It's interesting to play some Fortnite after playing a bunch of Marvel: Snap all weekend.
It's not like you'll catch me defending Fortnite for it's myriad of issues, but if there's one thing that really does work for the game it's the season pass. It costs $10, runs for about two and a half to three months, comes with a bunch of new cosmetic items, music, loading screens, characters, and emotes to unlock, and its goals are varied and myriad. Among other trials, this season I have: rung doorbells to trick or treat, looked for specific candies during the Halloween event, got bounties from Star Wars Stormtroopers, fought Darth Vader (again), turned myself into an Alex Mack chrome blob and plummeted seven stories without taking fall damage, and had to pick 3 fruits from trees planted by other players in previous matches. It's pretty varied!
Meanwhile, a $10 season pass in Marvel Snap consists of challenges like play fifteen 2 cost cards, win 15 matches, or win a location with 20 or more power 25 times. And your return for this grind is... a Miles Morales card, a variant Miles Morales card with the same abilities, a bunch of variants to Spider-Man themed cards you already have, and a smattering of upgrade/crafting resources. Woo?
Don't get me wrong: Fortnite only can do this because it operates at scale. Hundreds of programmers and artists are working behind the scenes to ensure that every week a new 3D action adventure is happening in the background of Fortnite's battle royale, and it can't operate that way /without/ that exploitation. But at the same time: $10 for a month-long grind for one or two exclusive cards and a bunch of cosmetics that amount to JPEGs of art done by comic artists years ago (who almost certainly see no royalties) that you earn by just grinding numbers down really isn't as appealing.
I guess what I'm saying is that season passes are either sustainable but probably not worth it, or worth it but probably unsustainable. It is not a great set up.
yeah, this is why i'm very wary of shifts in industry thinking towards making "forever games" the norm / the only kind of game that (is perceived as) making any money / the only kind of game that you can get funding for: it's a race to the top that only the most already-well-capitalized will win. and the way these games feed into a possible future "developer payout based on time played" world order is just... existentially horrifying. i want developers to make stuff they know they can do well! not bust their humps trying and failing to hold a candle to the output of a company with 100x more resources than them.
“I’m so pissed monetization impacts the design of card games, and doubly that monetization in digital card games is the fucking worst of all.”
This isn’t likely to going to be in the article because it’s about Marvel Snap, but shout out to Magic Arena for taking a game that was already expensive on its own and managing to raise costs on it by almost an order of magnitude (the average cost to acquire a specific rare single is ~$1-2 for tabletop and ~$7 on Arena).
