Are boycotts really the best solution to stop this epidemic in gaming?
Yes, but not if you don’t convince others to join you.
How can we best prevent these gambling grey markets and the gaming to gambling addiction pipeline?
Educate people on the dangers. Show them why it’s gambling, because there’s a lot of apologetics out there to trick people into thinking it’s not. Point out the same slot-machine-tactics they use to get people hooked.
And then convince them to boycott. The CEOs that put this shit in games know how to read sales numbers, and if sales start dropping (or player counts), they’ll soon figure out that it’s because of their lootbox/gacha systems.
Lastly, give people alternatives. I usually point people to Deep Rock Galactic, but there may be others that are better suited to people’s tastes. “Just leave” isn’t really effective if they don’t know where to go.
It’s a blast! The devs listen to and are involved in the community, you can go back and play earlier season content at your discretion, and all the paid content is optional cosmetics that exist primarily as an additional revenue stream for the devs, so no pay to win or praying to RNGesus to get that one ultra rare drop everyone needs.
Just don't play them. You're not going to convince millions of players that lootboxes = bad so they shouldn't play the games they love. But you can just play games from companies that respect their customers.
Are boycotts really the best solution to stop this epidemic in gaming? How can we best prevent these gambling grey markets and the gaming to gambling addiction pipeline?
No, boycotts do fucking nothing. The only thing that could make a difference is regulations to properly label these type of thing as gambling and even that is not very likely to succeed. They make a lot of money with gambling.
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.
yes, if for no other reason than that they’re tricking you into thinking they’re more fun than they are. you can have more fun playing other games with actual mechanic designs
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.
Realistically, you and the other dozen people here on Lemmy that see this aren’t going to make a difference. Its too far gone. You are free to play or not play whatever you want, but it won’t make any changes to how businesses in the gaming industry monetize their products.
It would be nice if businesses cared about their customers, but money talks way louder than feelings. And there are too many stupid people that will keep paying for Candy Crush MTX.
Personally, I am okay with RNG based rewards that cost real world money if the game is free to play, as long as it offers a way to get the RNG rewards by playing the game even if it is at a reduced rate. Even if it is Pay To Win, at least reviews will tell me going into it so I can decide for myself whether I am okay with potentially playing at a disadvantage or not. In some games that won’t really matter to me, such as if I don’t want to really engage with PvP, for example. But other games that are PvP focused, I probably won’t play unless the rewards are cosmetic only. RNG based rewards that cost real world money in a game that costs money just to gain access to or play the game that are not entirely optional cosmetics are stupid IMO, and so I just don’t buy or play those games. I almost never pay for RNG based rewards anyway, only doing it for games I really enjoy or if there is a collaboration event in the game with an IP I really enjoy, hopefully letting the IP holder know I want more of that IP.
It sucks, but a loss of only 50 or so players from here on Lemmy is nothing to game publishers that gain and lose thousands more players naturally and not because of monetization per week.
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).
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