Artificial scarcity in it’s barest form.
The fact that even some people think this shit is acceptable is very telling of how far we have yet to go, psychologically speaking, as a species.
Monkeys in fucking trousers.
Or, just stop games from selling in-game content?
Every skin is a texture or model swap, every “exclusive” always exists in the files, every in-game currency is fabricated.
Games try really really hard to make you pay for something that is copy and pasted
Fluke@lemm.ee 6 days ago
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 days ago
If anything gaming culture has regressed, at least in this aspect.
Remember when the $2.50 Oblivion horse armor DLC was considered to be a ridiculous?
NostraDavid@programming.dev 2 days ago
Remember when the $2.50 Oblivion horse armor DLC was considered to be ridiculous?
Blizzard now sells mounts at the price of 90 EUR, ~1.5x the base price of the game itself…
TBF, it’s a useful mount, but 90 fucking Euros…
gamer@lemm.ee 6 days ago
This is one of those radical ideas that people are terrified of, because it would kill the business models of a lot of massive corporations. It’s easy to spin that as the death of the game industry, rather than what it is: the death of a business practice.
Like the laws against underage smoking probably wiped out billions in shareholder value, but that was objectively a good thing. Banning (or heavily regulating) in-game purchases would also be a good thing, no matter how much it affects existing players. If it leads to the death of name brands like EA, Ubisoft, etc. then who cares? The market will readjust and new players who were able to adapt to the changed environment will take their place.