Games

This libertarian attitude only works for rational decisions. That's essentially impossible, in the context of a game, because games make you value arbitrary nonsense. That's what makes them games. All games trick people - into caring about points, or drops, or goals, or anything else that's not real. There's no ethical version of attaching a dollar value to that made-up desire.

Nothing makes this abusive manipulation more obvious than when people pay the price of a house and receive a floppy disk's worth of static props.

We're not bickering over whether games should cost $70. Nobody thinks games should cost $10,000. So obviously no part of a game should cost that much! If it's even possible to dump that much money into one game, and still only have a portion of its content, something's gone terribly wrong. Snipping over how we describe that problem is aggressively missing the point.

And that problem is half the industry. That problem is a multi-billion-dollar effort by an army of game developers, whose talents are being misdirected to convince people to open their wallets and look the other way. It's inexcusable, which is why you've made no effort, besides tacitly blaming their victims.

Veblen goods can't exist in a single-player game. There's nobody to peacock for. A housewife who spent a month's salary on gems in some mobile puzzle trash was plainly not purchasing luxury anything. Nor is anyone wowed by the ostentatious signalling of a virtual rasta hat for which you paid ten actual dollars.