Are boycotts really the best solution to stop this epidemic in gaming?
Consumer boycotts very very rarely work. I’ve never heard of a single successful video game boycott.
How can we best prevent these gambling grey markets and the gaming to gambling addiction pipeline?
Lobby for appropriate legislation with your government representatives. We could have legislation that forces companies to transparently show the chance of specific rewards, and even show the money you have to spend on average to get XY specific item. (I think there is already a law like this in the works in the EU?)
One of the major psychological tricks gambling games (including lootbox and gacha) employ is to obscure the true costs behind premium currencies. Once they are forced to remove this, and you are shown that yes, guaranteed acquisition of a single Genshin character will cost you ~300 USD, it might make you do a double-take before you pull out your bank card. (There are many more psychological dark patterns these developers employ, so it wouldn’t be a single miracle solution, unless of course legislation altogether bans random chance rewards buyable with cash.)
While I agree with the spirit of moat answers, I don’t think that the few of us boycotting such popular games will harm or affecg them at all. We are a very small minority.
However, I do think we can support a sustainable niche market of good and sensible games.
So I think a it’s a better use of anyone’s time to try and support good games than spend your energy on bad games.
Do what you think is right, but spend some time to consider whether you want to reward someone or some organization with your hard earned money if you consider what they are doing immoral or bad.
Maybe I’m just an old man now, but it’s been years since I was interested in a game with lootboxes. I think the last one I played was Overwatch, back when it originally came out
It is important to question what you think a boycott will do.
Do you think you are going to make a giant movement that changes the world? If so… you should stop eating those lead paint chips. Consumers, historically, will only engage in a boycott if there are alternatives. Shop at Walmart instead of Target. VERY short term you might get someone to boycott Amazon for a few days but… just check “leftist” forums like resetera for everyone immediately losing their shit over how a few older activision games they will never play are on sale.
Video games, contrary to what people will say, don’t really have alternatives. We’ll joke that The Last Descendent was “waifu frame” but the people who love Warframe very much have reasons for not wanting to play TLD and vice versa. Let alone games like Call of Duty where there really is nothing close to an alternative.
So “boycott to fix the world” (and I am gonna expand on what THAT would be shortly…) ain’t a thing.
So… now it is up to why? Personally, I “boycott” Ubisoft and have for the better part of a decade at this point. I think the last game I bought “from them” was GR Breakpoint and I got that years after the game was basically dead and on a hefty discount (see: lack of alternatives). I am under no illusion that my wallet is going to lead to yves et al leaving their own company out of shame for their role in enabling a culture of sexual harassment (and allegedly more). But I do know that I feel a lot better when I look at myself in the mirror and most games I am interested in DO have alternatives.
So do you think you are going to change the world? Cue Nelson Muntz. Do you just not want to contribute to the culture of loot boxes personally? Go for it. And it doesn’t matter what people on not-reddit tell you.
As for what you think will happen: I think we can all agree that Nintendo upping the… Err, let me rephrase that. I think we can all agree that any company other than Nintendo upping the base price of a game to 80 USD (pre-tariffs…) is REALLY bad for the industry. But… inflation IS a thing and while game sales have skyrocketed… game dev has too. Money has to come from somewhere. And RMTs (lootboxes, cosmetics, etc) and constant flows of DLC have actually been great for the industry. It, for two decades or so, stopped the endless “ramp up, ramp down” model where people would be hired to work on a game, fired when it went gold, and then hired again 6 months down the line if it got green lit for an expansion. Get rid of RMTs and we go back to that for all but the largest studios because you don’t need artists when you are fixing a bug in Batman’s cape and so forth.
So, personally? I buy and play games that I like. And a lot of that does have to do with the monetization model. Something like Warframe is RMT based and has some sketchy purchases but also is (mostly) playable as a free game and is built around “free” content. Whereas something like Genshin Impact is marketed as “you never have to spend a dime” but… yeah. So the games that “do it wrong”? I am… kind of already “boycotting” them because I am just not interested in them.
Counterpoint - you can boycott whoever you want for as long as you want whether the world is getting saved or not. Try not to give a shit what other people are doing. You don’t have to change the world. You just have to stick to your own principles. And if enough people do that, the world will change anyway. But all you can control is your own actions.
I have a long list of boycotted companies that I have never gone back on. Started with Blackjack Pizza in college when they wouldn’t refund a pizza that had oven cleaner all over the bottom of it. Facebook gone for 15 years now, and I go without the cool Quest VR stuff. Walmart kicked to the curb around the same time for their gross abuse of their employees. Amazon ditched 3 years ago, don’t miss it. I’d love to have Starlink to put on a vehicle when I travel the country, but it’ll be a cold day in hell before Muskrat gets a dollar out of me. Canceled all my Target shit (20 year card member) a couple months ago over their DEI bullshit and won’t set foot in one again. I shop at Costco as a single adult. The list goes on.
And while I wish other people would give these companies the finger so real change would happen, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that I am sticking by what I believe.
This is a very smart and thoughtful perspective. One should consider their time and money as valuable, and not put it in games they disagree with. Do you have any good alternatives to recommend for the most popular Valve FPSs?
You might not like my answer, but I haven’t really played new FPS games in years, because basically none of them are doing what I want. I’m well served in basically every other genre right now, but these things are cyclical. We’re just getting through the era of indie FPS games inspired by Doom/Quake and other more maze-like shooters, and we may soon be entering the era where FPS games are inspired by my favorites. My multiplayer these days is usually fighting games, and the only ones that will give you trouble on Linux are Dragon Ball FighterZ and the upcoming 2XKO, both due to anti cheat.
