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.)
Video game boycotts are an absolute fucking joke. Especially if organized here. I mean what % of consumers are on Lemmy? Like 0.00000000000000001%? For fuck sake.
I’ve been boycotting CS2 (née CSGO) since November 2019 when they introduced Fortnite skins with annoying voices that you couldn’t turn off or disable.
I don’t think it has worked but I’m definitely never playing another Valve multiplayer game, they always turn out the same way.
Played cs2 after not playing any counter strike for years. What an awful experience. I miss the days of finding a community server with people you get along with, or leaving a server you don’t like. Matchmaking you can’t leave, skins, loot boxes, has ruined online multiplayer for me, but it’s not going anywhere, sadly.
I already do, but I’m also not as avid a gamer as I once was. Every FPS became borderline unplayable when loot crates became a thing. Call me old fashioned, but I liked when games had the same weapons for everyone, and there weren’t random cards or whatever that made people’s guns more powerful / reload /shoot faster, etc. It really brings an imbalance to the game, and enables these stupid gambling sites. The companies making the games are making money hand over fist, so they aren’t going to stop any time soon barring regulation, and looking at this administration, good fucking luck with that. Boycott away.
If one wants to play F2P games I would like to recommend the no gatcha challenge. Meaning no gatcha or any in-game purchases. Rewards from forced tutorial pulls can often be sold / deleted or if the first pull isnt random then that doesnt count.
For battle pass games with only cosmetics I encourage to only use default skins, emotes, avatars, frames or etc. It probably annoys a lot of people to get owned by someone wearing “noob” skins.
If the games are still good / enjoyable after these restrictions then they just might be actually good f2p games.
Pretty much any game with gatcha like the Hoyoverse games. These often have some sort of endgame paywall but it could take hours to reach it. If the game is bad or simply unplayable without gatcha its a bad game. Free premium currency can often be used for non-rng non-gatcha stuff.
Competitive games usually only have cosmetics so you can just use default skin, ignore battle pass and focus on getting good and having fun. Some people could even get salty for getting their ass handed to them by someome using default costume.
Many of us have been doing this from the beginning, but it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how gacha games work.
Most people do not pump loads of money into these. Many don’t pay anything at all. But those people are not the target audience. These companies are going after the whales. Basically gambling addicts who will destroy their entire lives to pump everything they have into it.
Which is exactly why these games either need to be illegal, or the law needs to put caps on how much individuals are permitted to spend on these.
No, if anything, we need to boycott games with battle passes. I’m not a fan of lootboxes but I’d take them any day over a battle pass. Don’t pressure me to play specific ways, don’t exploit FOMO to try to get me to grind or spend money. I find that a LOT more predatory than lootboxes, at least in games where they’re optional.
Fallout London currently has my attention. It's remarkable how it's possible to build a game that doesn't feel like a tiny playpark with the tech. London is BIG!
I’ve bought singleplayer games with loot boxes and no anticheat and just used cheat engine to get the ingame currency for them. I think I’m doing my part.
Does that really count? As far as I know, the golden keys mechanic was just a way to get some good gear. It wasn’t exclusive gear, and you could get it just by playing the game.
Right, but the fifa series afaik makes most of its money by selling packs of cards with players in them. Packs and players that you can get by just playing. But they still sell those packs for $$, so why wouldn’t it count? Afaik, that’s one of the main culprits besides counter strike that are named when talking about loot boxes
Borderlands the same, you can buy random gear with cash. I guess it’s less fomo and less abusive, but they’re still literal loot boxes that they sell for money
You’re not though, you are still buying those games. Go the extra mile and pirate them if you really feel the need to play games containing loot box mechanics while trying to “stick it to them”
The Gatcha system is why I never finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2. The first game was phenomenal… But the second game required a gatcha system to unlock new party members. There were even quests that were locked behind certain ultra-rare party members. It’s an entirely single player game.
