Hacker News Reader

Comment by formerkrogemp | Hacker News Reader

> Or, you know, invested in building games where people retrospectively assess their time spent with the game as enriching rather than exploitative.

The most profitable franchises have not done this. It's all timesinks, pay-to-win, and microtransactions.

View on HN

The maximization of profit over everything else is the cause of much suffering.

No, it’s absolutely not the legal obligation. That’s just an internet meme.

No, and no. (Editing out when disagreed with is poor form.)

don’t care

Suffering. Really? All those poor suffering souls, forced to slave away playing... er... video games. Talk about first world problem.

I mean sure, game addiction is a thing, but I remember people shovelling coins into arcade machines. PTW and micro transactions are just the modern equivalent. Nobody's holding a gun to these people's heads.

If you ask me indie and art games are in a renaissance period. It's amazing how many cool games from small dev teams there are on the App Store and Steam. If bored housewives prefer PTW crap, well, they'd probably just be spending it on bingo or scratch cards instead. It's really just mass market casual entertainment moving out of newsagents and bingo halls and on to smartphones, but it's always been there.

Even from a reductionist and materialist "this game with microtransactions gives me the dopamine hits when I buy stuff" with no other considerations, I know how to get the dopamine hits for much cheaper than hundreds of dollars, and not gated behind microtransactions.

I can get only marginally more joy from getting the exact five-star gacha draw I want than I get from a Slay the Spire rare card draw that is just the card this run needs, but the former may be several multiples of the price of the latter's entire purchase price.

So, just straight facts here. In F2P games, (and gambling), the vast majority of the profits come from a very small minority of people called "whales". The vast majority of users never spend a dollar. These whales are usually people with a gambling addiction or some other psychological issues, and they can and will bankrupt themselves and their family. Yes, they have some of the responsibility here, but people that design games to prey on these people deserve some responsibility too.

Just a personal anecdote, I used to work on a F2P game years ago before I knew these things. Once, I wrote a visual effect for some dragons that players had to pay for which used some pretty fancy shader code. As a consequence of said fancy shader code, some low-end devices with poor ES2 standard support didn't run the shader properly. One day, we had a crazy lady drive to our office across interstate lines, about a 16 hour drive, and she threw a tantrum because she thought that we had "scammed" her out of getting the visual effect she paid for (I guess she was older and didn't realize it was just a bug). Some people get way too invested in this stuff, and as moral human beings we have to be mindful of that and not just blame the crazy person.

> Suffering. Really? All those poor suffering souls, forced to slave away playing... er... video games. Talk about first world problem.

People in Venezuela were forced to play RuneScape in order to make money for quite a few years. Prior to that in China, people were forced to play world of warcraft to farm gold to make money. I don't think it's just a first world problem.

Except some Nintendo games, like breath of the wild.

There are a raft on non-AAA publishers who produce amazing games without it

Hades, It takes two are two of the recent game of the year winners that wholesale rejected exploitative monetization

So profit is the only thing that matters in life? And not leisure, which appears to be the whole point of engaging in gaming?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com