There is a lot to complain about, but placeholder voice acting is not one of them.
Of course not. Being able to pump out mediocre games as fast and as cheaply as possible is the end goal.
The fact that this will end up resulting in making games without actors is simply a side-effect.
Yeah it is. Even if it’s not theirs.
Having to hire a real human being to represent a made-up character is an obstacle. “Games without actors” are how game development worked for decades. Even long after voice acting was technically possible, a lot of games did not have any, as a design decision. PS1 Final Fantasy games have oodles of full-motion video - but the characters speak exclusively in text.
The expectation of voiced characters adds immense cost, time, and restraint on any game. That is going to change. There is nothing anyone can do to stop it, and any backlash will be short-lived. This fight is already over.
And for anyone worried about the art of acting - look into “style transfer.” The shape of a voice actor’s throat can become as irrelevant as the shape of a voice actor’s face. When any person can sound like any character, all that matters is the performance.
If they didn’t use voice actors then the game should cost less right?
i feel like Free To Play is the cheapest you can get…
Unfortunately, no. The name is a lie. All those games are abusive wallet-siphons, and the whole business model should be banned.
ok… if a game is free to play, the game itself is free. the name isnt a lie.
what do we call a product that is 70 dollars and still has microtransactions? i call that wallet-siphon Diablo IV.
what about a product that is 25 dollars and still has microtransactions? i call that game Deep Rock Galactic.
do i have to purchase skins to play a free to play game? no, i dont. i simply have to install it…
why would i buy a skin for D4? i wouldnt. i already had to pay 70.
why would i buy a skin for DRG? to support the developers. even though i paid 25.
why would i buy a skin for a F2P game? to support the developers. because it cost nothing except bandwidth and storage space.
Fortnite makes four billion dollars a year. That’s not “free.” That’s a wallet siphon. A casino with no cover charge is still a casino. It only exists to take unlimited quantities of your actual money.
All games manipulate you into valuing arbitrary nonsense. That is what makes them games. Directly monetizing that is an abuse of how your brain works. It’s a deliberate confusion of make-believe value and real-world value. And it’s so effective, these companies don’t even need to sell the game to make billions of dollars… but they can also charge seventy goddamn dollars up-front and gouge you in-game. And people still fucking buy it. Perfectly normal adults will drop a thousand dollars on one game in one month and insist they weren’t scammed. As if the funny hats they got were worth twenty times the entire rest of the game.
Any form of charging real-world money inside a video game is just lootboxes with more steps. It’s all the same shit and it all needs to go. It’s in every genre, on every platform, at every price point. Boycotts don’t work, it’s so profitable. We will never shop our way out of it. It is the dominant strategy.
If we allow this continue there will be nothing else.
Why.
It makes sense, you don’t want to pay for voice actors then I don’t want to pay for the game. How hard is that to understand?
