janguv
Premier League
- 2 November 2016
Couldn't disagree more. It's so lazy to blame the customer for the behaviour of the business. It's rather inconsistent, too, if you really want to pin down Konami (and the industry more broadly) on the ethics of having gambling and microtransactions in their games: the big problem with these revenue-generation methods is how they are used to exploit people. So you plainly can't try to offer that critique and in the same breath blame the people exploited by those mechanisms. (Maybe you don't offer that criticism? I certainly do.)
Now, I'm not exactly fond of those who spend loads on a game like this – the whales – nor am I a fan of those who spend a smaller but regular amount. It's frankly annoying that the game/industry is able to sustain itself with these sorts of purchases, and it's sad that customers' standards for the value of a game have dropped so considerably. But it is not ultimately their fault – not unless you sign up to a quite libertarian conception of autonomy which sees all their purchasing decisions as themselves simply mini expressions of freedom.
If you take the sort of view I do, by contrast, what you have in front of you is this: an industry (and certain big players within it, such as Konami) that has...
- cultivated a shift in how gamers evaluate the monetary worth of games
- sought successively to normalise payments for privileges in games
- often deployed manipulative behavioural psychology techniques to do so
- often targeted children and young gamers to create these wholesale expectations
- and distributed the increased wealth extracted from playerbases to shareholders in the form of dividends and executives in the form of bonuses
The cultural role and habit of playing games recreationally is what industry exploitation has taken advantage of, much as, say, Sky Sports and private broadcasters took control of football television programming, and billionaire clubs have taken control of football stadiums and exploited fans to new levels. Such processes are especially sinister, because when you bring into focus the pre-existing social practices that undergird them, you can see how the "decision" to play videogames (or watch football on television, or watch it in the stands) is not some free-floating exercise of choice but something we are deeply drawn to and often require.
Given that cultural pull to play games, it's unavoidable that lots of people will get sucked into the industry changes to the market, will have their perceptions changed about what is normal and what has value. So I really cannot hold in contempt the ordinary gamer for buying loot boxes and other microtransactions, even their getting excited about it and broadcasting it (I do not withhold such contempt for those in outsized positions of influence, though, such as PES YouTubers promoting MTX). Nor can I hold them ultimately responsible.
