I think nothing inside a full priced video game should cost real money.
There’s plenty of examples of F2P games that have reasonable monetization in the form of mtx.
Manipulating players into paying unbounded quantities of real money for essentially nothing is an abuse, whether or not that casino has a cover charge. If you can grind something for free or pay one dollar, the entire product exists to harass you into paying that dollar, as often as you will tolerate.
There is no ethical form of this. Games make you value arbitrary nonsense - that is what makes them games. $600 scimitar bundles inside a full-price game are not different from whatever hamburger-priced hat you’re eager to defend; they’re just smaller. The problem is identical. Any successful example is optimized for addiction and frustration. They are deliberately unsatisfying, after a period coaxing you into habits and expectations, so they can dangle the button that costs a dollar to press, and make you feel good again every time you press it. That’s why the product is “free.” That’s why the product exists. All that art and gameplay shit is bait on the hook.
Any successful example is optimized for addiction and frustration.
That is just plain wrong.
Addiction I guess but frustration definitely not necessarily.
There are countless examples of highly successful games that do not monetize like that.
You can happily play PoE for thousands of hours without paying a penny; if you want to get into trading drop like 20 bucks for some stash tabs and you are ready to go again for absolutely any content the game has to offer.
CS or LoL also work just fine for f2p players.
And I say that as a player that fucking hates the new generation of soulless live service games.
Manufactured discontent is the only reason these games make money. They’re not a charity. They goad you into wanting whatever costs money. You can say no, but they try their absolute damnedest to squeeze out a yes.
Success here is inseparable from wringing money out of players using any means necessary. Acting polite and gentle is just another tactic. You are still being manipulated.
There’s no game that’s just so gosh-darn enoyable that people freely throw four billion dollars at it, out of the goodness of their hearts. They get roped in and ground down. They brag about how many thousands of hours they’ve spent not being addicted. They insist they chose to buy the stuff that’s shoved in their face on every load screen and round summary. Obviously they feel no obligation whatsoever toward mere cosmetics, but oh wow look how fancy that is, it super sucks you don’t have one of those.
Like, I don’t know what a “stash tab” is, but I bet if I look it up, it’s gonna be added functionality that’s objectively missing from the default version of the game, and that it costs the company approximately nothing. (Ugh, I shouldn’t have actually looked it up. That whole page is gross.) You obviously want that. It is withheld from you. Maybe not exclusively for real money - but gosh, what a lot of grinding it’d take, if you don’t fork over real money. Maybe just this once… right?
