One of Fortnite's most insidious cultural influences is that other kids are just about expected to bully "defaults" for not wasting enough money on that hypermonetized piece of trash. 
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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Valve TF2 allowing users to buy hats circa 2008 -------> 2024 and children have gambling addictions that their parents and teachers have little to no resources to cure.
If there's one thing you can rightfully slam China for is allowing G@mer gacha into their country I would have purged that entire industry and jailed its ringleaders as child predators.
It was an insidious crawling march of normalizing horrible monetization practices and it's gotten to the point that younger people just accept it because they haven't ever known a different way. 
I also blame Overwatch, that was around first and people made fun of players with default skins there too.
I've always hated Overwatch, mostly because it was so cynically designed from the start to press every button in 
possible about the le sexy waifu archetypes that would get sucked in and keep paying for it.
But it's D I V E R S E in its selection of waifus! Please don't ask why the cowboy character's name is now different.
Some of them are so incredibly painfully Blizzard-generic from the start that they feel like parodies of previous Blizzard slop. "Widowmaker" comes to mind especially.
Im ngl I have lots of problems with Overwatch but charachter design has never been one.
That's fine. That was a personal taste rant there, entirely subjective.
It doesn't help that I found previous Blizzard waifu characters grating... especially what they did with Kerrigan over time.
Yeah agreed that the waifuification of Kerrigan sucks.
She was always kind of a cliche, but a fun cliche, in the earlier Starcraft game/expansion. Blizzard really, really, likes its "corrupted waifu" cliches and has pushed that button many times since, especially in World of Warcraft.
Kerrigan was basically destroyed by waifuication in Starcraft II.
I could rant for hours about a similar waifuication of Cortana in the Halo series (yes, even when trying to kill Master Chef 
in a horny way that counts as waifuication)
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I never got into Overwatch because it just looked like Team Fortress 2 with even more micro transactions. And TF2 is my love/hate game.
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In early league of legends I feel there was the opposite culture, where you would get clowned on for using a skin especially if you performed badly
where you would get clowned on for using a skin especially if you performed badly
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzItS5BmUNw
Mechwarrior Online had some solidarity against the "gold Mechs" that were being peddled for hundreds of dollars each; they'd get teamkilled so consistently that it was extremely rare to see one at all after a while. 
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Kid showed me some of his Fornite skins I think he got them all F2P though
I hope those skins are accepted and aren't bullying targets.
I chipped in with some friends to get my buddy's kid a gameboy knockoff thingy that has roms of thousands of old games from like nes to ps2 on it. We did it specifically so the kid could have screen time without f2p and mtx skinner box stuff.
Yeah. I wish i had been around more for that (he's 8 now and last i saw him he was 4) and also had means to gift him stuff. His mom at least doesnt get him micros.
That sounds great compared to the official Nintendo overpriced retro console that had laughably few games and rammed in Ice Climbers because you will take Ice Climbers and you will LIKE IT 
You should reach out to him and introduce him to emulation and older games. The benefit is that you can obtain a lot of roms at one time and the system requirements are very low. If you get an HDMI adapter and a controller you can deprogram him out of freemium games.
I'm planning to donate my current laptop to my younger cousins as a "SteamOS-like" machine and a HDMI adapter when they're old enough and load it with a bunch of games running at 1080p under Vulkan. I could introduce them to pokemon romhacks and shit.
Someone needs to make a prepackaged Linux iso with like, every remotely popular rom and pc game through ps1 era pre set up. It would only be 100 GB or something.
There are already ISOs like that running Batocera out there if you look around.
Never heard of it, thank you 
You wouldn't have to do that, a torrent tracker would work just as well. There is a "gamer box" Linux iso and it's called bazzite.gg which you can install on your steam deck which can go up to Nintendo Switch games if its optimized enough.
Are there any where you can get ROMs through the package manager? That would be cool af
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I've done that with old laptops. Loaded it up with minecraft and some other kid appropriate games so they'd have fun games that are "safe" from a super-exploitative skinner box perspective.
He's 8 and i dont get a lot of time with him because we dont live close, and i also dont have a lot of knowledge about that stuff myself. (I can emulate via pc, but he doesnt have one literally at all. Just an Apple tv and a switch).
He does have switch online so i could maybe at least introduce him to old Nintedo games via that? I just saw the last of him ill see this visit but maybe ill try that next time i visit or if he visits me. Could do a lot if he visits me by emulating via pc and with my large steam library.
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I think back to Charles Entertainment Cheese's children's casino when we talk about this kinda thing. It was only better back in the day because they didn't have the infrastructure to make it worse.
Honestly at this point it's better to just buy them a PS4 and some old school kid games and remasters then have them accept this as a normal part of recreation. Like my weird paranoid theory is that all this f2p shit targeted at the young is to create a sense of acceptance towards extractive capital infesting every aspect of their daily lives, intentionally or not.
Yeah as I said elsewhere in the thread I wish I had the means to get him some better quality games that dont have this bullshit or at least only minimally do. So far the best solution that ive come up with thats realistic is showing him the old school stuff he can access on Switch online. But he'll probably still just do that with me and keep doing Fornite on his own lol.
They ruined Lego Star Wars?
Wall.
anyway yeah the fucking YouTube games as well - pure attention grabbing cancer. I remember back in the day there were YouTube malware ads where you had to swat or shoot a fly or something, and that was considered unacceptable. Those no longer exist. Instead we have built in Angry Birds.
The console/PC Lego Star Wars is still pretty normal, it's only on phones that you get the crazy predatory stuff (usually)
I’m gonna teach my kids to pirate games
Back in my day we had 1 coin, and nobody knew how to "spend it". 
spoiler
Eventually we found out 100 coins redeemed for a 1x1up, nowhere was this explained in the tutorial level.
I will say in defense of this (but only a tiny bit) that for some people collecting things and unlocking things can be fun, and these types of games have a nearly infinite amount of things to collect and unlock. So in some ways getting all the bonus this and currency that and hoarding it like a dragon can be fun for some people.
I think it's bad for kids to be exposed to it like that though. Definitely treatifying their developing brains to such a level can't be healthy
Oh yeah. I love completionist stuff in games. But the degree these games take it too and for games for kids
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One of the earliest examples of contemporary hypermonetized hell I can think of was a Smurf 
phone game that expected kids to collect berries... and collecting berries instantly charged their parents' phone account. Some kids racked up thousands of dollars of debt doing that.
5 seperate in game currencies.
I think the current king of contemporary hypermonetized grift is Diablo Immoral (it's too fun to call it that so I keep deliberately writing it that way) because it has even more currencies than that. Do you people not have phones? 
Star Citizen may be an even more disgusting grift but it has less reach and is more about hollowing out the bank accounts of a specific niche of reactionary boomer and boomer-adjacent gamedads. 
I have no idea how Diablo Immortal and IV are so popular. Immortal was instantly pegged as being a pay to win knockoff of another game. Diablo IV is like $75 and had day 1 DLC. I'm still pissed over Blizzard gaslighting everyone over Diablo III PVP. My guess is it's the same group who still play Call of Duty or buy EA products.
Then there's all the awful sexual harassment stuff which is reason to boycott by itself.
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Kids deserve better games
I'm 100% serious they also deserve their own safe places online and a bunch of other stuff they've lost thanks to the vice grip of big tech.
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