I wish there was a monthly pass I could buy that would give me access to a bunch of sites. I’m never going to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal or Boston Globe but sometimes someone here will post a link and I wouldn’t mind reading. Same with various game sites. I maybe read one or two articles on RPS a month. There is no way I’m paying a monthly sub for that site, but if it were included with a bunch of other sites that I could all sub to for $10/mo? Then I might be interested.
Greed has poisoned the well for internet advertising. If a site forces me to turn off an adblocker, I’ll just leave. Not only are ads miserable to deal with but they’re also a security risk. I’m not putting up with the obnoxious ads and making myself vulnerable to read an article. It’s just not worth it, sorry.
from time to time I disable my adblocker, and then I have to enable it again, because the ads are very intrusive. A lot of ads starting to play videos, sometimes not appropriate ads, sometimes the ad is all in bright red color all over the screen. Then I turn it off again. I don’t mind ads, but if they are constantly in your face, why should I bother?
Just recently I tried it with a soon to be closed gaming site. Still the same noisy ads… If websites can’t control the ads, what do they want from me?
I agree with both of you @KevinC and @newbrof. I would absolutely pay a monthly sub that gets me access to a host of interesting news sites, and I totally get that those places need some form of revenue. But browsing the Web without ad blockers is a thoroughly miserable experience, and as such it’s extremely rare that I’ll disable them for anything.
I agree with you both. It’s the insanely intrusive stuff that makes it impossible to tolerate.
Seems like an idea that would have some promise. For one thing, it avoids a practical problem where large numbers of separate automated payments makes it very difficult to opt out down the road. I suppose the downside would be that some of my money would be going to places I really do not want to support.
We made our devil’s bargain, perhaps unwittingly, a long time ago. When the 'Net was young, and we didn’t have HTML or the Web, we paid for BBS access and online communities, often by the hour. Sometimes we paid in kind, like file sharing sites where you uploaded to get credits you could use for downloads. It was all pay as you go. As we got into the HTML era, and “the Internet” proper took off, it was a wild mix of monetization strategies, from ads to hourly fees to monthly subscriptions. Out side of the odd online game, there wasn’t that much that was compelling, so it was easy to pick and choose.
The clear arc though was away from paying for stuff directly. This became especially true as more and more content ended up on the Web, content that often built on user contributions and the illusion of a broad community. So much stuff that FOMO was a big deal, and everyone wanted everything. No one, though, was going to (or would be able to) pay for all the stuff that was increasingly flooding into the stream. If you visit one news site and play one game, a fee is ok. If you browse and play dozens, not so much. But nothing is free, so something had to give.
The answer was data. Ads continued to be a part of the mix, as did subs and fees, but the vast majority of stuff became ostensibly free–but we were paying in data. Our data. In retrospect, it was probably the only way things could have shaken out. Short of the Internet being a state-run utility sort of thing (and who the hell wants that?), people producing content and more significantly hosting it and building the infrastructure for access were going to get paid, one way or another. The fact that the Internet provided a never before available level of highly granular consumer data in mass quantities sealed the deal. As long as the data harvesting was beneath the surface, and stuff was free, it seemed to work.
Today I still can’t really think of any other models that would actually pay for what we get without opening our wallets directly.
There are very few games recently published by Paradox that I played and enjoyed. Age of Wonders: Planetfall is definitely one of them (and Triumph does care about game design). CK3 is generally good but I’m not as drawn to it as I thought I’d be. Imperator: Rome I barely played because of all the changes I knew would come; now that it’s “on ice” (and most likely abandoned for good) I might actually get to play it. ;)
But that’s it, I think? After Stellaris (which was a disappointment - not a huge one because in a way I already expected to be disappointed, but still) there are very few things coming from Paradox that manage to get any reaction from me.
Ups forgot HOi 4, my favorite game of all time and in my eyes a fricking masterpiece too. :)
I’m personally very excited for Eu 5 and possibly anything else they might be doing. Their games aren’t for everyone, its complicated stuff compared to say…anything …really anything, maybe Shadow Empires…
Exactly. Just to be clear, my comment was about Paradox. As @rhamorim said, Triumph cares about game design. So do Haemimont and Introversion. But as a company, Paradox has been more concerned with business models than game design for quite some time now, and it shows in the games they publish, whether they’re developed internally or not. For what it’s worth, the latest and not-so-greatest DLC for Surviving Mars was farmed out to someone other than Haemimont, and it shows.
It’s also worth noting that they only care about critical reception if it helps their bottom line. Johan told me as much when he and their PR folks were instructed not to work with me anymore because I gave Crusader Kings a three-star review. Even then, Wester felt the need to chase me down on Twitter year later to call me out for hating their games (never mind the many positive reviews I’d written). If that’s how the CEO of their company behaves with press, how do you think he treats his employees and the studios they work with? How do you think he approaches creative decisions? How do you think that affects the kind of work his company publishes?
Sure that is petty. But is Paradox the only company that’s basically blacklisted your because reviews don’t use the 7-9 scale? This is real question not rhetorical.
I’m a fan for Paradox because they pretty consistently make games I really like. Also more than most companies I really like their after sale supports. They certainly refine their game for couple of years after they release it and I for one really appreciated.
For strategy games, I think they are most consistent publisher of high quality strategy games. In an ideal world, there’d be a dozen Mohawk games but that’s not the world we live in.
Thankfully I still enjoy Paradox games for the most part but they do seem to be making efforts to change that. :) I’ll have to see how Victoria 3 launches, I’m really looking forward to that one. If they screw that up… shakes fist.
Apple News is a bit like that, although several companies decided not to participate for a variety of reasons, from Apple being too controlling to losing the direct connection with their audience and as such the ability to upsell. The big names can likely make more money on their own than through Apple News.
It does have ads and some level of tracking by Apple, but they limit which ad networks can run and proxy the traffic through their servers so the tracking is limited to what Apple allows. They also tend to have higher standards than other networks and will refuse to run anything that looks like the user is being targeted by age or gender (even if behind the scenes, they do…).
In the end, Apple does not need or want to serve tons of abusive ads and is big enough to strong-arm newspapers which is good for users, even if it ends up being self-serving for Apple.
Oh, almost certainly not. But Paradox is the only company to tell me to my face they’re doing it. Which is pretty dumb for a couple of reasons. Not the least of which is releasing this statement shortly thereafter:
That’s the sort of thing that you see in a company that’s focused on business models instead of game designs. The actual words Johan said to me were “why would we give you review copies when you’re just going to hurt our Metacritic score?” Because there’s an answer to that question, but you’re never going to hear it from a game company that only cares about critical reception when it helps their bottom line.
And for the record, I’m a huge fan of most of Paradox’s games. I am their target audience.
Haven’t blockers been around for years on iOS? I use 1Blocker on my iPad and I can view RPS fine. I whitelist sites I really like, but RPS is not one of them.
