curious about their opinions on games like apex legends that is absolutely a free to play game, but has a way to pay for characters instead of using the in game method.

Woe betide the poor bikini artist! Nevermind their efforts were directed that way so the publisher could rake in hundreds of dollars, per year, for what's obviously the least impactful element of the game. Costumes would normally be an unremarkable detail - some callbacks, some easter eggs, whatever - but now they cost more than the rest of the fucking game. Do you imagine they took more effort than the rest of the fucking game? Like the horny bonus costumes are worth more than all the effort spent on balance, and netcode, and designing the actual characters. I'll assume not, and underline: that's the total disconnect between price and value. That's the predatory exploitation, laid bare. Those skins are the entire reason the game exists. *That's what makes all the money.* Street Fighter has been reduced to bait on that hook. And it still costs forty fucking dollars. > Also, you do know pro football players get bonuses per goal, right? This subject has the most aggressively off-topic replies. 'There's different forms of value. Some are artificial. You can't just buy more soccer goals.' 'Uh--! But--!' *No.*

"We" includes the guy saying "skins are fine," in reply to the same comment. Quick search, and... yeah FighterZ specifically still has a $60 base price, a $95 version with some annual pass, and a $110 version with additional content not covered by the pass... and several eyebrow-raising "stamps." There's three hundred of those. They seem to be static character images? They cost several dollars each. So do the voice packs. Music's $15 per pack. Assuming - *assuming* - the character bundles are cheaper, and include everybody, there's also $80 of them. So you can definitely spend at least $200 and still be tickled for a deluge of whateverthefuck stamps are for. Two of those character unlocks were day-one. Not quite the obvious scam of on-disc DLC, but still pretty fuckin' blatant. 'Hey thanks for buying our game, and extra-buying the exclusive preorder bullshit... saaay, you didn't want the powered-up versions of these popular characters, did you? Well don't be a freeloader, pay up.' If I buy the game, right now, all of those characters are in the game... but I don't get them. I can get my ass kicked by them. But I can't select them. Not until I pony up at least double the price of the actual game. And then apparently I'll be subject to the same predatory bullshit for some JPEGs in chat. (If all characters are unlockable through gameplay, but you can 'pay to skip the grind,' that *is* predatory bullshit.) This game is one of the less skeezy examples, and they still manage to turn an unremarkable amount of content into an obscene total price. It's on sale on Steam, and it still costs $130. 'But you can pay less up-front!' is the problem.

I'm not participating in your all-or-nothing hypothetical. We just discussed how this exact game could have emerged without this exact business model. And the version of the game with all the damn characters is the version where you had to keep paying to get all the damn characters. If you mean, from today onward, should the game be priced piecemeal on Steam, then no. But it doesn't magically revert to its launch state. I want them to sell the whole game... like regular. This is not a sprawling MMO. There's not terabytes of content. It's a 1v1 fighter with like thirty characters. If Arc honestly thinks the damn thing should be $130 when everything's 70% off, let them stick that single price on it, and good fucking luck.

I take issue with how you're still lying about what I said. 'Things being sold' is my entire drive. Did you miss it, in all caps? The problem is this farce of charging real money for permission to use what's already in a game you already paid for. Games were updated before this nonsense was possible. This business model is only like fifteen years old. Unreal Tournament '99 had updates and new content for years, because *people kept buying the game.*

Piracy FTW. Again. ‍️

I'm not missing, I'm saying that your hardline stance against things being sold isn't reasonable.

I don't think you understand how much work it takes to design and balance that many characters in a serious competitive fighting game. Serious question, do you play competitive fighters at all, do you know anything about how they work? In fact, the best way to ensure they're all polished is to start small and expand incrementally over time. This is the right model for a competitive fighter. You're deliberately ignoring the path to get from point A to point B if you think that in your world it would just be the final version right away. I'm saying that in your world, the fighting games I know and love would not be the games that I know and love. Personally, my favorite game of all time is Skullgirls, and they have been very open and transparent about all the expenses involved in developing a much smaller cast. Look up their finances, look up how long it took their small team to get from the eight characters at launch to what they have today. And I'm very happy with every cent I spent on that game, they didn't scam me by offering more of my favorite game. This is a game that has entertained me for a decade. Even if I count all the money I've spent on traveling to tournaments, which is far more than I spent on the game, it's still quite possibly the most efficient form of entertainment I've ever gotten my money's worth from. Can I have the games that I know and love, in the format that allowed them to be the games that I know and love? There is no third option here.

>"We" includes the guy saying "skins are fine," in reply to the same comment. Yes, optional skins are fine. I agree with that statement. >If I buy the game, right now, all of those characters are in the game... but I don't get them. I can get my ass kicked by them. But I can't select them. This is a good thing, because it means that you can still remain compatible with any opponent even if you choose to stay on the base game. The alternative was the old model where you HAD to buy every upgrade from Street Fighter IV to Super Street Fighter IV to Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition to Ultra Street Fighter IV, or else you were left behind and could no longer play with the rest of the playerbase that moved on to the latest edition. Would you rather have that be mandatory? Is that the model you want to go back to?

