The Finals developer Embark Studios has responded to criticism from voice actors and developers after it was slammed for using AI voice overs in its hit shooter.
Fortnite makes four billion dollars a year. That’s not “free.” That’s a wallet siphon. A casino with no cover charge is still a casino. It only exists to take unlimited quantities of your actual money.
All games manipulate you into valuing arbitrary nonsense. That is what makes them games. Directly monetizing that is an abuse of how your brain works. It’s a deliberate confusion of make-believe value and real-world value. And it’s so effective, these companies don’t even need to sell the game to make billions of dollars… but they can also charge seventy goddamn dollars up-front and gouge you in-game. And people still fucking buy it. Perfectly normal adults will drop a thousand dollars on one game in one month and insist they weren’t scammed. As if the funny hats they got were worth twenty times the entire rest of the game.
Any form of charging real-world money inside a video game is just lootboxes with more steps. It’s all the same shit and it all needs to go. It’s in every genre, on every platform, at every price point. Boycotts don’t work, it’s so profitable. We will never shop our way out of it. It is the dominant strategy.
If we allow this continue there will be nothing else.
Unfortunately, no. The name is a lie. All those games are abusive wallet-siphons, and the whole business model should be banned.
ok… if a game is free to play, the game itself is free. the name isnt a lie.
what do we call a product that is 70 dollars and still has microtransactions? i call that wallet-siphon Diablo IV.
what about a product that is 25 dollars and still has microtransactions? i call that game Deep Rock Galactic.
do i have to purchase skins to play a free to play game? no, i dont. i simply have to install it…
why would i buy a skin for D4? i wouldnt. i already had to pay 70.
why would i buy a skin for DRG? to support the developers. even though i paid 25.
why would i buy a skin for a F2P game? to support the developers. because it cost nothing except bandwidth and storage space.
Fortnite makes four billion dollars a year. That’s not “free.” That’s a wallet siphon. A casino with no cover charge is still a casino. It only exists to take unlimited quantities of your actual money.
All games manipulate you into valuing arbitrary nonsense. That is what makes them games. Directly monetizing that is an abuse of how your brain works. It’s a deliberate confusion of make-believe value and real-world value. And it’s so effective, these companies don’t even need to sell the game to make billions of dollars… but they can also charge seventy goddamn dollars up-front and gouge you in-game. And people still fucking buy it. Perfectly normal adults will drop a thousand dollars on one game in one month and insist they weren’t scammed. As if the funny hats they got were worth twenty times the entire rest of the game.
Any form of charging real-world money inside a video game is just lootboxes with more steps. It’s all the same shit and it all needs to go. It’s in every genre, on every platform, at every price point. Boycotts don’t work, it’s so profitable. We will never shop our way out of it. It is the dominant strategy.
If we allow this continue there will be nothing else.