this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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I don't "delight in their exploitation", I am one of the people who buy this stuff.
I am not a victim just because you decide I am. I have some say in this.
So hell yeah, bait me, daddy. To this day, Dragon Ball FighterZ is probably the best gaming experience I've ever had. I was there at ground floor, bought every character, watched every tournament, got competitive. I ended up with three copies of the game, all 100%-ed and with hundreds of hours of play.
And the only thing that bums me out is that they had to bail out of it early, presumably to go make Marvel Tokon.
I will be on ground floor for Tokon, and I will be funding that mouse engine with a bunch of piecemeal cash, I'm sure.
And I need you to listen to me when I tell you that it's going to be on purpose, that I'm not a victim, that I hope that treadmill lasts for a good long while and that the game is good enough to support it.
So please spare me the benevolent outrage. I don't need your protection from my own taste. I would very much appreciate an offline-playable version of the game I can buy with all the DLC down the line, like I did for Marvel vs Capcom 3 or Street Fighter IV, and thanks to the weirdly wholesome interaction between developers and the FGC I may actually get that at some point to support tournament play. But otherwise? Nobody is complaining. You can go save somebody else.
And hey, I say this being a big fan of single player games, and a big supporter of physical media and game preservation. But you come here to tell me that some of my favourite games —and I'm talking game-changing experiences I cherish deeply— should have been illegal and I just don't know better? Yeah, not gonna fly, Hillary.
Uh huh.
Nope, pulling the chute on this conversation.
That's somehow worse than the continued lying about banning games when I am talking about a bu-si-ness mo-dellll. Go fuck your strawman alone.
We're saying the games we like couldn't exist without the business models you want to ban. How does something like Dragon Ball FighterZ continue to expand if you are forbidding them from selling anything that would make character expansions possible?
If you want to say "nothing should cost money ever", then the natural outcome of that is that we just don't get new characters anymore. In effect, you are banning these games by making it impossible for them to exist like this.
Stop lying about what I said. "Nothing inside a video game" does not mean "nothing ever."
And you know goddamn well that fighting games had incremental re-releases, decades before this abuse was possible.
Or, sell actual expansions. You want characters to cost twenty bucks each? Fine, sell that like a game, not like a fucking hat. If it's on your hard drive, in your game, you already fucking have it, and charging real money is a scam.
Or, if you want continuing revenue for an online service - make it a service. Sell subscriptions. Oh sorry, do people not like that? Yeah no shit, because it's up-front about how much it costs, rather than luring people in and gouging them for untold sums.
Or, a game comes out, and plainly exists, and doesn't become the version that's squeezed a billion dollars out of ten percent of players over ten years. Oh well! TF2 without this bullshit would still be TF2. People would still be playing 2fort, forever, the same way they're still doing Ryu vs Ken on Street Fighter 2 Turbo. I do not respect the dishonest conflation of 'FighterZ doesn't get to expand forever' with 'FighterZ would be banned.'
Zero thought for all the games that genuinely don't exist, because publishers killed projects to demand live-service flops. Zero thought for all the novel software people could have spent money on, instead of dropping hundreds in one game that barely changes year-to-year. You're stuck on what exists, as if any change would mean all of it disappears, and you're magically robbed of that past.
Nah, some thoughts.
But not everything is black and white. And in the spectrum of grey there are plenty of in-game sales that are better than the alternative.
Again, I would much rather buy the characters one by one and have the all-in-one box come out later than have to wait for the big box and pay full price for it.
I am genuinely baffled about why you think that's worse than "pay me for the game every month or I take it away". I am even more baffled by how you think that distinction is somehow logical beyond personal preference. Your being adamant about this doesn't make it make sense.
Charging for anything inside a game is like applying a dollar value to soccer goals. It's a category error, exploited for profit. I am fundamentally opposed to this system of manipulating people into wanting arbitrary nonsense and then charging actual money for it. Your glib endorsement of that manipulation does not make it rational.
