It's made me appreciate my library more.
These days I hardly buy new since games are so expensive. And I only buy DLC if the game itself has earned the money I'm going to spend. I keep that mentality with any games that have additional costs. I spent a ton of time playing Genshin Impact, so when I put money in the game it felt like it had already earned that much based on the enjoyment I got. I try to stick to that as much as I can.
I feel that. I cannot justify spending 70+ dollars on a game, just to be able to play 50% of what the game is supposed to be, and also have to put up with numerous game-breaking bugs. If I have to spend money on DLC for an ALREADY $70 game, im never touching it. The exception being games like Civilization, where the game is complete, and the DLC is not only cheap but often bundled together with ALL OTHER DLC for a significant reduction in price.
In addition, it seems most AAA games these days are, in addition to being ridiculously expensive, often times buggy messes for the first 6 months of their release.
THEN THEY NEVER GO ON SALE UNTIL THE ONLINE GAME COMMUNITY IS DEAD OR DYING.
THEY ALSO ARE OFTEN TIMES P2W (looking at you CoD with your paywalled weapons, and Battlefront with characters locked behind an $800 paywall or 2000 hours of playtime).
Now, give me a F2P with cheap cosmetic MTX that don't break the game, and I'm in.
It pushed me straight back to uncompromising piracy, and a total refusal to give money for any reason unless the game is fully offline and on physical media.
I remember the first time I came in contact with DLC, coincidentally it was my first Steam game: Supreme Commander 2.
My first thought was: “What the fuck is this? Why isn’t this in the game?”. Later on, when DLC were getting more substantial, my thoughts changed to; ”Are they just rebranding Expansion Packs?”.
As other people noted, I don’t care about cosmetics. Even for Dota 2, which I’ve put over a thousand hours in and have played it 10 years, I just sell them on the marketplace to fund my next summer sale. The only time I buy stuff is when I want to support the game’s development.
My gaming time is too limited to worry about battle passes and shit like that. I just wanna click heads and farm creeps.
Edit: the one thing that does bum me out though is that back before item shops and shit, skins and unlocks used to mean something. Like, you’d see some dude in your Halo 3 lobby with a dope-ass helmet and you knew that he earned that from getting a Killtacular with only deagle headshots. Now it’s just, dude’s level 150. He must’ve swiped for the ultimate edition, XP boosters, or has too much free time.
Contrary to what you might think, games received updates far earlier than the introduction of DLC and Micro-transactions. Doom, for example, had many update patches post launch. Only, the game wouldn’t update automatically. You had to know that the patches existed, and where to find them to download them.
Games are actually different in so many ways other than this, that I can’t make a straight comparison, other than to say that before DLC, you just bought expansions on a disc, and before that, you had to buy an entirely new “Turbo” or “Super” edition of the game to get any updates.
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