Charging for anything inside a game is like applying a dollar value to soccer goals. It’s a category error, exploited for profit. I am fundamentally opposed to this system of manipulating people into wanting arbitrary nonsense and then charging actual money for it. Your glib endorsement of that manipulation does not make it rational.

And this is the shallow end. Characters, you can almost sorta kinda argue, as sloppy expansions. Skins? Fuck off. A bottomless pit of manufactured discontent. Plainly sufficient to wring billions out of people for a game that’s “free.” Or for a game that’s forty fucking dollars and will gladly take another hundred dollars every single year. And characters in a 1v1 fighter are drastically different from MOBA bullshit, where having the wrong options can ruin an hour of four other people’s lives.

People are rightly incensed by efforts to charge $80 to own one video game.

This is an entire market of games where you can pay $1000 and still not have the whole thing.

Something’s fucky.

Subscriptions are honest. Like actual sales - where you get a thing you didn’t have, in exchange for money. Paying money, to be allowed to use part of the game you already have, is not a sale.

SF6 fucking launched with $120 in DLC. Like yeah, you bought the game, at full price… but fuck you, pay us again. Breaking up the fuckening into individual characters, trickled out over years, is psychological manipulation to disguise that abuse.

And I’m not getting gouged, I know what the price tag is.

… the fact you can pay hundreds of dollars and still not have all of a 1v1 fighting game is not made problematic through mystery. No shit you can see the price tag. That price is obscene. Past abuses being worse is no kind of excuse.

I swear to god, Capcom could charge the price of a whole game for each new character bundle, and there’d still be people up my ass about how it must be fine because it was the same in the 90s. You know how I know? Because they do. Annual character passes are $30! Does that get you everything that comes out, that year? Does it, fuck.

I know you know we’re talking about what FighterZ was able to become

Of course you do, because it’s what that paragraph was about. How am I the one “playing dumb?” You’re still insisting there’s no way a game could be updated - aside from the other two ways you don’t like! - so that’s the same as the game being banned. Because saying it’s banned sounds really bad, and serious, and is totally the same thing as saying Capcom doesn’t need real negotiable currency in order to change the color of a character’s pants.

But hey, this is only the shallow end of a business model that’s turning the games industry into a frustration-based casino. Why worry?

Nothing inside a video game. That part is not optional. I’ve dealt with too many cranks who see me arguing - JUST SELL GAMES - and then go ‘you want it for free!’ No, folks, you want it for free. You want to play endlessly-updated games, ‘subsidized by teenage hormones.’ You imagine that you would never be taken for ungodly sums of money.

Even if you’re right, you’re counting on other people being taken for all the money you’re not paying, and more. That’s what it means, when this abuse makes more money.

Predatory abuse is inseparable from this business model. Maximum revenue comes from addiction and frustration. You can be made to want whatever bullshit they’re allowed to push. That’s how games work. They mechanically convince you to value arbitrary nonsense.

edit: oh shit, I thought I hit submit on this five hours ago.

I mean, if some guy gropes a coworker, a box filled with the contents of his desk is not carte blanche to spoil an upcoming announcement. But even his ass should be able to say ‘I got fired from [blank].’

Stop lying about what I said. “Nothing inside a video game” does not mean “nothing ever.”

And you know goddamn well that fighting games had incremental re-releases, decades before this abuse was possible.

Or, sell actual expansions. You want characters to cost twenty bucks each? Fine, sell that like a game, not like a fucking hat. If it’s on your hard drive, in your game, you already fucking have it, and charging real money is a scam.

Or, if you want continuing revenue for an online service - make it a service. Sell subscriptions. Oh sorry, do people not like that? Yeah no shit, because it’s up-front about how much it costs, rather than luring people in and gouging them for untold sums.

Or, a game comes out, and plainly exists, and doesn’t become the version that’s squeezed a billion dollars out of ten percent of players over ten years. Oh well! TF2 without this bullshit would still be TF2. People would still be playing 2fort, forever, the same way they’re still doing Ryu vs Ken on Street Fighter 2 Turbo. I do not respect the dishonest conflation of ‘FighterZ doesn’t get to expand forever’ with ‘FighterZ would be banned.’

Zero thought for all the games that genuinely don’t exist, because publishers killed projects to demand live-service flops. Zero thought for all the novel software people could have spent money on, instead of dropping hundreds in one game that barely changes year-to-year. You’re stuck on what exists, as if any change would mean all of it disappears, and you’re magically robbed of that past.

Read what you quoted.

“We can’t even say who just fucking fired us” is a sign that NDAs are broken.

Half the industry by revenue and growing.

‘But indies!’ means nothing, when you count two games with $43 in revenue between them, like that’s twice as many games as Fortnite.

People will always make art. People will always make games. If all the art you see is corporate slop that’s a you problem.

