this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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That shit is never going away, and for one simple reason: it's incredibly profitable. By converting real money into some nebulous fun bucks that doesn't directly correlate in value, they obfuscate how much money you're actually spending and make it more likely that you'll spend more than you intend to. The same reason that casinos have no windows and pump extra oxygen into the air so you feel less tired, all so you don't realize how long you've been in there.
Sure it's profitable, but it's also (correctly) seen as a manipulative, and some companies have stopped using those.
As I said Nintendo and Xbox store used to do that, but they transitioned to prices in real money quite some time ago, and if they got a wallet, they let you fill it with the exact amount of what you're buying. Same with PS store, most PC game stores, even freaking playdate catalogue and itch.io where the average payment must be like $3.
I expect that from shitty mobile games, because I know mobile gaming monetization is fucked forever, but I didn't know major publishers still used that garbage unemptiable wallet strategy.
Not only that, but if the mission costs $7 but you can only buy in increments of $10, that's $3 free money.
yep. Never underestimate how stupid the average gamer is.
Then realize half of them are even dumber than that.
Which is why gaming is in the state it is right now, cause a bunch of drooling mouth breathers keep throwing their wallets at problems because god forbid they do without or make a single sacrifice.
Except it's even worse than that. Because these companies hired psychologists to tell them exactly how to tweak the levers in people's brains to get them to pay.
So you have the stupid people, but also the people whose brains are naturally wired to be played like a fiddle by these companies, and then on top of that, you have the new generation of gamers who have simply never known a world where you didn't pay for skins.
But it's okay, "because it's just cosmetics."
Which is where the whole concept of using real money, to buy fake money (and never in the exact amounts that they charge for items), so you obfuscate the actual cost, especially once people start carrying a balance of fake money due to never being able to get the exact amount of fake money for the item came from.
Try going to a casino where you put a $5 in a slot machine and get 12,350 credits.
Probably exactly where they got the idea from.
Like Dave and Buster's play cards and games that cost 7.8 credits (at least right now, higher weekend evenings because of dynamic pricing) and needing to get out a fucking calculator to do the conversion from dollars to points to figure out you are spending $3.72 or whatever to play a single shitty game.