Imagine still buying and playing Cod games in 2024

Imagine paying for the privilege of hearing unemployed dudes and 12 year olds call you racial slurs in higher quality.

Greed. That reason is greed.

Steam needs an anti-wishlist so I remember not to buy it when it’s on sale for $1 ten years from now 😅

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”

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!”

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

Balatro is like, $10 and available on my phone tho-…

This isn’t even the first game to do it, and you can get most of the way there with EQ.

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“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

“For some reason”? Greed. That is the exact reason.

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.