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Predatory tactics in gaming are worse than you think
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this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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None of this is ever about the game part of the game. Fuck entirely off with pearl-clutching over content. This is about a business model. I want people to sell the most addictive, transgressive, customizable bullshit you can imagine, so long as it is either a product or a service. Like anything else you buy. Imaginary shit inside a video game is neither.
You can insist, 'but it's new!,' except it's already in your game. You're looking at it, on someone else's character. This is a dividing line where Oblivion's infamous horse armor is completely above-board. It was a hundred kilobytes of not much, but it was unambiguously an expansion. You, the human being, received a file you did not have before. Not just permission to say your guy had what anyone else could already wear.
This business model reduces the game part of the game to bait on this hook. Whatever people want, or can be made to want, is dangled at ten bucks a pop, fifty items at a time. Eough rubes get gouged for hundreds or thousands of dollars, such that the total revenue exceeds what the studio would get, even if they sold everybody the full-price game three separate times.
I care about those victims. You delight in their exploitation.
Nothing short of banning the abuse would work. We're talking about game designers. Manipulating people into enjoying certain behaviors is literally their job. People finally recognized lootboxes are bad - so they sold gave away the boxes and sold keys. Or sold gems. Or insisted it's just cosmetics. Or-- none of it's fucking different! It's all the same shit! You're all being dragged against the grindstone, using the same tricks that make games fun in the first place. The whole product is an excuse to keep grinding away at you until you decide to open your wallet and look away.
If you want to say that certain types of business models, like paying for RNG where you don't know what you're buying, are predatory, I would be with you on that.
But your extreme hardline stance of "nothing should cost money ever" is not a reasonable place to draw the line. At least some of what you're railing against should be perfectly fine.
Nothing inside a video game. That part is not optional. I've dealt with too many cranks who see me arguing - JUST SELL GAMES - and then go 'you want it for free!' No, folks, you want it for free. You want to play endlessly-updated games, 'subsidized by teenage hormones.' You imagine that you would never be taken for ungodly sums of money.
Even if you're right, you're counting on other people being taken for all the money you're not paying, and more. That's what it means, when this abuse makes more money.
Predatory abuse is inseparable from this business model. Maximum revenue comes from addiction and frustration. You can be made to want whatever bullshit they're allowed to push. That's how games work. They mechanically convince you to value arbitrary nonsense.
edit: oh shit, I thought I hit submit on this five hours ago.
I do want updated games, yes. My favorite games wouldn't be my favorite games if 1.0 was all we ever got.
Some games have predatory models, and I do oppose that. But only when it actually is predatory. I take issue with how you're trying to say nothing should ever be sold, even when what's being sold is perfectly fair.
I don't "delight in their exploitation", I am one of the people who buy this stuff.
I am not a victim just because you decide I am. I have some say in this.
So hell yeah, bait me, daddy. To this day, Dragon Ball FighterZ is probably the best gaming experience I've ever had. I was there at ground floor, bought every character, watched every tournament, got competitive. I ended up with three copies of the game, all 100%-ed and with hundreds of hours of play.
And the only thing that bums me out is that they had to bail out of it early, presumably to go make Marvel Tokon.
I will be on ground floor for Tokon, and I will be funding that mouse engine with a bunch of piecemeal cash, I'm sure.
And I need you to listen to me when I tell you that it's going to be on purpose, that I'm not a victim, that I hope that treadmill lasts for a good long while and that the game is good enough to support it.
So please spare me the benevolent outrage. I don't need your protection from my own taste. I would very much appreciate an offline-playable version of the game I can buy with all the DLC down the line, like I did for Marvel vs Capcom 3 or Street Fighter IV, and thanks to the weirdly wholesome interaction between developers and the FGC I may actually get that at some point to support tournament play. But otherwise? Nobody is complaining. You can go save somebody else.
And hey, I say this being a big fan of single player games, and a big supporter of physical media and game preservation. But you come here to tell me that some of my favourite games —and I'm talking game-changing experiences I cherish deeply— should have been illegal and I just don't know better? Yeah, not gonna fly, Hillary.