The whole concept of in-game purchases is just foreign to me. I wasn’t even willing to pay 99 cents for a few extra lives in Candy Crush. This market being worth billions is frankly unfathomable.
The whole concept of in-game purchases is just foreign to me. I wasn’t even willing to pay 99 cents for a few extra lives in Candy Crush. This market being worth billions is frankly unfathomable.
theangriestbird@beehaw.org 2 days ago
as someone who has a few fortnite skins, I can speak to that side of the market. When you’re playing a game like that, which is high budget and also free-to-play, it’s easy to talk yourself into spending a few dollars. You get sick of using the default skins, everything else looks so cool, and you’ve been getting hours and hours of joy out of the game, haven’t you? In a way, it’s like you’re showing support to the kindly devs that gave you this game for free. Then once you have a couple, you might get addicted to the rush of joining a party with your friends and hearing their reactions to your new skin or dance. Plus, if you’re like me, you might just enjoy the inherent humor to watching Master Chief do a TikTok dance. It’s actually enhancing your enjoyment of the game. Then, $50 later, you finally realize that you’ve been getting diminishing returns on the enjoyment with each purchase, or you just get bored with the game overall, so you finally stop spending money on new skins.
That’s been my experience. When we talk about the potential for “billions”, most of that money is coming from the whales. The people for whom money is no object, so they never hit the point where they realize that buying the skins isn’t bringing them any real happiness anymore. And of course, in the CounterStrike market, these skins are resellable, so there’s also a collector’s mindset that takes hold. Either you treasure your collection of high value skins, or you get caught up in the rush of pulling an expensive skin from a crate because you know how much you can sell it for.
Powderhorn@beehaw.org 2 days ago
I guess I just don’t understand motivations in the F2P market. Like, I’m happy to pay a reasonable price for a game, but I have no interest in being nickeled and dimed – I can’t tell you how many games I’ve noped out on because of that shit. Like, if Factorio charged for cosmetic add-ons, that would just be ludicrous. Either you made a playable game for the price of entry, or you didn’t.
I seriously need to find a grift to hook people in for monthly payments.
RisingSwell@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
I want my guns to look pretty and track how many kills I got with each gun.
Granted my total collection is like, $50
KillerWhale@orcas.enjoying.yachts 12 hours ago
The engineer needs a new tiktok dance.
theangriestbird@beehaw.org 2 days ago
You and every other corporation, pal
Powderhorn@beehaw.org 2 days ago
Yeah, but corporations don’t need to eat!