After playing World of Warcraft for 15 years, I started becoming increasingly bored and disgruntled with the game. The game being grindy and repetitive is no real surprise, I mean it’s an MMO. But the one thing that was really frustrating was paying monthly for a subscription and a huge chunk of cash for an expansion, but still having extra stuff flashed in my face all the time that was simply not possible to earn in-game. Mount skins, cosmetics, miscellaneous stuff that is only available in the Blizzard store. They also began adding loyalty items that require being subscribed every single month, and doing repetitive, extremely boring stuff on top of the other repetitive boring stuff, so basically double dipping on your grind, which really isn’t fun.
Aside from that, I also played other games that required a heavy amount of grinding too, and each one of them had similarly frustrating elements. Destiny 2, overwatch, Battlefield, Fortnite, Halo, and the list goes on. Each of them has the same issue: fear of missing out. FOMO basically makes it so that if you don’t seize the opportunity to spend real life money, you will never be able to obtain something really cool, because it’s only there for a short time, and then it’s gone, and you are made to feel guilty and bad about it. It’s just kind of depressing playing kind of games and realizing that you are now mentally dependent on financial transactions in order to get the full enjoyment of the game. That to me is a very very awful way to live life, and it really messes with your emotions
So I ditched every game that had any element of an in-game purchase. This is honestly helped my mental health a huge, huge amount. Now, I only play games that either have no microtransactions in them at all, or are completely free and 100% possible to play with no purchase required at all. So games like team fortress, deadlocked, Stardew Valley, and many other indie games that you can purchase and then never have to worry about getting suckered into the microtransaction cycle for
I feel that playing a game that has micro transactions and not participating in them still contributes to the problem. In fact, it seems to me that these micro transaction heavy games NEED people that don’t buy the cosmetics. It creates a greater sense of superiority in the people that do buy them by creating a hard line between the “plebs” (f2p players) and themselves. Regardless of how it makes you personally feel, lots of others will succumb to the social pressure of wanting to feel superior to f2p “bots”/“noobs”/“plebs”. It’s the same reason that people buy shit that they don’t need in real life, the difference being that you don’t get to choose whether or not you participate in an economic system
Im not a big fan of pay to win, but I see no problem with micro transactions for cosmetic stuff. If people are dumb and want to spend their money on that, more power to them, especially if I benefit from it.
Yeah I understand your viewpoint, and this was my perspective for a long time as well. But I’ve come to realise that it’s a self-centered perspective. These people aren’t necessarily dumb, they’re being manipulated by the game developers. Micro transactions are engineered to take advantage of natural human drives for reward and social connection. So I’ll just not play those games, because I don’t want to support that kind of behavior from game studios
I’m not going to avoid enjoying myself because you say other people can’t control themselves. That’s like telling someone to not drink alcohol because some people suffer from addiction, and alcohol companies advertise.
Is it not more like saying “I won’t drink Budweiser because they advertise a known harmful substance and I consider that a manipulative business practice”? I could still drink hundreds of other beers and instead support breweries that don’t rely on manipulative advertising tactics to make money. I’m not saying that I don’t play video games, and I’m not suggesting that anyone stop playing video games. I simply choose not to play video games that employ business practices that I consider to be manipulative
But people will buy alcohol because they are addicted. It’s a harmful substance, that the producers know is harmful, especially to addicts, and sell the highly addictive substance anyway. It’s profiting from manipulating weaknesses in human psychology, just like the games are. If no one bought it, people would stop producing it. So simply extending your logic, buying alcohol is self-centered and contributing to alcoholism.