Fortnite is its own evil. They only show an extremely small fraction of the items available each day, with no indication of whether they'll return, so that you feel you have to buy things now in case you never have the chance again.
Yes agreed, Epic's behavior in Fortnite is just as, if not more, predatory and relies on FOMO which is a huge factor in peer pressure among young people. Epic is not deserving of respect but should be called out more.
Have you ever felt a desire to buy a shirt because it won’t be available to purchase again?
Is there really a world where they say “this asset is for sale today and in 28 days” and you say “oh good I will want to be it then but not now”?
If you're not completely convinced by some cosmetic item you might say "I don't know whether I really want this so I'll just wait and maybe buy it later". But if it's time-limited, in this case without indication whether it'll ever be on sale again, you cannot wait and decide later. It's deliberate time pressure on the decision.
That's the kind of manipulation we see in some games. I don't think this should be considered normal. The same applies to Nintendo's Switch games that were only available for purchase for a short time after release, with Nintendo not saying whether those games will ever be available again [0]. We all know that a lot of people bought those games just in case, and that's the intention.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/1/22307522/mario-limited-tim...
This is the whole point of the fashion industry too, every year the "collection" changes, this makes people both afraid of being "left behind", but also of missing "classics" that won't be manufactured again, also it is why fashion designers release things in "collections", idea is seduce people in buying the entire collection, not just the piece they liked.
When you are dealing with something that has an actual value, for example a base-version magic the gathering or pokemon card, the value is exactly whatever the item is useful for, the more useful it is the more people pay for it, but when you are dealing with stuff that is useful to display social status, things change, and you end with people paying ludicrous amounts of money to buy a brick written "Supreme" when the "Supreme" guys themselves are not sure why this is happening.
https://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/skate-brand-supreme-se...
Or in case of game cards, people willing to pay sky high prices because the card has special art, sometimes even if the art is UGLIER than the base version, just because it is rare and a social status, things get even wilder when the social status is part of the reason the card exists in first place (for example cards that were manufactured to be given to judges or championship winners)
Surely you’re not saying people buy skins because they might turn out to be unpopular and thus cool to wear…
I’m sure there’s a niche culture around always buying the absolute latest piece, but that’s not the fear of missing out and would exist even if everything was always available?
"popular" can mean "widely desired", not necessarily "owned by many people".
With a few niche edge cases where you need a specific phone to acquire them as a promo for the hardware.
From a neutral party standpoint (i.e. I neither want to purchase the skins, nor do I benefit financially from their purchase, nor do I wish to ban their sale outright), it seems obvious that a fungible, non-exhaustible digital good (with it's near-0 maintenance cost) should be restricted from exclusive periods of sale. There is no reason for it, other than to take advantage of human brain chemistry to drive a specific type of sale by producing artificial demand.
At least with physical goods there is an overhead to keeping old SKUs in the catalog. A digital skin is a metadata blob in a database, which can't be deleted anyways, since anyone who paid for access to that metadata needs it to exist.
Devil’s advocate, which seems likely to me, is that having a small catalog that is frequently updated is a lot easier to make a sale on for its simplicity and expectation of finding something novel every time you look.
100 options is overwhelming. 5 is easier for the consumer. And if 95% of people who would ever buy your new skin will do so within a week of its release, it makes sense to just ship a new catalog next week and never bother with the old one again.
1. Anyone who sells anything has limited runs, sales and so forth. Like that's just commerce; and
2. Loot box games do all the same thing anyway so at least on Fortnite you know the cost of what you want.
This is one of these situations where Fortnite is strictly better than RNG loot boxes. That's not the same as saying they do no wrong. But better? Objectively, yes.
Yes, but Fortnite pushes this to the absolute extreme. It's one thing to visit a store with thousands of products where there's a discount on some of the items and a few limited-time offers. It's a very different thing to visit another store which has thousands of products but only makes eight of them available for sale each day, always as a limited-time offer, with no information about the rest of the catalogue.
They're skins. They have no in-game effect. If your need for social validation is so great that you would spend your life savings on skins then that should be a personal problem. Unlike lootboxes, the transactions is clear as day and there's no gambling aspect. I wouldn't call Nike evil because they refuse to re-release Jordan 1s.
This is true in exactly the sense that the brand and type of sneakers you wear has no-in school effect.
I don't know a lot about it and it isn't as clearly visible as sneaker culture but I know it exists, because I used to play that game and there were people in various discords and steam chats who were obsessed with skins to the point it was all they could talk about.
I was making the point that goods which practically affect one's appearance in reality affect more than just one's appearance due to the nature of human personality.