A YouTuber calculates how much it costs to max out a character's Legendary Gems in Diablo Immortal, and the final number goes beyond six figures.
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‘Free-to-play’ games should be banned.
Why? Because they allow poor people to have fun?
“Pay to fast” allows people with jobs and not much free time to play with their jobless friends. What’s wrong with that?
This feels like a horribly bad faith take.
Nobodies trying to stop “poor people” playing video games but when the above user said “free-to-play” I think it’s pretty clear they mean the predatory and manipulative marketing and gameplay loops designed into these games to encourage addictive and habit forming behaviour in fans regardless of their income.
Yes I fully agree games should have options to allow those with jobs and busy lives to skip progression (outside of any competitive sphere) but they shouldn’t have to pay for it?!
lol you clowning us with this comment and I’ve taken the bait here?
I totally agree with that. If the game is not free, this should be considered an accessibility feature.
If the game is free, developers need to find ways to get money from the game. People with income are good targets, both on the economical and ethical standpoint :)
“People with income are good targets, both on the economical and ethical standpoint”
Isn’t a very ethical take.
That’s essentially going “as long as they have an income, even if they are below the poverty line they are ripe for predatory and manipulative marketing in the pursuit of profit.”
How very capitalist.
Personally I believe free to play games and their systems of “generating income” are nothing but hyper-capitalist conditioning and bait and switch by companies gouging out more money from consumers. Free to play wouldn’t have materialised if there wasn’t insane potential for returns (otherwise no company would take the risk) so by your assessment its fine to exploit people for profit if they have an income? That seems very cynical.
I respect your argumentation, but I believe you slightly twisted mine. By “people with income”, I wanted to say “people with enough income to spend some on recreational activities”.
Concerning the “insane potential for returns”, I’m sorry to say that the company that I worked for and for which I developed a f2p game was a small company of 5 employees that never took off all that much. It is a business model. It is not a miraculous business model.
That’s the basic concept of a salary. I would agree that there are unfair salaries, sure. That’s when we can start talking about exploitation. I’m ok with salaries. I’m not ok with exploitation.
But who defines what’s an acceptable and available amount of income to spend on recreation vs maintaining your standard of living and who defines what arbritary level of income is ripe for manipulation?
If you wanna grift capitalists then you have all my support but regardless of someone’s income, if they are working class then that’s just preying on the people if you use manipulation and addictive game mechanics to accomplish it.
There’s isn’t any informed choice or agency when the consumption is psychologically manipulated out of a consumer.
I get where you are coming from but free-to-play isn’t just the adorable indie studio everyone’s rooting for, it’s fortnite, app games, software that essentially relies on whales to lose out for you to win.
Exploitation in this sense doesn’t just account for wage and labour exploitation but the exploitation of people’s agency and decision making through predatory marketing and psychology.
Those are good arguments. I need to take some time and think on them. Thank you.
You’re welcome. I don’t mean to come across so snotty if I have.
I don’t get the downvotes on this message. I can understand why the other posts might be NOK for some people, but this one? Please explain it to me.
Artists need an income. Are we all in an agreement on this? You would not ask for a musician to play a full concert every night for free, right? Why would it be fair to ask a developer to develop a game for free? Do they not deserve a salary? And where would the money come from if not from people having money to spend on games?
I didn’t downvote, but the main point for me isn’t that “pay to skip” is necessarily worse than a non-free-to-play game, it’s that these massive companies try to squeeze as much money out of consumers as possible, especially when they include gambling (e.g. loot boxes – don’t know if this particular game does, but I know it’s in several other Blizzard games). Unless they’ve changed their policy since I last played it, Path of Exile (another Diablo-like game) has an example of a much less exploitative system.
Thank you for your answer.
Diablo Immor(t)al is a pretty terrible case when it comes to trying to squeeze as much money as possible from people. We, players, are harassed by the notifications for paying features. And it is not just a “pay to skip”/“pay to fast” system: it is also a pay to win game for the competitive scene. That’s bad.
On the other hand, it has at least 120 hours of free content…
My arguments are not in defense of Diablo Immor(t)al, though. They are in defense of Free to play in general, with reserves.
Of course, free-to-play models have both pros and cons. Especially for mobile games and games by large companies, there tends to be active encouragement for micro-transactions (often gambling) and they’re often targeted at children; on the other hand, if it’s a single-player game, the people who manage to disregard the pay-to-skip elements can play it for free without a significantly diminished experience.
