Everybody relax! The arbitrary moralizing exclusion of perfectly legal software was only stuff that sounds gross and unpopular.

There’s no way this censorship could affect anything benign, here in this era of unquestioned queer acceptance, free expression between adults, and reliable protection of individual rights.

If it’s fiction, who fucking cares?

“Buying the book means you get the book.”

“What, the author’s notes? Publishing rights? I’m confused because video games are different somehow!”

The regulation needed is: fuck all that.

Games make you value arbitrary nonsense. That is what makes them games. Attaching a dollar price to that fiction is a category error. The entire business model is an exploitation of that confusion.

This abuse is making games objectively worse. Maximum revenue comes from addiction and frustration. Fun is an obstacle. At best, fun is bait on the hook. The actual goal, especially for “free” games, is to grind you down as thoroughly as possible to extract real money over and over and over and over. If you don’t think that’s you - neither did most people who wondered where all their money went.

Horse armor was above-board, compared to this shit. You got files you didn’t have. Modern “DLC” is already on your hard drive, appearing on other people’s characters, but you’re not allowed to touch that file until you pay ten actual dollars.

‘I was only endorsing what you’re condemning’ is a baffling sentiment.

A lot of what I think you’re talking about is based on player trading, is it not?

None.

… you know that cost is cumulative, yes? Games that somehow trick people into spending a thousand dollars a month don’t do it in one great lump.

Any product that can take one thousand dollars from someone, in exchange for what would typically earn a studio twenty dollars, is not differentiated by whether it has a cover charge.

The tolerable monetization model is: just sell games. They’re not services - they’re products. You buy them and own them.

Unfortunately, that’s not sufficient to keep that bullshit out of big-budget single-player games. Publishers can force it upon developers - and will. Once a few games get away with it, the cult of executives will figure they’re losing money if they don’t fuck you as hard as possible.

Nothing inside a video game should cost real money. Ban the entire business model.

Nobody thinks games should cost $1000. Yet that’s how much this abusive business model can extract from individual players. For hats. You don’t even get all the hats! When there’s not straight-up gambling, there’s still a constant trickle of bullshit, because some schmuck will think a static model with a particle effect is worth the price of several entire video games.

The total content of these games, even a decade in, is unremarkable. The least objectionable examples still want $200 to have all the characters, in a 1v1 fighter. Whoop de doo. Defenders can only insist Capcom used to gouge people even harder. The shit y’all put up with might be worse than annual sportsball releases.

The far end of that spectrum now needs an installment plan. How fucky does an industry have to get, before people stop going ‘but arcades?’ This shit is already half the revenue in gaming. It’s getting worse, and it’s spreading. It’s in full-price, flagship-franchise, single-player games. If we allow this to continue there will be nothing else.

The comparison is wrong. If the products you demand require continuing revenue - a subscription model allows rational consumer decisions. That’s why most consumers look at it and say ‘no thanks.’ Real-money charges inside games make more money than subscriptions, not because anyone wants to pay $130 for a video game, but because it obfuscates that price.

The real question is, if FighterZ has now been funded by all those piecemeal sales, and is - in its current state - your favorite game… why the fuck isn’t it $60 to buy it all once?

Like, you don’t want the Street Fighter IV model where each normally-priced game is a tiny upgrade. But you can buy whatever the last version of SF4 is, at a normal price, and it’s the whole goddamn game. If FighterZ doesn’t seem to be getting any more updates or content, why is it still priced for excuses about development costs?

Doesn’t seem to be.

The business model’s still intolerable.

Can you grasp that distinction?

We’ve been talking about a concrete example, one where you say this example is pReDaToRy

I have repeatedly, specifically, and explicitly pointed out this is a lie.

You don’t care.

You don’t get to sneer about a word choice I’ve told you over and over that I did not use, in the context you’re sneering about.

‘Stop calling everything predatory, you’re killing the word!’

I didn’t call everything pr–

‘You know what’s predatory? Paying for services!’

I’m out.

‘This is the gentle end of a spectrum where the far end is clearly predatory.’ ‘So this is predatory?’

Fucking aggravating.

Horse armor was above-board, relative to this.

I keep telling you the precise shape of the problem, and you keep going ‘yeah, something else.’

