This is a far better standard than pay2win models that require payement to level up or skip time consuming actions.
People who pay look cool, but people who can't afford still get to win using their skills.
There's actually the toxic culture revolving around cosmetic upgrades in games, where using the default skins is considered a sign of poverty, and leads to discrimination among groups of young people. Fortnite is one of the games where this issue is more prominent.
A lot of that is driven by "default" culture. They joke about it between themselves and use the terms to call each other names jokingly, who knows what they're calling others online.
As a and parent in my 30s I despise Fornite as a game and the culture it's creating with young children and the money it has them spending on a cosmetic candy cane or whatever it is this week.
But I totally recall that my parents in theirs 30's were desperate that I requested to wear mostly "surfers's brand clothing" which was the big hype when I was a teenager.
Peer pressure is a thing, videogame is one way to express it, but I don't think it's the root cause.
At least with clothing, you're getting clothing out if it (though frankly I prefer the system of my high school which was to have a uniform; evens the playing field, particularly for me as a working class child at a grammar school in an upper class area).
My issue with Fornite is the speed and cost with which they produce this stuff. I see my nephews spending 10s of £s at a time every week or so.
I'm not sure how I'll deal with the peer pressure issue, my child is too young right now, but Fornite has a strong affinity to children, I'd argue it's mostly played by children and the culture is a real issue which they're doing nothing to resolve that I can see.
Being the only brownish person in a very white middle and upper class grammar school in a very white part of England at the time _was_ something to be picked out on.
Electronic communications & transactions enable theses mechanics to happen faster & without schedule constraints if left unchecked. Same as for bullying by the way.
As far as social interaction goes we live in uncharted territory. Does it necessarily mean that it's bad? On the other side of the spectrum this enable YouthForClimate, BLM, and things yet to come...
It's really hard to analyze thing as they happen, this is not new either ;)
PS: Also not spoiling you kid seems like a good old advice still standing!
So, I can only assume this culture arises in specific games, not out of cosmetic microtransactions in general.
Which is not to say I think cosmetic microtransactions are a good thing. Just that they're not by necessity as bad as some in this thread are making them out to be.
They're so into the YouTube culture they recently requested (and received) RGB keyboards and accessories to adorn their desks even though they're gaming on consoles.
From reading the comments, it seems like Fortnite players make fun of each other for not having skins, thus people are pressured into buying them. I am guessing that because the game has so much downtime, there really isn't anything else to do.
Whether free2play is more or less discriminating than DRM AAA titles with price starting at 12x the price of an optional pass is a whole other real question.
Regulation of virtual goods economics market will be an important debate. But most people don't even know about these huge markets, let alone politicians.
One key point is that current copyright laws are totally inadequate to latest technologies. Company can build empire based on copyrighted material in a heartbeat while decades are needed before anything enter to the public domain. So much energy is wasted fighting legal roadblock instead of innovating on previous concepts...
At least with pay-to-win you know that it's a sham and that it's only the amount of money that you spend which influences how good you are at the game (more or less).
With cosmetics and appearances it's much more stealthy since you're still a good player if you win, but there is peer pressure to pay for a skin so you can keep up with the latest fashions. You could easily spend more and more money this way before realising what a sham it is, and all you'd have to show for it is maybe a full digital wardrobe of stuff you never wear. (With no way to sell that to recoup even some of the costs).
Thats not quite true w.r.t. loot boxes. Several EU and Asian countries have already classified them as gambling and regulated them as such. I believe EA's Fifa soccer was pulled from several countries because of this.
Stephenson's notion that in a future with ubiquitous VR there would be well-paid artists who crafted detailed, posh avatars for the well-off might just come true. I always thought it pretty far-fetched: sure, people are vain but they wouldn't be that vain. It appears I couldn't have been more wrong...
ß: We already have the mafia issuing extortion bonds. (ref: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-09/there-...)
