It's quite interesting to see the effectiveness of the strategy that game companies have adopted in the face of their actual controversies within the gaming community on non-hobbyists or casual video game players. I can only attribute it to motivated reasoning. I barely play any games myself, and even I notice the microtransaction model having changed the structure of major, popular titles even over the past few years.
The public relations strategy appears to be "these people complaining about our game design practices are all a bunch of neckbearded losers living in basements who are just upset that there aren't as many scantily clad women with large breasts on their screens anymore. Pay no mind to them, as we continue marketing tried-and-true addictive gambling concepts to children and teenagers. They can't go to a real casino yet, but they can buy loot boxes!"
It's exceptionally scummy and manipulative. Jim Sterling is a ranting weirdo "self identified gamer", exactly the sort of person who we're being asked to discount and ignore, but he's usually right (despite the hyperbole and dramatics).
__________________
"The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
Last edited by CorsiHockeyLeague; 04-25-2019 at 11:48 AM.
|