PenguinTD @ PenguinTD @lemmy.ca

Posts

2

Comments

383

Joined

2 yr. ago

Do you know what's a distribution? There are no system in the world a fucking psychology Richard Feynman equivalent can pull to make everyone that touched it become an lootbox addict. (or whatever addict you'd like to call it. )

It's not a melt down because it's so hilariously bad I offer a challenge to let you show me "any" reputable publication that stats what you claimed with certain co-relation. In these categories:

• open lootbox specifically designed to get you addict == micro dosing your kid with hard drugs
• open how many lootbox when a person has that addiction trait will then become untreatable
• any study that states opening lootbox with person that have addiction trait works exactly the same way to form the behavior feedback loop as hard drug addicts. (note: NOT how the brain respond to the stimuli "after" they become addicts. We have many hard drug user celebs examples that do not become addicts in Hollywood and Music industry. )

And, can I guess before hand? You have none of relevant qualification to make those claims, right? If this is r/science and I am wrong I will be slapped with pages worth of links by now. Go ahead, try educate this fellow stupid old man.

It's hard to argue with people thinking that giving a kid heroin is equal to let them open a gacha egg or lootbox and how they respond to the results. I don't know how you can make that connection and I'd like to see a reputable peer reviewed study where even expose once or a couple times lootbox and then they become untreatable gambling addicts. Show me anything and I will make personal call to the research institute asking questions and donate them, hosting a website and then spread it like gospel. You can't because that's not how gambling addiction works.

You are forming this "XXX = evil" argument and tag it's like feeding heroin to your kid. But provides nothing or alternative to help parents to catch those traits early. The same take away your entire pay check works for pretty many other things that are currently exists, like option trading, you wanna ban those too?

Lastly, you are also wrong about how the game industry works today. The whale hunters are moving to expensive skins in limited timed pass/event purchases to fomo their whale targets, the lootbox bussiness is shrinking even after the kompu gacha ban in Japan. People can sue and get (maybe not full) their money back, a couple case in Japan, EU, US and even Canada already.(most recent notable is the Epic lootbox/vbuck settlement case.)

The AAAs there are more games that recently come out without "any" mtx except digital deluxe and pre-order bonus, and they make banks compare to those in the F2P space. Which universe you lived in that all games become F2P and you are forced to play those and have to become addict to them? Check both out:

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/BestOf2022

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/BestOf2023

Notice any difference? There are less F2P titles in top platinum 1st~12th in 2023 than 2022, where is your version of F2P doomsday coming from?

And I hope your ban-this ban-that universe is so perfect that no one can scam, everyone is nice law abiding saints that work for free and help everyone in need. No no need to learn financial literacy and responsible spending behavior and you just need to hook this thing up before you sleep and your life will be perfect.

Come on, I am still waiting for your study that shows some miracle level of addiction triggering lootbox mechanics.

Who said I want to get child to have gambling addiction?

Do you know not everyone expose to gambling will become addict?

Do you even know how that type of addiction works?

Do you even read and see if I find out early that if my child has that trait we can identify that from these early behaviors? (like blowing all the allowance and can not stop themselves and tries to stole CC/lie etc to just get another box open.)

Are you the type of person thinking not exposing this one thing will prevent you from other types of addiction or exploits?

Compare to hard drug that chemically changes and damage the brain and slower process where brain chemical that works themselves because of the reward stimulation is entirely different for those gambling addict prone is totally different. You are talking about the brain "response" to the stimuli, not the cause and how they form that feedback loops.

Not everyone is going to become gambling addict by opening a few loot box, or buy cosmetics. The fact that I can participate and observe how they work with "not getting what they wanted" if they get a gacha egg at mall or lootbox in a game is very cost efficient tool, Heck, you don't even need actual currency like mall gacha eggs, plenty of mobile game gives you virtual currency to do the virtual gachas or funnel you to do more of those until you are hooked.(see Pokemom Go)

And, I do not mind restriction and even encourage that there should be laws around those chance based things for both adult and minors. Because we do need those to help those that are prone and can become addict to have something that help them identify that and help them toward therapy. Virtual game gacha/lootbox is probably the lowest cost compare to any other real life addiction for detecting those personal traits.

