I am explicitly willing to burn down my own childhood, if anyone convinced me it was the same kind of abuse we’re seeing now.
But I hold that the abuse we’re seeing now is demonstrably worse. And it is a half the industry by revenue. Spare me your narrative posturing and engage with how new things can in fact be fucked in ways that old things were not.
Things can be newly fucked in new and imaginative ways, but that doesn’t preclude things having been fucked in old and imaginative ways. The fuckery mostly just shifts around. Some configurations are worse than others, but a lot of that judgement does have to do with one’s perspective, which in turn has a lot to do with what specific pot of slowly boiling water they were raised in as baby frogs.
So no, I do not concede at all that there is a difference between Magic the Gathering packs and loot boxes. They are quite literally modelled on each other. Fun story, as a broke-ass college student I used to work at a comic store/hobby shop. We did keep a catalogue of collectibles we used to trade piecemeal. I’m not sure at all if this was legal in the first place, but we sure did it. It was a big ole accounting book with handwritten card names and prices because I’m old and so is Magic.
I saw kids jonesing for specific things all the time. I once had someone bang on the locked gate to try to get me to sell them CCGs after closing hours like the gacha zombie apocalypse had started. Another time I had a guy, a full on grown man, buy a HeroClix box, walk halfway down the street and then sprint back into the store to show me the rare he had just packed because it was the last of a set or somesuch. I have never stared more blankly.
And yeah, I was there when browser game MTX were all about energy mechanics and I was the quiet old guy in the back pointing out that they were effectively the same as paying for continues in arcades. And I was self-aware enough to realize that didn’t mean energy mechanics were particularly good, just that arcades were… kinda exploitative when you think about it. We just didn’t think about it that way.
We did think about all the Street Fighter 2 and Resident Evil re-releases, though. People were pissed even at the time. Capcom was the Ubisoft of the mid-90s like that.
I do not concede at all that there is a difference between Magic the Gathering packs and loot boxes.
Then why the fuck don’t you want both banned? Magic Online shouldn’t even be legal. None of the excuses work for a digital game!
I do not respect the comparison as a defense of current horseshit. Charging real money inside video games is a scam. It’s a cancer that lets “free” games somehow slurp up billions of dollars a year. It makes psychological manipulation for unlimited sums of money a primary goal of game design. Being good or fun does not matter, so long as people are addicted and unsatisfied.
I was the quiet old guy in the back pointing out that they were effectively the same as paying for continues in arcades.
You were wrong. Arcades are rental - their entire business model was built on cool shit you cannot possibly afford to own, being accessed in very short bursts, for negligible quantities of money. That’s obviously not the same thing as your tablet, running a generic 2D Unity project, asking ten fucking dollars unless you’d rather stare at a pointless counter for an entire hour.
Specific things getting worse is not some “back in my day” horseshit. Games and gaming have improved massively - but this bu-si-ness mo-del should have been illegal a decade ago. The shithole it spawned in, a pocket computer where you’re not allowed to run your own goddamn software, should never have been tolerated.
This shit is in $70, single-player, flagship-franchise titles. It gets added to shit you already bought. It’s naked greed with no upside. Delete it.
Negligible amounts of money my ass. I spent as much pocket change as I could get my hands on every day in my local arcade. Back of the envelope, I could have bought a Neo Geo and a copy of the game easily with the coins I dumped into SamSho2 after class (we got kinda competitive on that one). You want to know the worst part? It also led to me paying full price for the crappy home version of SamSho 1 on top. Ditto for Street Fighter 2, although I’m not sure I could have afforded a CPS1 cab.
As for wanting physical gacha banned… well, you’re assuming I have a problem with loot boxes, which I don’t, particularly. They can be fun. I don’t mind them. I don’t buy them for real money pretty much ever, but I can dig a gacha game for a bit.
I would age gate both, probably. That seems like a good call. Age ratings exist for a reason. You may be surprised by this, but I also don’t have a problem with actual gambling being legal among consenting adults. You’re gonna be shocked when you hear how I feel about alcohol and drugs, too.
Fuck them kids. I am talking about a scam perpetrated against people with credit cards.
Any comparison with alcohol requires some ridiculous metaphor where it costs money to keep the bottle on your shelf. Alcohol is clearly a product you buy, and then own. It’s consumable because it’s food. If all games were at least that much of a product there would be nothing her to complain about.
My condolences for somehow dropping one thousand dollars one quarter at a time - but you spent that money renting someone else’s hardware. Like a subscription to an MMO, the transaction fundamentally makes sense, as a service. That is never the case for microtransactions. They are charging for permission to say you have something that’s already in the game you’re already playing on the hardware you personally own.