The DLC is content in the video game.

That’s why you can see it, even if you haven’t paid for it.

Welcome to the conversation.

For the love of god, do not make me rub your nose in this a seventh time.

Should the games I know and love be able to exist in the form that made them the games I know and love?

Are we still pretending that paying for whole editions doesn’t serve the same function? Are we still ignoring subscriptions because they make you feel icky? Are we still not acknowledging games that get updated for years, to keep sales up, and then have sequels?

It is not a model that we should ever go back to

Well there’s one question answered, albeit still on the basis of ‘ick.’ It existed - it was profitable - but we can’t do it ever again because that’s the same as a whole existing game being banned. Blah blah blah.

I understand that compatibility is preferable. I am telling you it’s not worth preserving this business model. This is the gentlest this business model could possibly be, and it has still created a typical 1v1 with a total price that’s fucking bonkers.

Compatibility is also possible through the just-update-the-damn-game model. Like how nobody charges five bucks for improved netcode. That also costs money to create, and is surely a key part of improving past the initial version. Funny how it’s just taken for granted as part of the game you already bought.

I literally didn’t. I said it’s inseparable from this business model, eight hours later. The comment you’re replying to explains how it’s all one spectrum - including the things you, personally, would call predatory. The only specific examples I’ve given are skins and skip-the-grind.

What I get in response is ‘do you still beat your wife?’ over the apparent impossibility of updates that already happened, and repeated misrepresentations of how this thread started. You have quoted me directly and then been wrong in the next comment. I sound aggravated because you’ve been aggravating.

That is what it means, to sell content. That is what actual expansions are. This song-and-dance where you have the whole game, but you’re not allowed to really have the whole game, is inseparable from everything you would call predatory. It’s only a matter of degrees.

One of the several alternatives you’ve repeatedly ignored is that these additions can be added to the game people already bought. Surprisingly, this does not involve slave labor for artists, because games that stay popular keep selling more copies. Do they make as much money? No. But it turns out maximum corporate revenue is not a guideline for ethics.

Nothing inside a video game. That part is not optional. I’ve dealt with too many cranks who see me arguing - JUST SELL GAMES - and then go ‘you want it for free!’

I’d sound less hostile if you didn’t need this explained five separate times.

And it’s not incidental, because you are now that crank, insisting “you don’t seem to want anyone to get paid to make [content].”

Stop fucking that strawman.

“Pay to skip the grind” is weaponized frustration.

Free games that somehow make a billion dollars only exist to drag people across their wallet-hooks.

This is trolling.

It’d be fine if we never talk again.

I did. I just didn’t give you the clean yes-or-no you’re prepared to posture about.

The alternative is we either break compatibility, or the content doesn’t get made at all since you don’t seem to want anyone to get paid to make it.

Do you have object permanence?

Because you keep pretending we didn’t go over the obvious alternatives, repeatedly. You forgot your own examples include games that did not have this business model, but still plainly got made, and had major updates, and took a shitload of your money.

Do you honestly not know the difference between “nothing inside a video game should cost real money” and “everything should be free?” Because that impossible confusion would explain a lot of this conversation.

I know you understand charging money for things inside a game can be abusive. You have no trouble calling gambling or FOMO “predatory.” Would you respect someone telling you, that just means you don’t want those games made? Fortnite, banned! Call of Duty, deleted! Never made it past 1.0! How much of that shit would you take, from someone insisting “at least it’s not pay-to-win?” Pay-to-win is worse, surely. So anything less abusive than that must be fine. And if you don’t respect all the money developers get from pay-to-win, you must want them to to starve.

We don’t have to leave your stated examples to find disproof of your pet dichotomy. SF4 had the same kind of evolution while selling versions like they still came on cartridges. It’s possible. You just don’t like it.

Unless you mean one single byte of FighterZ being different would be a completely different game, in which case, just, shut up. You keep trying to treat any change what-so-ever as equivalent to the whole game ceasing to exist. That’s horseshit. You need to stop.

And you keep pretending I said “nothing should ever be sold.” Or “nothing should cost money ever.”

Do you need a diagram?

Scams work by choice. Putting a gun to someone’s head is a mugging. Scams, you walk into freely, and still get robbed. You don’t quite get nothing… but for the money, you don’t get much.

