Can Epic Go strawberry float Themselves?

This could probably be moved to the general microtransactions/lootbox thread, but all this cumulative 'noise' of skins, boxes, battlepasses, microtransactions, preorder bonuses and other stuff is starting to turn me off the vast majority of games. I've basically retreated to a small handful of franchises and genres as all this stuff does nothing for me.

You know you don’t have to buy their bullshit right?

Epic should add skins that change what your building materials look like. Think how much cash that would rake in.

the eponymous bollock wrote:

Gemini73 wrote:

Hime wrote:

Tafdolphin wrote:I just started playing Warframe, a FTP Destiny basically, which with a mere 26 million players isn't quite as big as Fortnite. Still, I stumbled on the below just yesterday:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/warfr ... verviewtab

Yup, $60 for two character classes (which already exist in the game. These are slightly more advanced versions).

I'm not sure whether to be happy or concerned about the rise of whaling in these games. I mean, it keeps it free for the rest of us but these people are obviously getting scammed.

It's a difficult one. I work with someone who spends several hundreds on FUT. I think it's mental but he enjoys it so who am I to tell him any different? Would he be better off like a lot of games to spend that money on games that he will never play?

I suppose if Fortnite is all he ever really plays then I guess from his perspective dropping down several hundred pounds on it is, to him, value for money on his return. You make a good point, Hime. Is spending £28 on a Fortnite skin any different than my putting down £30 on a copy of Rival Schools (PS1) just to sit on the shelf and look nice, particularly when you factor in that if I want to play said game I'll just fire up the emulated version?

Maybe it's just something in me, the environment I was raised or how much I value having money but for me there is a huge difference in buying a game and buying a cosmetic item in a game.

I can't think of a single time in my 20 years of gaming that I have spent money on purely cosmetic DLC, I've bought stuff that includes it, like BOTW and Mario Kart DLC but I was really buying the extra objectives and tracks there. I honestly can't think of a time the skin has been the thing I was investing money for and I think that's because I view it as having inherently no value. It doesn't make me play the game more, it doesn't affect the way I play and it barely makes me enjoy my time with the game any more. I think targeting this stuff mainly at people who's perception of this stuff isn't fully developed is a very shady business practice, especially when you're already making an obscene amount of money.

I know what you mean but really what does it matter what we think? I don't feel that strongly about because at the moment at least it's entirely optical. You can play the entire game of Fortnite without spending a money, that's pretty good if you don't want to spend any money.

I would imagine that wearing that skin is going to make you something of a target. I know I'd try my best to kill anyone wearing it.

Cosmetics do have a subjective impact on gameplay in some fashion. I'm likely to be more tactful in my approach to players wearing their spoils of reaching tier 100 or change course when gliding if say a horde of other players with flashy contrails a making a beeline for the same rooftop.

the eponymous bollock wrote:The above items have just been added to the Fortnite store, one is a character skin the other a glider you float into the match on.

I’d like people to guess how much they cost by posting an amount, they can then look at the spoiler at the end of this post for the actual amount before reacting accordingly.

Let’s see how it goes.

£28 strawberry floating Quid

That is significantly more than I answered! £7 However this is a free game and these are optional cosmetic upgrades. When EA make a paid Star Wars game that has loot boxes they get slated for the business model. Epic have to make money and players don't have to buy these to do well. The only thing they must ensure is that younglings are not exploited.

Unfortunately this is just peak capitalism, people will pay any price for what they perceive to have that value (which is often itself impacted by the price, i.e. it's expensive so it must be good).

I'd be interested to see what people think about comparing to something like sugar for example, which has no nutritional benefit whatsoever to the human body however people will happily spend hundreds of pounds a year on stuff like caster sugar and fizzy drinks yet have no measurable benefit from it. Economically it is pretty much the same need/want mechanic. The vast majority of what we buy is not needed to live well and so cosmetic items in games are an extension of an extension of that (although I would argue that entertainment is something that humans need).

Green Gecko wrote:I'd be interested to see what people think about comparing to something like sugar for example, which has no nutritional benefit whatsoever to the human body however people will happily spend hundreds of pounds a year on stuff like caster sugar and fizzy drinks yet have no measurable benefit from it. Economically it is pretty much the same need/want mechanic. The vast majority of what we buy is not needed to live well and so cosmetic items in games are an extension of an extension of that (although I would argue that entertainment is something that humans need).

What are calories?

Plus, nobody wants cakes that taste like bread.

I actually wanted to get into the concept of 'perceived worth' yesterday but was out and about. It's a fascinating area of psychology really. These skins obviously took effort to create, an artist and a designer and a modeller and a coder worked on getting them into the game. The issue is that when you value the work put into the core game at zero, the game is literally free, under what precepts are you assigning value to that one skin, a representation of a fraction of the work put into the effort behind the game entire?

It is, of course, supply and demand that dominate such discussions but in this case it certainly appears to be the supply that is commanding the demand and not, as is normal, the other way.

Knoyleo wrote:

Green Gecko wrote:I'd be interested to see what people think about comparing to something like sugar for example, which has no nutritional benefit whatsoever to the human body however people will happily spend hundreds of pounds a year on stuff like caster sugar and fizzy drinks yet have no measurable benefit from it. Economically it is pretty much the same need/want mechanic. The vast majority of what we buy is not needed to live well and so cosmetic items in games are an extension of an extension of that (although I would argue that entertainment is something that humans need).

What are calories?

Plus, nobody wants cakes that taste like bread.

Empty calories, I mean literally pure cane sugar in a balanced diet of other stuff. Pleasure is something else entirely.

