An even simpler version would be ok you unlocked this style of say pants, and it has various ways it can be hemmed or rolles up or dyed or have accessories mounted to it, and there are accompanying in game mechanics for being able to do all that.
So is your issue that people who don’t pay still have to download the content to see it on other players?
Would you be okay with a certain color of pants that’s only accessible through outside purchase of a dye (i.e. one that cannot be traded)? That way other users don’t need to download the dye, but they do need to have code on their machines to display that color.
The whole point here is to separate yourself from the unwashed masses, it doesn’t matter as much what the character looks like. It’s why the whole “blue bubble” vs “green bubble” thing is a thing, it’s a separation between “classes” of people in a sense.
It does have DLC. This is a far better funding and development model than MTX.
DLC is the same thing, especially since so many are simply enabling a license for existing content. For example, I can play maps I don’t have the DLC for provided the host has it, which means one of two things is happening:
I download the map when I connect, but still can’t access it w/o the license to do so
The map is already downloaded (that’s how most work) and I just load it up when the host verifies their license
The only difference is where the DLC is purchased (and maybe when the data is downloaded), and many games let you buy the DLC directly through the game. DLC can also be delisted, so what you seem to be asking for is for games w/ MTX to just jump through some extra hoops.
That is not a sense of fashion, that is just flaunting your wealth in am ostentatious, crude and immature manner.
That’s what fashion is, and why “fashionable” things are expensive. People don’t buy Rolex watches because they work better or look cooler than cheaper options, they buy them because they’re expensive and others recognize that they’re expensive. These usually have a level of quality to them, but they’re rarely more durable or have more utility than cheaper options.
We treat it differently because we give it a different name, but at the end of the day, those fancy stores (MK, Coach, etc) are the “poor people’s” designers and a way to flaunt some level of wealth (e.g. my in-laws gave me a ~$400 wallet from Burberry, which was functionally equivalent to other $50 wallets), and rich people do the same but with more private labels. I think I have successfully convinced my inlaws that I feel incredibly uncomfortable with such things (my current wallet cost $15-20, and I like it much better), but they still like buying that crap for themselves, despite being relatively poor (they live in an apartment, I live in a nice house).
It’s the same thing, people like to look successful to other people and flaunt what they have. It’s why so many rap songs boast about how much money they have, why celebrity awards ceremonies are largely about the fancy designer clothes they’re wearing, and why luxury cars are so popular (I see a lot more luxury cars in apartment complexes than my middle to upper-middle class neighborhood). For certain types of people, flaunting wealth is the point, it makes them feel wealthy, even if they’re up to their eyeballs in debt. I see exactly the same thing in upper-middle to upper-class neighborhoods, which is why I prefer to stick to the middle-class neighborhoods.
The same exact thing is happening with these games. People like to flaunt wealth, and that comes in a ton of forms.
My issue is that MTX is an exploitative predatory model for designing games and funding game development that essentially always leads to games that are unoriginal, that allows for and incentivizes very toxic social dynamics amongst its players, and that this often leads to many people with either poor impulse control or those susceptible to aforementioned toxic social dynamics will spend /too much/ of their money to the point it seriously negatively impacts their lives.
No, I would not be ok with a certain color being MTX only.
Not sure what you mean by blue bubble vs green bubble, but there are many ways one can seperate themselves from the masses in many games that feature character customization that do not feature MTX.
So, no DLC is not the same thing.
MTX to a large extent works by incremental gradualism in terms of the actual psychology of how it exploits susceptible people.
DLC on the other hand does not do this. Here is an outlined block of content, it usually features many new things in addition to new cosmetics, and usually all those things are not dependent on further microtransactions, but actual game play of some kind.
This is a much more straightforward and much less manipulative way to expand your games content.
While it still is not very common for games in general to allow players to play on maps they do not have, but a friend does, yes you are correct that a few games feature this.
This is irrelevant to the discussion of MTX, though. I do not have total and complete knowledge of all video games, but I have /never/ heard of playable maps as MTX before. Even if such a phenomenon does exist, maps are not usually tied to the player being able to alter gameplay for themselves /specifically/ or to clothing or weapons that /specifically/ are proven to be crucial elements to the toxic amd exploitative dynic that MTX creates.
The closest thing I can think of would be maybe an MMO with a player customizable house that has many things only obtainable via MTX, but I am not aware of a game with such features, and I would be against it anyway. Just make the things obtainable in game.
As to your views on fashion, I mean yes, many tasteless people view fashion only as a way to flaunt wealth.
That is /not/ what fashion actually is though to anyone with an actual sense of creative style.
This is not my area of expertise by any means but try asking actual character art designers what fashion is and how it works.
Different color schemes, styles of clothes, materials can all be mixed and matched, or paired neatly to convey certain elements of a character trying to be portrayed visually.
People who obsess over branded clothing items are nearlt always tasteless and have absolutely no sense of style.
It is entirely possible in many games, with and without microtransactions, to take different individual pieces of clothing amd make a unique look.
As example, though I dislike RockStar’s incorporation of a premium currency mechanic that allows for players to pay real world money for in game content, the games both feature a wide array of clothing choices that can be mixed and matched individually to create your own looks for your character.
Or, you can buy a pre made outfit and immediately be laughed at by everyone for spending money on it, because there are now thousands of other clones that look just like you, and its entirely possible to look good without doing this, you just have to put in some effort and actually, you know, have an actual sense of fashion to determine what looks good or conveys what you want your character’s appearance to convey, and when you have done this, it will actually be unique to you and your character.
Another example of this would be Cyberpunk 2077.
Its entirely possible to have a wardrobe that both looks good and is also effective in game… and is not just a cookie cutter clone of some faction or other character, but this requires actual work.
Much like how actually looking fashionable in real life does.
Further examples would be countless MMOs and even some more clothing heavy Survival Sims and MilSims at this point. Those games less commonly feature outright MTX, and again its entirely possible to do actual fashion by mixing and matching things until you find a ‘look’.
