toastus

I get it.

I sometimes put AAA games on my wishlist anyway.
Not to buy them on release but to get alerted when they go on discount at some point down the line, which is generally how I use my wishlist mostly.

I have some unreleased indie games on there as well, but those I might just buy full price anyway whenever I feel like it or have a little extra free time to play a bit more at a time.

You comment and comment and explain and explain shit that everyone already knows.

It is like you just recently learned what marketing is and now you feel like you know some big secret.

Just to make it short.
Every product in the world is marketed in a way to motivate consumers to buy.
That is not inherently immoral.

You said every successful game monetizes by maximizing addiction and frustration.

I have proven you wrong by naming games that just DO NOT MAXIMIZE FRUSTRATION.

Yeah off course even those games dangle stuff in front of you that you are supposed to buy.
That's the whole business model of f2p games.

But there are different ways to get to the players money.

There are those that indeed trigger responses to frustration.
This is absolutely prevalent in mobile games or even those million deckbuilder games.

But there just are also games that use other ways to make players buy mtx.
Again, you can play PoE, LoL, CS and many other games for literal thousands of hours without ever getting coaxed into frustrating barriers like a Diablo Immortals would do to players.

You said there aren't. So you were wrong.

So have fun running around with a goalpost in your hand, I am done.

right?

No, still wrong.

Obviously it is something that is not given to you for free.
It is a product and the developers/publishers are doing business after all.

And yes Sherlock, it is qol functionality that people playing the endgame might want and that is not included in the free version of the game.
But every functionality that any player ever needs is available for far less than what any other AAA title costs up front.

PoE is mainly financed by purely cosmetic supporter packs and whales.
Is that much more ethical than what you described? Maybe not.

But it sure as hell is not banking on frustrating the average user and thus a completely different form of monetization than the one that you just doubled down on insisting is the only one there is.
So again as I said, you are just plain wrong.

Oh and in CS I don't think you can buy any functionality at all.
Only cosmetics, that don't do anything for you in the game.

Any successful example is optimized for addiction and frustration.

That is just plain wrong.
Addiction I guess but frustration definitely not necessarily.
There are countless examples of highly successful games that do not monetize like that.

You can happily play PoE for thousands of hours without paying a penny; if you want to get into trading drop like 20 bucks for some stash tabs and you are ready to go again for absolutely any content the game has to offer.

CS or LoL also work just fine for f2p players.

And I say that as a player that fucking hates the new generation of soulless live service games.

I know it's trendy to shit on Germany rn (and Isreal obviously and for good reason), but 90 year old holocaust survivors surely aren't the ones commiting genocide.
And they very well might have had to relive a trauma that Germany rightfully feels a responsibility for.

So what is the problem with giving those old folks that really had to endure some of the worst things anyone ever had to endure a symbolic sum to show them that they are not forgotten?

This is in no way defending Germanys support of Israel, while it is committing cruel war crimes.
But let's be real here, is this gesture really that outrageous to you?

Those Larian Studios people seem pretty nice from what one can hear.

Lovecraftian art is inspired by the tone and the mystery of Lovecrafts works and not by his racism.

But that aside I didn't downvote you for your first sentence.
I personally wouldn't even have downvoted you for your second sentence, even though I strongly disagree with it.

I downvoted you for your edit, which ironically is totally tone deaf.
Noone downvoted the fact, that you called the dude some stuff. You got downvoted for attacking Valve over an innocent sale of supernatural mystery games.

Having read some of his works, it sometimes is scarring to read how he pictures arabic or black peope.

He definitely let his personal racism seep into his stories.
So I think the argument can be made, that one shouldn't just consume his works without critically reflecting on the author.

There is one story set in Egypt that I remember, where the open racism kept on breaking my immersion repeatedly.

But I agree that calling Valve tone deaf for highlighting lovecraftian games misses the spot.
Lovecraftian art is inspired by the tone and the mystery of Lovecrafts works and not of his racism.

I am willing to bet that you are simply more used to the imperial system.

I am not convinced that it has any objective advantage over the metric system.

My foot is about 50% larger than my SO's, but I can perfectly invision 30cm whenever I want or need to.

Totally different genre, but I liked how Celeste approached this.

If you struggle to complete it there are tons of accessibility options to make the game more approachable.

And the content necessary to finish the games story is not too much, while giving challenging -well- challenges to anyone who wants to spend more time with the game.

And you clear the game screen by screen making it possible to only play it a short bit at a time.

It's almost a bonus that the story and soundtrack are fucking beautiful.

Financial success.

I mean he defrauded rich people.

Off course he gets the book.