I don’t really care. Idiots are easily parted with their money. Thats their fault. I’ve played CS for decades and never paid for a chest or whatever. Never had an interest.
After they start and get addicted. You’re not ill when you start . Unless you have something else going on not related. You have full power not to start. Just play the game, kill the other guy, have fun with your team. Thats all you need to do in any game. Thats all I’ve ever done in a game like CS. I don’t even notice all the other stuff. I play the game.
There was a ballot proposition in my state some years back to build a local casino. I’m not a gambler, but we all have our vices, and it’s possible it could stimulate the local economy, so I looked into it. Of the research I could find, the best-case scenario seemed to be that it maybe had no ill effects on the local populace. The worst case was that people susceptible to gambling addiction were now exposed to it when they otherwise wouldn’t have been, and that was devastating on those people’s lives. Not only is online gambling accessible to us anywhere, which is proving to be systemically problematic in things like sports betting apps now, Valve skirts current regulations to make it available to those under 21.
I think people just want someone to blame. It’s as stupid as blaming a scummy car salesman because you bought a car you can’t afford. You let yourself be talked into it. You let somebody sell you something. They didn’t take the money from your pocket. Maybe I just don’t understand because I didn’t grow in the privilege to have money to waste on digital shit in digital crates. And if my parents did (they didn’t) they would’ve never ever given me access to their banking. Thats foolish.
It’s like people who expect things to be censored because they’re too lazy to monitor their children or learn router and dns level blocking. Or for gods sake, don’t give you child a smart phone.
You share that opinion with the many libertarians in this world, but unfortunately it is not that simple (and has not that much to do with financial privilege). I know it is en vogue to dismiss scientific insight, but sociology, psychology and medicine paint a very complex picture with many internal and external risk factors.
Exposing children and young adults to a gambling system with a very low entry barrier in a space that is hard for parents/guardians to oversee means malevolently accepting that you‘ll turn some of them into addicts that would not be otherwise. It’s like selling meth at a school yard fence.
If you are not an addict, that just means that you haven‘t been in the right (wrong) situation (yet). That of course is a true privilege.
You know, we restrict and ban certain drugs like fentanyl and heroin respectively because their addiction potential is so high and can cause a lot of harm at the population level.
Sure people have individual responsibility, but it’s also unrealistic to expect most people to resist an entire social and structural environments geared around certain behaviours, like drinking alcohol or smoking back in the day. Not everyone has the same has the same ironclad will and perfect emotionless reasoning as you, especially youth–remember they used to have smoking ads aimed at kids? And now it’s vaping.
While a lot of things I can easily resist, like narcotics and alcohol, I still get influenced by certain types of ads to try things, get addicted to certain games, and eat way too much junk food. For a lot of things, you can’t know it’s going to be a problem for you until it’s a problem. Plenty of people buy a few loot boxes here and there and don’t develop a gambling addiction. That doesn’t mean gambling addiction isn’t a risk and problem to take seriously and address at the systemic level, not just leave it to the individual.
Casinos and gambling venues IRL are almost always their own thing, you can’t go one by mistake and you shouldn’t see them surfacing in unspecialized common spaces, e.g. on Olympics stadium.
In videogames the casino element penetrates recreational spaces that were mostly safe from that for years. Not as a shadow scheme with reselling/gambling on some third party site - this can’t be stopped - but in the game itself. Valve’s promotional algorythm walks around the lobby giving everyone free spins coupons, that not only reaches mentally unstable addicts, but also normalizes the practice of jerking the slot machine from time to time for the larger userbase. Every actor in that trend is a self-serving agent, but their collective influence puts a foot in the door and proclaims that gambling is a casual part of a daily life and there’s nothing wrong in seeing it everywhere, even parting with a couple of bucks recreationally, that in the end makes bazillions to the house.
He’s right. It’s despicable. Trading card games, too. The thing with Valve is that, outside of this monetization of online games, they’ve unquestionably had an enormous positive impact on all sorts of things in this medium just by way of sheer market forces. They’ve done a lot of great open source work, and they’ve helped create a viable exit ramp from Windows. Despite claims of monopoly on PC, they’ve created more market competition than we could have ever hoped to see otherwise. A lot of what they do is informed by what they would want to pay for if they were the customers. That stuff can be true, and at the same time, they have directed their online games in a data-driven way toward whatever creates the best results, and that result is legalized (mostly, for now) gambling for children and other addiction-driven spending behavior via battle passes. The worst part is that if they ever arrived here by accident, they’re not remorseful enough to stop, since it makes so much money.
