Tim Sweeney literally exploits children’s psychology on an Epic scale with Fortnite V-Bucks. He doesn’t get a say about anything, and in a sane world, would probably be in prison (and he wouldn’t be alone).
But it doesn't make what he's saying here wrong.
But seriously, if you have literally once condemned something that doesn’t have a law against it, that shows your argument is trash.
Also, Sweeney not wrong. Billionaires are lining up to pay Trump his dues because it'll lead to more $$.
I wouldn't call it "one of the most problematic". It's bad, but it's not even close to the worst.
Fortnite does feel a lot more reasonable to me. From what I know of it, you pay for things directly, or you pay for a pass that you earn things on if you just play enough. And it's pretty cheap, compared to other online service-based games.
It’s like saying that it’s better that our children are smoking cigarettes instead of smoking weed. How about we just stop the smoking in the first place?
You can continue playing for free with your old skins and enjoy the game. You don't need to pay more. But you can also choose to get the new stuff, and you know what it'll be before you pay.
In a world where toys in cereal boxes are considered "exploitative", I'm not going to argue that live service games aren't. But there's a world of difference between what Fortnite does and what Genshin Impact does.
I got into Pokemon TCG Pocket recently, and the temptation to pay to keep pulling cards / doing wonder picks is strong. I can see why it's making almost as much as Pokemon Go's launch.
On Gamebanana (formerly FPSBanana) you'll find a million pieces of non-P2W content for certain games created for free.
Sure hosting the stuff is not free and has never been, but discussing the nuances of monetary addons is very far from the firsts of complaining about horse armor DLC or the distinction of extensions and addons, given that gaming was paid of gamers' own pocket for a long time.
The narrative is shifting/has shifted from a cultural to a consumerist artifact, exactly as intended.
I think it's just the nature of live service games that have grown in popularity, their expectation of ongoing content creation, rising salary/production costs for said game development, and the wild success MMORPG's discovered years ago with gacha whales. I will say I greatly appreciated the F2P cosmetics-only business model during my MMO days as a student with no income.
Kind of rambling at this point, but my problem lies in the exploitative psychology commonly found with microtransactions in these sorts of games. Cosmetics-only seems to relieve a lot of the pressure to take out one's wallet.
There never was a significant beneficial income (or rather: profit) stream. Only a stream of (self-limiting, but sometimes long lasting) experiences.
I have thousands of hours on a multiplayer game that cost 20 bucks. Its obscure sub-community has lived on for 20 years largely self hosted despite the formal "need for development".
I get that this also is about the ever precarious profession of an artist, but the market may simply not be as large. Content creators (hate to use the term) work for a living at the margins to create ever more stuff, to squeeze through the tight attention grid (dozens of games get published on Steam every day now!)
This creates pressure and it motivates the need for repeatability of transactions, so this story may not necessarily be about greedy execs alone (though it certainly can be!).
I find it ultimately tragic. So much creative talent chasing too little attention and only the most predative sustaining. When the market was more restricted these effects weren't as pronounced and you could more readily create mythologies (such as around Half Life or FF7)