Last and one more time, catch it early while they have full trust in me and work with therapy is going to cost 100x less then wall them up until they are 18 and then send them to the wild on their own. What kind of sick person trying to get their own kid become an addict? Which part of my post says I want to get my kids addict? What study supports your claim that if a child expose to lootbox and then they become untreatable when you identify the trait?

Do you realize that gacha eggs/capsules exists for more than 50 years? How many gacha eggs addicts you see everyday or in the study? Like I saw those when I am so small and my grandma's place still burn wood to heat water and cooking.

Show me any other more cost efficient way to trigger and identify that personality trait compare to a virtual game.

Well, I would never compare even 20 dollar bad purchase decision as to let them commit murder or feed them to wolves. I don't feel like continue discuss with you helps cause you can also see my other responses to why I feel it's a good tool for parents.

If you'd like to think this business model is a scam, then so do many other industries, like government run lottery or casinos, or trading card game, etc. Your logic is like "let's ban all bad things so they don't ever happen." right, good luck with that zero scam ideals, might as well try to build a no lying society?

When alcohol and cigarettes are scientifically proven bad to your health, look what our society decides to do with them?

I do the next best thing I can think of to educate and guide my kids, you do your effort to ban this type of business model, cool? I am not against that really, if you can pull it off.

I'd rather they share with me that experience and guide them compare to let them run into that much later in life while I was not around, make sense? If I can catch my kid that are actually have that addictive trait, I need to find out early and find therapy to help them building that mental wall or setup actual social/economical fence early on.(like register them to the blacklist from casinos etc so they get turned away even if they tried.)

Please don't compare bad spending decision to hard drug that permanently alter your brain chemicals/pathing.

You do realize that there are much worse scams irl for adults than gacha games right?

Unfortunately, human do learn "better" through experience (subject to personal trait that falls under a statistic distribution), and because of that a

• shit I should've saved the money used for 20/40/60 dollar cosmetics/passes/event only unlocks for this new game that I really wanted

is much much better than

• my [insert close relatives] maxed out my card now I am [insert big number] in debt.
• shit I bought a [insert expensive big ticket item] and I can't afford to pay the monthly now, what can I do? (just go check any financial help forum)
• insert that many other scams you can find common popped in forum that cost from hundreds to 100k+( cue people dump their retirement money into crypto )

I could afford to let my kid learn opportunity cost using the mtx, or dollar store toys, actual gacha eggs, etc once I start to let them handle their own allowance. They could also learn a bunch of marketing strategy that applies to them to make them dump allowance when talking with me later requesting to get more money to buy whatever they currently wanted. I'd rather spend that money as learning cost, than whatever forbidden method and then when they started working they dump their entire paycheck on those or even more expensive stuff because the sales convinced that they "can".

So yes, fuck them kids, let them stumble when they are short, let them trip to learn to pay attention on the road, let them whine for a month why they can't get extra to buy skin or whatever latest and greatest trending shit that some of their friends have because their physical or virtual piggy bank is empty. Fuck them with all the tricks at much smaller scale and let them learn from it.

There are much worse real life scam traps than the couple dozen or hundreds dollars worth of mtx (if your kid has that much allowance on their device.)

If he only have 20 a month he would have to come up with strategy to get what he wanted and then if he wants extra he has to work for it.

Your analogy would be like give your kid access to your bank accounts and CC without check. Learning opportunity cost without limited resource is a poor example.

Honestly, I think it's a good tool for parents (that cares) teach good financial habits from early age. It might even teach parents themselves better financial habits cause a lot of our economics are based on impulse buying behavior. (whether the impulse is generated by superficial, seasonal, compare to Jones, sales and promotions, government rebates, etc. )

If we follow the train of thoughts and going backwards, any "feel good" purchases should not exist and it's an abuse to the consumer. ie. why should you buy a game the torture you for hours with difficult bosses, put you through lots of stress, agony, twisted plots that might make you cry or angry and then you get absolutely nothing you can hold on to except for those "experience" itself. Your console breaks, disk scratched, save file lost, etc and everything would be gone except whatever that's left in your memory.

