Blizzard’s World of Warcraft is no stranger to costly in-game cosmetics, but its latest super expensive mount is so popular it’s causing a shortage of WoW Tokens in the in-game auction house.
That doesn’t impact all games though, the game market has essentially split into catering to three groups:
casual games (mostly mobile games) - more “investment” into a profile than actual game
live service MP games - “investment,” but with a skill element
“experiences” - focus is on SP gameplay and/or graphical fidelity
The more social a game is, the more likely the game is to throw in vanity purchases like skins.
I have a simple rule in my house, no F2P games, and it has worked really well in avoiding BS. There are some paid games w/ MTX and whatnot, but those are a lot fewer than among the F2P games.
Refuse to play the worst offenders and offer alternatives to your gaming friends, so you can eat your cake and have it too.
Not unlimited, but certainly a lot of flexibility. As long as they don’t commit fraud, I think they should be allowed to provide whatever services their customers are willing to pay for.
That said, I won’t participate, and I’ll be vocal about calling out their terrible business models. But I won’t go so far as to suggest legislation to solve a “problem” of adults making poor choices. People should always be free to make stupid choices, provided those choices don’t hurt others. I am sympathetic to some limits around kids, but those limits shouldn’t apply to adults. So maybe slap an “M” rating on a game if it has microtransactions or something and restrict direct sales to underage kids (enforcement should be lax though to avoid privacy violations).
The indie game scene is vibrant, and there are still plenty of AAA games without that nonsense. So play those and send a message to these companies that non-abusive games are absolutely still wanted. Also, be vocal about these exploitative practices by companies to convince others to avoid their products.
Choice does not excuse systemic abuse for profit. People choose scams all the time. That’s how they work!
As previously mentioned, fuck them kids. This is about abuses committed against adults. This is about the central nature of games, and how they invent value, of a sort completely incompatible with cash money. The exchange rate between enchanted scimitars and hamburgers is nonexistent.
There’s no technical reason to connect remote auctioneering to this… horse. Blizzard does it so they can gouge people you’ve given a derisive label. Every player is affected. Every player knows this is possible, and the overwhelming majority of them are denied. The game was made objectively worse for them, through their engineered dissatisfaction, specifically to bilk some tiny fraction for unreasonable quantities of money. Enough money, per person in that tiny group, to make kneejerk excuses like ‘just boycott!’ utterly useless.
Being vocal doesn’t matter - the money talks louder.
Only legislation will fix this.
I don’t think you disagree with that. You don’t want the problem fixed. You’re denying the problem is a problem, even as you describe “whales” like you’d describe “problem gamblers” or “scam victims.” So what if they made bad choices? You didn’t. It was easy, apparently. Good choices abound! Therefore, rampant exploitation of human frailty doesn’t count.
And I think Blizzard recognizes that WoW has largely run its course, so it’s trying to extract maximum profit from those who remain. That’s what happens when a company shifts from innovation to profit maximization, and it should be a signal for players to move on.
‘just boycott!’ utterly useless
It’s only useless if your metric for success is Blizzard changing their behavior. But if you shift your metric of success to “less predatory companies are viable,” it can absolutely be a success.
Depending on your metric of “success,” maybe legislation is the only option. But we don’t need every company to behave “properly” (however you define that) in order to have a competitive market for games. If you look beyond the handful of top-grossing games w/ manipulative in-game stores, you’ll find a vibrant market of games to play.
“scam victims.”
A scam is something else entirely. “Problem gambling” is largely a choice, and if you ask any gambler, they’ll be able to confirm that they understand that the casino always wins eventually, but that they continue to play because they think “this time will be different.” However, if you ask a scam victim, they’ll tell you they thought the scammer was legitimate and continued because they honestly believed they were making a good choice. Those are very different things.
Games fall under the “problem gambling” umbrella (players know what they’re paying for), not the “scam” umbrella (it’s rare for players to not know what they’re getting for their money). If there are incidents of the latter (e.g. loot boxes with lower than advertised odds of getting something of value), those should be aggressively litigated by regulators, and honestly anything where there isn’t a guarantee (i.e. not paying X to get Y product) should be considered “gambling” and regulated as such (restricted for minors, age verification required, etc).
Spending $90 for a mount is a stupid decision, but it’s not a fraudulent transaction if you get the mount when you pay. I don’t think that should be regulated, but it should spark outcry from news orgs and players and push people away from the game.
