StarCraft 2? I mean I still play Total Annihilation or Beyond All Reason, StarCraft 2 is practically a totally new game!
The nice thing about old things is that generally people only bother to keep returning to the good old things and the bad old things fade away and are forgotten, also the communities around old things while small tend to be very friendly and toxic people are muchhhhhh less common than with popular new games.
In my comment I attempted to point out that yes the profit from micro transactions never really goes to the artists and developers, but if it did in theory I would actually be really supportive of artist run cosmetic stores for multiplayer competitive games.
I want 3D modeling artists to be valued, and competitive multiplayer games providing a canvas in which artists can continually express themselves and create outfits/skins for players and items in game is an incredible opportunity to reaffirm the value of the labor of 3D modeling artists.
The opportunity is currently totally captured and subverted by shitty corporate control, but in theory it is still there.
For singleplayer games, no horse armor crap is lame, I just want developers working on expansion content.
Something tells me the person who made this doesn’t actually love playing multiplayer shooters with a controller, they just wanted a cool project to show off their DIY skills.
Ommmm I know that is why I got a steam deck? I love video games that don’t force you to buy a super expensive gaming rig.
I don’t really fuck with emulation though I want to (dunno where to get roms honestly) but there are so many banger indie games out there that barely use any resources to run, and honestly simpler graphics is almost always better for gameplay, development, and even aesthetics because it forces developers to adopt a style with their simplified vision of reality instead of just making things look super realistic.
I hate modern strategy games where the map is super pretty and 3D but impossible to read and all the menus are animated with tiny little buttons and hard to read text against textured parchment backgrounds…. it is clear as day that giving those game developers a more powerful computer to develop on was actually a catastrophic mistake in terms of UI readability.
I am actually ok with micro transactions in multiplayer competitive games for cosmetic skins.
I am not saying that most games that do this aren’t extremely toxic in their design but the idea of players of a popular competitive game continually paying small amounts of money to artists to create new riffs on the same player models and weapons that those players can use to express themselves is potentially a wonderful direct connection between 3D modeling artists and players that continually values those 3D modeling artists far after the initial game development is over (and a game company could potentially have no work for a 3D modeler when just maintaining a multiplayer game with small updates).
The problem is that the type of people who are most likely to spend money on loot boxes are exploited heavily, and then shamed by everyone around them into not revealing how much they spent on video game call of duty mobile skins.
None of this even remotely works when you talk about singleplayer games though, basically nobody dresses to the nines to just go for a walk in the woods where nobody can see them… the direct link between 3D modeling artists and players expressing themselves in view of other players is gone. Players may spend hours dressing their singleplayer character and enjoy that part of the game but it just isn’t the same thing as your multiplayer competitive game character you have spent countless hours playing in multiplayer matches interacting with countless people with. It is the difference between taking a freeing walk in the woods and taking a walk in a city in view of a crowd of other artists.
I guess what I am trying to say is that micro transactions are really only okay when they are “micro” because they are a direct interaction between a player and an artist in the way buying a single song from an album might be.
Of course, my entire point is subsumed by the fact that most of the big companies probably treat the 3D modelers making their skins like trash and are probably going to replace literally all of them with AI as quietly but as quickly as possible in the next couple of months.