Why do you buy [insert brand name] shirts, tie, shoes, jacket, blah? This literally extends everywhere.

Let those gacha, impossibly time limited events, all be life lessons. You simply can't get everything, your time and resource are limited, it take special kind of people and dedication(both mentally, physically and financially) to get what they can do. You can't be lucky enough to be a billionaire heir or oil princess? well, too bad, learn to accept reality, just like learning not everyone can make the cut to sports pro-league even if they dedicated their life training for it, genetics decides a lot of factors for that, same for e-sports.

If you can't even bother to teach your children those, well, maybe it's also hard to ask you to review your life decisions.

Once my son is old enough to do basic financial decisions with allowance, I will just let him decide if he wants to use that to buy snacks he liked or whatever in-game currency he wanted. Just like we can't all afford a Ferrari or [insert expensive car], we compromise and make decisions to make us survive and then be happy enough to keep going.

Yeah, this sums up really well. BG3 still have many flaws and flow issue but because of the shit other publishers did pushed our "good game" bar so far below it's actually not hard to have a passion project that come out ahead.

I haven't played GoW:R Valhalla yet but that's also something they put together while financially successful without putting a price tag on it. I don't mind if SantaMonica put a price on it and than ask for more money, but their decision to keep GoW series DLC/MTX free just keep me on board for their future launch window sale.(and I am willing to fork out extra for digital deluxe. I might do a pre-order like 1 day before next time to get the pre-order limited stuff, which turns out pretty decent in GoW:R, not necessary, but decent gear. ) I am still upset about Sony's PSN Plus price hike and no save back ups, but I will keep supporting the developers I love.

and then the money goes to China's onlyfan or whatever?

They even bought out Rocket League and delisted it from Steam, even though it was already published and had been on the platform for years.

As a PSN/Steam launch Rocket League player and still playing. The only thing I don't like about this decision is that it's losing the workshop integration since Epic doesn't have their own implementation. Otherwise I don't blame them for doing this and it does not affect any "new" players after the F2P switch. Workshop was eventually rectified with community mod for EGS version but I wish there is workshop maps on consoles as well, some of them are really well made, my son love those a lot.

Note, it does not mean I like or approve how they run Rocket League and recent changes. In fact I decided to stop buying anything on RL with recent removal of player trading until they implement new features or improve RL that's worth my bucks. I've paid enough in RL to let me go another 5_{7 years for my share of server cost. (base on my calculation of hosting a server with similar capacity, my numbers might be off but pretty sure I paid more than enough. average around 70}90 CAD each year since launch. )

I can’t criticize Epic for making their own properties exclusive

If I buy off Skyrim's right and have my own store and did the calculator for risk and return, you'd be dame sure I will delist it and only host on my store so I don't have to pay another store front 30% for the new Alan Wake II engine powered version of Skyrim.

Why buying exclusive deals are everywhere because making profitable games are almost like making correct bet on penny stocks. As a developer I would choose safe income to ensure we can keep going if no one else is willing to offer exclusivity deals. Those deals are really good for indie games especially if they are self-publishing instead of having to split with a stronger backing publisher. This is the part most steam worshiper or people that criticize Epic's moves don't get their head around and then threaten to "boycott" their once "loved" projects or developers, call them greedy, and abandon the fans, or backers. I believe some dev even promise to give out steam/gog keys after the exclusive deal expires but still getting shamed to death by accepting such deal. Developers aren't your personal slaves, they got bills to pay and company to run.

Sorry, I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at with this. Are you saying other storefronts/platforms on PC aren’t free, or that Epic Games Store currently does a better job?

