Bungie Job openings (Off-Topic)

by Durandal, Thursday, December 07, 2017, 10:29 (2486 days ago) @ Kahzgul

It's pretty gross. Blatant, codified manipulation of game structures to squeeze extra money out of consumers who already paid full price for a product, using a system that has proven, time and again, to be tantamount to gambling and which preys on the same addictions.

We need legislation. The video game industry has proven it is incapable of stopping this poor behavior on its own.

I hate to break it to you, but this is pretty par for the course across all industries.

"How do we make money" and "Can we make more money" are pretty basic and constant questions.

I work in the auto industry. I will tell you that we have lots of automotive complexity precisely because someone figured out that people will pay extra for some feature, but not all. So we have these base level packages with the bare bones, then we have all these comfort features that are bundled together precisely because we know people will pay extra because they want 2-3 things out of the 5-6 feature bundle.

I will note that the job also as maximizing customer satisfaction is part of the goal. I have this metric as well. It's hard to understand what customers want, compared to cold hard cash equations, but there is an honest effort for the most part to make customers happy.

Microtransactions are the current paradigm for squeezing more money out of a game, especially when the price point cannot be changed from the base 40/50/60$ bracket. Psychologically, no game developer could routinely get away with upping the price point for the initial software buy, so the added costs have to be taken out of DLC and microtransactions.

This job posting isn't anything unexpected or out of the ordinary.