I fundamentally disagree with your stance that any form of premium content is 'predatory'. You know what you're buying, and no one's putting a gun to your head forcing you to buy it. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's predatory. Predatory is when gambling-based business models obfuscate true costs and result in players literally financially ruining themselves. Predatory is when FOMO strategies are aggressively pushed to pressure consumers into buying things they otherwise wouldn't. Predatory is when subscription services keep players locked into an ecosystem, with the threat that they'll lose everything if they stop paying (and it's still extremely weird to me that you called this better). If you want to go after that kind of stuff, I would be with you. But calling *everything* predatory actually just makes it harder to talk about real problems. You are ruining this word.

Man, you really should play the game if you're trying to be mad about the additional content. It's really good and it's ten bucks on sale right now. Forty to get all the extra content. Well worth it. The stamps are mostly premium edition filler. There are hundreds in the base game and nobody is particularly mad at the three jpegs they try to sell for two bucks as a way to pretend they added two bucks of value to your premium bundle. The music pack is pretty solid, though. Lots of licensed anime music. Can't argue with blasting out Solid State Scouter when playing with Bardock. Just... remember to disable it if you're going to stream the game, you *will* get dinged for copyright infringement on Youtube. You want to get mad about something? How about selling people music as part of a game and then accusing them of infringement for streaming the game they paid for? How silly is *that*?

Skins are predatory bullshit. Skins are surely the majority of this abuse, by revenue. Skins are the easiest way to charge $1000 and still give someone a fraction of the content in one video game. Skins aren't trivial to create... but you sure can crank 'em out. The model I want to go back to is where buying the game means you get the whole god damn game. Letting people *have* content, but not *use* it, is inseparable from anything you'd acknowledge as predatory. We can try to split those hairs, and we would fail. Nothing short of addressing the *business model* will solve those problem. The only reason this bullshit can even sound defensible is that Capcom used to be even worse. Like if they sent a guy to your house to take a hammer to your cartridge, and now you can pay him five bucks at the door. Is that better? Probably. Is it tolerable? *Nope.* Imagine if this applied to literal versions. 1.1 drops, with bug fixes for save corruption and some balance tweaks, and Steam wants another ten bucks for it. Would you respect if someone scoffed, 'do you want them to make you buy the whole game again?' Plainly not. Incremental changes to the game you already bought... should just go in the game you already fucking bought... because you already fucking bought it.

> You’re deliberately ignoring the path to get from point A to point B if you think that in your world it would just be the final version right away. Who are you talking to? We *just discussed* how to incrementally build a game, without this specific business model. I am only against the business model. Do you know how to address that, without slapfighting a strawman? 'Game design is hard' doesn't excuse this creeping systemic abuse. Again: this is the low end, and it still expects $130 for an eight-year-old 1v1 fighter. *70% off.* This business model inflates prices to the absurd extremes, even when it's not an antipattern vortex.

You're repeatedly misrepresenting my stance after several clear and specific corrections.

I'm talking to you. You're living in fantasy land claiming these games could be the exact same thing without the business model that made them possible. They would not. Can I have the games that I know and love, in the format that allowed them to be the games that I know and love? There is no third option here.

You didn't answer the question. It's a good thing that this model allows them a source of revenue to develop more content, while still being able to offer patches for free so that players on the base game still get to enjoy compatibility. That's good. The alternative is we either break compatibility, or the content doesn't get made at all since you don't seem to want anyone to get paid to make it.

You said "Nothing inside a video game should cost real money". Those are your words. If you want to claim that your stance is actually something else, why did you say those words?

'I consider this business model fundamentally intolerable, and its total price divorced from reality.' *'So why aren't you playing it?'* You are not a serious person.

Who said "why aren't you playing it"? I said you *should* play it. Very different things. I know why you're not playing it. It's because you're a sourpuss that doesn't like good games and does like being angry on the Internet. I'm saying you should change that and play good games. Don't even need to spend hundreds on them. Just throw a tenner at them on sale, give them a look, maybe. Also, and I say this with utmost sincerity, I am not a serious person. Wish I was even less serious. I'm a bit too stiff for comfort, really.

Scams work by choice. Putting a gun to someone's head is a mugging. Scams, you walk into freely, and still get robbed. You don't quite get nothing... but for the money, you don't get much. What game could sell for $130, *on sale,* and be taken seriously? That shit only works because breaking it up into little pieces obfuscates the total cost. Same shit as "five easy payments!" in TV infomercials. And $130 is the low, low end. So many of these games, especially the ones that slog on for years, have *thousands of dollars* in stupid shit you can blow your money on. Gambling makes it worse - but worse isn't necessary, for it to be bad. > calling everything predatory Can we please go one interaction without you lying to me about my own opinions? I called skins predatory. Because Jesus Christ, have you seen Fortnite? They could ditch whatever mechanisms you consider beyond-the-pale, and the whole game would still exist as a funnel to exchange your whole wallet in exchange for playable references. I will again grant that this is the gentle end of the spectrum. But it's all the same spectrum. There's no hard cutoffs between thirty-seven characters at five bucks apiece, and pay-to-win weapon unlocks. Grinding instead would be worse. It's even less like an actual product. All incentives point straight toward maximum revenue through engineered frustration.