No, sorry for my failed sarcasm, EGS as storefront are probably worse than EA's Origin that was retired or Ubisoft's crazy Uplay. It's impossible with the current market share and dominance from Steam even if Epic actually put serious resource into making EGS better, and we all know they aren't. Because any right minded person would put more resource on product that make them money, for Epic it's Fortnite, for Valve it's Steam and not [Insert project name] 3. Just like Gabe have his plenty of pet projects, Tim also have his own pet store front and law suits. Rich people do what rich people do.

And, I want to point out, Tencent the venture capital/investment arm and Tencent the publisher is very different entity. Like yeah they have the CCP tie and stuff but the people that runs the venture capital is just similar to any other venture capital, they want their investment make them profit. Compare to say, EA/Activision buying your studio, I've heard better things from industry friends. Oh, and they would try to avoid publish that Tencent owns their shares etc to avoid this kinda of finger pointing from internet folks. Even the Tencent venture capital people knows this and suggest keeping acquisition/investment under wrap. Epic is public company so they have to disclose. Wouldn't it make sense? If you are a venture capital project manager would you:

1. pick and invest company that have good potential and planning to carry out their project and product then make big bucks in return and racking in your bonus. Less effort more result?
2. invest and dip your fingers into everything you can using your board voting power thus make future investment collaboration more difficult. And then getting fired because the company complaint in postmortem?

EA/Activision did their thing because they were in the game of owing your IP and then cut you off from your creation. They have long history of doing that and then fuck up the sequels/prequels/reboots, they don't care since they got what they wanted. EA was doing much better now from what I can hear.

My points and arguments are solely on don't view Epic as a malicious actor and focus on what changes it can bring to the digital game selling store front. Way too many people just "fuck Epic" and does not see the full picture and place their loyalty with a platform, just like fans of console wars. For example, during the past sale, I bought Witchfire on EGS, bought Cyberpunk on GOG even though I don't have good experience with Galaxy, almost bought the new Jedi on EA Play but decided against it because Disney doesn't need more of my money and I should not give in to my StarWars fan itch and buy a so-so product from the reviews I read. I made my purchase decision solely on one simple rule, how can I give the developer more revenue cut from the purchase I made.

There is actually a case going on regarding the platform pricing parity.

http://blog.wolfire.com/2021/05/Regarding-the-Valve-class-action

And there are other articles that checks for if you can sell at lower price(without temp sales) on EGS, only 5 out of 41 did so. I take it with some handful of salt cause ars didn't actually list out the games and who is the publisher behind those 5. That's why I post the first link from a developer's stand point. We will only know details once the case developed more.

Regarding reviews, it's like manage or moderate a forum, but it has huge impact if your changes aren't communicated, I just list this one but if you are more interested you can dig up older/newer changes. Simply put, if it wasn't through backlash and developers pulling teeth to push some odd changes like this back to a more neutral place. (ie. Early Access Reviews, Product received for free, product refunded tags are all much later than this article.) Steam's reviews would be something like youtube shorts that I simply skip. Is it better in the end? I don't know, cause you can still influence how popular a review is by the upvote/found useful from marketing campaign. Extra costs from developer to marketing(and still subject them to exploits), harder to navigate for consumer(like Amazon reviews), it's really messy and not really consumer/producer friendly.

I put my points in simply because there is a overwhelming "worshiping" of Valve/Steam that make the 30% cut seems justifiable, and distribution for digital good seriously can't be more expensive than physicals right? you can go check how much average Amazon charges seller even given it's dominant position as digital market place. Or simply put it this way, youtube/netflix/social bandwidth consumption is bigger than game distributions for average user. It might be a case for triple-As that come at _{45G per game but vast majority of games are about 1}2 hours worth of streaming(<20GB), I'd like Valve simply provide a usage based charge like cloud providers and developers can pick and choose what features they wanted to pay accordingly. 30% cut is not normal just as lootbox is not normal, they did it simply because they can. (as in traditional brick-and-mortar shop like BestBuy charging extras for cables etc, even with Amazon as competitor.)

