this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2024
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Manipulating players into paying unbounded quantities of real money for essentially nothing is an abuse, whether or not that casino has a cover charge. If you can grind something for free or pay one dollar, the entire product exists to harass you into paying that dollar, as often as you will tolerate.
There is no ethical form of this. Games make you value arbitrary nonsense - that is what makes them games. $600 scimitar bundles inside a full-price game are not different from whatever hamburger-priced hat you're eager to defend; they're just smaller. The problem is identical. Any successful example is optimized for addiction and frustration. They are deliberately unsatisfying, after a period coaxing you into habits and expectations, so they can dangle the button that costs a dollar to press, and make you feel good again every time you press it. That's why the product is "free." That's why the product exists. All that art and gameplay shit is bait on the hook.
That is just plain wrong.
Addiction I guess but frustration definitely not necessarily.
There are countless examples of highly successful games that do not monetize like that.
You can happily play PoE for thousands of hours without paying a penny; if you want to get into trading drop like 20 bucks for some stash tabs and you are ready to go again for absolutely any content the game has to offer.
CS or LoL also work just fine for f2p players.
And I say that as a player that fucking hates the new generation of soulless live service games.
Manufactured discontent is the only reason these games make money. They're not a charity. They goad you into wanting whatever costs money. You can say no, but they try their absolute damnedest to squeeze out a yes.
Success here is inseparable from wringing money out of players using any means necessary. Acting polite and gentle is just another tactic. You are still being manipulated.
There's no game that's just so gosh-darn enoyable that people freely throw four billion dollars at it, out of the goodness of their hearts. They get roped in and ground down. They brag about how many thousands of hours they've spent not being addicted. They insist they chose to buy the stuff that's shoved in their face on every load screen and round summary. Obviously they feel no obligation whatsoever toward mere cosmetics, but oh wow look how fancy that is, it super sucks you don't have one of those.
Like, I don't know what a "stash tab" is, but I bet if I look it up, it's gonna be added functionality that's objectively missing from the default version of the game, and that it costs the company approximately nothing. (Ugh, I shouldn't have actually looked it up. That whole page is gross.) You obviously want that. It is withheld from you. Maybe not exclusively for real money - but gosh, what a lot of grinding it'd take, if you don't fork over real money. Maybe just this once... right?
No, still wrong.
Obviously it is something that is not given to you for free.
It is a product and the developers/publishers are doing business after all.
And yes Sherlock, it is qol functionality that people playing the endgame might want and that is not included in the free version of the game.
But every functionality that any player ever needs is available for far less than what any other AAA title costs up front.
PoE is mainly financed by purely cosmetic supporter packs and whales.
Is that much more ethical than what you described? Maybe not.
But it sure as hell is not banking on frustrating the average user and thus a completely different form of monetization than the one that you just doubled down on insisting is the only one there is.
So again as I said, you are just plain wrong.
Oh and in CS I don't think you can buy any functionality at all.
Only cosmetics, that don't do anything for you in the game.
It's a charge. It's neither a product nor a service. The game is a product. Connectivity is a service. Charging an actual dollar for imaginary gems is a scam.
Stop using this industry-wide problem as an excuse for personal insults.
And what? Oh right, the victims being taken for thousands of dollars, each, for a game that's allegedly free. Mostly over the thing people insist nobody is interested in, so it's fine if each thing costs as much as a whole-ass indie game, and there's ten thousand.
Withholding that is frustration. You are made to want it. Once upon a time, choosing how you looked in a video game was just part of the fucking game.
Withholding quality-of-life is obviously frustration. There is a better version of the game, dangled in front of you, constantly. The entire rest of the game exists to nudge you against that grindstone.
CS is a hilarious example because of how insane the market is for shit you helpfully point out has no gameplay value. It's almost like there's other levers for influencing player desires! Jealousy, fear of missing out, basic peacocking - all of these things are exploited to maximum effect. Tweaking people's brains is how games work, and this business model is slapping a price tag on that direct manipulation.
You comment and comment and explain and explain shit that everyone already knows.
It is like you just recently learned what marketing is and now you feel like you know some big secret.
Just to make it short.
Every product in the world is marketed in a way to motivate consumers to buy.
That is not inherently immoral.
You said every successful game monetizes by maximizing addiction and frustration.
I have proven you wrong by naming games that just DO NOT MAXIMIZE FRUSTRATION.
Yeah off course even those games dangle stuff in front of you that you are supposed to buy.
That's the whole business model of f2p games.
But there are different ways to get to the players money.
There are those that indeed trigger responses to frustration.
This is absolutely prevalent in mobile games or even those million deckbuilder games.
But there just are also games that use other ways to make players buy mtx.
Again, you can play PoE, LoL, CS and many other games for literal thousands of hours without ever getting coaxed into frustrating barriers like a Diablo Immortals would do to players.
You said there aren't. So you were wrong.
So have fun running around with a goalpost in your hand, I am done.
As if frustration can only mean getting big mad at gameplay. Not, I dunno, the constant dissatisfaction and denial I've consistently described at such length that you roll your eyes at how often I keep explaining what I fucking meant the entire time.
You might as well fixate on "addiction" by saying video games can't cause chemical withdrawal.
Your efforts in these games are ineffectual and discouraging toward the parts that cost money. Doesn't matter how the game plays - it only exists to keep you looking at those things you don't have. Yes - that is the whole business model of these games. That's why they need to die.