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Comment by mirashii | Hacker News Reader

I think Valve's model of pure cosmetics with an active workshop and ability to implement custom games shows you can still have microtransactions without turning away the notion of a player community. It just seems to me that the common monetization schemes implemented in other games is a bit of a blatant money grab made by forcing people to artificially grind.

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On one hand I agree but on the other, Team Fortress 2, where the model originated has stagnated with only a handful of team members shipping actual content updates to the game with the majority of it just seemingly being community items made canon.

There is still a community but it doesn't feel like the same game since microtransactions were added. It's still a fascinating example of a player run economy though with (virtual) "Mac OSX Earbuds" being used as a primary currency at one point

This is tell nothing about monetization model though. It's just how Valve operate: too few developers interested in working on game so its stagnates.

I am a fan of the _idea_ of only charging for cosmetics customizations instead of hiding actual game content behind paywalls, but the way that Valve and others have implemented it in practice is highly predatory, because nearly everything desirable is hidden behind an opaque wall of RNG instead of just put up for direct purchase for a known price.

This is how you end up with gambling addicts blowing thousands of dollars for a virtual in-game skin, and it has enabled a vast network of grey-markets gambling operations to fuel those addictions [1].

It can be difficult for normal people (who mostly just enjoy the gameplay and maybe once in a while splurge on a few dozen bucks to make our virtual avatars look nicer) to emphasize with people who have real gambling problems, but that doesn't make it any more ethical to exploit them so blatantly.

Hiding these gambling platforms behind the veneer of innocent-looking games also exposes gambling to a younger audience that's much more susceptible to predatory tactics often used by gambling platforms to build up their addiction. There are pretty good reasons why gampling is a regulated industry, and online games that employ these kinds of systems are way overdue for some oversight.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling

I disagree with nothing you've said, but I do believe it's orthogonal to my main point: monetization via microtransactions doesn't need to inherently influence gameplay in any serious negative way, such as by introducing arbitrary grind or pay to win components. That said, I do wish the implementation was a bit better. It's an attempt at price discrimination which seems to work well, but the gambling aspect is definitely problematic and long in need of either a regulatory look or a pushback from the community. So far, the community seems to push back only when things become egregious.

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