered anything to replace it (even the NES releases have been getting rather anemic). To me it reads like the initial Tetris 99 release was a low-confidence experiment, and once the game was a hit the developer is now trying to make more money off of it in ways that the original setup didn’t cleanly enable.

Now another wedge is being driven between Nintendo Switch Online and Tetris 99 - and this one’s even more confusing. The game is receiving a physical release that includes the DLC and a one-year online subscription and (at least in the US) is priced the same as those two things put together (the DLC is ten dollars, a year of online is twenty, the physical Tetris 99 that includes both of these is thirty).

One hopes that the DLC content is included on the game card and it isn’t just bundled with a code - otherwise, the card itself is basically just a dongle and the internet is required for it to be any use at all. But even if it is on the card, it feels weird to me that the game forces you to buy an online subscription. If you wanted to play this game online anyway, why attach it to a piece of plastic that makes the game harder to play because it needs to be in the game slot? And if you didn’t, why would you pay triple the cost of the offline modes for it?

At this point it would make so much more sense for Tetris 99 to just be a ten dollar game with all its content, including an online mode that naturally requires the online subscription to play. And I suspect that the main reason this isn’t how it’s structured is due to the legacy of how the game launched - as a free Nintendo Switch Online bonus. The unusual and high-profile nature of that launch surely got the game a lot more attention than it otherwise would have - it seems entirely possible to me that it would have failed without that early boost, given how many simultaneous online players it needs to have to be successful. But it’s made things weird now that it’s trying to monetize further.

It’s a few months later and Google has done nothing to position Stadia as streamer- or esports-focused, which seems to kill my previous speculation. Also, they’ve revealed pricing details and as explained by Shamus Young, they are nonsensical.

My view of Google Stadia has shifted from “it might be a reasonable service for which I am simply not the target audience” to “probably a bad idea that will fail unless it pivots significantly.”

It’s being reported that the upcoming Animal Crossing: New Horizons will not support cloud backups for its save files “to avoid manipulating time, which remains one of the founding concepts of the series.” (Source, translation.)

It’s bad enough that Nintendo doesn’t allow you to back up your own save files manually and makes a paid subscription the only way to protect your data from hardware failures, damage, loss, or theft. That’s already anti-consumer.

But if they’re going to do that, then once you’re paying money for the privilege of backing up your data from playing your game on your console, no game should be able to opt out. It’s ludicrous to charge you for a service and then tell you “Nope, this particular developer didn’t feel like you should get to use the service you’re paying for on the product they sold you.”

Supposedly, developers need “a good reason” to opt out of cloud backups, but in practice the reasons we’ve seen so far usually aren’t good at all. But what I find interesting about this one is how paternalistic it is.

It feels similar to the argument you sometimes hear against the inclusion of easy modes, that somewhere a player might play on easy even though they’d enjoy the game more on hard, and preventing this possibility is somehow worth blocking other people from enjoying the game at all. I don’t care if some player out there uses save backups to finish their insect collection faster or whatever - why on earth is preventing that worth blocking all players from backing up their save in a game that’s intended to be played for months or years?

Whenever I browse sales on the Switch eShop, I find myself looking at interesting-seeming games and trying to remember whether I’ve looked them up before. Some games go on sale repeatedly and I end up researching them multiple times because I don’t recall that I’ve already decided not to buy them at that price.

So, here’s a new feature I’d like to see - a “below my price threshold” view on sales. Whenever you browse the shop, you can mark games as “not interested at this price”. Then when you go to the “threshold” view, it only shows you games that are currently at a price lower than you’ve ever marked them. So that game that’s been 15% off a few times, but doesn’t really look like your thing? It won’t clutter up your screen again next time it goes 15% off and make you try to remember how you felt about it, but it will show up again when it goes 50% off. (Alternately it could let you specify a price threshold manually - maybe you know you don’t want that game unless it’s 75% off.)

It’s a little hard to explain this concisely and probably not useful to most casual consumers, so I can’t imagine it ever really taking off, but I’d use it a lot.

Here’s another pet peeve: when games forget that something is positioned as a reward and get stingy with it.

I was thinking of this recently because of Hyrule Warriors. Similar to Fire Emblem Warriors, it has a system where you can scan up to five different amiibo per day and for each one get a semi-random reward of in-game currency, materials, or a weapon. Characters from the game’s actual franchise get special treatment, but any old amiibo will give you something.

Currency is generally the worst reward in my opinion, as that’s the easiest resource to farm in-game. You can get different amounts of it, though, and 50,000 rupees is nothing to sneeze at. Unfortunately, one of the possible rewards - which I have gotten several times - is one rupee.

I normally have about one million rupees on hand. One rupee is basically worthless. It would almost be less insulting and frustrating if you got nothing at all.

This might be a reasonable outcome if everyone just got five pulls on this slot machine every day. I think I’d still rather balance the rewards so the expected earnings were the same but there weren’t any duds like this, even though you’d still probably get something decent from five pulls. An engagement reward shouldn’t be insulting.

But pulls aren’t free. They are a reward for buying amiibo and an attempt to add value to them as a platform. (Even if Nintendo has largely abandoned this.) I bought a figurine expecting to be able to use it in a variety of games, I go to the effort to fire up the game for the day, go to the amiibo menu, and physically pick up my amiibo and put it on the controller - and the game blows me a one rupee raspberry in response.

I’m glad they figured out this was a bad idea. This “reward” was dropped from Fire Emblem Warriors, and the smallest amount of currency you can get from an amiibo there is five hundred.

