Can you imagine Battle.net beating Steam, then the primary online digital distribution platform ending up being owned by Activision?
I get the icks just thinking about it.
The worst part is it’s not that far fetched, we’re actually pretty lucky that valve isn’t massively predatory and we didn’t end up with bobby kotick instead of gaben
The entire gambling lootboxes were massively popularized by Valve, turning Team Fortress 2 from pay2play to predatory gambling.
TF2 is not and has never been pay for anything except cosmetics.
I come from a time where we all lost our shit over horse armor being sold. Your comment just reminds me they have normalized things. They won.
I’ve never understood what’s so bad about letting people pay for virtual cosmetics. You can still play 100% of the game.
Well… No. Those cosmetics are part of the game. You should be able to unlock them through gameplay.
They are part of the game, but they do not change the play of the game.
I mean you are right to some degree, but considering there’s way worse stuff to get riled up about, I think we mostly have our priorities straight, and I have no issues with that.
And valve tried to push the paid mods shit, too bad people forget too quickly. Not saying valve is straight up bad, but they aren’t your friends either
I guess because I never played TF2 back then my experience of games having predatory gambling mechanics was mobile games with the f2p and low costs pushing towards different ways to monetize. Seemed inevitable once mobile gaming exploded and makes up a larger portion of revenue than PC and console gaming making other companies want to copy it.
The reason Valve is not massively predatory is because they aren’t publicly traded and remain a private company.
We got lucky.
If Blizzard owned something comparable to Steam they could have become too big to be bought by Activision.
Its possible that being the platform meant they wouldn’t have been bought up.
Thank god for that. There might be scummier companies than Blizzard out there, but I wholeheartedly believe the only reason that Blizzard aren’t on the same level of scum as Nestle and BP Oil is because they make games, and there are only limited opportunities to sell human lives to authoritarian regimes when you just make games.
I remember reading a very long (but fascinating) 11 part series of posts a couple of years ago on reddit about scummy stupid Blizzard. Here it is, if anyone still cares.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/riq4fq/games_world_of_warcraft_part_1_beta_and_vanilla/