Jesus, why can’t people differentiate the content of games from the way they’re sold? It’s about the money. I’m not shitting on your favorite time-sink, for its art style. I’m angry about the fact it goads you toward paying twenty actual dollars to give your character an ironic t-shirt.

I get subsidized by your teenage hormones and keep playing the game I like.

Uh huh.

So hell yeah, bait me, daddy.

Nope, pulling the chute on this conversation.

That’s somehow worse than the continued lying about banning games when I am talking about a bu-si-ness mo-dellll. Go fuck your strawman alone.

Stupid bully repeats failed script.

This thread has been fucking great for blocking people who would have insisted, whatever this new Auschwitz thing is, it’s just as bad as something Hindenburg did.

None of this is ever about the game part of the game. Fuck entirely off with pearl-clutching over content. This is about a business model. I want people to sell the most addictive, transgressive, customizable bullshit you can imagine, so long as it is either a product or a service. Like anything else you buy. Imaginary shit inside a video game is neither.

You can insist, ‘but it’s new!,’ except it’s already in your game. You’re looking at it, on someone else’s character. This is a dividing line where Oblivion’s infamous horse armor is completely above-board. It was a hundred kilobytes of not much, but it was unambiguously an expansion. You, the human being, received a file you did not have before. Not just permission to say your guy had what anyone else could already wear.

This business model reduces the game part of the game to bait on this hook. Whatever people want, or can be made to want, is dangled at ten bucks a pop, fifty items at a time. Eough rubes get gouged for hundreds or thousands of dollars, such that the total revenue exceeds what the studio would get, even if they sold everybody the full-price game three separate times.

I care about those victims. You delight in their exploitation.

Nothing short of banning the abuse would work. We’re talking about game designers. Manipulating people into enjoying certain behaviors is literally their job. People finally recognized lootboxes are bad - so they sold gave away the boxes and sold keys. Or sold gems. Or insisted it’s just cosmetics. Or-- none of it’s fucking different! It’s all the same shit! You’re all being dragged against the grindstone, using the same tricks that make games fun in the first place. The whole product is an excuse to keep grinding away at you until you decide to open your wallet and look away.

No. They weren’t.

Generic percentage increases to immigration enforcement are not the same as Kristi Noem tweeting about SIXTY-FIVE MILLION PEOPLE, no matter how strongly you feel about the shit we were doing before.

The Idiot is talking about stripping natural-born citizens of that citizenship, and sending them all to cat-food factories in Sudan, and y’all still wanna bicker about Obama catching people crossing the border. Like you can’t figure out there’s a difference between a little over a million people, across eight years, and every Hispanic in America facing a no-trial black-hood flight to fuckoff nowhere, as soon as practically possible.

‘But arcades!’ Are renting someone else’s hardware. Different thing. This did abuse not exist fifteen years ago.

‘But free games!’ Can just be free. Or pay-what-you-want. Or cheap. Or something you already own. How’s your back catalog on Steam?

This Skinner-box horseshit where a game is """free""" but somehow makes a billion dollars is weaponized frustration. The handful of games that were re-released with tiny updates at full price are now the entire industry’s goal, thanks to this specific abuse. (And they still got you chumps to buy three 3D versions of Street Fighter.)

You can pay the price of a whole-ass game for a hat.

Lesser versions of that aren’t better, just lesser. The opportunity to spend one hundred dollars right the hell now is shoved in your face between rounds. Or dangled each time a lootbox animation juuust misses. Or crammed into your inventory, as a gift, mmyes, if only you bought a key.

If LoL wants to keep making money they can charge a subscription or sell expansions. Y’know - rational consumer purchasing decisions. Not playing keep-away and then tickling people’s balls in a controlled environment where fireworks go off each time you click Confirm Purchase.

Inevitably: ‘but people don’t often go for subscriptions.’ Yeah! It’s almost like conscious choices are less generous than engineered decisions! Or: ‘but budgets rely on that immense revenue!’ Then they should shrink. Budgets follow revenue. Always always always. Whatever money these fuckers spent, they expect to extract from you, three times over.

Scale alone makes this monument important. It should be preserved, even if we bury it in dirt for a couple centuries. Like the Bamiyan Buddhas, a hole gouged in the mountainside is a worse scar than a message that must recede into the past.

But if bigoted assholes want to whinge about a museum at the bottom where all the gift-shop merchandise reads “IT WAS ABOUT SLAVERY, STUPID,” they be first in line to shovel that dirt.

If you see a difference between two things, so can the law.

It’s malice, Ken. They know it’s bad and that’s the point.

Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.

Ban the entire business model.

If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.

Oh right, I’m on ML. Where whatever a building is used for now is the fault of whoever built it.

No difference between fighting human trafficking and separating all children from all parents.

No difference between having immigration laws and shipping random brown people to Sudan.

Same same same nuh uh always same.

They weren’t planning to round up an entire fifth of the US population and put them in concentration camps.

I feel like that alone counts for a lot. Sorry you seem to disagree.