This is a far better standard than pay2win models that require payement to level up or skip time consuming actions.
People who pay look cool, but people who can't afford still get to win using their skills.
There's actually the toxic culture revolving around cosmetic upgrades in games, where using the default skins is considered a sign of poverty, and leads to discrimination among groups of young people. Fortnite is one of the games where this issue is more prominent.
A lot of that is driven by "default" culture. They joke about it between themselves and use the terms to call each other names jokingly, who knows what they're calling others online.
As a and parent in my 30s I despise Fornite as a game and the culture it's creating with young children and the money it has them spending on a cosmetic candy cane or whatever it is this week.
But I totally recall that my parents in theirs 30's were desperate that I requested to wear mostly "surfers's brand clothing" which was the big hype when I was a teenager.
Peer pressure is a thing, videogame is one way to express it, but I don't think it's the root cause.
So, I can only assume this culture arises in specific games, not out of cosmetic microtransactions in general.
Which is not to say I think cosmetic microtransactions are a good thing. Just that they're not by necessity as bad as some in this thread are making them out to be.
Whether free2play is more or less discriminating than DRM AAA titles with price starting at 12x the price of an optional pass is a whole other real question.
Regulation of virtual goods economics market will be an important debate. But most people don't even know about these huge markets, let alone politicians.
One key point is that current copyright laws are totally inadequate to latest technologies. Company can build empire based on copyrighted material in a heartbeat while decades are needed before anything enter to the public domain. So much energy is wasted fighting legal roadblock instead of innovating on previous concepts...
At least with pay-to-win you know that it's a sham and that it's only the amount of money that you spend which influences how good you are at the game (more or less).
With cosmetics and appearances it's much more stealthy since you're still a good player if you win, but there is peer pressure to pay for a skin so you can keep up with the latest fashions. You could easily spend more and more money this way before realising what a sham it is, and all you'd have to show for it is maybe a full digital wardrobe of stuff you never wear. (With no way to sell that to recoup even some of the costs).
Thats not quite true w.r.t. loot boxes. Several EU and Asian countries have already classified them as gambling and regulated them as such. I believe EA's Fifa soccer was pulled from several countries because of this.
Stephenson's notion that in a future with ubiquitous VR there would be well-paid artists who crafted detailed, posh avatars for the well-off might just come true. I always thought it pretty far-fetched: sure, people are vain but they wouldn't be that vain. It appears I couldn't have been more wrong...
ß: We already have the mafia issuing extortion bonds. (ref: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-09/there-...)
Does it hurt the people who waste huge amount of money, who further develop bad economic habits and potentially harm their loved ones (their parents or god forbid their kids)? No.
Does it hurt regular consumers that want to buy the item they want instead of gambling for it? No.
Does it hurt a large abstract entity that doesn't get to maximize their profits? I guess it would! (Epic has grown from a few hundred million company in the early 2010s to an almost 20 billion company in mid 2020, literally all of it based on Fortnite which only brings money through these microtransactions)
So you're arguing for a business model that is not beneficial to any consumer, that decreases net happiness, all in the name of "freedom".
There are a million other things we don't allow because if we let people take personal responsibility for them they consistently fuck up. It's the exact same situation with a lot of softer drugs.
Not to mention that they break immersion in the game too, Call of Duty Modern Warfare started off last year as a slick game with mostly realistic skins and characters, now it's full of pink anime guns, colourful tracksuits and even a Hyena...
Was kind of a meta-game, but yes definitively paved the way for virtual goods stock market. Some social science researcher should totally investigate that (if not already done).
Example of an exchange: https://backpack.tf/
Edit: Lot apparently they also suffer from economic crash sometimes like with bitcoin https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-07-26-team-fortress-...
I mean, not quite a social scientist, but they hired varoufakis at the time to study the economics of the loot boxes among other things. Here are some of the articles about it from his website.