The point of true fashion may be said to convey certain things about yourself or the character via their attire, and the art of it comes in to understanding how styles work, how the human form works, how colors work, how materials work, and then all of this is constrained by other factors such as practicality, affordability, etc.
Its more impressive to pull off a good looking cheap dress than a just as good looking but 20x as expensive one, unless your entire goal is projection of wealth /over/ actually looking good.
Work boots are relatively common and know for being useful in hard physically demanding conditions, so both a construction worker and a soldier may wear different versions of them.
But when a construction worker puts on mil grade knee pads and a scavenged carrier rig, and carries a battered rifle, this conveys a very different character than a standard soldier in BDU does:
We can immediately tell that he is doing this not as his profession and as a rather impromptu affair, that he likely did not plan for this.
I list these examples to attempt to show you how fashion and character appearance is far more than a competition of wealth display: In video games and movies it is very often a means of conveying the character through ways other than what they do or say.
As yet another example I once designed basically Sam Fisher in Arma 3, wearing pants utilitarian enough to be practical, but also conventional enough to look like many civilians. Had a button up dress shirt with plate body armor with PRESS emblazoned on it, shades, no helmet.
DLC on the other hand does not do this. Here is an outlined block of content, it usually features many new things in addition to new cosmetics, and usually all those things are not dependent on further microtransactions, but actual game play of some kind.
That’s one form of DLC, sure, but there’s no technical reason why MTX couldn’t just be transitioned to appear as DLC. For example, you can buy Shark Cards for GTA V as a DLC, and that type of thing would normally be MTX within the game.
MTX is just a special type of DLC that is usually time-limited and is logged in your online account instead of your launcher. That’s really it.
I have /never/ heard of playable maps as MTX before
You can buy maps for Risk: Global Domination as an MTX and use them if the host has them. Likewise, you can use any EU4 or CK3 DLC in an MP game if the host has them (only gameplay DLC, not cosmetics like unit packs). It’s relatively common for SP games w/ MP mode, but a bit less common to gate maps behind a DLC/MTX for F2P games.
My point is that this is very similar to a cosmetic DLC/MTX. Basically, player A buys the “DLC,” and other players can “use” the DLC when they see the player using the cosmetic. That’s the same general idea as temporarily “getting” a DLC when joining an MP game. If we make MTX illegal, they’ll just call them DLC because on a technical level, it’s the same thing.
That said, I don’t know of any games with “DLC” cosmetics that are visible but not usable by other players, aside from F2P games w/ MTX. But that’s probably because if they’re going to go that route, they’ll make them time limited instead of permanent like most DLC are, but there’s really no technical reason why they can’t just make MTX work exactly like DLC (i.e. show up in your launcher under the DLC section). In short, why would they do the more complicated thing if they don’t need to?
Thanks for letting me know what the green bubble blue thing is. I have never and will never use an Apple product for many reasons, so, didnt know that.
That being said, yeah, thats another example of an exploitative business decision that has no technical reason for existing whatsoever, and uses peer pressure to get children to waste money, like MTX.
I expanded my post a good bit a couple of times but maybe you missed it: Purchasable premium currency is /also/ a horrible, exploitative practice that is functionally indistinguishable from MTX in almost every way.
The fact that RockStars shark cards and gold for rdr2 are only purchasable on steam in the DLC section does not make premium currency DLC.
DLC is essentially an addon pack, an expansion of the original game with new levels, characters, maps, weapons, equipment, new gameplay modes, etc.
Another way of looking at DLC is that in the old days before it was practical to download more than around 100mbs as a patch, and a game developer wanted to release an expansion pack, they would sell a whole new cd at stores for maybe 1/2 to 1/3 the cost of the base game.
Now, for the rest of your comment:
I am not saying that outlawing MTX would be 100% effective. My point is that MTX is /bad/, games that heavily rely on MTX are often bad, that it is exploitative, blah blah blah already wrote everything.
That being said: Your reasoning here is not certainly wrong, but likely not very good. Loot Boxes have been functionally banned after the EU figured out how to precisely define them, and shortly thereafter many games had to alter their mechanics to not explicitly be loot boxes, and these days it is rare for new games to come out that feature them.
Should a law be sufficiently well worded and have the teeth to be enforced, I would say its actually pretty likely that the practice of designing MTX into games could functionally be ended, though of course not totally, not perfectly.
I personally do not care if F2P games with MTX are affected, as being F2P is the equivalent of a crack dealer offering you your first hit free of charge. Enough people get addicted that to the game that its profitable to just sell them new cosmetics.
Further, nearly all F2P MTX games are based around extremely boring, simplistic and repetitive gameplay, which is itself designed to actually be effectively random in terms of your skill level having anything to do with your actual success at the game. Less mature players will believe that they can actually get good at the game by playing it enough, because either they have not played many games before or they basically become addicted to the gameplay loop itself, which is /also/ knowingly designed to be both addictive and rage inducing.
So with F2P MTX you generally get the absolute worst possible situation from the standpoint of a child or a person susceptible to peer pressure or with basically the same personality of a gambling addict.
The technical implementation of MTX just shifting everything over to being outside of the game itself /would actually be a significant success/ from the standpoint of preventing impulse purchases quite literally because it forces the user to undergo more steps before making their purchase.
Another thing that could potentially be done from a legal standpoint is to quite literally make it illegal for a game to allow you to spend more than so much on MTX or Premium currency in a certain amount of time, and/or only allow a purchase every so often, and or display government mandated warning placards in the same vein as cigarettes must display every time you access any in game or out of game market for the game.
These things are all definitely legally and technically possible to implement.
It does not matter what section of some menu has what UI label to a well written law. Such tbings are laughably easy for any competent programmer to alter within at most a month.
What matters is the functional workings of the entire system in its totality, and the precedent for this approach working has, again, already been established by the EU’s ban on lootboxes.
exploitative business decision that has no technical reason for existing whatsoever
There is a technical reason, actually. The messages from Android are SMS, whereas the messages from immediate iMessage are encrypted and sent over a different channel.
