this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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It's crazy how far micro-transactions and monetizing games have come since Bethesda charged $2.50 for cosmetic armor to put on your horse. If you'd told someone back then that one day an in-game mount would cost more than the game itself they would have laughed you out of the room.
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.
This. That’s why I gave up on arguing with people a long time ago. There is a shimmer of hope in me that this industry still comes crashing down at some point. I would celebrate it. But by the looks of it, it won’t happen anytime soon.
The best I could do is not buying anything on release, early access or riddled with microtransactions, mostly indie games and maybe one AAA title a year, also avoid certain studios. Oh, and also don’t really care at all when these kind of news come up. I cared back then, I voted with my wallet and still do, but the other side won. Shit happens. There is nothing I can do other than get angry, but that’s not worth the hassle.
A crash is impossible at this point, the market is too big and vast, if AAA dies, mobile will live on like nothing happened, and guess where lootboxes and gacha started...
In casinos, that are (were until recently) government regulated?
I'm with you. I buy almost exclusively on-sale games. I try to buy the super-premium editions about a year after release so I can get lots of content for less than the original game costs, and I avoid any p2w or lootbox games altogether.
Do I miss interactions with some friends who only play the latest titles? Absolutely. I have primarily been a single player gamer anyway, so maybe it just doesn't impact me as terribly.
The market has spoken, and it said some real stupid shit. I've given up on gaming as a hobby, and good riddance.
If we trusted the Market to make it good for us, we'd still have children working 16 hour shifts until they get their arms chewed off by machinery and get thrown on the streets to starve.
"Vote with your wallet" is just something business say to try to convince us that regulation isn't needed, conveniently forgetting to mention that the fattest wallet in the room is the CEO's.
Also let's not forget the horse armor was the free patch, Microsoft allowed 1 free cosmetic patch on the x-box, then everything else they required Bethesda to put a price on. It just so happened to be win -win for both Bethesda and Microsoft
No.
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.
But they're not being nickled and dimed. They're being Lincolned and Hamiltoned.
"But it's only cosmetic!!"
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.
It's a slippery slope. Money talks. They are accountable to their shareholders. So when they saw that people were paying for them, they started to monetise more and more.
Horse Armor? How about a jewel-encrusted horse!?
Am I alone in thinking this is a joke that has gone over everyone’s heads? Isn’t it just a sparkly topping on a pile of currency anyway?
Horse armor is completely ethical, compared to this. That's how bad this is. Horse armor was paying for additional game files you otherwise would not have. Same idea as an expansion pack... just smaller. (And dumber.) But this shit? This is already in the game. You can see it even if you pay nothing. You can probably get it, even if you pay nothing. It's just obscenely unlikely, so they can make up a high number and say that's what it's "worth."
Which is why this is a scam. This entire business model is numbers pulled from a hat. The people taking your money control the whole environment for giving them money. They can make you desire absolutely worthless things. That's how games work. That's what games do. This trick is the reason you give a shit about baskets and captures and... enchanted scimitars. None of it is real. The game could give everyone a million, and it would cost nothing.