What game could sell for $130, on sale, and be taken seriously? That shit only works because breaking it up into little pieces obfuscates the total cost. Same shit as “five easy payments!” in TV infomercials.

And $130 is the low, low end. So many of these games, especially the ones that slog on for years, have thousands of dollars in stupid shit you can blow your money on. Gambling makes it worse - but worse isn’t necessary, for it to be bad.

calling everything predatory

Can we please go one interaction without you lying to me about my own opinions? I called skins predatory. Because Jesus Christ, have you seen Fortnite? They could ditch whatever mechanisms you consider beyond-the-pale, and the whole game would still exist as a funnel to exchange your whole wallet in exchange for playable references.

I will again grant that this is the gentle end of the spectrum. But it’s all the same spectrum. There’s no hard cutoffs between thirty-seven characters at five bucks apiece, and pay-to-win weapon unlocks. Grinding instead would be worse. It’s even less like an actual product. All incentives point straight toward maximum revenue through engineered frustration.

‘I consider this game’s business model fundamentally intolerable, and its total price divorced from reality.’

‘So why aren’t you playing it?’

You are not a serious person.

You’re repeatedly misrepresenting my stance after several clear and specific corrections.

You’re deliberately ignoring the path to get from point A to point B if you think that in your world it would just be the final version right away.

Who are you talking to?

We just discussed how to incrementally build a game, without this specific business model. I am only against the business model. Do you know how to address that, without slapfighting a strawman? ‘Game design is hard’ doesn’t excuse this creeping systemic abuse.

Again: this is the low end, and it still expects $130 for an eight-year-old 1v1 fighter. 70% off. This business model inflates prices to the absurd extremes, even when it’s not an antipattern vortex.

Skins are predatory bullshit. Skins are surely the majority of this abuse, by revenue. Skins are the easiest way to charge $1000 and still give someone a fraction of the content in one video game. Skins aren’t trivial to create… but you sure can crank 'em out.

The model I want to go back to is where buying the game means you get the whole god damn game. Letting people have content, but not use it, is inseparable from anything you’d acknowledge as predatory. We can try to split those hairs, and we would fail. Nothing short of addressing the business model will solve those problem.

The only reason this bullshit can even sound defensible is that Capcom used to be even worse. Like if they sent a guy to your house to take a hammer to your cartridge, and now you can pay him five bucks at the door. Is that better? Probably. Is it tolerable? Nope.

Imagine if this applied to literal versions. 1.1 drops, with bug fixes for save corruption and some balance tweaks, and Steam wants another ten bucks for it. Would you respect if someone scoffed, ‘do you want them to make you buy the whole game again?’ Plainly not. Incremental changes to the game you already bought… should just go in the game you already fucking bought… because you already fucking bought it.

I take issue with how you’re still lying about what I said. ‘Things being sold’ is my entire drive. Did you miss it, in all caps? The problem is this farce of charging real money for permission to use what’s already in a game you already paid for.

Games were updated before this nonsense was possible. This business model is only like fifteen years old. Unreal Tournament '99 had updates and new content for years, because people kept buying the game.

I’m not participating in your all-or-nothing hypothetical. We just discussed how this exact game could have emerged without this exact business model.

And the version of the game with all the damn characters is the version where you had to keep paying to get all the damn characters.

If you mean, from today onward, should the game be priced piecemeal on Steam, then no. But it doesn’t magically revert to its launch state. I want them to sell the whole game… like regular. This is not a sprawling MMO. There’s not terabytes of content. It’s a 1v1 fighter with like thirty characters. If Arc honestly thinks the damn thing should be $130 when everything’s 70% off, let them stick that single price on it, and good fucking luck.

“We” includes the guy saying “skins are fine,” in reply to the same comment.

Quick search, and… yeah FighterZ specifically still has a $60 base price, a $95 version with some annual pass, and a $110 version with additional content not covered by the pass… and several eyebrow-raising “stamps.” There’s three hundred of those. They seem to be static character images? They cost several dollars each. So do the voice packs. Music’s $15 per pack. Assuming - assuming - the character bundles are cheaper, and include everybody, there’s also $80 of them.

So you can definitely spend at least $200 and still be tickled for a deluge of whateverthefuck stamps are for.