As an aside, I’ll also say that where you put your time shouldn’t matter, if the product is free, for instance, but it does matter in online video games. Your presence in matchmaking is adding value for someone else who might spend money in the game, so you’d still be helping the causes of CS2 and TF2 just by playing on the official servers. For TF2, I think the code just went open source and there’s a revitalization project to bring it back to what it was like at launch? If so, that might be pre-loot-box, and playing that version of the game would help send the message you want to send. The same might apply to old versions of Counter-Strike.
I myself am against fomo. So we are sort of similar a little bit at least. We both dislike dark patterns.
I second that fighting games are mostly a mecca for us. I recommend Guilty Gear Strive, basically the only complaints people have about it nowadays is that it and it’s lobbies can load kind of slow, and some subjectively don’t like the gameplay, but that is up to you to decide (personally I love it’s gameplay). The new Virtua Fighter also looks incredible, maybe when it releases it will suit you well.
I also agree that tf2 classic looks great. It’s like the tf2 we grew to love but without the bullshit. When it releases on steam hopefully it gains traction.
Other games that are extremely pro consumer that I enjoy are Due Process and Straftat.
I haven’t been into FPS for several years, but if I was going to play anything current, I’d give The Forever Winter a look. It’s still being worked on, but the early access gameplay is really cool looking, and it’s bringing a lot of ideas to the table creatively.
I like a FPS but I have the most fun with the PVE sub genre of FPS. Left 4 Dead 2 and Deep Rock Galactic being my two favorites. Playing against other humans can be annoying if the skill balance isn’t right and if they’re cheating then it makes it no fun, imo.
If you are not their target audience then you can‘t really boycott them in the first place. And in my opinion there is no harm in playing a game with loot boxes when you don‘t buy them. They aren’t really getting anything out of non-spenders. That’s not how their servers keep running. And most f2p games that I encounter nowadays do season passes without the random factor anyway, so I feel the loot box discussion is becoming a little outdated for the main stream. Thank goodness.
I‘ve also noticed multiple times that this community has a gripe with multiplayer games for some reason. It‘s better to take anything from online strangers with a grain of salt.
Just play “Team Fortress 2 Classic” or “Open Fortress” both are really cool community projects without crates, or any micro transactions as far as I know.
Those projects look great! I will have to check both those out. My problem with a lot of community FPS games is that the community is just too small to play regularly (like Xonotic, for instance).
If the loot boxes affect your ability to win, don’t buy the game. If they are just cosmetic, meh.
But don’t stop there. If it has day one DLC, don’t touch it. If it has DLC to patch game functions that should be in the base game, don’t touch it. If it has any kind of pay to win function, don’t touch it. If it has a subscription, don’t touch it. If it’s a pre-order, don’t touch it. If it’s put out by a conglomerate publisher that eats real developers and shits out imitations of their IP, don’t touch it.
And most of all, teach these things to gamer kids and their parents. Kids are ignorant of the effect their purchases, and parents don’t have the time and energy to go learn for themselves. Spreading awareness helps everyone.
I know that I'm one guy, and my purchasing decisions ain't gonna change nothin'. But I still try to vote with my wallet as much as I can in order to feel like I'm doing the right thing. I'm the guy old-fashioned enough to still only buy native Linux games because I don't like the idea of replacing official support with just hoping Proton happens to work, knowing full well that this replacement happened long ago and I am too late to turn back the clock. And I've got a whole list of publishers I will never buy from under any circumstances.
I will never ever ever spend money on gacha, because if I don't know what I'm buying then I'm not buying it. Even putting aside the ethical concerns, that's just a stupid purchase.
But I have a lot of nostalgia for TF2, and I don't know how to reconcile that. They kinda got away with sneaking in gacha before we realized how evil this is. I haven't touched the game in a long time anyway, but if the Heavy Update ever saw the light of day (it won't) or even if they just brought back rd_asteroid (even more not happening), I'd be very tempted and I dunno what I'd do.
There are two gacha games I still play, without spending any money on, while knowing what a hypocrite I am for playing them. Mahjong Soul and Riichi City. They're the two most populated Riichi Mahjong clients - it's either these or Tenhou, but Tenhou isn't in English, hasn't been updated in a long time, paywalls a number of features behind a subscription model, and is steadily losing players to its competitors. If a new client with an ethical business model took off I'd switch in heartbeat, but I can't imagine one would ever take off to a point where I could queue at any time of day and get high-ranking opponents at my level. So I'm kinda stuck with these.
Yes. And you should boycott Steam because they practically invented gambling for underage. Watch the coffee-something video about it.
Now, 3,2,1 watch all the so-called gamers rip their shirt to defend this evil soulless capitalist business because “they offer a good service and care about gaming blablabla ubisoft bad blablabla”.
I dont know what Fut is and I don’t really care. Steam is the most profitable business per employee in the US, they shouldn’t get kids addicted to gambling is my point, nor should any other game.
They have been the most profitable business *per employee" for a long period, and they definitively are in still in the top. They have under 200 employees and generate billions in revenu because of loot boxes and because they take 30% on every games, while many studios have hundred of employees on a single game lol.
Now I had that conversation dozens of time with gamers and I won’t do it again, but steam fucking sucks. At this point, it’s basically like arguing with a trump voter, nothing anyone can say will make them change their mind.
Most profitable per employee is a different metric, and yes, they may very well be that, but that’s not what you said before. Boycotting all of Steam because some of Valve’s games do the thing they don’t like is a tough sell, rather than just not playing or paying into the offending games. I certainly don’t take issue with them taking a cut of every game sold on Steam, given all that they’ve built with those proceeds.
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