Arstechnica: The practice of incorporating micro transactions and loot boxes into video games has grown from sporadic to omnipresent in recent years. 2017 saw the loot box trend explode and even bleed over from a "cosmetic" model to one that affects gameplay. But in-game items like loot boxes—which commonly appear in multiplayer games—are worthless to publishers if players don't engage with them.
Game publisher Activision has already patented a way to drive in-game purchases by manipulating "matchmaking," or how players are paired up with strangers in online multiplayer games. This week, eagle-eyed YouTuber YongYea deserves credit for discovering a similar, though not identical, matchmaking-manipulation scheme being researched and promoted by researchers at game publisher EA.
Rockstar has launched an official marketplace for "every server and every player" to buy mods: Cfx Marketplace.
I wonder how much of this isn't just taken work of others who have modded for free.
Edit: Also, great way for R* to take popular ideas and build them into GTAVI based on demand.
What I see happening here is, R* is going to ban mods in GTA6 UNLESS you buy them from the marketplace and R* then gets a cut of that sale.
Ah, perfect timing with them taking down the Bully online fan mod. Greedy a$$ company.
Yep, right there with you. I'll happily donate to a mod creator if it looks really cool, or if I enjoy it. But expecting payment up front? Nope, not touching it.
I'm not entirely sure how to read this, as it doesn't seem exactly like an exact parallel to Bethesda's paid mods shenanigans.
Rather than single player stuff, this appears to be aimed solely on Cfx Servers. From what I've gleaned, apparently Rockstar bought the Cfx mod team several years ago, coming a few years after weird contentions led them to ban a few of their members. Ultimately, the question is if they plan to keep this contained to only online/servers.
I have to guess to a degree yes. It'd be pretty hard to "force" paid mods for single player when modding files locally on your own machine, but much easier for servers they'll control. So perhaps this is their soft launch ahead of GTA6 online and they'll clamp down more tightly on non-official servers going forward? Ever since they've become a 1 or 2 property studio, I haven't really cared much for Rockstar stuff, so I'm not entirely up on everything surrounding this. Sounds like it has the potential to be problematic further down the line, but right now fairly easy to ignore...I think lol.
Former CEO describes lawsuit filed by Swedish pension fund as a "collateral attack" on Activision Blizzard.
Kotick Made $155 million from MS in the buyout, the little b*tch needs to stop whining. Thanks to this Microslop deal and massive industry consolidation thousands upon thousands of devs and other workers lost their livelihoods. This greedy piggie pervert needs shut up and f-off.
Discover how Sony Interactive Entertainment, Nintendo, and Microsoft continue to collaborate to improve player safety across our platforms.
Soon they will create AI interfaces to control all our moves with the ultimate purpose to make us keep spending money non stop.
I cant recognise the game industry anymore, how did it got so deformed and twisted compared to just 10 years ago?
"Sporadic to omnipresent"... seriously...
Nope this genre is dying
EA's E3 Panel this year should be empty & anyone that does stupidly show up do loud boos