• mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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      9 months ago

      People should be able to buy games without getting put in a vise, god dammit! Everyone gets less and worse and has less money! There is no upside to this shit, unless you’re the one sucking on the wallet-siphon.

      Nobody’s gonna take your precious fucking vidya. This is about a business model. Precisely nothing needs to change, in terms of the game part of a game. The problem is naked greed. Stop flipping out and hurling insults like “stop gouging money” is what you think constitutes censorship.

      • PrincessEli@reddthat.com
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        9 months ago

        If you don’t like it, don’t play it. Simple as. The government has no place telling private citizens what games they can buy or sell.

        • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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          9 months ago

          Banning scams is absolutely the government’s job.

          This business model is a scam.

          Buying and selling is what I want, but it’s not what these assholes offer - they are taking money in exchange for fuck-all. For “gems.” For time on a clock they made up. For a chance to get a ticket to run a dungeon to roll drops that might give you a thing that’s already in the game you’re playing.

          Horse armor was perfectly ethical, relative to this abuse. That’s how bad this is. It is neither a good nor a service. It is fundamentally not an acceptable thing to charge any amount of money for.

                • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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                  9 months ago

                  When you get nothing, but think you got something. Consent doesn’t matter if the whole thing is a trick. And it is: that’s what games do. That’s what games are for. They trick you into valuing arbitrary worthless crap. Points, hits, lives, goals - they’re not real. They are achievable fictions for making your brain squirt the happy juice.

                  Your brain is not great at separating forms of value. That’s why points and crap feel good. It’s also why swapping that made-up value for USD is an exploitation of predictable irrationality.

                  Even if you want to bicker about how actually receiving a made-up thing counts, somehow, you will never convince me some fake hat is worth the price of an entire goddamn game. But that shit’s all over this industry, now. There’s imaginary objects that expect hundreds of dollars. Whole-ass AAA games do not cost hundreds of dollars. Anyone getting manipulated into paying that kind of money, for one thing inside a much larger game, is a victim. As surely as if they’d agreed to pay $5000 for a PS5 because you told them Sony stopped making it. They got exactly what you offered - at a price that’s fucking robbery, because you lied to them about everything else.