this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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WoW is a stepping stone, it's used as a frequent example in Reality is Broken, which is good place to start if you want to understand where all this comes from, as well as the rather utopian hope psychologists had at the time.
I was there, and it didn't "come from" WoW. Mtx were already popular in South Korea and China, with games like MapleStory (2003) and ZT Online (2006) being early examples, which predates mtx in WoW. Farmville also had them back in 2009, around the same time WoW started selling pets. And back then Zynga were making like a $1mil a day from Farmville mtx, and this was before WoW pet sales really took off.
Yes, WoW did play a role, but it wasn't as big as you think - after all, it had a very niche audience, whereas games like Farmville, Candy Crush, Angry Birds etc had a much wider appeal that reached out to several age groups and audiences, whilst simultaneously being a lot more accessible - which made them so much more dangerous (in terms of addiction).
WoW appealed to the hardcore MMO gamers, gamers who were used to paying for virtual goods, whereas games like Farmville normalized mtx across for the general and wider public. Paying for virtual items was no longer something that nerds did, it was a completely normal thing. And then Candy Crush tweaked the formula even further. WoW's mtx was a lot more benign compared to some of the shady psychological designs games like Candy Crush implemented.
I absolutely agree that Farmville had a bigger impact, especially as it was geared towards a more casual market. Showing that people who would not describe themselves as gamers would spend a lot of money on games was a huge thing that a lot of people set out to copy.
I worked at GameStop when Farmville was big. Regularly had older women come in and spend $40 to $100 dollars on Farmville cards. A couple of these women came in every week, outspending almost every "traditional" gamer I knew.