Rejecting monetization strategies that look, function, and feel a lot like gambling doesn’t mean players will always appreciate their alternatives, however. Hall said that even he is frustrated by the “Paradox model” of paid expansion and DLC packs his studio RocketWerkz chose for its survival game Icarus after moving away from a free-to-play scheme.
It’s been years, and I still scoff at the criticism. The Paradox model is to ask a price for a good that they produced. If you don’t feel it’s worth it, you don’t buy it. They don’t obfuscate the details of what’s in the expansion; they don’t make things available for a limited time only; they ask what they feel is a fair price for a product. It’s the only method of monetizing a video game that doesn’t feel scummy to me. If Hall doesn’t like monetizing Icarus that way, he needs to scope his projects down so they can put a bow on the last one and move on to the next one more quickly.
Im sympathizing with both sides of the conversation. Grand strategy games are so complex and can be supported for 10+ years so it makes sense that they regularly make DLCs to support development.
But they’re not totally optional/unnecessary. The problem is that many games are balanced around the new DLCs that sometimes you’re at a disadvantage if you dont buy them. I remember some drama around crusader kings where some mechanics don’t make sense unless you buy some DLCs
I agree. Strategy game do occupy a weird space, EU4 was a go to game for me for like 10 years. I appreciated the support for the game and did buy the DLC that changed mechanics (skipping most flavour packs). I remember people complaining about janky mechanics without DLC, but I know others would rollback to previous versions.
Funny thing is that despite playing EU4 for years and really enjoying the game. I feel little urge to upgrade to EU5.
That’s like 10 development years worth of additional content. There’s not many games that get that much post release dev time without a valid monetization strategy.
You have a point but the cost of Paradox DLCs FAR exceeds the development time most of the time. You really have to do your research before buying anything
I feel like doing research shouldn’t be an issue for people playing Paradox games, where it takes hours of research in the tooltips just to understand the mechanics.
That said, my research for new Paradox DLC usually consists of hovering over it in the store, ignoring anything with reviews less than mixed, taking interest in those with positive, and reading the first dozen reviews of the mixed ones, and that works well enough.
I think that’s a fair critism, but also it’s not like people get a dlc buying addiction. It’s not necessarily predatory (although it could be if the base game was incomplete and needed to be fixed by DLCs) like gambling is
The price is off-putting because we can see the sticker in order to get sticker shock. But lootboxes and gambling have no upfront sticker, the true cost is obfuscated and extended over years. In that regard, Paradox is much more transparent than Valve.
That being said, my beef with them is their "subscription for DLC" model, at least the version I saw being rolled out for EU4. That and the free updates tend to be fairly unbalanced if you don't also buy the corresponding DLC for that update. That seems skeevy... but still not as skeevy as lootboxes.
The thing with Valve is that, outside of this monetization of online games, they’ve unquestionably had an enormous positive impact on all sorts of things in this medium just by way of sheer market forces. They’ve done a lot of great open source work, and they’ve helped create a viable exit ramp from Windows.
I don’t know about the exit ramp for a casual user, if you mean ditching Windows altogether, since that’s not really happening. But what did happen - Microsoft didn’t get to own the central position in gaming on their own platform, and Steam is a program that installs other programs uninterrupted - just to take a sense of what rights it has there for almost two decades. They had GFWL, now MS Store, integrated with XBOX, and they still aren’t mentioned as a PC marketplace anywhere besides having a monopoly on Minecraft. There hasn’t been their IE for games, and it’s awesome. I can’t say Valve and MS even compete there, but having eggs in two different baskets is better than having them in just one. Two different monopolies instead of one.
We are basically getting a casino shoved in our faces most online games we play now. Not sure why this isn’t outlawed, it is absolutely having an effect on the population, not the mention the growing population specifically (growing as in kids being shoved this in their face while they grow up).
Valve has one for the few lootbox systems that you can actually get value back out of outside the game. While they deserve all the same criticism of every lootbox game, they probably also deserve some praise for that.
