The spongebob game wasnt so bad. It had like a login bonus but it didnt seem to be too bad But once we got into the lego star wars game the f2p bullshit started. And oh god. This game clearly designed for kids had all the f2p bullshit. Login bonuses. Gridnyness. Multiple in game currencies. The daily/weekly ect missions. The unlockables
But god the racing game was even worse. 100000 things to unlock and basically nothing is by default basically. Sooooooooooo absurdly grindy. And most harrowing of all… i swear to god… 5 seperate in game currencies.
I want to reach out and scream to him “games werent always like this maaaaan”
One of Fortnite’s most insidious cultural influences is that other kids are just about expected to bully “defaults” for not wasting enough money on that hypermonetized piece of trash.
Valve TF2 allowing users to buy hats circa 2008 -------> 2024 and children have gambling addictions that their parents and teachers have little to no resources to cure.
If there’s one thing you can rightfully slam China for is allowing G@mer gacha into their country I would have purged that entire industry and jailed its ringleaders as child predators.
I also blame Overwatch, that was around first and people made fun of players with default skins there too.
I’ve always hated Overwatch, mostly because it was so cynically designed from the start to press every button in possible about the le sexy waifu archetypes that would get sucked in and keep paying for it.
But it’s D I V E R S E in its selection of waifus! Please don’t ask why the cowboy character’s name is now different.
I never got into Overwatch because it just looked like Team Fortress 2 with even more micro transactions. And TF2 is my love/hate game.
In early league of legends I feel there was the opposite culture, where you would get clowned on for using a skin especially if you performed badly
where you would get clowned on for using a skin especially if you performed badly
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzItS5BmUNw
Mechwarrior Online had some solidarity against the “gold Mechs” that were being peddled for hundreds of dollars each; they’d get teamkilled so consistently that it was extremely rare to see one at all after a while.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Kid showed me some of his Fornite skins I think he got them all F2P though
I chipped in with some friends to get my buddy’s kid a gameboy knockoff thingy that has roms of thousands of old games from like nes to ps2 on it. We did it specifically so the kid could have screen time without f2p and mtx skinner box stuff.
You should reach out to him and introduce him to emulation and older games. The benefit is that you can obtain a lot of roms at one time and the system requirements are very low. If you get an HDMI adapter and a controller you can deprogram him out of freemium games.
I’m planning to donate my current laptop to my younger cousins as a “SteamOS-like” machine and a HDMI adapter when they’re old enough and load it with a bunch of games running at 1080p under Vulkan. I could introduce them to pokemon romhacks and shit.
Someone needs to make a prepackaged Linux iso with like, every remotely popular rom and pc game through ps1 era pre set up. It would only be 100 GB or something.
There are already ISOs like that running Batocera out there if you look around.
You wouldn’t have to do that, a torrent tracker would work just as well. There is a “gamer box” Linux iso and it’s called bazzite.gg which you can install on your steam deck which can go up to Nintendo Switch games if its optimized enough.
Are there any where you can get ROMs through the package manager? That would be cool af
He’s 8 and i dont get a lot of time with him because we dont live close, and i also dont have a lot of knowledge about that stuff myself. (I can emulate via pc, but he doesnt have one literally at all. Just an Apple tv and a switch).
He does have switch online so i could maybe at least introduce him to old Nintedo games via that? I just saw the last of him ill see this visit but maybe ill try that next time i visit or if he visits me. Could do a lot if he visits me by emulating via pc and with my large steam library.
Switch Online would at least be a good entry point to emulation. If there’s any possibility at all of like used lenovo thinkpads/their workstation desktops with like a 6th or 7th generation (or higher) chip in them you could (I and many others here would gladly assist too) load it up with a curated retro-romset and you could set up a steam family library to share all your titles with him
Im already in a steam family (and they dont allow multiple right?) So im tied up there but the rest seems possible.
I think back to Charles Entertainment Cheese’s children’s casino when we talk about this kinda thing. It was only better back in the day because they didn’t have the infrastructure to make it worse.
Honestly at this point it’s better to just buy them a PS4 and some old school kid games and remasters then have them accept this as a normal part of recreation. Like my weird paranoid theory is that all this f2p shit targeted at the young is to create a sense of acceptance towards extractive capital infesting every aspect of their daily lives, intentionally or not.
Yeah as I said elsewhere in the thread I wish I had the means to get him some better quality games that dont have this bullshit or at least only minimally do. So far the best solution that ive come up with thats realistic is showing him the old school stuff he can access on Switch online. But he’ll probably still just do that with me and keep doing Fornite on his own lol.