Our group got Lethal Company - and promptly refunded, none of us really felt it. Later “Content Warning” was given free, which we got and still occasionally play, it’s okay - if a bit jank. We’ve been discussing about this one, but it just screams streamer/youtuber-bait to me, and while it is exceptionally fun to watch good streamers having a banter and laughs. I dunno if it holds as well for us, it kinda feels like we’d play it once or twice and then drop it entirely.
Visually the game is on point, though. The southpark-esque “canadian” way the robot-characters talk is hilarious, and the slight eye movements really sell it.
I can totally see where that sentiment is coming from. I had one of my friends practically begging me to buy it to play with them, and i was still pretty hesitant about it because I wasn’t sure if I’d actually play it again. I am glad I enjoyed it, but basically I completely get where you’re coming from.
Do you mind if I ask more about how Content Warning is? I got it for free on Steam a while ago and have been considering giving it a try
I’m a bit two minds about Content Warning - on one hand, it’s simple to pick up and it’s definitely goofy and, fun? But lack of meaningful permanent progress kinda brings it down for me.
Essentially, you can do “fine” with the basic gear (camera, flashlights), but you get more views (ie. money) with better gear - assuming you actually can capture some footage the game-logic deems worthy. Lost items can occasionally be found in the spoopy-place later on, but not guaranteed. Also replacing/buying new gear is kinda expensive, and dead teammates cost money to bring back (but you can’t go to debt because of it, iirc, so that’s nice).
The runs, at least for us, are usually VERY short, like few minutes in and out. Your runs are limited by oxygen, health and amount of footage you can record - which is 30s. so make it count. So basically how the runs go:
find the first monster
goof with it and try not to die
okay steve died while goofing with the monster, but I got it on film!
RUN AWAAAY with camera set in selfie-mode and try not to die
Usually monsters can be found very quickly, sometimes it takes a while. But usually run is over in few minutes, the prepwork before taking a dive tends to take longer :D
AFAIK There are some “hidden puzzles”, like combine some bones or whatever to summon a spoopy secret monster or such, but I haven’t seen them myself, just seen some mentions about them occasionally.
Also, It has mod support too. We tried a few:
longer/infinite film - initially we thought this would be great, but that just defeated the whole point, recorded footage started to drag on and on and on… Short film forces you to really asses the situation and only record peak footage, instead of meandering nonsense.
More/infinite money - While it was dope to finally test the equipment we were usually too stupid drunk bad to be able to afford them, the items range from useless single use toy to needlessly expensive for what they are.
More days - same, kinda defeats the point.
free hospital bills - a good one, imo. The game is punishing enough as is.
Maybe a bit more durable dudes or longer/infinite oxygen tanks would do, dunno.
Doesn’t sound like a glowing recommendation, but in general I’ve never had bad time in the game. The runs are just over bit too quickly, but then again starting a new doesn’t take long either. It’s decent at minimum.
I might look into picking it up for friends when it goes on sale. From what i’ve heard it sounds like the kind of thing we could have a good time with, maybe not at full price though
Almost everything about OW1 is now back in OW2! 6v6 is back, loot boxes are back. You can even play the OW1 metas if you want, though they pretty much only show just how much better the game has gotten over the years.
I’ve been playing OW1 since launch and have really liked OW2, my only complaint was that they were making playable heroes unlockable, but that was fixed a long time ago.
Been playing REPO too. I think its a better ‘game’ than Lethal Company, but Lethal Company shines more in the horror comedy area. Only issue with that is a lot of the comedy around the scares wears off as you play more and start to understand what monsters you need to fear and which you dont etc, then for me lethal company becomes a bit of a walking sim.
Repo doesn’t rely on scares as much & also has a much shorter route to walk to from cashout so you can spend more time playing and less time waiting for your stamina to reload so you can move more than 1 ft per second.
I may get bored of it at some point but I’ve had more enjoyable playtime so far than I did with lethal company.
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