Black Ops 6 hides better audio behind an additional purchase for some reason
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is charging players for better audio on Xbox, PlayStation and PC, annoying many fans.
"For some reason." Money. The reason is money.
“A Personalized Profile analyzes your unique head and ear shape for precision sound,” reads the option on the Call of Duty store.
Sounds customized for your specific ear shape??? I've never been less willing to believe something in my life
Sony did this with the ps5, you had to send Mark Cerny ear pics...
It is a real thing. Very few people have identical ears on both sides of their head, and almost no one shares the same shape with another person. There's a few active implementations of this on truly wireless earbuds, but the latency makes it irrelevant for most things except music. Depending on just how unique the ear shape is, it can drastically change how things sound.
In no capacity should it be a paid feature in a game, though. In a more competitive game with a lot of value placed on audio like Escape From Tarkov, this would completely change the game and how it is played.
TLDR: Your ears are unique, and your brain spends your entire life from the moment your ears are hearing things, tuning to them.
"For some reason"? Greed. That is the exact reason.
"Because fuck you, give me money" - AJ
for some reason
It's called price discrimination.
If there are multiple groups of potential purchasers who have different levels of willingness to pay, if you can identify some characteristic of people willing to pay more, then you can create a version of the product that targets that characteristic and thus the group.
Price discrimination ("differential pricing",[1][2] "equity pricing", "preferential pricing",[3] "dual pricing",[4] "tiered pricing",[5] and "surveillance pricing"[6]) is a microeconomic pricing strategy where identical or largely similar goods or services are sold at different prices by the same provider to different buyers based on which market segment they are perceived to be part of.[7][8][2] Price discrimination is distinguished from product differentiation by the difference in production cost for the differently priced products involved in the latter strategy.[2] Price discrimination essentially relies on the variation in customers' willingness to pay[8][2][4] and in the elasticity of their demand. For price discrimination to succeed, a seller must have market power, such as a dominant market share, product uniqueness, sole pricing power, etc.[9]
- "Product versioning"[8][16] or simply "versioning" (or "second-degree" price differentiation) — offering a product line[13] by creating slightly differentiated products for the purpose of price differentiation,[8][16] i.e. a vertical product line.[17] Another name given to versioning is "menu pricing".[14][18]
In this case, you're going to have something like a group of "value customers" who care a lot about how much they need to spend on the game. And then you're going to have "premium customers" who aren't too fussed about what they pay, but want the very fanciest experience.
If you had just one version, sold the game at the "value customer" price, then you'd lose out on what the "premium customer" would pay. If you sold it at the "premium customer" price, then you'd have a bunch of "value customers" for whom the game would no longer be a worthwhile purchase, who wouldn't buy the game, and you'd lose the sales to them. But by selling it at multiple prices, you can optimize for both groups.
EDIT: l'd also add, on the technical rather than economic side, that I've messed around with having a custom HRTF model myself, as Linux (and maybe elsewhere, dunno) games that use OpenAL let you specify a custom HRTF model in the config file. My own impression was that any impact on audio experience was pretty minimal. Might be different if someone had really weirdly-shaped ears or something, dunno.
It starts with increasing price for specific customer > next decrease the normal features for regular customer > add the same feature for extra paying customers > brain wash people into believing its normal and who are protesting against it are cheap > rinse and repeat
In before: "Dude, you don't need high res textures or better audio. I play on lowest setting anyways."
I think most people playing video games are familiar with the phenomenon.
As a recent example Dragon Ball Sparking Zero has versions for: au$115, au$160, au$180, or au$390.
Au $115 is around $76 usd
FYI
It pleases me when I use a service at a low price tier with the knowledge my usage is being subsidized by those willing to pay more for features I deem unnecessary.
It stinks when the basic tier just doesn’t cut it. But overall I’d probably rather have power users subsidize things.
Imagine still buying and playing Cod games in 2024
Black Ops 3 on steam has enough workshop content to last well past this flash in the pan. I'll stay with that.
Before I read the article I just assumed that the developers put uncompressed audio files into a DLC, in order to both reduce filesize of the game and provide people that car about audio a better experience.