But the net result is a lot of social pressure.
DLC is essentially an addon pack, an expansion of the original game with new levels, characters, maps, weapons, equipment, new gameplay modes, etc.
It sounds like you’re explaining what you want it to be. Some DLC is certainly like that, but quite often it’s not. Sometimes you get that kind of content as a MTX. People try to draw a line here, but there really isn’t one because it’s all convention. Some DLC require a download (e.g. the D part), many do not (i.e. just a DRM check when you launch).
Yeah, in the old days, you’d buy your expansions as a separate product (e.g. Brood War for Starcraft), but these days there’s a lot less formality and variety to it.
So if we try to craft some kind of law against MTX, companies will just call them DLC. The only difference is how they’re marketed; on a technical level, there’s no clear separation between the “good” and the “bad,” it comes down to how it’s marketed and the value you get. The only clear separation I can think of is things that are time limited (i.e. you can only buy it for the next X days), but that’s a practice in pretty much every industry and a practical necessity for copyright law (e.g. music is usually licensed for a set number of years, hence why older GTAs aren’t available for purchase).
I’m guessing there’s a mechanism to buy DLC from within a game, and if there isn’t, game studios would push for that to be created.
worst possible situation from the standpoint of a child or a person susceptible to peer pressure or with basically the same personality of a gambling addict.
I agree children should be protected here because they cannot consent. However, we don’t prevent people with gambling addictions from gambling provided they’re adults, because they are responsible for their actions even if they suffer from addiction. Adults are expected to take measures to protect themselves, children are not.
So I’m absolutely in favor of banning children from F2P games where profit comes from manipulative practices (either they’re being manipulated, or they’re being used to manipulate others, both of which are wrong). Maybe that’s enough to dramatically reduce these games, maybe it’s not, but that’s not the goal; the goal is to protect those who cannot consent.
make it illegal for a game to allow you to spend more than so much on MTX or Premium currency in a certain amount of time
That sounds overly restrictive. If I want to buy an expensive item, I would need to make that MTX several times over the course of days in order to get it? Why?
A better solution, imo, is to provide a mechanism for customers to set their own limits so they can self regulate. It would be up to them to decide what that limit is, so they get to decide what they’re comfortable with. But they should also be allowed to disable that limit as well, though perhaps with a multi-day waiting period so they don’t just disable it while drunk and render the whole thing useless.
Apple designed their different protocol early on for no actual reason other than to intentionally be incompatible with the standards used by the entire rest of the industry, entirely to use as a peer pressure and marketing tactic to make less technically knowledgable users believe that it is somehow better or has more features or is more secure or somethimg.
It isnt, it doesnt, and it isnt more secure.
They easily could have used existing standards, but again, decided to develop their own exclusive standard and them basically lie and make misleading statements that would promote exclusivity and a superiority complex amongst its user base.
Your quibbling about the definition of DLC is irrelevant and pointless, and you do not seem to know what DLC is if you think DRM is DLC. Its not.
I already outlined substantive definitions of what constitutes DLC and MTX, and you are just repeating yourself saying the line between them is blurry. It is no where near as blurry as you think it is, and its now becoming clear that you do not appear to be able to comprehend what I have written.
The only difference is absolutely not how they are marketed. I think you are referring to how they presented in a UI.
I already addressed this, MTX is a system that has identifiable characteristics and properties that make it distinct from DLC, regardless of UI labelling.
Thats not marketing. Marketing is promotional material, trailers, paid game reviews, statements made by the company selling the product for the purpose of getting you to buy the product, a demo held at a convention, that sort of stuff.
As to your preference for allowing customers to self regulate:
Congrats, you have missed the entire concept that large demographics of people do not have the ability to self regulate their addiction problem, because an addiction problem literally is the lack of the ability to self regulate in regards to a certain activity or substance.
Anyway, I was not saying I would be necesarilly for or against such a measure, I was merely proving to you that it can legally be done, with examples.
Its clear your reading comprehension is not that good and you have at no point acknowledged that basically I have disproved everything you think you understand about how anything we have talked about works, functions, is actually defined, etc.
I will likely not be responding to you on this matter further as it is evident you basically have no idea what you are talking about.
integration with macOS - you can message people on macOS/iOS without going through your phone
features like read receipts and reactions
aforementioned encryption (and yes, it is encrypted, and you want that), which has the practical benefit that telcos (read: police, hackers, etc) can’t see the content of your messages
There are practical benefits, and you would want to know if a message is encrypted or not. The issue isn’t that they’re using a nonstandard protocol, it’s that they didn’t open it up to others. I’m sure Android would’ve loved to integrate with it, but instead Apple kept it proprietary and even took steps to shut down a competitor that found a way to be compatible, all to drive purchases for iPhones.
The problem isn’t making an alternative to SMS, it’s actively preventing competitors from making a compatible app. This wouldn’t be an issue at all if Android users could install a compatible app.
Your quibbling about the definition of DLC is irrelevant and pointless, and you do not seem to know what DLC is if you think DRM is DLC
I’m explaining how game companies will react to a ban on MTX.
And yes, DRM can be a part of DLC. Instead of downloading content, many games just check if you have a license for the content and flip a switch internally to enable it. That’s how DLC gets to be available for clients if the host has the DLC, it just enables that switch if the host has it. There’s no actual download process, it’s literally already included in the game, just disabled.
That’s literally the same way MTX work, but instead of the DRM check happening with the launcher, it happens with the game server.
its now becoming clear that you do not appear to be able to comprehend what I have written.
No. You’re writing what you think DLC is, I’m providing examples where the line actually is blurry.
Yes, there are plenty of cases where DLC requires a download and is local only, but there are also plenty where it doesn’t and is shared with others who play with you. MTX is like the latter.
If we ban MTX, we run the very real risk of banning other, “good” forms of DLC that work in exactly the same way. So the distinction becomes very subjective. Sure, maybe you and I could agree that a given method is “good” or “bad,” but that’s not something that can easily (read: feasibly) be written into law, and the gaming industry will find workarounds.
