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How Greed Ruined Gaming
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this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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Blame gamers for embracing every single greedy move and asking for more. If you shout how fucked up this is and still open your wallet, you are the problem.
Gamers aren't a monolith. I'm not going to blame the people who appreciate gaming as an art form when the problem is the people who will buy the latest Madden and Cod games every year
There's a big flaw in your logic.
The biggest portion of people buying this stuff aren't "gamers" in the way that it's often used around these circles. It's the millions of people who buy coins for their Bejeweled clone of choice and have never owned a console in their life. And there's so many new kids entering gaming all the time who have never known a better world. I remember a Twitch streamer talking about how heartbreaking it was when AC6 came out and gave you the full color wheel plus multiple channels to customize your mech, and their chat was full of kids shocked that you didn't have to buy skins or color packs. That's how it used to be. You'd unlock skins by playing the game, not buying them in the store, but that hasn't been the case in decades now.
And the often touted story of the whale with more money than sense is a myth. Do they exist? Sure. But the vast majority of money coming from mtx from gamers is from people who are psychologically vulnerable to addiction/gambling and people with a poor ability to comprehend finances like kids. These companies have hired psychologists to tell them how to best extract money from your wallet by probing your brain in just the right way. From lootboxes to battle passes and seasonal content to daily quests and washing money through funny money currencies, it's all been designed to prey upon people with addiction issues, ADHD, training young kids into gambling addicts, etc. It's the Lotto tickets and pumping extra oxygen into the air of casinos and making sure there's no natural light in there so you don't realize how long you've been playing slots of the gaming world. Look at WoW, with its daily quests. They train players using Skinner Box techniques to continue logging into the game and paying the monthly subscription long after they've stopped enjoying it because it's become a habit and they are afraid of falling behind.
Voting with your wallet isn't going to fix it. You'll never get your average Facebook mom to care enough not to buy Farmville tokens or whatever, and these companies will never stop abusing psychology on their own. Only industry regulation will stop this.
That's the real big issue here, IMO: The North Korea approach. Kids are starting to become able to spend money who were indoctrinated with this. Because to them it's the north. It's just a part of this entertainment that you continuously spend small amounts of cash. To them it's normality.
What's the saying? Something like, "There's plenty of fools in the game, and there's a new one born every minute."
I feel like the casual mobile gaming crowd falls into the same category. Regardless of how old they are, spending money on mtx is normal because they never knew a world where you just bought a game rather than downloading one onto your phone and putting up with both ads and mtx.
It's like how words like "unalive" have entered common usage - people have gotten so used to obeying what advertisers want on the internet that it's started dictating daily life, especially for younger people.
The unregulated gambling aspect designed to exploit human psychology to target vulnerable people to spend money that they probably can't afford to spend is also a huge issue, but that at least would be easy enough to regulate, if politicians cared enough to do something about it.
Those are the real criminals! With all the good they could have done in today's society, choosing to use their knowledge and training to manipulate people against their best interest is just the worst!
Don't forget that they were hired by companies looking to make a profit off of exploiting the psychology of people and that the blame also lies with those who hired them for those jobs.
The same companies who have fought tooth and nail to prevent regulation to protect those exploited by these practices when politicians have actually cared enough to try to do something about it.
Thank you kindly for your good write-up. If you were to permit it I would like to use excerpts of this in slightly rephrased forms in similar future discussions.
By all means, go right ahead. I simply summarized my own observations and what I've seen other people say over the years.
Vote with your wallet means people with more money get more votes than you do. MTX does not target people at large, they are fishing for the small amount of whales for whom money is no object. It ruins gaming for the rest of us.
There is a reason industries get regulated. Swill milk killed a ton of babies, and sold like hot cakes.
Up to a point. I mean they have to get a large player base still and if by and large gamers just didn't pre-order and buy the latest fucking re-hashed, yearly version of COD, I doubt just the whales would be enough to sustain them since whales only get gratification of pay to win against other people.
I mean look at some of the latest rounds of shitty GaaS. Suicide squad, Marvel avengers. No playerbase, not enough whales to sustain.
MTX is also aiming for kids stealing thier parents credit cards and charging them up. At a minimum they ask ONLY for game credits for Xmas/bdays to burn on games so they have cool skins to brag to friends about.
I played multiple supercell games (coc, bb, cr, be) for years, each, without paying a dime. They were well polished and fun games, and I got to play them for free.
I also really enjoy foetnite. Again, well polished. I play for free.
Will I ever compete at the highest level? No. And omg I'll never own all the skins! Lol But I've had plenty of fun, because other people will pay the game makers for me. This is fantastic, as far as I'm concerned.
Sure, mtx can be implemented terribly, but I've also benefitted from it's implementation as well.
You playing for free illustrates my point perfectly. You are there to provide entertainment for whales who actually pay for the game. The deal is that you get some entertainment of your own so that you stay around. But the game is not made for you, and that becomes apparent every time the owner puts the screws on to extract some more money.
I get your point, but I disagree because they need me for the whales, so the game has to also be made for the non whales as well. The payment system is made for extracting money from whales.
But really I was responding to the claim that it was ruined for me. And I find that to be the exact opposite: I care about having fun playing a well polished game, and now can do that for free. It's like the opposite of being ruined.
I have to agree. The issue is that people keep buying these dogshit live service games. If people didn't buy them then companies wouldn't make them.
Another issue, those people aren't on here. Or reddit. We're preaching to the choir and idk what to do outside of standing outside of a Gamestop and trying to lecture people about MTX, but that seems like a good way to get ignored or beat up.
We failed to hold the line at the goddamn horse armor.
I'm sure there are cases where someone is spending money they shouldn't, or they know better, but we have to acknowledge that a lot of tactics used are the same predatory strategies that take advantage of human addiction. I don't think people should gamble, or bet on sports but that shit is everywhere, and it's normalized. It's no wonder why so many people fall into it because they don't think it's dangerous.
We can scream at people and tell them to stop, but that's not a real solution, at least I don't see how that really works. A predatory studio puts out a game that people want to play, then if it fails because people don't buy enough, they just shut everything down and cancel the content, even when people want it. I think there examples of this happening now.
The „gamer“ label has become sort of redundant given the industry is much bigger than movies and music combined now. They‘re just consumers and no matter what silly decisions some of them make, they need protection from certain practices for the good of all of us. Just blaming a small portion of them doesn‘t help us out of any mess.
Yeah I love Gabi but it hurts that she doesn't even seem to question whether or not she should stop buying these games. Like, I get that you love Pokemon but you acknowledge yourself that this shit isn't going to change if people keep buying this shit.
The gamers?! I don't hear anyone saying they want loot boxes. This is 100 percent the devs and the companies that put all the best loot behind the loot boxes. Good games such as FFXIV, does not.
Lol I take it you're a republican?
Let's blame the consumer for buying something they like, and not the system of capitalism for it's inevitable march to enshittification which happens across all industries amirght?