I see spending stupid amounts of money on a game to be similar to spending stupid amounts of money on any other vanity purchase, like lifted trucks, designer clothing, or expensive jewelry. If you want to buy those things, you should absolutely be allowed to, even if a lot of people would say it’s a stupid idea if they understood your finances. Adults must be free to make stupid choices, and the only limits IMO should be if you were deceived and wouldn’t have made the choice if you had more accurate information.
Ignoring how thousands of brand-new games pull this shit from day one.
The existence of good options means nothing. This abuse should be criminal. The fact companies don’t have to commit this intolerable exploitation against their users, does not lessen the problem when some companies do it anyway. If you just mean to nitpick the word “nothing,” sure, congratulations. Someone somewhere will dodge this bullet. But I’m on about all the people getting taken by this systemic problem that’s already half the industry by revenue.
Any real money spent in games was defrauded, because all apparent value was made-up. As surely as someone selling you the deed to scrap the Brooklyn Bridge. The paper is real! You get the paper! But the paper is not why you handed someone a suitcase full of cash. There was a story you were told, and it’s not real. That’s what games are.
Games make you value worthless things. That is what makes them games. There is no real-world value to points or shards or rare drops. They’re arbitrary goals with arbitrary obstacles. They’re achievable so that your brain will squirt the happy juice. But treating them as valuable, the way money is valuable, is a category error.
The small charges are more insidious. Like the naked greed of paying instead of watching a counter tick down - a transaction that is neither a good nor a service. Or the lootboxes that everyone now agrees are intolerable, once the industry has moved on to calling them keys. Or anything consumable, proving your money went to something so worthless, the game will just hands them out in unbounded quantities. Even peacocking for other players makes people go, oh, it’s just a dollar. It’s just cosmetic. It’s just the only reason the game exists in the first place, to grind you against that constant nagging temptation.
These games are no longer optimized to make you feel good when you’re good at them.
They’re optimized to make you feel good when you open your wallet and look away.
And until you do, they’re as addictive and frustrating as we can manage.
This business model is built on exploitation of innate human shortcomings. Your brain is not very good at distinguishing sources of happy juice. It can easily be tricked, and literally the entire games industry exists to trick it. Again: that’s what games are. Their enjoyability comes from that fiction. That’s why pretending any of it can have real monetary value is a scam.
I’m on about all the people getting taken by this systemic problem
What do you mean by “taken”? Were they not aware of what they were buying? Was there fraud at any point in the transaction?
A bad deal isn’t criminal, it’s only criminal if it’s misrepresented. And given that there are a ton of repeat customers, I fail to see how it’s being misrepresented. When exactly did the fraud take place? Did the customer get something other than what they expected to get?
At the end of the day, all value is made-up, especially with digital licenses. I may value a cosmetic skin a lot more highly than you do, but that doesn’t mean I was defrauded, it just means I find more value in it than you.
The small charges are more insidious
Oh, they absolutely are, and I definitely don’t like the stupid dopamine machine that mobile gaming has become. But you also have to understand that the value in paying for a ton of MTX in those games is often less about those incremental dopamine hits and more about showing off to friends/randoms online (Look how big my base is! Look how cool my character looks! Look how high on the leaderboard I am!). That’s the real dopamine hit IMO, and that’s where the analogy with luxury items comes in (lifted trucks, designer bags, etc).
lootboxes
This one is different and I consider it gambling, and it should be regulated as such, because the value is undetermined.
These games are no longer optimized to make you feel good when you’re good at them.
Right, these are casual games, where you can pay to appear successful. That’s what luxury goods are. If I go into debt to buy a fancy car, I look rich to other people, and that gives me that dopamine hit. This is just the digital equivalent of that, in many cases.
The F2P players are being used to give these whales an audience so they can flaunt their “skill” (read: how much they paid).
That’s why pretending any of it can have real monetary value is a scam.
And that’s where I disagree. It’s only a scam if you get something other than what was advertised. If the advertising is simply “buy this to instantly complete X” and buying it instantly completes X, then there’s no fraud, therefore no scam. You paid a stupid tax for being impatient, and you did that while understanding that you’re buying a temporary high.
Just because something is addictive doesn’t mean it’s a scam. Cigarettes and alcohol aren’t scams. Gambling isn’t a scam. Lotteries aren’t scams. Using any of them to excess is a really bad idea, but I don’t think they’re scams. And that’s why I think any legislation should be limited to kids, since kids are assumed to be more susceptible to dark patterns and addictions, whereas adults are assumed to have responsibility for their own actions.
