• ampersandrew@kbin.social
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    10 months ago

    What I suggested is not ignoring the problem. Ignoring bad products makes bad products less financially viable. Buying good products instead creates more supply of good products, because producers want the money coming from consumers who only buy good products. This is not a binary boycott vs. no boycott. There is every minute step along the way. Half the industry by revenue is not coming from half the customers.

    Sega’s $70M whoopsie-daisy evidently hasn’t ruined the company.

    Nor does it need to. It just shows that they don’t think the live service business model they made was going to work; so much so that they flushed their most expensive game to date down the toilet.

    Nor has it seemed to stop their plans for Dreamcast-era nostalgia-bait games with the same abusive business model as their hilariously-late-to-the-party battle royale cancellation.

    There is zero information on their nostalgic franchises play regarding business model. Many of which came from a different era of predatory monetization that came to an end without legislation (the arcades).

    There is no sufficient back-pressure against publishers asking, ‘but what if more money?’

    There is when you stop buying their games in the first place.

    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      Half the industry by revenue is not coming from half the customers.

      That’s why it’s spreading. So long as a fraction of people get sucked in - your non-participation does not matter.

      Those victims “voted with their wallets” and their vote counts for ten times more than yours. This is why outright vitriolic boycotts barely made a dent. This is why it can creep into existing games, including ones you already bought. They’ve got your money. They want more.

      This business model amounts to a scam. Games make you value arbitrary nonsense - that is what makes them games. There is no ethical form of attaching a real-world price tag to anything inside that make-believe. Convincing you that you need some random imaginary geegaw is half these people’s job.

      No kidding nobody should throw money at that.

      But I don’t know why anyone defends its continued existence.