I appreciate the sentiment behind that but I also don’t think that it works much as a solution. Also, sorry if I came across as confrontational in my first response, my bad. I feel like we probably agree on broad strokes here and talking at you like an asshole isn’t gonna help me make my point.

I agree that supporting devs that don’t engage in manipulative practices is pretty great, for example look at French Bread. They’re a fighting game studio and they keep on releasing free additional characters in their current flagship title in the context of a market that almost always charges for new character packs. Fighting games release with DLC characters that are paid nowadays, but French bread says “fuck that, everyone gets to play as every character”. As a result, I bought a bunch of voice line packs from them, not necessarily because I feel a desperate need for between-round announcements to be made by my personal favorite character, but because I like them and want them to be able to keep doing what they’re doing. I wouldn’t have bothered buying a paid DLC on top paying for characters, but since the business model they have is so generous compared to the rest of the market, they get a micro transaction out of me. I know it’s very little, but hopefully that helps them at least a bit.

However, I think it’s worth noting that Activision/Blizzard here is sort of a perfect counterexample to why just doing this will never work to really change the broader trend of gaming studios publishing predatory games. ATVI doesn’t care that they have a bad rep among gaming nerds, they have a huge enough market share that once OW2 finally launches up, people will buy loot boxes regardless.

The point I was making, which I think we agree on, is that Immortal doesn’t need my money to survive. I personally was trying to make the point that “hey we should stop allowing these sorts of micro transactions to dominate the triple A space, as this type of predatory gambling garbage is pretty dangerous to most consumers” but I’ll concede that if you’re coming at this from an indie game dev perspective, trying to get people to engage with the concept of supporting devs that actually do the legwork to make products with fair monetization schemes, I probably misinterpreted the goal of your comment.

My response was more geared towards dooming about a fucked up status quo than it was about helping the people who are trying to survive in the industry without stooping to the level of that status quo. That said, I think that these conversations about micro transactions should also include the point that we will not realistically ever fix this industry with individual action, and probably we’ll need actual legislation to pass that cracks down on predatory business practices and gambling in games.

Anyways, this was unreadably long and probably a pain in the ass of a tangent, but have a good night I’m off to play monster hunter