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This arguments premise is flawed. Cosmetics are not nearly that resource intensive to produce, so its not about 'wearing nice clothes' a-la real life, where go

This arguments premise is flawed. Cosmetics are not nearly that resource intensive to produce, so its not about 'wearing nice clothes' a-la real life, where good materials are more expensive to produce. Attaching a price tag is PURELY for the benefit of the publisher. Attaching real world costs to purchases in games also disproportionately targets neurodivergent and fiscally uneducated people. That seems like a fairly malicious business practice. Microtransaction apologism is not a tractable stance, ever.

ratorx 5y ago
There is a real world equivalent which affects many more people. Wearing nice clothes might mean wearing well-made clothes, or wearing branded clothes. Although there is some correlation, there are definitely examples of moderate quality clothes being sold for insane prices because of a brand. Not to say that micro transactions are good practice or that they can’t be dealt with independently, but micro transactions are a very similar problem to real world cosmetics. Sure you could argue that just having some correlation between true quality and perceived value is good enough, but I’d argue that charging for more visually appealing and better designed models ALSO is not zero correlation.
dado3212 5y ago
There is still the value of creating the model asset, though I agree that it’s a cost that doesn’t scale with how many people buy it (except for maybe some of the song packs, not sure how RL’s royalty package is structured). Why does attaching real world costs to purchases in-game strike you as “malicious” but not the real world cost of buying the game?
- plaguepilled 5y ago
  The issue is twofold. The first issue is that like I originally mentioned, microtransactions disproportionately affect neurodivergent individuals because of the addictive mechanics used to implement them. The concept of 'whales' is a term used to refer to big spenders in a game economy without fully examining the reason they are spending so much. For example, where you can only buy one copy of Elden Ring, you could easily buy a new copy of Forza every year and buy each car, which may be a compulsion if you have OCD, for example. The same argument could be (and should be) made against tiered subscription services in games. If there is a lootbox mechanic involved, the issue is only compounded further as it is an introduction of gambling mechanics. In some cases, it can be worth examining the presence of envy economics 'Oooh I want was they have! How much is it? Oh I want it more now I know!'. The second issue is the scale difference is ridiculous. The amount of dev and artist time to produce a game sits at around 1.5 to 4 years and sometimes much more. There is a large number of artistic assets that are used in combination with code when making a game and those assets are paid for using the proceeds from the game sales. When micro transactions are produced, a fraction of those assets are divided out of the main game (or less often, added later) and can be produced on a 6 month cycle to be sold separately. To be explicit, the amount of assets made in a microtransaction is FAR less than those used to make the game, but often the price of the microtransaction does not reflect this (again, refer to Forza and the $200 car dlc for a minimum-$100 game). This means that either the publisher or the developer team (including art team) is receiving that margin, and if you think the developers are receiving a proportionate amount of that margin then I have some bad news for you. To be clear, I think game monetisation is OK. But that does not mean all forms of monetisation are OK, and it definitely does not mean that diluting a product in a harmful way is OK.

ratorx 5y ago

There is a real world equivalent which affects many more people. Wearing nice clothes might mean wearing well-made clothes, or wearing branded clothes. Although there is some correlation, there are definitely examples of moderate quality clothes being sold for insane prices because of a brand. Not to say that micro transactions are good practice or that they can’t be dealt with independently, but micro transactions are a very similar problem to real world cosmetics. Sure you could argue that just having some correlation between true quality and perceived value is good enough, but I’d argue that charging for more visually appealing and better designed models ALSO is not zero correlation.

dado3212 5y ago

There is still the value of creating the model asset, though I agree that it’s a cost that doesn’t scale with how many people buy it (except for maybe some of the song packs, not sure how RL’s royalty package is structured). Why does attaching real world costs to purchases in-game strike you as “malicious” but not the real world cost of buying the game?

plaguepilled 5y ago
The issue is twofold. The first issue is that like I originally mentioned, microtransactions disproportionately affect neurodivergent individuals because of the addictive mechanics used to implement them. The concept of 'whales' is a term used to refer to big spenders in a game economy without fully examining the reason they are spending so much. For example, where you can only buy one copy of Elden Ring, you could easily buy a new copy of Forza every year and buy each car, which may be a compulsion if you have OCD, for example. The same argument could be (and should be) made against tiered subscription services in games. If there is a lootbox mechanic involved, the issue is only compounded further as it is an introduction of gambling mechanics. In some cases, it can be worth examining the presence of envy economics 'Oooh I want was they have! How much is it? Oh I want it more now I know!'. The second issue is the scale difference is ridiculous. The amount of dev and artist time to produce a game sits at around 1.5 to 4 years and sometimes much more. There is a large number of artistic assets that are used in combination with code when making a game and those assets are paid for using the proceeds from the game sales. When micro transactions are produced, a fraction of those assets are divided out of the main game (or less often, added later) and can be produced on a 6 month cycle to be sold separately. To be explicit, the amount of assets made in a microtransaction is FAR less than those used to make the game, but often the price of the microtransaction does not reflect this (again, refer to Forza and the $200 car dlc for a minimum-$100 game). This means that either the publisher or the developer team (including art team) is receiving that margin, and if you think the developers are receiving a proportionate amount of that margin then I have some bad news for you. To be clear, I think game monetisation is OK. But that does not mean all forms of monetisation are OK, and it definitely does not mean that diluting a product in a harmful way is OK.