The Sims 4 Cottage Living Expansion Pack

"MissElpheba;c-17914613" wrote:

"Triplis;c-17914472" wrote:


There was a time when the norm for video games was you bought a physical disk in a store and that was the end of the transaction. No DLC, no MTX, no patches, end of story. No amount of weird hypothetical theoretical talk about sales tactics changes that. Don't @ me with that stuff, I'm just not going to engage with it, there is nothing to argue.

Not true, I'm afraid. I'm old enough to have bought games in store (probably bought my first pc game with my own money 25 years ago). They often came with physical pre-order freebies - mini figures, caps, bonus disc, mini guides and so on. Used to resell them usually for profit on Ebay. Pre-order bonuses are not new to digital. And even before digital purchases of whole games were a thing, physical games got patched from time to time, once the old internet came along.

The monetization tactics for video games are objectively far worse than they were then across the board. No amount of hedging on the details changes that and I will note, I made a distinction in my original criticism in this thread between digital pre-order items and physical ones. I don't know where the determination from regular people comes from to normalize worse forms of monetization as always there, but it's just not true.

The attempts to exploit are not new, sure, but the forms they take and the extent they push it is definitely worse than it was 25 years ago. I will concede, if it helps put into perspective my understanding of this, that before the mass adoption of PC/console, there were arcades. And kids dropping coins at arcades, essentially renting time on a game, was pretty predatory in its own right. These things can be observed going through cycles because the underlying system is the same and a change in medium that is slow enough leaves some room for temporary improvement before the same institutions get a foothold in it (like what happened with streaming services) and right now, with video games, we are in the part of the cycle where they are dug in and there are games with mechanics that are basically like digital casinos (lootboxes).

So frankly, I have to just scratch my head at the level of interest I keep encountering in this thread, in being dismissive of the reality of it, or rewriting the history by underplaying how things have changed with attempted corrections on surface level details. I am happy to leave it well enough alone, but people keep coming at me specifically about it and they are not going to get an argument if that's what they want, just more information about the reality of what things are, as best I understand it. Or more likely, they'll just get nothing, as I've about exhausted my energy to continue the conversation at this point, what with continuously having people make up a guy to argue with.