People buy this shit so they make more. Simple as that.

People buy it. People then buy the skins. I play the free to play one sometimes and nearly every single person I kill has a $30+ skin and weapons. It's saddening.

One of the funniest things with cod too now, is that people always used to say it was the same game every year, but it is actually the same game every year now, with progress and weapons carrying over.

Gone are the days of a one time purchase and a solid game. (Well in the AAA space anyway)

The term "beta" has been abused for so long that it's become meaningless in terms of what it actually is supposed to be. It's just a paid demo and/or early access.

Just look at WoW, they had a "beta" for like 2 or 3 months, and a paid early access package. Adding insult to injury they started patching/nerfing stuff like a day after early access. It's annoying as fuck that they have many months of "testing" and then fail to fix the blatant issues until it hits live servers and even after the early access period. Everything screams like "should've bought the beta and early access, huh?". Paid stuff like betas and early access are just money grabs, and people fall for it. So next expansion will probably be an even longer early access period, or more bonuses.

As for CoD looking like a collection of brainrot operators, weapons and themes, I think they are just trying to figure out ways to keep CoD relevant without releasing actual identical games every time, even if it just means changing the theme. And people are still buying it, so why would they stop.

FWIW the open beta will be open, but people who prepurchase get extra skins and early beta access. Activision has been putting anti-consumer features in CoD since Black Ops 3, to my knowledge. That was the first one where you had to roll loot boxes to unlock all the weapons as opposed to just playing MP matches.

The gameplay has changed so little over the years but that's because it's unfortunately pretty solid.

I played a lot when I was younger but stopped because I didn't have the money, hard drive space, or internet bandwidth to keep up with the new games and updates.

With that said, I actually jumped into this beta since it was included in Game Pass and it reminded me of CoD of my youth.

Will I every give them anymore more money? Nah.

Will I play it some more via Game Pass? Maybe.

My biggest complaint is the ecosystem is cancer. They have CoD HQ that acts as a launcher but can only handle a couple games and if you select to play one of the games it can't play, it fully closes and launches the game you want to play.

Can you simply download and launch only the game you want to play? Nope.

This is all to get your eyes on as much of their content as possible to really squeeze out those last few dollars.

The amount of players I saw with the skins that cost them $100 minimum was crazy. These are very likely the same people that buy every game every year and are precisely the target demographic they're marketing towards.

That has to be a meme post. Black Ops SIX? You're joking. This is a picture from 2018.

How is this only blowing your mind now and not the entire past decade or so where this has become the norm for the giant corpo devs like Blizz, EA, and Ubisoft? This has been common long enough that I've become completely numb to it now.

I haven’t looked into the beta itself. This particular ad seems to say you can use the exclusive items from the pack in the beta.

Edit: I just googled it. There is an early access beta but there is also an open beta.

But really the answer to "why is it like this?" Is "because money."

Right now it's open to anyone who pre-ordered or anyone who has game pass. it's open to everyone for free next week. maybe they should have called it limited instead of open, but it isn't closed to anyone, anyone can get game pass and play the beta rn so it is technically an open beta.

and why are people playing CoD? because it's really solid gameplay that recieves weekly updates and events to always keep things fresh. the new movement system in this one is really a game changer and makes the game a lot of fun to play.

The current COD (MW3/Warzone) is my guilty pleasure. It crashes during 50% of my play sessions, the player/weapon skins are cringe, the battle pass is pushed pretty hard, but somehow I’m able to ignore all of that and have a lot of fun with it. Warzone is my personal favorite battle royale implementation and MW3 is a nostalgia trip with all the remade maps from past games.

Admittedly, half of my enjoyment comes from playing with my clan from the Xbox 360 days and feeling like we’re in high school again, so playing alone might not be so fun

It's pretty far from a realistic military shooter at this point, huh?

Feels disingenuous to say "open beta" and require a purchase. Just call it beta early access like every other game.

I have a friend who was really trying to convince me to preorder this garbage

Same guy who refuses to play older games because they "look bad"

Honestly the skins look better than the shit I saw in the last one like Niki Minaj and shit. I still wouldn't buy any of them though.

Edit: as for paying for any kind of beta is dumb

The original one was amazing. I played the entire thing through to the end. So many of the scenes are from real history, that it felt like we were experiencing a part of history. When I watched Saving Private Ryan, I saw many of the same scenes that I had experienced in the game. But with each consecutive release it has become more focused on competitive PVP and selling skins and expansions. It has nothing at all to do with the original game anymore, other than the name, and the fact that they're both FPS.

To be fair, you don't HAVE to buy it to access the beta as it's open to everyone next weekend.

But yes, betas are now "glorified demos" and have been for a fair few years.

It's not really beta quality. I hopped on with my brother just to see if I was interested in the game (we both played black ops, the original back on the PS3). It was actually extremely stable and pretty fun. He noticed a UI glitch but ... it's not like there was even a feedback or bug report button.

It's just early access with the disclaimer there might be something wrong... Which isn't that different from buying a release day game anymore unfortunately.

Capitalism

https://unherd.com/2023/03/is-call-of-duty-a-government-psyop/

It was never not evil. Just increasingly evil these days.