And that’s not even getting into the discussion about whether it’s moral to restrict individual choice of adults in the first place. So my focus will be on protecting children, not trying to ban MTX entirely because I honestly don’t think that’ll work.
Congrats, you have missed the entire concept that large demographics of people do not have the ability to self regulate their addiction problem, because an addiction problem literally is the lack of the ability to self regulate in regards to a certain activity or substance.
No, addiction is not the inability to self-regulate, it’s a physical or psychological dependence.
Someone with an alcohol addiction probably needs to avoid alcohol entirely. That’s a form of self-regulation. If you’re addicted to MTX, your form of self-regulation is either to entirely avoid games with MTX, or put a lock on your account to prevent purchases (if there’s a PIN, have an SO set it so they can help you control it). If you only make stupid decisions while drunk and you look to drink while playing, putting a daily purchase cap could be enough.
We don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater here, we can instead provide tools to help those with addiction problems self-regulate. That would be the direction of legislation, not banning things that impacts a small subset of the population.
Yep, you continue to be wrong in ways that I have already explained which you obviously do not understand, and in more baffling ways that would require even further in depth explanations from me which at this point you quite clearly would also misunderstand.
You often do not even understand how to make relevant criticisms and simply assert something false or irrelevant about one point I make and use it to argue against some other point in a way that I have already shown to be false or failing to even grasp the concept being discussed.
You are in this latest post just outright contradicting yourself within the span of two adjacent sentences as opposed to separate posts.
Obviously you are someone who plays games and has opinions about them and has no actual programming or tech industry or video game creation experience, as opposed to myself who does have actual experience making games and has worked in the tech industry for a decade.
Again, you have no idea what you are talking about and have basically been wrong about literally everything you have mentioned.
DRM still is not DLC. Yes. They interact. That does not mean they are the same thing or necessarily must coexist. DRM is not /content/ it is /content management/.
Their interplay or relationship is irrelevant to a discussion about MTX, which you still fundamentally fail to grasp is a system with definable attributes, which I again have already defined more than sufficiently, which you again are either forgetting or ignoring.
You insist on relying on astoundingly vague and unspecified concepts of ‘good’ DLC vs ‘bad’ DLC which is obviously not possible to legislate or regulate because it is not well defined.
We absolutely do not run the risk of banning any kind of DLC if MTX is regulated against.
Again, as I already stated, in a world where say games were not allowed to, within the actual game itself, offer access to the player to additional content that applies specifically to that character’s avatar as either a cosmetic or a functional in game item, where the actual digital code for said items is already present to all players without additional download, this would 1) lessen impulsive purchases 2) reasonably result in many games moving there stores for MTX to a program or website not actually in the game itself.
Then, if you combine that with my other theoretical restriction of being able to purchase additional DLC for a specified game only every so often, or put a cap on max spending on DLC in a time period, what this results in initially MTX individual items to be sold as bundles, and at the very least highly incentivizes game companies that rely on MTX to make reasonably priced bundles, while also not seriously affecting non MTX games that semi-regularily release DLC that contains more substantial things than just items for the individual player.
While this would not entirely destroy the ability of MTX games to sell more content, it would seriously dampen the exploitative power of their predatory business model to harm those susceptible to it.
In the world of preventing addictions and similar things, there is never a full proof solution, but there often are very effective harm reduction techniques.
Not that you have any understanding of such policies as you apparently still cannot grasp that addiction literally is a self regulation problem, but also simultaneously that it is and MTX is somehow unique and special and different than other addiction problems and should be addressed by methods which are very, very well known to be very ineffective for all other addiction problems.
I cannot believe that I have actually wasted my time repeating myself due to your inability to string together consistent concepts from my differing posts.
You are just arguing for the sake of wanting to be right and have absolutely no ability to realize you are incorrect, uniformed, and also just at this point unable to make a coherent argument.
You are in this latest post just outright contradicting yourself within the span of two adjacent sentences as opposed to separate posts.
Then please point that out so I can either explain how it’s not a contradiction, or learn where I was mistaken.
DRM still is not DLC. Yes. They interact. That does not mean they are the same thing or necessarily must coexist. DRM is not /content/ it is /content management/.
I never said they were. I said that in many cases, DLC is already “part of the game,” just hidden behind some DRM. That seemed to be the contention you had with MTX, that content was in the game, but not available unless the player purchases it. I’m sure there are plenty of games in your library with content locked behind a DLC paywall, but still in the binary you downloaded.
DLC used to simply be a replacement for those expansion disks you can buy at the store, and now they’re just unlocked in the same binary everyone downloads. MTX is extremely similar in that you get to see content you can’t access directly, provided someone you’re playing with has paid for that content.
Again, as I already stated, in a world where say games were not allowed to, within the actual game itself, offer access to the player to additional content that applies specifically to that character’s avatar as either a cosmetic or a functional in game item, where the actual digital code for said items is already present to all players without additional download, this would 1) lessen impulsive purchases 2) reasonably result in many games moving there stores for MTX to a program or website not actually in the game itself.
Games would just provide a link to a browser (or embed a browser directly, depending on the wording of the law) in the game itself, and then you’d see the effects immediately in the game when buying cosmetics. Yeah, maybe it would be a slight hurdle to jump, but it would basically only be one more click.
And that’s if your bill even passes. The market is just too lucrative for these companies to just roll over, they will find a way to capitalize on players’ vanity and desire to have “everything.”
theoretical restriction of being able to purchase additional DLC for a specified game only every so often, or put a cap on max spending on DLC in a time period
How would that be enforced? Unless that number is quite high, it’s going to annoy a lot of players (i.e. let’s say I come back to a game like Magic Arena or Hearthstone and want to get caught up with the latest cards), and if it’s too high, it’s probably not going to help much. Maybe a requirement for games to block users for unusually high spending would help in some cases, but would that really apply to people who are addicted (i.e. that have consistently high spending)?
