Numbers aren’t what make this an abuse. There is no ethical form of charging money inside a video game. Games make you want arbitrary nonsense - that is what makes them games. Attaching a dollar value to anything inside that fiction is an exploitation of humans’ sloppy grasp of value.
The fact we can’t fully separate ‘I need this to not die in real life’ from ‘I need this to defeat the demon king’ is why games are enjoyable in the first place. They provide tractable goals with clear rewards so your brain makes the good chemicals. Sticking a tollbooth in the middle of that process is fundamentally intolerable.
And the alternative is: just sell games. They got seventy fucking dollars for this thing, and demand potentially hundreds more. “Tacky” is not the first word I’d use, when condemning that boundless greed.
Numbers aren’t what make this an abuse. There is no ethical form of charging money inside a video game. Games make you want arbitrary nonsense - that is what makes them games. Attaching a dollar value to anything inside that fiction is an exploitation of humans’ sloppy grasp of value.
The fact we can’t fully separate ‘I need this to not die in real life’ from ‘I need this to defeat the demon king’ is why games are enjoyable in the first place. They provide tractable goals with clear rewards so your brain makes the good chemicals. Sticking a tollbooth in the middle of that process is fundamentally intolerable.
And the alternative is: just sell games. They got seventy fucking dollars for this thing, and demand potentially hundreds more. “Tacky” is not the first word I’d use, when condemning that boundless greed.