[ SECRET POST #4331 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4331 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.



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02.
[Sabrina the Teenage Witch reboot]


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03.
[The Great British Bake Off, series 9]


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04.
[K/DA - POP/STARS - League of Legends]


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05.
[Pointless (Australia)]


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06.
[Penny Dreadful]


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07.
[Diablo Mobile/Blizzard]










Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 29 secrets from Secret Submission Post #620.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[soldatsasha]

To add to what the anon above me said, even legit non-gambling micro-transactions aren't great. They're designed to take advantage of consumer psychology and basically entice people spend way more than they would on a regular transaction.

In essence they create a shopping addiction.

The player spends $1.50 on a power-up, and it gets them through a tough level. It's easy for the player to justify the purchase as just a little bit of cash for a less stressful game experience. Then maybe they buy the power-up ten pack for $10. They feel like it's money well spent bc the first power-up was fine and they play the game a lot, but the side effect is that now they feel subconsciously invested in the game. So even if their attention wanes, they'll keep playing bc they've spend real money. At this point, it's an easy jump to buying some cosmetic items. Those cosmetic items give them a few minutes of novelty for just a little cash, so it's easy to keep buying more and more. The cost is so low that most players won't really tally it up and think about how much they've spent.

After a few months, that adds up to a lot more than they would have spent otherwise. To give a more concrete example, I'll compare Mass Effect to Subeta (a pet-site with tons of cash shop items).

For Mass Effect, there were weapons and armor DLC packs for about $5. Totally optional, mostly cosmetic, but they did give a little boost. Note that this is a single-player game so there's no competitive advantage to buying DLC. There were also story DLC for $15-$20. These added several hours of quests, unique environments, cool stories, new squadmates for the whole game, etc. but many customers balk at the thought of paying that much. To buy ALL of the story DLC for the trilogy, you'd have to spend about $120 iirc.

Subeta has a monthly cash collection which has your choice of a variety of items. Each item is $2.50. Some are purely cosmetic, others have various "uses" such as going into collections. To complete these collections, it's necessary to buy tons of cash items either with your own money or the site currency. On top of these monthly collections, every month lots of other cash shop items are released. There's also lots of special monthly promotions for buying cash currency, discounts for buying it in large amounts, various cash shop sales, user-made custom items, etc. Many users have spent multiple hundreds or (literally) thousands of dollars on the site. It's easy for them to justify it, bc they're only spending it in increments of a few dollars. At most they might spend $10 on an exclusive item or something. But it adds up.

tl;dr Micro-transactions are the High Fructose Corn Syrup of gaming.

[(Anonymous)]

I am fascinated by your choice of subeta as the microtransaction example.

I play it and never thought of it as microtransactions before, which is pretty weird.

It's an ongoing game, so I compare money spent on it to subscription /microtransactions games, rather than single player ones.

[(Anonymous)]

Mobile/multiplayer games are usually "ongoing" as well, so there's no difference there.

Diablo hasn't been a true single player game in a long time. You can play Subeta all alone too, if you really want to.

[soldatsasha]

I couldn't think of a non-single player game that didn't have some form of microtransactions aside from Minecraft, plus I figured it would be better to compare a game with the traditional DLC model vs the modern MT model.

Subeta is one of the most hilarious and egregious examples of microtransactions imo. I'm on a sort of permanent hiatus (I do plots and log in every day but I'm sitting on so much sP I don't have the motivation to do anything else.) Despite the fact that you have some users dropping thousands on CWs every month, they still seem to fall consistently short of their Daily Support Goal and the site isn't in much better shape now than it was five years ago.

[(Anonymous)]

see, i don't see how that's any different or worse than the people who spend money on makeup, their daily starbucks habit, etc. there are a ton of ways to fritter away money that probably aren't really worth it but that give you temporary enjoyment in return. i think all of those things are dumb personally but i don't necessarily think they're somehow bad for people to spend their money on if that's what they want to do. i mean, is spending $5 on a game really any different than spending $5 on a starbucks coffee that's going to last you maybe 20 minutes at most?