But actually its just an extra charge for spatial audio for some reason. Who will even actually buy this? I wonder if this is a test to see if it is financially valuable to keep in the game engine (spoiler alert, most people do not care about this and wont pay extra for it).
I care a lot about audio and that’s why I don't use spatial. Stereo all the way with a good pair of headphones, or better yet, a really nice stereo monitor setup.
Then again, audio is also a drop in the bucket of why I don’t care for COD games lately. The sound is often weird, and the hit marker sounds too much like a cash register, which reminds me what COD games are really about - in case I forgot about the clowns and gorillas running around for a moment.
Proper spatial audio, ie not the DSP effect that upconverts stereo, but something like Atmos or DTS:X that’s sending object based audio to an arbitrary number of speakers, does sound better to me on headphones in the few games that support it. The only game where use it regularly that I can think of is MSFS, but it does sound better than headphone stereo. You do have to pay Dolby to use it, or buy headphones that come with it, however. Sounds best on my 5.1 home theater, but also does a good job with binaural headphone output.
Steam needs an anti-wishlist so I remember not to buy it when it's on sale for $1 ten years from now 😅
That's what the ignore option is for. I just wish I could do it for entire companies.
You can.
Imagine paying for the privilege of hearing unemployed dudes and 12 year olds call you racial slurs in higher quality.
Can I get higher quality slurs? I want my racism to be more sophisticated than the common man; like Measurehead in Disco Elysium.
Granted, the slurs are now far more hurtful to you when you hear them due to their high quality.
Some reason... I think its money.
One might think that paying extra would simply cover the extra costs of a specific audio license. I'm not claiming anything regarding this, as I don't know, but I do would say that CoD games had spatial audio for many many years already.
Anyways, next up: "thanks for purchasing our game, are you interested in purchasing access to the 3D renderer or the input handler? both are billed separately for your convenience"
Greedy corpos aside, going back to BO1 the audio design was fantastic; everything from the subtle crunch of a boot on gravel to the clack of reloading a gun. Pure ear candy (except for maybe the crazy over-dramatic melee sound). BO 2-5 were good too in terms of sfx but nowhere near 1. I feel like that era had a special attention to detail to audio that modern games don't care to emulate. Maybe they will with 6; either way microtransactions suck and I'll stick to playing the older COD games for this very reason
I think the audio detail was so high because it helped to sell the realism of the game. Go back and play those early games and they don’t look nearly as good as my brain remembers, but the audio helped to fill in the lack of gravel looking texture and leaves tussling sounds in bushes that had two twigs on them.
I played BO Cold War a few years ago, and was very disappointed in both sounds and visuals. It just wasn’t a well-made game on the technical level. The fire in a Vietnam flashback location looked like something from the 90s, a 2D model that was rotating to where I was watching it from. A rip-off for a full priced AAA game.
This was the last COD game I tried, I don’t bother anymore with the franchise.
Balatro is like, $10 and available on my phone tho-…
So sound whoring is a pay to use privilege now?
Oh shit this is hat immersive game pack shit?
Yeah, it's garbage, don't fucking use it. FFXIV did a whole thing back in end Walker and it just ruins audio
Meanwhile my 5.1 setup works with most games out of the box, and universal HRTF works better than IG on the 6 pairs of phones I've tested it on on 2 different fucking Games
Scam software
Greed. That reason is greed.
Fun (probably) fact. Warzone players complained almost constantly about the lack of audio quality. It was an issue that only got worse with each "season". So now that this happens, I can see why.
"Hey players, you complained and we listened! Now pay the fuck up!"
This isn't even the first game to do it, and you can get most of the way there with EQ.
Shocking. A company mistreats the people purchasing their game like crap with a micro transaction for “better audio quality”. I really hope this bites them in the ass.
a general setting thats available to everyone, and a paid version of that same setting but customized to your individual ears seems pretty reasonable to me actually
No. The game is paid. It should come with all available settings. This is just one step away from studios hiding HD textures behind paywalls.
And this line of thinking is what let's them get away with it.
This game costs 80€. No other game in the market costs as high as that for a base edition. You're claiming that a 80€ game offering a 20€ subscription to a feature every other game that offers it has it for free, is a reasonable thing.
Some people are really delirious...
Tbh I don't know any other game that allows personal HRTF customization other than the PS5 presets