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Comment by swi | Hacker News Reader

Chris Wilson released a video on this topic yesterday - "Dark Patterns: Are Your Games Playing You?". He has an interesting perspective having been the lead of Path of Exile. A free to play, decade long, popular, action role playing game.

While opinions vary on the correct use of these patterns, the video is a helpful and easy to digest, reminder of them. The video description contains additional links.

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"Dark Patterns: Are Your Games Playing You?" - https://youtu.be/OCkO8mNK3Gg

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PoE seems to be an outlier, having probably the softest freemium model in existence. I dont recall having been even slightly tempted to spend money in that game.

You say that, but some of the games that people point at as having harmful monetization have basically the same system of only selling cosmetic items that don't give you an advantage (e.g. Fortnite). And PoE's stash tabs straddle that line a bit.

As far as I can tell the main difference is a younger demographic and being more pop culture adjacent. I don't think that should affect whether you consider it "bad" monetization, but I will concede that context is important with these sort of things.

> And PoE's stash tabs straddle that line a bit.

They don't straddle any lines, they're well beyond it. Stash tabs are de facto required for trade. One can, technically, play without trade and complete all the game content but the ones actually capable of that are putting in tons of hours and they will definitely use extra stash space.

There isn't really a target player that plays POE for free aside from those that are just trying it out. That's all fine with me but if you're going to get into the game, you're going to pay money.

Yeah, late game without a currency tab just sounds terrible. Probably spend more time organizing stash than actually mapping.

You can trade via trade chat. But yeah most people will buy trade and currency tables just because it saves so much time.

But it's certainly not required for ssf, you can complete the game without it.

Sure, but Fortnite's UI is set up to sell to you the whole time. After every match you can see unlocks. Before every match you spend time surrounded by other players with their skins and emotes.

The relationship between EXP and levels in each season only really reward you if you have a battle pass - so the more you play the more the pass seems like an attractive purchase. Once you have the pass, you're then encouraged to play more than you might otherwise want to in order to max out the time-limited rewards.

Some of Fortnite's skins have given players an advantage. They've sometimes changed skins later because of it. Fortnite has other dark patterns and harmful monetization practices too though, from their season passes to their in-game currency.

There is pretty heavy pressure to buy stash tabs once you hit the later parts of the game, but you get a LOT of time to figure out if you actually like the game before you feel it.

You absolutely need to spend money in PoE to buy stash tabs. It's basically mandatory if you play regularly. The difference to most dark patterns is that the spending has a very low cap. Once you've spent $50 or so on stash tabs you are set forever and never need to spend again. So it's not so different from buying a $50 game, just that you get to try it out for free first.

$50 is exaggerating it nowadays. With async trade you could buy a single merchant tab to gain access to trade (stuff sells pretty quick with async trade!), and maybe a currency and scarab tab for the bare minimum convenience. Around $20 and you've got yourself a meaty beast of a game.

Did you ever get to endgame? I cant imagine playing without stash tabs

No I have heaps of hours across 2 accounts and never even heard the phrase stash tab.

Containers for all the shiny loots that I cannot bear to just destroy, and the nice organised containers for all those currency types. Hits my weak spot right in the wallet.

There’s always a few people, saying this whenever the topic comes up, but as always, smarks are still marks. They want you to think you’re getting one over the system, because you’ll either cave, or advertise the game to someone who does. Even if you don’t, the marginal cost to them is essentially zero.

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