At the end of the day, all value is made-up, especially with digital licenses. I may value a cosmetic skin a lot more highly than you do, but that doesn’t mean I was defrauded, it just means I find more value in it than you.
Flashbacks to god-botherers insisting atheists must have faith in something.
I am explicitly distinguishing incompatible meanings of the word value. So are you, by the way, if you even hold an internally consistent view of what scams are. Otherwise, nooo, selling someone the Brooklyn Bridge is legit, because isn’t all value made-up?
The kind of value money represents cannot be the kind of value you see in scoring a goal in soccer, or you could fucking buy them.
But you also have to understand that the value in paying for a ton of MTX in those games is often less about those incremental dopamine hits and more about showing off to friends/randoms online
That’s the same thing. Peacocking for other pl-- I already fucking said this! Do you read things before responding?
Right, these are casual games, where you can pay to appear successful.
Yep, no ranked competitive games have this, stop fucking lying to me. Don’t make up excuses you cannot possibly believe.
if you even hold an internally consistent view of what scams are
Yes, and I’ve detailed it already. A scam is a fraudulent business deal, meaning you receive something other than what was agreed on.
Selling someone the Brooklyn Bridge is fraud because you’re not receiving what was promised, ownership of the Brooklyn Bridge, because the seller doesn’t own it and therefore can’t transfer ownership to you. It’s not a scam because you can’t take it home with you, it’s a scam because you’re not getting what was advertised.
Yep, no ranked competitive games have this
Right, and there are two mentalities here:
“posers” - those who spend a ton to “look” fancy, but they’re really not that good
good players - they’ll either earn cosmetics, or they stream and the cosmetics become a business expense
You’ll see the first in the lower brackets and the second in the upper brackets. They’ll both often have top-tier gear, and the first gets it to “feel” cool instead of actually getting an edge from the benefits of that gear, whereas the second actually benefits from the gear. So even in a competitive game, the MTX are still targeting the more casual players. I think there’s also a significant overlap in cheaters and the first group, because the first group feels “entitled” to doing well, despite not actually being that good.
I consider that first group to largely be “casual” because the intent there isn’t to practice to get better, but to show off, even if the game is designed to be competitive.
In any case, those MTX aren’t scams, you’re getting exactly what you’re paying for, and in many cases you can demo it before purchasing. I think buying them is stupid, but that’s because I put very little value in what they offer, whereas others could find a lot more value in it.
Disagree. Let the whales waste their money, I have plenty of other options. In fact, indie gaming is better than it has ever been.
I certainly don’t like that type of revenue model, but I don’t think it should be banned, especially since the alternatives are plentiful and growing.
I disagree with letting whales waste their money.
Video game design has changed to specifically cater to whales and ignore regular gamers.
That doesn’t impact all games though, the game market has essentially split into catering to three groups:
The more social a game is, the more likely the game is to throw in vanity purchases like skins.
I have a simple rule in my house, no F2P games, and it has worked really well in avoiding BS. There are some paid games w/ MTX and whatnot, but those are a lot fewer than among the F2P games.
Refuse to play the worst offenders and offer alternatives to your gaming friends, so you can eat your cake and have it too.
You’re a libertarian who has personally told me corporations have unlimited right to manipulate people out of their money.
Sorry if I’m misremembering - you might’ve said “exploit.”
Not unlimited, but certainly a lot of flexibility. As long as they don’t commit fraud, I think they should be allowed to provide whatever services their customers are willing to pay for.
That said, I won’t participate, and I’ll be vocal about calling out their terrible business models. But I won’t go so far as to suggest legislation to solve a “problem” of adults making poor choices. People should always be free to make stupid choices, provided those choices don’t hurt others. I am sympathetic to some limits around kids, but those limits shouldn’t apply to adults. So maybe slap an “M” rating on a game if it has microtransactions or something and restrict direct sales to underage kids (enforcement should be lax though to avoid privacy violations).
The indie game scene is vibrant, and there are still plenty of AAA games without that nonsense. So play those and send a message to these companies that non-abusive games are absolutely still wanted. Also, be vocal about these exploitative practices by companies to convince others to avoid their products.
Choice does not excuse systemic abuse for profit. People choose scams all the time. That’s how they work!