Two of those character unlocks were day-one. Not quite the obvious scam of on-disc DLC, but still pretty fuckin’ blatant. ‘Hey thanks for buying our game, and extra-buying the exclusive preorder bullshit… saaay, you didn’t want the powered-up versions of these popular characters, did you? Well don’t be a freeloader, pay up.’

If I buy the game, right now, all of those characters are in the game… but I don’t get them. I can get my ass kicked by them. But I can’t select them. Not until I pony up at least double the price of the actual game. And then apparently I’ll be subject to the same predatory bullshit for some JPEGs in chat. (If all characters are unlockable through gameplay, but you can ‘pay to skip the grind,’ that is predatory bullshit.)

This game is one of the less skeezy examples, and they still manage to turn an unremarkable amount of content into an obscene total price. It’s on sale on Steam, and it still costs $130. ‘But you can pay less up-front!’ is the problem.

Woe betide the poor bikini artist!

Nevermind their efforts were directed that way so the publisher could rake in hundreds of dollars, per year, for what’s obviously the least impactful element of the game. Costumes would normally be an unremarkable detail - some callbacks, some easter eggs, whatever - but now they cost more than the rest of the fucking game.

Do you imagine they took more effort than the rest of the fucking game? Like the horny bonus costumes are worth more than all the effort spent on balance, and netcode, and designing the actual characters. I’ll assume not, and underline: that’s the total disconnect between price and value. That’s the predatory exploitation, laid bare.

Those skins are the entire reason the game exists. That’s what makes all the money. Street Fighter has been reduced to bait on that hook. And it still costs forty fucking dollars.

Also, you do know pro football players get bonuses per goal, right?

This subject has the most aggressively off-topic replies. ‘There’s different forms of value. Some are artificial. You can’t just buy more soccer goals.’ ‘Uh–! But–!’ No.

The magic word is prorated.

If getting 99% of the way to something comes out to 0% of the payoff, that’s fraud waiting to happen. A promise unfulfilled.

Charging for anything inside a game is like applying a dollar value to soccer goals. It’s a category error, exploited for profit. I am fundamentally opposed to this system of manipulating people into wanting arbitrary nonsense and then charging actual money for it. Your glib endorsement of that manipulation does not make it rational.

And this is the shallow end. Characters, you can almost sorta kinda argue, as sloppy expansions. Skins? Fuck off. A bottomless pit of manufactured discontent. Plainly sufficient to wring billions out of people for a game that’s “free.” Or for a game that’s forty fucking dollars and will gladly take another hundred dollars every single year. And characters in a 1v1 fighter are drastically different from MOBA bullshit, where having the wrong options can ruin an hour of four other people’s lives.

People are rightly incensed by efforts to charge $80 to own one video game.

This is an entire market of games where you can pay $1000 and still not have the whole thing.

Something’s fucky.

Subscriptions are honest. Like actual sales - where you get a thing you didn’t have, in exchange for money. Paying money, to be allowed to use part of the game you already have, is not a sale.

SF6 fucking launched with $120 in DLC. Like yeah, you bought the game, at full price… but fuck you, pay us again. Breaking up the fuckening into individual characters, trickled out over years, is psychological manipulation to disguise that abuse.

And I’m not getting gouged, I know what the price tag is.

… the fact you can pay hundreds of dollars and still not have all of a 1v1 fighting game is not made problematic through mystery. No shit you can see the price tag. That price is obscene. Past abuses being worse is no kind of excuse.

I swear to god, Capcom could charge the price of a whole game for each new character bundle, and there’d still be people up my ass about how it must be fine because it was the same in the 90s. You know how I know? Because they do. Annual character passes are $30! Does that get you everything that comes out, that year? Does it, fuck.

I know you know we’re talking about what FighterZ was able to become

Of course you do, because it’s what that paragraph was about. How am I the one “playing dumb?” You’re still insisting there’s no way a game could be updated - aside from the other two ways you don’t like! - so that’s the same as the game being banned. Because saying it’s banned sounds really bad, and serious, and is totally the same thing as saying Capcom doesn’t need real negotiable currency in order to change the color of a character’s pants.

But hey, this is only the shallow end of a business model that’s turning the games industry into a frustration-based casino. Why worry?