the ppl (children) are being manipulated by alot of psychological tactics with alot of money/research behind it to get you/them to buy those AAA games. fomo, gambling, all the tricks
I think about this a lot when I’m playing live service games. None of the ones I sink money into are triple A games I think. Even still I can’t say I like how susceptible I am to the fomo of a battle pass or the like.
the money sink is just one part of it. the time sink is way bigger than you think, they use all sort of tactics to keep you coming back with timed resources and drip feeding content, then eventually the sunk cost become too large and you can't quit anymore even if you stopped enjoying the game for a while now.
If you're poor, you can stop being susceptible to fomo tactics on the basis of not having the money to be susceptible to fomo tactics. Read: water found in ocean.
If you're filthy rich, like, you wipe your ass with $100 bills rich, try reducing your debit cards to only one debit card and put all of your money in your other accounts, keeping only a little amount of money in your debit card so that it's an inconvenience to move money from one account to another every time you want to waste money on bullshit. Psychologically, what is happening is you're putting a small mental wall between you and wasting your money on bullshit, by purposefully installing and maintaining an small inconvenience between you and money-wasting. You're banking on being too lazy to hypothetically climb that mental wall, preventing yourself from wasting money on bullshit.
If you lack force of will, there really is only one other way to prevent yourself from doing something by making it hard enough that you're too lazy to do it, and that is by making the consequences of doing it way too real and bad enough that your trauma kicks in every time you have the opportunity to do that thing, so you don't do it out of pure instinct.
I love my gacha games, but I am 100% a strong believer in why the fuck are these not 18+
Them and other live services are specifically designed to psychologically manipulate you...and who has soft squishy impressionable brains and no sense for the real cost of money? Kids.
Unfortunately a lot of the discourse ends up being "gacha bad, game bad, you are bad" so it never really gets anywhere 😩
if you bring these issue up it will legit become victim blaming in a beat. it's futile to try and educate random internet strangers on the danger of these type of games. the best way is to try and educate your own community about it, your close friends, your kids, your neighbors kids, even your grand parents about it, they are 10000 times more likely to listen to you.
This is the most disturbing thing to me. All of us that “know better” will eventually die off and all the young kids that grew up with microtransactions as a normal thing won’t think twice about it. People don’t often question the things that have just always been that way during their lifespan. I’m sure there are things that my millennial generation also don’t take into account in the same way.
Companies are milking it, but the ones paying for it are their parents.
The economy isn’t what it used to be in the US, which has been the top gaming market, and I think the number of parents letting their kids spend $10, $50, $100 a month on games and micro transactions is going to become less and less over the next few years.
Not all AAA games are multiplayer gaas cash grabs. RE Requiem, 007 First Light, FF7 Rebirth, Onimusha, Elden Ring, the Witcher remake, Baldurs Gate 3, soon GTA 6 etc are all amazing AAA games.
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u/Pleasant_Expert7329 15h ago
Honestly I feel like that’s just the gaming industry in a nutshell