Yes, it is. Why is the Maelstrom skin behind a paywall but the others aren’t? Why not have all of them require subs? Why is Maelstrom being treated differently to the others?
And I get that, but why give any skill mtx for free?
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Why is any of the dozens (I assume) other MTX not part of the twitch drops behind a paywall and those aren’t? Why are those dozens being treated differently?
It’s also not the maelstrom that is behind a sub, it’s the rip blood.
But if you were to reverse them, then why would the player title be locked behind a paywall and the skill MTX aren’t?
Because that is also a form to support the streamer, since you have to be watching them for a few hours.
I guess the only way to make this fair would be to put all of them behind paywalls?
Umm, no?
Yup.
Yes, or none of them.
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I mean, are the samples supermarkets provide unfair? Those are free and you have to pay for everything else.
Are these samples? Will I have to pay additional amount every time I log in and want to use a skill MTX? Will my chatacter die because they didn’t buy enough skill MTX (like you or I would die if we didn’t have enough food)? Will there be a skill MTX welfare system to support those who are unable to buy them?
Metaphors aren’t always useful…
It’s the same principle. Samples aren’t being offered because you need to eat. They’re being offered so you’ll buy more of their products. Same as giving you some MTX for free. Same as letting you use some software for a trial duration. Same as doing discount sales so people that wouldn’t normally buy those items now do because it’s a bargain.
It’s all just marketing techniques. They are meant to entice you to buy more of their products.
Actually yes, uniform treatment of these things is a very good situation that’s sadly been phased out of the market for a while. Same as creating artificial scarcity around digital products being a thing that has been done.
Both are a net negative for the customer as it diverts from the normative method of acquiring those things. Some might not have access, some might have easier access for some reason, some might not be there when it happens.
I also never understood why supporter packs would ever need to be phased out, it’s a very nonsensical thing in digital goods. With physical ones? Absolutely and 100% behind it! There’s a inherent limitation and hence scarcity which can’t ever be solved in a reliable way… but things like supporter packs being removed after a cycle is over? Why? Can’t I support the game nonetheless? There’s no issue with providing them afterwards, what speak against it?
Ah yes, the limited time thing only, the ‘I was there and you weren’t’ thing… which… once again, for a physical situation (Like a band shirt from a concert as example) it makes absolute sense, for a digital product it never did. If someone starts playing LE in 5 years and is absolutely… and utterly into the game, wanting to have everything surrounding it because that person is such such a huge fan… it’s fairly unfair to say ‘well, tough luck that you’ve only found this product so late, you’ve missed out on aaaaall the stuff coming before and you can only stare at it from the distance now’.
Feels fairly shit, never felt good, raises those being there early on a pedestal for no reason.
Physical goods have scarcity.
Digital goods have not.
Oranges run out. Code never does.
Not even remotely.
That’s a sample. Try it out… like it? Yes? Buy it! If not… goodbye!
Do I have to pay for that MTX later on?
Would I only be able to have a trial version for a limited time? ‘Try it out or you’ll forever miss out’?
Your example is fairly faulty there.
And discount sales are also something which is one major disaster in several countries, with tons and tons of scamming going on. So why allowing it? Is your product not good enough to get people into it without those methods?
Oh right, it happens because everyone can do it… so everyone has to do it as it does something to the psyche of the one it’s catered towards after all. So not doing it would make it a detriment.
So I got a solution… forbid such stuff… evens the playing field and does make quality the primary marker rather then PR 
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Why? There’s no real difference. You go to a concert and you get a special shirt that only people that went to the concert can have. Likewise, you support them this season, you get a supporter pack that only people that supported them this season can have.
The band could simply continue to print the special concert t-shirt if they wanted. There is nothing that prevents them from doing it. There isn’t any physical limitation to it. The only reason people don’t is because they want those items to be exclusive to an event.
Being physical or not is irrelevant for this.
All scarcity is artificial, whether it’s digital or physical (other than raw materials) and made only for profit.
For the same reason that there exists a medium sized menu in fast food that is almost the same price as the large one: so people feel like they’re making a bargain when they otherwise wouldn’t ever buy it.
The medium sized menu isn’t ever intended to actually be sold. It’s just there to provide value to the other product.
It’s all a play on mass psychology. People that would otherwise never buy your product, will buy your product if they feel like they’re saving money.
Are you missing the one word I’m throwing out repeatedly by design? Scarcity.
Physical situation: Unresolvable. We can’t avoid it.
Digital situation: Artificially created. You have to go out of your way to make it even happen. It’s the extra mile. It’s making a net-negative for the customer solely to create a FOMO urge.
Yep, and each print costs something.