I just noticed that when you look at a game listing in Nintendo’s eShop, in either the website or the Switch store, if you already own the game it doesn’t show you the current price.

I just bought Thumper since it’s on sale for five bucks in North America, and if I view the listing in an incognito window, it shows as twenty bucks marked down to five. Viewed while logged in to my Nintendo account, it shows as twenty bucks. Viewed on my Switch, it doesn’t show a price at all.

I assume this is to prevent the frustration of buying something and then immediately seeing it on sale for less than you paid, and possibly related customer complaints/requests-for-belated-discounts. I’m curious if they have any numbers to suggest it’s worthwhile for that purpose, but naively it seems misguided.

First, I’m very skeptical that it even works. When you look at the list of what games are currently on sale, that doesn’t filter out games you already own. I check that list far more often than I look at individual listings of games I already own, and many times I’ve seen games for which I paid more.

Second, I’m not generally a fan of hiding this kind of information from the customer - and the website goes one step farther and presents inaccurate information. This could easily backfire - suppose I’m telling my friend that Thumper is cool so they ask how much it is, and I tell them it’s twenty bucks because that’s the price I see, and that’s above their threshold when the actual sale price isn’t? I doubt this happens a lot but I’d expect it happens more often than someone is upset to learn that the game they just bought is on sale now not from checking the list of current sales but from going to that game’s individual listing.

This just feels like a weird strategy to me, and I doubt the benefits outweigh the dishonesty.

It’s been announced that Dragon Quest Builders 2 will have four DLC packs releasing over three weeks, so it seems like a good time to complain about this approach to DLC.

Release window sales are very important for triple-A games. Pre-orders are risky since they commit to a purchase before in-depth reviews are out, but they’re really helpful for the developer/publisher - people who pre-order are the best possible customers with the highest loyalty and investment, and can generate valuable organic marketing during the release window if they start playing the game right away and hype it up on social media. It’s absolutely in the interests of the developer/publisher to encourage and reward these customers.

As mentioned in my very first Tumblr post, DQB2 is my most anticipated game for 2019. I’ve had it pre-ordered since February. It comes out on July 12. Fully two weeks later come two DLC packs - one free, one paid. A week after that comes another paid DLC pack, and another week after that comes the final paid DLC pack.

Even if I buy all the DLC (which, to be clear, most of which is already out in Japan, with the last pack set to get a release date today) I won’t have a complete game until four weeks after launch. It’s not a great way to encourage and reward early adopters.

I recognize that often DLC is developed after the initial release of a game and can’t possibly be released alongside the main game. That seems to have been the case with DQB2 in Japan. But several times I’ve seen a game get localized from Japan well after all the DLC is available in Japan, including when that DLC is cosmetic and should be very quick and easy to localize, and still get a staggered DLC release schedule in other territories.

My assumption is that the intent is to extend the launch window, getting the game more attention for longer by putting out new content for it on a weekly basis for a while. But the result is that the best customers get a worse experience. (Relatedly, I assume the purpose of putting out free DLC instead of putting the same content in a more-convenient title update is to get people looking at the store where they might buy paid DLC.)

I feel like there’s a reasonable compromise available here - when there’s a season pass, it’s generally available before the DLC rolls out. Indeed, there’s one for DQB2 that can even be pre-ordered before the game launches. In cases like this where it’s feasible to make all the DLC content available at launch, why not do so via the season pass so early adopters get everything right away? The individual DLC packs could still be released piecemeal over time to extend the launch window, but this way early adopters are rewarded instead of punished.

If DQB2 did this, I would absolutely buy the season pass along with my pre-order. As is, I expect to get through a large chunk of the game before the DLC is even available, so when it does come out I’ll be much less motivated to pick it up.

Yesterday, PlayStation LifeStyle ran an article looking back at Star Ocean 2. I’ve always loved this game and been frustrated that I don’t have a great way to revisit it. Outside of Japan, Star Ocean 1 and 2 haven’t been made available since their physical PSP release - they didn’t even get put up on PSN digitally so they can’t be played on a Vita or PSTV. I do have them for PSP, but my PSP died several years ago. Japan got a digital release of Star Ocean 2 for PS3, Vita, and PS4, but despite persistent fan interest and the game already being translated this version did not get localized or released elsewhere.

I haven’t messed with emulators since I was a poor college student, but yesterday I officially gave up on being able to pay for these games (short of buying a replacement PSP, which… no). Within an hour of this decision, I was set up with PPSSPP and playable ISO backups of my PSP games. On a larger screen with visual improvements, remappable controls, screenshot capability (plus easy video capture via OBS), save states, fast forward capability, and cheat support. I even copied over my existing save files from my PSP.

I would happily have bought official ports of Star Ocean 1 and 2, but since that wasn’t an option, I went this route instead - and it was so fast, so easy, and provided a better experience than what Sony does sell. I didn’t pirate any games, but I easily could have and it was a good reminder that (as I’ve discussed before) piracy is symptomatic of market failure, not legal failure, and is often required for any reasonable degree of games preservation.

And then today it was announced that the PSP remake of the first Star Ocean is getting ported to PS4 and Switch - worldwide, according to Nintendo Life. I had to laugh. I’ll definitely be buying this, and Star Ocean 2 if that comes next (which seems likely; it’s the same engine and more popular). But I can’t help but reflect on the fact that these versions are probably not going to have the convenience features like save states, and if they have cheats they might be paid DLC.

(I’m also trying not to think too hard about the fact that this is probably only happening due to interest generated by the success of Star Ocean Anamnesis - a freemium gacha bullshit mobile spin-off.)