I mean, if some guy gropes a coworker, a box filled with the contents of his desk is not carte blanche to spoil an upcoming announcement. But even his ass should be able to say ‘I got fired from [blank].’

Stop lying about what I said. “Nothing inside a video game” does not mean “nothing ever.”

And you know goddamn well that fighting games had incremental re-releases, decades before this abuse was possible.

Or, sell actual expansions. You want characters to cost twenty bucks each? Fine, sell that like a game, not like a fucking hat. If it’s on your hard drive, in your game, you already fucking have it, and charging real money is a scam.

Or, if you want continuing revenue for an online service - make it a service. Sell subscriptions. Oh sorry, do people not like that? Yeah no shit, because it’s up-front about how much it costs, rather than luring people in and gouging them for untold sums.

Or, a game comes out, and plainly exists, and doesn’t become the version that’s squeezed a billion dollars out of ten percent of players over ten years. Oh well! TF2 without this bullshit would still be TF2. People would still be playing 2fort, forever, the same way they’re still doing Ryu vs Ken on Street Fighter 2 Turbo. I do not respect the dishonest conflation of ‘FighterZ doesn’t get to expand forever’ with ‘FighterZ would be banned.’

Zero thought for all the games that genuinely don’t exist, because publishers killed projects to demand live-service flops. Zero thought for all the novel software people could have spent money on, instead of dropping hundreds in one game that barely changes year-to-year. You’re stuck on what exists, as if any change would mean all of it disappears, and you’re magically robbed of that past.

Read what you quoted.

“We can’t even say who just fucking fired us” is a sign that NDAs are broken.

Half the industry by revenue and growing.

‘But indies!’ means nothing, when you count two games with $43 in revenue between them, like that’s twice as many games as Fortnite.

People will always make art. People will always make games. If all the art you see is corporate slop that’s a you problem.

Jesus, why can’t people differentiate the content of games from the way they’re sold? It’s about the money. I’m not shitting on your favorite time-sink, for its art style. I’m angry about the fact it goads you toward paying twenty actual dollars to give your character an ironic t-shirt.

I get subsidized by your teenage hormones and keep playing the game I like.

Uh huh.

So hell yeah, bait me, daddy.

Nope, pulling the chute on this conversation.

That’s somehow worse than the continued lying about banning games when I am talking about a bu-si-ness mo-dellll. Go fuck your strawman alone.

None of this is ever about the game part of the game. Fuck entirely off with pearl-clutching over content. This is about a business model. I want people to sell the most addictive, transgressive, customizable bullshit you can imagine, so long as it is either a product or a service. Like anything else you buy. Imaginary shit inside a video game is neither.

You can insist, ‘but it’s new!,’ except it’s already in your game. You’re looking at it, on someone else’s character. This is a dividing line where Oblivion’s infamous horse armor is completely above-board. It was a hundred kilobytes of not much, but it was unambiguously an expansion. You, the human being, received a file you did not have before. Not just permission to say your guy had what anyone else could already wear.

This business model reduces the game part of the game to bait on this hook. Whatever people want, or can be made to want, is dangled at ten bucks a pop, fifty items at a time. Eough rubes get gouged for hundreds or thousands of dollars, such that the total revenue exceeds what the studio would get, even if they sold everybody the full-price game three separate times.

I care about those victims. You delight in their exploitation.

Nothing short of banning the abuse would work. We’re talking about game designers. Manipulating people into enjoying certain behaviors is literally their job. People finally recognized lootboxes are bad - so they sold gave away the boxes and sold keys. Or sold gems. Or insisted it’s just cosmetics. Or-- none of it’s fucking different! It’s all the same shit! You’re all being dragged against the grindstone, using the same tricks that make games fun in the first place. The whole product is an excuse to keep grinding away at you until you decide to open your wallet and look away.

‘But arcades!’ Are renting someone else’s hardware. Different thing. This did abuse not exist fifteen years ago.

‘But free games!’ Can just be free. Or pay-what-you-want. Or cheap. Or something you already own. How’s your back catalog on Steam?

This Skinner-box horseshit where a game is """free""" but somehow makes a billion dollars is weaponized frustration. The handful of games that were re-released with tiny updates at full price are now the entire industry’s goal, thanks to this specific abuse. (And they still got you chumps to buy three 3D versions of Street Fighter.)

You can pay the price of a whole-ass game for a hat.

Lesser versions of that aren’t better, just lesser. The opportunity to spend one hundred dollars right the hell now is shoved in your face between rounds. Or dangled each time a lootbox animation juuust misses. Or crammed into your inventory, as a gift, mmyes, if only you bought a key.

If LoL wants to keep making money they can charge a subscription or sell expansions. Y’know - rational consumer purchasing decisions. Not playing keep-away and then tickling people’s balls in a controlled environment where fireworks go off each time you click Confirm Purchase.

Inevitably: ‘but people don’t often go for subscriptions.’ Yeah! It’s almost like conscious choices are less generous than engineered decisions! Or: ‘but budgets rely on that immense revenue!’ Then they should shrink. Budgets follow revenue. Always always always. Whatever money these fuckers spent, they expect to extract from you, three times over.

If you see a difference between two things, so can the law.

Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.

Ban the entire business model.

If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.

The confusion of products and services has been awful in general. Publishers demand continuing revenue. A fixed subscription is at least an honest economic exchange, for customers - unlike any form of “microtransactions.”

‘This systemic theft is against adults.’

‘Yeah, man, voluntary extinction.’

???

Fuck them kids. Children aren’t why these bastards are offering financing for this industry-swallowing abuse.

AI tends to be distinct, because things move so fast that we’re exposing programmers’ stupid internal names.

What an obviously terrible name.

Bu-si-ness mo-del.

Not: genre. Not: content. Not: players. We are talking about corporations committing systemic abuse for profit.

Abuse that’s gouging so hard, you might need FINANCING… to play a VIDEO GAME. How big a hint do you need that something has gone wrong?

Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.

Ban the entire business model.

Well yeah, Perl is write-only. Larry Wall asked the monkey’s paw for a language that works on the first try. What’s onscreen are your raw brain patterns.

Thank god it runs like crap. Optimized C isn’t pretty, but any project that compiles proves someone looked at it more than once.

He

Hmm.

But they can’t just patch out always-online DRM! Think of all the no more money they’d lose!