And this is the shallow end. Characters, you can almost sorta kinda argue, as sloppy expansions. Skins? Fuck off. A bottomless pit of manufactured discontent. Plainly sufficient to wring billions out of people for a game that's "free." Or for a game that's forty fucking dollars and will gladly take another hundred dollars every single year. And characters in a 1v1 fighter are drastically different from MOBA bullshit, where having the wrong options can ruin an hour of four other people's lives.
People are rightly incensed by efforts to charge $80 to own one video game.
This is an entire market of games where you can pay $1000 and still not have the whole thing.
Something's fucky.
Skins are fine. They are entirely optional. Something existing doesn't mean you must own it.
That's the part where we're not going to agree. Well, the maximalist holier-than-thou stance in general. But otherwise, you see things existing as an affront to you personally. This skin was made by someone and put in the game, and so I'm entitled to it, so it either shouldn't exist or it should be mine.
That just doesn't track. I don't feel any more entitled to some random bikini costume than I do to some random statue bundled with a collector's edition. It's faff some people may want, but I'm not being attacked because somebody is buying and selling collector's edition of Cyberpunk for 200 bucks, just like way I'm not attacked by someone buying some in-game costume.
Also, you do know pro football players get bonuses per goal, right? That comparison means different things depending on whether you know that and both are confusing.
Woe betide the poor bikini artist!
Nevermind their efforts were directed that way so the publisher could rake in hundreds of dollars, per year, for what's obviously the least impactful element of the game. Costumes would normally be an unremarkable detail - some callbacks, some easter eggs, whatever - but now they cost more than the rest of the fucking game.
Do you imagine they took more effort than the rest of the fucking game? Like the horny bonus costumes are worth more than all the effort spent on balance, and netcode, and designing the actual characters. I'll assume not, and underline: that's the total disconnect between price and value. That's the predatory exploitation, laid bare.
Those skins are the entire reason the game exists. That's what makes all the money. Street Fighter has been reduced to bait on that hook. And it still costs forty fucking dollars.
This subject has the most aggressively off-topic replies. 'There's different forms of value. Some are artificial. You can't just buy more soccer goals.' 'Uh--! But--!' No.
There is no exploitation in charging different prices for different things. Prices aren't based on how much a thing costs to make, they're based on how much people are willing to pay for it. Welcome to supply and demand.
Cosmetics are (relatively) cheap to make and sold at a high margin because they are subsidizing a game that is sold at very low price. Turns out the sticker price in DBFZ with its what, 24 characters at launch is twenty bucks or so cheaper than good old Street Fighter 2 with its eight characters.
There are a bunch of ways we've been shaving cost from games to keep that somewhat artificial price point. Selling people who are willing to spend more a bunch of non-game-relevant stuff at a higher margin is just one of them. You are extremely outraged by this for some reason, I am very glad.
Because yeah, sure, I spent like 200 bucks in my copy of the game (probably a bit more, I got the Switch version, too) and I subsidized a number of more casual players that only bought the base game.
That's cool. I get more people to play against and they get a cheaper game up front. I played that game for 500 to 1000 hours, I spent 3-5 cents per hour. I have no regrets. Didn't even have to pay a subscription for it, my physical version will live forever and I can still play my Steam copy with forty-plus characters.
You are commited to being mad about this on our behalf, turns out us spenders don't need your protection. If you don't like it, that's fine. You don't have to get it. We'll pick up your slack.
Which is not to say everything is fair game or that there aren't predatory practices at play in gaming. It's to say you're obscuring those by crying wolf because you like being mad about things and have fixated on this in particular to an unreasonable degree.
I fundamentally disagree with your stance that any form of premium content is 'predatory'. You know what you're buying, and no one's putting a gun to your head forcing you to buy it. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's predatory.
Predatory is when gambling-based business models obfuscate true costs and result in players literally financially ruining themselves. Predatory is when FOMO strategies are aggressively pushed to pressure consumers into buying things they otherwise wouldn't. Predatory is when subscription services keep players locked into an ecosystem, with the threat that they'll lose everything if they stop paying (and it's still extremely weird to me that you called this better).
If you want to go after that kind of stuff, I would be with you. But calling everything predatory actually just makes it harder to talk about real problems. You are ruining this word.
