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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • StoneyDcrew@lemmy.worldtoGames@lemmy.worldDragon’s Dogma II sales top 2.5 million
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    3 months ago

    Apathy is worse than the whales.

    Let’s do some theoretical scenarios for microtransactions:

    -apathy with whales: “we need to ensure a good monetisation model to extract value from the whales, even if the normal players are missing out”

    -apathy without whales: “let’s try adding microtransactions to extract more value per player, it won’t hurt our sales!”

    -No apathy with whales: “no one is buying our game! And our whales have no one to play with! Are the whales even enough to fund this on its own? We got to undo the microtransactions soon!”

    -No apathy no whales: “why did we even add microtransactions! Every business knows that only quality games and good marketing can help sales!”

    A little hyberbolic but surely you see my point.


  • Ah. The “I’ll just tolerate this until it gets worse” mindset. Never backfires!

    Surely even you can admit that slipping this in on release was a scummy move.

    It’s “theoretical” only because there is no non-monetised version. They could have created a cheat shop with the items for free. Even if you choose not to use them having that option means it is a better experience, so it would still be a “diminished experience”.

    If someone can pay extra money to get a different game experience from you then the publishers have denied you the chance at that experience which is “diminished”.

    This isn’t even mentioning the performance issues on lunch that would be tolerated because “surely they’ll fix it later!”.

    Sure you don’t care. Many people don’t care. And surely someone is going to try and highlight this apathy as a virtue somehow. And so publishers get to continue experimenting with how to milk franchises for every dollar it can instead of making an optimal game experience, overall making the game industry worse.


  • StoneyDcrew@lemmy.worldtoGames@lemmy.worldDragon’s Dogma II sales top 2.5 million
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    3 months ago

    I don’t like the idea of them being slid in there

    Yeah, but you’re tolerating it. which is good enough for greedy publishers.

    If you want it to stop, don’t buy it. It’s the only option. Otherwise you allow publishers to make your game experience worse for profit.

    The reason people like me are disappointed it is selling well is that these anti-consumer practices are not a deal-breaker for most people thus it allows these practices to persist in the game market. That is hardly “nonsense” as you put it.

    I’m sure I’ll get a lot of “tolerating” people commenting that these “can be easily ignored”, but I doubt I will get a single person that says their experience was enhanced by these microtransactions, which could have simply been a cheat code instead.