Comment Re:80 million daily users + 5 billion annually (Score 1) 43
You're making the same mistake the AI bros make, making the entire argument about money.
"If you aren't making the same slop everyone else is making, only on roblox, then you're missing the gravy train." Which is the same idea the AI slop makers are doing to youtube, and to tiktok, and so forth.
Like for every game concept you find on roblox, you can likely find the game it was stolen/inspired from was some popular friendslop game that was released months before it. I'll give you the most obvious example. Do you know how many "Among Us" clones exist? There are literal clones (eg duck duck goose) available on the same platforms Among Us is on, there are clones within Fortnite, there are clones within Roblox, there are clones within VRChat, there are clones anywhere that lets you do UGC within the game engine.
That's just how things work, especially if you misprice the game. You are not going to make a gritty Call of Duty game within a UGC system because those require complicated systems that you're not going to replicate, with or without AI. But you're also not going to recoup your costs if you let an AI generate something that on the surface looks like COD either.
The two ways games get mis-priced are:
- Asking for an entrance fee to play a multiplayer game. If it costs money to buy the game and the core game loop is simple, then it's never going to be popular, people will just rip it off and make it in VRChat, or Roblox, or a Minecraft mod, or whatever. The correct price for a game with multiplayer is 0$, recoup the costs some other way.
- Gating cosmetic gear behind P2W/Gambling mechanics. This is the appeal of VRChat and Roblox, and also Fortnite. You can customize your avatar, often with crap found/won in free activities. Sure Fortnite definitely has a lot of shovelware tier cosmetics. But it has it. VRChat people just steal things from other games, often wholesale (eg pokemon), but I'm also going to point out that a good 90% of VRChat worlds are "coded" as ERP (Erotic Role Play), and how do you know that? If you see a mirror in a "bed" room, it's an ERP world. I don't know if the same is true in Roblox, it's just too damn ugly, and I've seen Roblox since it's initial slow-ass physics-sandbox lego-clone it was originally. There is no working around that.
The "Okay grandma" arguement, okay fine, but my point is not that I think the game is ugly, it's that I know it's the same argument as "mobile games are not real games", which are heavily gacha-oriented or loaded with ads for a "free" experience, and not real games to me. They are portable slots machines. Roblox and Fortnite to me follow the same "the user is a money pinata, see how much you can nickel and dime them before they quit and take their friends."
I personally hate lootbox/gacha mechanics, but I'll also groan and still play such a game while avoiding that mechanic if the stuff is optional, not necessary to play the game, and not attached directly to a hand-in-your-wallet mechanic (Eg if the game requires you to have a credit card on file, just stay the heck away.)