Re: Two Random PC Business Facts

On Wed, 12 Jun 2024 10:14:31 -0500, Mandrake <prmandrake@gmail.com>
wrote:

JAB wrote:

On 06/06/2024 22:42, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

I'm surprised the market doesn't dry up.  I just don't find these games
fun.  Like you said they take an idea and make it all the same by adding
MTX.  It really comes down to which player is captivated enough to spend
the most money.  That's not competition - that's an auction.

For PC games, a lot of the titles that use extraneous MTX (cosmetics,
etc.) are involved in the grey-market gambling that is a major part of
Steam's ecosystem. Having little value in themselves, they're used as
'poker chips'  for the gambling websites, representing more valuable
prizes for better games.

Even when the MTX are legitimate, it doesn't take all that many gamers
to be engaged with the MTX before it becomes extremely profitable;
more profitable than selling the games themselves. There are people
who literally spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on MTX (Although
most 'whales' -as the big-spenders are called- only spend ~$500 to
$2000 on a game). But even the tiny fish -the sort who spend <$10 per
game- are amazingly lucrative if you can lure in enough of them. Which
is why so many of these games are given away for free.

The truly sad thing is how so many gamers have become acclimatized to
this sort of thing. There's an entire generation of gamers who no
longer expect to receive full and complete games for their purchase;
who are shocked when they learned we used to get things like cheat
codes or fun extras like 'big head modes' and extra characters for
free, included in the base game. Which isn't to say publishers weren't
money-grubbers back in the 80s and 90s either (you just have to look
at arcade game design to disprove that theory!) but even they never
took it as far as modern publishers.