Maybe I am biased. I worked in the gaming industry and developed a F2P game 18 years ago… And of course we added features that encourage habit forming behavior and manipulative marketing. F2P are free but developers have to earn money at some point. I am all for OSS gaming but let’s face it: they cannot rival with games developed by for-profit gaming companies… not because they have no talent but because developing a game is a huge investment and requires a lot of people that deserve a salary.
Now the honest question is: is the world worse because there are F2P games? Sure, some people will have problems, but at the same time, many people will be happy to play the game for free.
To phrase it as a utilitarian question: does the overall happiness increase or decrease because of these games? My opinion is that overall happiness increases. YMMV :)
Yes. The world is objectively worse because of free to play video games.
It’s created gambling addicts and debt in ways traditional game development physically couldn’t until the onset of lootbox mechanics.
I won’t pretend it’s the no.1 issue facing society currently but there wasn’t an industry of exploitation before and through free-to-play there’s now a brand new industry that exploits people on top of the others.
Objectively it’s another capitalist grift and by that assessment yes, the world is objectively worse when you add another exploitative industry to the pile.
That was not my argument. I did not say it was all pink and that nobody suffered from f2p. I talked about the overall happiness. The same utilitarian approach can be used when talking about vaccines. Some people die because they took a vaccine shot. However the overall population is better because of the vaccine.
I’m not saying that f2p games are comparable to vaccine. I’m just trying to make clear that my argument is utilitarian, and that I’m not disregarding people having issues because of f2p games.
Yeah ngl that’s not an accurate comparison.
Utilitarian as in maximising happiness? Again i disagree.
What markers of overall increased happiness are you measuring? How have you measured and defined and overall increase in happiness through f2p?
You haven’t to be blunt. At minimum you’ve assumed that more access to video games means increased happiness but we both know its not anywhere near as cut and dry as that. Given that game taste is subjective, the access to increasingly manipulative video game models has only annoyed me. Not made happiness increase so to use your logic as an example that would make f2p objectively anti-utilitarian but I’m not the world so you can’t measure it through me or a handful of individuals or users is my point.
You can’t say with any reason of certainty that access to f2p games that require micro transactions and manipulative gameplay loops have increased happiness because the material conditions of what each game and the experience mean to an individual are so nebulous.
Some people may say “having access to candy crush has made me happier” but what’s actually increased there happiness isn’t access to a video game but distraction from the world around them as an example. That can be accomplished through several means and none of them require exposing oneself to potential manipulation for profit by a company.
I’m all for increasing people’s happiness but as we’ve seen in western society, the markers and justifications for quality of life and happiness defined by those in positions of power have historically being horseshit given that access to variety of cereal in the west (as a result of capitalism they say) has not improved my material conditions or my overall mental health and happiness.
If people want to play f2p that’s there perogative and so be it, but I can’t justify the mechanisms of their design personally in the same way that British drinking culture while fun and people’s choice has not objectively increased happiness but I’d argue in the long run actively prevented it.
Again, very good argumentation. Thank you. Your comments are much appreciated.
That particular argument gives me much to think about. 👍
No need to thank me for been an opinionated bellend online, again apologies If I’ve came cross like I’m lecturing.
Overall increase in happiness is the end goal, its important we understand how to achieve this meaningfully through changing material conditions and agency vs metrics on a feedback survey.
While being poor I had a lot of fun from games. It’s called piracy. And once I stopped being poor, I largely stopped pirating. I have no hesitation torrenting The Sims or The Witcher (since CDPR refuses to take my stinky Belarusian money), but I see no problem paying for anything else if it’s sufficiently convenient. And even when I didn’t have time or just wanted quick fun, there was a way to do so. It was known as “cheats”.
“Free to play” incentivizes a certain game design where a game is so terrible you want cheat codes, and then selling those cheat codes to the player. Additionally, it preys the most not on the people who have money to burn but on neurodivergent folks predisposed to addictive behaviors (like I am but thankfully I dodged the worst of it and learned to just never touch the stuff at all). Hell, that’s why the game is not sold — the point is to probe the market for vulnerable people with the free first dose. This is immoral, predatory behavior, and while nobody would argue that a developer needs money, it’s this particular way the developer skills are used to make said money, and from whom, that people rightfully find repulsive.
Thank you for your answer. It clearly challenges my position regarding f2p games. I completely forgot about piracy, now having the chance of earning enough to pay for stuff, but you are correct and that is a very good argument.
I would be really interested in reading studies on the classification of whales. If that assertion is true, this would change my mind about f2p in a split second.
Diablo Immoral
I mean, literally everyone expected this since the first game announcement, why is anyone even surprised.
It costs nothing to not play shit