warm

I’ll just say it because you want me to.

You are very confused. My point is very simple and understandable, yet you will purposefully misinterpret everything I say, just to fit your agenda for the sake of argument.

I already said, if you want to buy skins, go for it. It’s your money. You dont need to get so defensive over that. It’s okay.

Because you are so hellbent on going in circles as an argument strategy, I wont discuss further. Good luck out there.

I’m sorry you feel that way.

This might have been a bad time for you to ask, because I just finished Outer Wilds.

It’s bland. That’s my opinion. If you don’t think so that’s fine, but that is literally what an opinion is. The style is very similar to their old Frostbite games. You can see the EA Star Wars Battlefront in it.

The drones just being physics based isnt all that impressive that it makes the game for me, it’s not exactly revolutionary, similar things have existed before anyway. The gameplay is like you see in a lot of other games, that’s why I think it’s bland. It’s your run-of-the-mill 3rd person shooter, with some basic extraction shooter elements added.

If you enjoy it, fantastic go have fun, doesn’t mean I have to like it and you don’t have to defend the game or your position at all.

As much as people want to think otherwise, you are right, the rise is mainly because of the Steam Deck.

SteamOS releasing for desktops could be huge for Linux gaming, having a company like Valve behind a distro for gamers will help massively to tip the scales. I hope they go through with it.

No, not at all. Extraction shooters require you to take in gear, which you can lose. Find loot or better gear and extract with it. If you die during the mission you lose pretty much everything, high stakes are required. DRG has no stakes, you just go and complete a mission for some progression.

That is unironically the main reason why it’s third person.

I said the situation is crazy, not a specific person. I dont blame any individual, the strategies used over the years by these companies to sell skins and make consumers complacent are all very manipulative and effective. The people designing the systems and the ones doing the marketing have done a very, very good job.

You seem stuck on artists all being freelance, getting paid on some sort of commission. They are almost always salaried employees like anyone else at the development company.

Weird analogy, paying for a game, something usually worked on for years, is a lot different than paying for a cosmetic change to something. It’s like going to the movies and paying the price of the ticket again to sit in a green chair instead of a red one and being told that’s completely normal and something you should do.

I agree, if skins were sold for $0.50, $1.00, max $5, then I would have less issue with them. I’d still have issue with the predatory practices used to sell them though. Some people are more susceptible to this than others, so I would rather it didnt exist at all.

You buy a game once, have all the content and are not pressured again to spend anything, that’s the ideal scenario, why would I compromise on that?

Games should be a sustainable art form, not gross corporate projects to extract as much money as possible from consumers.

No need to start throwing insults. It takes away from your argument. If you want to pay for cosmetics, sure go for it, but that’s how we got in this mess.

Artists get paid either way, they are not paid on commission of skin sales. Any extra profit goes to the executives anyway, not to the artists. So that entire point is null.

Games existed before with no paid cosmetics, they would exist again without them. This used to be the free-to-play model, but now they realise they can charge you for the game and then again and again for skins. These types of games are designed to extract as much money from you as possible, that’s their entire purpose. They are not giving you extra skins to be nice and then paying the artists more from it. A skin is made one time and sold a potentially infinite amount of times for ridiculous prices.

As I said:

It’s so ingrained it’s actually crazy.

Why would you ever want to advocate for a worse experience? It blows my mind, but that’s the situation we got ourselves into.

The core gameplay loop hasn’t changed between any of the “beta” tests and release.

It’s so ingrained it’s actually crazy. All cosmetics should be free.

I tried it. It’s pretty bland, I already said that. You are allowed to enjoy it, that was just my opinion. No need to get defensive.

(They forgot we used to change what our character looks like for free)

One look at the menus says otherwise, but I’d rather not continue the conversation anyway.

Exactly! A good example of consumer complacency!

Skins and such that cost as much as the game itself. The industry has gone crazy and consumers keep sucking it up.

Out of what? Like 5 extraction shooters? I don’t get the popularity, it’s pretty damn bland and shoves MTX in your face like crazy, but I have been pretty out of touch with the mainstream market for a while now.

I’d rather Blam! be doing both.

CSGO was peak, before they added agent skins. Then competitive integrity was thrown out the window. CS2 actually downgraded a lot of the game, I’m still not sure it functions fully now.

They butchered community servers and don’t seem interested in supporting that scene the same as in the past. So there’s no “fun” until they give it to us. The game is just for siphoning money, more than it has been in the past. The entire industry is like that and new consumers are accustomed to it, so it’s never going to change and it’s probably why Valve jumped on CS again.

I think it’ll settle after a while, covert items will come back down in price. Really good change from Valve. Though removing MTX entirely would be preferable.

They dont want people buying the old games, even their 15 year old ones are still full price on purpose. They want you in the latest game each year, exposed to all the predatory extra-transactions, then they want you to do that again the next year and the next and the next… the games are not priced like that because they “forgot”, it’s a business strategy.