Former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra thinks big budget games should offer players the ability to add a tip on top of already spending $70. For a number of reasons it’s dumb to add tipping to big corporate games, but when it’s been suggested by a literal corporate leader, the whole proposal seems more sinister than stupid.
Why Proposing Tip Jars For Mainstream Videogames Is Either Stupid Or Malicious (The Jimquisition)
Former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra thinks big budget games should offer players the ability to add a tip on top of already spending $70. For a number of reasons it’s dumb to add tipping to big corporate games, but when it’s been suggested by a literal corporate leader, the whole proposal seems more sinister than stupid.
Just the tip… 😉
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Is this some sort of twisted joke?
btw the potato chip joke at the start caught me so off guard holy shit
Also the sthealthiest skeleton warriors gag ever 11:42
Sure, you’ll be tipped as well as you give service… PREPARE TO START DIETING!
“Mike Ybarra, who pays for Twitter, …” OMG – what a burn, and so casually, deliciously delivered. I woke up my cat laughing at that one.
Usually indie game devs with a tip jar give the game away for free or “pay what you want”
What’s also crap is the US-centric attitude being displayed, because as a Brit 1. I don’t tip at the % expected by Americans and 2. I don’t want US tipping culture imported here – I want fair wages.
Lets face it. Tiping Indie devs is dubious due it normalizing idea that artist and musicians suffer from – where you do it for the love and not the money, so you should do your shit for free. Tiping, even directly to big Studio devs is a horrible idea, as it would normalize same thing what happened to Waiter and some other service industries in US – you pay them (in many cases below) minimum wage with justification that tipping makes up the rest. I can instantly see where any big publisher that implements this “tip jar” into their AAA games, 3 years later, cuts every ones salary in half (except execs) and announces that “tipping” should make up the rest and they should make better games if they want to eat (not those exact words, but just ask chat GPT to white you Yellow text on black background message)
I wanted to be a game developer. Still do, whenever I muse. But with the industry as it is, and everyone and everything about to get scruwed by politicians and the oligarchy, I’m glad I won’t be doing anything for this world. I’d rather never have been born than work for this bs planets “wages”. Eat me earth.
This is ridiculous coming from a corporate hack, but what else do we expect? Tipping culture has become way out of hand, especially in the United States. Any tips given to a big corporation will go into the pockets of the executives, with at most a few tiny crumbs going to the regular employees. An in-game tip jar would be especially tacky. If this ever happens in any game, I will quite happily laugh at it and not buy the game.
It could be argued that small cosmetic DLCs and packs of goodies (i.e. art books and soundtracks) are similar. Paying a little extra for such things is essentially a tip, but at least you get some sort of small item in return. Big corporations abuse this, of course, by spamming games with loads of this stuff. I only find this practice acceptable when it is done by very small indie developers and it is limited to a small number of items and doesn’t start to look like Paradox-style DLC spam. If I appreciate what a small developer has accomplished, and I feel like I want to give them a little more money in the hope that it helps with their next effort, then I don’t mind paying a few extra dollars for some non-essential digital stuff. Interestingly, some developers don’t do this even when they could easily get away with selling a couple small DLCs or goodie packs. Concerned Ape (Stardew Valley) and Hello Games (No Man’s Sky) are notable examples. I feel like these games are bargains for the amount of enjoyment I have received from them, and they have never asked for anything more than the initial purchase price.
10:10 LOL at everything going on in that stock clip
for little more context on why tipping got the way it was in america, before the great depression tipping was seen in many areas of the US restaurant industry as a form of bribery (stemming from our “work hard for the sake of working hard so that you can be rewarded with more work to work hard at” puritanical mindset that seeped into our culture from the early days of our country) but when the great depression got started, tipping was the only way most people got payed for working those jobs and when the great depression ended the industry never went back (because see previous statement about puritanical mindset).
4:57 Someone should explain this to Crunchyroll whenever they claim to support the _notoriously abusive_ anime industry. I don’t want to support the anime industry, I want to support the individual animators who are oft underpaid and overworked.
I hate tipping culture so much. I might just stop doing it all together because I keep seeing it pop up in more places.
landlord dude had a point
When I bought Killing Floor 1 over a decade ago for less than 5USD, a game I got hundreds of hours of play out of, I was very cool with buying the Dosh dlc as a way to “reward” them for a game I enjoyed a bunch. KF2’s release as a 60USD game *WITH* lootboxes (styled like Team Fortress 2’s lootboxes (also a paid game, though made free later)), I was very disheartened (to put it mildly). (KF2 hasn’t even had the good taste to go free to play, they just reduced the selling price.) I’m not saying I want their programmers to be unemployed, but I do wish failure and bankruptcy on everything Tripwire’s management ever touches.
Thank god Total Biscuit didn’t have to see this.
Tip jars are better than what they have been doing.
Tipping is, as you say perverted to the point where it makes no sense. If a server gives great service and you tip them it’s no longer a show of gratitude for going above and beyond but an expected charge which gives the server absolutely no motivation to do a good job….It’s stupid
Let’s get to games actually being worth 70 dollars first