this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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I've never understood what's so bad about letting people pay for virtual cosmetics. You can still play 100% of the game.
Well... No. Those cosmetics are part of the game. You should be able to unlock them through gameplay.
They are part of the game, but they do not change the play of the game.
Aesthetics are part of the game. Vibe is a big part.
In a perfect world, things like FOMO and group pressure would not exist. People would understand that skins are just useless pixels. We do not live in that world. Yes there are a handful of people who are not affected by the psychological effects of this and if you are one of them lucky you. The truth is, most people are affected, most people feel bad to be the only one with no knife skin, with default armor ( "Default" being an insult in online games with a very young audience) and most people do love the "look" and feel a real need to buy cosmetics.
There is a reason game developers hire psychologists. That's why all lootboxes have sparkles and sound effects and even look like slot machines although what is in your box is long decided. It is because it works for most people's brains as stimulating. That's why some people make a living out of videos where they open loot boxes because even watching someone else open them makes our brain chemistry go WROOOOOM.
It is way less of a choice for most people than you think it is. I remember one FPS game has a quest where you need to open a loot box ingame and others can watch you do it, to animate them to buy loot boxes. These businesses have no shame to invent constantly new ways of making you enter the shop. Like making food rot ingame so you will have to buy a fridge from the shop (Fallout 76).
MTX and loot boxes are part of the core of many games. When they finally got rid of loot boxes in Mordor: Shadow of War , they had to redo the whole economy of the game, because it was to the core made in a way to encourage you to buy war chests for better Orcs.
You CAN live without ever eating cake, but if everyone eats cake, all other food looks bland and boring and you constatnly are shown ads for cake, shiny cake, tasty cake, colorful cake, cake that you can only buy until and cake that only 100 people can buy and all your friends are having cake right now and telling you how good it is.... there is a point where it doesn't matter that the cake is a ~~lie~~ scam, you will want cake too.
Loot box and that gambling business aside, wouldn't the FOMO argument also apply to the video game itself? If everyone around you is playing this game, you'll be pressured into purchasing it yourself as well.
That was absolutely a thing when I was a kid with playstation and N64, the difference being it was only a couple games at most per year to have such an effect, and you only had to buy the game. You didn't feel the need to spend $1000 over the next couple years buying each new cosmetic that all your friends have for $10-20 a pop.
You also got the value of, you know, playing and enjoying that game. If you spend $60 on a game you play for the next month, that's far more value than getting 3-6 skins at one every week or 2 and basically never using it again after you get the next one and honestly not really adding any actual value or fun overall to the time you do spend playing the game.