Actual booster packs are just barely excused by the fact cardboard costs money. Permission does not. And yet: the entire industry is being reshaped to funnel people toward systems that are objectively worse than the most borderline-tolerable abuses of decades past. This is bad, actually. And it’s not some niche or remainder or side hustle. It’s HALF THE INDUSTRY, BY REVENUE.
If we allow this shit to continue there will be nothing else.
Nah, the vast majority of this is just wrong, or at least a significant exaggeration.
It’s not a scam if properly implemented and communicated, and there is no requirement to have immediate access to all content in a game just because it’s stored in the same package as other content you’ve paid to access, for one. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to play a fighting game against a player using a DLC character you don’t own, since the files for the game to show you their character when you fight them are the same as the files that allow you to use it yourself.
You sort of argue against yourself by somehow granting an exception to MMOs, too, because live games have running costs in general. I’m not clear on why a loot box or a cosmetic microtransaction is supposed to be an invalid way to fund those server costs but a subscription fee is not, beyond you being stuck in some olden days assumption of commercial transactions applying only to physical goods. I hate to break it to you, but even for the most self-contained, MTX-free indie you buy on Steam you’re only paying an access license fee. I don’t necessarily think that’s good, but it is what’s happening.
And lastly, no, the entire industry won’t become a F2P MTX uniform thing. That model may be very popular and genuinely huge, but standalone, offline gaming has its own market, which has in fact grown fduring most of that process in absolute size. I think part of the reason people see it as a takeover is the gaming industry likes to share bombastic, dumbed down claims about being bigger than this or that other media form and people read it like it’s a single blob of things, often based on their impression of triple A gaming at some point in the past. The reality of it is that a bunch of that “half the industry by revenue” comes down to audiences that are just not engaging with the formats and distribution channels than the historically smaller hardcore gaming subset do. Which doesn’t mean traditional gaming is going away, just that some other variants that may as well be an entirely different media type have grown faster.
If anything there’s been a bit of crossover, where a lot of that was happening in mobile, where especially in Western markets the amount of fossilized slop at the top end started sending people and distributors back to paid up-front experiences while a bunch of PC and console gamers are now starting to fossilze into forever games (free or not) that are several years old and not moving on. I have to guess that will come and go in waves as the whole thing stops growing endlessly by double digits and becomes yet another form of legacy media just chugging along for another century.
Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to play a fighting game against a player using a DLC character you don’t own
Good. The alternative is inseparable from providing everyone the whole roster, but pretending each character is worth twelve fucking dollars, so a generic fighting game is somehow worth five times what any sane person would pay up-front for one game.
The counterproposal is just selling the god-damned game, with all the fffucking characters. Or adding free shit as incentive to attract new customers and retain existing players. Or selling an honest-to-god sequel or expansion, instead of charging expansion kinds of money for the bare minimum of content.
live games have running costs in general.
Then they should charge a subscription or die off.
People make rational spending decisions about subscriptions. They’re not popular. People don’t like that sort of thing, when you treat them honestly and fairly, instead of tricking them.
I have negative patience for the idea that a company spending money justifies whatever horseshit monetization scheme they propose. As if, because they’ve already blown half a billion dollars, and intend to keep burning more, that makes it okay to charge eight actual dollars for an imaginary hat. Fuck that noise. If your company has ongoing costs - announce ongoing fees. Don’t play stupid games about tricking a fraction of players into spending their whole paycheck.
you’re only paying an access license fee
Fuck that and fuck anyone who told you that. You own things that you buy. That’s what the money was for. The first sale doctrine knocked this shit down, an entire century ago, and it’s only through corruption and nuh-uh-ing that software has retained any form of special consideration. If I bought Peter Jackson’s King Kong on HD-DVD and King King The Game Of The Movie for Xbox 360, I own both equally. Whatever text is written inside to pretend otherwise is meaningless. I own that text, too.
If you believe any mumbo-jumbo saying otherwise then you should demand its immediate repeal. You should be morally opposed to its continued existence. Defend your basic right to own products.
there is no requirement to have immediate access to all content in a game
THEN WHAT DOES IT FUCKING MEAN TO BUY THE GODDAMN GAME?
Even subscription MMOs pull this shit! Games that have obviously covered their ongoing costs, for twenty years straight, are double-dipping out of naked greed. Nobody’s objections matter. The abuse is worth more than whatever dent could be made by people rightly saying, fuck this abuse.
standalone, offline gaming has its own market
Those games have this too.
Were you not listening?