It just seems incredibly hard to craft a law that effectively solves the problem, doesn’t restrict players’ freedom too much, and that large gaming companies would not fight too hard against. And I’m sure large gaming companies would find a way around whatever law is crafted (i.e. maybe gifts don’t count, so players gift each other stuff instead).
addiction literally is a self regulation problem
No, addiction is a dependency problem.
Ask anyone who has made it through AA or any similar program and you’ll learn that the (physical or psychological) dependency is still there, but they’ve learned how to self-regulate to avoid triggering it. What seems to work is placing obstacles in their way to force themselves to make a conscious decision instead of giving in to that need.
So if there’s any regulation here, it should be around giving people the tools to self-regulate (and perhaps requiring games to advertise them), not on preventing the behavior directly (that limits individual choice). If people know they have an addiction problem, they can set a cap (or ideally just not play predatory games).
You are just arguing for the sake of wanting to be right
No, I’m arguing because I have a different opinion, and I think you’re misunderstanding it. If you simply disagreed, you’d presumably stop replying, or try to convince me of yours. But if you attack my arguments, I’ll clarify and explain.
So is your issue that people who don’t pay still have to download the content to see it on other players?
Would you be okay with a certain color of pants that’s only accessible through outside purchase of a dye (i.e. one that cannot be traded)? That way other users don’t need to download the dye, but they do need to have code on their machines to display that color.
The whole point here is to separate yourself from the unwashed masses, it doesn’t matter as much what the character looks like. It’s why the whole “blue bubble” vs “green bubble” thing is a thing, it’s a separation between “classes” of people in a sense.
DLC is the same thing, especially since so many are simply enabling a license for existing content. For example, I can play maps I don’t have the DLC for provided the host has it, which means one of two things is happening:
The only difference is where the DLC is purchased (and maybe when the data is downloaded), and many games let you buy the DLC directly through the game. DLC can also be delisted, so what you seem to be asking for is for games w/ MTX to just jump through some extra hoops.
That’s what fashion is, and why “fashionable” things are expensive. People don’t buy Rolex watches because they work better or look cooler than cheaper options, they buy them because they’re expensive and others recognize that they’re expensive. These usually have a level of quality to them, but they’re rarely more durable or have more utility than cheaper options.
We treat it differently because we give it a different name, but at the end of the day, those fancy stores (MK, Coach, etc) are the “poor people’s” designers and a way to flaunt some level of wealth (e.g. my in-laws gave me a ~$400 wallet from Burberry, which was functionally equivalent to other $50 wallets), and rich people do the same but with more private labels. I think I have successfully convinced my inlaws that I feel incredibly uncomfortable with such things (my current wallet cost $15-20, and I like it much better), but they still like buying that crap for themselves, despite being relatively poor (they live in an apartment, I live in a nice house).
It’s the same thing, people like to look successful to other people and flaunt what they have. It’s why so many rap songs boast about how much money they have, why celebrity awards ceremonies are largely about the fancy designer clothes they’re wearing, and why luxury cars are so popular (I see a lot more luxury cars in apartment complexes than my middle to upper-middle class neighborhood). For certain types of people, flaunting wealth is the point, it makes them feel wealthy, even if they’re up to their eyeballs in debt. I see exactly the same thing in upper-middle to upper-class neighborhoods, which is why I prefer to stick to the middle-class neighborhoods.
The same exact thing is happening with these games. People like to flaunt wealth, and that comes in a ton of forms.
My issue is that MTX is an exploitative predatory model for designing games and funding game development that essentially always leads to games that are unoriginal, that allows for and incentivizes very toxic social dynamics amongst its players, and that this often leads to many people with either poor impulse control or those susceptible to aforementioned toxic social dynamics will spend /too much/ of their money to the point it seriously negatively impacts their lives.
No, I would not be ok with a certain color being MTX only.
Not sure what you mean by blue bubble vs green bubble, but there are many ways one can seperate themselves from the masses in many games that feature character customization that do not feature MTX.
So, no DLC is not the same thing.
MTX to a large extent works by incremental gradualism in terms of the actual psychology of how it exploits susceptible people.
DLC on the other hand does not do this. Here is an outlined block of content, it usually features many new things in addition to new cosmetics, and usually all those things are not dependent on further microtransactions, but actual game play of some kind.
This is a much more straightforward and much less manipulative way to expand your games content.
While it still is not very common for games in general to allow players to play on maps they do not have, but a friend does, yes you are correct that a few games feature this.
This is irrelevant to the discussion of MTX, though. I do not have total and complete knowledge of all video games, but I have /never/ heard of playable maps as MTX before. Even if such a phenomenon does exist, maps are not usually tied to the player being able to alter gameplay for themselves /specifically/ or to clothing or weapons that /specifically/ are proven to be crucial elements to the toxic amd exploitative dynic that MTX creates.
The closest thing I can think of would be maybe an MMO with a player customizable house that has many things only obtainable via MTX, but I am not aware of a game with such features, and I would be against it anyway. Just make the things obtainable in game.
As to your views on fashion, I mean yes, many tasteless people view fashion only as a way to flaunt wealth.
That is /not/ what fashion actually is though to anyone with an actual sense of creative style.
This is not my area of expertise by any means but try asking actual character art designers what fashion is and how it works.
Different color schemes, styles of clothes, materials can all be mixed and matched, or paired neatly to convey certain elements of a character trying to be portrayed visually.
People who obsess over branded clothing items are nearlt always tasteless and have absolutely no sense of style.
It is entirely possible in many games, with and without microtransactions, to take different individual pieces of clothing amd make a unique look.
As example, though I dislike RockStar’s incorporation of a premium currency mechanic that allows for players to pay real world money for in game content, the games both feature a wide array of clothing choices that can be mixed and matched individually to create your own looks for your character.
Or, you can buy a pre made outfit and immediately be laughed at by everyone for spending money on it, because there are now thousands of other clones that look just like you, and its entirely possible to look good without doing this, you just have to put in some effort and actually, you know, have an actual sense of fashion to determine what looks good or conveys what you want your character’s appearance to convey, and when you have done this, it will actually be unique to you and your character.
