Unicronic Arts (The Jimquisition)

Biased towards what? If you say towards microtransactions being a usually dishonest business model? Then I'd agree. I see some rather rational arguments for that.

The business model is based on a couple of rather troubling systems:

  • Players who pay have to have a percieved advantage over players who don't. The most harmless form of that (IMO still super tacky and wasteful, but whatever) are cosmetics. But that's a rare exception. The Western model is usually built around "XP boosts".

  • A lot of those are built around "lottery tickets" where you're getting a chance to unlock a rare item but it's obviously a chance biased towards the house. That's straight up gambling logic, often linked (directly or indirectly) to real-life money. It's cheap psychological trickery that abuses our tendency to overestimate the chance for reward when it's dangled right in front of us (even if the math behind it makes it unlikely).

  • The game is profitable because of artificial item "rarity" or ways to bypass time/grind gates. This is a business model completely detached from good gamedesign/mechanics, actually it's anti-gamedesign since they are creating ways to make the slightly game worse in order to sell you a way to make it more enjoyable. We tend to celebrate the fact that game studios are companies and their goal is to be profitable. By that logic, what has priority: Creating an interesting game with new mechanics? Or creating more hats?

  • Actual profits tend to come from "whales", i.e. a select few players who pay absurd amounts (often 4-digit numbers). That seems to be the only way for those games to be profitable since there doesn't seem to be much going on between "whales" and players who don't pay a cent. That means the game's microtransactions have to add up to horribly overpriced numbers. You now only have two reasonable options: Play for free and accept the game having grind/time/fun-barriers that just make it slightly more annoying (not offensively annoying, of course, or you get a revolt as people notice). Or overpay.

Some of this could easily be completely avoided by adding a simple options: A reasonable one-time price to unlock all (at least gameplay-affecting) content. Maybe yearly DLC to compensate for updates. Why do so few microtransaction-financed games offer this? Because whales are actually wonderful cash cows. You add infinite ways to put cash into the game (depleting "resources") and it's essentially printing money without you having to design anything of value. Item rarity (and thus real-life value) is completely artificial, it's a number in a database to decide drop rates and an artist spending an hour mocking some shit up in a 3D modeling program. It's completely fake and exploitable.

So yes, I kinda "hate" this business model. But for reasons, not "blindness". Kinda like how I hate patent trolls and the anti-vaccination movement.

I guess you kinda like it but I assume you have your reasons, too. So… agree to disagree?

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