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The whales will buy it and satisfy the management who approved this piece of shit price
Oblivion’s Horse Armor dlc has more worth than this
Oblivion’s Horse Armor DLC also didn’t cost more than Oblivion either.
Only legislation will fix this.
If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.
Only legislation will fix this.
Legislation can’t fix stupid. We have to let people be able to hurt themselves or we are no better than slaves. Because at that point gov is dictating every aspect of our lives. Freedom isn’t free from consequences, but it’s worth it.
Victim-blaming, dehumanization, and libertarian twaddle, all in one comment. Aren’t you a winner. Shoo.
Victim blaming? You consider people who willingly pay for game cosmetics victims? You have a pretty low bar, huh?
Avoids commenting on the actual issue and resorts to name-calling. You’ve convinced me!
Two of those are reasons, troll.
What kind of legislation, though? Loot boxes seem like an easy one to write: gambling is illegal already in a lot of places. When it’s just exploitative greed, I’m not sure how it’s technically so different from charging exorbitant rates for swag at a baseball game or something. Or charging a few thousand bucks for a purse at some high-end fashion retailer.
To be clear: I loathe the FOMO trends in game development, overpriced skins, micro/macro-transactions, and all the “credit/XP boosters” type bullshit. Turning money into ingame currencies to obfuscate actual prices, the general design of games frontloading fun and then squeezing dollars out of you to feel that same high again…I’m just skeptical that there’s anything to do about it from a legal perspective that doesn’t apply to most of the rest of the capitalist enterprises out there. Please though, I want to be wrong about this, so any examples of how to curb some of these excesses would be great.
Stop letting games take real money.
(Not: stop charging money for games. Not: end subscriptions. Not: make games free. I will not be tolerating any bullshit today from people who refuse to acknowledge how “microtransactions” are the topic and the problem.)
All forms of this are just lootboxes with more steps. We all finally admit lootboxes are bullshit, right? Even the most diehard kneejerk ‘but it’s cosmetic!’ yeahbutts are quick to say some it’s not awful, like lootboxes. But they’re all just gentler ways of taking unlimited quantities of your actual money.
Nothing inside a video game should cost money.
It’s a fucking game. It’s not real.
The game itself can and should cost money - the rise of allegedly-free wallet siphons proves how lucrative that bullshit is. They don’t need your money up-front; they’ll get more from wearing you down. But the fact the same bullshit is in flagship AAA games, including some which want to charge ninety goddamn dollars up-front, and have a subscription, proves they can take you both ways, because you don’t really have a choice. This shit is in everything. It is infecting the entire medium, and making the path to maximum revenue a matter of addiction and frustration. We were never going to shop our way out of it. We have to tell the whole industry it’s simply not allowed.
You can get the whole MCC on sale for less…
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Your non-participation counts for nothing, versus the minority of people suckered into throwing in arbitrary quantities of money for fuck-all.
Only legislation can fix this. This business model is a scam. Maximum revenue comes from addiction and frustration. If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.
Bro it’s cosmetic who gives a fuck. Just play the game and buy the reasonably priced skins. Better yet, just don’t buy the skins at all. People are so fucking entitled holy shit.
People are tired of being subjected to psychological manipulation to throw endless quantities of money at the products they already fucking bought, just so they can look slightly different. A feature that used to be taken for granted, and is the bare fucking minimum of developer effort.
How you look in a video game should not cost real money.
Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
Psychological manipulation because my guy can only be bright green not dark green.
These are just different ways the company would profit from their game. You play the game for the gameplay and that’s all that matters.
Besides, what if you really like the game and just literally want to donate to the company? I know I did for rocket league, and bought a skin for like $20 when I got the game itself for like $15 or some shit. I thought the game was worth way more with how much fun I had with it. Same for games that let you “buy” the OST. Everyone knows this is bullshit just ignore it.
Manipulation by games comes from astral projection, so ‘just play and don’t worry about it’ makes perfect sense.
Besides, what if you really like the game and just literally want to donate to the company?
Send them a check. If you want to give them money, out of the blue, you don’t need a leash they can yank.
It’s impossible to ignore this - it’s in fucking everything.
It’s becoming the entire industry.
It only works because it gets under your skin!
Manipulation is when the game gives you the illusion that you can get something if you work hard enough on it without paying. Similar to how battlefront did with their characters when you pretty much can’t unlock the characters without paying unless you grind like a million hours. It’s similar in games where you use real money for stuff that give you an advantage and you can pretty much guarantee a loss if you don’t buy their shit.
There is no illusion here. You just play the game and get everything the others are getting without paying. You only pay for the cosmetic skin. How is that manipulation?
Manipulation is the game making you want to work for it. And that’s fine - that’s what games are. Video games necessarily make you value arbitrary nonsense which they can hand out at any time. The illusion is that there’s anything special about selecting how your guy looks.
But there’s no ethical form of monetizing that that invented desire. Any value beyond a knee-jerk “neat” is created and controlled by the game. It’s made-up. There is no real-world price for flags captured, or murlocs skinned, or goals scored. A conversion rate between dollars and scoreboard points is a category error. They cannot have value, in the sense that money has value.
The clearest proof of this is that working hard usually works. Items allegedly worth real-world money - some priced higher than the whole game! - will be given to you, if you play a bunch. As if dicking around in Blood Gulch is productive economic activity. Like it’s labor. When the game rewards you some obscenely-priced cosmetic guff, how high would you have to be to ask for cash instead?
Sure acheivements don’t have inherent value, but the skins do. The idea of a captured flag or whatever is how good you are at the game and the fact that you had fun doing it. Skins are the same as clothes. You don’t have to get the best, but people pay obscene amounts of money to get some bullshit they think looks good and shows off status. It’s the same here. But you don’t see people advocating for the shutting down of LV or Gucci or whatever.
Not even the game itself has inherent value. Why would I pay $60 for a Mario game that I don’t like and it lasts like 50 hours when I can play the $20 Binding of Isaac (masterpiece) that could easily last me hundreds of hours. Other people would say the opposite.
Every sentence in that comment is a distinct kind of wrong. I’d be impressed if it wasn’t just depressing.
In reverse order: games are products. They have utility-value, for you, a human person. Even if you think they suck. A bad pizza is still a pizza, and a perishable good which can be manufactured and sold, as a textbook example of commerce.
Veblen goods like Gucci products are priced primarily for sign-value, where the cost is high to show off how much you can afford. But they still function. A Gucci purse only has the same utility as any other purse, but both purses are obviously products.
Exclusionary bullshit like paid skins are nothing but sign-value. You pay money to say you paid money. That is a scam. You are goaded into desiring some empty peacocking nonsense versus everyone else, where the only practical mechanism is to throw money at the people who let you say you have a skin. It’s not a product - you already have the content, on your hard drive. You must, to see other people using it. It’s not a service - can only see other people using it because you’re already on the server. It’s a completely made-up money sink.
That bullshit is becoming the entire industry.
Scams like this are so lucrative, companies can give games away, just to sucker in more peacocking chumps.
Exploitation like this takes unlimited quantities of money from an arbitrary number of people, for the same fucking game they already paid full price to play. No kidding every company’s shoving that into every game. The actual part where you play the game is just bait on that hook. The high-level goal of every company doing this becomes addiction to keep you from leaving, frustration to keep you forking over thousands of dollars, and just enough socialization to make you feel superior to the idiots who only forked over hundreds of dollars.
The only consistent argument for this infection is ‘but it makes money, so it must be ethical.’