Another example of this would be Cyberpunk 2077.
Its entirely possible to have a wardrobe that both looks good and is also effective in game… and is not just a cookie cutter clone of some faction or other character, but this requires actual work.
Much like how actually looking fashionable in real life does.
Further examples would be countless MMOs and even some more clothing heavy Survival Sims and MilSims at this point. Those games less commonly feature outright MTX, and again its entirely possible to do actual fashion by mixing and matching things until you find a ‘look’.
The point of true fashion may be said to convey certain things about yourself or the character via their attire, and the art of it comes in to understanding how styles work, how the human form works, how colors work, how materials work, and then all of this is constrained by other factors such as practicality, affordability, etc.
Its more impressive to pull off a good looking cheap dress than a just as good looking but 20x as expensive one, unless your entire goal is projection of wealth /over/ actually looking good.
Work boots are relatively common and know for being useful in hard physically demanding conditions, so both a construction worker and a soldier may wear different versions of them.
But when a construction worker puts on mil grade knee pads and a scavenged carrier rig, and carries a battered rifle, this conveys a very different character than a standard soldier in BDU does:
We can immediately tell that he is doing this not as his profession and as a rather impromptu affair, that he likely did not plan for this.
I list these examples to attempt to show you how fashion and character appearance is far more than a competition of wealth display: In video games and movies it is very often a means of conveying the character through ways other than what they do or say.
As yet another example I once designed basically Sam Fisher in Arma 3, wearing pants utilitarian enough to be practical, but also conventional enough to look like many civilians. Had a button up dress shirt with plate body armor with PRESS emblazoned on it, shades, no helmet.
Practical, Fashionable, Mission Appropriate.
And I did not need any MTX to accomplish this.
The Apple messages thing where iMessage users have a different bubble color vs non-iMessage users (read: Android users). Here’s a relevant article that discusses the social impact on children.
That’s one form of DLC, sure, but there’s no technical reason why MTX couldn’t just be transitioned to appear as DLC. For example, you can buy Shark Cards for GTA V as a DLC, and that type of thing would normally be MTX within the game.
MTX is just a special type of DLC that is usually time-limited and is logged in your online account instead of your launcher. That’s really it.
You can buy maps for Risk: Global Domination as an MTX and use them if the host has them. Likewise, you can use any EU4 or CK3 DLC in an MP game if the host has them (only gameplay DLC, not cosmetics like unit packs). It’s relatively common for SP games w/ MP mode, but a bit less common to gate maps behind a DLC/MTX for F2P games.
My point is that this is very similar to a cosmetic DLC/MTX. Basically, player A buys the “DLC,” and other players can “use” the DLC when they see the player using the cosmetic. That’s the same general idea as temporarily “getting” a DLC when joining an MP game. If we make MTX illegal, they’ll just call them DLC because on a technical level, it’s the same thing.
That said, I don’t know of any games with “DLC” cosmetics that are visible but not usable by other players, aside from F2P games w/ MTX. But that’s probably because if they’re going to go that route, they’ll make them time limited instead of permanent like most DLC are, but there’s really no technical reason why they can’t just make MTX work exactly like DLC (i.e. show up in your launcher under the DLC section). In short, why would they do the more complicated thing if they don’t need to?
Thanks for letting me know what the green bubble blue thing is. I have never and will never use an Apple product for many reasons, so, didnt know that.
That being said, yeah, thats another example of an exploitative business decision that has no technical reason for existing whatsoever, and uses peer pressure to get children to waste money, like MTX.
I expanded my post a good bit a couple of times but maybe you missed it: Purchasable premium currency is /also/ a horrible, exploitative practice that is functionally indistinguishable from MTX in almost every way.
The fact that RockStars shark cards and gold for rdr2 are only purchasable on steam in the DLC section does not make premium currency DLC.
DLC is essentially an addon pack, an expansion of the original game with new levels, characters, maps, weapons, equipment, new gameplay modes, etc.
Another way of looking at DLC is that in the old days before it was practical to download more than around 100mbs as a patch, and a game developer wanted to release an expansion pack, they would sell a whole new cd at stores for maybe 1/2 to 1/3 the cost of the base game.
Now, for the rest of your comment:
I am not saying that outlawing MTX would be 100% effective. My point is that MTX is /bad/, games that heavily rely on MTX are often bad, that it is exploitative, blah blah blah already wrote everything.
That being said: Your reasoning here is not certainly wrong, but likely not very good. Loot Boxes have been functionally banned after the EU figured out how to precisely define them, and shortly thereafter many games had to alter their mechanics to not explicitly be loot boxes, and these days it is rare for new games to come out that feature them.
Should a law be sufficiently well worded and have the teeth to be enforced, I would say its actually pretty likely that the practice of designing MTX into games could functionally be ended, though of course not totally, not perfectly.
I personally do not care if F2P games with MTX are affected, as being F2P is the equivalent of a crack dealer offering you your first hit free of charge. Enough people get addicted that to the game that its profitable to just sell them new cosmetics.
Further, nearly all F2P MTX games are based around extremely boring, simplistic and repetitive gameplay, which is itself designed to actually be effectively random in terms of your skill level having anything to do with your actual success at the game. Less mature players will believe that they can actually get good at the game by playing it enough, because either they have not played many games before or they basically become addicted to the gameplay loop itself, which is /also/ knowingly designed to be both addictive and rage inducing.
So with F2P MTX you generally get the absolute worst possible situation from the standpoint of a child or a person susceptible to peer pressure or with basically the same personality of a gambling addict.
The technical implementation of MTX just shifting everything over to being outside of the game itself /would actually be a significant success/ from the standpoint of preventing impulse purchases quite literally because it forces the user to undergo more steps before making their purchase.
