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this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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they always realized that. before they called it a "microtransaction" they called it "insert another quarter to continue." People forget that kids in the 80s and early 90s had to play video games in public, and that you would basically spend your entire allowance trying to beat one fighting game on medium difficulty with a joystick the size of a gear shift and 5 fat buttons that were the size of your palm.
i remember realizing one day how stupid i was for playing tekken 3 at the mall and that I had spent way more in quarters on tekken 3 over the course of a year or two than I would have if I had just bought the game for PS1
There was a brief moment between the death of arcades and the birth of WoW where single player style story based games and local multiplayer were the primary product. And I think that colored a lot of expectations for what video games should/could be.
Not to say other times were better or worse. Almost all the video games from the late 70s and early 80s would be considered shovelware now. They were largely cheaply made trash imitating other, more popular games. Many of them programmed, printed and shipped in a matter of weeks. The Arari 2600 even had a cartridge with an early modem that had what we'd call DRM today. You'd pay to download a game, you'd play it three times, and it would delete itself. And hilariously the company that made this thing went on to found America Online.
I think we're at a good moment though with games honestly. Passionate indie creators are making things leaps and bounds ahead of major studios.
to agree and add - this also coincided with the advent of internet forums allowing worldwide discussion of niches like video games, setting the expectations for what "good" video games were and should be. These expectations and opinions have largely stuck around since the early 2000s, probably because they were the first worldwide, accessible, free to access opinions that the world could disseminate
I forgot about that, know that you mentioned it, it seems like the switch was more from phisical machines to software. And so they can rempve the intermediary who used to own the quarter machine or the net cafe.
To be honest, I think the real switch is from when video games went from being in person only (arcades and consoles) to online (so you can play with anyone in the world). I think when video games are something you can only play by yourself or with friends, it is so fundamentally different of an experience than gaming today. And the corollary with this: that you could really only talk about video games with people you know, instead of via forums and Reddit.
This is the correct take. Online gaming changed everything