“Frank! What the hell are you doing out here?!”
“Frank! What the hell are you doing out here?!”
Genuinely shocked it’s not because the Gallagher brothers cancelled upon remembering they despise each other.
So more-efficient competitors emerged against the supermajority market leader and didn’t impact that company’s market share.
Hmm.
If only it did what they told it.
“Three may keep a secret, if two are dead.”
If you say goodbye to the cat, it’s a Tokyo sayonara.
Pathological liar keeps yapping.
Somehow it’s news.
At the end of the day, all value is made-up, especially with digital licenses. I may value a cosmetic skin a lot more highly than you do, but that doesn’t mean I was defrauded, it just means I find more value in it than you.
Flashbacks to god-botherers insisting atheists must have faith in something.
I am explicitly distinguishing incompatible meanings of the word value. So are you, by the way, if you even hold an internally consistent view of what scams are. Otherwise, nooo, selling someone the Brooklyn Bridge is legit, because isn’t all value made-up?
The kind of value money represents cannot be the kind of value you see in scoring a goal in soccer, or you could fucking buy them.
But you also have to understand that the value in paying for a ton of MTX in those games is often less about those incremental dopamine hits and more about showing off to friends/randoms online
That’s the same thing. Peacocking for other pl-- I already fucking said this! Do you read things before responding?
Right, these are casual games, where you can pay to appear successful.
Yep, no ranked competitive games have this, stop fucking lying to me. Don’t make up excuses you cannot possibly believe.
“Why is Google search falling apart?” is a question.
“Why Google search is falling apart” is an explanation.
Ignoring how thousands of brand-new games pull this shit from day one.
The existence of good options means nothing. This abuse should be criminal. The fact companies don’t have to commit this intolerable exploitation against their users, does not lessen the problem when some companies do it anyway. If you just mean to nitpick the word “nothing,” sure, congratulations. Someone somewhere will dodge this bullet. But I’m on about all the people getting taken by this systemic problem that’s already half the industry by revenue.
Any real money spent in games was defrauded, because all apparent value was made-up. As surely as someone selling you the deed to scrap the Brooklyn Bridge. The paper is real! You get the paper! But the paper is not why you handed someone a suitcase full of cash. There was a story you were told, and it’s not real. That’s what games are.
Games make you value worthless things. That is what makes them games. There is no real-world value to points or shards or rare drops. They’re arbitrary goals with arbitrary obstacles. They’re achievable so that your brain will squirt the happy juice. But treating them as valuable, the way money is valuable, is a category error.
The small charges are more insidious. Like the naked greed of paying instead of watching a counter tick down - a transaction that is neither a good nor a service. Or the lootboxes that everyone now agrees are intolerable, once the industry has moved on to calling them keys. Or anything consumable, proving your money went to something so worthless, the game will just hands them out in unbounded quantities. Even peacocking for other players makes people go, oh, it’s just a dollar. It’s just cosmetic. It’s just the only reason the game exists in the first place, to grind you against that constant nagging temptation.
These games are no longer optimized to make you feel good when you’re good at them.
They’re optimized to make you feel good when you open your wallet and look away.
And until you do, they’re as addictive and frustrating as we can manage.
This business model is built on exploitation of innate human shortcomings. Your brain is not very good at distinguishing sources of happy juice. It can easily be tricked, and literally the entire games industry exists to trick it. Again: that’s what games are. Their enjoyability comes from that fiction. That’s why pretending any of it can have real monetary value is a scam.
The adjective is “biased.”
Because I wasn’t sure, the way your comment comes out swinging.
Too many threads like this feature people who are convinced that corporate models were trained on hyper-illegal pornography (with accurate human labeling!) or that the absence of real human persons is no excuse. Like they’re not clear why this specific thing is as illegal as possible.
The anti-gay jokes are the ones that aren’t funny and the gay jokes are the ones they don’t get.
This specific business model is a scam, regardless of which numbers we twiddle.
Say what you want.
Say what you want or shut up.
You can’t keep scoffing that nobody’s talking about what you mean, when what you fucking said apparently isn’t relevant, and you dance around avoiding whatever secrets lie within your heart.
Otherwise - The Idiot is a fascist, and if you call him a centrist, that makes you worse than a fascist.
Steam didn’t need to change because none of their competitors challenge their de facto monopoly. Reasons do not change how it is plainly a monopoly. They have a supermajority market share, and people glibly admit, they don’t even consider buying games except on Steam.