Drug dealers exceedingly commonly give out free samples of drugs, usually as sharing in a public space/party. They’re just very careful to do it with people who are first time users. Lowers barrier to entry in an attempt to create a lifelong customer. This is even echoed in pop culture references to drug dealers in…

So your goal was to further demonstrate that you fundamentally misunderstand addiction? Knowing what you’re doing is harmful does not mean you’re not addicted. Do you think heroin isn’t addictive because the first time you did it, you knew that you shouldn’t? This is worse because the initial act is not fundamentally…

The problem is that most of those games wouldn’t exist at all in their current state if they had to only be marketed at adults. Most of them have those mechanics shoehorned in though so if only they had less unscrupulous publishers, they wouldn’t have had that predatory BS in the first place.

Bad choice? Buying and supporting games with exploitative practices. Your defense of this crap is a bad choice.

I knew there were going to be a lot of morons saying this, but holy crap are you tone deaf. After weeks of backlash over these things and you’re STILL this ignorant?

Said by someone who CLEARLY does not understand addiction. People aren’t addicts the first time they’re exposed to something. They BECAME addicts because of that first exposure. It rewires your brain. It makes you justify why what you’re doing isn’t addiction or harmful... until it’s too late usually. You can’t AVOID…

Find another way. Worked for years, will continue to work for many more years. If predatory bullshit is the only way you can think of to make your game work, you shouldn’t be making that game or any other games.

Agreed. A pay wall to get this thing you want is much better than a pay wall to MAYBE get this thing you want. The industry moved to this in the hopes of conning you out of MORE than the $5 pay wall that would have been there back in the day. The free boxes for leveling up or whatever are the same as the free Ecstasy…

Those titles, likely due to being on the Xbox One and critically underwhelming and/or MTX being tied to modes no one cared about, didn’t make enough of a splash for anyone to care about the MTX one way or the other. I own Riss of the Tomb Raider and I didn’t even know it had MTX at all. It’s very likely that they…

Cool, then take away the purchasable loot boxes then. Or is there some catch to buying the skins outright that makes the loot boxes inherently more valuable even though you could just buy the skins? Loot boxes, like I said, are inherently predatory if they can be purchased at all. The ONLY loot boxes that should be…

This is happening because capitalism. Plain and simple. Because Wall Street demands GROWTH every year, not just disgusting profit, and the only way to get growth is to milk more money from an existing audience or bring in new audiences. And since Nintendo is the only one who has any desire to broaden gaming at all and…

This. I’m so tired of gamers making excuses for these things because “it’s JUST COSMETIC!!” Loot boxes are a way to put more bullshit between you and the thing you want. When it’s cosmetic it’s just easier to trick you into doing it in the first place and even less work on their part because they just had to make a…

This. “Blizzard did it” is not a statement that automatically makes something ok. Gaming as a whole would do well to learn this lesson already. Hell, I’d bet that Blizzard would’ve gotten away with Battlefront 2's system if they did it first and we still would’ve called EA out.

If you disagree with loot boxes and still but the game, whether you buy the boxes or not, you’re sending the message that you are ok with exploitative practices in your full priced games. If this were a free to play game, not buying boxes would be a powerful message, but in a full priced game you’re just telling EA…

Agreed entirely, although I’d definitely say EA is a worse offender there with the Star Wars brand, haha.

And that’s alright! They’re just equally bad is a perfectly reasonable way to see it. They’re certainly no better though since, you know, they use all the same tricks as a casino uses to trick people susceptible to addiction into using their life savings on stupid costumes for a repetitive multiplayer shooter.

Agreed. In fact, in Overwatch, vanity IS the only semblance of progression. Loot boxes are your reward for leveling up so either the cosmetic items are heading and we shouldn’t care about them, giving Overwatch the worst reward structure ever, or they’re incredibly motivating and just as bad as these. May not be pay…

Built in the same predatory way. In fact, you could actually find Blizzard’s to be more egregious depending on your point of view as the limited time nature of Overwatch’s costumes COMPELS you to spend if you want those costumes when, in Battlefront, you could just grind forever and get it. Overwatch needs to stop…

But the AMA is just more marketing BS. This progression system can’t be “fixed,” only gutted and replaced entirely. Want this upgrade? Need more credits. That number of credits will ALWAYS be JUST enough more than reasonable to obtain without paying money, even if they reduce it. Want to level up your cards? Need…

It’s interesting that you use the word dense to describe Sony fans when, after 4 different messages, you still haven’t actually made a coherent statement in favor of the Xbox One X. There is currently no console this gen that is more over hyped than the Xbox One X because the other consoles are hyping games instead of…