Sure… thats ok. Its tricky for me tho. I have conflicting thoughts on the matter… I suppose its because I dont like to be played… I would rather make a decision to pay for the priviledge to play with price that is known and predicatable and not have a game try and underhandedly / by dubious means try and trick me into paying for things when I am hooked…
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I think the big take away is no one is actually opposed to cash shops.
People are opposed to outrageous and crazy price gouging, or outrageous gating based on money.
No one wants to get price gouged, which is basically what games that sell power are.
PoE is fairly successful and offers not an ounce of power to players unless we get into the grey area of the economic power stashes provide.
People will often complain about the cost of a suit of armor though, but hey like the video says, games cost money to make. So if you wanna look snazzy you can drop 150$ and look cool as heck.
Riot and league of legends also runs off this model, they just print money selling people skins which also can get pricey for “some pixels”
What games get flamed would be something like maplestory where you are actually stat checked at door of any late game experience unless you swipe up, and that swipe isnt just a “haha one and done” swipe. its a repeated swipe over and over everytime you get a new gear set or reach a new hurdle. This is simply making sure the player is always funneling money into the system at a rate that far exceeds a monthly sub.
But its been a long time of the F2P model being around, we all know you can make a game survive off cosmetic sales alone, so anything else is basically just trying to gouge the player for more money.
How did I know you would respond like this… should have guessed… You are very good at stating the obvious as if everyone doesnt know the point of making money in a business in a capitalist society. Of course I understand the issue making more money over less… Grief dude - could you be more insulting/condescending?
I assumed that anyone who read my comment would understand that… What I am getting at, and what you obviously missed - probably because I was not clear enough - is that I dislike the nefarious methods with which companies approach this need to make the most money to the point where they prey on people by hiding the fact that they are generating revenue by slowly bleeding players dry over time by offering them fictious benefits after having made them addicted to playing a game…
I am of the opinion that everything should be up front and clear… If a company wants to make $100 income per player then they should charge $100 to play… not sneakily try and earn $1 here or there so that the player doesnt realise that they eventually spend $500 on the game…
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Yeah, that too.
If you can enjoy it without spending any money, good for you. Having watched Bellular’s video about it, made me not want to try it.
In general, yes, but this is Blizzard we’re talking about here & they have the massive cashcow of WoW to fund their game development, Blizz have no dry period.
True, but the units shifted has also massively increased over the past ~20 years.
I’m absolutely with you.
Back in the days you only needed the box price. So everybody who could afford the game had the same core experience (given the specs of the pc were good enough to run the game smoothly).
The first games I remember playing online were all competitive, shooters like Q3 Arena or UT. There it was mandatory to have equal chances. It was all about player skill.
The first time I really faced a disparity between player skill and gear was in Warcraft 3. I really loved doing PvP. And I was very good at it. But I could not afford to put that much time into it so my gear was only average. With a bit luck and skill I could 1vs1 a better geared player. I felt nice to kill people that obviously had epic raid gear when I was only wearing that standard set stuff you get in the first endgame dungeons. But very often I wasn’t able to kill even the biggest PvP noobs because they had the way better gear.
That was kind of frustrating for me, but I also was ok with it in the grand scheme. Those people had earned their gear by spending a lot of time. So why shouldn’t they have an advantage?
When games then became f2p with cosmetics and boosters it first looked like a really cool thing to me. I, as a more casual gamer, could spend some extra cash to boost my leveling speed and/or gear so I could close the gap between me and the 24/7 players. But the thing is that nothing prevents the 24/7 gamers from not also spending money. And what type of people wouldn’t be more motivated to become strong as fast as possible if not the hardcore gamers.
And all of a sudden gaming wasn’t about skill and time investment anymore. It was about the wallet. The real life laws have made it into gaming. When before everybody would have had equal chances in a game - no matter how wealthy he was - now it had changed: The guy with the bigger wallet would be able to just buy to power - like in the real world.
I made use of it to some extend. I’m far away from being a whale, though.
The effect of these kind of business model is that companies profit massively from addiction. They want you to feel forced to buy stuff by gating not only power behind money, but also content, progress, convenience,… They create models to please the whales but also to suck every penny out of the small fishes pockets.
