I still don't see the wrong in the original "If you want a proper game, you should stop supporting this game in its current state. Especially with your money" statement.
It's not a statement about morality or ethics. It's just rational decision making. It makes zero sense to give a company any money if you no longer like where they're going or what you currently get in return. It's simply not actively supporting products you claim you don't want or like.
Yeah, not giving them my money today does not guarantee I'll get a "proper game" in return any time soon, but it's an essential baby step and the only thing I can do. The alternative, actually giving them money, is just daft in comparison.
I think that's fair – it doesn't have to be read as some moral imperative (that's why I added the bit about it being potentially a piece of practical wisdom, I suppose).
But a few remarks either way – often people do slide from asserting a causal responsibility to a moral one (indeed in this thread it's happened quite a bit). Perhaps that's inevitable, but we can put that aside. We can question even the causal responsibility, regardless. E.g., the idea it's in your rational self-interest not to buy the game (/spend money on the game, etc), in the way you've put it, probably presupposes the idea that you are, in buying MTX/games, causally responsible to some degree for their continued success and their structure. (That's what you imply by the "baby step" idea of withholding spending.) But I just don't think even that point is true, really.
Unless you're spending hundreds-to-thousands, you're barely supporting this model and this franchise. Its success really trades on (as I understand it) exploiting the "whales" who do spend in such excess. I believe that's what drives this particular incarnation of the F2P model they've gone with (am I wrong about that?). So either you're not a whale, and so are not an impactful "consumer" for the company, or you are a whale, who does make such an impact. But even then, the archetypical whale lacks a relevant kind of agency to be considered even causally responsible: they act on whims and urges basically external to them, which means the causal chain starts with the manipulative behaviour of the industry. So, whale or not, gamers/consumers aren't really the cause of this model and its success – what is the cause is the array of techniques deployed by big publishers, and the surely many structural factors like governments failing to crack down on this exploitation or media failing to spotlight and critique it.
A larger ideological force probably pervades all these considerations too, and the attitudes of the ordinary gamer (or consumer of services and goods across many industries) are submerged in it: we are conditioned by a particular trend within the political economy to think
there is no other way – what Mark Fisher called "capitalist realism". The reason so many gamers submit to the likes of EA, Konami, Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft, and so on – why people fork out for their entertainment products, or increasingly services – is that they just find themselves feeling helpless in the face of these behemoths. Gaming was a recreational or enthusiast hobby which provided some escape from the harshness of productive life, but it slowly got co-opted by a rapacious sort of capital that gradually squeezed the good-natured fun and aesthetic pleasure out of it. These forces are out of our control; we might convince ourselves that we can take baby steps by voting with our wallets, but really these kinds of non-protest serve to confirm our helplessness in the face of what feels like an impossible state of affairs.
We can of course look elsewhere, do other things, even in the space of gaming: turn to indie gaming; collaborate with others to create projects that serve our actual recreational gaming needs, or help to fund such collaborations. But such options don't seem viable in a climate of capitalist realism, even if they are, and this is another overarching factor that effectively disrupts our agency, making us barely even causally responsible for the successful gaming industry paradigms: we are acted upon, and our view of what is possible is restricted.
Long and poncy diatribe – I apologise to all who read it.
Unsavory truth: Video games have always been business investments made to generate money. Except maybe freeware from the 1990s made as passion projects, but even those are precursors to money-generating projects.
The issue here is that they discovered from experience with EA's FUT and MyClub that online makes more money. So their business model clashes with what offline players like myself would want. I can only *hope* that when they implement crossplay, they wouldn't be concerned about offline causing a hit to online player numbers in a way that impacts its appeal.
EA doesn't have this issue because they have a way, way, way bigger player base they aren't worried about offline modes cannibalizing their online player base.
I don't know; I think that's quite naive. I think anyone looking in a clear-minded fashion at gaming industry trends in the last, say, three decades would spot very definite changes in terms of what capital is invested, how it is invested, how production incentives have changed, how profit margins have expanded, how that profit has been divested, and how workforces are divided and treated. And it wouldn't be a simple story of quantitative growth here either, as the only difference over time – a matter purely of degree.
We are presently in a stage that is quite unprecedented in the industry, one that would be too simply glossed as "business investments made to generate money". When shareholders of Activision Blizzard voted to approve that Bobby Kotick could take $150-200m in bonuses a couple years back (I forget the exact figure), simply for supposedly returning on shareholder investment (through dividends), and all while continuing to lay off staff in large numbers, introducing pay cuts, etc. – we are in a newer and uglier paradigm than
businesses doing businessy things. I mean: the idea of the product or service at the heart of the business, and the values intrinsic to that venture, have at that point been completely sidelined. And that's where we're at with this industry and its "AAA" (a self-appointed nonsense designation) publishers and studios.
For all that, though, there are other avenues. There's the odd decent established developer or publisher; there's the indie game market. It's not just projects from the '90s that buck the trend – and going by my argument, much of the industry in the '90s would be considered a bucking of today's trend, because developers were not uncommonly given autonomy and support to implement an artistic vision or to develop genuinely engrossing products – even if cash-grab trash existed alongside these products.
