Video game Development Ethics Dylan Olson
Topics Games as a Service ● Asset Reuse ● Overmonitization ● Lying to the Customer ● Microtransactions ●
Games as a Service Minimum Viable Product (M.V.P.) is the least amount of a product that can be sold for a ● price Closer - Enters close to release to cut the product down to a MVP ● Games as a service - Selling an M.V.P. and building upon it later on ● Some examples include Anthem, Fallout 76, Destiny 1 and 2 ●
Games as a Service - Good Examples Warframe ● CS:GO ● DOTA 2 ● Path of Exile ● Great examples of games with a balance of free and paid experiences
Games as a service - Good examples An expensive skin won’t make you git gud ●
Games as a Service - Destiny Started out with little to do ● Considered a good game only after first expansion ● Destiny 2 launched in a worse state than Destiny 1 ● Destiny 2 considered good only after first expansion ● Links between cut content of Destiny 1 and Destiny 2 DLC ● Destiny 1 DLC content areas discovered in Vanilla ● Cut content would cost additional $120 ●
Games as a Service - Fallout 76 Full of bugs at launch, but still sold for $60 ● Players had to wait while new content added ● Beta deleting itself (45 GB) ●
Asset Reuse - Fallout 76 Free cosmetics from Fallout 4 sold for real money ● A lot of assets reused from Fallout 4 ● Code has many references to Fallout 4 and Skyrim ●
Asset Reuse - Destiny 34% of Destiny 2 Exotic Weapons reused from Destiny 1 ● Suros Regime Zhalo Supercell/Riskrunner Thorn
Overmonitization - Black ops 4 $60 base game ● $50 season pass ● Battle Pass ● 50 day season, 200 tiers ○ Some exclusive content for the season ○ 333 hours and 20 minutes(13.89 days) to complete ○ $1 to buy next tier ○ Loot boxes ● Shop Rotations ● Previously free reticles now cost money ●
Lying to the Customer - Fallout 76 Customers ask if MTX will be game impacting ● Customers told only cosmetic MTX ● Recent update adds Repair kits ● Repair kits seen as Pay to Win ●
Lying to the Customer - No Man’s Sky Many things missing from the base game that were supposed to be ● Almost 3 year later, still some of the content doesn't exist ● Reddit post ●
Lying to the Customer - Anthem Soderlund stunned by demo in Spring 2017 ● Demo was foundation of E3 2017 trailer ● Trailer was completely faked ● Bioware staff didn't know what the game was supposed to be until the trailer ●
Anthem Continued Loot scaling math lie ● Empty gear slots improved dps ● Luck does nothing ● Updates meant to fix, break thing ● Update makes accidental change that helps the game, and gets reverted ● No real testing ● Lots of emotes, fabrics, metals, and armor pieces cut for G.A.A.S. ●
Lying to the Customer - The Division Graphical downgrade from reveal trailer ● Core mechanics gone ● Game world drastically downgraded ● Lied to players ●
Lying to the Customer - The Division 2 Little downgrading compared to the reveal trailer ● Learned to not lie to customer ● Received great reviews because of this ●
The Division 2 vs Anthem (4/29/2019)
Microtransactions For Honor – Feb 14th 2017 - $700 ● Battlefront 2 – Nov 17th 2017 - $2100 ● Mortal Kombat 11 – April 23rd 2019- $6500 ●
Case Study Studio B wants to make a video game ● They want to make a lot of money from the game ● Studio B makes a fake demo, and the publisher loves it ● The demo is used to make a reveal trailer, saying the trailer was real time footage in game ● The game eventually releases, and many fans are upset that the game is different than ● what was advertised Did Studio B do anything unethical? ●
Case Study 1st formulation of Kant ● Studio B lied to consumers ○ Studio B wants others to tell them the truth ○ Studio B is acting Unethically ○ 2nd formulation of Kant ● Studio B knew the trailer was fake ○ Because of the trailer, many people pre-ordered the game ○ Studio B lied to the consumer to make money ○ Studio B is acting Unethically ○
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