Chebucto Regional Softball Club

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?

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!*' No, folks, *you* want it for free. You want to play endlessly-updated games, 'subsidized by teenage hormones.' You imagine that *you* would never be taken for ungodly sums of money. Even if you're right, you're counting on other people being taken for all the money you're not paying, and more. That's what it means, when this abuse makes more money. Predatory abuse is inseparable from this business model. Maximum revenue comes from addiction and frustration. You can be made to want whatever bullshit they're allowed to push. *That's how games work.* They mechanically convince you to value arbitrary nonsense. edit: oh shit, I thought I hit submit on this five hours ago.

I mean, if some guy gropes a coworker, a box filled with the contents of his desk is not carte blanche to spoil an upcoming announcement. But even his ass should be able to say 'I got fired from [blank].'

Stop lying about what I said. "Nothing inside a video game" does not mean "nothing ever." And you know goddamn well that fighting games had incremental re-releases, decades before this abuse was possible. Or, sell actual expansions. You want characters to cost twenty bucks each? Fine, sell that *like a game,* not like a fucking hat. If it's on your hard drive, in your game, you already fucking have it, and charging real money is a scam. Or, if you want continuing revenue for an online service - make it a service. Sell subscriptions. Oh sorry, do people not like that? Yeah no shit, because it's up-front about how much it costs, rather than luring people in and gouging them for untold sums. Or, a game comes out, and plainly exists, and doesn't become the version that's squeezed a billion dollars out of ten percent of players over ten years. Oh well! TF2 without this bullshit would still be TF2. People would still be playing 2fort, forever, the same way they're still doing Ryu vs Ken on Street Fighter 2 Turbo. I do not respect the dishonest conflation of 'FighterZ doesn't get to expand forever' with 'FighterZ would be *banned.*'

Read what you quoted.

"We can't even say who just fucking fired us" is a sign that NDAs are broken.

Half the industry by revenue and growing. 'But indies!' means nothing, when you count two games with $43 in revenue between them, like that's twice as many games as Fortnite. > People will always make art. People will always make games. If all the art you see is corporate slop that’s a you problem.

>> I get subsidized by your teenage hormones and keep playing the game I like. Uh huh. > So hell yeah, bait me, daddy. Nope, pulling the chute on this conversation.

> “games I don’t like shouldn’t exist”

'But arcades!' Are renting someone else's hardware. Different thing. This did abuse not exist fifteen years ago. 'But free games!' Can just *be free.* Or pay-what-you-want. Or cheap. Or something you already own. How's your back catalog on Steam? This Skinner-box horseshit where a game is \"\"\"free\"\"\" but somehow makes a billion dollars is weaponized frustration. The *handful* of games that were re-released with tiny updates at full price are now the entire industry's goal, thanks to this specific abuse. (And they still got you chumps to buy three 3D versions of Street Fighter.) You can pay the price of a whole-ass game for a *hat.* Lesser versions of that aren't better, just lesser. The opportunity to spend one hundred dollars right the hell now is shoved in your face between rounds. Or dangled each time a lootbox animation juuust misses. Or crammed into your inventory, as a *gift,* mmyes, if only you bought a key. If LoL wants to keep making money they can charge a subscription or sell expansions. Y'know - rational consumer purchasing decisions. Not playing keep-away and then tickling people's balls in a controlled environment where fireworks go off each time you click Confirm Purchase.

If you see a difference between two things, so can the law.

Nothing inside a video game should cost real money. Ban the entire business model. If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.

The confusion of products and services has been awful in general. Publishers demand continuing revenue. A fixed subscription is at least an honest economic exchange, for customers - unlike any form of "microtransactions."