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this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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Games
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Any game taking real money is a scam.
(No that doesn't mean buying games. No that doesn't mean subscriptions. No that doesn't mean expansions. No that doesn't mean card games. No that doesn't mean arcades. Jesus Christ, do people find a lot of ways to get mad about nonsense, whenever I say this.)
Nothing inside a video game should cost real money. Absolutely fucking nothing. All possible forms are abuse, built on how games by definition invent value for worthless elements that can be arbitrarily granted or withheld. That is what makes them games.
The business model is intolerable - and if we allow it to continue, there will be nothing else. It's the dominant strategy. Your disgust and non-participation will never outweigh some tiny fraction of people getting taken for obscene quantities of real money in exchange for incrementing a variable. It's in free mobile trash. It's in $80 "AAA" flagship-franchise titles. It's in single-player, multi-player, subscription MMOs - it's in everything. There is zero incentive for them not to try robbing you like this. Companies that don't rob you will make less money than companies that do.
Only legislation can fix this.
Dark pattern games should be fucking illegal.
So many kids are stuck on terrible games that force them to get angry and beg mommy and daddy to buy stuff in a game. My youngest is forever stuck doing this and it drives me nuts.
I try to avoid making it about kids, because adults are just as exploited. The victims these bastards describe as "whales" to be hunted have jobs and houses and everything - and they're spending a whole lot of money on a whole lot of nothing.
Yeah that's fair. I know as an adult I have more control so I avoid those games (now) but once you're in, your locked into that fomo.
But I see it negatively impacting my kids more than anything. Imagine growing up playing those games.. I had Mario and games you bought and owned lol I can't relate to most of the games of today.
While absolutely too many things are charged for in gaming today (exp boosts? skip potions? cheat armor that was already fully developed at launch? all ways to get your company on my high seas list).... in the specific case where (1) new content is continuously being developed AND (2) the game is not asking for mandatory spending to continue playing (e.g. no expansion pack to purchase, no subscription fees), I don't think the concept of charging for in-game content at all is abusive.
If I buy once and then a year later some optional paid cosmetics or other goodies are added, I think that's permissible. And if I'm in a free to play live service game, I recognize the ongoing dev costs need to get covered somewhere.
I do vastly prefer those companies that give their games TLC and updates for free, and I'm not saying the standard pricing for optional purchases in the modern market are reasonable. But I think the existence of in-game purchases, if not their current state, can make sense sometimes.
"Free to play live service games" are a scam. They're built on an abusive business model, where addiction and frustration are the only way the game makes money. Fuck their costs. They spend that money because they know they can squeeze it back out of you, if you let them keep subtly disappointing you and dangling the option to open your wallet.
What you want is like saying casinos are okay if they just had better odds. It is an optimistic misunderstanding how this garbage works. All incentives point toward making you less happy, so you can pay them to fix that, but keeping you unaware and unwilling to quit. Charging real money doesn't just cost more for less content - it is making games objectively less enjoyable.
Maximum profit cannot come from a good game that's fun to play for an entire year. It comes from day-one fuckery, either gouging gentle enough to keep people from running scared, or gouging hard enough that their boycott counts for nothing.
Lmao you sure as hell talk a lot for having zero fucking clue what you're talking about
You're writing all live service games as being based on frustration when that absolutely isn't the case, so I have to think you have too many preconceived notions on this subject to actually be open to a conversation about it.
Oh well. No game is for everyone and sometimes the pay content is worth it just because it's damn awesome.
Frustration is the only reason people give them money. Fear of missing out, forced waiting, rolling the dice in vain - there's endless ways to make people want something and not get it. Directly monetizing that manufactured desire is an abuse of why anyone plays games.
If you're having fun without paying them, they're losing money. Or at best - you're the AI for paying players to treat like chumps.
I guess 'you just don't like it' goes on the list of reasons people make up instead of addressing the argument.
Lol, instead of addressing what argument? Your argument is entirely "nuh-uh, you are frustrated. I know you are because my argument would fall apart if you weren't, so you are. It's just that you like being frustrated."
It's just not the case. There are rare good ones out there, and if that frustrates you into claiming I'm some masochist and therefore my enjoyment is somehow invalid, that's your own whole subscription of issues.
I named three unambiguously commonplace examples of what I'm talking about. Every single game that squeezes money out of people, over and over, uses some equivalent tricks. That's what squeezes the money out of people. If you can't deal with that and want to make up a conversation, have it with yourself and leave me alone.
You‘re a rate breed in this sub. Someone who actually sees what is happening.
But in other words: there should be gaming reviewers that check for any kind of on top cost (that is not an additional expansion imo) and divide games in easy to distinguish categories (green and red for example). Green is without money making schemes.
That way you can just check out the games without these mechanics if you like, like I would.
Unfortunately, even that wouldn't be reliable information, because several major games have added this crap in after launch. Sometimes immediately. Sometimes after a few weeks on sale.
Even if clear warnings were accurate, I worry they'd just encourage the thought-terminating cliche of "just don't buy it." I'm already not-buying it as hard as I can. It's still spreading. Fools think that proves it's what consumers want, when obviously it's so profitable that boycotts can't work.
Only legislation can fix this.
You are 100% correct. The same is correct for social media and there are studies that indicate that social media is „trapping“ people through their mechanics, dark patterns and peer pressure.
I‘m still baffled that some people (on lemmy!) are not able to understand why big corpos=bad.
Even fucking Mastodon implemented infinite scrolling. Shoved that right in there when Twitter caught fire - if there's an option to go back to what I signed up for, I have not found it.
Now I gotta ask: is that not how it was? I haven’t been a big twitter user ever.
It used to be cleanly paginated like mobile Twitter... back when mobile Twitter existed. You'd get 20 or 40 posts in a row, and then a Next link. Which I think was based on timestamps instead of being /page/2 nonsense, so reloading a tab would actually put you where you left off, instead of some arbitrary distance behind the eternal present.
Okay! That makes sense. I can see how this both improves the using experience for some but also makes it more addictive.
What's so bad about infinite scrolling pages?
It's an antipattern. It prevents you from segmenting your time on a site, so you're more likely to just keep going, never recognizing it's been hours.
It's also dogshit for usability. Are you trying to catch up on some artist's comic? Have fun holding Page Down for half an hour. Hope the site doesn't reload whenever it feels like it.