Scams work by choice. Putting a gun to someone's head is a mugging. Scams, you walk into freely, and still get robbed. You don't quite get nothing... but for the money, you don't get much.
What game could sell for $130, on sale, and be taken seriously? That shit only works because breaking it up into little pieces obfuscates the total cost. Same shit as "five easy payments!" in TV infomercials.
And $130 is the low, low end. So many of these games, especially the ones that slog on for years, have thousands of dollars in stupid shit you can blow your money on. Gambling makes it worse - but worse isn't necessary, for it to be bad.
Can we please go one interaction without you lying to me about my own opinions? I called skins predatory. Because Jesus Christ, have you seen Fortnite? They could ditch whatever mechanisms you consider beyond-the-pale, and the whole game would still exist as a funnel to exchange your whole wallet in exchange for playable references.
I will again grant that this is the gentle end of the spectrum. But it's all the same spectrum. There's no hard cutoffs between thirty-seven characters at five bucks apiece, and pay-to-win weapon unlocks. Grinding instead would be worse. It's even less like an actual product. All incentives point straight toward maximum revenue through engineered frustration.
Can you go one interaction without the excessively hostile tone?
We started this conversation because you said that the act of selling anything at all in games is predatory.
I literally didn't. I said it's inseparable from this business model, eight hours later. The comment you're replying to explains how it's all one spectrum - including the things you, personally, would call predatory. The only specific examples I've given are skins and skip-the-grind.
What I get in response is 'do you still beat your wife?' over the apparent impossibility of updates that already happened, and repeated misrepresentations of how this thread started. You have quoted me directly and then been wrong in the next comment. I sound aggravated because you've been aggravating.
Those aren't the games we're talking about. We're talking about DBFZ, an example of fixed DLC being sold at a reasonable price, which you want to dishonestly conflate with more predatory models in order to say that nothing should be sold ever.
"We" includes the guy saying "skins are fine," in reply to the same comment.
Quick search, and... yeah FighterZ specifically still has a $60 base price, a $95 version with some annual pass, and a $110 version with additional content not covered by the pass... and several eyebrow-raising "stamps." There's three hundred of those. They seem to be static character images? They cost several dollars each. So do the voice packs. Music's $15 per pack. Assuming - assuming - the character bundles are cheaper, and include everybody, there's also $80 of them.
So you can definitely spend at least $200 and still be tickled for a deluge of whateverthefuck stamps are for.
Two of those character unlocks were day-one. Not quite the obvious scam of on-disc DLC, but still pretty fuckin' blatant. 'Hey thanks for buying our game, and extra-buying the exclusive preorder bullshit... saaay, you didn't want the powered-up versions of these popular characters, did you? Well don't be a freeloader, pay up.'
If I buy the game, right now, all of those characters are in the game... but I don't get them. I can get my ass kicked by them. But I can't select them. Not until I pony up at least double the price of the actual game. And then apparently I'll be subject to the same predatory bullshit for some JPEGs in chat. (If all characters are unlockable through gameplay, but you can 'pay to skip the grind,' that is predatory bullshit.)
This game is one of the less skeezy examples, and they still manage to turn an unremarkable amount of content into an obscene total price. It's on sale on Steam, and it still costs $130. 'But you can pay less up-front!' is the problem.
Man, you really should play the game if you're trying to be mad about the additional content. It's really good and it's ten bucks on sale right now. Forty to get all the extra content. Well worth it.
The stamps are mostly premium edition filler. There are hundreds in the base game and nobody is particularly mad at the three jpegs they try to sell for two bucks as a way to pretend they added two bucks of value to your premium bundle.
The music pack is pretty solid, though. Lots of licensed anime music. Can't argue with blasting out Solid State Scouter when playing with Bardock. Just... remember to disable it if you're going to stream the game, you will get dinged for copyright infringement on Youtube. You want to get mad about something? How about selling people music as part of a game and then accusing them of infringement for streaming the game they paid for? How silly is that?
'I consider this game's business model fundamentally intolerable, and its total price divorced from reality.'
'So why aren't you playing it?'
You are not a serious person.
Who said "why aren't you playing it"? I said you should play it. Very different things.