I think you can probably measure the benefit from the enjoyment it brings if you set about it right.

Green Gecko wrote:

Knoyleo wrote:

Green Gecko wrote:I'd be interested to see what people think about comparing to something like sugar for example, which has no nutritional benefit whatsoever to the human body however people will happily spend hundreds of pounds a year on stuff like caster sugar and fizzy drinks yet have no measurable benefit from it. Economically it is pretty much the same need/want mechanic. The vast majority of what we buy is not needed to live well and so cosmetic items in games are an extension of an extension of that (although I would argue that entertainment is something that humans need).

What are calories?

Plus, nobody wants cakes that taste like bread.

Empty calories, I mean literally pure cane sugar in a balanced diet of other stuff. Pleasure is something else entirely.

This seems like a false equivalency scenario you are suggesting GG.

Cosmetic items like those being debated in this thread make no tangible difference to the game for which they have been purchased, they are literally just a visual bauble popped on top of the exact same mechanics. Sugar, as well as being nutritionally beneficial as a direct source of glucose, has a fundamental impact on the food in which it is used - it alters it in terms of taste, colour, texture etc. It's not just a "cosmetic" item like a Fortnite skin.

There may well be a sensible debate to be had about the need for sugary foods in our diet, and there are plenty of reasons why moderating our sugar intake is a good thing, but to me it doesn't feel like it fits with this topic?

Also we need food to survive and sugar is one of many things that can make that process of eating the food our body requires more enjoyable, nobody NEEDS to play Fortnite!

If the comparison is weak fair enough but I'm not dismissing things like natural sugars in fruit and vegetables, what I'm talking about is adding sugar raw cane caster sugar from a bag like Silver Spoon to something just to make it sky high in terms of sweetness and sugar content.

I suppose cherry on top is a better metaphor, you certainly don't need the cherry but people might pay more if they see a tart with one on. I'll stop peddling it now.

(I do think nobody needs to add sugar to anything however and in that sense it doesn't need to be added if glucose already exists from other ingredients in meals. I mean do people add sugar to their roast vegetables... Erm nope. Many people don't eat desert either or add sugar to tea. But they are unspeakable individuals.)

Came for the cosmetic DLC debate, stayed for the sugar education.

I very rarely pay £28 for an entire game, I certainly wouldn’t pay that for items/costumes.

I’d pay £280 for a bag of raw cane caster sugar though. Mmmmm raw cane caster sugar.

Trelliz wrote:This could probably be moved to the general microtransactions/lootbox thread, but all this cumulative 'noise' of skins, boxes, battlepasses, microtransactions, preorder bonuses and other stuff is starting to turn me off the vast majority of games. I've basically retreated to a small handful of franchises and genres as all this stuff does nothing for me.

Nothing "Micro" about this transaction, eh?

What actually is the rationale behind paying out some of the sums that people do for purely cosmetic items in stuff like Fortnite? Do people really care that much about what stupid hat they are wearing when they kill a stranger in a computer game?

"My victory over LisaSimpson45 will feel all the sweeter because I am wearing this jesters costume and can do a custom taunt when I kill them!"

"Costmetic" items in the real world serve some purpose in terms of what they communicate about someone and acting as social indicators which people use to portray an image, to attract or intrigue others, to indicate belonging to a particular sub group etc. But all of that ultimately relies on some follow up activity - someone see's you are wearing the football shirt of the team you both support and engages you in conversation, someone is dressed the way you like and you try and chat them up etc. In these games there doesn't seem to be scope for that kind of activity so the baubles are literally just here for the sake of being baubles?

Well you make that comparison but here we are talking about it online and that's where the talk happens with streaming, esports and their followers etc. We fill our homes with cosmetic items and we wear expensive clothes somethings which I would also argue we don't need, so where you spend a lot of time and recreation in an online space (people wear fancy clothes to social events etc) some people feel they want to "dress up" really what is the difference we are talking about to justify doing that "in real life". For people online there isn't that difference, it is part of real life and it is happening as it's an intrinsic part of their every day being. I think this idea that things that go on online aren't real and don't happen and don't really matter needs to be let go of because clearly society has changed in that respect.

True it is causing us to talk about it, but in terms of either derision or confusion, there's still no tangible "product" to that.

I'm not necessarily suggesting that what goes on online isn't "real", more I'm questioning whether those additional semi-functional aspects of an otherwise cosmetic item from real life have an equivalent expression online. Like I say if I buy a certain outfit in the "real" world it serves more purpose than just to change my appearance, but I'm not sure it does anything more than that in something like Fortnite. Are two people engaging one another in the game going to have a different experience because one of them is wearing a paid for skin? Are the functional aspects of their encounter going to change in any way? I don't think so. I guess it may cause players to adapt their behaviour to a degree ("I'm going to go after anyone dressed as X in this game because I hate X", "We're both dressed as characters from Y, let's work together!") - but then part of the problem is that the capabilities of these online realities (certainly in the case of something like Fortnite which is fairly streamlined functionally) don't really offer the sort of tools required to properly support this emergent behaviour in a powerful way? Without the ability to effectively communicate how a players cosmetic choice has altered my behaviour as their competitor or companion then how has their actual experience changed? If I kill them because I hate the way they're dressed does that come across as my motivation or as far as they are concerned is it just another random death?

I suppose a "digital world" benefit to cosmetics might be that a video of someone doing something cool in a game like Fortnite might get more views if that player is dressed as something stupid? But that feels like modern culture eating itself in a fairly ridiculous way!