Another thing that could potentially be done from a legal standpoint is to quite literally make it illegal for a game to allow you to spend more than so much on MTX or Premium currency in a certain amount of time, and/or only allow a purchase every so often, and or display government mandated warning placards in the same vein as cigarettes must display every time you access any in game or out of game market for the game.
These things are all definitely legally and technically possible to implement.
It does not matter what section of some menu has what UI label to a well written law. Such tbings are laughably easy for any competent programmer to alter within at most a month.
What matters is the functional workings of the entire system in its totality, and the precedent for this approach working has, again, already been established by the EU’s ban on lootboxes.
There is a technical reason, actually. The messages from Android are SMS, whereas the messages from immediate iMessage are encrypted and sent over a different channel.
But the net result is a lot of social pressure.
It sounds like you’re explaining what you want it to be. Some DLC is certainly like that, but quite often it’s not. Sometimes you get that kind of content as a MTX. People try to draw a line here, but there really isn’t one because it’s all convention. Some DLC require a download (e.g. the D part), many do not (i.e. just a DRM check when you launch).
Yeah, in the old days, you’d buy your expansions as a separate product (e.g. Brood War for Starcraft), but these days there’s a lot less formality and variety to it.
So if we try to craft some kind of law against MTX, companies will just call them DLC. The only difference is how they’re marketed; on a technical level, there’s no clear separation between the “good” and the “bad,” it comes down to how it’s marketed and the value you get. The only clear separation I can think of is things that are time limited (i.e. you can only buy it for the next X days), but that’s a practice in pretty much every industry and a practical necessity for copyright law (e.g. music is usually licensed for a set number of years, hence why older GTAs aren’t available for purchase).
I’m guessing there’s a mechanism to buy DLC from within a game, and if there isn’t, game studios would push for that to be created.
I agree children should be protected here because they cannot consent. However, we don’t prevent people with gambling addictions from gambling provided they’re adults, because they are responsible for their actions even if they suffer from addiction. Adults are expected to take measures to protect themselves, children are not.
So I’m absolutely in favor of banning children from F2P games where profit comes from manipulative practices (either they’re being manipulated, or they’re being used to manipulate others, both of which are wrong). Maybe that’s enough to dramatically reduce these games, maybe it’s not, but that’s not the goal; the goal is to protect those who cannot consent.
That sounds overly restrictive. If I want to buy an expensive item, I would need to make that MTX several times over the course of days in order to get it? Why?
A better solution, imo, is to provide a mechanism for customers to set their own limits so they can self regulate. It would be up to them to decide what that limit is, so they get to decide what they’re comfortable with. But they should also be allowed to disable that limit as well, though perhaps with a multi-day waiting period so they don’t just disable it while drunk and render the whole thing useless.
No, there’s no technical reason.
Apple designed their different protocol early on for no actual reason other than to intentionally be incompatible with the standards used by the entire rest of the industry, entirely to use as a peer pressure and marketing tactic to make less technically knowledgable users believe that it is somehow better or has more features or is more secure or somethimg.
It isnt, it doesnt, and it isnt more secure.
They easily could have used existing standards, but again, decided to develop their own exclusive standard and them basically lie and make misleading statements that would promote exclusivity and a superiority complex amongst its user base.
Your quibbling about the definition of DLC is irrelevant and pointless, and you do not seem to know what DLC is if you think DRM is DLC. Its not.
I already outlined substantive definitions of what constitutes DLC and MTX, and you are just repeating yourself saying the line between them is blurry. It is no where near as blurry as you think it is, and its now becoming clear that you do not appear to be able to comprehend what I have written.
The only difference is absolutely not how they are marketed. I think you are referring to how they presented in a UI.
I already addressed this, MTX is a system that has identifiable characteristics and properties that make it distinct from DLC, regardless of UI labelling.
Thats not marketing. Marketing is promotional material, trailers, paid game reviews, statements made by the company selling the product for the purpose of getting you to buy the product, a demo held at a convention, that sort of stuff.
As to your preference for allowing customers to self regulate:
Congrats, you have missed the entire concept that large demographics of people do not have the ability to self regulate their addiction problem, because an addiction problem literally is the lack of the ability to self regulate in regards to a certain activity or substance.
Anyway, I was not saying I would be necesarilly for or against such a measure, I was merely proving to you that it can legally be done, with examples.
Its clear your reading comprehension is not that good and you have at no point acknowledged that basically I have disproved everything you think you understand about how anything we have talked about works, functions, is actually defined, etc.
I will likely not be responding to you on this matter further as it is evident you basically have no idea what you are talking about.
There are technical reasons, such as:
There are practical benefits, and you would want to know if a message is encrypted or not. The issue isn’t that they’re using a nonstandard protocol, it’s that they didn’t open it up to others. I’m sure Android would’ve loved to integrate with it, but instead Apple kept it proprietary and even took steps to shut down a competitor that found a way to be compatible, all to drive purchases for iPhones.
The problem isn’t making an alternative to SMS, it’s actively preventing competitors from making a compatible app. This wouldn’t be an issue at all if Android users could install a compatible app.
I’m explaining how game companies will react to a ban on MTX.
And yes, DRM can be a part of DLC. Instead of downloading content, many games just check if you have a license for the content and flip a switch internally to enable it. That’s how DLC gets to be available for clients if the host has the DLC, it just enables that switch if the host has it. There’s no actual download process, it’s literally already included in the game, just disabled.
That’s literally the same way MTX work, but instead of the DRM check happening with the launcher, it happens with the game server.
No. You’re writing what you think DLC is, I’m providing examples where the line actually is blurry.
Yes, there are plenty of cases where DLC requires a download and is local only, but there are also plenty where it doesn’t and is shared with others who play with you. MTX is like the latter.
If we ban MTX, we run the very real risk of banning other, “good” forms of DLC that work in exactly the same way. So the distinction becomes very subjective. Sure, maybe you and I could agree that a given method is “good” or “bad,” but that’s not something that can easily (read: feasibly) be written into law, and the gaming industry will find workarounds.
