Except it’s even worse than that. Because these companies hired psychologists to tell them exactly how to tweak the levers in people’s brains to get them to pay.

So you have the stupid people, but also the people whose brains are naturally wired to be played like a fiddle by these companies, and then on top of that, you have the new generation of gamers who have simply never known a world where you didn’t pay for skins.

But it’s okay, “because it’s just cosmetics.”

Probably exactly where they got the idea from.

That’s the one. He’s got it as a clip on the YouTube channel, and that got served to me by the almighty algorithm.

Except that shit is designed by literal psychologists to prey upon people with poor fiscal responsibility, like people with ADHD, depression, addiction issues, and kids.

It’s like blaming people for smoking cigarettes after they got addicted from secondhand smoking.

That shit is never going away, and for one simple reason: it’s incredibly profitable. By converting real money into some nebulous fun bucks that doesn’t directly correlate in value, they obfuscate how much money you’re actually spending and make it more likely that you’ll spend more than you intend to. The same reason that casinos have no windows and pump extra oxygen into the air so you feel less tired, all so you don’t realize how long you’ve been in there.

The one and only point that I disagree with you on is your take on mtx. They may not affect you, but everything about them is designed to be psychologically exploitative, and the wealthy whale is largely a myth. The vast majority of money from mtx is made from people with addiction issues and other mental health issues or atypical neurology, like people with depression or ADHD.

Microsoft bought up all those studios and didn’t support them, but that’s business as usual for Microsoft, and the money that they’ll make from mtx like this will more than make up for it. I recently watched a former Blizzard dev who was talking about how a single $15 mount for WoW made more money than StarCraft 2 did.

The big issue I see is that most people largely don’t know about anything beyond the big AAA releases, and as we’ve already established, that’s an exploitative wasteland nowadays. There’s plenty of demand for good games and there always will be, but while the indie scene is the best that’s it’s ever been, the majority of indie companies go under after their first game. It’s still hard out there for them, too. There’s just enough of them popping up and putting out truly great games that they can actually compete with the AAA space.

I think it’s “legally grey” in the sense that governments have largely made no policies one way or the other on the data harvesting. It’s not banned, but it’s not openly encouraged either, and there’s no real legal precedent to point to for this specific matter besides the general data harvesting big tech does.

The area with the largest similarity I feel is music sampling, and as far as I know, the music industry was very quick to ensure that data harvesting for AI had to follow the same copyright laws as sampling.

I wanna say it became a thing from Twitch streamers when e sports was a big thing, but I’m by no means sure that that’s correct.

Well, this is the third time the community has failed to secure the AT mines, so it wouldn’t be in the spirit of the game for them to just give them to us anyway.

It was definitely the other way around. When I first checked the planets, there were around 1.5k divers on the mine planet and it was in the 0.x% range, while the children’s planet was around 54% with close to 60k divers on it.

Since posting, I’ve learned some extra context that may or may not be true but would be very relevant here. Supposedly, Sony are the ones in charge of the actual store page. Which would mean that it was their decision to have it listed in countries where you can’t make PSN accounts.

Meaning that there are two mistakes here: Sony knowingly listing it, and Arrowhead not making it clear that the optional account linking was temporary. The second of which the CEO of Arrowhead has already taken the blame for on Twitter.

I don’t disagree there, I was talking about Arrowhead specifically. I’ve now seen people saying that Sony is the one in charge of the Steam store page, and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if Sony had done it knowingly.

Except that people didn’t realize that the account was mandatory until this announcement because they didn’t read the store page nor the message you get the first time you launch the game, and Steam probably doesn’t tell devs why a game was refunded.

The PSN account was mandatory when you first logged in on day one, but was made optional later that day due to server load while Sony rolled out extra infrastructure. Why would they knowingly sell a game in 20 countries that would just refund it 10 minutes after first launching it?

The thing is that it was enforced right at the beginning. There was a period where you couldn’t play without a PSN account, before they made it optional while Sony rolled out more infrastructure to handle the player numbers.

It’s an issue now because it wasn’t stated clearly enough and loudly enough that not having a PSN account was only temporary, and I think Arrowhead screwed up because they didn’t know that PSN accounts aren’t available everywhere and so were selling the game in places that couldn’t play it unknowingly.

Steam is usually pretty good about refunds and has apparently already pulled the game from the store in places where you can’t make a PSN account, so I imagine they’re planning to refund the game. This looks like the kind of thing that could be class-action lawsuit worthy.

How did they ignore it when it’s both on the store page and the first thing you see ingame since day one? They didn’t add that in later. It’s always been there. It wasn’t optional for a period of time on launch day, before the servers were overloaded. It was then temporarily made optional, and they said as much (though obviously not clearly enough for people to realize that).

They expected an active userbase of about 10k. They didn’t know how popular this game was going to be.

More likely, they didn’t know that PSN accounts are only available in select regions. They followed the stipulations on all fronts except selling the game in places that can’t make accounts, and everything else is the result of the PSN account requirement being made optional while Sony rolled out more infrastructure to handle the player load.

It was listed on the store page from day one. It was put in front of your face the first time you launched the game. It was only made optional temporarily due to the overloaded servers on launch day. This was said, though not clearly enough for people to realize before now that the PSN account being optional was only temporary, it seems.

My money’s on Arrowhead not knowing that PSN accounts are only available in specific regions and countries. Otherwise, none of it makes sense. This was always going to happen if they knew and did it anyway, and why would they torpedo their dev studio with the refunds like that.

Or, Arrowhead didn’t know that only certain regions of the world can make PSN accounts and Steam isn’t directly involved in the creation of any individual store page unless they have reason to be - like limiting the regions Helldivers 2 is sold in after the fact.

You and I both have no way of knowing whether or not Arrowhead knew that they were selling their game in regions where people wouldn’t be able to play it, but I could totally see it being the case where Sony didn’t tell them and it just never occurred to them that that was a possibility because it’s not an issue where the company is located. The PSN account requirement was in the game and listed on the store page from day one; it was only temporarily made optional due to how overloaded the servers were at launch. Arrowhead themselves said they expected an active userbase of around 10k people.

And if Steam is anything like Etsy, then the most involvement they have with setting up any individual store page is their automated systems like the profanity filter. I run a business on Etsy and they have no direct involvement with any of my store besides providing the hosting platform and systems to create the storefront and listings (as well as backend systems like tracking pageviews and such). The only time that they’d get involved personally would be if something like this happened.

Regardless of where the blame lies, I think Arrowhead are the only ones who will suffer unless Sony relents on the PSN account requirement. The money for refunds isn’t gonna come out of Valve’s pockets, and I can’t imagine Sony forking over the cash now that they’ve taken their cut.

And that second option already happened with this exact game when people expressed concern over the DRM, which is designed like a rootkit, giving it essentially full control/access to your system while it’s running.

People can still get a refund. It just has to be manually reviewed and deemed justified instead of just being okayed by the automated system.

Reminder that the hours played rule is only a limit for the automated refund system. You can request a refund for a game at any time for any reason. It just has to be manually reviewed and deemed justified by a person.