This shit is in FLAGSHIP FRANCHISE, SEVENTY-DOLLAR, SINGLE-PLAYER GAMES. It costs almost nothing to add. The backlash barely matters, because some fucks will lurch out to defend it. The marketing value of ‘we won’t rob you!’ is dwindling, and again, can become a lie after you bought it.
Counting on media literacy to stop direct manipulation for profit is a failure to acknowledge how any marketing has ever worked. Have you seen reality lately? Educating the rubes never fucking works, because the people manipulating them for direct monetary gain are better at tricking them than you could ever be at convincing them they have been tricked.
Yeeeeah, you may just be angry on principle about things that don’t merit black-and-white, this-is-an-abomination rage.
No, I won’t wait three extra years and pay 200 bucks for a fighting game to see if I like it and then only play ten percent of the roster. I find it very convenient to get a base game roster so the dev team doesn’t have to bet the farm that the game will be successful without knowing what will happen and I don’t have to pay three times as much or get a third of the game. Hell, that particular example has improved significantly, it used to be if I wanted to play Cammy on SF2 I had to pay full price to repurchase every other character in the game all over again. Screw that. You can get a character for five bucks these days. Gimme the characters one by one forever.
And I absolutely prefer MTX over subscriptions. All day any day. More convenient, typically cheaper and exactly as problematic as every other games-as-service model, no more, no less.
You can all caps and swear all you want, but digital distribution is giving you what it’s giving you. You don’t own your Steam games, that’s just how it works.
This model has fundamental downsides that need to be addressed and probably need legislative intervention to do so, but the outcome is not going to be “you can only buy things in a static format and devs are forbidden from selling you expansions”. Even if it made sense to regulate things to that extent, it’s inconvenient, expensive and impractical. You may feel strongly about this in all caps, but… yeah, you are in a tiny majority.
By all means go find games that give you that experience. GOG is right there for you. I like it, I use it, go give them money.
But I am not advocating for a blanket ban on all DLC, microtransactions, server-dependent games or free to play games. Those are good things. I like them. They have full-on upsides. They just need to be regulated to the point where consumers are protected and media isn’t an entirely fungible thing built on planned obsolescence. Those are two very different bars.
No, I won’t wait three extra years and pay 200 bucks for a fighting game to see if I like it and then only play ten percent of the roster.
Who asked?
“you can only buy things in a static format and devs are forbidden from selling you expansions”
At no point have you understood this argument.
I came out the gate with a favorable comparison for horse armor.
And somehow the least tolerable part of this strawman is ‘you’re just angry, you only feel strongly, juuust because you disagreeee.’ It pains me to leave this abuse-promoting fluff unanswered, but you’re not listening anyway.
I am explicitly willing to burn down my own childhood, if anyone convinced me it was the same kind of abuse we’re seeing now.
But I hold that the abuse we’re seeing now is demonstrably worse. And it is a half the industry by revenue. Spare me your narrative posturing and engage with how new things can in fact be fucked in ways that old things were not.
Things can be newly fucked in new and imaginative ways, but that doesn’t preclude things having been fucked in old and imaginative ways. The fuckery mostly just shifts around. Some configurations are worse than others, but a lot of that judgement does have to do with one’s perspective, which in turn has a lot to do with what specific pot of slowly boiling water they were raised in as baby frogs.
So no, I do not concede at all that there is a difference between Magic the Gathering packs and loot boxes. They are quite literally modelled on each other. Fun story, as a broke-ass college student I used to work at a comic store/hobby shop. We did keep a catalogue of collectibles we used to trade piecemeal. I’m not sure at all if this was legal in the first place, but we sure did it. It was a big ole accounting book with handwritten card names and prices because I’m old and so is Magic.
I saw kids jonesing for specific things all the time. I once had someone bang on the locked gate to try to get me to sell them CCGs after closing hours like the gacha zombie apocalypse had started. Another time I had a guy, a full on grown man, buy a HeroClix box, walk halfway down the street and then sprint back into the store to show me the rare he had just packed because it was the last of a set or somesuch. I have never stared more blankly.
And yeah, I was there when browser game MTX were all about energy mechanics and I was the quiet old guy in the back pointing out that they were effectively the same as paying for continues in arcades. And I was self-aware enough to realize that didn’t mean energy mechanics were particularly good, just that arcades were… kinda exploitative when you think about it. We just didn’t think about it that way.
We did think about all the Street Fighter 2 and Resident Evil re-releases, though. People were pissed even at the time. Capcom was the Ubisoft of the mid-90s like that.
Then why the fuck don’t you want both banned? Magic Online shouldn’t even be legal. None of the excuses work for a digital game!
