I want to shed light on a tactic that involves collecting data as you play, feeding this data into complex algorithms and models that then alter the rules of your game under the hood to optimize spending opportunities.
I want to shed light on a tactic that involves collecting data as you play, feeding this data into complex algorithms and models that then alter the rules of your game under the hood to optimize spending opportunities.
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.
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.
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.