How Greed Ruined Gaming

Gamers aren't a monolith. I'm not going to blame the people who appreciate gaming as an art form when the problem is the people who will buy the latest Madden and Cod games every year

There's a big flaw in your logic.

The biggest portion of people buying this stuff aren't "gamers" in the way that it's often used around these circles. It's the millions of people who buy coins for their Bejeweled clone of choice and have never owned a console in their life. And there's so many new kids entering gaming all the time who have never known a better world. I remember a Twitch streamer talking about how heartbreaking it was when AC6 came out and gave you the full color wheel plus multiple channels to customize your mech, and their chat was full of kids shocked that you didn't have to buy skins or color packs. That's how it used to be. You'd unlock skins by playing the game, not buying them in the store, but that hasn't been the case in decades now.

And the often touted story of the whale with more money than sense is a myth. Do they exist? Sure. But the vast majority of money coming from mtx from gamers is from people who are psychologically vulnerable to addiction/gambling and people with a poor ability to comprehend finances like kids. These companies have hired psychologists to tell them how to best extract money from your wallet by probing your brain in just the right way. From lootboxes to battle passes and seasonal content to daily quests and washing money through funny money currencies, it's all been designed to prey upon people with addiction issues, ADHD, training young kids into gambling addicts, etc. It's the Lotto tickets and pumping extra oxygen into the air of casinos and making sure there's no natural light in there so you don't realize how long you've been playing slots of the gaming world. Look at WoW, with its daily quests. They train players using Skinner Box techniques to continue logging into the game and paying the monthly subscription long after they've stopped enjoying it because it's become a habit and they are afraid of falling behind.

Voting with your wallet isn't going to fix it. You'll never get your average Facebook mom to care enough not to buy Farmville tokens or whatever, and these companies will never stop abusing psychology on their own. Only industry regulation will stop this.

Vote with your wallet means people with more money get more votes than you do. MTX does not target people at large, they are fishing for the small amount of whales for whom money is no object. It ruins gaming for the rest of us.

There is a reason industries get regulated. Swill milk killed a ton of babies, and sold like hot cakes.

I have to agree. The issue is that people keep buying these dogshit live service games. If people didn't buy them then companies wouldn't make them.

We failed to hold the line at the goddamn horse armor.

I'm sure there are cases where someone is spending money they shouldn't, or they know better, but we have to acknowledge that a lot of tactics used are the same predatory strategies that take advantage of human addiction. I don't think people should gamble, or bet on sports but that shit is everywhere, and it's normalized. It's no wonder why so many people fall into it because they don't think it's dangerous.

We can scream at people and tell them to stop, but that's not a real solution, at least I don't see how that really works. A predatory studio puts out a game that people want to play, then if it fails because people don't buy enough, they just shut everything down and cancel the content, even when people want it. I think there examples of this happening now.

The „gamer“ label has become sort of redundant given the industry is much bigger than movies and music combined now. They‘re just consumers and no matter what silly decisions some of them make, they need protection from certain practices for the good of all of us. Just blaming a small portion of them doesn‘t help us out of any mess.

Yeah I love Gabi but it hurts that she doesn't even seem to question whether or not she should stop buying these games. Like, I get that you love Pokemon but you acknowledge yourself that this shit isn't going to change if people keep buying this shit.

The gamers?! I don't hear anyone saying they want loot boxes. This is 100 percent the devs and the companies that put all the best loot behind the loot boxes. Good games such as FFXIV, does not.

Lol I take it you're a republican?

Let's blame the consumer for buying something they like, and not the system of capitalism for it's inevitable march to enshittification which happens across all industries amirght?

By shitty hat do you mean tf2?

Cause that’s all I played during the rise of microTXs. To me, the way valve went about it was literally the line between monetization and not ruining the game.

I thought that meant it can be done, all it proved looking back is publicly traded companies suck!!

I think what really started the current levels of rot was online passes for used games. They saw that people were playing without paying them directly, and wanted to stop it.

It was unpopular, as were map packs (which split the player base in online games), and here we are now with endless lootboxes and gacha elements. Sure, you can play without paying, but you'll always feel like a second class citizen if you do. Everything you want will be held deliberately out of reach, and the aspect of "fun" has been reduced to collections and bars filling up.

It's bred this generation of zombie gamers. I went to see my sister at Christmas, and her husband was playing Fallout 76 "doing his dailies". I did ask what it was for and he said he didn't really play it or want anything from the points it gives, and admitted what he was doing was kind of pointless. And then fired up the next game and did the same thing.

I tend to just stay away from multiplayer games these days. They're pretty much all like that. The idea of playing because it's fun is dead.

It’s been so tiring clicking through the Do Not Recommend option on every single channel mentioning Sweet Baby as the new flat earth conspiracy.

It's easier to rant about a boogeyman like SBI than to engage with any of the actual issues facing the industry, unfortunately

I love Gabi but her videos are never well researched imo. They're fun not informative.

Seeking infinite growth in a finite system. Biologists call that cancer.

In before the capitalist apologists telling us how bad all the other systems are that nobody suggested we use and how great capitalism is while rejecting any suggestions to how it could be reined in.

No, the people who deserved it are the ones at the top with garages full of supercars and fleets of private yachts. The Bobby Koticks, the Don Mattricks, etc.

The ones who I guarantee you are NOT suffering or losing their livelihoods.

The tens of thousands of devs who got into making video games because of their deep love of them… devs who have worked countless hours and crunched over the holidays while missing out on sleep, family events and more all just because management won’t plan, can’t stop chasing trends and pivoting the project, and because they fired 10% of the team last quarter to boost the share price by $0.02.

The devs didn’t deserve any of that.

They don’t deserve to lose their jobs right after some game ships and it turns out no one wants to pay $70 plus micro transactions shoved in their faces every other round between matches.

AAA gaming is broken and many of my peers from that industry seem to be in a bad spot now at no fault of their own… but their boss’s boss’s bosses who keep steering the ship into rocks are the ones you should be throwing rotten produce at.

Maybe game developers should wake up and understand that people like to be able to customize their characters cosmetically and not just click to slash over and over and over again.

You want consumers to spend money based on how much effort you put into a product instead of how appealing it is to the consumer? Newsflash, that's not how capitalism works.

Totally disagree. The homogenization and enshittification of AAA games has meant that there is less choice than ever. More and more established IPs are tanking in quality and there aren’t enough new ones to replace them. There are certainly “more games”, but the problem with this quantity of quality style of production means that there are fewer standouts and unique experiences to actually choose from. This has resulted in entire genres collapsing under their own weight. There are still unique, standout games but I’d hardly say there are now that 10-15 years ago. And the ones we do have are more often than not made by indie and AA studios.

Maybe watch the video lol? She acknowledges games are better then they've ever been, she's just pointing out how corporate greed has created a trend of publishers forcing half-baked games out the front door and fixing them later (or not).

sigh. ok boomer, that wasn't the conversation but sure, pipe in with a story about the old days, we care and it matters, no, really, it's ok. pat pat.

In other words: "Because I'm not bothered by X, neither should you be".

I don't get it

Yo not gonna lie kinda vibe with this comment. I love gaming as an art and a social activity but it's also the "sand I bury my head in". I'm currently on a Factorio playthrough that I started purely as a distraction for my latest bout of depression.

And I do also agree greed has ruined a lot more "important" things than gaming.

But also, no need to shame people for wanting something they love to be free from corporate greed. Be cool friend.