Does a download on Steam cost something besides bandwith? Do you need warehouses to store individual sets of the data to then ship out individually to the recipients? Ever seen ‘sorry, can’t be downloaded, the next data batch will be available at xyz again’ somewhere?
No?
Oh right, that’s because data can be copied without limits and downsides nowadays. Physical goods can’t.
Having a company print a single shirt because a single person once a year does want it from the band they heard about which had a concert 10 years ago with 50 people attending costs boatloads of money to do. Doing 10000 at once a single time costs a miniscule fraction. We’re talking ‘pay 10 dollars or 100 dollars for your shirt’ difference… or more given storage space costs hence needing to be evenly distributed between hundreds of thousands of extra products in need to be pre-stored, with thousands if not ten thousands of unique production lines dedicated to making obscure phased out products overall.
Physical goods have underlying limitations. Digital ones not. I can provide on my home PC hundreds of small-scale games at once, with my - cheapest available - bandwith here providing all of them to 3 people per day, meaning I multiplied the existence of that product by 3… for no cost at all.
Can you do that with a shirt? A tea-cup? A pen? A service by itself?
The last time I picked an apple tree empty from my grandfather’s place and returned a few minutes later surprisingly the tree was still empty. And no matter what I did… it kept staying empty!
But you’re right, I probably didn’t find the ‘refill’ button somewhere on the trunk, should’ve looked more closely.
Because:
Makes automatically all physical goods limited. We don’t have endless resources. We also don’t have endless energy… but if your PC is already turned on then the energy is nontheless used, no matter if you buy an MTX during that time or not.
Yes, and I’m saying it’s a shitty way to do things. Preying on psychological weaknesses rather then providing a qualitative deal
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They are both artificially created. That is what I’m trying to tell you. Other than rare stuff (meaning based on materials that are so rare that you can’t physically do more), it’s all artificial. A limited edition digipack version of a CD is artificial rarity. Why not print all CDs as a limited edition digipack?
Yes, it does. It also costs storage space. They need to have the physical files available to upload. The more games they have, the more space they need. Thus, the more money they need to spend to store them.
Each print of the special t-shirt costs something. But it also profits something. So they could keep on selling them while there was demand. Much like a limited edition digipack. But they don’t. They creaate artificial scarcity to increase the value of the item.
They could still sell if for 110 dollars once they’re out of season. As in “you really want this special edition one? Fine, we’ll sell it but we need to profit”.
Don’t be a wiseass. I did specifically say “except raw materials”.
We don’t, but we also don’t have endless demand. So that’s just wrong. We have more than enough materials to provide every single person on earth with a playstation 5, for example.
We have more than enough materials to provide every single person on earth with a phone of any brand.
We have more than enough materials to provide every single person on earth with a limited edition digipack of .
So that scarcity is artifically created to provide value.
Why? The person buying it on sale is happy because they saved money. The person selling it is happy because more people are buying their product which wouldn’t otherwise (many times even leading to excess stock which has to be terminated).
There are many things I dislike about capitalism, but discounts and promotions aren’t one of them.
I think you’re missing one important aspect there.
With a physical good it doesn’t matter if you produce 1… 10… a million or a friggin septillion units of something. It’s limit. You don’t overwrite the whole of existence and beyond with that item, making it infinity. It ends, no matter what you try.
Data doesn’t ‘end’ unless you let it end, be it intentionally or neglect.
You can create ‘infinity’ out of a byte. It’s digital. You can copy it as much as storage space is available. It never runs out.
So it’s factually and very easily visibly wrong.
Once more, apple tree… pick the apples, tree is empty, no way to reproduce more at the moment. Worse if you cut down the apple tree or it dies, the option for those exact apples from that tree is forever lost hence forward.
True, I can easily carry all the libraries of the world with me in my pocket… while physically all those - individual - books do take up the space of a small-sized city instead. A severe difference. And one which makes storage space mostly neglicible for something the size of a game.
Yes, the more individual distinct ones.
You don’t need copies (outside of the mandatory backup systems) for them though. No warehouse full of ‘Diablo 4’ copies needed. It’s not even a single storage rack, it’s a fraction of that, with a few dozen other games of that large-scale size on it. Or thousands upon thousands of small ones.
It’s utterly neglicible. Gaming is a really miniscule aspect for industrial storage, the bigger issue is reduandancy and bandwith, which increases the footprint, but that also scales fairly linearly and not exponentially.
Nope, that’s also wrong.
If you don’t sell it you don’t profit from that individual shirt. Actually… it costs you something beyond production.
As does a game on a storage device. Just in a magnitude of several thousand to ten thousand times less, so much that it becomes… neglecible Which is why those shoddy ‘sold 100 times’ games can stay on the Steam servers for decades without issue. Actually removing them would loose the company ten thousands of times more revenue then simply keeping those individually worthless piles of data available.