I know why you're not playing it. It's because you're a sourpuss that doesn't like good games and does like being angry on the Internet.
I'm saying you should change that and play good games. Don't even need to spend hundreds on them. Just throw a tenner at them on sale, give them a look, maybe.
Also, and I say this with utmost sincerity, I am not a serious person. Wish I was even less serious. I'm a bit too stiff for comfort, really.
This is trolling.
It'd be fine if we never talk again.
You know the real problem with this conversation?
It is not, and everything I said is sincere and honest.
I mean, unless it's a confession, which I guess I could believe.
Yes, optional skins are fine. I agree with that statement.
This is a good thing, because it means that you can still remain compatible with any opponent even if you choose to stay on the base game. The alternative was the old model where you HAD to buy every upgrade from Street Fighter IV to Super Street Fighter IV to Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition to Ultra Street Fighter IV, or else you were left behind and could no longer play with the rest of the playerbase that moved on to the latest edition.
Would you rather have that be mandatory? Is that the model you want to go back to?
Skins are predatory bullshit. Skins are surely the majority of this abuse, by revenue. Skins are the easiest way to charge $1000 and still give someone a fraction of the content in one video game. Skins aren't trivial to create... but you sure can crank 'em out.
The model I want to go back to is where buying the game means you get the whole god damn game. Letting people have content, but not use it, is inseparable from anything you'd acknowledge as predatory. We can try to split those hairs, and we would fail. Nothing short of addressing the business model will solve those problem.
The only reason this bullshit can even sound defensible is that Capcom used to be even worse. Like if they sent a guy to your house to take a hammer to your cartridge, and now you can pay him five bucks at the door. Is that better? Probably. Is it tolerable? Nope.
Imagine if this applied to literal versions. 1.1 drops, with bug fixes for save corruption and some balance tweaks, and Steam wants another ten bucks for it. Would you respect if someone scoffed, 'do you want them to make you buy the whole game again?' Plainly not. Incremental changes to the game you already bought... should just go in the game you already fucking bought... because you already fucking bought it.
You didn't answer the question.
It's a good thing that this model allows them a source of revenue to develop more content, while still being able to offer patches for free so that players on the base game still get to enjoy compatibility. That's good. The alternative is we either break compatibility, or the content doesn't get made at all since you don't seem to want anyone to get paid to make it.
I did. I just didn't give you the clean yes-or-no you're prepared to posture about.
Do you have object permanence?
Because you keep pretending we didn't go over the obvious alternatives, repeatedly. You forgot your own examples include games that did not have this business model, but still plainly got made, and had major updates, and took a shitload of your money.
Do you honestly not know the difference between "nothing inside a video game should cost real money" and "everything should be free?" Because that impossible confusion would explain a lot of this conversation.
I know you understand charging money for things inside a game can be abusive. You have no trouble calling gambling or FOMO "predatory." Would you respect someone telling you, that just means you don't want those games made? Fortnite, banned! Call of Duty, deleted! Never made it past 1.0! How much of that shit would you take, from someone insisting "at least it's not pay-to-win?" Pay-to-win is worse, surely. So anything less abusive than that must be fine. And if you don't respect all the money developers get from pay-to-win, you must want them to to starve.
If I ask you a yes-or-no question, and you say 'nuh-uh', you did not answer the question. In fact, you haven't answered a single question I've ever tried to ask you over the course of this conversation.
Do you play competitive fighting games at all? Do you know anything at all of this world?
Do you seriously think having to pay for every edition of SF2 and SF4 separately is somehow better than being able to continue playing against anyone even with the base game?
Should the games I know and love be able to exist in the form that made them the games I know and love?
No, I gave you an example of a game that broke compatibility and was widely criticized for doing so. It is not a model that we should ever go back to, no one else in the world besides you likes that. The new model is better because it preserves compatibility. Do you understand the point I am making here?
Yes, sometimes some things can be. But you're arguing that everything is, and that is what I disagree with. And I feel that by being so aggressive towards things that are perfectly reasonable, you only end up making it harder to talk about real problems.