It’s astonishing how predatory some p2w models are and even more how many people play those games.
But the internet is full of storys that are just ridiculous, like people investing into NFT projects and getting scammed 7 times in a row within 3 years and losing thousands of dollars. But that’s another thing… 
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That’s a nice opinion to have. It’s also idealist and willfully naïve.
Gamers in general are extraordinarily cheap, and many would just voluntarily not buy the game because they’d be unwilling to spend $100 up front as a matter of “principle”. Others wouldn’t buy games at a higher price point without knowing that they were going to like it - driving the industry to adapt by focusing even more on sequels, remakes, and copycats that would sell more reliable than innovation and experimentation. Still more would be priced out of buying the game entirely because they simply can’t afford to. There’s an entire avalanche of negative effects that would come raining down on the industry, many of which come from straight up childish entitlement at the hands of gamers, with the net result being sales and revenue would plummet.
Do you want to experience a world of gaming where everything becomes COD and Madden and WoW just so companies can sell enough, reliably, to make a profit? Should economically disadvantaged people be prevented from playing AAA games to appease a vocal minority’s uninvestigated ideas about ethics and transparency?
Or is it maybe better for everybody that players have options in how much they choose to spend on a game that they want to play? Some people get to play for years without spending a dime, and their ability to do that is subsidized by streamers and people with high disposable income who feel they get value out of dropping thousands or more on the shop. Some people can try a game for a few hours, find out it’s not for them, and not feel bad about losing the box price or even worse - playing a game they aren’t having fun with just to appease their sense of sunk cost.
Or is that also all so obvious that pointing it out makes me condescending?
I am not receptive to arguments that grant as valid the practice of not keeping track of one’s own finances unless the subject has a mental health issue (like gambling addiction) or is an actual child (in which case I’m only a little receptive, because their parents should be doing it). Absent those scenarios, an adult is perfectly capable of keeping track of and restraining how much money they spend on any given hobby. If they choose not to, that is on them, not the game company. “You get Thing for Price”, right up in your eyeballs in the shop, is not sneaky.
Meanwhile, how much time and enjoyment did this hypothetical player get out of spending that $500? At what point does that $500 divide out on a gameplay hours basis that it’s no longer “bad” to have spent it? Did they spend it on a game that was delivering content to them which was otherwise free, for years, as is the case with the majority of games that make heavy use of MTX? Did they pay nothing to start paying the game, in which case you can subtract $60-90 out of that $500 to make up for the lack of a box price? Did they start playing years after the initial release, after the game has gone through many development and release cycles of content updates and expansions that they’re now getting for free? How does that $500 spent on a game compare to potential spending on other, equally frivolous hobbies? I spent almost 10x that just last year on equipment for one of my other hobbies.
And that’s always the problem with this argument. People just make up and toss out numbers that sound bad to them with no context and no consideration thereof, as though the number just stands on its own as an indictment. But if that’s $500 you spent on POE, that could potentially be less than $50 a year, or $30 per expansion, and that doesn’t sound as unreasonable does it? That’s a game you can play with any dollar figure the average person is going to end up spending on a normal game.
I wasn’t talking just about Blizzard. It was a general statement.
But, WoW doesn’t mean it doesn’t apply to Blizzard too. WoW just isn’t the revenue juggernaut it used to be, and they are a large company that can have any number of games in active or experimental development, sometimes spending years on projects that get dropped entirely or radically change direction. Even though Blizzard has a reputation for paying poorly compared to many of their peers and exploiting their employees, good talent is still expensive. They can’t rely on just WoW to cover the costs of all the development that isn’t currently making money, and may not for years, and that’s why they don’t. And again, that is just one cost that revenue has to cover - Ongoing infrastructure maintenance both for games and for staff, customer support, office space, utility consumption, security, legal teams (especially in the last year), and so on.
(And to be clear I’m not trying to make a statement about Immortal, its MTX, or the ethics thereof here. The game doesn’t interest me, so I haven’t investigated it and don’t really care.)
I look at streamers vids occasionally for build ideas, but that’s the extent of it.
