Q

Anonymous asked:

What are your thoughts on reselling assets in games? Criticisms imply that, if you bought the assets in a previous game, any other game reusing them should be reused n the base game already or be brought in via free updates, so that nobody has to buy for the same thing again, otherwise it’s money predatory, greedy, and shady in every possible way. But how do you and other devs see this practice?

A

The argument tends to break down if you poke at it. A single purchasable asset is never atomic - the purchased item is comprised of many parts like the 3D model, the diffuse textures, normal map, occlusion map, any other materials, rigging, animations, shaders, and so on. The vast majority of assets can’t be dragged and dropped into a new game without some changes made to some of those elements in order to make sure the finished asset looks right within the new game. Epistemologically, it’s a question of how many elements must be the same in order to retain (reasonably) the quality of “sameness” in the player’s mind, and thus retain ownership of (or access to) that asset.

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Regardless of opinions on partial ownership and whatnot, the reality is that players generally want value for their money and dislike it when we offer things they want at a price point they are unwilling to pay. In this situation, some players feel frustrated that their purchases don’t carry forward, so they voice their opinions. Some game devs have listened and tried to address this - Call of Duty, for example, carried purchases from MW2 to MW3 and kept support for those purchased items in the new game. If MW3’s carry-forward is wildly successful, other devs will take notice. If it is not, it is likely the initiative will be retired and developments will move on. Personally, I think it is unreasonable to expect that game developers must continue to spend their development time each game to support legacy player purchases for the rest of time.

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Mar. 14 2024
#carry forward #ownership rights #microtransactions
14 notes

Notes

  1. supercomputer276 reblogged this from askagamedev
  2. mrbity reblogged this from askagamedev
  3. snarwin said: I’d say Pokémon is an example of this being done successfully: since the 3rd generation games, it’s always been possible to transfer your pokémon from one generation to the next. It’s not a huge burden on the developers, because the assets for the pokémon are a core feature that they’d be including in the games either way.
  4. zerragonoss said: I am also guessing that this is likely an even more extreme version of backwards compatibly for consoles. it sounds great and you would be hard pressed to find a player who does not say they want it when asked, than when you actually look at usage data its tiny compared to work load.
  5. theothin reblogged this from askagamedev
  6. askagamedev posted this
    What are your thoughts on reselling assets in games? Criticisms imply that, if you bought the assets in a previous game,...