Yeah I would need to see the “read more” here, all of these look fine but I’d never be surprised to see shit like cruise control or heated seats pop up on a paywall.

Advertising in general is a way for a person to show people they have a product worth buying, so the producer is able to make a living on it.

This argument isn’t even about consumer protections anymore, it’s just anti-business. I’d be completely with you if there were only giant FAANGS corps in gaming, but there are also small developers trying to make a living.

Also, the same example I’ve been using, I just now opened league, the homepage is defaulted to the latest patch overview. If you hit the play button you go straight to the lobby and from there into a match, all without seeing an advertisement. You’re making broad generalizations that only accurately describe some of the worst store models, and you’re generally acting like it’s a horrible thing for a business to pursue profits

By your logic, going to a store and looking at clothes is predatory and manipulative.

Subscription services rely on the customer forgetting and paying for something they don’t necessarily actively want, especially in gaming, not sure how thats such a better alternative than a cosmetic you can simply not purchase.

There is no psychological manipulation for a straightforward cosmetic purchase lol

Going into a cosmetic shop and purchasing the exact cosmetic that you saw and wanted is not gambling.

People complain even MORE about subscriptions. There is a very good reason that wow and ffxiv are some of the only games around that can make it work, or you can do it like fortnite crew but people will complain again if you don’t have enough content to create value on it.

Nothing wrong with a simple cosmetic store. They also allow other people to play without paying whatsoever.

And if it wasn’t clear, I’m not talking about loot boxes or gacha, at all. Those are gambling and predatory, and exactly why I said it’s disingenuous to lump every f2p game together for discussions like this.

Pretty disingenuous to attribute this to every f2p game.

Some developers don’t have money and wouldn’t be able to convince people to pay for their game right away.

People buying those skins are also exactly whats funding those games to keep going and developing, league of legends would have run out of money YEARS ago if it dropped on a standard $60 model.

Idc if it’s an unpopular opinion, complaining about ai voices in games is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever in my life heard people get upset about.

You DONT want game characters to be able to intelligently respond to events in game and the things you do? What??

This conversation should be purely concentrated around how they compensate the actors for using their voice as an AI training tool.

I don’t disagree with anything but I feel like GabeN said that before streaming and subscriptions took over.

Photoshop is an incredibly easy to use and powerful tool for creators - I’d be happy to drop like $200 on, for example, the 2024 version. I’m not happy to spend $10 or $30+ a month for life to use it, especially when they lock you in to a year subscription and charge you a fee if you cancel early so you literally can’t just sub only the month when you need it, it’s the whole year, period. I’ll just pirate or use photopea or whatever.

Similar for streaming. Netflix gave us the option to pay for more screens to watch on. Now suddenly it matters whose house it’s in?? All while you’re constantly removing value from the platform and you cancel anything decent if the production value is too high? Fuck you man I’m not paying like $30 monthly for that.