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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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