Your taste is pretty good, too. I’m not one for gachas or other games with exploitative monetization, but damn do I keep clicking save on the fanart I come across.
Aww thank you for the compliment! Tbf I find the smartly engineered psychological gacha mechanism pretty distasteful (and also impressed how well it works on a lot of people), but I haven’t spent a dime on Genshin and never will. These gacha tricks don’t really work on me luckily.
You’re lucky. I’m in a similar place with Apex, I enjoy he game. The business model disgusts me, and just playing it props up the whole thing in a tiny way. Those other people wouldn’t spend, if they didn’t have me to show their pointless cosmetics to. These methods wreak havoc on the financial health of certain susceptible individuals. Someone made a sub for discussing this stuff, I saw:
https://sopuli.xyz/c/abusivemonetization
Hopefully, someday, all these lootboxes, gachas and battlepasses will be behind us, and games will be bought and sold because they are worth it in and of themselves.
Oh was Apex lootbox heavy from the get-go? Wouldn’t be surprised about that, since it’s an EA game. Yeah as I recall every freemium games tries to grab a certain 1% of players, whose are called the whales. They are those people who willingly spend insane amounts of money, and apparently in most of the cases this 1% produces noticeably more money than some wider and less spending audiences.
It’s really interesting, since a clueless person would probably think that the main income comes from these smaller spenders, but not.
I’m not really optimistic about if these tactics will ever vanish, but I’m fine with only cosmetic "micro"transaction if the overall game quality is deservingly good (for me it’s Genshin Impact). I’m more keen on eliminating FOMO tactics. Those tactics sometimes slightly pushes me to do some free events, because time limit.
I’m not fine with even that, especially as it’s so ludicrously profitable that it re-contextualises how management of video game studios make decisions. Case in point the axing of Titanfall 3 and Overwatch 2. The quality of the stuff produced by the entire industry is dropping due to these practices. Why spend dev time fixing bugs or making new gameplay systems, when the return on investment for adding 12 more skins and another battlepass season, is 1000% higher.
Why make a new or better game, when just another coat of paint will keep 99% of players happy playing the same thing for another year.
Yeah your stance is absolutely understandable, I’m probably just the victim of accepting this as a norm, and I don’t have that much recollection of when no games had DLCs, expansion packs, microtransactions, or ludicrous gambling tactics, instead, they came out in a finished state. (Only 22)
Ah yeah I think I’ve already seen a YT video about your point. Prioritizing time to microtransaction, and not making the game actually better. It’s really sad to see that, probably it’s one of the driving forces of me being a bit burnt out of new video games.
EDIT: Also these tactics really vanish the soul of the game, and that kills the fun.
