Otherwise you have to sell new products to make new money. You can make a sequel, or a no-kidding expansion, instead of charging ten actual dollars to let your character wear a hat that’s already on your god-damn hard drive.
Or… you can make another game. This era dragging out games for ten years is a bizarre blip that’s only maximizing their investment in antipattern suck-zones with instant access to your wallet.
Zero respect for ‘people who rightly despise this also secretly crave it.’ Cram that garbage.
None of this is about what I like. Charging money in games is a scam. Games make you value arbitrary nonsense - that is what makes them games. There is no intrinsic economic value to putting balls through hoops or clicking on heads. The exchange rate between enchanted scimitars and real-life hamburgers is nonexistent. It’s a category error.
This abusive business model is half the industry, by revenue. It’s in every genre, on every platform, at every price point. If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else. Only legislation will fix this.
I’d argue subscription is seen as very similar to micro transactions, although I can see that one is capped and other is not, so maybe subscription is less predatory
Charging repeatedly for local software or… using your car battery… is an intolerable abuse. But MMOs are plainly a real service, with simple ongoing costs, and new content you access by playing the damn game.
And even MMOs are pulling this shit. WoW wanted $90 for a magic horse that’s also an auction house. The entire base game costs less than that one fucking object inside the game. This is fundamentally different, and obviously worse, and it has infected ev-er-y-thing.
Subscriptions. Y’know - like a service?
Otherwise you have to sell new products to make new money. You can make a sequel, or a no-kidding expansion, instead of charging ten actual dollars to let your character wear a hat that’s already on your god-damn hard drive.
Or… you can make another game. This era dragging out games for ten years is a bizarre blip that’s only maximizing their investment in antipattern suck-zones with instant access to your wallet.
Zero respect for ‘people who rightly despise this also secretly crave it.’ Cram that garbage.
None of this is about what I like. Charging money in games is a scam. Games make you value arbitrary nonsense - that is what makes them games. There is no intrinsic economic value to putting balls through hoops or clicking on heads. The exchange rate between enchanted scimitars and real-life hamburgers is nonexistent. It’s a category error.
This abusive business model is half the industry, by revenue. It’s in every genre, on every platform, at every price point. If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else. Only legislation will fix this.
I’d argue subscription is seen as very similar to micro transactions, although I can see that one is capped and other is not, so maybe subscription is less predatory
Charging repeatedly for local software or… using your car battery… is an intolerable abuse. But MMOs are plainly a real service, with simple ongoing costs, and new content you access by playing the damn game.
And even MMOs are pulling this shit. WoW wanted $90 for a magic horse that’s also an auction house. The entire base game costs less than that one fucking object inside the game. This is fundamentally different, and obviously worse, and it has infected ev-er-y-thing.