this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
340 points (98.0% liked)
Games
16806 readers
832 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Only legislation will fix this.
If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.
What kind of legislation, though? Loot boxes seem like an easy one to write: gambling is illegal already in a lot of places. When it's just exploitative greed, I'm not sure how it's technically so different from charging exorbitant rates for swag at a baseball game or something. Or charging a few thousand bucks for a purse at some high-end fashion retailer.
To be clear: I loathe the FOMO trends in game development, overpriced skins, micro/macro-transactions, and all the "credit/XP boosters" type bullshit. Turning money into ingame currencies to obfuscate actual prices, the general design of games frontloading fun and then squeezing dollars out of you to feel that same high again....I'm just skeptical that there's anything to do about it from a legal perspective that doesn't apply to most of the rest of the capitalist enterprises out there. Please though, I want to be wrong about this, so any examples of how to curb some of these excesses would be great.
Stop letting games take real money.
(Not: stop charging money for games. Not: end subscriptions. Not: make games free. I will not be tolerating any bullshit today from people who refuse to acknowledge how "microtransactions" are the topic and the problem.)
All forms of this are just lootboxes with more steps. We all finally admit lootboxes are bullshit, right? Even the most diehard kneejerk 'but it's cosmetic!' yeahbutts are quick to say some it's not awful, like lootboxes. But they're all just gentler ways of taking unlimited quantities of your actual money.
Nothing inside a video game should cost money.
It's a fucking game. It's not real.
The game itself can and should cost money - the rise of allegedly-free wallet siphons proves how lucrative that bullshit is. They don't need your money up-front; they'll get more from wearing you down. But the fact the same bullshit is in flagship AAA games, including some which want to charge ninety goddamn dollars up-front, and have a subscription, proves they can take you both ways, because you don't really have a choice. This shit is in everything. It is infecting the entire medium, and making the path to maximum revenue a matter of addiction and frustration. We were never going to shop our way out of it. We have to tell the whole industry it's simply not allowed.