As far as streamers voicing opinions, I don;t pay them any attention whatsoever. How can you possibly pay any attention to the “opinion” of someone whose entire revenue is from sources including the paid promotion of said games. It’s like asking a second hand car dealer if the car he is trying to sell you is a good car or not. Of course he will be honest with you, and no doubt tell you “trust me”. The sad fact of modern society now is that the majority of people are IMHO stupid enough to do just that.
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As far as the 50 million that was quoted, that’s easy to explain.
Companies (and some might say Govs) in this new Era of “fact checking” can publish any nonsense they want and claim it as fact, because as long as the “independent fact checkers” (who are all the complete opposite of independent) are on the same “team” then it gets whitewashed.
Face it, we live in an age of complete bullshit. Even someone as sceptical as me, it takes a lot of time combing the web to actually find out if something is really true or not, and it’s damn tough to be 100% convinced. There are just so few actual sources/websites of truly independent verified factual sources out there now. So, the “50 million” could in actual fact be anything from 10 to 50M. It depends on what constitutes “pre-registered users”? It could be anything from an actual fiscal deposit of funds to someone spamming a few thousand fake email addy’s onto a list with no fiscal repercussions.
I have literally no idea how you come away with that statement from this thread alone? Let me kill that one straight away. I AM AGAINST CASH SHOPS. There, now your “take away” is totally invalidated. See how simple that is?
If you read the replies properly, you will see that what some of us are saying is that not all cash shops are the same, there are different types. So, MAYBE you could have taken away that people don’t seem to be against purely COSMETIC, non game effecting cash shops. That I could understand.
However, almost all of us posting seem to be completely against P2W cash shops. 
It is indeed easy. Much easier than the complex “explanation” you give. 
As soon as Diablo Immortal was announced, you could go on battle.net (with a battle.net account abviously) and pre-register.
Completely free, took one click. Literally just registering your interest in the project.
When they put that in place, Blizzard said they would give everybody pre-registered an ingame gift if they reached 30 millions. This was reached before March.
That’s it. It doesn’t mean buyers, or suscribers, or anything financial. Just interested people. I don’t see why they would make up a fake number.
Diablo is Diablo. It is legendary. I know quite a few people with zero interest in action RPGs who will always buy a Diablo game just to have a quick look, for old times sake.
[Edit: that makes the decision of not going for a box price even harder to understand. They would have sold loads just on the name.]
To come back to the subject, all these “casuals” won’t give a hoot about a cash shop being there or not, and care even less about streamers’ opinions: they just come for a quick romp anyway. And I still believe there is far more of them, in sheer numbers, than hardcore gamers interested in competition and the “pay-to-win” fallacy.
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If you’d watched the video you’d have heard Ziz, briefly, explain his stance/view on pay-2-win twice. Personally I found Bellular’s video on it much more interesting as he went into far more detail on what was gated by what.
Of course its idealist… Good god man cant you read between the lines? Once again, you interpret things in a very narrow minded way and miss the general point I am trying to make. Its not about the $100 - thats an arbitrary figure I pulled out of my arse… It could have been $1 or $10 or $1000. Of course $100 is too much for most gamers to pay as a box price… thats exactly why the companies try and hide it.
Its condescending because you feel the need point it out as if I am a moron not knowing this… Am I supposed to write a doctoral thesis with clearly defined points, rebuttals, justifactions and harvard formatted references just for you to understand that I understand the background involved.
I know for a fact my 15 year old kid has zero clue how much money he has forked over for playing CS:GO or fortnite or any other game that allows microtransactions or even subscriptions/season passes… and I can assure you, I keep track and he has spent WAY more than $100 on each game… and interestingly his max hours played are all on fixed price boxed games without microtransactions that just have once off dlc payments every so often.
The point I was trying to make is that companies taking microtransaction route are trying to hide this fact from the players and lets face it, I figure most people playing games these days are younger, impressionable and in danger of suffering from addiction because they dont know better.
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I could not tell how much money I put into Warframe or Rocket League. A season pass here, a small pack there. Oh, there’s a a discount running? Let’s just buy some ingame currency…
I’m a grown adult and perfectly able to keep track. But I don’t. And so many other people don’t. That’s the whole purpose of MTX. Having people losing track.
