Beemo Dinosaurierfuß

I get it.

I sometimes put AAA games on my wishlist anyway.
Not to buy them on release but to get alerted when they go on discount at some point down the line, which is generally how I use my wishlist mostly.

I have some unreleased indie games on there as well, but those I might just buy full price anyway whenever I feel like it or have a little extra free time to play a bit more at a time.

You comment and comment and explain and explain shit that everyone already knows.

It is like you just recently learned what marketing is and now you feel like you know some big secret.

Just to make it short.
Every product in the world is marketed in a way to motivate consumers to buy.
That is not inherently immoral.

You said every successful game monetizes by maximizing addiction and frustration.

I have proven you wrong by naming games that just DO NOT MAXIMIZE FRUSTRATION.

Yeah off course even those games dangle stuff in front of you that you are supposed to buy.
That’s the whole business model of f2p games.

But there are different ways to get to the players money.

There are those that indeed trigger responses to frustration.
This is absolutely prevalent in mobile games or even those million deckbuilder games.

But there just are also games that use other ways to make players buy mtx.
Again, you can play PoE, LoL, CS and many other games for literal thousands of hours without ever getting coaxed into frustrating barriers like a Diablo Immortals would do to players.

You said there aren’t. So you were wrong.

So have fun running around with a goalpost in your hand, I am done.

right?

No, still wrong.

Obviously it is something that is not given to you for free.
It is a product and the developers/publishers are doing business after all.

And yes Sherlock, it is qol functionality that people playing the endgame might want and that is not included in the free version of the game.
But every functionality that any player ever needs is available for far less than what any other AAA title costs up front.

PoE is mainly financed by purely cosmetic supporter packs and whales.
Is that much more ethical than what you described? Maybe not.

But it sure as hell is not banking on frustrating the average user and thus a completely different form of monetization than the one that you just doubled down on insisting is the only one there is.
So again as I said, you are just plain wrong.

Oh and in CS I don’t think you can buy any functionality at all.
Only cosmetics, that don’t do anything for you in the game.

Any successful example is optimized for addiction and frustration.

That is just plain wrong.
Addiction I guess but frustration definitely not necessarily.
There are countless examples of highly successful games that do not monetize like that.

You can happily play PoE for thousands of hours without paying a penny; if you want to get into trading drop like 20 bucks for some stash tabs and you are ready to go again for absolutely any content the game has to offer.

CS or LoL also work just fine for f2p players.

And I say that as a player that fucking hates the new generation of soulless live service games.