Or they could release 3-4 full scale games. A price people are plainly willing to pay, over more than a decade. More games would exist.
They’re only able to drag out this one game by turning it into a factory for manufactured discontent. Their revenue comes from keeping people hooked, and while they are hooked, influencing them to keep forking over more money. People have spent thousands of hours in this game. Can you even quantify how much impact the most subtle and “ethical” mechanics have had on their decisions?
Every game with real-money charges is the same pattern. This business model is built on addiction and frustration. You have to be unhappy enough that some of you will fork over money - ideally for the least content possible - sometimes for the same content over and over. But you have to be hooked or you might not put up with that tickling denial for just one more daily challenge. There have to be people who will blow hundreds or thousands of dollars, or this whole gross mess wouldn’t be so much more profitable than just selling games.
This is half the industry’s revenue, now. It’s in single-player games. The format of this abuse is the same, no matter how openly gross its details are, in any particular game. Insisting otherwise is like saying gambling isn’t gambling if the amounts are smaller. The mechanism is the same, and the mechanism has intense intrinsic problems. It is inseparable from exploitation of humans’ sloppy grasp of value. That’s the only reason it works.
Or they could release 3-4 full scale games. A price people are plainly willing to pay, over more than a decade. More games would exist.
They’re only able to drag out this one game by turning it into a factory for manufactured discontent. Their revenue comes from keeping people hooked, and while they are hooked, influencing them to keep forking over more money. People have spent thousands of hours in this game. Can you even quantify how much impact the most subtle and “ethical” mechanics have had on their decisions?
Every game with real-money charges is the same pattern. This business model is built on addiction and frustration. You have to be unhappy enough that some of you will fork over money - ideally for the least content possible - sometimes for the same content over and over. But you have to be hooked or you might not put up with that tickling denial for just one more daily challenge. There have to be people who will blow hundreds or thousands of dollars, or this whole gross mess wouldn’t be so much more profitable than just selling games.
This is half the industry’s revenue, now. It’s in single-player games. The format of this abuse is the same, no matter how openly gross its details are, in any particular game. Insisting otherwise is like saying gambling isn’t gambling if the amounts are smaller. The mechanism is the same, and the mechanism has intense intrinsic problems. It is inseparable from exploitation of humans’ sloppy grasp of value. That’s the only reason it works.