As previously mentioned, fuck them kids. This is about abuses committed against adults. This is about the central nature of games, and how they invent value, of a sort completely incompatible with cash money. The exchange rate between enchanted scimitars and hamburgers is nonexistent.
There’s no technical reason to connect remote auctioneering to this… horse. Blizzard does it so they can gouge people you’ve given a derisive label. Every player is affected. Every player knows this is possible, and the overwhelming majority of them are denied. The game was made objectively worse for them, through their engineered dissatisfaction, specifically to bilk some tiny fraction for unreasonable quantities of money. Enough money, per person in that tiny group, to make kneejerk excuses like ‘just boycott!’ utterly useless.
Being vocal doesn’t matter - the money talks louder.
Only legislation will fix this.
I don’t think you disagree with that. You don’t want the problem fixed. You’re denying the problem is a problem, even as you describe “whales” like you’d describe “problem gamblers” or “scam victims.” So what if they made bad choices? You didn’t. It was easy, apparently. Good choices abound! Therefore, rampant exploitation of human frailty doesn’t count.
And I think Blizzard recognizes that WoW has largely run its course, so it’s trying to extract maximum profit from those who remain. That’s what happens when a company shifts from innovation to profit maximization, and it should be a signal for players to move on.
It’s only useless if your metric for success is Blizzard changing their behavior. But if you shift your metric of success to “less predatory companies are viable,” it can absolutely be a success.
Depending on your metric of “success,” maybe legislation is the only option. But we don’t need every company to behave “properly” (however you define that) in order to have a competitive market for games. If you look beyond the handful of top-grossing games w/ manipulative in-game stores, you’ll find a vibrant market of games to play.
A scam is something else entirely. “Problem gambling” is largely a choice, and if you ask any gambler, they’ll be able to confirm that they understand that the casino always wins eventually, but that they continue to play because they think “this time will be different.” However, if you ask a scam victim, they’ll tell you they thought the scammer was legitimate and continued because they honestly believed they were making a good choice. Those are very different things.
Games fall under the “problem gambling” umbrella (players know what they’re paying for), not the “scam” umbrella (it’s rare for players to not know what they’re getting for their money). If there are incidents of the latter (e.g. loot boxes with lower than advertised odds of getting something of value), those should be aggressively litigated by regulators, and honestly anything where there isn’t a guarantee (i.e. not paying X to get Y product) should be considered “gambling” and regulated as such (restricted for minors, age verification required, etc).
Spending $90 for a mount is a stupid decision, but it’s not a fraudulent transaction if you get the mount when you pay. I don’t think that should be regulated, but it should spark outcry from news orgs and players and push people away from the game.
I see spending stupid amounts of money on a game to be similar to spending stupid amounts of money on any other vanity purchase, like lifted trucks, designer clothing, or expensive jewelry. If you want to buy those things, you should absolutely be allowed to, even if a lot of people would say it’s a stupid idea if they understood your finances. Adults must be free to make stupid choices, and the only limits IMO should be if you were deceived and wouldn’t have made the choice if you had more accurate information.
Ignoring how thousands of brand-new games pull this shit from day one.
The existence of good options means nothing. This abuse should be criminal. The fact companies don’t have to commit this intolerable exploitation against their users, does not lessen the problem when some companies do it anyway. If you just mean to nitpick the word “nothing,” sure, congratulations. Someone somewhere will dodge this bullet. But I’m on about all the people getting taken by this systemic problem that’s already half the industry by revenue.
Any real money spent in games was defrauded, because all apparent value was made-up. As surely as someone selling you the deed to scrap the Brooklyn Bridge. The paper is real! You get the paper! But the paper is not why you handed someone a suitcase full of cash. There was a story you were told, and it’s not real. That’s what games are.
Games make you value worthless things. That is what makes them games. There is no real-world value to points or shards or rare drops. They’re arbitrary goals with arbitrary obstacles. They’re achievable so that your brain will squirt the happy juice. But treating them as valuable, the way money is valuable, is a category error.
The small charges are more insidious. Like the naked greed of paying instead of watching a counter tick down - a transaction that is neither a good nor a service. Or the lootboxes that everyone now agrees are intolerable, once the industry has moved on to calling them keys. Or anything consumable, proving your money went to something so worthless, the game will just hands them out in unbounded quantities. Even peacocking for other players makes people go, oh, it’s just a dollar. It’s just cosmetic. It’s just the only reason the game exists in the first place, to grind you against that constant nagging temptation.
