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I would consider modding very different from pay-to-win mechanics. We're talking about live service games with anticheat and online communities. I think it's j

I would consider modding very different from pay-to-win mechanics. We're talking about live service games with anticheat and online communities. I think it's just the nature of live service games that have grown in popularity, their expectation of ongoing content creation, rising salary/production costs for said game development, and the wild success MMORPG's discovered years ago with gacha whales. I will say I greatly appreciated the F2P cosmetics-only business model during my MMO days as a student with no income. Kind of rambling at this point, but my problem lies in the exploitative psychology commonly found with microtransactions in these sorts of games. Cosmetics-only seems to relieve a lot of the pressure to take out one's wallet.

RGamma 2y ago
Live service games are a phenomenon of securing income streams. In the cultural era this live service has been done by (let's face it) mostly children such as formerly you and me. There never was a significant beneficial income (or rather: profit) stream. Only a stream of (self-limiting, but sometimes long lasting) experiences. I have thousands of hours on a multiplayer game that cost 20 bucks. Its obscure sub-community has lived on for 20 years largely self hosted despite the formal "need for development". I get that this also is about the ever precarious profession of an artist, but the market may simply not be as large. Content creators (hate to use the term) work for a living at the margins to create ever more stuff, to squeeze through the tight attention grid (dozens of games get published on Steam every day now!) This creates pressure and it motivates the need for repeatability of transactions, so this story may not necessarily be about greedy execs alone (though it certainly can be!). I find it ultimately tragic. So much creative talent chasing too little attention and only the most predative sustaining. When the market was more restricted these effects weren't as pronounced and you could more readily create mythologies (such as around Half Life or FF7)

RGamma 2y ago

Live service games are a phenomenon of securing income streams. In the cultural era this live service has been done by (let's face it) mostly children such as formerly you and me. There never was a significant beneficial income (or rather: profit) stream. Only a stream of (self-limiting, but sometimes long lasting) experiences. I have thousands of hours on a multiplayer game that cost 20 bucks. Its obscure sub-community has lived on for 20 years largely self hosted despite the formal "need for development". I get that this also is about the ever precarious profession of an artist, but the market may simply not be as large. Content creators (hate to use the term) work for a living at the margins to create ever more stuff, to squeeze through the tight attention grid (dozens of games get published on Steam every day now!) This creates pressure and it motivates the need for repeatability of transactions, so this story may not necessarily be about greedy execs alone (though it certainly can be!). I find it ultimately tragic. So much creative talent chasing too little attention and only the most predative sustaining. When the market was more restricted these effects weren't as pronounced and you could more readily create mythologies (such as around Half Life or FF7)