Gamers aren't a monolith. I'm not going to blame the people who appreciate gaming as an art form when the problem is the people who will buy the latest Madden and Cod games every year

There's a big flaw in your logic.

The biggest portion of people buying this stuff aren't "gamers" in the way that it's often used around these circles. It's the millions of people who buy coins for their Bejeweled clone of choice and have never owned a console in their life. And there's so many new kids entering gaming all the time who have never known a better world. I remember a Twitch streamer talking about how heartbreaking it was when AC6 came out and gave you the full color wheel plus multiple channels to customize your mech, and their chat was full of kids shocked that you didn't have to buy skins or color packs. That's how it used to be. You'd unlock skins by playing the game, not buying them in the store, but that hasn't been the case in decades now.

And the often touted story of the whale with more money than sense is a myth. Do they exist? Sure. But the vast majority of money coming from mtx from gamers is from people who are psychologically vulnerable to addiction/gambling and people with a poor ability to comprehend finances like kids. These companies have hired psychologists to tell them how to best extract money from your wallet by probing your brain in just the right way. From lootboxes to battle passes and seasonal content to daily quests and washing money through funny money currencies, it's all been designed to prey upon people with addiction issues, ADHD, training young kids into gambling addicts, etc. It's the Lotto tickets and pumping extra oxygen into the air of casinos and making sure there's no natural light in there so you don't realize how long you've been playing slots of the gaming world. Look at WoW, with its daily quests. They train players using Skinner Box techniques to continue logging into the game and paying the monthly subscription long after they've stopped enjoying it because it's become a habit and they are afraid of falling behind.

Voting with your wallet isn't going to fix it. You'll never get your average Facebook mom to care enough not to buy Farmville tokens or whatever, and these companies will never stop abusing psychology on their own. Only industry regulation will stop this.

Vote with your wallet means people with more money get more votes than you do. MTX does not target people at large, they are fishing for the small amount of whales for whom money is no object. It ruins gaming for the rest of us.

There is a reason industries get regulated. Swill milk killed a ton of babies, and sold like hot cakes.

I have to agree. The issue is that people keep buying these dogshit live service games. If people didn't buy them then companies wouldn't make them.

We failed to hold the line at the goddamn horse armor.

I'm sure there are cases where someone is spending money they shouldn't, or they know better, but we have to acknowledge that a lot of tactics used are the same predatory strategies that take advantage of human addiction. I don't think people should gamble, or bet on sports but that shit is everywhere, and it's normalized. It's no wonder why so many people fall into it because they don't think it's dangerous.

We can scream at people and tell them to stop, but that's not a real solution, at least I don't see how that really works. A predatory studio puts out a game that people want to play, then if it fails because people don't buy enough, they just shut everything down and cancel the content, even when people want it. I think there examples of this happening now.

The „gamer“ label has become sort of redundant given the industry is much bigger than movies and music combined now. They‘re just consumers and no matter what silly decisions some of them make, they need protection from certain practices for the good of all of us. Just blaming a small portion of them doesn‘t help us out of any mess.

Yeah I love Gabi but it hurts that she doesn't even seem to question whether or not she should stop buying these games. Like, I get that you love Pokemon but you acknowledge yourself that this shit isn't going to change if people keep buying this shit.

The gamers?! I don't hear anyone saying they want loot boxes. This is 100 percent the devs and the companies that put all the best loot behind the loot boxes. Good games such as FFXIV, does not.

Lol I take it you're a republican?

Let's blame the consumer for buying something they like, and not the system of capitalism for it's inevitable march to enshittification which happens across all industries amirght?