These games are no longer optimized to make you feel good when you’re good at them.
They’re optimized to make you feel good when you open your wallet and look away.
And until you do, they’re as addictive and frustrating as we can manage.
This business model is built on exploitation of innate human shortcomings. Your brain is not very good at distinguishing sources of happy juice. It can easily be tricked, and literally the entire games industry exists to trick it. Again: that’s what games are. Their enjoyability comes from that fiction. That’s why pretending any of it can have real monetary value is a scam.
What do you mean by “taken”? Were they not aware of what they were buying? Was there fraud at any point in the transaction?
A bad deal isn’t criminal, it’s only criminal if it’s misrepresented. And given that there are a ton of repeat customers, I fail to see how it’s being misrepresented. When exactly did the fraud take place? Did the customer get something other than what they expected to get?
At the end of the day, all value is made-up, especially with digital licenses. I may value a cosmetic skin a lot more highly than you do, but that doesn’t mean I was defrauded, it just means I find more value in it than you.
Oh, they absolutely are, and I definitely don’t like the stupid dopamine machine that mobile gaming has become. But you also have to understand that the value in paying for a ton of MTX in those games is often less about those incremental dopamine hits and more about showing off to friends/randoms online (Look how big my base is! Look how cool my character looks! Look how high on the leaderboard I am!). That’s the real dopamine hit IMO, and that’s where the analogy with luxury items comes in (lifted trucks, designer bags, etc).
This one is different and I consider it gambling, and it should be regulated as such, because the value is undetermined.
Right, these are casual games, where you can pay to appear successful. That’s what luxury goods are. If I go into debt to buy a fancy car, I look rich to other people, and that gives me that dopamine hit. This is just the digital equivalent of that, in many cases.
The F2P players are being used to give these whales an audience so they can flaunt their “skill” (read: how much they paid).
And that’s where I disagree. It’s only a scam if you get something other than what was advertised. If the advertising is simply “buy this to instantly complete X” and buying it instantly completes X, then there’s no fraud, therefore no scam. You paid a stupid tax for being impatient, and you did that while understanding that you’re buying a temporary high.
Just because something is addictive doesn’t mean it’s a scam. Cigarettes and alcohol aren’t scams. Gambling isn’t a scam. Lotteries aren’t scams. Using any of them to excess is a really bad idea, but I don’t think they’re scams. And that’s why I think any legislation should be limited to kids, since kids are assumed to be more susceptible to dark patterns and addictions, whereas adults are assumed to have responsibility for their own actions.
Flashbacks to god-botherers insisting atheists must have faith in something.
I am explicitly distinguishing incompatible meanings of the word value. So are you, by the way, if you even hold an internally consistent view of what scams are. Otherwise, nooo, selling someone the Brooklyn Bridge is legit, because isn’t all value made-up?
The kind of value money represents cannot be the kind of value you see in scoring a goal in soccer, or you could fucking buy them.
That’s the same thing. Peacocking for other pl-- I already fucking said this! Do you read things before responding?
Yep, no ranked competitive games have this, stop fucking lying to me. Don’t make up excuses you cannot possibly believe.
Yes, and I’ve detailed it already. A scam is a fraudulent business deal, meaning you receive something other than what was agreed on.
Selling someone the Brooklyn Bridge is fraud because you’re not receiving what was promised, ownership of the Brooklyn Bridge, because the seller doesn’t own it and therefore can’t transfer ownership to you. It’s not a scam because you can’t take it home with you, it’s a scam because you’re not getting what was advertised.
Right, and there are two mentalities here:
You’ll see the first in the lower brackets and the second in the upper brackets. They’ll both often have top-tier gear, and the first gets it to “feel” cool instead of actually getting an edge from the benefits of that gear, whereas the second actually benefits from the gear. So even in a competitive game, the MTX are still targeting the more casual players. I think there’s also a significant overlap in cheaters and the first group, because the first group feels “entitled” to doing well, despite not actually being that good.
I consider that first group to largely be “casual” because the intent there isn’t to practice to get better, but to show off, even if the game is designed to be competitive.
In any case, those MTX aren’t scams, you’re getting exactly what you’re paying for, and in many cases you can demo it before purchasing. I think buying them is stupid, but that’s because I put very little value in what they offer, whereas others could find a lot more value in it.