Looking at the amount of money gacha and other “free”-to-play titles are pulling these days, it seems like quite a few people have lots of money to burn on gaming.

The vast majority of the bonus was going to the leaders who were ousted.

Why do people like video games?

It always seemed like a kiddie hobby that’s not meant to be taken seriously, but apparently a bunch of people in their 20s and 30s take it very seriously.

Yeah, PC gamers bent the knee to Steam decades ago at this point. This isn’t exactly a brand new issue.

On the plus side, the virtue signalers saved $ and can spend it on something that’ll bring them more joy and is hopefully more aligned with their views. And gives them practice and a mindset of “I’m the kind of person willing to boycott” for any other boycotts that might have a real effect someday.

It’s not really a boycott if you never really planned on buying the product. Otherwise, I’m technically boycotting Apple and Ford. Because I don’t buy Apply products and I don’t buy Ford cars.

When I say “please” and “thank you” I’m essentially just virtue signaling that I’m willing to play nice…

Those are specific actions you are taking in being kind and nice towards another person in reality. However, if you were to make a comment on Lemmy about how kind of a person you are because you claim you say “please” and “thank you” all the time, then that would be virtue signaling, because making claims about what you do or care about on social media is relatively meaningless without the specific actions being taken outside of that context.

So, in this case, talking about how evil Nintendo is for pricing a game at $80, what does that do exactly? Why should anyone else listen or care about someone expressing that opinion? Are you joining activist groups and spending time or money pushing for laws/politicians/etc to enact change to fight back against these actions? If so, then that’s not virtue signaling. But I’m unconvinced most people expressing these opinions and upvoting/downvoting posts and comments are doing anything beyond exactly that.

It’s not really about boycotts not working.

It’s that a handful of people virtue signaling about how bad X game/company is on niche social media communities don’t matter if their opinions aren’t aligned with your average person.

Most people just enjoy games as a hobby and treat it the same way they treat picking something to watch on Netflix.

What I don’t understand is why do developers make bad games? They should just make good games instead.

Gamers want good games, not bad games.

Or you could always just not play the game? Is that not an option?

Wow. I actually did back this way back in the day and I swear I completely forgot about it for at least the last couple years until this post.

Yeah, thankfully with PC gaming there are no large corporations involved.

Man, development times are getting pretty crazy at this point. Hard to believe that we are starting to see decades between sequels to titles as a normal thing in the high end of the market.

It’s no wonder more games are aiming for games-as-a-service style models.

Filling fees for an arbitrator may be higher than filing a case in court.

Which is why Valve is making the change. They were potentially paying a lot for these filings.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/column-mass-arbitration-target-valve-accuses-law-firm-litigation-funder-2023-12-08/

Steam is actually pretty decent, by company standards.

They aren’t doing this because they are decent. It’s because they were getting reamed on fees through people choosing the arbitration. I believe it was a law firm basically encouraging people to request arbitration because they would get paid every time a claim was submitted, regardless of the outcome.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/column-mass-arbitration-target-valve-accuses-law-firm-litigation-funder-2023-12-08/

Yeah, I get not wanting to get too hyped about games ahead of time, but it feels like these days people are online to look for the next game to get angry about.

Good luck figuring out how to avoid labeling every game ever made as a “skinner box”. It’s basically a jaded person’s definition of what video games are at their core.

If you value your time, you wouldn’t be playing video games at all. As they are nearly an entertaining way to waste time.

All games waste either time, money, or both. So I guess we just have to make video games illegal now. Oh well. Was fun while it lasted.

Without being a gacha game, World of WarCraft is guilty of a lot of the same stuff.

I’m not a fan of trying to poison the well on this discussion by trying to bring in a lot of secondary issues and try to broaden the issue to the point of uselessness.

The biggest issue with gambling is the ability to lose your money.

Sure, you can waste time with World of Warcraft. But I can also waste time playing too much Baldur’s Gate 3, or Civilization, or by binging shows on Netflix.

But none of those allow me to spend thousands or tens of thousands by gambling on mechanics within the media itself.

How about we focus on that issue first?

But both are gambling.

Nah, they are not comparable in a meaningful way. Sure, at a high level, you can apply aspects of “gambling” to both examples. But the biggest and most important point is the ability to spend actual money for additional changes at “winning”.

People are against gaming because of some deep-seating fear of Random Number Generation by itself. They are against it because of how easy it is to lose money.

Isn’t that foam what we are discovered is leeching into ground-water supplies everywhere and is super unhealthy for everyone?

I meant more that a restaurant owner isn’t going to see or really get any value from an open source solution vs closed source specifically. They are just choosing a platform at a price point that works for them.