There is a school of thought that imagines the individuals as free thinkers in front of supermarket shelves. Every purchase has strictly personal and rational motivations and tastes are not debatable, because they are the foundation of freedom of consumption. Therefore, what we put in our carts is exactly what we want to take.
It is undeniable that no one forces you to buy anything, but reducing the backbone of an economic and social system to the sole will of the individual beings who are part of it is a excessive trivialization into which it would be better not to fall.
Without going too far, because this is not the context to do so, let’s say that a single purchase can be the result of multiple forceswhich unconsciously direct towards certain choices. The consumer does not know it, but those who have to sell do and, based on their economic strength, will spend great resources to ensure the best minds that guarantee the success of their product.
Of course, we are not talking about an exact science, since There are many external factors to considerbut in general when we put our hand on the shelf to take something, it is likely that we have already suffered the effects of some unconscious push, which made us choose one product rather than another.
The success is evident
In video games, the exact same principle applies. When they were introduced, microtransactions were seen and apostrophized in a very negative light. Many people have lashed out against the so-called pay-to-winthat is, the purchase of objects that give advantages in the game, considering it the absolute evil. In reality it was a very honest and not at all greedy way of conceiving the system, because it started from an explicit assumption: everyone plays for free, but those who pay have advantages.
Over time, the techniques for selling in-game items have been refined, both addressing complaints and circumventing them by completely changing their approach.
New players have internalized the system without batting an eyelid, while old ones have put up more resistance, but have slowly adapted, so much so that the video game market is currently made up mainly of microtransactions, as a recent study tells us according to which 82% of American gamers have purchased items in games that sell them. Furthermore, the much-derided Ubisoft for its effort towards live services has published excellent financial results, relating to the fiscal quarter just ended, based mainly on its live services and the sale of catalog titles. It is not even worth mentioning the fact that practically all the big publishers now live more on season passes sold, and the sale and exchange of items, than on finished games. When a game takes root among the public, the usual anthology of offers kicks in, often linked to new content, which aim to prolong its life as much as possible, transforming it into a platform / store on which to invest huge resources over time.
There are many factors at play (often free access, social push, significant marketing investments, obscuring of alternatives, influencers hunting for the latest phenomenon and so on) with only one presence that appears increasingly reduced, namely the will of the consumer, which we can consider a kind of mythwhere the same is simply the victim of impulses that are exploited without great ethical dramas by the publishers, now aware that the system has established itself and that there is no longer any resistance to break down to make money. Every now and then some controversy breaks out here and there, but it is a sterile controversy that leaves the time it finds, certainly not a structured discussion that can put anything into crisis.
This is an editorial written by a member of the editorial staff and is not necessarily representative of the editorial line of Multiplayer.it.
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