If you want to get specific it’s not praising the dealer for buying back the drugs. It’s praising the drug dealer for allowing the customers to sell those drugs to others while taking a small cut from every sale. But they still shouldn’t get any praise because they shouldn’t be doing that in the first place.
Genshin directly shows you the stuff, Valve has a slot machine like animation.
I have students who play both Genshin and CS2 and spending money them. In Genshin they spend to get a character they want, in cs2 is to try to make money…
And casinos can hardly be honest given the couple of time I read about cases in which a customer wins at slot machine and casino claims it was faulty.
They know nobody is going to purchase the pay-per-view, but I guess they don’t care since the alternative is not getting any money anyways. Esports was never sustainable because fans refuse to spend money, so they rely on shady sponsorships from gambling sites and Saudi money.
They’re charging for it because the Japanese audience will pay for it, and I guess they don’t want to handle it differently abroad. Fighting games, at least up to this point, have been sustainable in a way that the rest of e-sports have not. The rest of e-sports was predicated on future growth, and fighting games have only grown as fast as the money coming in, in general. (2XKO is putting out $50k in pot bonuses for a game that doesn’t look to be earning that much, and the Saudis now own SNK and treat Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting like they’re Call of Duty.)
The only time I ever tried loot boxes was with TF2 and Dota2 back in the early to mid 2010s.
I very quickly realized that this wasn't what I was looking for in gaming. These days I mostly play indie games where monetisation is not issue. Even gave up on Paradox because I am not okay with their DLC approach. I don't mind paying for DLC, but one has to look at their release of Cities: Skylines 2 to see that they've really become the "EA of Europe".
I understand your outrage but silence is not consent. It is fear. Apply that phrase to any other situation where consent is required and that would be considered victim blaming.
Now M$ COULD be fine with this, we truly don’t know, but they could also be afraid of how the administration would retaliate against them if they spoke up. I do agree with you when you say these companies are cowardly.
Lol, they willingly work with this fascist regime and others around the globe. Their silence is implicit consent, because a multi billion dollar company doesn’t get to cry fear in the face of the governments they willingly work with.
Stop defending corpos, they’ll gladly sell you to the government and tell your family they’re suuuuuper sorry you got nabbed but there’s nothing they can do.
The current government strategy of illegal use of copyrighted materials, often with the full understanding that the artist/IP owners will not consent to it should really have a harsher punishment to it. The DHS social media pages in particular keep using songs without artist permission because they know it will be taken down but by that point it doesn’t matter and they just steal another song. Given that the use of these songs implies tacit approval from the artist, this should absolutely count as the rights of the artists to free speech are being infringed upon.
Yeah it almost reads like Microsoft has endorsed the Trump administration and its marketing. Like a forced brand crossover. These things aid in the far right pipeline. Has young men thinking hating immigrants is as cool and mainstream as Halo.
It’s quite literally the least bad thing they’ve done across two terms in office.
Given that the use of these songs implies tacit approval from the artist
Who seriously believes that? We’re so beyond “Death of the Artist” at this point. FFS, I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard the chorus line of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The USA” played full on patriotically, without a tinge of irony or self-reflection.
If an artist consents to the use of their song in a specific way, it’s not a matter of belief at all. It just is tacit approval. So when the government does this without consent, until the moment the artist responds, the implication is that the artist has approved it. Which isn’t as big a deal if a private entity does it, but it’s a much bigger deal when the federal government does it.
Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck. I have SOOOOOO MUCH SHIT BLOCKED and I still have to see this invasive fucking shit fucking EVERYWHERE IN FUCKING LEMMY. fuck you fuck everyone fuck all this endless fucking fellatio you give this fucking twat. Just shut the fuck up and stop sharing the images and name and giving it attention. Holy fucking shit it’s god damn inescapable.
Man. I’m sorry you are experiencing reality. But like, maybe you should be aware of what is happening?
The fact that you are more mad about reading an article from PC gamer than that hundreds of thousands of people are being abducted says a lot about you.
Some of us used to care and the endless exhaustion is too much. I simply am a person trying to exist, and I only continue to shrink how much bullshit I consume more and more and more since it infects everything.
Not wanting to see horrible shit constantly doesnt equate to not caring.
Sont worry. I’m getting fucked hard. By my government that hates me and by people like you who think they don’t need to even be informed of current events.
The apathy and inaction from you and your ilk is fucking me hard, and has killed many.
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Aktywne