I do not respect the comparison as a defense of current horseshit. Charging real money inside video games is a scam. It’s a cancer that lets “free” games somehow slurp up billions of dollars a year. It makes psychological manipulation for unlimited sums of money a primary goal of game design. Being good or fun does not matter, so long as people are addicted and unsatisfied.
You were wrong. Arcades are rental - their entire business model was built on cool shit you cannot possibly afford to own, being accessed in very short bursts, for negligible quantities of money. That’s obviously not the same thing as your tablet, running a generic 2D Unity project, asking ten fucking dollars unless you’d rather stare at a pointless counter for an entire hour.
Specific things getting worse is not some “back in my day” horseshit. Games and gaming have improved massively - but this bu-si-ness mo-del should have been illegal a decade ago. The shithole it spawned in, a pocket computer where you’re not allowed to run your own goddamn software, should never have been tolerated.
This shit is in $70, single-player, flagship-franchise titles. It gets added to shit you already bought. It’s naked greed with no upside. Delete it.
Negligible amounts of money my ass. I spent as much pocket change as I could get my hands on every day in my local arcade. Back of the envelope, I could have bought a Neo Geo and a copy of the game easily with the coins I dumped into SamSho2 after class (we got kinda competitive on that one). You want to know the worst part? It also led to me paying full price for the crappy home version of SamSho 1 on top. Ditto for Street Fighter 2, although I’m not sure I could have afforded a CPS1 cab.
As for wanting physical gacha banned… well, you’re assuming I have a problem with loot boxes, which I don’t, particularly. They can be fun. I don’t mind them. I don’t buy them for real money pretty much ever, but I can dig a gacha game for a bit.
I would age gate both, probably. That seems like a good call. Age ratings exist for a reason. You may be surprised by this, but I also don’t have a problem with actual gambling being legal among consenting adults. You’re gonna be shocked when you hear how I feel about alcohol and drugs, too.
Fuck them kids. I am talking about a scam perpetrated against people with credit cards.
Any comparison with alcohol requires some ridiculous metaphor where it costs money to keep the bottle on your shelf. Alcohol is clearly a product you buy, and then own. It’s consumable because it’s food. If all games were at least that much of a product there would be nothing her to complain about.
My condolences for somehow dropping one thousand dollars one quarter at a time - but you spent that money renting someone else’s hardware. Like a subscription to an MMO, the transaction fundamentally makes sense, as a service. That is never the case for microtransactions. They are charging for permission to say you have something that’s already in the game you’re already playing on the hardware you personally own.
Actual booster packs are just barely excused by the fact cardboard costs money. Permission does not. And yet: the entire industry is being reshaped to funnel people toward systems that are objectively worse than the most borderline-tolerable abuses of decades past. This is bad, actually. And it’s not some niche or remainder or side hustle. It’s HALF THE INDUSTRY, BY REVENUE.
If we allow this shit to continue there will be nothing else.
Nah, the vast majority of this is just wrong, or at least a significant exaggeration.
It’s not a scam if properly implemented and communicated, and there is no requirement to have immediate access to all content in a game just because it’s stored in the same package as other content you’ve paid to access, for one. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to play a fighting game against a player using a DLC character you don’t own, since the files for the game to show you their character when you fight them are the same as the files that allow you to use it yourself.
You sort of argue against yourself by somehow granting an exception to MMOs, too, because live games have running costs in general. I’m not clear on why a loot box or a cosmetic microtransaction is supposed to be an invalid way to fund those server costs but a subscription fee is not, beyond you being stuck in some olden days assumption of commercial transactions applying only to physical goods. I hate to break it to you, but even for the most self-contained, MTX-free indie you buy on Steam you’re only paying an access license fee. I don’t necessarily think that’s good, but it is what’s happening.
And lastly, no, the entire industry won’t become a F2P MTX uniform thing. That model may be very popular and genuinely huge, but standalone, offline gaming has its own market, which has in fact grown fduring most of that process in absolute size. I think part of the reason people see it as a takeover is the gaming industry likes to share bombastic, dumbed down claims about being bigger than this or that other media form and people read it like it’s a single blob of things, often based on their impression of triple A gaming at some point in the past. The reality of it is that a bunch of that “half the industry by revenue” comes down to audiences that are just not engaging with the formats and distribution channels than the historically smaller hardcore gaming subset do. Which doesn’t mean traditional gaming is going away, just that some other variants that may as well be an entirely different media type have grown faster.
If anything there’s been a bit of crossover, where a lot of that was happening in mobile, where especially in Western markets the amount of fossilized slop at the top end started sending people and distributors back to paid up-front experiences while a bunch of PC and console gamers are now starting to fossilze into forever games (free or not) that are several years old and not moving on. I have to guess that will come and go in waves as the whole thing stops growing endlessly by double digits and becomes yet another form of legacy media just chugging along for another century.
