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Comment by prolikewh0a | Hacker News Reader

It's not like those same complaining fans aren't going to all play it and throw endless money at microtransactions.

Remember COD:MW2 protests?

https://kotaku.com/5403286/what-modern-warfare-2-boycotters-...

I am not a gamer so I could be wrong but it’s REALLY hard to believe hardcore PC gamers are going to play a reskinned Chinese game on a cell phone and pay microtransactions. It might make money, but not from the people up in arms about this.

The blizzard developer quoted in the article stated emphatically that wasn't true, and that similarities owed to adopting successful GUI idioms in other markets; does the gaming community have information to update the story?

"Successful GUI idioms," is that a euphemism for dark patterns to make people spend more money? Anyway, even if they built it from scratch it isn't enough to refute the spirit of it being just a reskin of some other crappy cellphone game.

Many, though certainly not all PC gamers are serious about not having their platform choices manipulated by exclusivity deals. It is interpreted as bullying, and we have had plenty of practice sticking to that belief against attempts to coerce people to buy every console. Red Dead Redemption 2 was just released, but even though it looks like an actually good game, it simply doesn't exist for me until it comes to PC.

Wow, you are harsh. They replicated the control scheme from another game because it was a good control scheme. Sort of like how most PC games all use Q,W,E,S for movement.

You don't know what the monetization scheme will be but you are sure it will use dark patterns to drain peoples wallets.

You apparently didn't read the article to see what the similar GUI patterns they replicated were but you are certain it's just another pay to win game.

Your bias is showing.

I do feel that the world of mobile games is tarnished in reputation for good reason, and that backlash against mobile games is primarily from parents, because the population they've been targeting has been very young kids.

In some ways it also tarnishes the Android and Apple brand, which is why I think Google reacted with multi-accounts device sharing and YouTube kids. I wonder how much mobile gaming revenue is because parents signed in with their credit card and there aren't multiple accounts on iOS, and you can't update a game without the parent signing back in, and Family Sharing has no granularity. I have to think that Apple has walked over every inch of their UX and knows this.

On Blizzard, I'm feeling what they mismanaged was the fact that their conference is expensive and anticipated enough to travel to, but what they announced is for a different audience.

Their statements don't make a good case for them doing more than following the money, and part of the reason for the outrage. The outrage is itself a move played to signal this. People talk about how capitalism is driven by signals from the demand side, and this kind of outrage is integral to forming boycott factions large enough to oppose the advertising and noise produced by the marketing-industrial complex.

As corporations become ever larger, it becomes harder to make demand-side opinions observable, and so it becomes necessary to employ more extreme forms of protest to avoid being overpowered by the sell-side attempts at influence. If that influence is not opposed, the market will become entirely dominated by the sell-side and will allow trust-like abuse of power, destroying the equilibrium pressure by which markets are allegedly regulated. This kind of market abuse does not require monopolies, and appears to be a blind spot for many proponents of market economies.

This is not just a problem with gaming, and one could reasonably argue that there are more important battles to fight. That said, this is probably one of the few markets where that kind of demand-side mobilization is still possible, as many others have already been neutralized by divide-and-conquer tactics.

Dark Patterns != Pay To Win; that is just one tactic. It is well known that the metrics by which success are measured in mobile gaming are addictiveness and microtransactions: the ability to create whales.

> Your bias is showing.

Your ignorance of the market is showing.

> The blizzard developer quoted in the article stated emphatically that wasn't true

Sure, because it's not just a reskin. They are creating new models, too. When people say "reskin," they sometimes aren't literally talking just about skins. Rather, they are talking about making another game on top of the same basic engine that exists in other games. And considering who Blizzard is partnering with to make this game and the other games they've put out, you can see there point.

I'm not that familiar -- but isn't it possible that the die hard fans who show up to a convention are more likely to be PCMR/console types who don't like the idea of a watered-down mobile experience?

And maybe successful COD example is due to the more casual gamers who wouldn't attend a conference (given that there are many more of them, it doesn't take as much engagement for financial success. )

Less than 20 people playing out of 800 seems to be a pretty effective boycott to me.

There are two kinds of people in this world:

1) those who can extrapolate from incomplete data

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