Games

I'm so sick of this revisionist bs. Plenty of us were outraged then and warned of EXACTLY this. Y'all reaped what you sowed. Now micro transactions and paid early access are the norm. We screamed and yelled to "vote with your wallets", and by god, you did. "It's just a few bucks" is the most common one I hear. Well, now EVERYTHING is "just a few bucks".

You won.

Unless you were in MBA school, at which point they'd hail you as their king.

Yeah I remember saying that that Bethesda's horse armor bs would lead to gamers being nickeled and dimed to death and was soundly called a overreacting whinger.

And like you said here we are now and gamers are being outright exploited and you still have people saying it's all still blown out of proportion like these companies aren't hiring psychologists to manipulate us to buy this bullshit.

Some people would have laughed you out of the room. A lot of people, myself included, warned that this was the kind of shit we'd spiral into with these microtransactions. It was basically confirmed within a year or two with the absolutely insane amount of money mobile gaming was seeing where the base product was just addictive crap with as many microtransactions shoveled in as possible. These games just completely blew the revenue of actual AAA titles would out of the water. It was basically inevitable and we're now in a situation where we've got a generation of consumers raised on this trash.

People with poor fiscal responsibility skills, such as children, people with ADHD, and people with mental health issues like depression.

They literally hire psychologists to make this stuff as enticing as possible by pushing the right buttons in your brain.

Yes.

People who spend 10s of thousands of dollars on micro transactions do need help.

Said help probably needs to come at a government level banning things that were designed in a computer lab to be digital Crack.

Might be the people that play only one game. I used to play WoW and then Diablo III exclusively like it was a full time job, and wound up in social bubbles with people who were equally invested. I never spent money on cosmetics or in-game items or anything but at that point it'd be pretty easy to rationalize since it's something someone is spending 20-80 hours a week playing.

Back in WoW we used to sell one slot on our Algalon raid (hardmode only raid boss) and pay for our Ventrilo and website with that lol

The fact that this meme misattributes horse armor to Skyrim instead of Oblivion is bothering me way more than it should

If consumers as a whole keep buying overpriced skins then yes, I will blame the consumers for enabling this behavior.

I mean I do blame the consumer. Specifically for not voting in harsh consumer- and worker-protection laws curbing corporate abilities.

I saw someone mentioned the other day in that thread about buyer's remorse that they didn't even feel like they were playing a game, that it played itself basically and that just made me think about watching my son-in-law playing Diablo 3 and all he really did was walk around while shit died around him due to his character's abilities and items, and I asked how that was even fun anymore and he turned to me with a straight face and said "it's not fun. I just want to 100% it."

Or just stop playing games that exist as shitty GACHA vending machines.

It isn't even the cost per-say. Its the fact that mounts were implemented in D4 as a practical afterthought. They barely affect gameplay, you can't take them into dungeons, they don't have any kind of skill progression or character synergy on their own right. Barely more than a TF2 fancy hat.

I got D4 at base price on release, played the main act, and shelved it months ago. I can't imagine still playing a game that's been nothing but bloody runs since that initial release. Nevermind paying $60 for a fucking cosmetics improvement while I grind mobs for incremental stat increases at the level cap.

At least Diablo is easier to quit than games that literally condition players into a gambling addiction. But all this is easier said than done.

Its nice to see a low cost microtransaction, and nice to see that you can get the currency in game but really thats just the same as it was a few years back before it went full 100 dollar for a reskin mode.

You are defending a game by pointing out that its money grabbing methods are less greedy than another company.

Games wont make the billions and billions they make now if they move away from the in game purchases models but they also evidently dont need billions and billions to operate.

Some of the best games on the market were made on small budgets by indie developers and sell well because the are fun and people actually want to play them.

Step 1: make some genuinely top shelf, genre-defining games in the 90s and early 2000s

Step 2: Sell out

Step 3: Become shittier than anyone could ever imagine

Step 4: Charge 1 kidney for a shitty in app purchase

Paradox DLC policy is why I don't play Paradox games anymore.

If I were to only play 1 game ever, then the DLC system might be ok, it's basically a subscription system. But since I'd only play a campaign every other year or so, I'm not going to fork out that much money for 1 campaign. And it's way too annoying to play some game with obvious parts missing + in game ads, so now Paradox gets no more money from me.