Dupont would be proud.
Mike Ybarra is a bit of a scapegoat. He was dragged into his role as leader of Blizzard following a sexual abuse scandal that left the position as toxic, and then he was thrown out of the role when Microsoft took over as an example of the change that would be coming to the brand. Now that would be a pretty significant position to hold, a shining example to stick in one's CV, had it not followed that whole 'sexual abuse scandal' that I just mentioned. (Bit of a red flag, that.) As it happens the man was a stop gap between the Blizzard that had to be doused for it's PR and the Blizzard that was incoming because the Blizzard deal was being cooked up for an age and a half before he even swore the oath. (They have an oath of office at Blizzard, right?) But do not get me wrong, despite his relatively brief tenure, my man has quite a few achievements under his belt!
Why, he marched into the office and demanded he needed to see everyone's pearly teeth in person else he just couldn't quite get in the 'working mood'- or at least that's what I can assume would be the logic behind a 'return to office' order... for a technology company. (It just isn't the same unless you're typing on our keyboards!) He scrapped the annual profit-sharing bonuses that the company had run on for years, essentially meaning that when the company had achieved well because one department excelled, everyone would benefit- and he did a bunch of other little stuff like downplaying the importance of QA teams and other stuff that actual developers who make the products consider antithetical to a healthy environment. The dude was a Looney Tunes character brought into a role that had an expiration date upon signing, scrambling to try and make enough changes to stick on his over-inflated CV so he brag about all the nonsensical changes he made and how much of a 'trend setter' he was!
Mike's a moron, basically. Which is why it should come as no surprise to anyone that the man, enjoying his time out of the big seat for now, spouted cringe on main when it came to single player games. Yeah, that thing which Blizzard doesn't do anymore because they can't figure out how to squeeze it for every cent it's worth, single player games? Mike is playing them now. (To be fair, Blizzard never really made any Single Player games, it's just that the reason behind that these days is a bit different to how it used to be.) And Mike is using the internet's dirty dumping ground, known as Twitter, (or some other name I can't remember) to tell us all about his further revolutionary ideas which, much like the actual policies he affected as a CEO, clearly did not churn around his little walnut of a brain for longer than it took him to evacuate his bowels that morning.
"I thought about this idea for a while..." he claimed, likely referring to the particularly stubborn 'log' he struggled to shake off just an hour previously. "When I beat a game, there are some that just leave me in awe of how amazing the experience was. At the end of the game, (Unnecessary comma alert) I've often thought "I wish I could give these folks another $10 or $20 because it was worth more than my initial $70 and they didn't try to nickel and dime me every second." Now barring the severe irony of the man talking about being 'Nickel and Dimed' when he was CEO for the release of bloody Diablo 4- is my man seriously advocating for tipping game developers? Because that is either an insanely naïve idea formed by a severely delusional idealist or... no, actually I won't give the benefit of the doubt- that's all it is. Naïve.
Now to be clear, this man is not talking about indie games on Itch.io- (as you can likely deduce from the $70 comment) because obviously those games already have a tipping feature, built into the service. He's talking your mega games, your Red Dead Redemption 2, your Baldur's Gate 3, your Horizon Zero Dawns. He thinks these are the kinds of games that simply demand much more than that painful '$70' price tag, which is already raising a debate on 'value proposition' lately- why? Because he wants to pay more, damn it! And the developers deserve a bit more of a kick-back! You mean... that they deserve... Bonuses? You think people should be rewarded for success with bonuses, Mike Ybarra- famous scrapper of bonuses? I wonder why he didn't use the common term 'bonus' and instead conjured up some bizarre 'tipping' concept. I wonder...
But lets' throw our heads into 'La La' land for a second, ignore the waltzing Ryan Gosling and pretend this was a real thing people could do. Why in the hell would you ever think that extra money would see developers? What has happened since games shot up to $70? Where has that extra $10 gone? To the sacking of half the AAA industry, whilst profits shoot up for the suits! So where do you think your tip money would go? Right into those same pockets. See- that's why this whole 'please give us more RRP for our poor hungry developers' is a bunch of absolute barnacle paste! When you're talking about multi-million dollar studios who are balancing whole empires in their balance sheets- you have to realise that the only barrier to developers being paid solid wages, are the companies themselves. There's no lack of money flying around the industry, there's a lack of standards on whom gets paid what. Unless we're talking about implementing some sort of 'royalties' system but- let's be honest, Mike didn't think this through- of course he never considered 'royalties'.
All this is without taking into account that Mike Ybarra is actually talking about reward games with more than the above full-price standard for the sheer magnanimity of not 'Nickle and Diming' us. My man has such low esteem for the consumer caste that he thinks we should wheel out the parades and circuses every time developers doesn't go to the nth degree to clog up their games with endless Microtransactions, bloat out progression to encourage time skipper packs, lock day-one content behind ludicrously over priced special editions and... well, do everything that Ubisoft does. He basically wants to Pavlov the game's industry for not becoming more like Ubisoft. That's kind of like the bare minimum, Mike. I thought your generation was supposed to be so far removed from the 'participation trophy' mentality! Turns out that's because your more into the 'You've made it out of bed, here's my credit card details' meta!
Tipping comes with a strange change of the dynamic between consumer and product, and just like every single 'revision' to that relationship I've ever read over the course of the past year- no one really thinks past the basic implementation of their insanely short sighted idea. I read one Metro contributor propose every game being free-to-play for the first few hours with people paying access to the content they want to play, thus circumventing the exorbitant buy in prices. Totally ignoring how that would influence all game design to front end the most explosive content to try and trick people into investing for the back half of lazier stuff. (Which is already a quiet meta worming it's way through design.) Or the whole 'pay per hour you play' model I heard brought up, which would totally assassinate all slower paced games which encourage you to enjoy the journey and see the sights such as Red Dead Redemption 2. Mike Ybarra kind of slides neatly into that cadre of clueless 'ideas guy' people who throw around half-baked shoot-for-the-fences concepts without putting any of the gears upstairs to work trying to think their ideas through. Thank god he's no longer a CEO and those ideas no longer have a human cost!
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