Are we still pretending that paying for whole editions doesn't serve the same function? Are we still ignoring subscriptions because they make you feel icky? Are we still not acknowledging games that get updated for years, to keep sales up, and then have sequels?
Well there's one question answered, albeit still on the basis of 'ick.' It existed - it was profitable - but we can't do it ever again because that's the same as a whole existing game being banned. Blah blah blah.
I understand that compatibility is preferable. I am telling you it's not worth preserving this business model. This is the gentlest this business model could possibly be, and it has still created a typical 1v1 with a total price that's fucking bonkers.
Compatibility is also possible through the just-update-the-damn-game model. Like how nobody charges five bucks for improved netcode. That also costs money to create, and is surely a key part of improving past the initial version. Funny how it's just taken for granted as part of the game you already bought.
We can't go back to an objectively worse model because no consumer in the world besides you would be okay with it now that a better model is possible. You cannot be serious trying to say you think we'd ever go backwards.
The current model is updating the game. Everyone gets to play the latest update even if you do not pay for the DLC.
I am also still baffled that you can somehow claim with a straight face that subscriptions are better. Subscriptions are a lock-in model that threaten you with losing everything as soon as you stop paying, so you'll have to keep paying forever to keep your game. If anything in this conversation is predatory, it's subscriptions!
'Stop calling everything predatory, you're killing the word!'
I didn't call everything pr--
'You know what's predatory? Paying for services!'
I'm out.
Please explain to me how a lock-in model that forces you to keep paying forever in order to keep what you already paid for is better than just being able to buy something once and have it.
Of course I know, I know how much it fucking sucked! No one wants to go back to that!
You'd rather spend $60 on Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, then spend $60 on Street Fighter II': Champion Edition, then spend $60 on Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting, then spend $60 on Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers, then spend $60 on Super Street Fighter II Turbo?
That's better to you than being able to get the patches for free, with the option of buying characters at a reasonable price, all while still retaining compatibility with opponents on the latest version even if you don't spend a dime?
How is that better? How?
No, no I don't like that! I would much rather buy a character once than have to subscribe to them forever! If I buy a character I get to keep them, if I subscribe I don't. And I'm not getting gouged, I know what the price tag is. If anything, a subscription is gouging because I have to keep paying again and again in order to keep what I should've only had to pay for once.
I'm actually baffled that you're seriously trying to suggest subscriptions as a better alternative. Like... seriously? Really?
FighterZ as we know it would not exist in your world. In your world, it'd just be the 1.0 base game and that'd be it, but I know you know we're talking about what FighterZ was able to become over the course of its lifespan thanks to DLC.
You're taking this needlessly aggressive tone accusing us of misconstruing you, but I know you know damn well what we're saying here while you keep misconstruing us. Don't accuse me of being dishonest when you're playing dumb like this.
Subscriptions are honest. Like actual sales - where you get a thing you didn't have, in exchange for money. Paying money, to be allowed to use part of the game you already have, is not a sale.
SF6 fucking launched with $120 in DLC. Like yeah, you bought the game, at full price... but fuck you, pay us again. Breaking up the fuckening into individual characters, trickled out over years, is psychological manipulation to disguise that abuse.
... the fact you can pay hundreds of dollars and still not have all of a 1v1 fighting game is not made problematic through mystery. No shit you can see the price tag. That price is obscene. Past abuses being worse is no kind of excuse.
I swear to god, Capcom could charge the price of a whole game for each new character bundle, and there'd still be people up my ass about how it must be fine because it was the same in the 90s. You know how I know? Because they do. Annual character passes are $30! Does that get you everything that comes out, that year? Does it, fuck.
Of course you do, because it's what that paragraph was about. How am I the one "playing dumb?" You're still insisting there's no way a game could be updated - aside from the other two ways you don't like! - so that's the same as the game being banned. Because saying it's banned sounds really bad, and serious, and is totally the same thing as saying Capcom doesn't need real negotiable currency in order to change the color of a character's pants.
But hey, this is only the shallow end of a business model that's turning the games industry into a frustration-based casino. Why worry?
DLC is honest. I get a thing in exchange for money. I know what the price tag is, and I'm happy to pay what I think is a fair price. And I only pay once to keep the thing I paid for, unlike a subscription.
