People would stop putting micro transactions in games if users stopped paying for them.
I might be wrong, but aren’t whales the target demographic for microtransactions? It’s not like the majority of players are buying them. It’s a “vocal” minority that make the business model viable via insane spending habits and the rest of us just have to deal with it.
This is the problem with the whole “vote with your dollar” thing overall. Going by net worth, the median net worth of an american family is $103,500. Jeff Bezos, otoh, has a net worth of 152 billion. That means that he has 1468999 times as many votes as the average person. That’s about a third the population of America. If we “vote with our dollars” because “the free-er the markets, the free-er the people” then one guy has the same power as a full third of the country’s population. As inequality increases, the middle class is disappearing. The number of people with effectively no voice at all is increasing, and the number of people with a voice that can speak over the populations of entire states is also increasing.
This whole “it’s only whales” narrative needs to go away, it hasn’t been true for years. Want proof?
Jump on any of the massive free to play or even paid games that top the player count and sales charts every single year. In game you’ll see probably 50%+ of the people you come up against have a paid skin.
Micro transactions are extremely popular across the gaming population because they’re cheap and they give people what they want.
Want proof? Here’s an anecdote!
Half the playerbase having a skin that costs a dollar doesn’t invalidate the argument that the majority of total dollars spent come from a very small minority of actual players. Even assuming that what you assert without evidence is actually true, it doesn’t prove your point.
That’s true of lots of predatory behavior and doesn’t excuse it. Even if 90% of people don’t use them, the whales make it worth it. People with addictive personalities or so much money that it just means nothing to them. And we all suffer for it.
The same could be said of literally every single product that magically became way more expensive post pandemic for no justifiable reason.
My partner and I have started using the vague “Y’know, covid…” to dismiss anything without explaining it. It comes from when I was in the hospital and they wanted to stay on the couch in my room with me. They were told that they couldn’t, and when they asked why the nurse just said “y’know, covid…”. Now in real life, the best covid policy is to stay, not to go out into the world and come back. But after 3 years of all sorts of knock-on craziness due to the pandemic people who work in customer service seem to have realized that they can just say “you know, covid…” to almost anything and everyone else will just be like “Yeah…”
