Current Events > When did we actually lost the battle on microtransactions?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Gamers have no spine nor patience.

I think Lootboxes were when the battle was lost. Microtransactions was always winning this "battle" but it wasn't totally lost until we got to full ""you don't even know what you're buying" lootboxes.

Paying little bits for extra bits of DLC or whatever is one thing when you at least know what you're getting, so you can get exactly the skin or whatever you happen to want for a couple bucks. It sucks, but that's still like several levels above "pay real money for a chance to get something you might like"

The minute Nexon introduced it in Maple Story.

The mistake is believing that the fight isn't ongoing every day. It isn't a fight that ends either.

There are plenty of games that don't shit on you with microtransactions, and those by and large are the only ones I play nowadays.

when idiots bought the horse armor

They made you comfortable by selling you little hats and other bullshit for your xbox avatar and other things like that, and showing you that your friends have them too.

Not much of a stretch to go from buying little cosmetic bits and pieces to buying a preorder pack, and then a loot box, and then "time savers" for assassin's creed. They make the game suck on purpose so that you pay extra to make it less shitty.

OniLink5000 posted...

and then "time savers" for assassin's creed

I still don't know how this type of item became a thing.
You're basically paying NOT to play the game.

Jagr_68 posted...

Probably traces all the way back to Oblivion horse armor.

Then Overwatch, Fortnite, and PubG.

That's a 10 year gap though, what happened in between those years to lead to that moment.

saspa posted...

That's a 10 year gap though, what happened in between those years to lead to that moment.

That's the "???" step before the "Profit" one.

Requiem posted...

I still don't know how this type of item became a thing.
You're basically paying NOT to play the game.

Yeah I loved Origins but disliked Odyssey. I'd never buy one of those, and it seems like they reached the peak worst of it in Valhalla, which I'm still holding off on getting.

I was somewhat ok with and enjoying the gameplay reboot of being an open world action rpg until I realized they did it just to have those, and made combat tedious and enemies damage sponges. Now I prefer if the next one goes back to being just a regular game like the previous ACs. Preferably the ones on ps3 since the ps4 ones before the reboot were all garbage or disappointing.

When the whales opened up their wallets. So instantly.

saspa posted...

That's a 10 year gap though, what happened in between those years to lead to that moment.

CS GO added lootboxes with skins several years before going free to play.

Im going to assume EA with their sports titles and sports fans buying into the microtransactions in their games.

That or the FTP mobile games.

Just wait until Western publishers discover the kind of bullshit Nexon was doing in South Korea like 20 years ago. At least in most of our games you're not literally paying to rent an objectively better gun or cart or whatever for 30 days at a time.

Chicken posted...

People say its horse armor, but if you were around back then you know people pushed back on that hard.

The real answer is Team Fortress 2 when they introduced loot crates, which then really took off in CSGO.

People pushed back hard against lootboxes and gacha, too.

The "battle" was lost at the very beginning for the same reason we'll never recover from it: the gamers who push back are dramatically outnumbered by gamers who are either fine with it or simply ignore it. Voting with your wallet doesn't work when a bigger wallet votes against you.

Sort of feel like the market is too different between South Korea and the West to use that comparison... mostly the rampant piracy in Sk pretty much made it impossible for all other forms of business model to be viable.

s0nicfan posted...

Just wait until Western publishers discover the kind of bullshit Nexon was doing in South Korea like 20 years ago. At least in most of our games you're not literally paying to rent an objectively better gun or cart or whatever for 30 days at a time.

I 100% refuse to ever purchase consumable items.

When people kept buying shit.

When Tekken made me pay 8 bucks to use Lei Wulong i knew we where living in the darkest timeline.

There was no war.
We got rolled.

VeggetaX posted...

Explain how this is a bad thing.

This was the start of the slippery slope. Now we have macro transactions in 70 dollar priced games.

And the biggest issue is, that we have no way of knowing how much content was cut from the base game, only to be sold at a later point in time.

What was so wrong with unlocking skins/armor/cosmetics as part of a challenge in a game?

Nazanir posted...

This was the start of the slippery slope. Now we have macro transactions in 70 dollar priced games.

And the biggest issue is, that we have no way of knowing how much content was cut from the base game, only to be sold at a later point in time.

What was so wrong with unlocking skins/armor/cosmetics as part of a challenge in a game?

this is a reasonable explanation but its just greed. Plain and simple theyve made gaming so damn expensive. Basically have to buy a game DBFZ twice as all the characters have to be purchased smh