Let me just cut straight past all your deflecting. Do you think that the final version of DBFZ, with all of its DLC, sold at its price, should be able to exist in this form?
I'm not participating in your all-or-nothing hypothetical. We just discussed how this exact game could have emerged without this exact business model.
And the version of the game with all the damn characters is the version where you had to keep paying to get all the damn characters.
If you mean, from today onward, should the game be priced piecemeal on Steam, then no. But it doesn't magically revert to its launch state. I want them to sell the whole game... like regular. This is not a sprawling MMO. There's not terabytes of content. It's a 1v1 fighter with like thirty characters. If Arc honestly thinks the damn thing should be $130 when everything's 70% off, let them stick that single price on it, and good fucking luck.
I don't think you understand how much work it takes to design and balance that many characters in a serious competitive fighting game. Serious question, do you play competitive fighters at all, do you know anything about how they work?
In fact, the best way to ensure they're all polished is to start small and expand incrementally over time. This is the right model for a competitive fighter. You're deliberately ignoring the path to get from point A to point B if you think that in your world it would just be the final version right away. I'm saying that in your world, the fighting games I know and love would not be the games that I know and love.
Personally, my favorite game of all time is Skullgirls, and they have been very open and transparent about all the expenses involved in developing a much smaller cast. Look up their finances, look up how long it took their small team to get from the eight characters at launch to what they have today. And I'm very happy with every cent I spent on that game, they didn't scam me by offering more of my favorite game. This is a game that has entertained me for a decade. Even if I count all the money I've spent on traveling to tournaments, which is far more than I spent on the game, it's still quite possibly the most efficient form of entertainment I've ever gotten my money's worth from.
Can I have the games that I know and love, in the format that allowed them to be the games that I know and love? There is no third option here.
Who are you talking to?
We just discussed how to incrementally build a game, without this specific business model. I am only against the business model. Do you know how to address that, without slapfighting a strawman? 'Game design is hard' doesn't excuse this creeping systemic abuse.
Again: this is the low end, and it still expects $130 for an eight-year-old 1v1 fighter. 70% off. This business model inflates prices to the absurd extremes, even when it's not an antipattern vortex.
I'm talking to you. You're living in fantasy land claiming these games could be the exact same thing without the business model that made them possible. They would not.
Can I have the games that I know and love, in the format that allowed them to be the games that I know and love? There is no third option here.
We don't have to leave your stated examples to find disproof of your pet dichotomy. SF4 had the same kind of evolution while selling versions like they still came on cartridges. It's possible. You just don't like it.
Unless you mean one single byte of FighterZ being different would be a completely different game, in which case, just, shut up. You keep trying to treat any change what-so-ever as equivalent to the whole game ceasing to exist. That's horseshit. You need to stop.
I already told you that SF4 is exactly what people don't want to go back to. The game was widely criticized for the fact that you had to buy every upgrade or be left behind. You might be the only person in the world who thinks that's better than what we have now.
By the way, despite characters not being DLC when they should've been, SF4 did sell costume DLC, which you seem to think is the worst thing ever. IIRC, the kicker with SF4's costumes is that your opponent couldn't see them unless they also bought the costumes, and that was also something people disliked because they didn't want to buy costumes no one will see.
That is what it means, to sell content. That is what actual expansions are. This song-and-dance where you have the whole game, but you're not allowed to really have the whole game, is inseparable from everything you would call predatory. It's only a matter of degrees.
One of the several alternatives you've repeatedly ignored is that these additions can be added to the game people already bought. Surprisingly, this does not involve slave labor for artists, because games that stay popular keep selling more copies. Do they make as much money? No. But it turns out maximum corporate revenue is not a guideline for ethics.
It is not inseparable from predatory, because it is not predatory to begin with.
The idea that they should just make all DLC free is not a viable alternative.
'This is the gentle end of a spectrum where the far end is clearly predatory.' 'So this is predatory?'
Fucking aggravating.
Is DBFZ predatory or not?
Hey, if latching on to the jokes helps you ignore the point be my guest, but the point stands with or without your acknowledgement.