Tim Sweeney literally exploits children’s psychology on an Epic scale with Fortnite V-Bucks. He doesn’t get a say about anything, and in a sane world, would probably be in prison (and he wouldn’t be alone).
If you wrote a web app for elderly people which demanded $799 every time they needed tech assistance, with said assistance coming straight from Pakistan and thus unintelligible, there’s no law against that.
But seriously, if you have literally once condemned something that doesn’t have a law against it, that shows your argument is trash.
That doesn’t make him any more right than someone who pulled this claim out of his rear. Tim Sweeney has hated all of these people for years, so it’s a fine slur completely in line with past comments.
I find Fortnite to have a much more reasonable monetization pattern compared to literally all other games that children play nowadays (Genshin and Roblox being the two most problematic). I also love that Epic is the only attempt at breaking the Steam game distribution monopoly we have today.
Also, Sweeney not wrong. Billionaires are lining up to pay Trump his dues because it'll lead to more $$.
I'm not saying Genshin's pull-gambling isn't problematic, but it was one of the first I knew of that have a pity system, where you'd eventually be guaranteed to get the unit you wanted. As a player that pays $5/mo for some gems and gets all their other gems for free, I've hit that pity payout quite a few times since launch.
I wouldn't call it "one of the most problematic". It's bad, but it's not even close to the worst.
Fortnite does feel a lot more reasonable to me. From what I know of it, you pay for things directly, or you pay for a pass that you earn things on if you just play enough. And it's pretty cheap, compared to other online service-based games.
And it's not pay-to-win. I bought a skin when I was playing Fortnite just because I sunk enough time into it. Gachas in games like Genshin, on the other hand, directly impact gameplay and prey on the frustration of F2P gamers and their sense of progression. I'm a fan of microtransactions when it's purely cosmetic.
I got into Pokemon TCG Pocket recently, and the temptation to pay to keep pulling cards / doing wonder picks is strong. I can see why it's making almost as much as Pokemon Go's launch.
IMO framing any discussion around pay2win is missing the forest for the trees and playing into publisher's hands.
On Gamebanana (formerly FPSBanana) you'll find a million pieces of non-P2W content for certain games created for free.
Sure hosting the stuff is not free and has never been, but discussing the nuances of monetary addons is very far from the firsts of complaining about horse armor DLC or the distinction of extensions and addons, given that gaming was paid of gamers' own pocket for a long time.
The narrative is shifting/has shifted from a cultural to a consumerist artifact, exactly as intended.
I would consider modding very different from pay-to-win mechanics. We're talking about live service games with anticheat and online communities.
I think it's just the nature of live service games that have grown in popularity, their expectation of ongoing content creation, rising salary/production costs for said game development, and the wild success MMORPG's discovered years ago with gacha whales. I will say I greatly appreciated the F2P cosmetics-only business model during my MMO days as a student with no income.
Kind of rambling at this point, but my problem lies in the exploitative psychology commonly found with microtransactions in these sorts of games. Cosmetics-only seems to relieve a lot of the pressure to take out one's wallet.
Live service games are a phenomenon of securing income streams. In the cultural era this live service has been done by (let's face it) mostly children such as formerly you and me.
There never was a significant beneficial income (or rather: profit) stream. Only a stream of (self-limiting, but sometimes long lasting) experiences.
I have thousands of hours on a multiplayer game that cost 20 bucks. Its obscure sub-community has lived on for 20 years largely self hosted despite the formal "need for development".
I get that this also is about the ever precarious profession of an artist, but the market may simply not be as large. Content creators (hate to use the term) work for a living at the margins to create ever more stuff, to squeeze through the tight attention grid (dozens of games get published on Steam every day now!)
This creates pressure and it motivates the need for repeatability of transactions, so this story may not necessarily be about greedy execs alone (though it certainly can be!).
I find it ultimately tragic. So much creative talent chasing too little attention and only the most predative sustaining. When the market was more restricted these effects weren't as pronounced and you could more readily create mythologies (such as around Half Life or FF7)
How about we accept the truth that any child psychologist would tell you: they are both, and all, exploitative. The only thing that could remotely considered ethical would be a game paid for upfront.
It’s like saying that it’s better that our children are smoking cigarettes instead of smoking weed. How about we just stop the smoking in the first place?
You do pay "up front" for Fortnite. For every season. It's constantly being updated and getting new content.
You can continue playing for free with your old skins and enjoy the game. You don't need to pay more. But you can also choose to get the new stuff, and you know what it'll be before you pay.
In a world where toys in cereal boxes are considered "exploitative", I'm not going to argue that live service games aren't. But there's a world of difference between what Fortnite does and what Genshin Impact does.