And that’s not even getting into the discussion about whether it’s moral to restrict individual choice of adults in the first place. So my focus will be on protecting children, not trying to ban MTX entirely because I honestly don’t think that’ll work.
No, addiction is not the inability to self-regulate, it’s a physical or psychological dependence.
Someone with an alcohol addiction probably needs to avoid alcohol entirely. That’s a form of self-regulation. If you’re addicted to MTX, your form of self-regulation is either to entirely avoid games with MTX, or put a lock on your account to prevent purchases (if there’s a PIN, have an SO set it so they can help you control it). If you only make stupid decisions while drunk and you look to drink while playing, putting a daily purchase cap could be enough.
We don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater here, we can instead provide tools to help those with addiction problems self-regulate. That would be the direction of legislation, not banning things that impacts a small subset of the population.
Yep, you continue to be wrong in ways that I have already explained which you obviously do not understand, and in more baffling ways that would require even further in depth explanations from me which at this point you quite clearly would also misunderstand.
You often do not even understand how to make relevant criticisms and simply assert something false or irrelevant about one point I make and use it to argue against some other point in a way that I have already shown to be false or failing to even grasp the concept being discussed.
You are in this latest post just outright contradicting yourself within the span of two adjacent sentences as opposed to separate posts.
Obviously you are someone who plays games and has opinions about them and has no actual programming or tech industry or video game creation experience, as opposed to myself who does have actual experience making games and has worked in the tech industry for a decade.
Again, you have no idea what you are talking about and have basically been wrong about literally everything you have mentioned.
DRM still is not DLC. Yes. They interact. That does not mean they are the same thing or necessarily must coexist. DRM is not /content/ it is /content management/.
Their interplay or relationship is irrelevant to a discussion about MTX, which you still fundamentally fail to grasp is a system with definable attributes, which I again have already defined more than sufficiently, which you again are either forgetting or ignoring.
You insist on relying on astoundingly vague and unspecified concepts of ‘good’ DLC vs ‘bad’ DLC which is obviously not possible to legislate or regulate because it is not well defined.
We absolutely do not run the risk of banning any kind of DLC if MTX is regulated against.
Again, as I already stated, in a world where say games were not allowed to, within the actual game itself, offer access to the player to additional content that applies specifically to that character’s avatar as either a cosmetic or a functional in game item, where the actual digital code for said items is already present to all players without additional download, this would 1) lessen impulsive purchases 2) reasonably result in many games moving there stores for MTX to a program or website not actually in the game itself.
Then, if you combine that with my other theoretical restriction of being able to purchase additional DLC for a specified game only every so often, or put a cap on max spending on DLC in a time period, what this results in initially MTX individual items to be sold as bundles, and at the very least highly incentivizes game companies that rely on MTX to make reasonably priced bundles, while also not seriously affecting non MTX games that semi-regularily release DLC that contains more substantial things than just items for the individual player.
While this would not entirely destroy the ability of MTX games to sell more content, it would seriously dampen the exploitative power of their predatory business model to harm those susceptible to it.
In the world of preventing addictions and similar things, there is never a full proof solution, but there often are very effective harm reduction techniques.
Not that you have any understanding of such policies as you apparently still cannot grasp that addiction literally is a self regulation problem, but also simultaneously that it is and MTX is somehow unique and special and different than other addiction problems and should be addressed by methods which are very, very well known to be very ineffective for all other addiction problems.
I cannot believe that I have actually wasted my time repeating myself due to your inability to string together consistent concepts from my differing posts.
You are just arguing for the sake of wanting to be right and have absolutely no ability to realize you are incorrect, uniformed, and also just at this point unable to make a coherent argument.
Ciao for now.
Then please point that out so I can either explain how it’s not a contradiction, or learn where I was mistaken.
I never said they were. I said that in many cases, DLC is already “part of the game,” just hidden behind some DRM. That seemed to be the contention you had with MTX, that content was in the game, but not available unless the player purchases it. I’m sure there are plenty of games in your library with content locked behind a DLC paywall, but still in the binary you downloaded.
DLC used to simply be a replacement for those expansion disks you can buy at the store, and now they’re just unlocked in the same binary everyone downloads. MTX is extremely similar in that you get to see content you can’t access directly, provided someone you’re playing with has paid for that content.
Games would just provide a link to a browser (or embed a browser directly, depending on the wording of the law) in the game itself, and then you’d see the effects immediately in the game when buying cosmetics. Yeah, maybe it would be a slight hurdle to jump, but it would basically only be one more click.
And that’s if your bill even passes. The market is just too lucrative for these companies to just roll over, they will find a way to capitalize on players’ vanity and desire to have “everything.”
How would that be enforced? Unless that number is quite high, it’s going to annoy a lot of players (i.e. let’s say I come back to a game like Magic Arena or Hearthstone and want to get caught up with the latest cards), and if it’s too high, it’s probably not going to help much. Maybe a requirement for games to block users for unusually high spending would help in some cases, but would that really apply to people who are addicted (i.e. that have consistently high spending)?
It just seems incredibly hard to craft a law that effectively solves the problem, doesn’t restrict players’ freedom too much, and that large gaming companies would not fight too hard against. And I’m sure large gaming companies would find a way around whatever law is crafted (i.e. maybe gifts don’t count, so players gift each other stuff instead).
No, addiction is a dependency problem.
Ask anyone who has made it through AA or any similar program and you’ll learn that the (physical or psychological) dependency is still there, but they’ve learned how to self-regulate to avoid triggering it. What seems to work is placing obstacles in their way to force themselves to make a conscious decision instead of giving in to that need.
So if there’s any regulation here, it should be around giving people the tools to self-regulate (and perhaps requiring games to advertise them), not on preventing the behavior directly (that limits individual choice). If people know they have an addiction problem, they can set a cap (or ideally just not play predatory games).
No, I’m arguing because I have a different opinion, and I think you’re misunderstanding it. If you simply disagreed, you’d presumably stop replying, or try to convince me of yours. But if you attack my arguments, I’ll clarify and explain.