Good. The alternative is inseparable from providing everyone the whole roster, but pretending each character is worth twelve fucking dollars, so a generic fighting game is somehow worth five times what any sane person would pay up-front for one game.
The counterproposal is just selling the god-damned game, with all the fffucking characters. Or adding free shit as incentive to attract new customers and retain existing players. Or selling an honest-to-god sequel or expansion, instead of charging expansion kinds of money for the bare minimum of content.
Then they should charge a subscription or die off.
People make rational spending decisions about subscriptions. They’re not popular. People don’t like that sort of thing, when you treat them honestly and fairly, instead of tricking them.
I have negative patience for the idea that a company spending money justifies whatever horseshit monetization scheme they propose. As if, because they’ve already blown half a billion dollars, and intend to keep burning more, that makes it okay to charge eight actual dollars for an imaginary hat. Fuck that noise. If your company has ongoing costs - announce ongoing fees. Don’t play stupid games about tricking a fraction of players into spending their whole paycheck.
Fuck that and fuck anyone who told you that. You own things that you buy. That’s what the money was for. The first sale doctrine knocked this shit down, an entire century ago, and it’s only through corruption and nuh-uh-ing that software has retained any form of special consideration. If I bought Peter Jackson’s King Kong on HD-DVD and King King The Game Of The Movie for Xbox 360, I own both equally. Whatever text is written inside to pretend otherwise is meaningless. I own that text, too.
If you believe any mumbo-jumbo saying otherwise then you should demand its immediate repeal. You should be morally opposed to its continued existence. Defend your basic right to own products.
THEN WHAT DOES IT FUCKING MEAN TO BUY THE GODDAMN GAME?
Even subscription MMOs pull this shit! Games that have obviously covered their ongoing costs, for twenty years straight, are double-dipping out of naked greed. Nobody’s objections matter. The abuse is worth more than whatever dent could be made by people rightly saying, fuck this abuse.
Those games have this too.
Were you not listening?
This shit is in FLAGSHIP FRANCHISE, SEVENTY-DOLLAR, SINGLE-PLAYER GAMES. It costs almost nothing to add. The backlash barely matters, because some fucks will lurch out to defend it. The marketing value of ‘we won’t rob you!’ is dwindling, and again, can become a lie after you bought it.
Counting on media literacy to stop direct manipulation for profit is a failure to acknowledge how any marketing has ever worked. Have you seen reality lately? Educating the rubes never fucking works, because the people manipulating them for direct monetary gain are better at tricking them than you could ever be at convincing them they have been tricked.
Yeeeeah, you may just be angry on principle about things that don’t merit black-and-white, this-is-an-abomination rage.
No, I won’t wait three extra years and pay 200 bucks for a fighting game to see if I like it and then only play ten percent of the roster. I find it very convenient to get a base game roster so the dev team doesn’t have to bet the farm that the game will be successful without knowing what will happen and I don’t have to pay three times as much or get a third of the game. Hell, that particular example has improved significantly, it used to be if I wanted to play Cammy on SF2 I had to pay full price to repurchase every other character in the game all over again. Screw that. You can get a character for five bucks these days. Gimme the characters one by one forever.
And I absolutely prefer MTX over subscriptions. All day any day. More convenient, typically cheaper and exactly as problematic as every other games-as-service model, no more, no less.
You can all caps and swear all you want, but digital distribution is giving you what it’s giving you. You don’t own your Steam games, that’s just how it works.
This model has fundamental downsides that need to be addressed and probably need legislative intervention to do so, but the outcome is not going to be “you can only buy things in a static format and devs are forbidden from selling you expansions”. Even if it made sense to regulate things to that extent, it’s inconvenient, expensive and impractical. You may feel strongly about this in all caps, but… yeah, you are in a tiny majority.
By all means go find games that give you that experience. GOG is right there for you. I like it, I use it, go give them money.
But I am not advocating for a blanket ban on all DLC, microtransactions, server-dependent games or free to play games. Those are good things. I like them. They have full-on upsides. They just need to be regulated to the point where consumers are protected and media isn’t an entirely fungible thing built on planned obsolescence. Those are two very different bars.
deleted by creator
Who asked?
At no point have you understood this argument.
I came out the gate with a favorable comparison for horse armor.
And somehow the least tolerable part of this strawman is ‘you’re just angry, you only feel strongly, juuust because you disagreeee.’ It pains me to leave this abuse-promoting fluff unanswered, but you’re not listening anyway.