Hime wrote:The last point was that we might not think much of F2P games but if it allows all children to be able to play together then that is a good thing. I would imagine the cases of bullying over Fortnite costumes are very much the exception. Similarly, those addicted to buying cosmetic items (strictly cosmetic here, not blind boxes) are the outliers and not representative of most who play games with optional items for purchase.
I imagine that's the case too for overt "lol look at this povvo they don't have the latest skins" pressure, but these kinds of games are built on more subtle internal FOMO pressure, getting you to bully yourself into buying the latest shiny shiny to keep up with everyone else who is having more fun as a result etc. I know this is basic marketing 101 but combine that with the lootboxes (which is where a lot of the cosmetics reside in many games, not just Fortnite here) and you get unregulated promotion of gambling-like mechanisms to children, which is perhaps the insidious core of this whole torrid business.
Hime wrote:I get your point about having the option to do something with physical items but I believe most of what we're discussing are seen as disposable, so by their nature they become worthless. You could argue that certain videogames have been the same for some time now, how much is a copy of FIFA/NBA 2K, Pro Evo, etc worth two years after release? Yes they technically can be sold or traded but their worth is essentially nothing.
I suppose the point I was trying to make was that in these closed one-way systems it is very easy to take things further - the idea of getting "duplicates" in your lootboxes. Surely it would be easy to quickly check what people have when one is opened and remove them from the loot table on the fly, but then eventually people would get enough from a particular box to stop buying keys, which is the exact opposite of what they want to happen. This a deliberately created problem framed as some universal inevitability.
Hime wrote:It might not be ideal but I don't think you can expect games to be supported for months and years after release based solely on one off sales. It's just a shame devs can't stop being so greedy and charge such outrageous amounts for digital items, there are certainly times I've thought about buying something and just thought "actually, strawberry float you" when I've seen the prices.
Not all games have to be; another example of reframing expectations is the decline of community/player run servers for games. As long as you had enough players to fill a server then a game could live forever (CSS/TF2
) but, linking in to your point about the value of yearly sports games, that is no longer relevant or important. The mainstream games industry will gladly burn down anything from its past to make a quick buck now, making games that are just artificially fun enough (i.e. your brain feels good from all the numbers going up, not missing out on time-limited items/events etc) to keep people "engaged" and spending more money.
I am not against the concept of DLC itself, but I would rather pay £10-15 for a proper expansion of the type that existed throughout the 90s and early 2000s which were almost entire games in and of themselves (Yuri's Revenge for Red Alert 2, the various Civ expansions that get celebrated time and again, which The Witcher has done great too) than launder more money into EA fun bucks for some spins of the wheel. I try not to reference Jim Sterling much as some people get very riled up to the point of derailing a conversation, but i'm basically parroting most of his stuff, and one of the main points is that now the modern industry seems like the title of Mary Trump's book, 'Too much and never enough'. All of these systems are never implemented for our benefit, but because of FIFA/CoD pushing what is acceptable etc every game has to be a live service platform because that's where the money, not quality, is.