I’m not fixated on the word choice. You just changed it to trick but haven’t in any way proven that game companies are “tricking” or “defrauding” anyone. You’re just making an empty claim. Explain how spending money on a character skin is a trick. Or buying DLC isn’t getting you what you paid for. As far as I can tell you haven’t even established that anything they are doing is even “dishonest” which I think is a much much lower bar. You literally have not a god damned thing to back up your pov.
Your examples included expansions that they charged money for. And a game where if one person bought everything in the game, it would be some hundreds of thousands of dollars. Those aren’t tricks. Nobody is making anyone buy a house worth of bits. Nobody is making anyone pay for an expansion they don’t want to pay for (well, other than children forcing their parents). These are all optional transactions that adults enter into of their own volition. You can say you think it’s scummy they charge so much, but it’s not a trick.
Synonyms are words that mean nearly the same thing. I’m not gonna jump through whatever hoops exist in your brain, to avoid describing how this is bad. A scam is a thing where you trick people for money. Fraud is a thing where you trick people for money. That’s what those words mean.
Nothing could possibly excuse all the content in a mundane video game costing ten thousand times more than any other mundane video game. If people are paying anyway - they were tricked. Quod erat demonstrandum.
Nobody’s ever forced to get scammed. That’s what the trick is. Victims freely choose to throw away their money, for some bullshit. The alternative is a mugging.
If the value of paying for all the shit in the game is obviously nonsense, then the value of paying for any shit in the game is obviously nonsense. It’s all worthless. It’s all inflated so arbitrarily - because of what makes games, games - that listing a whale’s ransom in geegaws proves that every last geegaw is equally worthless. Tricking a single person into paying for a single fake hat is an intolerable abuse.
So your proof someone was tricked/scammed/defrauded is that they spent more money on something than you would?
They key point you seem intent on avoiding is that you have not shown a single example of someone actually being tricked/scammed/defrauded. Someone buying a thing that is arbitrarily priced well outside of it’s practical value or actual cost is not a scam, it’s literally the definition of a luxury good. Is every person who buys a diamond getting scammed, in your mind? What about those $1000 shoes people buy as an “investment”? Were they scammed in your imagination?
This libertarian attitude only works for rational decisions. That’s essentially impossible, in the context of a game, because games make you value arbitrary nonsense. That’s what makes them games. All games trick people - into caring about points, or drops, or goals, or anything else that’s not real. There’s no ethical version of attaching a dollar value to that made-up desire.
Nothing makes this abusive manipulation more obvious than when people pay the price of a house and receive a floppy disk’s worth of static props.
We’re not bickering over whether games should cost $70. Nobody thinks games should cost $10,000. So obviously no part of a game should cost that much! If it’s even possible to dump that much money into one game, and still only have a portion of its content, something’s gone terribly wrong. Snipping over how we describe that problem is aggressively missing the point.
And that problem is half the industry. That problem is a multi-billion-dollar effort by an army of game developers, whose talents are being misdirected to convince people to open their wallets and look the other way. It’s inexcusable, which is why you’ve made no effort, besides tacitly blaming their victims.
Veblen goods can’t exist in a single-player game. There’s nobody to peacock for. A housewife who spent a month’s salary on gems in some mobile puzzle trash was plainly not purchasing luxury anything. Nor is anyone wowed by the ostentatious signalling of a virtual rasta hat for which you paid ten actual dollars.
I’m not fixated on the word choice. You just changed it to trick but haven’t in any way proven that game companies are “tricking” or “defrauding” anyone. You’re just making an empty claim. Explain how spending money on a character skin is a trick. Or buying DLC isn’t getting you what you paid for. As far as I can tell you haven’t even established that anything they are doing is even “dishonest” which I think is a much much lower bar. You literally have not a god damned thing to back up your pov.
Your examples included expansions that they charged money for. And a game where if one person bought everything in the game, it would be some hundreds of thousands of dollars. Those aren’t tricks. Nobody is making anyone buy a house worth of bits. Nobody is making anyone pay for an expansion they don’t want to pay for (well, other than children forcing their parents). These are all optional transactions that adults enter into of their own volition. You can say you think it’s scummy they charge so much, but it’s not a trick.
You changed it, from scam to fraud.
Synonyms are words that mean nearly the same thing. I’m not gonna jump through whatever hoops exist in your brain, to avoid describing how this is bad. A scam is a thing where you trick people for money. Fraud is a thing where you trick people for money. That’s what those words mean.
Nothing could possibly excuse all the content in a mundane video game costing ten thousand times more than any other mundane video game. If people are paying anyway - they were tricked. Quod erat demonstrandum.
Nobody’s ever forced to get scammed. That’s what the trick is. Victims freely choose to throw away their money, for some bullshit. The alternative is a mugging.
If the value of paying for all the shit in the game is obviously nonsense, then the value of paying for any shit in the game is obviously nonsense. It’s all worthless. It’s all inflated so arbitrarily - because of what makes games, games - that listing a whale’s ransom in geegaws proves that every last geegaw is equally worthless. Tricking a single person into paying for a single fake hat is an intolerable abuse.
So your proof someone was tricked/scammed/defrauded is that they spent more money on something than you would?
They key point you seem intent on avoiding is that you have not shown a single example of someone actually being tricked/scammed/defrauded. Someone buying a thing that is arbitrarily priced well outside of it’s practical value or actual cost is not a scam, it’s literally the definition of a luxury good. Is every person who buys a diamond getting scammed, in your mind? What about those $1000 shoes people buy as an “investment”? Were they scammed in your imagination?
This libertarian attitude only works for rational decisions. That’s essentially impossible, in the context of a game, because games make you value arbitrary nonsense. That’s what makes them games. All games trick people - into caring about points, or drops, or goals, or anything else that’s not real. There’s no ethical version of attaching a dollar value to that made-up desire.
Nothing makes this abusive manipulation more obvious than when people pay the price of a house and receive a floppy disk’s worth of static props.
We’re not bickering over whether games should cost $70. Nobody thinks games should cost $10,000. So obviously no part of a game should cost that much! If it’s even possible to dump that much money into one game, and still only have a portion of its content, something’s gone terribly wrong. Snipping over how we describe that problem is aggressively missing the point.
And that problem is half the industry. That problem is a multi-billion-dollar effort by an army of game developers, whose talents are being misdirected to convince people to open their wallets and look the other way. It’s inexcusable, which is why you’ve made no effort, besides tacitly blaming their victims.
Veblen goods can’t exist in a single-player game. There’s nobody to peacock for. A housewife who spent a month’s salary on gems in some mobile puzzle trash was plainly not purchasing luxury anything. Nor is anyone wowed by the ostentatious signalling of a virtual rasta hat for which you paid ten actual dollars.
First, to set the record straight: look up the definition of scam
If the definition of scam is defrauding someone, I changed nothing about your word choice.