Sorry if I miss some parts to provide follow ups, simply too tired to focus on stuff. Mark my words, once Gabe passed gamers are gonna have the reckoning coming for them. All my purchases are based on how much money the developers can get at the end. I buy games on store/launcher even if I don't like them, but if more bucks goes to developer, that's where I choose to buy. That's the important part, we buy stuff to support the developer we like/love, not to support the "platform" selling them.

Valve's steam provides values to consumer but aren't entirely "consumer friendly". Some of their "give ins" are entirely because of competition.

Examples:

• self refund and refund window, directly copy EA's origin.
• allow big publisher to negotiate store cut, direct response to Epic's store cut.
• linux push is entirely for steam's own survival, not a pro-consumer move.
• their policy changes on steam reviews over the years.
• the Steam UI revamp multiple times and makes discovery pretty messy when they tried to gamify the discovery process. All for easier marketing campaign pushes. (I found it pretty annoying, but I also don't like the Netflix style on EGS or other store front.)
• Valve's market place and their key/lootbox and cross game drops are among the pioneers just shy of the scummy gacha from the mobile space.
• Valve's policy dictates that you can not sell at lower price on different store front. Ie. a game dev selling on EGS can take off 18% and get the same amount of revenue from the store front, but they can't price lower because of Valve's policy. That's not consumer friendly.

The fact that Valve can just charge 30% even if a developer didn't use "any" steam feature is simply because they can. And we are all eating the cost cause developers have to factor that in as well.

care to layout how he buy his way into his own monopoly?

• buy exclusives or studio? most big publishers do that.
• give free games out? It's consumer friendly.
• drive Valve or other store front out of business? lol
• make EGS/EOS so good and free that no one wants to publish on Steam? lol, any advance in that 2 department Steam as platform will respond way before they take foot hold. (EOS voice chat back end does work nicer compare to steam's one if the game build for it. BUT, many gamers just use discord instead.)

anything I missed?

Epic's capital is tiny compare to other big publishers.(MS, Sony, Tencent)

good luck with that angle, practically "all" creative industry software have a free learning or community edition until you cross certain threshold and they are also all very dominant software, not because there are no competition, but more like existing market share friction. Like asking Maya artist to transition to Blender.

There are also plenty of game engine out there that are free or cheaper, UE4 or UE5 aren't exactly click 2 buttons and you have a game. (in fact, people spend decent amount of time to trim features/plugins they don't use/need from the source to cut build time and memory cost for the shipping build.

I think the discovery aspec would come from these:

• links from your frequently visited sites, community
• recommendations when you ask in more niche group, the frequent there usually can point you to a better youtuber/reviewer.
• or some lazy effort when you just go to the default and search with keywords(while in a container tab) and navigate through the useless stuff.

I complaint because now my youtube feed are filled with other pseudo-science and auto-generated stuff, youtube's algorithm have failed me basically. Half are from my subs and another half are from people or program that are trying to exploit you with those "try this to improve ....." shit and just paste some sounding scientist names.

the day this combo no longer works is the day I don't visit youtube. Honestly if there are some alternative front end/extension that's better please let me know. I visit youtube for times like game award announcement(so trailers and official release), search for review benchmark while I want to buy PC stuff, and the rest mostly just game educational stuff from Digital Foundry and channel like PBS Space Time. I am doing the upkeeping(so tagging channel as not interested or straight blocking them), but recent generated clips are flooding Youtube like crazy. I want to have a page/frontend that only my subscribed channels and whitelist keywords to show up.

I agree, it would eventually have it's own ecosystem around that water usage if "fresh" water or not really drinking water related use is required. At this point I think it's just cost related, cheaper just to dump into ocean.

someone from a totally different thread mentioned that the water can't stay in the system because of whatever mineral stuff from the cooling pipe/anti-algae/anti-corrosive has to leave the system after certain cycles. So unless you have a treatment plant down stream it's not exactly "drinkable" freshwater. (and I doubt water regulation would allow that to happen.)

The consume here means that water is not usable for other application. How? I don't know, maybe it can be used for power wash?

10 non-skippable ads before you play? and stop in middle of boss fight to sell you continues?