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Predatory tactics in gaming are worse than you think
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this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
Ban the entire business model.
If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.
There are 14,000 games released on Steam every year. What percentage do you believe contain in-game purchases? It's quite literally just the giant AAA venture capitalist backed studios that do this. Just don't buy them.
It's like saying if we allow AI art to continue soon there will be no more humans making art. People will always make art. People will always make games. If all the art you see is corporate slop that's a you problem.
Half the industry by revenue and growing.
'But indies!' means nothing, when you count two games with $43 in revenue between them, like that's twice as many games as Fortnite.
Jesus, why can't people differentiate the content of games from the way they're sold? It's about the money. I'm not shitting on your favorite time-sink, for its art style. I'm angry about the fact it goads you toward paying twenty actual dollars to give your character an ironic t-shirt.
Yeah, no.
I like a bunch of games that do this. I've liked games that do this for 40 years.
I mean, technically you just banned all arcade games that ever existed. I liked a bunch of those.
And I like a bunch of free to play games. I spent a bunch of time playing Hearthstone. I'm gonna say that at least some of the millions of people in LoL would like to keep playing what they're playing. I am looking forward to a bunch of new characters in Street Fighter 6. I kinda don't want to go back to the days where I had to buy a second full price copy of Street Fighter 2 just to get access to 4 new characters.
I get that it sounds good to say this when thinking about the worst parts of the industry, but... yeah, no.
'But arcades!' Are renting someone else's hardware. Different thing. This did abuse not exist fifteen years ago.
'But free games!' Can just be free. Or pay-what-you-want. Or cheap. Or something you already own. How's your back catalog on Steam?
This Skinner-box horseshit where a game is """free""" but somehow makes a billion dollars is weaponized frustration. The handful of games that were re-released with tiny updates at full price are now the entire industry's goal, thanks to this specific abuse. (And they still got you chumps to buy three 3D versions of Street Fighter.)
You can pay the price of a whole-ass game for a hat.
Lesser versions of that aren't better, just lesser. The opportunity to spend one hundred dollars right the hell now is shoved in your face between rounds. Or dangled each time a lootbox animation juuust misses. Or crammed into your inventory, as a gift, mmyes, if only you bought a key.
If LoL wants to keep making money they can charge a subscription or sell expansions. Y'know - rational consumer purchasing decisions. Not playing keep-away and then tickling people's balls in a controlled environment where fireworks go off each time you click Confirm Purchase.
Inevitably: 'but people don't often go for subscriptions.' Yeah! It's almost like conscious choices are less generous than engineered decisions! Or: 'but budgets rely on that immense revenue!' Then they should shrink. Budgets follow revenue. Always always always. Whatever money these fuckers spent, they expect to extract from you, three times over.
Wait, in what world is a subscription a "rational consumer purchasing decision" where buying characters for a fighting game if you want them as they come out is not?
I would prefer to pay for in-game content of any kind, cosmetics included, over paying a subscription for a game. Any day. Especially if the content is characters, as is the case in LoL or Street Fighter.
And yeah, I bought three 3D Street Fighter games. And a bunch of characters for each. Even a costume or two. I am extremely on board with that. Money extremely well spent, as far as I'm concerned.
Hell, the SF6 community at the moment is begging for more cosmetics. They just announced a handful of horny-ass swimsuit costumes and people went ballistic. It's not my bag, but if people like them and they know what they're buying who the hell are you to tell them they're wrong, let alone that it should be illegal?
I mean, it's a straightforward enough transaction. You think bikini Cammy with tan lines is hot and will pay some money for that skin. I get subsidized by your teenage hormones and keep playing the game I like. Win/win in my book.
That's the problem with this train of thought. There's some stuff where you and I agree there are bad practices and we can probably agree on some common sense regulation for them. But if you're going to come at me with a maximalist approach that boils down to "games I don't like shouldn't exist" we're going to disagree.
Which, if nothing else, is a good reason for regulation of creative products to be relatively loose whenever possible. I was not on board with Hillary wanting to ban Mortal Kombat in the 90s because she didn't like hearts being ripped out and I'm not on board with people wanting to ban free to play games now. It made sense to have age ratings in the 90s and it makes sense to have that and other common sense regulations now.