Sure, and deal with transport, taxes, quality control, distribution areas… all the stuff which physical things have an issue with for every individual item, done once for a digital product.
Digital goods don’t scale exponentially in upkeep with unit size. They scale in a linear manner.
Gonna need to be one there. All physical products underly raw material access limitations after all. All digital ones don’t have that, they only have space limitations… which physical goods have as well on top of resource limitations.
Sure, if you then don’t make microchips for the server farms, for the Xbox, for the Wii, for GPUs, for industrial machines and anything else Because… we don’t!
We’re using up a substantial amount of the planet’s resources already, sure… not in the grand scheme of things, but those still available are respectively harder to acquire and… are not freed up yet.
Also we don’t have the production capacity to even produce them. Which lacks the physical space to create those factories to make em, which lacks the materials for the construction lines on their own, which lack the workers to even create those, not to speak man them and deal with the upkeep, which also lacks the respective power supply to keep that running, which lacks the materials to simply create power plants in a respectively scaled amount to produce that, which lacks the resources for the power lines to be adequate and reliable since the materials for that are short and the workers to actually put them up (ask Texas how well theirs works for example) and so on and so forth.
So not really… but you can give everyone owning a computer a copy of Minecraft! By tomorrow even
Because they didn’t ‘save’ money. Saving money is accumulating it. They spent money, just less.
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Actually not true. The more games steam has on the store, the bigger the server farm required to provide their service, which means higher costs.
A thousand small games that barely sell anything are in fact generating a loss for them. It just gets eaten up in the profits of the larger games and also provides the aspect of having a huge store available.
This is not to mention the cost required in maintaining their ever increasing database of products, sales and customers. Along with support. Along with development costs for their app/store. It all adds up and many digital products end up being more expensive to make than a physical one.
So you need to have them have value in order to have a profit. Be it the digital box price, the in-game MTX price, etc. And if you don’t rotate out older products in favour of new ones, new products get lost in the ocean of existing ones and their value is diluted.
This is wrong. Saving money is also spending less. If you pay 100 bucks for your energy bill and you reduce it to 75, you’re saving money.
If you want to buy a TV and you buy one for half price, you’re saving money.
Saving money just means spending less than you would normally do. And if you spend “less enough”, you accumulate it.
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So, one thing after another here:
Storage space cost can be completely neglected in comparison. If we would take tha data size into books and store it physically we would have a metropolis as a single warehouse, solely to store a single copy of each of those games. That’s how much work goes into digital goods nowadays.
Also supporting staff can be utterly neglected - in comparison - as well. Imagine having to print all those games onto a physical device, packing it up, managing storage, distribution network and all the upkeep for those buildings as well as organizational stuff. Steam would need 100 to 1000 times as many workers to support that. Hence it would be impossible.
It can be done because the digital medium is so low effort to support, that’s not possible with physical goods unless we invent a MAM (Make-anything-machine) factory basically. And then quantity would be low.
a 10€ game sold 100 times causes Steam to make 300€ revenue. Given the sizes of those games that alone pays for a good year of the server space + upkeep at a professional storage unit with a small-scale contract… not one like Steam has, that’s a fraction of the costs for them even.
No… that’s ‘spending less’, nothing else. You spend, you don’t save.
Money up = saving.
Money down = spending.
Anything else is nonsensical and solely something PR methods tried to ingrain into us. It’s utterly and entirely wrong and has never been right in the history of mankind.
No. Money up = earning. When I get my paycheck, I didn’t save x bucks. I earned them.
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Depending on how pedantic one wants to be, that’s not quite true. There’s a hard limit on the informational capacity of a region of space & thus a maximum amount of data that there can exist in the universe (or part thereof). But yes, compared to physical goods, data is effectively unlimited (given our current level of technology).
If one wanted to be pedantic, which I never do…
As an accountant, I’m going to have to disagree with you there. If I need to buy a thing (food, housing, whatever) & I have an expectation of spending X (lets call it a budget for that thing) but I manage to spend <X for whatever reason, that is a saving because after the purchase, I have both the thing & more money than I would have had if I’d spent X.
Also, no, not so much. I’m prepared to concede programming-related things to you, but not accountancy-related things. Accountancy & the like is not PR.
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Which we generally don’t wanna be 
Agreed agreed
Fair, and badly worded from my side.
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New skill mtx look awesome
People will complain, forget, stop playing the game and move on. FOMO sucks but at the end of the day it’s all marketing so who cares. You don’t need skins to enjoy the game it’s more for the collectors. But you do need to add more variety to in game gear assets as that’s lacking in my opinion.