Tell that to the horse armor lol back in the day no one would buy a game with these kind of MTX and we would laugh at it. But now we’re saying “it’s not that bad come on, it’s still a good game”. The slippery slope is very much a thing.
No one was saying “no one would buy a game with these kinds of MTX” Skyrim was already out and wildly successful at that point and secondly the Skyrim horse Armor criticisms were amount Bethesda adding paid mods to get cuts of all mods which is a hugely different situation. When Diablo IV and Street Fighter created extremely overpriced costumes we laugh at them because it’s stupid to assume anyone is going to buy them
Oh, my dear, sweet summer child, they’re not talking about Skyrim. When people say “horse armour” they’re talking about one thing:
In the year of our lord 2006, when Skyrim was still half a decade away. the Xbox 360 release of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion had a $2.50 “DLC” for two sets of horse armour, and it was roundly mocked for it. It wasn’t the first microtransaction, but it was certainly the first one that set everyone talking about its absurdity. The conversation was absolutely about charging money for cosmetics. In fact the general tone was, perhaps ironically, the opposite of today’s prevailing zeitgeist; this was a time when people were accustomed to spending $10-20 for a sizable “expansion pack” or “content disc”, and the idea of dropping $2.50 for horse armour that didn’t even do anything was absolutely ludicrous.