Social Platypus

Opinion Mods not microtransactions: How to keep players engaged. By Josiah Sapp     Players invest a lot of their time and money in games that they believe in. We want the best experience for the investment. Developers and publishers make a living because we spend money on their product and spend time in their creation. It’s a highly competitive market and the tactics are cut throat. If a studio isn’t on top of the gaming trends, they get shut down or reallocated elsewhere. That’s why we get stories like Visceral studios being disbanded and their projects getting canceled. What they were working on, in theory, wasn’t being developed in line with future trends of the marketplace. Studios want their customers to return to their game while spending money on extra content. The avenue in which developers have achieved this retention and spending is through paid DLC and microtransactions to varying degrees of success. It seems, however, that all games are doome...

Opinion The climate of the gaming marketplace: What EA closing Visceral studios means for games. By Josiah Sapp      The gaming industry is still very young and has plenty of growing pains to endure. It’s already been saved once from an absolute crash back in 1983 and has seen it’s fair shares of innovative brilliance and outlandish flops. But where is the industry today? More importantly, where is it heading? In the past several years we’ve seen trends take root in the industry like the MOBA or hero shooter. We’ve also seen new tech that was supposed to “revolutionize gaming” but fell apart due to lack of imagination and support. Something that I didn’t see coming, however, is the dismantling of a founding pillar of the gaming world. The single player experience.     Some of the best and most groundbreaking video games were designed to be played by a single player. A straightforward linear progression with a...

Opinion Microtransactions: An old concept that needs clarification By Josiah Sapp     In today’s world, we’re constantly being sold something. Insurance, clothes, jewelry, new tech. It’s impossible to browse the internet without someone trying to grab your attention and give you a sales pitch. We’ve come to accept this type of advertising as normal in our society. It’s something we just deal with and if something catches our fancy, then we’ll buy it but if it doesn’t pertain to us then we don’t give it a second thought. Microtransactions in video games are no different than normal ads but they get under our skin somehow. The idea that a game (either free or paid for) has smaller transactions built within the game has somehow crossed the line. Why is that different than any other advertisement we encounter in the world? For most people, it feels forced.     Microtransactions have proven to be a very lucrative business stra...