Does it hurt the people who waste huge amount of money, who further develop bad economic habits and potentially harm their loved ones (their parents or god forbid their kids)? No.
Does it hurt regular consumers that want to buy the item they want instead of gambling for it? No.
Does it hurt a large abstract entity that doesn't get to maximize their profits? I guess it would! (Epic has grown from a few hundred million company in the early 2010s to an almost 20 billion company in mid 2020, literally all of it based on Fortnite which only brings money through these microtransactions)
So you're arguing for a business model that is not beneficial to any consumer, that decreases net happiness, all in the name of "freedom".
There are a million other things we don't allow because if we let people take personal responsibility for them they consistently fuck up. It's the exact same situation with a lot of softer drugs.
Not to mention that they break immersion in the game too, Call of Duty Modern Warfare started off last year as a slick game with mostly realistic skins and characters, now it's full of pink anime guns, colourful tracksuits and even a Hyena...
Was kind of a meta-game, but yes definitively paved the way for virtual goods stock market. Some social science researcher should totally investigate that (if not already done).
Example of an exchange: https://backpack.tf/
Edit: Lot apparently they also suffer from economic crash sometimes like with bitcoin https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-07-26-team-fortress-...
I mean, not quite a social scientist, but they hired varoufakis at the time to study the economics of the loot boxes among other things. Here are some of the articles about it from his website.
I've been working to articulate why I think this has actually made Steam's the worst, and possibly the most nefarious.
Up front disclosure: I directly blame the Steam Marketplace for putting my account at high risk of hostile takeover (to the point I've seen evidence of a botnet cracking my password in unbelievable time), for what I believe to be the dumbest reason imaginable. (A TF2 hat I use if I play TF2 that was a pre-order exclusive of an unrelated game.)
The Marketplace seems to only push whales towards further over-spending with dreams of exotic arbitrage of their randomly gambled loot box items.
The Marketplace allows Valve to directly double (and triple and more) dip on the costs of items through Marketplace fees. Whether a whale decides to drop everything on loot box rolls or trawling the Marketplace for "deals" or any sort of would be arbitrage in between (including account hijacking, trade phishing, etc), Valve still gets their cut.
(If there's a specific over indulgence to point to, other than Steam sales in general, as to why Valve is so fat and sated and not hungry enough to develop more games for themselves, I'd argue that Marketplace fees seems an obvious one.)
Even beyond the impacts on whale and thief psychology, you yourself demonstrate why the Marketplace is more nefarious than most of the rest of loot box schemes: the option to sell what you don't want and to buy exactly what you want makes the whole thing seem friendlier. Under the hood the dynamics are the exact same: random lotteries/slot machines create artificial scarcity of digital goods and an illusion of value. In turn the Marketplace, despite and because of most aspirations for arbitrage, serves only prop up and exacerbate that artificial scarcity. Even worse, that Market puts a real money price tag on items. Sure, most of those items are truly micro-transactions at pennies apiece, but there's just enough rare items (because of course there is) that the worm gets into your head that maybe if you gamble on that $1 loot box you'll get a $30 item you could sell to pay for half your next game.
One final reason I think to mention about how nefarious Steam's Marketplace is for gaming: by having the loot box slot machines placed so near to the cashier Marketplace, Valve absolutely is playing the most dangerous game of just about anyone in threatening a Pinball Prohibition-style gambling law crackdown on videogames.
At first you could just buy item sets, which I didn't bother with, but you could also buy tickets to pro games, which I enjoyed and sometimes you'd get a bonus item. Also, the sets were made by third parties, and they'd get a cut of the sales. Also, all the gear could be sold on the Steam Market (generally for pennies though..).
Eventually this morphed into you could only 'gamble' for the sets by buying loot boxes which was a big step down, but there was still the option to buy from someone on the Steam Marketplace - so at least that was an option.
Overall, I found Valve's lootbox implementation the best as you could sell and buy on the Marketplace, but I preferred the original way where I could just buy a character set that I wanted.