The whales will buy it and satisfy the management who approved this piece of shit price
It’s honestly sad. The whales are just a different form of gambling addicts, the wasted money isn’t even a factor for some people.
I had a roommate who was absolutely a whale, and he would buy expensive skins in multiplayer games because they were expensive and he literally wanted to feel better than others who he thought couldn’t afford the skin. When in almost all situations it’s that they just weren’t idiots like him
Oblivion’s Horse Armor dlc has more worth than this
You can get the whole MCC on sale for less…
Nah. Things like this aren’t meant to have a large appeal. It aims to expoilt the few customer with lack of financial control. ‘Just not buying’ doesn’t really hurt the company since it didn’t really cost anything in the first place. It is (like a scam) designed to filter out financially irresponsibile people and extract as much money as possible from them.
You’d have to convince the diehards, casuals, and especially the ones that are willing (regardless of being able to) to spend money on whatever the company throws their way of this. Way, waaaay easier said than done, unfortunately.
Can’t speak for everyone else, but due to the company’s track record, i didn’t even look at Halo Infinite’s direction since it was announced. Then again, as soon as I heard the multiplayer was Free to Play and seperate from the campaign, yeah…not surprised they pulled something like this.
Your non-participation counts for nothing, versus the minority of people suckered into throwing in arbitrary quantities of money for fuck-all.
Only legislation can fix this. This business model is a scam. Maximum revenue comes from addiction and frustration. If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.
Only legislation will fix this.
If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.
What kind of legislation, though? Loot boxes seem like an easy one to write: gambling is illegal already in a lot of places. When it’s just exploitative greed, I’m not sure how it’s technically so different from charging exorbitant rates for swag at a baseball game or something. Or charging a few thousand bucks for a purse at some high-end fashion retailer.
To be clear: I loathe the FOMO trends in game development, overpriced skins, micro/macro-transactions, and all the “credit/XP boosters” type bullshit. Turning money into ingame currencies to obfuscate actual prices, the general design of games frontloading fun and then squeezing dollars out of you to feel that same high again…I’m just skeptical that there’s anything to do about it from a legal perspective that doesn’t apply to most of the rest of the capitalist enterprises out there. Please though, I want to be wrong about this, so any examples of how to curb some of these excesses would be great.
Stop letting games take real money.
(Not: stop charging money for games. Not: end subscriptions. Not: make games free. I will not be tolerating any bullshit today from people who refuse to acknowledge how “microtransactions” are the topic and the problem.)
All forms of this are just lootboxes with more steps. We all finally admit lootboxes are bullshit, right? Even the most diehard kneejerk ‘but it’s cosmetic!’ yeahbutts are quick to say some it’s not awful, like lootboxes. But they’re all just gentler ways of taking unlimited quantities of your actual money.
Nothing inside a video game should cost money.
It’s a fucking game. It’s not real.
The game itself can and should cost money - the rise of allegedly-free wallet siphons proves how lucrative that bullshit is. They don’t need your money up-front; they’ll get more from wearing you down. But the fact the same bullshit is in flagship AAA games, including some which want to charge ninety goddamn dollars up-front, and have a subscription, proves they can take you both ways, because you don’t really have a choice. This shit is in everything. It is infecting the entire medium, and making the path to maximum revenue a matter of addiction and frustration. We were never going to shop our way out of it. We have to tell the whole industry it’s simply not allowed.
You don’t think game development catered specifically for whales is a problem?
Only legislation will fix this.
Legislation can’t fix stupid. We have to let people be able to hurt themselves or we are no better than slaves. Because at that point gov is dictating every aspect of our lives. Freedom isn’t free from consequences, but it’s worth it.
Victim-blaming, dehumanization, and libertarian twaddle, all in one comment. Aren’t you a winner. Shoo.
Avoids commenting on the actual issue and resorts to name-calling. You’ve convinced me!
Only legislation will fix this.
You say this for everything, holy shit man.
“Only legislation will fix this” was your response to WoW charging extra for early access, to Mortal Kombat having paid fatalities, to a Disney game not being free-to-play when it leaves early access, to a translation error from a developer who does not speak English and/or the developer adding paid DLC to their $20 game, to a free mobile game having in-app purchases.
I’m really starting to think that you truly believe game developers should perform unpaid labor.
‘You say this every time a product is treated like a service! Make up your mind!!!’
Most of those aren’t even different situations - they’re all blatantly about charging real money inside video games. Just like this. “Microtransactions” are intolerable bullshit, and they’re in fucking everything.
I say this a lot because IT’S IN EVERYTHING. Hello, and welcome to the point! This greedy exploitation is the dominant strategy. It sucks for everyone, customers and developers alike, because you can either become this kind of (eugh) “live service,” or make less money than the suits expect. So every genre, every price point, fuckin’ single-player games, will grow this rot, and then try to soak you for unlimited quantities of real-life currency.
This needs to stop. There is only one way that happens.