this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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It's complicated.
The game itself can be extremely good, well made, and fun. You can choose not to participate in the MTX stuff.
Kinda wonder what would happen if such a game came out, was insanely popular, but literally nobody bought any MTX in it ever. Obviously a FTP game would just die, but would they take the hint if it was a $60-70 AAA game that also included BS MTX systems?
It's not like MTX is popular. They specifically go after the small percentage of players that get addicted and spend their life savings on that shit.
I game with people who just cannot help themselves and must buy everything. One guy spent nearly a thousand on Overwatch before he was able to walk away.
I just don't even tempt these guys anymore, I only ever play games that don't abuse them. We've enjoyed plenty of Factorio, Valheim, Avorion, Volcanoids, Deep Rock Galactic, etc.. I had to stop playing Vermintide/Darktide with them along with a few others, which has honestly pissed me off.
Now they're all eyeing Helldivers 2 and I'm spooked that the game is going to be MTX hell and we can't touch it, because I've enjoyed a lot of Arrowhead's previous stuff.
This is a perfect example of my above reply to another user:
Multiplayer games with a certain blend of either competitive play, or cooperative play that lends itself to competition amongst the cooperative players as to who is carrying the team vs who is getting the whole team wipe, these kinds of games /are known and understood by game developers/ to cause a toxic social dynamic amongst many of its players that escalates into basically an extremely expensive fashion competition.
This can also be accomplished by basically nailing some niche art style, by being a very popular established brand, or by simply using cartoony graphics and appealing to basically children with poor impulse control.
Its not complicated at all.
Microtransactions are well known to be an extremely effective psychological manipulation technique that is both highly effective against basically a certain market demographic/psychological profile of players (whales), and also when combined with the social dynamics of a certain set of games with certain attributes (which are also designed and targeted through market research and psychological profiling) create an atmosphere of peer pressure that is known to be effective on basically bullying many other players into at least some MTX.
It is a highly predatory and ethically repulsive practice that is done with precision and intent.
You say 'you can choose not to' which is fine from a theoretical perspective of basically a libertarian economist, where you assume that all human beings only make rational decisions that would benefit them and do not have human emotions, desires, you know, psychology.
The fact is there are now many documented cases of people having their lives literally ruined by spending too much money on these things. And I mean documented as in journalism on more extreme, individual cases as well as more comprehensive scientific studies.
Further, many MTX games are also obviously marketed at children with cartoony graphics and other marketing amd stylistic techniques that are, again, market researched to understand their viability in appealing to the demographics that will be most likely to make irresponsible spending decisions.
You claim that MTX is not popular and this basically baffles me as MTX is astoundingly popular in mobile phone games and there have been many popular games in the last few years that have featured MTX.
Case in point to your hypothetical example of a AAA 60 or 70 dollar game with MTX would be the buggy catastrophic mess that was/is Fallout 76.
So there is your answer: Video Gamers in general are highly susceptible to brand loyalty, and will often, very often pay for broken unfinished games, even with MTX, if those games have a sufficiently popular brand.