3mo ago

Marvel Rivals' latest gambit is seeing whether you'll pay real money for colours

www.rockpapershotgun.com

13 comments

I mean, that's all skins have been anyway. Originally you'd just upload a texture and do whatever you wanted. Then you could do the same with the models.
Then someone got the genius idea to make you pay for the privilege...
Blizzard tried this with the Dark Pathways Bundle for Diablo 4 before, 30$ to change the colors of the Town portals. Was not very successful!
- Infamously Dead or Alive did that with character hair colours. That is, not paying to unlock the option, not even paying to unlock individual colours to swap them when you want : you'd have to pay every time you wanted to change a character's hair.
  
  I love fighting games.
  But holy fuck is the monetization some of the most outrageous I've seen.
- "Dark Pathways" indeed, really telling on themselves lmao
Enshittification. I am so jaded with all this.
- The most depressing aspect of it is how many people keep falling for this kind of crap.
  
  I blame streamers for that. Rivals sponsored a lot of streamers, which is kind of interesting for a free to play game. But if you watch theirs streams, the first thing they always do is looking at the new skins IMMEDIATELY. and then they tell you how absolutely fire the new skins are and they buy some with the score credit they get.
  They just normalise buying a 20 dollar skin.
Remember, they gutted the whole dev team shortly after launch. It’s a zombie now.
- They didn't fire the whole team, just the six people (from what I can find,) that worked in the US. Some suspect NetEase's move was to consolidating their workers in China. The six who were fired did, to some extent, level design and game design. I'm not sure anyone has a good answer on how much of each. And the creative lead and lead producer are still on the team, in China.
  That's not to suggest how you should feel about the developer who fired people after a massive success, regardless of how many they fired. Just saying "the whole dev team" is a vast overstatement, considering how many people worked on the game. We can be pissed at people and be accurate. That's all.
Nothing inside a video game should cost real money. Least of all how you look.
Only legislation will stop this. If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.
Ban the entire business model.

13 comments