None of this is ever about the game part of the game. Fuck entirely off with pearl-clutching over content. This is about a business model. I want people to sell the most addictive, transgressive, customizable bullshit you can imagine, so long as it is either a product or a service. Like anything else you buy. Imaginary shit inside a video game is neither.
You can insist, 'but it's new!,' except it's already in your game. You're looking at it, on someone else's character. This is a dividing line where Oblivion's infamous horse armor is completely above-board. It was a hundred kilobytes of not much, but it was unambiguously an expansion. You, the human being, received a file you did not have before. Not just permission to say your guy had what anyone else could already wear.
This business model reduces the game part of the game to bait on this hook. Whatever people want, or can be made to want, is dangled at ten bucks a pop, fifty items at a time. Eough rubes get gouged for hundreds or thousands of dollars, such that the total revenue exceeds what the studio would get, even if they sold everybody the full-price game three separate times.
I care about those victims. You delight in their exploitation.
Nothing short of banning the abuse would work. We're talking about game designers. Manipulating people into enjoying certain behaviors is literally their job. People finally recognized lootboxes are bad - so they sold gave away the boxes and sold keys. Or sold gems. Or insisted it's just cosmetics. Or-- none of it's fucking different! It's all the same shit! You're all being dragged against the grindstone, using the same tricks that make games fun in the first place. The whole product is an excuse to keep grinding away at you until you decide to open your wallet and look away.
If you want to say that certain types of business models, like paying for RNG where you don't know what you're buying, are predatory, I would be with you on that.
But your extreme hardline stance of "nothing should cost money ever" is not a reasonable place to draw the line. At least some of what you're railing against should be perfectly fine.
Nothing inside a video game. That part is not optional. I've dealt with too many cranks who see me arguing - JUST SELL GAMES - and then go 'you want it for free!' No, folks, you want it for free. You want to play endlessly-updated games, 'subsidized by teenage hormones.' You imagine that you would never be taken for ungodly sums of money.
Even if you're right, you're counting on other people being taken for all the money you're not paying, and more. That's what it means, when this abuse makes more money.
Predatory abuse is inseparable from this business model. Maximum revenue comes from addiction and frustration. You can be made to want whatever bullshit they're allowed to push. That's how games work. They mechanically convince you to value arbitrary nonsense.
edit: oh shit, I thought I hit submit on this five hours ago.
I do want updated games, yes. My favorite games wouldn't be my favorite games if 1.0 was all we ever got.
Some games have predatory models, and I do oppose that. But only when it actually is predatory. I take issue with how you're trying to say nothing should ever be sold, even when what's being sold is perfectly fair.
I don't "delight in their exploitation", I am one of the people who buy this stuff.
I am not a victim just because you decide I am. I have some say in this.
So hell yeah, bait me, daddy. To this day, Dragon Ball FighterZ is probably the best gaming experience I've ever had. I was there at ground floor, bought every character, watched every tournament, got competitive. I ended up with three copies of the game, all 100%-ed and with hundreds of hours of play.
And the only thing that bums me out is that they had to bail out of it early, presumably to go make Marvel Tokon.
I will be on ground floor for Tokon, and I will be funding that mouse engine with a bunch of piecemeal cash, I'm sure.
And I need you to listen to me when I tell you that it's going to be on purpose, that I'm not a victim, that I hope that treadmill lasts for a good long while and that the game is good enough to support it.
So please spare me the benevolent outrage. I don't need your protection from my own taste. I would very much appreciate an offline-playable version of the game I can buy with all the DLC down the line, like I did for Marvel vs Capcom 3 or Street Fighter IV, and thanks to the weirdly wholesome interaction between developers and the FGC I may actually get that at some point to support tournament play. But otherwise? Nobody is complaining. You can go save somebody else.
And hey, I say this being a big fan of single player games, and a big supporter of physical media and game preservation. But you come here to tell me that some of my favourite games —and I'm talking game-changing experiences I cherish deeply— should have been illegal and I just don't know better? Yeah, not gonna fly, Hillary.