It is. But it’s also naive to state that everybody without mental health issues is fully aware of any MTX he did on his games.
But you don’t need to explain how the world functions. Vapour is fully aware. It’s just his view on that topic. It’s not his expectation what will happen.
It’s also naive to think we could stop climate change. But nevertheless we should try.
It’s also naive to think by not buying LE MTX you have helped some Uyghurs. But some people do.
It’s about a moral standpoint. That’s what matters. It’s not about how likely something is.
I’ve done nothing but read between the lines. The only thing I’ve found there is that you think excessive/irresponsible spending on MTX should be the responsibility of game companies to prevent, rather than the responsibility of people who are spending the money to pay attention and make good decisions.
“Here is a store you can buy in-game things from. Thing A costs $X, Thing B costs $Y.”
There is nothing being hidden from anyone. It is right out in the open. It is not deceptive to offer additional features at a clearly communicated cost after an initial purchase.
You literally asked “Why isn’t $X good enough for a business?” Thought exercise: Who is more likely to ask that question - Someone who doesn’t understand that the purpose of a business is to make money, or someone who does? What you’re supposed to do is not ask rhetorical questions that make it look like you don’t know things if you can’t handle someone else pointing out what you appear not to know.
And if you have a problem with that, the only place you should be pointing a finger is the mirror. If your 15 year old can spend money on games unfettered without paying attention to how much he has spent, that’s not on Valve or Epic for “trying to hide it”, it’s on you.
I didn’t say “is”. I’m very well aware of how little some grown adults pay attention to the money they spend on, well, just about anything.
What I said was they can be, they should be, that it is their responsibility to be, that nothing is stopping them from being, that curtailing it is not a responsibility they get to dump on a game company, and that I’m not sympathetic to cries of “hiding the costs” by mentally healthy adults who willfully don’t pay attention to their finances.
Please remember to keep conversations civil. I understand this is certainly a highly controversial topic and it’s easy to get heated, but please try to debate points or opinions raised rather than attacking the posters.
Cept for the Trade marked mental manipulation tactics like skewed match making, mental fomo tactics, offering deals when you are losing on chain etc. that these companies use.
like how can anyone watch this and blame consumers when these guys literally start off with “lets leave morality out of it”
I agree with you in a lot of games, if you are spending 10k on league skins in a year you might have a problem. But the devs/companies have responsibility to engage in moral choices.
We flame companies for using children workers in other countries because thats morally wrong. Just like its morally wrong to manipulate consumers underhandedly.
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That’s the typical “blame it on the customer” behaviour.
There’s a reason why Belgium and Netherlands ban lootboxes and predatory financial models. You can’t play Diablo Immortal and Lost Ark in these countries. I don’t think it is because their governments think that all their citizens are from mental illness suffering fools with addiction problems.
Mobile games scam people. It’s not only “keep track of your payments”. Those games play with peoples minds. Mechanics are created by psychological experts to trigger a certain behaviour. This happens all the time when you go shopping, but the games industry is one of the most predatory in that regard. Just saying “look in the mirror” truly is naive.
Edit:
@DiceDragon well written. I wholeheartedly agree. 
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Wow.
If you sincerely dont believe that consumers should be protected from companies seeking to maximise profit by utilising underhanded ploys and psychological methods to trick them into spending more money then there isnt much more I can say.
I really pity those people who you think are not intelligent, educated, experienced or financially astute enough to not fall for these companies methods.
Its all their own fault obviously…
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No, I didn’t, nor will I. As I said above, I watch streamers’ vids occasionally on builds or game mechanics but that is all. I have less than zero tolerance for listening to “opinion pieces” from streamers. I form my own opinions, I don’t give a rat’s ass for others whose opinions may or may not be tainted by payment bias. On an individual basis, I respect all the work Ziz does in making informative build and mechanics vids and also his dev work in some games, but he is also allegedly paid income by gaming companies like other streamers. Therefore I prefer not to possibly taint my good opinion of him by listening to opinion pieces or editorials that may or may not be clouded by external motivations. I bring you back to my 2nd hand car dealer example above.
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